ARCHAEOLOGY
AMATEURS FIND
A MASTERPIECE
PAGE TWO
In Rome,
visiting the
anti-Trump
Timothy Egan
OPINION
ROME Walking to the Eternal City, over
stones worn down by the sandals of
centurions, on a pilgrims path nearly
forgotten in all the layers of Italian
time, the mind focuses as the muscles
stiffen.
The Vatican is 100 kilometers (about
62 miles) away, according to a Via
Francigena sign, and after another
two-dozen gut-busting hills, past too
much litter in too many lovely places,
now only 50 kilometers distant. At last
you come out sweaty and sunburned
from an urban forest to see a distant
St. Peters Basilica the Oz of global
Christianity.
What awaits is for now the
moral center of the universe, and a
very politically adept pope. The col-
lapse of honor and principle at a White
House led by a
As the man with a peb-
ble for a soul has
United States allowed an en-
president lightened octoge-
went low, narian to flour-
Pope Francis ish.
The more
went high. powerful you
are, the pope
said earlier this
year, the more responsible you are to
act humbly. Quick, Mr. President, to
the dictionary. Humble, humbly, humil-
ity.
The pope waves from a window at
his Sunday appearance. He still
projects that lightness of being, wear-
ing his soul on his sleeve. At almost the
same time, Trump forwards a tweet of
the president of the United States
hitting a woman, his political opponent
from last year, in the back with a golf
ball and knocking her down. Some
very funny stuff, believe me.
The pope tells the crowd assembled
in the square to forgive, even if the
person you cannot force yourself to
forgive is, say, a Trumpian monster,
though he doesnt name names. Those
who cannot let things go, he says,
close our hearts to love for others.
Yeah, well, what does he know?
Much more than Trump has yet to
figure out. One in four American voters
is a Roman Catholic. And a third of
those Catholics are Latino. Theyre
watching Trump, but theyre listening
to Francis on climate change, immi-
gration, refugees, war and peace.
The popes approval rating in the
United States was at 70 percent in a
Pew survey at the start of this year,
while Trump has been at about half
that for much of the last few months.
Throughout the world, every country
but Russia (and to a small degree,
Israel) has a lesser view of the United
States under Trump.
For years at a time make that
EGAN, PAGE 14
With Michael Phelps, a shoulder to lean on
TEMPE, ARIZ.
Olympic champion helps
another swimmer confront
mental health problems
BY KAREN CROUSE
Nearly a week into their most recent
therapeutic reunion, Michael Phelps
and Grant Hackett, two giants of
Olympic swimming, sat down to break-
fast at a packed restaurant and won-
dered how they would explain them-
selves to their children someday.
The conversations they foresaw had
nothing to do with Phelpss record-shat-
tering medal haul or with Hacketts defi-
ance of debilitating illnesses during a
decade-long dominance of the 1,500-me-
ter freestyle, the most grueling event in
the pool, which earned him the nick-
name Captain Courageous from his fel-
low Australians.
They were reliving dark moments,
NEWSSTAND PRICES
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +=!"!$!%!}
Andorra 3.60
Antilles 3.90
Austria 3.20
Bahrain BD 1.20
Belgium 3.20
Bos. & Herz. KM 5.50
BLACK BOXES
NEW GENERATION
WILL STAY AFLOAT
PAGE 8 | BUSINESS
Kurds gathered last week for a pro-independence rally in Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, ahead of Mondays referendum on independence from Iraq.
You know youre going to lose
LONDON
Britains gambling problem
is growing, and some say
a machine is to blame
BY PATRICK KINGSLEY
Tony Franklin entered a betting shop in
northwest London one morning two
weeks ago and paid 300 pounds, or
around $400, into a gambling machine
and lost that money within 16 min-
utes.
Then he paid in another 300. Then a
further 1,000 six minutes later. And 20
minutes after that, a final 1,000.
Within 42 minutes, Mr. Franklin had
lost 2,600, the latest relapse in a dec-
ades-long gambling addiction that he
reckons has cost him more than a mil-
lion pounds, his marriage, several jobs
and his relationship with his three chil-
dren.
I just dont know why I go in, and this
is the problem, Mr. Franklin, 46, said a
few hours later. You know youre going
to lose.
Mr. Franklin has been trying to quit
gambling for years. What usually drags
times when they had posed a danger to
themselves and others.
Phelps, 32, imagined the day when his
toddler son, Boomer, would refer to one
of those low points: You were going 86
miles an hour in a 45-mile zone. Why
cant I?
Hackett, 37, laughed ruefully and told
Phelps he had already spoken with a
child psychologist about how to guide
his 8-year-old twins through the sham-
bles of his post-swimming life.
There will be conversations that
need to be had, Hackett said, and a cer-
tain strength youll have to find.
Such exchanges are the reason Hack-
ett traveled 8,000 miles from Australia
to Arizona last month to stay with
Phelps and his wife, Nicole. It wasnt his
first visit. He has used their home as
something of a halfway house, joking
that he spends so much time with them
that he is getting mail there.
His life in Australia, where distance
swimmers can become celebrities on a
par with N.F.L. quarterbacks in the
United States, started careening out of
control several years ago. In February, it
Cameroon CFA 2600 Egypt EGP 20.00
Canada CAN$ 5.50 Estonia 3.50
Croatia KN 22.00 Finland 3.20
Cyprus 2.90 France 3.20
Czech Rep CZK 110 Gabon CFA 2600
Denmark Dkr 28 Great Britain 2.00
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
him back in is a particular kind of gam-
bling machine, known as a fixed odds
betting terminal, that lies at the heart of
a bitter debate about the future of
British gambling. Campaigners and
some researchers say the machine is an
unusually addictive form of gambling
that is sucking billions out of Britains
poorest communities, and some hope it
will be banned after a government re-
view next month.
But bookmakers, backed by other re-
searchers, counter that there is no clear
evidence that the machine is any more
addictive than other kinds of gambling
like the online casino, a product that is
restricted in the United States but legal
in Britain. They warn that banning the
machines, which are found only in
British betting shops and provide more
than half their profits, would lead to the
loss of thousands of jobs.
For campaigners, a set of statistics
published in August by the Gambling
Commission, which regulates the
British gambling industry, highlighted
the urgency of the matter: It suggested
that the number of British problem
gamblers, or people whose lives are
damaged by their gambling, had risen
by almost 50 percent between 2012 and
2015, from 280,000 to 430,000.
The bookmakers, though, pointed to a
MARK J. TERRILL/ASSOCIATED PRESS
The swimmers Grant Hackett, left, and
Michael Phelps after a race in 2005.
derailed in a very public fashion.
He visited his parents Gold Coast
home, and his father, Neville, called the
police to report that Hackett had been
drinking and had suffered a mental
Greece 2.50 Kazakhstan US$ 3.50 Norway Nkr 30
Germany 3.20 Latvia 3.90 Oman OMR 1.250
Hungary HUF 880 Lebanon LBP 5,000 Poland Zl 14
Israel NIS 13.50 Lithuania 5.20 Portugal 3.20
Israel / Eilat NIS 11.50 Luxembourg 3.20 Qatar QR 10.00
Italy 3.20 Malta 3.20 Republic of Ireland 3.20
Ivory Coast CFA 2600 Montenegro 3.00 Reunion 3.50
Jordan JD 2.00 Morocco MAD 30 Saudi Arabia SR 13.00
Receipts detailing three days of gambling for Tony Franklin of London. Each line of
receipts represents a day; the third line shows 2,600, about $3,500, lost in 42 minutes.
line in the report that said the rate of
problem gambling had remained stat-
istically stable, because both figures
are small compared with the British
population as a whole.
The history of fixed odds betting ter-
breakdown that sent him into a rage.
The Olympian was taken to a detention
center in handcuffs a scene that was
broadcast across Australia and set off a
social media frenzy.
He was released without being
charged, but his family was unable to
find him the next morning. Alarmed,
Neville Hackett stepped before televi-
sion cameras, described his son as a
missing person in urgent need of help,
and implored him to come home.
Grant, let us know where you are, he
said. We love you and we want to help
you.
Phelps followed the drama from
Paris, where he and Nicole spent Valen-
tines Day. He had learned about what
was happening in Australia through a
text message from Allison Schmitt, an-
other Olympic swimmer.
Phelps, who considers Hackett one of
his dearest friends, sent a flurry of texts
to him and then paced in his hotel room
while he waited to hear back. Nicole
Phelps recalled her husbands saying
several times, with increasing urgency,
PHELPS, PAGE 16
Issue Number
Senegal CFA 2600 The Netherlands 3.20 No. 41,845
Serbia Din 280 Tunisia Din 4.800
Slovakia 3.50 Turkey TL 9
Slovenia 3.00 U.A.E. AED 12.00
Spain 3.20 United States $ 4.00
Sweden Skr 30 United States Military
Switzerland CHF 4.50 (Europe) $ 1.90
Syria US$ 3.00
SOCCER
ONE INJURED PLAYERS
LONELY JOURNEY BACK
PAGE 17 | SPORTS
IVOR PRICKETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
minals is under less dispute. They were
introduced into British betting shops in
2001, at a time when the government of
Tony Blair, then the prime minister, was
accelerating the gambling industrys
GAMBLING, PAGE 7
HEADLINE SPONSOR
..
Kurds vote
on self-rule
recalls their
tortured past
MALA OMER, IRAQ
Drive for independence
based on long history of
treachery in northern Iraq
BY DAVID ZUCCHINO
The Kurdish soldier, wounded in battle
last year, rose in pain from his wheel-
chair. As his reedy legs wobbled, his 13-
year-old son thrust a cane into his hand.
The soldier, Dana Salah Hama, was
undergoing physical therapy at his
home this month to become strong
enough to hobble to a polling station on
Monday, when Iraqi Kurds plan to vote
on independence from Iraq.
For Mr. Hama, and for several million
fellow Kurds in the autonomous enclave
of Kurdistan, the vote is a down pay-
ment on a dream deferred. Denied a
homeland after World War I, Iraqs
Kurds are determined to escape their
tortured past and fulfill a national des-
tiny: a country to call their own.
Kurds know no one will protect us
but ourselves, said Mr. Hama, 35,
whose back was injured by a roadside
bomb as he battled Islamic State mili-
tants last year. That is why I fought
for the day we Kurds will be both free
and safe.
Almost every Kurd in northern Iraq
can trace a family history stained by
treachery and dispossession: Kurdish
women and children killed in chemical
attacks, villages razed, Kurdish men de-
tained and murdered, families deported
or banished to internment camps.
For decades, Baathist regimes in
Baghdad tried to crush or evict the
Kurds, and to repopulate their ancestral
lands with Arabs.
But protected from Saddam Husseins
troops by an American no-fly zone since
1991, the Kurds have since built a thriv-
ing proto-state across northern Iraq.
Now that Kurdish fighters have
proved nearly indispensable to the
American-led coalitions fight against
the Islamic State, Kurdish leaders sense
that this is their moment. Some of the
most urgent issues in the region ter-
rorism, oil, the brutal civil war in Syria
and the upheavals of postwar Iraq in-
tersect in Kurdistan.
But as tens of thousands of flag-wav-
ing Kurds packed a stadium in Erbil, the
capital, on Friday, chanting Bye-bye,
Iraq! the referendum was at risk.
Nearly every major power in the re-
gion has opposed the vote, and the
Kurds were locked in tense negotiations
with the United States and Baghdad, of-
fering to cancel the referendum in re-
turn for an ironclad guarantee of a road
map to independence.
If the vote does go forward, there is
no going back on independence, said
Peter W. Galbraith, a former American
diplomat who is close to the Kurdish
KURDS, PAGE 5

2 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
page two
A link to the Roman era
BOXFORD JOURNAL
BOXFORD, ENGLAND
Amateur archaeologists
uncover spectacular mosaic
in the English countryside
BY STEPHEN CASTLE
Their ages range from 9 to about 80.
They include a butcher and a builder.
Some devoted vacation days to laboring
on their hands and knees in an open
field.
The group of amateur archaeologists
55 in all, though only two dozen toiled
on a typical day were part of an exca-
vation project near the village of Box-
ford, in southern England. They had to
contend not just with days of backbreak-
ing work, but also with a daunting, two-
week deadline to complete the challeng-
ing dig.
Their commitment was handsomely
repaid, though, in a few magical mo-
ments one Saturday last month. As a
layer of soil was carefully scooped away,
small, muddy pieces of red-colored
tiling glinted in the sunlight, probably
for the first time in more than one and a
half millenniums.
The mosaic that slowly emerged from
the earth is part of a Roman villa,
thought to date from 380 A.D., toward
the end of the period of Roman domina-
tion of England. The find is being de-
scribed as the most important of its type
in Britain in more than half a century,
and in this picturesque, riverside village
of thatched cottages, the scale of the dis-
covery is still sinking in.
While surveys had shown something
of interest beneath this stretch of gently
undulating English countryside, they
had suggested that it was a medium-size
Roman villa that was unlikely to yield
anything exceptional.
The surprise discovery came at the
conclusion of a project that was spread
over three years and a hectic two weeks
necessitated by limited financing and
availability.
Among the first to spot it was Joy Ap-
pleton, who leads the Boxford History
Project and who was a driving force be-
hind the excavation.
I was stunned into silence, Ms. Ap-
pleton recalled of her first sight of the
small red tiles, each the size of a finger-
nail. Which is unusual.
The expert on site, Matt Nichol, was
equally surprised. I will never forget
that moment, said Mr. Nichol, a profes-
sional archaeologist who was supervis-
ing the dig.
It was down to the volunteers, it re-
ally was. I get quite emotional about it; it
was something to see their drive, added
Mr. Nichol, project officer for Cotswold
Archaeology, a company whose normal
work includes helping real estate devel-
opers preserve archaeological finds.
Experts say the mosaic at what is now
called Boxford villa depicts Bellero-
phon, a hero of Greek mythology who
was sent to kill the chimera, a fire-
breathing monster with the head of a
lion, the torso of a goat and the tail of a
serpent. Hercules is also thought to be
featured, fighting a centaur, and so is Cu-
pid.
According to Anthony Beeson, a spe-
cialist in classical art and member of the
board of the Association for Roman Ar-
chaeology, the discovery is important
for several reasons.
It is so unusual because it has all
sorts of quirks which you dont expect,
American author of provocative feminist plays
MYRNA LAMB
1930-2017
BY NEIL GENZLINGER
Myrna Lamb, a playwright who put the
tenets of second-wave feminism in front
of theatergoers in provocative works
that were staged at the Public Theater in
Manhattan and elsewhere, died on Sept.
15 in Point Pleasant Beach, N.J. She was
87.
Her daughter Joellen Hachtman con-
firmed the death. She said Ms. Lamb
had progressive heart disease.
Ms. Lamb had a high-profile introduc-
tion to the theatrical mainstream in 1970
when Joseph Papp staged the musical
Mod Donna at the Public Theater. The
production, for which Ms. Lamb wrote
the book and lyrics and Susan Hulsman
Bingham the music, was often described
as the first womens liberation musi-
cal.
Many critics savaged it, but to women
who were bristling at subjugation, dou-
ble standards and the innate oppres-
siveness of a patriarchal society, the
work was a significant breakthrough.
It was revolutionary at the time,
Jane Everhart, who helped the National
Organization for Women with publicity
in that period, recalled in an interview.
A second musical, Apple Pie, with
music by Nicholas Meyers, received
much the same treatment when Papp di-
rected it at the Public in 1976. Feminists
were thrilled to see their movements
messages on prominent display, but crit-
Printed in Athens, Denpasar, Beirut, Nivelles, Biratnagar, Dhaka, Doha, Dubai, Frankfurt, Gallargues, Helsinki, Hong Kong, Islamabad, Istanbul, Jakarta, Karachi, Kathmandu, Kuala Lumpur, Lahore, London, Luqa, Madrid, Manila, Milan, Nagoya, Nepalgunj, New York, Osaka, Paris, Rome, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Taipei, Tel Aviv, Tokyo,Yangon.
The New York Times Company 620 Eighth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10018-1405, NYTCo.com; The New York Times International Edition is published six days per week. To submit an opinion article, email: opinion@nytimes.com, To submit a letter to the editor, email: nytiletters@nytimes.com,
Subscriptions: Subscribe.INYT.com, nytisubs@nytimes.com, Tel. +33 1 41 43 93 61, Advertising: NYTmediakit.com, nytiadvertising@nytimes.com, Tel.+33 1 41 43 94 07, Classifieds: nyticlassified@nytimes.com, Tel. +44 20 7061 3534/3533, Regional Offices: U.K. 18 Museum Street, London WC1A 1JN, U.K., Tel. +44 20 7061 3500,
France Postal Address: CS 10001, 92052 La Defense Cedex, France, Tel. +33 1 41 43 92 01, Hong Kong 1201 K.Wah Centre, 191 Java Road, North Point, Hong Kong, Tel: +852 2922 1188, Dubai PO Box 502015, Media City, Dubai UAE, Tel. +971 4428 9457 nytdubai@nytimes.com
A mosaic from a Roman villa thought to date from 380 A.D. was discovered near the village of Boxford, in southern England.
It has all sorts of quirks which
you dont expect, and it has
subjects on it that are completely
alien to mosaics in this country.
and it has subjects on it that are com-
pletely alien to mosaics in this country,
he said.
Some figures breach geometric bor-
ders and there seems to be a trompe
loeil effect. Mr. Beeson added that he
could not think of another Roman mo-
saic in this country that is as creative as
this one. There are inscriptions, too,
though only about one-third of the mosa-
ic was excavated and the full text was
not uncovered.
The execution is uneven, Mr. Beeson
said, suggesting that the mosaicist has
had ideas above his technical ability,
producing what he called a very so-
phisticated design done in a slightly
nave manner.
Boxford villa had been marked in-
accurately, as it turned out on an old
map. (It later turned out that the site
was disturbed in the 19th century, when
the installation of a land drainage pipe
damaged part of the mosaic.)
With much to be revealed, there is still
a lot to learn about life at Boxford villa,
though its owner must have been afflu-
ent and cultured, and clearly wanted to
show off a broad knowledge of mythol-
ogy to guests.
Mr. Beeson says he believes that it is
really vital that we at least see what the
other part of the mosaic is like; its too
important not to investigate.
For Ms. Appleton, the discovery has
filled in part of a missing link in the his-
tory of Boxford, a village of around 300
inhabitants. Evidence of Stone, Bronze
and Iron Age life had been discovered,
and there is a Saxon window in the local
church that dates to the period before
the Norman invasion of 1066.
Given the geographical location, and
the quality of the agricultural land, Ms.
Appleton was confident that this was
also the site of a Roman settlement, a
conviction reinforced by the discovery
ics were unwelcoming.
Nicholas Meyerss music is Kurt
Weill acrid without being Kurt Weill me-
lodic, Walter Kerr wrote in The New
York Times. And he concluded with this
assessment of Ms. Lambs abilities as a
dramatist: I am told that Miss Lamb is
a feminist playwright. I am willing to be-
lieve she is a feminist.
Such reviews most of the critics be-
ing male, some of them throwing dismis-
sive remarks about feminism into their
reviews served only as more evi-
dence to support the new feminisms
grievances.
Feminism was then the cause du
jour, and Papp, as usual, had his ear to
the zeitgeist, Anselma DellOlio, a film
critic and director who worked with Ms.
Lamb in those early days, said by email.
But Myrnas plays were just too out-
there for most men.
Myrna Lila Lamb was born on Aug. 3,
1930, in Newark. Her father, Melvin,
worked a number of jobs to try to make
ends meet at the start of the Depression,
as did her mother, the former Minna
Feldman.
Ms. Lamb began working during
World War II while still in high school,
including, Ms. Hachtman said, in a job at
an insurance company that had her su-
pervising adults. Her writing while in
school had caught the attention of her
teachers, but her father resisted the idea
of college. Instead, in 1948, Ms. Lamb
married Marvin Epstein, whom she had
met at a family wedding.
Ms. Lamb had been writing intermit-
tently while raising two children her
RICHARD MILLER
The find may be the most important of its
type in Britain in over 50 years.
of several artifacts from that period.
So Ms. Appleton and her group
pressed ahead. Survey work began in
2012, and there were discoveries at two
nearby sites during digs in 2015 and
2016.
Without expert archaeological knowl-
edge, the Boxford History Project se-
cured help from the Heritage Lottery
Fund, a national charity funded by lot-
tery receipts, to pay for professional su-
pervision during a project made up of
short excavations conducted on three
sites in three consecutive years.
By chance, Mr. Nichol, who super-
vised the dig, does not live far away, an
irony that is not lost on an archaeologist
who has traveled to the Western Sahara,
Macedonia and Serbia in search of an-
tiquities, only to discover something so
spectacular so close to home.
Myrna Lamb, right, and a co-producer discussing a show about the suffragettes in 1974.
archive, Ms. Hachtman said, includes
typed manuscripts, notebooks, even
notes scrawled on paper plates but
her entry into the New York theater
scene can be credited largely to an in-
cendiary episode of The David
Susskind Show and an answering serv-
ice that bailed on its responsibilities.
In 1968 Susskind invited four leaders
of second-wave feminism in New York
onto his syndicated television talk
show: Ms. DellOlio; Rosalyn Baxan-
BOXFORD PARISH BLOG
I never believed it could have been in
Boxford, 30 minutes drive from home,
he said.
What happens to the site in the future
remains unclear because, once exposed
to the atmosphere, a mosaic deterio-
rates quickly unless it is preserved.
Ms. Appleton and Mr. Nichol hope to
uncover the rest of it next year, though
that will depend on whether funding can
be raised. But even if they do, making it
available for public view would be
costly. Just lifting it and removing it
from the site would cost hundreds of
thousands of pounds.
In fact, there was little choice about an
immediate solution which was to
bury it in the earth that had protected it
for so long because the farmer needed
his land back to plant his wheat crop.
Even that step proved nerve-racking
because there was no money to pay for
security to prevent treasure hunters
from damaging or destroying the mosa-
ic.
The risks increased when, the day be-
fore the mosaic was covered over, the
site was opened to friends and families
of the volunteers who had worked there,
increasing the number of people who
knew the location.
So for the organizers, it was a relief,
rather than a disappointment, when the
earth was pushed back to conceal their
discovery.
The night before that was done, Mr.
Nichol decided to keep watch over the
site from his S.U.V. with a supply of food,
a sleeping bag and a bottle of red wine,
all donated by volunteers.
The Roman owner of the villa would
have invited guests to eat and drink on
this spot, using the mosaic as a talking
point, so a mildly bacchanalian vigil did
not seem out of place.
I was on my own in the field; it was
incredible, Mr. Nichol said. He de-
scribed how, in the solitude, he felt
drawn back across the centuries to ex-
perience a unique connection to the
more-than-1,600-year-old archaeologi-
cal site, and to the mythological images
of its extraordinary, colorful mosaic.
The wine did help, he added.
CARL GOSSETT JR./THE NEW YORK TIMES
dall, the feminist historian; Kate Millett,
who would soon publish the landmark
book Sexual Politics; and Jacqui Ce- of Papp, who had had a huge success
ballos, who was active in the National
Organization for Women.
Ms. DellOlio used the occasion to
mention that she intended to start a fem-
inist theater, and Ms. Ceballos repeat-
edly gave the phone number of the New
York NOW office, urging women inter-
ested in the principles of feminism to
reach out.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
She revived and taught
classic form of Indian dance
RITHA DEVI
1924-2017
BY AMISHA PADNANI
Ritha Devi, a performer and teacher
who presented Indian classical dance to
American audiences with poetic beauty,
died on Sept. 12 in Pune, India. She was
92.
A nephew, Reet Das, said the cause
was complications of a stroke she suf-
fered on July 30. She lived in Pune.
Ms. Devi specialized in Odissi, a form
of dance that originated about 2,000
years ago in the ancient temples of
Orissa (now Odisha), a state in eastern
India. Through supple torso movements
and flowing arm gestures, each dance
tells a mythical story or conveys a spir-
itual message from Hindu religious
texts.
By the 1940s and 50s, Odissi had fall-
en out of favor in India. But Ms. Devi,
who began studying it in 1964, helped re-
vive it through worldwide tours in the
1970s and as a professor in New York
Universitys dance department from
1972 to 1982.
Odissi is reminiscent of the images of
female dancers that are carved into the
friezes of Hindu temples. The upper half
of the body articulates precise move-
ments that allow for interpretation,
while the lower half maintains any of
five statuelike stances. The costumes
consist of a headdress, called a tahia;
lots of silver jewelry; dozens of tiny bells
on each foot; and vibrant silk or cotton
dresses with elaborate thread work.
Ms. Devi was a consummate actress,
conveying emotions through every part
of her body, be it the flexing of a toe or
the swooping of an arm. Even her face
seemed to dance; her lips, brows and
gaze all helped tell the story.
On their honeymoon, she
learned of her husbands dislike
for dance when he refused to
accompany her to a performance.
To miss one raising of her eyebrow or
the precise relationship of her hip to the
angle of her elbow is to miss the har-
mony of images she has taken such care
to construct, Anna Kisselgoff wrote in
The New York Times in a review of a
performance at Carnegie Recital Hall in
December 1975.
Though only 4 feet 11 inches tall, Ms.
Devi could command the stage, taking
several different roles in a single tale
told through movement and dramatic
mime dialogue. Her performances often
ran three or four hours.
In her United States debut, in 1968 at
Jacobs Pillow, the annual summer
dance festival in Becket, Mass., she
danced multiple roles in enacting the
legend of Ahalya, a story of passion, re-
venge and redemption revolving around
the chaste and beautiful wife of a Hindu
sage.
She was born Rita Mukherjee on Dec.
6, 1924, in Assam, a state in northeastern
India. The arts were central to her fam-
ily life. Her mother, Aruna, taught music
and organized stage performances in
their town.
A relative, the poet Rabindranath Ta-
gore, was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 1913.
The family later moved to Baroda, a
state in western India in a region now
known as Gujarat. Ms. Devis father,
We got thousands of calls, and the
answering service threw us out, Ms.
Ceballos said in a telephone interview.
So I answered all those calls, and one of
them was Myrna.
Ms. Ceballos invited her to send in
some of her writing, and soon Ms. Lamb
was the go-to playwright for Ms. DellO-
lios New Feminist Theater.
The group made its first big splash in
1969, with an evening of Ms. Lambs
short works. One, But What Have You
Done for Me Lately?, was about a man
who experiences societys double stand-
ard firsthand when he wakes up from a
medical procedure and a female doctor
tells him he has been implanted with a
uterus and is pregnant. He is not happy.
It is natural for a woman to create
life, the man complains. It is not natu-
ral for me.
The doctor replies: The dogma of
beneficial motherhood has been handed
down by men. If a woman spews out
children, she will be sufficiently ex-
hausted by the process never to attempt
art, music, literature or politics. She
knows that this is all that is expected of
her.
Ms. Lambs work caught the attention
with Hair in 1967, and if her stridency
did not necessarily lend itself to that sort
of musical, it did inflame passions. Mod
Donna, which was about a mnage
quatre and skewered traditional views
of marriage, certainly had people taking
sides.
I was at opening night with my then-
boyfriend, Ms. DellOlio recalled, a de-
..
REG SPELLER/FOX PHOTOS/HULTON ARCHIVE, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Ritha Devi in April 1972. She specialized in
a dance that originated 2,000 years ago.
Satyabrata Mukherjee, was a govern-
ment official there.
Over her fathers objections, Ms. Devi
began studying classical dance after
graduating from Bombay University.
She started with the dance style known
as Manipuri, which is derived in part
from the martial arts and is named after
the region in northeast India in which it
originated.
Her parents, eager to marry her off,
moved her to Kolkata to find a groom,
and in 1950 she married Indra Chatterji.
On their honeymoon in Sri Lanka she
learned of his dislike for dance when he
refused to accompany her to a perform-
ance.
The moment we got married, he put
his foot down, she said in an interview
for the International Odissi Festival in
2011. He said: No dance. Nothing. You
have to become a housewife.
When her husband got a job in Chen-
nai, India, in 1953, she said, she did not
go with him, deciding instead to travel
throughout India to learn more forms of
the countrys classical dance. They di-
vorced in 1968. The couple had one son,
Rahul, who survives her.
As her performing career blossomed,
a mentor advised her to adopt a stage
name before embarking on an interna-
tional tour. Her first name, Rita,
sounded too European, he told her, so
she added an h and made it Ritha.
Devi was her grandmothers maiden
name.
It was while she was on tour that a
New York University faculty member in
the audience approached Ms. Devi and
asked her to teach. She had been taking
her young son on tours with her and had
had little money with which to raise him.
A steady job was appealing, and she
agreed.
She remained in New York for 35
years, teaching, continuing to perform
and starting a dance academy.
Later in life, Ms. Devi attributed her
stamina in dancing for hours at a time to
the enduring struggle she faced as a
young woman in pursuing her love of
dance against the wishes of the men in
her life. Younger generations of danc-
ers, she said, often seemed to lack that
passion.
Unless you have fought for some-
thing, you have sacrificed for some-
thing, you have totally surrendered for
something, you cant acquire it, she
said. You have to have dance as your
main passion in your life.
ceptively mild-mannered man who rose
out of his chair at the curtain and began
to shout that feminism was a sham and
that he would tell the awful truth about
what wretched liars, manipulators,
fakes and so on we in the movement
were. I had never seen him in such a
rage. Many men in the audience around
us were nodding approval at his out-
burst.
In addition to Apple Pie, about a
Jewish woman who flees Hitlers Ger-
many but finds that life in the United
States has its oppressiveness, too, Ms.
Lambs works included Crab
Quadrille and Olympic Park.
In a 1976 interview with The Times,
Ms. Lamb said the critical response to
her two productions at the Public stung.
They dont say, I dont agree with
what youve done or how youve done
it, she said. They say, You cant
write.
The feminist playwright label was
also beginning to bother her.
Though the feminist movement nur-
tured all of us, I am disillusioned with it,
she said in the same interview. What I
found after I was savagely attacked by
critics for Apple Pie was that the wom-
en were no different from the men
they are afraid to affiliate with you if you
are not an establishment success.
Ms. Lambs husband died in 1985. In
addition to Ms. Hachtman, she is sur-
vived by another daughter, Ilsebet Gi-
anna, and two grandchildren.
Ms. Lamb lived her final years with
the Hachtman family in Point Pleasant
Beach.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 3

Its tiny, green, and could

be the future of biofuels.
Algae is a renewable source of energy. ExxonMobil is researching its
potential to produce a lower CO2 emission alternative to todays
transport fuels. And because algae can grow in salt water and on
land unsuitable for crops, a successful algae-based biofuel could
provide the world with more energy without posing a challenge to
global food and fresh water supplies. Learn more at EnergyFactor.com

4 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
World
Nature of quake limited Mexico Citys toll
MEXICO CITY
Toughened building codes
helped somewhat, despite
enforcement seen as lax
BY AZAM AHMED,
MARINA FRANCO
AND HENRY FOUNTAIN
The devastation caused by Tuesdays
earthquake in Mexico City was far less
than it might have been, and a fraction of
what the city suffered in the quake of
1985.
But one main reason had to do with
the nature of the earthquake itself and
less with the toughened building codes
adopted in the last 30 years, as many
people had thought.
Although the new codes now rank
among the worlds best, their enforce-
ment is deeply flawed and uneven, ac-
cording to interviews with scholars, offi-
cials and building inspectors.
Building inspections have essentially
been outsourced to a network of private
engineers who are hired and paid for by
the developers, creating conflicts of in-
terest that can undermine even the best
standards.
Tighter building codes, better con-
struction materials and a robust public
awareness surely played a role in lim-
iting the carnage this time around.
Fewer than 300 people died and about
40 buildings collapsed, while nearly
4,000 buildings were declared severely
damaged and are likely to be uninhabit-
able, officials have said.
But what spared this metropolitan
area of 21 million was, at least in part,
luck.
The 1985 earthquake was 30 times
more powerful than the one on Tuesday.
It toppled apartment and office towers,
killing more than 10,000 people.
Tuesdays earthquake, while centered
closer to the capital, struck hardest at
smaller, less populated buildings, taking
fewer lives.
They were different seismic activi-
ties, in magnitude but especially given
the distance, said Dr. Eduardo Reinoso,
a researcher specializing in seismic en-
gineering at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico. Because this one
was much closer, the shock waves were
different. This quake affected shorter
houses and buildings, while in 1985 the
collapses were mostly high-rises be-
cause of the different waves.
In a 2016 study of a random sample of
150 buildings constructed after 2004,
when the new codes were adopted, Mr.
Reinoso found that many failed to meet
city standards. In many cases, the build-
ings reviewed did not even have enough
necessary paperwork to conduct a full
assessment.
As it often goes in Mexico, it is not the
law that is problematic, but rather the
implementation. Whether because of a
lack of political will, the corruption that
Hurricane leaves Puerto Rico facing months without power
SAN JUAN, P.R.
BY FRANCES ROBLES,
LIZETTE ALVAREZ
AND MARY WILLIAMS WALSH
Two days after Hurricane Maria flat-
tened this island of 3.5 million people,
knocking out all its power and much of
its water, the rebuilding of the services
and structures needed for people to re-
sume some semblance of ordinary life
was looking more complicated by the
day.
All or part of three towns in the north-
western part of the island Isabela,
San Sebastin and Quebradillas were
ordered to evacuate Friday because of
fears about structural damage to the
nearby Guajataca Dam. Close to 70,000
people could be affected if the 90-year-
old dam, which is 120 feet high and can
hold about 11 billion gallons of water, col-
lapsed, said Puerto Ricos governor, Ri-
cardo Rossell. On Saturday, officials
said that the dam would not burst. But
the danger from flooding was real.
And with everyone from the governor
of Puerto Rico to the mayor of San Juan
predicting that it could take four to six
months to resume electrical service,
people were contemplating empty re-
frigerators, campfire cooking, bathing
in their own sweat and perhaps wran-
gling for fresh water on an island accus-
tomed to hard times but nothing like
what the future may bring.
Its been hard to see infrastructure
deteriorate in Puerto Rico, but it has
been harder to meet citizens who have
lost it all, Governor Rossell said.
Finding gasoline was already a big
problem. Lines for ice and gas stretched
for blocks. Generators needed diesel or
regular gas to work, and supplies at gas
stations were quickly dwindling.
People will start going nuts pretty
soon, said Miguel A. Soto-Class, presi-
dent of the Center for a New Economy, a
nonpartisan research organization. I
dont think it will be 'Mad Max, but peo-
ple will be looking for diesel and gaso-
line, more than water even.
The water supply was also becoming
seethes through the system or the dys-
function of the bureaucracy, one of the
deadliest threats that the nation faces
has been left unfixed. Once the dust set-
tles, officials will be confronted once
more with a choice: whether to truly en-
force a public safety imperative or con-
tinue with reforms that seem to exist
mostly on paper.
Some developers have their pre-
ferred inspectors and they usually hire
the same person for their buildings, so
that inspector is active, familiar, and al-
ways has a ton of work, said Jorge Or-
tiz, an engineer and architect who is one
of several hundred contract inspectors
for the city. And sometimes if you have
several projects, they arent there as
much or are not present at all phases of
construction, and thats when theres
carelessness.
According to last years study, of the
buildings that could be fully inspected,
71 percent failed to meet a high threshold
of compliance with the city standards,
while 36 percent failed to meet even a
lower threshold of compliance.
It would appear that the regulator is
not performing its duty, the study con-
cluded.
But the inspection of older buildings
can also be lax, which might have been
the case in the tragedy at the Enrique
Rebsamen School, where 19 children
and 6 adults died last week following the
collapse of one of its buildings.
City code requires that certain build-
ings, including schools, be inspected for
safety after an earthquake. After a mas-
sive earthquake hit Mexico on Sept. 7, an
inspector was dispatched to the school.
The contracted inspector signed off
on the structure, deeming it safe, said
Claudia Sheinbaum, the local delegate
in charge of the district where the school
is.
They came to the school to verify the
building and said it was O.K., she said.
There are still tens of thousands of
pending requests across the city for en-
gineers to review structural damage, so
the estimate of damaged buildings is
likely to grow.
As in many of the recovery efforts, le-
gions of volunteers are helping with the
building assessments. A patchwork
group of engineering groups and non-
governmental organizations have taken
to the streets to assess the status of
structures whose sagging frames pose
dangers to neighboring buildings as
well as passers-by.
Still, it could have been worse, a mes-
sage that some in the civil engineering
community are hoping to send to Mex-
ico City officials to prompt changes to
the conflict-ridden system of building in-
spections.
We are concerned if we have a huge
earthquake like the one in 1985 we may
have problems in buildings, said Sergio
Alcocer the vice president of the Mexi-
can Society of Civil Engineers and the
former head of structural engineering
for the governments Center for the Pre-
vention of Natural Disasters. Its a
wake-up call.
Mickey Garcia, at left, tending to food with his neighbors in Toa Baja, P.R. At right, an aerial view of a flooded neighborhood in Catao, P.R., after Hurricane Maria hit.
a problem. Even in San Juan, people
need electricity to access water, and wa-
ter is also critical to running some air-
conditioning systems. At Centro
Medico, a major hospital outside San
Juan in Ro Piedras, the emergency unit
was treating patients but had no air-con-
ditioning, said Dr. Johnny Rulln, a phy-
sician.
But the biggest long-term obstacle
was the prospect of months without
power.
Puerto Ricans are the first to say they
can improvise resolver when a
drought dries them up or a terrible
storm knocks them down. But the idea of
grappling long term without power
hung like a pall over the island.
This is really affecting me, said
Nina Rodriguez, a human resources
manager in San Juan. I have four chil-
dren and the youngest is 6 months old.
We are preparing for six months, maybe
even a year without power.
She added: All the infrastructure has
collapsed. Everything we had before the
hurricane is beyond reach.
While few places could withstand a
Category 4 hurricane without extensive
Rescue workers and soldiers on a Mexico City street after a powerful aftershock on Saturday. In the background, a building that had collapsed during last Tuesdays earthquake.
Unlike a deadlier earthquake in
1985, last weeks quake produced
a kind of shock wave that tends
to damage smaller buildings.
The 1985 quake, at magnitude 8.1, re-
leased about 30 times more energy than
Tuesdays magnitude 7.1 quake. But it
also struck twice as far from the capital
220 miles compared with about 100.
There were other differences as well:
The 1985 quake was shallower, and even
the orientation of the faults the direc-
tion the rocks moved in was different.
All of those factors affected the toll in
destroyed buildings about 350 in 1985
and one-tenth that number on Tuesday
and in deaths. Four days after Tues-
days quake, the death toll was still
climbing, but the final tally will be no-
where near the estimated 10,000 who
died in 1985.
Generally, a more powerful quake
would cause more shaking and greater
destruction. Being farther away would
tend to reduce the impact.
ERIKA P. RODRIGUEZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
damage to power grids, Puerto Ricos
government-owned power company
was particularly vulnerable because of a
history of neglect, mismanagement,
out-of-control debt and decrepit infra-
structure, experts said. A monopoly by
the Puerto Rico Electric Power Author-
ity, or Prepa, was reviled by island resi-
dents long before Hurricane Maria shut
it down.
Our plants look like the cars in Cuba,
said Eduardo Bhatia, a Puerto Rican
senator. They could produce power be-
fore the hurricane, but not efficiently
and not cheaply.
So much of the damage still needs to
be assessed that it is possible the power
situation may turn out to be less dire
than feared. On Friday, Prepas chief ex-
ecutive, Ricardo Ramos, said on CNBC
that he was hopeful that the power
plants as opposed to the power lines,
pylons, substations and transformers
may be intact.
Weve lost probably 80 percent of the
transmission and distribution infra-
structure, he said, adding that crews
had completed only about a third of an
island-wide survey of the damage and
But in the case of the 1985 earthquake,
the larger distance from the epicenter
played a critical role in which buildings
were damaged and destroyed, and in the
death toll as well.
After that quake, engineers noticed a
pattern to the destruction. Of the hun-
dreds of buildings that collapsed or were
heavily damaged, most were six to 16
stories tall.
The reason soon became apparent.
High-frequency waves of energy gener-
ated by the quake dissipated over the
miles to Mexico City, leaving mostly
low-frequency waves to reach the capi-
tal. During the earthquake, those lower-
frequency waves rolled through the city
about one second apart. That closely
matches the natural resonance, or rate
of vibration, of buildings about 60 to 160
feet tall.
Successive waves caused those build-
ings to sway more and more. The soft
sediments that the city is built on, which
tend to amplify movements, made the
swaying even worse until the structures
failed.
In the quake on Tuesday, however,
would have more information in two
days.
He also said that important buildings
on the island, including Centro Medico
and a convention center now being used
by emergency workers, would have
their power back in two or three days.
Mr. Ramos said he shortened esti-
mates for how long power would be out
after Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New
York arrived Friday with teams to help
restore electricity. We expect three to
four months at most, for the whole is-
land, he said.
Getting power back to Puerto Rico
will be daunting and expensive. Trans-
formers, poles and power lines snake
from coastal areas across hard-to-ac-
cess mountains. In some cases, the
poles have to be maneuvered in place
with helicopters.
And yet it gets worse. Puerto Rico is
an island, which means the tons of
much-needed supplies trucks, poles,
cables, tools, spare parts, helicopters customers. Most of the electricity it
must be shipped into Caribbean ports,
making the process infinitely more cum-
bersome. Trained electrical workers by
the hundreds will also have to be flown
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
there wasnt as much distance for that
higher frequency energy to be ab-
sorbed, said Gavin Hayes, a geophysi-
cist with the United States Geological
Survey. As more of these shorter, faster
waves reached the city, smaller build-
ings vibrated until failure. Taller build-
ings were generally spared this time.
Since smaller buildings hold fewer
people, that helped keep the death toll
down.
But not all larger buildings were
spared. In an area called Portales Sur,
which sits on the fringe of the rapidly
gentrifying neighborhood of Narvarte,
buildings have sprung up in recent
years for young professionals looking to
own their first home in the city.
The builder of a six-story condomini-
um completed this year promised the
latest in technology and design apart-
ments constructed of concrete and
steel-draped elegance. Rainwater cis-
terns fed eco-friendly plumbing, while
solar panels stationed by the rooftop
garden powered units that sold for about
$150,000.
The building collapsed on Tuesday, ta-
RICARDO ARDUENGO/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE GETTY IMAGES
into Puerto Rico, where they will have to
find places to stay, not an uncomplicated
task. So every relief delivery can be a
major event.
Mr. Cuomo and a delegation from
New York arrived Friday morning with
supplies that included more than 34,000
bottles of water, 500 flashlights, 1,400
cots and blankets and, perhaps most im-
portant, 10 generators.
Mr. Soto-Class said Prepa has been
plagued by bungling and more recently
a debt it cannot pay, a shortage of cash,
and layoffs. Some of its infrastructure
dates back to the 1970s, or earlier.
When the electric power authority
had the money, they mismanaged it and
didnt invest, he said. Now there is less
money to run the authority with. This
compounds it all, one on top of the other.
By some measures, the authority,
formed during the Great Depression, is
the largest public electric utility in the
United States, with more than 1.5 million
Williams Walsh from New York. Luis
produces is generated by burning fuel
oil a dirty, outmoded source. It is vir-
tually the last power company pro-
ducing electricity that way. Hearings in
..
HENRY ROMERO/REUTERS
king with it the lives of two people. Now,
its remains sit in a pile of twisted metal
and fractured concrete, testament to the
often-shoddy construction and lax in-
spections that helped clear the way for a
voracious real estate boom in the capi-
tal, according to experts and officials.
Residents are searching for legal re-
course, given the failure of inspectors to
detect or report the structural flaws.
They have to. Many did not have prop-
erty insurance, as few people do in Mex-
ico, and the developer has claimed the
quake was unforeseeable, raising fears
among the unit owners that the com-
pany may try to abdicate responsibility.
I cant believe something like this
can happen in a new building, said Luis
Resndiz, 35, a photographer who said
he saved for five years to buy an apart-
ment there. This is the fruit of many
years of labor, and here it is, all lost.
Azam Ahmed and Marina Franco re-
ported from Mexico City, and Henry
Fountain from New York. Elisabeth
Malkin contributed reporting from Mex-
ico City.
the Puerto Rican Senate revealed that
the authority bought sludge and then
billed Puerto Ricos unsuspecting rate-
payers as if they had bought high-grade
oil.
The lack of electricity also affects the
water supply in certain areas. Some
towns need electricity to get their water
pumped in.
For now, generators are the saving
grace for the lucky few who have them
to crank up their refrigerator and a few
fans. Some restaurants, hotels and
many hospitals have operating genera-
tors. But the vast majority of Puerto Ri-
cans on the impoverished island cannot
afford them.
For older residents, the lack of power
could be dangerous.
Ermerita Rosa Perez, 83, sat on her
porch in San Juan praying the rosary
and worrying not just about comfort but
about survival.
Four to six months without electrici-
ty?! Oh no, no, no, no, we will die, Ms.
Rosa said. Us old people cant make it
that long. Just today, I was looking at
this flooded mess and I was thinking of
mopping. I said, No, I cant. I need to
rest. I will take a cold water bath
which Im not supposed to do, because I
have arthritis and rest.
She worried about her health. I am
diabetic. I have high blood pressure. Its
so hot I cant take it, she said. Im an
old lady, hauling pots to my carport to
cook on a gas stove? Its too much. So I
sit here on my porch, trying to catch a
breeze, praying to God to bring things
back to normal.
Her son, Hilberto Caban, was less
panicked. He said the authorities were
probably exaggerating how long the
lights would be out.
That way if it takes three weeks or a
month, well all say, Great! Look how
hard they worked! he said.
Frances Robles reported from San Juan,
Lizette Alvarez from Miami and Mary
Ferr-Sadurn and Ivelisse Rivera
Quiones contributed reporting from
San Juan and Campbell Robertson from
Pittsburgh.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Kurds vote for independence recalls tortured past
KURDS, FROM PAGE 1
leadership.
Mr. Galbraith predicted a solid major-
ity in favor of independence. Would you
want to be part of a country that commit-
ted genocide against you? he asked.
Often called the worlds largest ethnic
group without a homeland, some 30 mil-
lion Kurds are spread across Turkey,
Iran, Iraq and Syria. They were denied
statehood when the Middle East map
was redrawn after World War I. Isolated
and marginalized, Iraqs Kurds are now
demanding a path to self-determination.
Kurdistan is part of Iraq, but it looks
and feels like a separate nation. It enjoys
broad autonomy, with its own govern-
ment and parliament, its own language
and customs and a fighting force known
as the pesh merga.
After the 2003 American-led invasion
toppled Mr. Hussein, Kurdistan endured
a mutually dependent but ultimately
dysfunctional relationship with Iraq. In
2006, a Kurdistan agency hired an
American company to produce an ad-
vertising slogan that was both ambiva-
lent and taunting: Kurdistan the
other Iraq.
The Kurds and Iraq have since drifted
apart, like a couple trapped in a failed
marriage. Kurdistan has accused Bagh-
dad of reneging on commitments to the
Kurds made in the post-Hussein Consti-
tution of 2005, including a referendum to
determine control of areas in northern
Iraq disputed by Kurdistan and Bagh-
dad. The Iraqi government claims that
Kurdistan has illegally sold Iraqs oil.
After pesh merga fighters seized the
city of Kirkuk and its lucrative oil fields
in 2014, Baghdad stopped sending budg-
et payments, crippling an economy al-
ready battered by sinking oil prices.
Arabic, once mandatory in Kurdistan
schools, is fading among young Kurds,
many of whom barely speak the lan-
guage. Some Kurds resent their pre-
dominately Arabic-language Iraqi iden-
tity cards and passports, and long for
documents that say Kurdistan.
Kazei Kurda, 22, a Kurdish university
student, said teachers scolded pupils
who said they lived in Iraq. They are told
they live in Kurdistan, she said.
Ms. Kurda said the atrocities inflicted
upon Kurds were drummed into her as a
child. Several members of her mothers
family died in 1988, when Mr. Husseins
military killed up to 5,000 people in a
chemical attack on the city of Halabja.
From 1977 to 1987, more than 4,500
Kurdish villages were razed and thou-
Dana Salah Hama, 35, a wounded Kurdish pesh merga soldier, with his son at their home in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurds know no one will protect us but ourselves, Mr. Hama said.
sands of residents forcibly removed to
detention camps, according to Human
Rights Watch. During Mr. Husseins An-
fal campaign against Kurds in 1988, up to
100,000 Kurds were executed.
The history of the Kurds is one of be-
trayal, said David L. Phillips, a former
State Department adviser who worked
on Iraq for 30 years.
Amina Ahmed, 53, a former pesh
merga fighter, said her brother was exe-
cuted by the Baathist regime. Her fam-
ily was evicted from Kurdistan and
spent seven years in an internment
camp inside Iraq a foreign country,
Ms. Ahmed called it.
Those memories will guide her hand,
she said, when she votes yes in the ref- the time to break away from Iraq.
erendum. We are writing our own his-
tory now, she said.
Since the rise of the Islamic State in
2014, the pesh merga and the Iraqi Army
have been allies in the fight to drive the
militants from Iraq. After Iraqi soldiers
fled an Islamic State onslaught that
year, the pesh merga stood and fought,
seizing Iraqi areas and expanding the
Kurdish enclave by more than 40 per-
cent.
But the dispute over the independ-
ence vote has become so acrimonious
and intractable that Kurds say now is
State.
We have given up on Baghdad now
that the Iraq we fought for is broken,
said Hoshyar Zebari, Iraqs former for-
eign minister and a leader of the refer-
endum effort. Mr. Zebari said the Shiite
Muslim-led Baghdad government had
aligned with Iran, no friend of Iraqs
Kurds or the United States.
The Kurds historic sense of mistrust
and insecurity is playing out in the poli-
tical showdown with the United States,
which fears the referendum will foment
IVOR PRICKETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ethnic violence, fracture Iraq and rup-
ture the coalition against the Islamic
a former pesh merga fighter, said his sis-
The Kurdish psyche is one of being
different and very bitter over how the
rest of the world looks at us, especially
the Arabs, said Alan Noory, a Kurdish
university professor.
Mahdi Ahmed Hamza, 49, a school
headmaster, said he had always felt like
a second-class citizen, barely tolerated
by Iraqi Arabs outside Kurdistan.
Its like you are a bird in a cage that
has food brought to it, Mr. Hamza said.
But only when you are able to fly away
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 5
world
do you discover that you are able to feed
yourself.
For Lt. Esra Salim, 26, a pesh merga
soldier, the sound of knocking will be
playing in her head when she votes
yes on Monday. She said she would al-
ways remember Iraqi security forces
constantly knocking on her familys
door, searching for male relatives hiding
in attics and garden sheds. Many Kurd-
ish men were killed, imprisoned or
pressed into military service.
Najmaldin Karim, 67, said that in 1963,
when he was 13, Iraqi government sol-
diers publicly executed Kurds in his
hometown, Kirkuk, and hanged their
corpses in the streets. Mr. Karim saw
the dangling body of the father of one of
his best friends.
I still see that face all those faces
right in front of me, he said.
Today, Mr. Karim is the embattled
governor of Kirkuk Governorate, fired
on Sept. 14 by Baghdad but still in office
because Kirkuk is controlled by Kurds.
But Kirkuk, one of several disputed
areas included in the referendum, is also
home to Arabs and Turkmens, who feel
threatened by possible inclusion in a
Kurdish nation.
Maybe the Kurds will tell Turkmens
and Arabs to leave because now this is a
home for the Kurds, said Ali Abdel, 37, a
Turkmen who owns a billiard hall in
Kirkuk.
Mr. Abdels Kurdish boyhood friend
and business partner, Mohammed Hus-
sein, 37, sought to assure his friend that
Kurdistan would welcome everyone.
The Turkmens will be safe, Mr. Hus-
sein said. All we want is a homeland
where we can be safe, too, along with our
Arab and Turkmen brothers.
Sixty miles north, Mr. Hama, the
wounded Kurdish soldier, practiced
shuffling with a walker. He said his fam-
ily was forcibly removed from their an-
cestral village in 1988 and confined to an
internment camp for five years.
His father, Salah Mohamad Amin, 64,
ter and her four children were abducted
by Iraqi forces in the 1980s and never
seen again.
People around the world may won-
der why the Kurds are causing trouble
with this vote, Mr. Amin said. If they
knew our history, they would under-
stand.
Kamil Kakol contributed reporting from
Mala Omer, and Margaret Coker from
New York.

6 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
world
Pyongyang raises the specter of danger
WASHINGTON
Prospect of a nuclear test
over the Pacific poses
tough choices for the U.S.
BY DAVID E. SANGER
AND WILLIAM J. BROAD
If North Korea follows through on its
threat to conduct an atmospheric nucle-
ar test, it would be a far more dangerous
step than anything Kim Jong-un, its
leader, has attempted and poses a
host of hard decisions for the Trump ad-
ministration because attempting to stop
the test could be as dangerous as letting
it go ahead.
All six of the Norths nuclear tests
have been underground, containing the
radioactive fallout. But an atmospheric
test perhaps with a warhead shot
over the Pacific on a North Korean mis-
sile, or set off from a ship or barge
would put the populations below at the
mercy of the Norths accuracy and at the
winds that sweep up the radioactive
cloud.
That is why the United States and the
Soviet Union banned such tests in their
first nuclear test-ban treaty, more than a
half-century ago.
It is exactly that fear of an envi-
ronmental or humanitarian calamity
that Mr. Kim appears eager to foster as
he looks for ways to strike back at the
United States, Japan and others seeking
to choke off his money and trade. But ex-
perts who have been through the uncer-
tainties of nuclear testing say there are
risks all around, for Mr. Kim as well as
his foes.
It is not clear North Korea has that
capability yet, said Siegfried S. Hecker,
the former director of Los Alamos Na-
tional Laboratory and the nuclear weap-
ons expert the North Koreans let in to
see their uranium enrichment plants
years ago, when they wanted to make
clear to the Obama administration that
their atomic weapons program was
moving ahead, unimpeded by sanctions.
Besides, said Dr. Hecker, now a pro-
fessor at Stanford University, a live
missile test one loaded with an H-
bomb poses enormous risk. He re-
called that when the United States per-
formed such tests in the early days of
the Cold War, one blew up on the
launchpad and one had to be destroyed
right after launch, creating significant
radioactive contamination.
The North Koreans have studied this
history, too, according to current and
former American intelligence officials.
But the appeal of an atmospheric test is
obvious: It would create a sense of fear
that an explosion deep inside a tunnel in
North Korea does not. The underground
At U.N. and off North Korean coast, trading sharp messages
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA
BY CHOE SANG-HUN
AND JANE PERLEZ
American warplanes have flown close to
North Koreas coast, on the same day
that the Norths foreign minister told the
United Nations General Assembly that
President Trumps threats against the
country were making our rockets visit
to the entire U.S. mainland inevitable all
the more.
On Twitter, Mr. Trump responded to
Foreign Minister Ri Yong-hos speech
with yet another threat. Saying he had
heard Mr. Ris speech, and using his re-
cently coined nickname for the Norths
leader Kim Jong-un, Mr. Trump wrote:
If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket
Man, they wont be around much long-
er!
Earlier Saturday, the Pentagon said
the Air Force had sent B-1B bombers
and F-15C fighters over waters north of
the Demilitarized Zone separating the
two Koreas, in response to what it called
the North Korean governments reck-
less behavior. It was the farthest north
any U.S. fighter or bomber aircraft
have flown off North Koreas coast in the
21st century, Dana W. White, the De-
fense Departments chief spokeswom-
an, said in a statement.
This mission is a demonstration of
U.S. resolve and a clear message that
the president has many military options
to defeat any threat, Ms. White added.
Although B-1B bombers have flown
near the Demilitarized Zone over land
several times, this flight seemed in-
tended to underscore American military
strength to Mr. Kim, who has been en-
gaged in a war of words with Mr. Trump.
At the General Assembly on Saturday,
Mr. Ri said that North Korea intended to
have a nuclear hammer of justice
against its rivals and boasted that it was
a few steps away from becoming a nu-
clear power.
Referring to Mr. Trumps threat in
his General Assembly address on Tues-
day to totally destroy North Korea, the United States, which the North be-
Mr. Ri said the American president had
committed an irreversible mistake.
None other than Trump himself is on
a suicide mission, he added.
But Mr. Ri also said the Norths nucle-
ar program was a deterrent intended to
avert an invasion, with the ultimate goal
being balance of power with the U.S.
We do not have any intention at all to
use or threaten to use nuclear weapons
tests are detected on a Richter scale; an
atmospheric test, like the kind the
United States conducted at Bikini Atoll
starting in 1948, creates a terrifying
mushroom cloud.
The largest of those, a 1954 test code-
named Castle Bravo, turned out to be
roughly three times larger than Ameri-
can bomb designers anticipated. They
had made a mathematical miscalcula-
tion about the power of one of the nucle-
ar fuels contained in the weapon, and
the explosion spread radioactive ma-
terial across the globe. Ultimately, Cas-
tle Bravo helped fuel the call for a ban on
atmospheric tests.
No one knows what kind of test the
North Koreans have in mind; the coun-
trys foreign minister, Ri Yong-ho, did
not specify when he raised the possibil-
ity when talking to reporters at the
United Nations on Thursday. This
could probably mean the strongest hy-
drogen bomb test over the Pacific
Ocean, he said. Regarding which
measures to take, I dont really know
since it is what Kim Jong-un does.
But the presumption is that if Mr. Kim
decided to go ahead, the North would at-
tempt to conduct the test by firing it on a
missile, presumably to an empty spot in
the Pacific.
The goal would be to demonstrate
that it had solved all the technological is-
sues involved in delivering a nuclear
weapon to an American city.
But that form of testing putting a
live weapon on a missile is particu-
larly risky. Other countries have
blanched at the potential for disaster, Dr.
Hecker noted, including the Chinese,
who conducted one missile launch with
a live nuclear weapon in the warhead. It
worked as planned, he said, but the Chi-
nese considered the risks unacceptable
and never tried it again. In the hands of
the North Koreans, some say, it would be
even riskier.
This would be a regional nightmare
for East Asia, said Heather Conley, a for-
mer senior State Department official,
now at the Center for Strategic and In-
ternational Studies in Washington.
It is possible the threat will never
come to fruition. Detonating a weapon
inside a missile warhead, or even from a
ship or barge, would be far more difficult
for the North than setting one off inside
a mountain, where engineers have
months to wire up the weapon, and no
time pressure.
It would require what experts call a
weaponized device that could survive
shocks, stresses and, if launched from a
missile, the heat of re-entry into the at-
mosphere, something North Korea has
never demonstrated it can handle.
The D.P.R.K. would be taking a big
risk missile tests fail, said Philip E.
Coyle III, a nuclear scientist and former
head of the Pentagons weapons testing.
The live nuclear warhead could come
A broadcast by Kim Jong-un of North Korea, in Pyongyang. The United States has sent warplanes north of the Demilitarized Zone.
against the countries that do not join in
the U.S. military actions against North
Korea, Mr. Ri said.
Over the years, as Pyongyang raced
to build a nuclear arsenal, the world has
often turned to its neighbors for help:
China, because of its economic leverage
over the North, and South Korea, be-
cause it would suffer the most in any
military confrontation.
Now, China and South Korea have
been left squirming on the sidelines,
with Mr. Kim having been essentially
granted his wish: dealing directly with
lieves has the most to give.
To the North Koreans, the United
States can offer a peace treaty, diplo-
matic recognition, the easing of sanc-
tions and the withdrawal of American
troops from South Korea, which the
North considers its existential threat.
Since Mr. Kim came to power nearly
six years ago, North Korea has acceler-
ated its nuclear and missile tests to grab
The United States attempted a missile-launched nuclear test only once, in 1962, spurring negotiations that led to a treaty banning
tests in the atmosphere. Thus far, all of North Koreas nuclear tests have been underground, containing the radioactive fallout.
down on a neighboring country, or if the
missile blew up on the launchpad as
has been known to happen set off the
nuclear warhead in North Korea.
The transportation risks would be
enormous, including the chance of an
Washingtons attention and to force ne-
gotiations on terms favorable to the
North, according to South Korean intel-
ligence officials and analysts who study
Mr. Kims motives.
When Mr. Trump made his threat on
Tuesday it gave Mr. Kim a perfect
chance to square off directly against the
United States, they said. In an unprece-
dented personal statement on Friday,
Mr. Kim called Mr. Trump a mentally
deranged U.S. dotard and Mr. Ri raised
the prospect of exploding a hydrogen
bomb over the Pacific.
To back up such talk, Mr. Kim will
probably carry out more weapons tests,
analysts said.
A tremor detected Saturday near
North Koreas underground nuclear-
testing site raised fears of another deto-
nation, but South Korean experts said it
appeared to have been a natural earth-
quake.
We now cant avoid the military ten-
sions on the Korean Peninsula further
accidental detonation before the nuclear
device reached the target zone. And
while the worlds best missiles fail
roughly once in every 100 flights, the
failure rate for the Norths missiles is
much higher. Last year, one type of mis-
ED JONES/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE GETTY IMAGES
escalating, said Cheong Seong-chang, a
North Korea expert at the Sejong Insti-
tute, a think tank near Seoul, the Souths
capital. The standoff is intensifying
partly because South Korea lacks capa-
bilities to confront North Korea while
the North ignores the South and insists
on dealing only with the United States,
Mr. Cheong added.
As the crisis spiraled over the last few
days, China found itself a bystander
an uncomfortable role for President Xi
Jinping, who was most likely seething
about Mr. Kim and about the North Ko-
rean governments criticism of Chinas
most vaunted institution, the Commu-
nist Party, as its leadership prepares to
meet, analysts said. The Norths Korean
Central News Agency referred to a com-
ing party congress in Beijing in unflat-
tering terms on Friday.
The quiet in Beijing illustrated Chinas
almost complete lack of influence in con-
trolling the North and its unsuccessful
efforts to persuade Mr. Trump to tamp
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
UNIVERSAL HISTORY ARCHIVE/UIG, VIA GETTY IMAGES
sile failed seven out of eight times, per-
haps in part because it had been tar-
geted by a series of cyberattacks or-
dered by President Barack Obama.
Since then, the North has ceased testing
that type of missile and been more suc-
down his language, they said.
Fearful of failing and of losing face in a
peacemaking role, Mr. Xi would be re-
luctant to make any diplomatic or stra-
tegic moves before the party congress
opens on Oct. 18, analysts said.
Mr. Xi was left merely humoring Mr.
Trump by agreeing to tougher sanctions
at the United Nations.
I think Chinas diplomatic leverage
over North Korea is zero, said Feng
Zhang, a fellow at the Australian Na-
tional Universitys department of inter-
national relations. North Korea doesnt
want to see Chinese envoys and is not
interested in Chinese views.
President Moon Jae-in of South Korea
has also found room for diplomacy
shrinking, as North Korea and the
United States locked themselves in
what he called an escalating vicious cy-
cle of provocations and sanctions.
North Korea has not responded to Mr.
Moons calls for dialogue as it acceler-
ates its missile and nuclear tests. When
he came to power in May, Mr. Moon
found little leverage left over North Ko-
rea: Under his conservative predeces-
sors, South Korea had cut off all trade
ties and pulled out all investments in
North Korea.
We need a breathing room, an easing
of tensions, Mr. Moon said Friday.
Mr. Trump, however, has said talking
is not the answer and ridiculed South
Korea for talk of appeasement.
Despite the tightening sanctions,
North Korea is unlikely to stop weapons
tests until it believes it has enough
leverage to enter talks as an equal with
Washington, some South Korean offi-
cials and analysts say. It will reach that
point when it has secured a capability to
deliver a nuclear payload to the main-
land United States, they added.
Although Asias regional powers say
they want North Korea to stop develop-
ing nuclear arms, they are also playing a
complex game of geopolitical chess
among themselves, which is partly why
the nuclear crisis has been so in-
tractable for more than 20 years.
While Mr. Trump is hinting at military
action to rid the North of its nuclear
arms, South Korea opposes the use of
force, fearing war on the peninsula and
an attack on Seoul. China also does not
want war on its border, hoping that
North Korea will remain a Communist
buffer against South Korea and its ally,
the United States.
Mr. Kims refusal to listen to China
shows how far apart China and the
North have become, said Chen Jian,
..
cessful with others.
And even if one of the Norths missiles
succeeded in lofting a nuclear weapon,
the bigger challenge would be bringing
it back down during the fiery re-entry.
The heat, pressures and forces of decel-
eration are enormous. To date, evidence
from the Norths test launches suggests
it is still in the beginning stages of learn-
ing how to build a survivable warhead.
It would be far easier for the North to
entrust a nuclear weapon to a plane or a
boat. But it has few with the long-range
capability for the job, and the chances
that the United States or its allies would
detect it in transit are considerable.
It would also break a taboo. It has
been 37 years since any nation tested a
nuclear weapon in the planets atmos-
phere. And given what is now known
about the effects that radioactive fallout
from such tests has on human health
and the environment, one now would
only intensify the international oppro-
brium Mr. Kim already faces.
According to one estimate by a physi-
cians group opposed to nuclear weap-
ons, 2.4 million people could die from
cancer caused by the radioactivity from
the more than 2,000 known tests that
have already taken place.
The last atmospheric test took place
on Oct. 16, 1980, when China fired what
experts believed to be a nuclear-tipped
ballistic missile into a desert salt flat
along what was once the Silk Road,
more than 1,300 miles west of Beijing.
The United States attempted a mis-
sile-launched nuclear test only once
on May 6, 1962 during a frenzy of Cold
War tests. A submerged submarine, the
Ethan Allen, fired a Polaris A-2 missile
in the direction of Christmas Island in
the Indian Ocean. After traveling more
than 1,200 miles, its warhead exploded
at an altitude exceeding 10,000 feet.
That test helped spur negotiations
that ultimately led to a treaty banning
tests in the atmosphere, outer space or
underwater. It was signed in 1963 by the
United States, the Soviet Union and
Britain.
In 1996, a far broader agreement to
ban all nuclear testing, the Comprehen-
sive Test Ban Treaty, was adopted at the
United Nations and has been ratified by
166 states. The United States, China and
North Korea are among the holdouts,
along with Egypt, India, Israel, Iran and
Pakistan.
An effort by the Clinton administra-
tion to ratify the treaty failed; Mr.
Obama promised to resubmit it for ratifi-
cation but never did, fearing a second
defeat. The United States and China
have adhered to its restrictions, even if
neither has ratified it.
David E. Sanger reported from Washing-
ton and William J. Broad from New York.
Steven Lee Myers contributed reporting
from Beijing.
emeritus professor of history at Cornell
University.
Kim and North Korea are making
more trouble and headaches for Xi and
Beijing than anyone else in todays
world, Mr. Chen said. Why should
China fight a war against the U.S. for
Kim and North Koreas sake?
On Saturday, China said it would ban
exports of some petroleum products to
North Korea, as well as imports of tex-
tiles from its neighbor, to comply with
new sanctions by the United Nations Se-
curity Council. Chinas support of the
sanctions was largely a nod to Mr.
Trump and would be insufficient to crip-
ple the North Korean economy and force
it to the negotiating table, Chinese ex-
perts said.
Mr. Xi has displayed contempt for Mr.
Kim, who is half his age and whom he
has never met. His new envoy for North
Korean negotiations, Kong Xuanyou,
cannot go to Pyongyang because the
North Koreans will not let him.
If Mr. Xi thinks Mr. Kim is a lost cause,
he would be more likely to turn to Mr.
Trump for solutions, but only after the
party congress.
In a reflection of the Norths festering
anger at China, the Korean Central
News Agency carried a column by a
writer called Jong Phil at the same time
it issued Mr. Kims denunciation of Mr.
Trump on Friday.
The column said that North Korea
owed little to the Chinese and that Bei-
jing should consider North Korea more
than a buffer zone that protects it from
gangsters invasion.
It also questioned whether Chinas
news media should be entitled to enter
the coming party conference hall be-
cause recent reports had been betray-
ing the peoples of the two countries.
Some China experts considered the
commentary an attack on a fellow Com-
munist government in almost unheard-
of terms.
This is a very big and serious matter,
and certainly unprecedented, Mr. Chen
of Cornell said. Even during the Cultur-
al Revolution, when Chinese-North Ko-
rean relations reached the lowest point,
and the Red Guards were making all
kinds of nasty attacks on Kim Il-sung
Kim Jong-uns grandfather the eldest
Kim avoided personally attacking his
comrades in Beijing.
Choe Sang-Hun reported from Seoul, and
Jane Perlez from Beijing. Somini Sen-
gupta contributed reporting from New
York.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 7

world

Showdown over Catalonia tests Spains leader

MADRID
A secessionist conflict
is threatening to spiral
out of control after arrests
BY RAPHAEL MINDER
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy is the
great survivor of Spanish politics. He
has withstood electoral defeats, a bank-
ing bailout and party corruption scan-
dals, not by demonstrating political
boldness but rather by being cautious
and often waiting for others to fail.
Now, however, Mr. Rajoys political
survival is at stake as well as the unity
of Spain as a secessionist challenge
that he allowed to fester in Catalonia
threatens to spiral out of control. His
support for the recent arrests of Catalan
separatists and elected officials has em-
boldened the independence movement.
It was a rare forceful move by Mr. Rajoy
and it could backfire.
Rajoy has always shown the phleg-
matic approach of a clever administra-
tor rather than the vision of a great poli-
tical leader, said Josep Ramoneda, a po-
litical columnist and philosopher. But I
think he is now going to pay a high price
for his inactivity and unwillingness to
take charge of this issue and for believ-
ing instead that Catalonia was a prob-
lem that would somehow die on its own.
Catalonias separatist regional gov-
ernment is preparing to hold an inde-
pendence referendum on Oct. 1, ignoring
opposition from politicians and judges
in Madrid who say the vote would vio-
late the Constitution. On Wednesday, the
Spanish police raided the regional gov-
ernments headquarters in Barcelona,
arresting 14 people.
Almost immediately, roughly 40,000
people poured into the streets in protest.
Catalan leaders suggested that Mr. Ra-
joy was taking the country back to the
ernment announced that it would send
more police officers to Catalonia to
maintain order and block a referendum;
additional officers are being billeted in
ferries off the Catalan coast.
There is disagreement over who is re-
sponsible for the escalation of the con-
flict. But there is a growing consensus in
Madrid that Mr. Rajoy missed opportu-
nities to negotiate with Catalonias lead-
ers and also to take advantage of the po-
litical divisions within the autonomous
region. Instead, his critics said, he
stonewalled the Catalans, who were ini-
tially more focused on issues of money
than of sovereignty.
Mr. Rajoy has years of experience in
negotiating with Catalans. In 1996, he
was among the leaders of the conserva-
tive Popular Party who traveled to Bar-
celona to strike an agreement with their
Catalan counterparts to allow Jos
Mara Aznar to become prime minister
of Spain.
Rajoy has always shown the
phlegmatic approach of a clever
administrator rather than the
vision of a great political leader.
In his autobiography, Mr. Rajoy said
the Catalan deal opened one of the most
brilliant periods in the recent history of
contemporary Spain.
But in 2012, in the midst of Spains
banking crisis, Mr. Rajoy rejected a re-
quest from Catalonias regional govern-
ment to negotiate better fiscal terms for
a region that accounts for almost a fifth
of Spains economy. The leadership of
the main conservative party of Catalo-
nia then joined the drive to split from
Spain. Five years later, Catalan leaders
are saying that they are no longer inter-
ested in tax concessions but want to
manage their own state. The separatists
hold most of the seats in their regional
parliament (without having won a ma-
jority of votes). Opinion polls show sup- FERNANDO ALVARADO/EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY

dark days of Franco and fascism.
The Spanish government has over-
stepped the red line that separated it
from authoritarian and repressive re-
gimes, said Carles Puigdemont, the
Catalan leader, after the arrests on
Wednesday.
Those detained were eventually re-
leased, but they are expected to be
charged with civil disobedience and the
misuse of public funds to organize an il-
legal vote. On Friday, the Spanish gov-
port for independence waning, but a ma-
jority in favor of voting over Catalonias
future.
Rajoys focus has always been on
keeping the loyalty of his own elector-
ate, based on the rule of law but now also
with the use of more force in Catalonia,
said Jaime Pastor, a Madrid-based pro-
fessor of politics at UNED, a distance-
learning university. That can perhaps
help keep him in power in the short
term, but it can only deepen the territo-
Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy of Spain. His support for the recent arrests of Catalan separatists and elected officials has emboldened the independence movement.
rial fracture of Spain.
Indeed, Spains main opposition So-
cialist party, which had backed Mr. Ra-
joys stance toward Catalonia, now ap-
pears less certain in its support.
On Tuesday, Margarita Robles, the
partys parliamentary spokeswoman,
criticized Mr. Rajoy for relying on purely
legal rather than political tools to con-
front the separatists. She asked him to
clarify exactly what emergency steps
the government was willing to apply in
Catalonia.
The Socialists are caught between
wanting to be seen as a solution for Cata-
lonia and wanting to use this conflict as
the opportunity to remove Rajoy, Mr.
Ramoneda, the columnist, said.
Analysts say Mr. Rajoy had no choice
but to toughen his stance. Whether its
Rajoy or someone else in charge, no-
body can allow separatists to dynamite
the rule of law, said Csar Daz-Carrera,
a politics professor at Complutense Uni-
versity of Madrid.
But some analysts also note that Mr.
Rajoy avoided raising the stakes the last
time separatists held a ballot on inde-
pendence, in November 2014: That vote
was declared illegal, but neither Mr. Ra-
joy nor the police took physical meas-
ures to stop it.
In 2014, however, Catalonias vote was
nonbinding, and Mr. Rajoy held a parlia-
mentary majority, which meant his poli-
tical survival was not on the line.

Britains gambling problem grows

GAMBLING, FROM PAGE 1 paign against fixed odds betting termi- different conclusions, making it easy for
transformation, as the academic David nals is backed by people who make bookmakers to argue that there is not

CREATING NEW DYNAMISM

Runciman has argued, from one that
was permitted only to meet demand into
one that was allowed to stimulate it.
Today, there are roughly 33,000 such
machines spread across Britains 9,000
betting shops. They collectively pro-
vided a profit of more than 1.8 billion
last year, far more than those outlets
made from bets on horse races, dog
races and soccer matches combined.
Roughly half of the terminals are sup-
plied by a subsidiary of a company
headed by the American businessman
Ronald Perelman. The configuration of
money from other kinds of gambling,
and say that banning the machines
would force many shops to close, lead-
ing to job losses.
That argument strikes campaigners
as myopic, given the social damage they
say the machines are already causing to
some of Britains poorest communities.
Figures from the Campaign for Fairer
Gambling suggest that there are twice
as many such terminals in the countrys
55 most deprived areas as there are in
the 115 richest districts (which contain
the same population), and more than
enough evidence to support changing
the law.
A 2007 survey by the National Center
for Social Research showing that the FOSTERING A SHARED FUTURE
machines were the most common cause
of gambling addiction in Britain was
contradicted by other surveys the orga-
nization conducted in 2010 and 2012.
Most controversially, the waters were
also muddied by a 2014 report commis-
sioned by GambleAware, Britains larg-
est gambling addiction charity, that said
more research was needed to discern a
causal link between gambling machines

ECONOMIC LEADERS CEOs SUMMIT

the machines themselves is unique to
Britain, partly because their settings
are illegal in some other countries.
The machines allow users to place
bets of up to 100, once every 20 seconds,
on computerized casino games such as
roulette.
While researchers are divided on the
subject, many gambling addicts say that
the machines singular features make
them uniquely addictive and uniquely
harmful, both accelerating the rate of
loss and decreasing the waiting time be-
tween bets.
Its a gamblers dream, said Jason
Haddigan, a former addict who wrote
about his decades-long addiction in a
new book, How and Why I Conned the
Bookies. You get the buzz straight-
away and you get hooked straightaway.
Bookmakers dispute these claims.
There is no link between gaming ma-
chines in betting shops and problem
gambling, said Gary Follis, a spokes-
man for the Association for British
Bookmakers, citing the Gambling Com-
missions recent report, which sug-
gested that problem gamblers tend to
use several different gambling prod-
ucts.
Bookmakers also argue that the cam-
A fixed odds betting terminal at a bookmaker in London. Some British campaigners
hope the terminals will be banned after a government review next month.
double the losses.
Socially, its decimating communi-
ties, said Carolyn Harris, a Labour
Party lawmaker who heads a parlia-
mentary group that discusses the ma-
chines. The less money you put in these
machines, the more disposable income
people will have to put into other busi-
nesses, she said, adding that banning
them would boost the economy and
create employment.
Research commissioned by the Cam-
paign for Fairer Gambling in 2015 sug-
gested that for every 5,000 jobs that
might be created by the machines, a fur-
ther 25,000 jobs would be lost.
Campaigners want to ban the termi-
nals or at the very least to lower the
maximum bet to 2. But the betting in-
dustry has so far fought such a success-
ful countercampaign that Parliament
has yet to add any new restrictions. (It
emerged this month that members of
Parliament had accepted a greater
amount of gifts and hospitality from
Ladbrokes Coral, Britains biggest bet-
ting company, than from any other
source in the past year.)
Part of the problem facing Parliament
is that different investigations into the
machines addictiveness have drawn
ANDREW TESTA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
and gambling addiction.
Critics of the gambling industry say
these discrepancies have been subtly
encouraged by the industry itself.
After interviewing 67 stakeholders in
the British gambling industry, Rebecca
Cassidy, a professor at Goldsmiths, Uni- Unparalleled opportunities for global business executives
versity of London, concluded that aca-
demic research into gambling was a to engage world leaders and high-level government officials
second-rate field because of the prolif-
eration of industry-financed research Topics include:
projects.
To comply with British law, the coun-
trys bookmakers must voluntarily do-
nate money each year for research into FUTURE OF NEW FRONTIERS WORKERS AND JOBS
and treatment of problem gambling. But GLOBALIZATION FOR TRADE OF TOMORROW
most do this solely through Gam-
bleAware, which funded the contentious
2014 research into fixed odds betting ter- Invited speakers include:
minals.
As a result, GambleAware is now the
largest single source of financing for DAVID ABNEY ROBERT E. MORITZ PHILIPP RSLER
British gambling research, while simul-
taneously attracting claims that it is too UPS PwC WEF
close to the companies it is supposed to
be examining impartially.
The Charity Commission, which regu-
lates British charities, has ruled that DAVID L. CUNNINGHAM
there is no conflict of interest to the way
that GambleAware commissions re- FedEx
search. The charity itself also says that
it operates independently of the indus-
try, and works to research guidelines set
by another regulatory body.
Theres no question of money com- Join us at the APEC CEO Summit For information or to request an invitation,
ing in with strings attached, Iain Corby, Da Nang, Viet Nam / 08-10, November, 2017 visit apecceosummit2017.com.vn
GambleAwares deputy chief executive,
said in an interview, adding later, We
are the good guys.
But the charity has attracted criticism
because until recently, roughly half of its
trustees were representatives of the Knowledge
gambling industry. Partner
The government is due to release a
long-awaited review of fixed odds bet- Platinum
ting terminals in October, and cam- Sponsors
paigners hope it will recommend in-
creased restrictions on their use. Gold
Yet others, including Mr. Franklin, say Sponsors
the government needs to reform not just
machine gambling, but also the industry Premier Media
as a whole. Partners
The controversial machines are just
one part of a massive problem, he said. General Media
One part of the cradle-to-grave elec- Partners
tronic gambling extraction business
that is causing untold unhappiness in
this country.

8 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
Business
Apple ranks
as the best
investment
Strategies
JEFF SOMMER
The iPhone helped to catapult Apple
into its position as the worlds most
valuable publicly traded company. But
now Apple has another and, arguably,
more exalted stock market distinction.
In the history of the markets since
1926, Apple has generated more profit
for investors than any other American
company.
That conclusion emerges from a
study of stock market returns by Hen-
drik Bessembinder, a finance professor
at the W. P. Carey School of Business at
Arizona State University. His broad
findings on the market are startling:
Most stocks arent good investments.
They dont even beat the paltry returns
of one-month Treasury bills, he has
found.
But a relative handful of stocks are
extraordinary performers. Only 4
percent of all publicly traded stocks
account for all of the net wealth earned
by investors in the stock market since
1926, he has found. A mere 30 stocks
account for 30 percent of the net
wealth generated by stocks in that long
period, and 50 stocks account for 40
percent of the net wealth.
Ive written about Professor
Bessembinders broad findings before,
and several readers asked to see all
the stocks in the professors lifetime
wealth creation list. So at my request,
he updated his calculations through
December 2016 and provided fresh
rankings in his paper Do Stocks Out-
perform Treasury Bills? Weve repro-
duced the crucial elements here, with
an important revision: Today, in the
iPhones 10th anniversary year, Apple
is No. 1.
In a phone conversation, Professor
Bessembinder reminded me that the
stock market is a moving target and
that his rankings, while valid through
the end of 2016, dont capture the sharp
movements of this calendar year. In his
2016 rankings, Exxon Mobil, not Apple,
appears at the top, with net wealth
creation of more than $1 trillion. Apple
lags at about $745 billion.
But it has been a wild year. Exxon
Mobil shares have declined more than
11 percent at a time of weak energy
prices, while Apple, which just intro-
duced a raft of new iPhones, is on a
spectacular stock surge, gaining more
than 37 percent.
Run the numbers as I did, and its
clear that at this moment, Apple has
pulled ahead of Exxon Mobil, with total
net wealth creation of somewhere in
the vicinity of $1 trillion. Counting
dividends, Exxon Mobils losses in the
stock market have reduced its total to
a bit over $910 billion. (Note that, as a
technical matter, Professor Bessem-
binder defines net wealth creation as
total stock returns in excess of one-
month Treasury bill returns, which
averaged an annualized 3.38 percent,
so the actual stock returns for Apple,
Exxon, and the others are even higher
than indicated.)
Its remarkable that Apple has
generated so much wealth in such a
short period of time, he said. Exxon
has had decades to pile up those re-
turns.
Exxon is among the top wealth-
creating companies that have been
publicly trading under the name of a
predecessor, Standard Oil of New
Jersey since the inception of Profes-
sor Bessembinders tally in July 1926.
Get your
career in
focus
Meet top ranked
b-schools: Cornell,
INSEAD, HEC, IE, LBS, Tuck,
ESCP Europe, BI Norwegian,
CEIBS, Duke...
Others include General Electric, IBM,
Altria, Coca-Cola, DuPont, PepsiCo and
Schlumberger.
He relied on a database developed at
the University of Chicago, known as
CRSP, for the Center for Research in
Security Prices, that contains virtually
all publicly traded stocks in the United
States. The list is a fascinating ranking
of big winners in the stock market. But
for a variety of technical reasons, it
isnt a straightforward table of the
greatest wealth generators in market
history. For example, the long-term
gains generated by Exxon Mobil and
its predecessors are understated be-
cause of the databases limited dura-
tion and strict criteria.
Exxon Mobils wealth in the list
doesnt include Mobils, which Profes-
sor Bessembinders listing says,
ceased to exist in November 1999,
when it merged with Exxon. And going
back further, both Exxon and Mobil
were among the descendants of the
Standard Oil trust, established by John
D. Rockefeller and his partners in the
19th century. The total wealth generat-
ed by the cluster of companies derived
at least partially from the trust
which also include Amoco and Chevron
doesnt appear in a single notation,
because of the lists logic.
The listings for most of the recently
created companies are less tangled.
Amazon, which started trading in
1997, has soared to the 14th spot. Al-
though it hasnt been in existence long
compared with Exxon Mobil, its annu-
alized return is the highest on the list,
37.4 percent through December. A
group of young companies have also
had remarkable results.
Facebook,
which started
Only 4 percent trading in June
of all publicly 2012, is the
traded stocks youngest on the
list, with an
account for annualized re-
all of the net turn of 34.5
wealth earned percent. Visa,
by investors which had its
since 1926. initial public
offering of stock
in 2008, is the
second-newest
company, with a 21 percent annualized
return, followed by Alphabet (Google),
ranked 11th at 24.9 percent.
And then there is that great wealth
machine, Microsoft, ranked as the
third-greatest wealth creator. Since
1986, it has had an annualized return of
25 percent, making its founder, Bill
Gates, the richest man in the world,
with a net worth of more than $87
billion, according to Bloomberg.
No list of wealth-generating compa-
nies is complete without Berkshire
Hathaway. It ranks 12th, just behind
Alphabet, with an annualized return of
22.6 percent. By comparison, Exxon
Mobils annualized return was only
11.94 percent.
Anyone who invested in Apple or
Microsoft or, really, in any of these
companies at their inception and just
held on did extraordinarily well. You
might look at that record and conclude
that you should just buy the best com-
panies as a foolproof way to get rich.
If only it were that easy.
How do you find those companies?
Not here.
The problem is, I have no idea
which companies will generate the
best returns over the next 10 or 20 or
30 years, Professor Bessembinder
said. Probably it will be some compa-
nies weve never heard of. Maybe it
will be companies that dont even exist
now.
This list is worth studying for under-
standing the past. But, unfortunately,
its not a guide to the future, except for their flight data at all and instead live-
this: In a market where most of the
gains are attributable to a few big
winners that are hard to identify in
advance, Professor Bessembinder
said, it makes a lot of sense to diversi-
fy your position to avoid the danger
of omitting the big winners from your
portfolio.
Register now:
TopMBA.com/nytimes
Attend and access $7 million
worth of scholarships.
Copenhagen...............2nd Oct
Oslo................................4th Oct
Stockholm...................5th Oct
Paris...............................7th Oct
Istanbul........................7th Oct
Madrid........................10th Oct
London.......................14th Oct
and more cities
A section of the tail of Air France Flight 447. After a search that lasted more than two years, the flight data and cockpit voice recorders were finally recovered from the ocean floor.
Flight recorders that float
Devices will be released
and send a tracking signal
for satellites to pick up
BY ZACH WICHTER
Since the dawn of the jet age, flying has
gotten significantly safer. In fact, you
are thousands of times more likely to die
while driving to the airport than you are
flying in a plane.
Yet for all the safety advances, avia-
tion safety experts have long been
stymied by plane crashes in the sea. The
onboard recorders, known as black
boxes, can be difficult, if not impossible,
to recover deep beneath the waves.
But a new generation of recorders, an-
nounced this summer by Airbus and set
to roll out on new A350 airframes in late
2019, will make those boxes easier to re-
trieve. Instead of going down with the
plane, one of the recorders will be re-
leased and float back to the surface. It
will then send a signal that satellites
could pick up, allowing searchers to pin-
point its location.
That could be just the first step in
changing how data is recovered in a
plane crash. Some industry advocates
suggest that airplanes no longer carry
stream it to a central storage place on
the ground. But that future is taking
some time to materialize all across the
fleet, said Charles Champion, executive
vice president of engineering at Airbus
Commercial Aircraft. The drawback to
that is we dont have broadband every-
where, so streaming is not yet reliable
enough to make onboard black boxes
obsolete.
No matter how they obtain the infor-
mation, investigators say it is important
to learn the causes of air crashes. If you
dont solve the accident or if it remains
unclear, it can cast a pall, said Peter
Goelz, a former managing director of
the National Transportation Safety
Board. The way you do that these days
is by looking at the data.
The redesigned recorders are largely
a response to two of aviations biggest
modern disasters. Both highlighted the
limitations of the current generation of
black boxes.
In 2009, Air France Flight 447 crashed
into the Atlantic en route to Paris from
Rio de Janeiro, killing all 228 people on
board. After a multinational, multi-
million-dollar search that lasted more
than two years, the flight data and cock-
pit voice recorders were finally recov-
ered from the ocean floor.
They revealed that the crash had been
caused in part by faulty pitot (pro-
nounced PEE-toe) tubes sensors that
provide airspeed data to the pilots. The
tubes had gotten clogged with ice, re-
sulting in some inaccurate data in the
cockpit. Confused by mixed signals from
their instruments, the pilots uninten-
tionally put their aircraft into an aerody-
namic stall, which ultimately caused the
crash.
After that time-consuming and ex-
pensive recovery effort, many in the avi-
ation industry and regulators began
calling for flight data to be made more
easily recoverable after a crash. That ef-
fort gained traction in 2014 after Ma-
A Chinese relative of a missing passenger on Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. Most of the
wreckage, including the data and voice recorders, was never recovered.
The floating flight recorder that Airbus plans to install on A350 jetliners due in 2019. It
will be able to store 25 hours of cockpit voice up from about two hours now.
laysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared.
Based on radar data, experts believe it
probably veered off course and crashed
into the Indian Ocean while flying be-
tween Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and
Beijing.
Most of the wreckage, including the
data and voice recorders, was never re-
covered, so the precise cause of the
route deviation has not officially been
determined. There were 239 people on
board.
When a plane crashes into water, a
sonic beacon on the recorders sends out
a signal for about 30 days. In theory, the
beacon makes them discoverable with
the right sonar equipment, but that is
not necessarily the case in deep water,
especially if investigators do not already
know the precise location of the wreck-
age.
Airbuss new generation of recorders,
which is still being developed by L3
Technologies and the Canadian subsid-
iary of Leonardo DRS, will combine
voice and data functions in one appara-
tus. Aircraft will carry both a fixed and
deployable version, each storing 25
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
KEVIN FRAYER/GETTY IMAGES
said Elizabeth A. Pasztor, Boeings vice
Unlike traditional sonic
locaters, the satellite-based
technology instantly provides
the recorders exact position.
hours of cockpit voice up from about
two hours now and data on thousands
of flight parameters.
In the event of a crash, the deployable
recorder will be released from the plane,
triggered either by structural deforma-
tion in the fuselage or because it starts
to go under water, Mr. Champion, of
Airbus, said. Under a few meters, it will
release, and the box pops up back to the
surface.
Once the box is separated from the fu-
selage, a satellite-based detection sys-
tem will be activated the first of its
kind on a civilian aircraft. The first
alert will go off within three seconds af-
ter the beacon is deployed, said Blake
van den Heuvel, director of air pro-
grams at DRS Technologies Canada.
With that first hit, theyll be able to pin-
..
ALEXANDRE SEVERO, VIA EUROPEAN PRESSPHOTO AGENCY
point the location of the downed air-
craft.
Unlike traditional sonic locaters, the
satellite-based technology instantly
provides the recorders exact position,
updating regularly as it bobs on the wa-
ter. DRS is designing that satellite loca-
tor to last 150 hours about six days.
The traditional beacon on the fixed re-
corder, in the aircraft, will be upgraded
to transmit for 90 days in response to
regulations that go into effect in 2018.
Mr. van den Heuvel said that his com-
pany had been supplying similar de-
ployable recorders on military aircraft
for decades and that they had a proven
record of recoverability.
For the ones that dont get recov-
ered, I think youll find that we have situ-
ations where weve had a midair colli-
sion of two tactical aircraft, two very,
very small aircraft both approaching
Mach 1, and in that event you have very
little left of the aircraft, he said. For
transport aircraft, weve had a 100 per-
cent success rate.
Although Boeing has not made any
similar announcements about efforts to
make data on its aircraft easier to re-
cover, the company emphasized that it
placed a high value on safety.
The culture of safety has really pro-
gressed collectively over the years,
president for safety, security and com-
pliance.
The industry is much more likely than
it once was to share data, Ms. Pasztor
said. When it comes to safety, we truly
do collaborate as an industry, she said.
This is not an area to compete.
In the past, with less technology and
fewer regulations, flying was a much
riskier way to travel. Archival pages
from The New York Times can attest
that not so long ago, pilots were more
likely to misjudge terrain and crash into
mountains, or even to crash into other
planes in midair.
The last fatal airliner crash in the
United States occurred in 2013 when an
Asiana Airlines flight came in too low as
it approached the runway in San Fran-
cisco and struck the sea wall at its edge.
Video shows the plane pirouetting dra-
matically across the runway, but despite
the remarkable images, only three peo-
ple died; one of them survived the crash
only to be run over by a rescue vehicle
racing to the scene. The passengers who
were killed were not wearing their seat-
belts and were ejected from the plane.
In 2009, 50 people died when a Colgan
Air commuter flight from Newark to
Buffalo, N.Y., stalled while approaching
the runway, essentially falling out of the
sky. That accident led to a series of new
regulations based on recommendations
of the National Transportation Safety
Board on flight crew training and work-
ing conditions.
Robert L. Sumwalt, the chairman of
the N.T.S.B., emphasized that making
flying safer was a shared effort across
the industry. It has largely been success-
ful, he said, but is continuing.
When you put all of this together
the human, the machine, the envi-
ronment, including the things the air-
craft manufacturers are doing those
things combine to make our aviation
system much more safe than it was a
few decades ago, Mr. Sumwalt said.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Facebook chief following a familiar path
Farhad Manjoo
STATE OF THE ART
I knew the big Mark Zuckerberg
speech was coming. It always does.
Scandals involving Facebook tend to
follow a well-worn pattern: Through-
out the social networks short history,
when the company has felt pummeled
by users or lawmakers or shareholders
over one of the dozens of controversies
that have plagued its rise, there comes
a moment when the clamor reaches a
fever pitch. You begin to wonder why
on earth they arent doing more. Cant
they see how deep they are in it?
Just then, Mr. Zuckerberg will issue
a blog post, and these days, a live
video, too as he did on Thursday, in
a short address on Facebooks role in
Russias interference of last years
presidential election.
To a cynic, last weeks message, like
others Mr. Zuckerberg has issued,
might sound like puffery. After all, he
and his top lieutenants especially
Sheryl Sandberg, Facebooks chief
operating officer are as meticulous
in stewarding their own images as
they are in managing a sprawling
multibillion-dollar corporation.
Mr. Zuckerberg, in particular, has
come to see his own role in guiding
Facebooks community, and the trust
the community places in him, as cru-
cial to the fate of the corporation. So
when the heat from American lawmak-
ers regarding ads placed by Russian
trolls on Facebook began to rise, Mr.
Zuckerberg had no option to ignore it;
he had to say something.
But these messages arent just show.
Inside Facebook, Mr. Zuckerbergs
exhortations carry the weight of God.
Thats why the detailed plan he offered
to address election meddling is a very
big deal.
Like all tech leaders, Mr. Zuckerberg
is often hailed as a visionary, but his
primary talent is as a reactor. His true
skill is not in seeing ahead, but in
Leaning on arms factories
Economic View
LOUIS UCHITELLE
If you want to see what President
Trump can do to expand manufactur-
ing in America, look past his criticism
of free trade and the few jobs he may
have saved at Carrier. Instead, look at
his plans for the military.
Manufacturing has always relied on
public funding in one form or another,
and in particular on outlays for weap-
onry, even nearly three decades after
the end of the Cold War. Roughly 10
percent of the $2.2 trillion in factory
output in the United States goes into
the production of weapons sold mainly
to the Defense Department for use by
the armed forces.
And the spending shows. The United
States, after all, has 10 aircraft carriers
in active service versus just one for
China, although China has a bigger
manufacturing industry than the
United States. One can argue that
China is bent on big increases in weap-
ons production and is still in the early
stages. Whatever the case, Americas
weapons production is still far greater
than Chinas, while China has bur-
nished its reputation as a manufactur-
er of civilian goods for export and,
increasingly, for its own citizens.
The United States once went that
route. In the summer of 1945, after
nearly five years of wartime rationing,
the civilian population of the United
States was starved for new cars and
appliances, new clothing and shoes,
and new homes and their furnishings.
Mark Zuckerberg addressing a Facebook conference. Mr. Zuckerberg has been late before in perceiving problems, but he has a track record for finally making things right.
looking back and fixing where Face-
book has failed. And whats notewor-
thy is that when he marshals Face-
books considerable resources to ad-
dress a problem, Mr. Zuckerberg has a
track record of making things right.
I am not asking you to blindly accept
that Facebook will be able to com-
pletely address the role it plays in
modern propaganda wars. On Russian
meddling specifically, it took Facebook
more than 10 months after the election
to reveal that Russian trolls had
bought ads through Facebook, and
then it further dragged its feet on
So was the rest of the world, and
American manufacturers prospered by
meeting that need as well. Converting
factories to civilian production was a
no-brainer and sufficiently profitable to
match wartime earnings.
After the Korean War in the early
1950s, however, a somewhat similar
conversion back to civilian production
wasnt as profitable. And companies
that considered it in the early 1990s,
like General Dynamics in Groton,
Conn., decided to stick with making
weapons for the Defense Department.
These companies found that military
work was more profitable and generat-
ed more jobs.
As weapons production increased,
the manufacture of autos and electron-
ics shifted partly or wholly overseas.
So did the production of other civilian
products leaving behind weapons
bought by the Defense Department as
an ever bigger share of the nations
factory output.
While President Dwight D. Eisen-
hower warned of the perils of the mili-
tary-industrial complex in his farewell
address in January 1961, the Vietnam
War accentuated this reliance on
weapons production, which became
embedded in annual budgets. That
may well continue in the years ahead.
In his first budget proposal in May, Mr.
Trump called for significant cuts in
domestic spending but roughly a 10
percent increase in military outlays.
Public money flows to factory own-
ers in many ways often as a result of
the frequent bidding by municipal
governments to persuade a manufac-
turer to locate a factory in one commu-
nity rather than another. These auc-
tions sometimes top $100 million per
factory location.
deciding to make those ads available to
Congress.
Whats more, Mr. Zuckerbergs initial
reaction to the question of Facebooks
role in the election was marked by a
reflexive defensiveness.
Personally, I think the idea that
fake news on Facebook, which is a
very small amount of the content,
influenced the election in any way I
think is a pretty crazy idea, he said at
a tech conference days after last years
presidential election. Since then, he
has slowly too slowly come
around to the idea that social media
A manufacturer who finally accepts
a municipalitys bid collects tax breaks,
a gift of land on which to put a factory
and sometimes the cost of building and
equipping the factory itself at taxpay-
ers expense. Cities and towns are that
eager to have a factory, with its net-
work of nearby suppliers and its rela-
tively well-paying jobs relative to
the lower paying retail and service
industry work that is often the alterna-
tive for high-school- or even junior-
college-educated men and women.
To put the matter graphically, fac-
tories in the United States churn out
one rifle barrel for every nine auto
fenders.
Cutting back on factory production
isnt the direction the Trump adminis-
tration has been going. Instead, the
promise is that whatever goods they
produce the Trump eras factories
will be big employers. But the reality is
that modern factories, even when they
materialize, are highly automated,
which helps to explain why the manu-
facturing work force has bumped along
at less than 13 million for nearly a
decade, according to the Labor Depart-
ment, although factory output in-
cluding weapons production keeps
rising smartly.
These constraints make me yearn
for the good old days just after World
War II, when America seemed to have
easier policy choices. Even inexpen-
sive trinkets were manufactured in
America, and my mother, for one,
ordered her children to stay away from
a neighborhood boy whose parents had
bought him a BB gun. Disarmament
ran deep in the late 1940s. We didnt
need to produce weapons, even BB
guns, to keep manufacturing afloat.
Im afraid that we do now.
CAM COTTRILL
may not be the force for good in the
world that he and other optimists
always promised.
But it is worth noting that this sort of
thing has happened before. Through-
out Facebooks history, on questions of
privacy and advertising and business
strategy, he has repeatedly fallen
behind, then issued blog posts begging
for another chance to put things right.
Often these messages conform to a
template that he has honed over the
years. He will usually begin with a
note of reflection, sometimes issuing
an outright apology. Often, he will
DIVERSITY PROGRAMMES
PROTECT INSTITUTIONS
RATHER THAN DIVERSIFY THEM
Can we train out gender bias? Do diversity programmes
really drive inclusion? Do they do more harm than good?
Watch the live stream on Thursday, October 5 at 16:05 C.E.T. from the
Carrousel du Louvre, Paris to hear influential voices in business,
academia and public affairs debate one of the most important issues
facing contemporary business.
DEBATERS INCLUDE:
Kate Glazebrook
C.E.O., Applied
Kate Burns
C.E.O., NextTech, Hambro Perks
Kim Stevenson
Senior Vice President, Lenovo
JUDGES INCLUDE:
Vronique Sarlat-Depotte
Purchasing Alliance Global E.V.P., and
Chairman, Renault-Nissan
For more information, visit
womens-forum.com
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
underline Facebooks central tenet of
transparency and openness: Calm
down. Breathe. We hear you, he wrote
in 2006, in one of the earliest of these
addresses (people were very upset
that Facebook had begun News Feed;
what innocent times).
Next, he will offer a specific plan for
the future, often soliciting feedback
from users. And he tends to end on a
ringing plea for another chance, as he
did this week: It is a new challenge
for internet communities to deal with
nation states attempting to subvert
elections, he said in his address on
DEBATE
Francesca Aceto
President, SNCF Womens Network
Rohini Anand
Global Chief Diversity Officer, Sodexo
Siri Uotila
Senior Research Associate, Women and
Public Policy Program, Harvard University
Gabriela Ramos
Chief of Staff and G20 Sherpa,
OECD
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 9
business
Thursday. But if thats what we must
do, we are committed to rising to the
occasion.
This promise reminded me of a very
different but equally daunting problem
that Facebook faced five years ago. It
had just floated its stock on the public
markets, and things were not looking
good. For the first time in its blessed
rise, experts were questioning the
social networks future.
Facebook was born as a website on
desktop browsers, but the world was
moving to mobile phones and there
was little evidence that Facebook had
the technical or cultural expertise to
move along with them. Mr. Zuckerberg
has admitted that he was late to notice
the problem; as late as 2012, the com-
pany had fewer than 20 people on its
mobile team.
Then, finally, after much prodding by
investors, Mr. Zuckerberg came
around. He tore up the companys old
mobile strategy and brought in new
leadership to manage a new one. Get-
ting Facebooks mobile apps working
perfectly became the companys top
priority not just for a handful of
teams, but for everyone who worked at
Facebook, from Mr. Zuckerberg and
Ms. Sandberg on down.
Mobile is everyones job, Mr.
Zuckerberg told the company.
It was a do-or-die moment and
Facebook did. At first slowly and then
more quickly than anyone might have
guessed, more people began to use
Facebook on their phones which
drove more advertisers to place ads on
Facebooks mobile apps.
The latest series of scandals engulf-
ing Facebook has not affected its busi-
ness, which under Ms. Sandbergs
leadership remains brisk. But they
present no less of an existential prob-
lem.
Facebooks main asset is us, its
users; how we users and lawmakers
perceive Facebooks effect on our lives
and on our democracies and na-
tional security is a crucial factor in
its future.
A friend and mentor who knows Mr.
Zuckerberg well told me recently that
his greatest skill is his ability to learn
from his mistakes. He was late to
appreciate how the worlds most-used
social service might be used for ill.
Now that he finally seems to under-
stand the problem, there may be hope
that he can do something about it.
 ..
10 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

We want to make life

easier for seniors
and include them in
todays society.
Thomas Bergdahl, Vice President of Product Development at Doro, Sweden

To the older generation, the technology that was connecting everyone else seemed
to be leaving them behind. One company, Doro, made it their mission
to reconnect this generation. Using Androids open-source and flexible nature,
Doro completely redesigned the user interface and tailored their smartphones
to the needs and behaviours of senior citizens.

Watch the mini-documentary about the smartphone

that connects generations: g.co/androidstories
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 11
 ..
12 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Opinion
How to win a war on drugs
Portugal
treats
addiction as
a disease,
not a crime.
Nicholas Kristof

LISBON On a broken-down set of steps,

a 37-year-old fisherman named Mario
mixed heroin and cocaine and care-
fully prepared a hypodermic needle.
Its hard to find a vein, he said, but
he finally found one in his forearm and
injected himself with the brown liquid.
Blood trickled from his arm and pooled
on the step, but he was oblivious.
Are you O.K.? Rita Lopes, a psy-
chologist working for an outreach
program called Crescer, asked him.
Youre not taking too much? Lopes
monitors Portuguese heroin users like
Mario, gently encourages them to try
to quit and gives them clean hypoder-
mics to prevent the spread of AIDS.
Decades ago, the United States and
Portugal both struggled with illicit
drugs and took decisive action in
diametrically opposite directions. The
U.S. cracked down vigorously, spend-
ing billions of dollars incarcerating
drug users. In contrast, Portugal un-
dertook a monumental experiment: It
decriminalized the use of all drugs in
2001, even heroin and cocaine, and
unleashed a major public health cam-
paign to tackle addiction. Ever since in
Portugal, drug addiction has been
treated more as a medical challenge
than as a criminal justice issue.
After more than 15 years, its clear
which approach worked better. The
United States drug policy failed spec-
tacularly, with about as many Ameri-
cans dying last year of overdoses
around 64,000 as were killed in the
Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq Wars PHOTOS BY DANIEL RODRIGUES FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
combined.
A recovering drug
In contrast, Portugal may be win-
user smoking a
ning the war on drugs by ending it.
cigarette after
Today, the Health Ministry estimates
picking up her daily
that only about 25,000 Portuguese use
cup of methadone
heroin, down from 100,000 when the
(above). Miguel
policy began.
Fonseca smoking
The number of Portuguese dying
cocaine in Lisbon
from overdoses plunged more than 85
(left). A fisherman
percent before rising a bit in the after-
named Mario
math of the European economic crisis
preparing an
of recent years. Even so, Portugals
injection (right.)
drug mortality rate is the lowest in
Western Europe one-tenth the rate
of Britain or Denmark and about
one-fiftieth the latest number for the
U.S.
I came to Portugal to talk with drug
dealers, users and public health ex-
perts because this nation has become a
model for a drug policy that is not only
compassionate but also effective.
Its not a miracle or perfect solution.
But if the U.S. could achieve Portugals
death rate from drugs, we would save
one life every 10 minutes. We would
save almost as many lives as are now
lost to guns and car accidents com-
bined. her that he wasnt overdosing, and he intervene with counseling or other So how effective are the methadone today its hailed as a model. The World
This issue is personal to me, because scoffed at the idea of methadone as an assistance before an offender becomes vans and prevention campaigns? I Health Organization and American
my hometown in rural Oregon has alternative to heroin. addicted. thought Id ask some real experts: Public Health Association have both
been devastated by methamphet- Mario told me that he had started My main concern is the health of drug dealers. praised decriminalization and a public
amines and, more recently, by opioids. with heroin at age 14 (another man I the person, Capaz explained after- There are fewer customers now, health focus, as has the Global Com-
Classmates have died or had their met had started at age 11), and used it ward. Our approach is much closer to complained one heroin dealer in the mission on Drug Policy.
lives destroyed; my seventh-grade during the two years he worked as a that of a medical doctor than to a court gritty Lumiar neighborhood. Another, One attraction of the Portuguese
crush is now homeless because of her fisherman in Massachusetts. Por- of law. Joaquim Farinha, 55, was skeptical approach is that its incomparably
addictions. tuguese heroin isnt as high quality as The public health approach arises that methadone was costing him much cheaper to treat people than to jail
Many people are also coming to American heroin, he complained. He from an increasingly common view business. Business is still pretty them. The Health Ministry spends less
Portugal to explore what a smarter, then reached for a pipe and began to worldwide that addiction is a chronic good, he said, interrupting the inter- than $10 per citizen per year on its
health-driven approach might look smoke cocaine. disease, perhaps comparable to diabe- view to make a sale to a middle-aged successful drug policy. Meanwhile, the
like. Delegations from around the Public health workers like Lopes tes, and thus requires medical care woman. U.S. has spent some $10,000 per house-
world are flying to Lisbon to study may never be able to get Mario to give rather than punishment. After all, we (Portugals drug market is relatively hold (more than $1 trillion) over the
what is now referred to as the Por- up drugs, but she can help keep him dont just tell diabetics, Get over it. nonviolent and relaxed partly because decades on a failed drug policy that
tuguese model. alive. Seeing Mario, his blood spat- My sense from observing the hear- of another factor: Handguns are results in more than 1,000 deaths each
This is the best thing to happen to tered on the steps from his constant ings and talking to users is that the tightly controlled.) week.
this country, Mario Oliveira, 53, a injections, tottering off to get more Dissuasion Commission isnt terribly On balance, the evidence is that Ive been apprehensive of decrimi-
former typesetter who became hooked drugs, it was clear that the Portuguese effective at dissuading. How successful drug use stabilized or declined since nalizing hard drugs for fear of increas-
on heroin 30 years ago, told me as he model isnt as effective as we might could a 15-minute session be? Then Portugal changed approaches, particu- ing addiction. Portugal changed my
sipped from a paper cup of methadone hope but it occurred to me that in again, criminal sanctions also seem larly for heroin. In polls, the proportion mind, and its policy seems fundamen-
supplied by a mobile van. The vans, a America, Mario might well be dead. ineffective at discouraging drug use: of 15- to 24-year-olds who say that they tally humane and lifesaving. Yet lets
crucial link in Portugals public health Portugal switched to its health focus When scholars look at the impact of have used illicit drugs in the last also be realistic about what is possible:
efforts, cruise Lisbons streets every under the leadership of a socialist crackdowns, month dropped by almost half since Portugals approach works better than
day of the year and supply users with prime minister named Antnio Guter- they find theres decriminalization. Americas, but nothing succeeds as
free methadone, an opioid substitute, res and if the name sounds familiar, Drug use typically little Decriminalization also made it easi- well as we might hope.
to stabilize their lives and enable them its because hes now the United Na- stabilized impact. er to fight infectious diseases and treat The hilly Casal Ventoso neighbor-
to hold jobs. tions secretary general. The new ap- In the first overdoses. In the U.S., people are hood of Lisbon was ground zero for
Methadone and other drug treat-
or declined
proach was a gamble. We were facing year or so of sometimes reluctant to call 911 after a heroin in Lisbon 15 years ago, a wall
ment programs also exist in the U.S., a devastating situation, so we had since Portugal decriminalization friend overdoses for fear of an arrest; of death, remembered Paulo Brito, 55,
but are often expensive or difficult to nothing to lose, recalled Joo Castel- changed its in Portugal, thats not a risk in Portugal. In 1999, who has been using heroin since he
access. The result is that only 10 per- Branco Goulo, a public health expert approach. there did seem to Portugal had the highest rate of drug- was 15.
cent of Americans struggling with and the architect of the policy (our be the increase related AIDS in the European Union; Brito weaned himself off drugs with
addiction get treatment; in Portugal, national hero, as one Portuguese in drug use that since then, H.I.V. diagnoses attributed the help of health workers and re-
treatment is standard. cabinet minister told me). critics had predicted. But although the to injections have fallen by more than mained clean for 10 years but
If I couldnt come here, I dont So lets be clear on what Portugal Portuguese model is often described 90 percent and Portugal is no longer at relapsed a year ago, and I met him in
know if Id still be alive, Oliveira told did and didnt do. First, it didnt change simply as decriminalization, perhaps the high end in Europe. todays Casal Ventoso. There are fewer
me. He said that he used to steal to laws on drug trafficking: Dealers still the more important part is a public One crucial mistake that Portugal overdoses now, but it is still littered
support his habit but is now getting his go to prison. And it didnt quite legalize health initiative to treat addiction and did not make was to follow the United with hypodermic packages and other
life under control. Two weeks ago, he drug use, but rather made the pur- discourage narcotics use. My take is States in adopting prescription opioid detritus of narcotics, as well as a pall
began reducing his dose of methadone, chase or possession of small quantities that decriminalization on its own painkillers for routine use. Adalberto of sadness.
and he hopes to wean himself off opi- (up to a 10-day supply) not a crime but might have led to a modest increase in Campos Fernandes, the health min- Ive hit rock bottom, Brito told me
oids completely. an administrative offense, like a traffic the use of hard drugs, but that this was ister, said that Portuguese doctors despairingly. Im losing the person I
Yet Portugals approach is no magic ticket. swamped by public health efforts that resisted overprescribing and that most love in the world.
wand. Offenders are summoned to a Dis- led to an overall decline. regulators also stood in the way. His girlfriend, Teresa, is begging
Im homeless and jobless and ad- suasion Commission hearing an Portugal introduced targeted mes- Another factor that has benefited him to give up heroin. He wants to
dicted again, Miguel Fonseca, a 39- informal meeting at a conference table saging to particular groups prosti- Portugal: The economy has grown and choose her; he fervently wants to quit.
year-old electrical mechanic, said as with social workers who try to prevent tutes, Ukrainians, high school drop- there is a robust social fabric and But he doesnt know if he can, and he
he held a lighter under a sheet of tin a casual user from becoming addicted. outs, and so on. The Health Ministry safety net, so fewer people self-medi- teared up as he said, Its like entering
foil to turn a pinch of heroin powder How long have you been using? dispatched workers into the most cate with drugs. Anne Case and Angus a boxing ring and facing Mike Tyson.
into fumes that he smoked to get high. Nuno Capaz, a sociologist and member drug-infested neighborhoods to pass Deaton of Princeton University have Yet for all his suffering, Brito lives,
He spends about $100 a day on his of the Dissuasion Commission in Lis- out needles and urge users to try chronicled the rise of deaths of de- because hes Portuguese. The lesson
habit, and in the past sometimes has bon, asked a 26-year-old factory methadone. At big concerts or similar spair and argue that opioid use in that Portugal offers the world is that
turned to theft to support it. worker caught with hashish. They gatherings, the Health Ministry some- America in part reflects a long-term while we cant eradicate heroin, its
Less than 100 feet away, Mario, the chatted, with Capaz trying to figure times authorizes the testing of users decline in well-paying jobs for those possible to save the lives of drug users
fisherman I began this story with, was out if the young man was in danger of drugs to advise them if they are safe, with a high school education or less. if were willing to treat them not as
injecting himself with heroin and co- taking up harder drugs. The dissua- and then the return of the stash. De- Portugal initially was scolded criminals but as sick, suffering human
caine, and showing little interest in sion board can fine offenders, but criminalization makes all this easier, around the world for its experiment, as beings who need helping hands, not
Lopess health outreach. He assured thats rare. Mostly the strategy is to because people no longer fear arrest. a weak link in the war on drugs, but handcuffs.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 13

opinion

Meet Pakistans modern middle class

with a snake charmer evidence of a ics, along with frequent trips to West- restaurant employment in the United
ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR., Publisher A.G. SULZBERGER, Deputy Publisher Ammara Maqsood period when Pakistan enjoyed a more ern-style shopping malls, megastores States. Pakistan received $20 billion in
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
favorable global reputation. and markets in Lahore. Careful atten- remittances in 2016, according to the
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
The old middle class sees Pakistan tion is paid to rearing children: using World Bank.
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director PHILIPPE MONTJOLIN, Senior V.P., International Operations
as being on the path toward modernity branded diapers instead of local nap- The visible religiosity of the new
before the Islamization agenda of Gen. pies, buying clothes from well-known middle class is often identified as the
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising Pakistan is often seen as a country Zia-ul-Haq (1978-88) brought upheaval. Pakistani labels and feeding them Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia. How-
ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences with a small Birkin-bag-sporting elite, Their nostalgia influences foreign Western-style snacks, such as chicken ever, it is not Wahhabi Islam but the
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor CHANTAL BONETTI, V.P., International Human Resources a poverty-ridden mass and little in commentators, who tend to showcase nuggets and instant noodles.
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing between. The reality is that Pakistan globalized Islam practiced by Muslims
events, such as literary festivals, that Yet twinned with the desire for in the West that better explains con-
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation does have a large urban population glorify the earlier progressive history consumption is anxiety about such
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific that identifies itself as middle class. temporary religious trends. Made
of the country. exhibition and how to sustain it. Most familiar with Muslim practices abroad
SUZANNE YVERNS, International Chief Financial Officer Being middle class is a status closely Implicit in these portrayals is a homes possess microwaves and mixer-
associated with a progressive moderni- through relatives living abroad and
vilification of the upwardly mobile grinders, but their owners use them returning migrants, many members of
ty in Pakistan, in India that indi- groups whose more visible religiosity sparingly and store them in their origi-
viduals and successive governments the new middle class have started
is viewed as the legacy of General Zia. nal packaging. They buy sofas to incorporating them in their own lives.
alike yearn for. It is these groups that constitute the match what they see in soap operas For instance, Quran schools and
TRUMP SQUANDERS THE WORLDS TRUST In undivided, colonial India, the term
middle class was associated with
new urban middle class that has and advertisements, but protect them religious study circles, where the Qur-
emerged since with plain sheets that are removed an is studied with translation and
At a crucial moment, Donald Trump is forcing the world Indian officials, bureaucrats, doctors, the 1980s. In only on special occasions.
lawyers and teachers who were linked The emerging interpretation, were introduced in
The presidents to confront core questions it really shouldnt have to Lahore, many of Families on the poorer end of the
Lahore in the early 2000s by returnees
to the colonial state. But while they populace loves them are second- new middle class visit malls and shop-
indifference to ask: Can he be trusted? And, more saliently, can Amer- displayed the values and ambitions of from the United States. Similarly,
to shop and generation mi- ping spaces for recreational experi-
Americas ica be trusted? His threats to jettison the Iran nuclear the modernizing English middle class grants from ences. They rarely make purchases
many women have replaced dupattas
commitments deal are undermining Americas credibility as a negoti- mediating between the rulers and sees Islamic small towns and from such places and prefer to look for
and chadors the traditional ways of
the ruled many of them came from values as the showing modesty- in public with
undermines its ating partner and weakening Americas ability to lead rural areas in the same or similar goods in cheaper
aristocratic and landed backgrounds. head scarves and cloaks similar to
the free world as it has for 70 years. solution to Punjab. bazaars and wholesale markets. Their
credibility in After the formation of Pakistan in Products of the ability to find more economical deals those worn by relatives in the West,
In his rush to bulldoze President Obamas accomplish- the countrys Saudi Arabia or the Gulf.
negotiations 1947, the families employed in the
problems. state education becomes a way to distinguish them-
ments, Mr. Trump has withdrawn from the 12-nation colonial government were at the fore- system of the selves from the presumed decadent It is not so much the desire to be
and weakens front of the national project of modern- closer to the heartland of Islam that
Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, leaving 1980s a time and self-indulgent upper classes.
its ability China with a freer hand to set trade rules in Asia; aban- ization, along with emerging groups when General Members of the new middle class prompts these changes, but the desire
to lead. such as urban professionals from India Zia gave religious clergy free rein and covet government employment, which to display a modern Muslim identity, a
doned the hard-won 195-nation Paris Agreement to shift commensurate with their eco-
and educated families from smaller curbed political parties most mem- still remains a mark of status, but such
address climate change; and sowed grave doubts about towns in Punjab. They are known as bers of the new middle class are famil- work does not provide sufficient in- nomic progress.
his commitment to NATO, the bedrock alliance that has the old middle class in contemporary iar with the discourses of Islamic come to sustain their idealized level of Denied the status of modernity in
kept peace in Europe after World War II. Pakistan. Their children dont work for groups. While many are sympathetic middle-class consumption. Many in the local class hierarchy, these groups
Now, Mr. Trump is threatening to torpedo the 2015 the state but tend to be employed at to Islamist parties call for social jus- this group augment their state income look for it through a familiarity with a
midlevel and top positions in the more tice, and some have had affiliations through investment in real estate. global Muslim community. Just as the
nuclear deal, which imposed strict limits on Irans nucle- lucrative private sector. old middle class gains its modern
with such groups, few are lasting mem- Many families in new middle-class
ar program in return for a lifting of international sanc- In Lahore, Pakistans second-largest bers. Support for an Islamist party is circles have acquired their current status through a narrative that is used
tions. He has hinted that next month he will not certify city, old middle-class families distance often issue-based and transient, and in status through money made by a rela- to explain Pakistan to the outside
that Iran is complying with its commitments, even themselves from the upwardly mobile most cases, does not translate into tive in a semiskilled job in the Gulf world, so the new middle class at-
though the head of Americas Strategic Command just through their genealogical ties to votes. countries or North America. The most tempts to use its own connections to
prestigious families, local notables and The new middle class has a strong significant waves of semiskilled labor the West to assert its modernity.
said that it was. The certification is required every 90 their display of affinity for the lost sense that the solution to Pakistans migration from Pakistan over the past
days; a failure to provide it could lead to the re-imposi- culture of the 1950s and 1960s. They problems lies in becoming better Mus- half-century have been for industrial AMMARA MAQSOOD, a junior research
tion of American sanctions and cause the agreement to share photos and stories of Ava Gard- lims and instilling Islamic values. But work in Britain in the 1960s, construc- fellow in anthropology at St. Catherines
unravel. ner staying at Falettis Hotel during it is also conspicuous for its members tion labor in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf College, University of Oxford, is the
Perhaps the most immediate consequence of reneging the filming of Bhowani Junction and considerable investment in the latest in the 1970s and 1980s and, since the author of The New Pakistani Middle
Dizzy Gillespie playing saxophone mobile phones and consumer electron- 1980s, taxi driving, construction and Class.
on the Iran deal is that it will make it even harder, if not
impossible, for the president to negotiate a peaceful
resolution of the crisis over North Koreas nuclear weap-
ons program. The Norths leader, Kim Jong-un, is erratic
and frightening, but why would it help matters to elimi-
nate any confidence Mr. Kim might have in Mr. Trumps
word?
Such a reckless choice on the Iran deal would also
free Iran to resume unfettered nuclear activities and
constitute a slap in the face to major powers Britain,
France, Germany, Russia and China that worked with
the United States and Iran for two years to negotiate
and implement the deal. Those nations are now fe-
verishly trying to persuade Mr. Trump to stick with
Americas commitment.
It would be one thing if Iran had violated the agree-
ment, but the International Atomic Energy Agency,
which monitors the nuclear program 24/7, has repeat-
edly confirmed Irans compliance. Mr. Trump didnt
even bother to try to make a case against Iran when he
lashed out at it during a speech at the United Nations
General Assembly last week.
One unanswered question is whether the United
States would be violating international law if it re-
imposed sanctions on Iran without cause or otherwise
undermined the agreement. In the United States, most
legally binding international agreements take the form
of treaties, which require approval by two-thirds of the
Senate, and executive agreements, which are entered
into by the executive branch and dont require Senate
action. The Iran deal is a political commitment that is
not legally binding, though some experts believe that
the United States has an obligation to comply since the
deal was codified in a United Nations Security Council
resolution.
While Mr. Trumps Republican and Democratic prede-
cessors often pursued significantly different domestic
policies, on the whole their foreign policies did not radi- SARA FARID FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

cally diverge from administration to administration. People outside a shopping mall in Karachi, Pakistan.
And for good reason: America and its leaders, whatever
their failings, have largely taken their international
responsibilities seriously and found value and security
in adhering to laws, legal obligations and political com-
mitments that reassure allies, constrain enemies, ad-
vance stability and promote democracy and human
rights. If he shrugs off previous commitments without
clear cause, Mr. Trump may find that world leaders will
Kurdish independence is a good bet
State, replace the brutal regime of are economically viable, with a well- Today they stand as a nation reborn,
start to wonder if his successors will treat his deals as Ron Prosor Bashar al-Assad in Syria and contain developed energy industry. They have about to embark on an inspiring exer-
indifferently as he is treating his predecessors. Iran, which still threatens to go nucle- functioning institutions, including cise in democracy. We have a moral
The issue is not that presidents dont sometimes re- ar. But the best way to stamp out dark- elections for Parliament and a rela- duty to support its outcome. In a re-
nege on predecessors agreements. In 2002, President ness isnt through military might, but tively free media. And theyve proved gion where the flags of liberal democ-
No one likes winning more than Presi- through light. And an independent capable of defending themselves racies are routinely set alight, Kurdi-
George W. Bush abandoned the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Mis- dent Trump. He has a chance to prove Kurdish state would be a beacon of against the Islamic State without at- stan has chosen to embrace liberal
sile Treaty. While that was an unwise move that stoked it on Monday, when Iraqi Kurds hold a hope in a part of the world where hope tacking others. democratic values.
Russian suspicions about the West, Mr. Bush was not referendum on their independence. is desperately needed. Kurdistan is already, in values and Now the United States faces a criti-
acting capriciously. He relied upon the treatys agreed- There is no shortage of losers in the An independent Kurdish state would governance, a democratic nation in cal choice. President Trump has the
Middle East, but anyone in the busi- be a victory for democratic values, waiting. Is it a perfect Jeffersonian chance to demonstrate American
upon withdrawal clause and had a strategy for improv-
ness of spotting winners should bet on national self-determination and the democracy? No. Does it have a long leadership, promote American values
ing relations with Russia going forward. an independent Kurdish state. Backing rights of women and minorities. Is way to go? Yes. But in a region where and strengthen an American ally.
President Ronald Reagan called the SALT II arms the Kurds is not only strategically there a more iconic image of the fight tyranny is the Israel would welcome his support for
control treaty fatally flawed, yet he found a way to live smart they are a steadfast ally in against the Islamic State than that of norm, its on the the Kurds. And if handled intelligently,
with it as part of a strategy that used an arms buildup to the fight against the Islamic State and female Kurdish peshmerga fighters Backing the right track. the pragmatic Arab states such as
pressure the Soviets.
Islamist extremism, doing battle along- doing battle on the front lines against Kurds is not With a state, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the
side American soldiers its also the jihadists who demand the subjugation only the right the Kurds could United Arab Emirates could follow
A bellicose stance toward Iran is just one part of the right thing to do. of women? An independent Kurdish become an even suit, on the grounds that Kurdistan
incoherent and inconsistent foreign policy that Mr. Yet the Trump administration has state would empower these warriors in thing to do. more valuable could serve as a bulwark against Iran
Trump described to the United Nations General Assem- worked to prevent the referendum, a part of the world where women and Its also a and constructive and the Islamic State.
bly. He elevated sovereignty as his guiding principle arguing that with the war against the girls are typically second-class citi- smart strategy. ally against If we wait for the region to be per-
Islamic State yet to be won, a vote zens. extremism. That fectly stable, for Islamist extremism to
for international relations and used it as a rationale for could risk further dividing an already In addition to its commitment to would be in the disappear or for the collective blessing
threatening Iran, North Korea and Venezuela, then gave fractious coalition. In a statement, it gender equality, Kurdistan has also American interest, but just as impor- of Ankara, Tehran and Baghdad, we
kid glove treatment to Russia which has not only called the referendum provocative shown its commitment to minority tant, it would be a fulfillment of Ameri- could be waiting forever. If, however,
seized territory from Ukraine but has also sought to and destabilizing. rights. Over the past three years, can values. Supporting Kurdish inde- the United States wants to support a
This is a serious mistake. In failing Kurdistan, which is about the size of pendence means supporting the right stabilizing, modernizing and democrat-
undermine Americas own sovereignty and China,
to offer full-throated support for Kurd- the U.S. state of Maryland, has taken in to self-determination of a people that ic force, the choice is clear: Mr. Trump
which has expanded its territorial claims in the South ish independence, the United States is nearly two million refugees, including have overcome oppression, persecu- should bet on a winner and support an
China Sea. focusing solely on the short-term vola- Assyrians, Yazidis, Turkmen, Shabaks tion and tyranny to build a thriving, independent Kurdish state.
Given the standard that Mr. Trump is setting for for- tility of the region and overlooking and Christians fleeing the Islamic State vibrant society. Thats one of the rea-
eign policy reversals, his own decisions could eventually serious medium- and long-term oppor- and sectarian violence in other parts of sons Israel supports the Kurds right to RON PROSOR is a former Israeli ambas-
tunities. Iraq and in Syria. self-determination. sador to the United Nations and the
be overturned by his successor. But the damage to Theres no denying that the Middle Even without a formal state, the Some 30 years ago, the Kurdish chairman of the Interdisciplinary Cen-
Americas standing as a trusted, reliable partner wont East is a mess: To truly stabilize the Kurds have built a society that meets people were being choked with chemi- ters International Diplomacy Institute
be so easily repaired. region, we need to defeat the Islamic many of the criteria of statehood. They cal weapons by Saddam Hussein. in Herzliya.

14 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
opinion
Conflicted over Uber
Helen Lewis
When Sadiq Khan, the Labour mayor
of London, stands in front of the annual
gathering of his partys activists next
week, he can be confident that his
speech will have at least one applause
line: He is the politician who took on
Uber.
On Friday morning, Transport for
London, the not-for-profit company
that runs and regulates transport in
the capital, made the surprise an-
nouncement that Uber, the company
that likes to call itself a ridesharing
app, would not have its license to
operate in London renewed on Sept.
30.
Mr. Khan immediately released a
statement supporting the decision,
saying that all London businesses
needed to play by the rules. Its a
sentiment that will be echoed by the
Labour Partys leader, Jeremy Corbyn,
a left-wing populist who has often
criticized big business.
Last year, when the Labour leader
claimed he had to sit on the floor of a
ram-packed train, and used the
opportunity to call for the renational-
ization of Britains railways, it led to an
almighty row between Mr. Corbyn and
Virgin trains, which operates the serv-
ice and released CCTV images showing
Mr. Corbyn bypassing vacant seats
but that row only burnished Mr. Cor-
byns anti-establishment credentials.
Sticking it to a Silicon Valley start-up
will play equally well with Labours
activist base.
Mr. Khan, meanwhile, will find this
infusion of political capital particularly
useful; he backed an unsuccessful
challenge to Mr. Corbyns leadership
last summer. Until earlier this week, he
had not been given a slot to speak to
the partys annual conference in Brigh-
ton, but now he will have an opportuni-
ty to make the case that Labour is
prepared to confront the titans of the
so-called gig economy. That will be
music to the ears of the trade unions,
which provide the party with the bulk
of its funding.
Even so, this move is not without
risk for the London mayor. Around
40,000 drivers work for Uber (though
the company has always rejected
suggestions that they are its employ-
ees). In a sad irony, that contract-
Whatever happens
next, we'll help you
make sense of it.
Newspaper subscription offer:
Save 66% for three months.
In unpredictable times, you need journalism that cuts through
the noise to deliver the facts. A subscription to The New York
Times International Edition gives you uncompromising reporting
that deepens your understanding of the issues that matter,
and includes unlimited access to NYTimes.com and apps for
smartphone and tablet.
Order the International Edition today at
nytimes.com/discover
Offer expires December 31, 2017 and is valid for new subscribers only. Hand delivery subject to confirmation by
local distributors. Smartphone and tablet apps are not supported on all devices.
TOBY MELVILLE/REUTERS
A cab in central London passing a bill-
board with images of city landmarks.
worker status also means drivers will
not be entitled to severance pay if
Uber ceased to operate in London.
Some would undoubtedly find work
with other minicab companies, while
others might struggle to pay their bills,
particularly if they have borrowed
money to buy or lease their cars. The
mayor needs to find a way to seem
sympathetic to their plight while con-
fronting the mighty Uber.
Of course, this skirmish could still
end peacefully rather than leading to
all-out war. Uber is allowed to operate
in London until its appeal is heard, so,
in some ways,
There is a the announce-
ment feels like a
general feeling
in the air muscular negoti-
ating tactic from
that regulators the regulator,
should stand up aimed at bring-
to businesses ing the ride-
that ignore any hailing company
rules they to heel.
dont like. The Transport
for London state-
ment said that
Uber was not a
fit and proper company, citing its lax
approach to background checks and
reporting criminal offenses, as well as
its approach to explaining the use of
Greyball software, which could be used
to block the regulator from monitoring
its services. It is possible that Uber
could address these issues within
weeks and have its license renewed.
And there are bigger undercurrents
to the confrontation. The number of
traditional cabs whose drivers learn
the Knowledge, meaning they dont
rely on satellite navigation has been
falling for five years and is now 24,618.
(For comparison, there are estimated
to be 117,857 private hire drivers in
London.) But cabbies are still a big
enough bloc to lobby effectively for
their livelihood to be protected.
Earlier this year, Transport for Lon-
don ended up in court over its plan to
make all licensed drivers pass a writ-
ten not just spoken English test.
Since the majority of cabbies are white
and British, while the majority of driv-
ers for Uber and other private compa-
nies are not, the test felt to many like
stealth protectionism. Fans of Uber
also argue that black cabs have been
slow to adapt to new technology. For
example, credit card payment ma-
chines were only introduced as stand-
ard last October. Without pressure
from competitors, that small innova-
tion might have happened even more
slowly.
Many middle-class Londoners the
kind who buy organic food and voted
to stay in the European Union feel
conflicted about the cabs vs. Uber war.
They complain that the traditional cabs
are uncomfortable, expensive and
belch diesel fumes into a city with air
quality problems. Cabbies also have a
reputation for being grumpy and un-
helpful something that Uber drivers,
who are given a star rating by every
customer, cannot afford to be.
But those same Londoners are also
quietly impressed by the way Trans-
port for London runs the capitals
transport network you can tell,
because they dont constantly grumble
about it. (Actually praising it would be
very un-London.) The contrast with
privatized rail companies only makes
commuters feel more goodwill towards
the organization.
How the London vs. Uber saga plays
out will be an important test of Brit-
ains mood and will give clues to its
future political direction. There is a
feeling in the air that regulators should
stand up to businesses that simply
ignore any rules they dont like. Even
among Conservatives, free market
fundamentalism is out of fashion.
Britons are no longer so in love with
disruption that we are prepared to
overlook the consequences to job secu-
rity and quality of life it can entail.
Perhaps voters have decided that the
slogan that galvanized the Brexit vote
Take back control! equally
applies to imposing rules on unfettered
capitalism.
HELEN LEWIS is deputy editor of the New
Statesman.
The great and immortal French Bof
Roger Cohen
Oh, the eternal consolations of France,
how satisfying they are. I am always
happy when I am reminded of them.
The headline on the New York Times
story was Trump Threatens to To-
tally Destroy North Korea. In a Face-
book comment about the piece, there
was this laconic response from one
Martina Vialard to the threatened
apocalypse: Il ne fera rien, or He
will do nothing.
There it is: the immortal, the inimi-
table French shrug, expression of the
wisdom of a people who has seen it all
and refuses to be rattled by hyperbole,
seduced by blandishment or surprised
by folly.
The purest expression of this shrug
lies in the word bof. It conveys the
contemptuous French dismissal of, say,
a politicians affair, and is the best
retort I know to the hyperventilating,
nasty outrage that has become the
lingua franca of the social media age.
Bof, cest normal its normal, As Saul Bellow observes in his novel
people more often reveal their weak-
nesses than discover the better angels
of their nature. Trump he of the
small hands dreams of a gigantic
mushroom cloud. Normal, get used to
it.
The Trump headline, of course,
alluded to our esteemed leaders
speech at the United Nations this week
in which, borrowing without credit
from Elton John, he called Kim Jong-
un, the North Korean leader, a Rocket
Man. Kim hit back by calling Trump a
dotard (roughly, a person suffering
from senile decay), which was kind of
classy if a little recherch. Dotard, a
word in vogue in Shakespearean times,
is now a sure bet for revival.
Kim also noted, A frightened dog
barks louder. This was interesting.
The question always arises with
Trump whether he is more coward
than bully. You dont have to be called
Sigmund to sense that Trumps bully-
ing and pouting braggadocio reflect
some deep cowardice. Is the combina-
tion more likely to produce action or
inaction?
It could well be that Vialard will be
proved right: big hat, no cattle. Il ne
fera rien. He will do nothing. Bof.
Along with a handful of other jour-
nalists, I had a conversation this week
in New York with Emmanuel Macron,
the French president. He remarked
In Rome, visiting the anti-Trump
EGAN, FROM PAGE 1
decades the home of the successor
to St. Peter was a house of nasty in-
trigue, deceit and power put to awful
use. Popes fathered wars, and children,
had heretics executed or chained to a
cell in the belly of Castel SantAngelo,
the fortress that fronts Vatican City.
The Vicar of Christ cut deals with
dictators, including a devils bargain
with Mussolini. With its institutional
cover-up of pedophile clerics, the
church showed the Mafia a thing or
two about organized crime. In matters
of sex, it was medieval and hypocriti-
cal. It was afraid of science.
Now the pope uses science to shame
Trump, who stares down a parade of
hurricanes and says, nothing to see
there. Whoever denies it has to go to
scientists and ask them, said Francis
last week. They speak very clearly.
Scientists are precise. Can a statue of
Galileo in St. Peters Square be far
behind?
On Wednesday, a glorious Roman
morning with a bite of fall in the air,
the pope holds his general audience.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
that what Trump says is not always
what he does. And what he decides to
implement.
The young French leader suggested
that Trump gets himself in deadlock
with his various threats. On these
different issues, Macron mused,
whats his alternative? He doesnt
have any. On climate, even on Iran,
there is no alternative. So we have to
rebuild some multilateralism where
the president finds his place.
That will be tough. But Macrons
right about Trumps self-imposed
deadlock. The American president
has not yet built his wall. He has not
yet made his decision to withdraw the
United States
from the Paris
Seeing Trumps climate accord
apocalyptic effective. He has
leanings through not yet torn up
a different lens. the Iran nuclear
accord.
The Macron
conversation
reminded me of French good sense.
America likes to indulge the sentimen-
tal. It is constantly preening in the
mirror, so as to avoid looking in the
mirror and remembering where the
bodies are buried, as Paul Beatty puts
it in his roller-coaster of a novel, The
Sellout.
France has little time for illusions. It
has been disabused of them over time.
Ravelstein: The French were genu-
inely educated or had been so once.
They had taken a bad beating in this
century. However, they had a real
feeling for beautiful objects still, for
Emmanuel Macron with President Trump during a meeting of the United Nations Gen-
eral Assembly last week.
The goofy smile is electric. Hes buoy-
ant. The day before, Trump spoke to
the United Nations, a tweet dressed up
as a speech. He made a very real
threat to wipe out a nation of 25 million
people. He would, if he has to, totally
destroy North Korea.
This has always been the implication
of having more nukes than the other
guy. But diplo-
macy another
As the president word for Trump
threatens world to look up is
peace and global the art of war by
health, Pope other means.
Francis throws Trump pushed
ecclesiastical America first,
which sounded
shade his way. like Me, me,
me. He played
the petulance
card, the grievance card.
As Trump went low, the pope went
high. A few days earlier, Francis was
asked about a Trump decision that
could break up the families of 800,000
Dreamers in the United States. If he is
a good pro-life believer, he must under-
..
leisure, for reading and conversation;
they didnt despise creaturely needs
the human basics.
Some 40 years ago I was living in
Paris and working for a cool start-up
magazine called Paris Metro. I wrote a
piece that started with my encounter
in the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont with
Marie-Claire, age 6, whose plastic ball
had landed on my head. We got to
talking; she told me how she played
with her older brother, and I asked if
he was nice to her.
No, Monsieur, she responded. He
bullies me all the time. He pushed me
over, and calls me a sissy. He pulls my
hair, and he breaks my toys. He never
lets me win any games. He says that
one day hell throw me into the pond,
head first.
What do you think of that?
Bof, Marie-Claire said. Cest nor-
mal.
Trump, of course, is not a normal
president. He called Kim a madman;
he should know. So I am happy that the
European leader with whom Trump
seems to have the strongest rapport is
Macron, who can bring his countrys
wisdom on the human basics to bear
on Trumps wild leanings. French
antennae for the normal are also useful
in detection of the abnormal.
Once upon a time I took a cab from
Pariss Charles de Gaulle Airport and
got stuck in traffic. It was a gorgeous
morning, clear sky, spring in the air. I
remarked on the beauty of the day to
the driver. He turned to me and said:
Bof, a ne va pas durer, Monsieur,
yeah, it wont last, Sir. Nor will Trump.
Il ne fera rien.
LUDOVIC MARIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE GETTY IMAGES
stand that family is the cradle of life
and one must defend its unity, Francis
answered.
People who are hung up on doctrinal
changes angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin
arguments over whether divorced
Catholics can receive communion or
not are missing the big picture.
Behold the Francis doctrine: an expan-
sion of pro-life to include help for
refugees, the poor, the powerless.
Trump doesnt get it. His nominee to
the Vatican is Callista Gingrich, wife of
Newt Gingrich. Newt, you must re-
member, carried on a six-year extra-
marital affair with her while impeach-
ing a president for having an affair.
Her appointment was something the
Vatican of old would do a cynical
ploy.
The Vatican of today can marvel at
how quickly history pivots on a single
person.
TIMOTHY EGAN, a former national corre-
spondent for The Times, writes about
the environment, the American West
and politics.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
FashionMilan
Edging toward
reinvention
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
And what of the two Milan Fashion
Week debuts at labels that once upon a
time epitomized the intellectual, min-
imalist side of fashion in the city and its
id-driven maximalist opposite? Both of
which seemed to have lost their way,
and their identity, since their founders
left, and that have been engaged in a cy-
cle of private equity musical chairs?
That both took a risk on unexpected
names in a bid to push the reset button?
What, that is to say, of the new design-
ers at Jil Sander and Roberto Cavalli?
Each could have erased the past and
redefined the house on personal terms
(see, for example, Phoebe Philo at
Cline) or paid allegiance to what the
founder built and tried to edge cau-
tiously into the future.
Both opted for the latter. You can un-
derstand it, but at this point both brands
are so far from where they started, the
former strategy might have yielded
more interesting results.
At Sander, the label that once defined
a way for women to enjoy their power
while speaking softly and wearing a
great suit that built confidence and
sensuality from the inside out, the hus-
RO B E RTO band and wife team of Luke and Lucie
CAVA L L I Meier (him, formerly of Supreme and
his own label, OAMC; her, ex-Dior) r of-
fered a dual-gender interpretation of the
houses aesthetic rooted in an almost el-
egiac combination of novitiate-like aus-
terity and handicraft.
First came floor-length shirt dresses
as pure as nuns nighties and then with
ruffles at the side (aside from Ms. Sand-
er, there were echoes of Yohji Yamamoto
in this collection).
Small shouldered jackets and coats
sliced up the spine for movement were
paired with hip-slung trousers, puddling
at the ankles, and macram vests trail-
ing strands of fringe (weirdly, macram
is sort of a thing this season). Dresses
were a rolling patchwork of open-weave
mohair.
It was an interesting study in the al-
lure of reduction, but shuffled, rather
than strode.
Just as at Cavalli, the British designer
JI L S A N D E R Paul Surridge, making his womens
PHOTOGRAPHS wear debut after a career spent in mens
BY VALERIO
MEZZANOTTI wear, picked up a lot of the cues of the
FOR THE NEW
YORK TIMES
brand animal prints, energy, a certain
luxurious slickness (see: caramel croco-
dile jeans) but missed its just-this-
side-of-kitsch rock n roll sense of fun.
The bandage knits and racer-back
dresses and jumpsuits had a gym-toned
energy yet no clear identity.
Work it out.
Does Milan
matter?
BY VANESSA FRIEDMAN
It was 9:30 a.m. on Saturday, the Bot-
tega Veneta show was about to start,
and Franois-Henri Pinault, chief exec-
utive of Kering, the French conglomer-
ate that owns the Italian brand, was het
up.
Were the models late? Had some
clothes not arrived? Did he oops
not like what he saw?
Nope. His morning had been ruined
because of the news that the Trump ad-
ministration was changing the federal
governments policy on sexual assault
on campus, potentially allowing col-
leges to raise the standard of proof re-
quired, a decision widely seen as alter-
ing the balance of power toward the col-
leges and away from the victims.
VE R S AC E
Kering has a womens foundation that
had done a lot of work on the issue, and
he couldnt believe what he had read. He
was wondering if there was a way they
could protest the decision. Between that
and the Mexico City earthquake (his
wife, Salma Hayek, is Mexican) there
were things on his mind besides fashion.
At least until the show began. Then
the sporty 1970s shapes straight
skirts and boxy jackets and belted
trench coats and T-shirt gowns in col-
or field combinations of chartreuse, lilac
and dusty rose, teal and olive green and
dark gray, adorned with metal grom-
mets and glinting mirrors so the utilitar-
ian was transformed into the decorative,
demanded a certain attention.
A few Pocahontas fringed dresses
aside, this was a smart (in every sense
of the word) proposal for how to navi-
B OT T EG A V E N ETA
gate a world where attention is else-
where; a sophisticated reminder that
between no frills and fantasy, aesthetic
invention can still be found. The priori-
ties were right.
Still, its been a largely out-of-focus
season in Milan. Italy has been some-
thing of a peripheral player in the Euro-
pean narrative of late in the various
dances among Macron and Merkel and
Trump and May, Prime Minister Paolo
Gentiloni rarely cuts in and designers
seem equally confused about their own
roles in the greater fashion ecosystem.
In the bowels of a decrepit theater, An-
tonio Marras threw a Weimar-like caba-
ret for the end of the world, complete
with a woman soaring overhead on a
swing, and piles of distressed velvets,
beading, fringe, florals and regimental
stripes. Also a brass marching band. A
+ MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 15
model at Salvatore Ferragamo walked
in one direction in a fringed flapper
dress and almost bumped into a model
walking the other way in a cherry red
bathing suit and matching sheer ano-
rak. A hand-painted python halter dress
and a watercolor velvet gown with teeny
straps passed like ships in the night. It
wasnt clear where to look, or what was
the point. (Well, shoes.)
Its just clothes is the usual refrain; tail frocks.
there isnt any big point! And theres
nothing wrong with just clothes ex-
cept that the outside world has so much
more urgency than what has been on the
runway, the connection between the two
seems increasingly frayed.
Angela Missoni, celebrating her 20th
anniversary as the family brands cre-
ative director, decided to do it with a
combined mens and womens show ded-
icated largely to . . . party duds. Hot
pants and sheer metallic maxi dresses,
disco leggings and matching crop tops
(the men mostly got to wear pants,
lucky them), all in the signature fine-
gauge knit. It was pretty but ultimately
the fabrics were awfully thin. So was the
idea.
Milan has never really been an intel-
lectual fashion city; leave that to the de-
constructionists and conceptualists of
Paris and London. Its more about the
immediate gratification of extraordi-
nary fabric and high-voltage cleavage.
But at the very least such clothes should
ease your way in the world; give you a
sense of possibility, or strength, or pro-
tection as required by moment. They
dont have to espouse philosophy. They
do have to serve a purpose. If only to cre-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VALERIO MEZZANOTTI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ate visual coherence in a chaotic time.
See, for example, Marni, where the
designer Francesco Risso, in a much-
improved sophomore outing, tackled
the subject full-on, embracing plaid,
1950s sofa florals, diadem pearls, canvas
and leather (also some David Salle
nudes), and then taming the mess in
controlled combinations of corsetry, vo-
luminous skirts, clown pants and cock-
Or Etro, where for the first time Ve-
ronica Etro, the womens wear designer,
and her older brother Kean, who han-
dles the mens wear, worked together on
a joint collection.
Instead of a recipe for confusion, it
brought a balance often missing in the
brand. The combination of his tailoring
and flower-children-on-the-silk-road
(they both have a genetic love of paisley
and maharajah-meant materials) creat-
ed a tension that was apropos.
Which was broken, finally, at Versace,
where in a Tribute collection to her
brother, Gianni, Donatella Versace re-
vived the wild prints of the 1990s in a riot
of thigh-high jeweled boots and catsuits
and schoolgirl pleated skirts and sharp-
shouldered jackets.
At the end of the show, the curtain
came up on a tableau of supermodels
Christy, Claudia, Helena, Naomi, Cindy
in gold chain mail goddess gowns,
who proceeded to strut so convincingly
down the runway they reduced the
jaded fashion audience to gibbering fan-
bots. Those legs! That hair! That ele-
mental force of femininity!
For one cathartic moment, you could-
nt think about anything else.
 ..
16 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Sports
In Michael Phelps, a shoulder to lean on
PHELPS, FROM PAGE 1
We have to convince him to come home
with us.
Hackett soon contacted his family,
saying he was safe and simply hiding
from the humiliation.
Phelps could empathize with Hackett
in a way few others could. Along with his
28 Olympic medals, Phelps accrued two
arrests for driving under the influence
the second one after the police
stopped him for going almost twice the
speed limit on a road in Baltimore, his
hometown. He had also been pho-
tographed holding a bong at a private
party, an image that ended up in a
British tabloid.
After the second D.U.I. arrest, in 2014,
Phelps spent eight weeks at the Mead-
ows, an Arizona treatment center, to
deal with the anxiety and depression
that he had tried to overcome on his own
after the 2004, 2008 and 2012 Olympics.
Recognizing how difficult it is for many
people to recognize their vulnerabilities
and reach out for help, Phelps has de-
voted himself to unraveling the stigma
of mental illness.
I want to be able to get out in public
and talk and say, Yes, Ive done these
great things in the pool, but Im also a
human, Phelps said, sweeping his
gaze across the restaurant. Im going
through the same struggles as a lot of
the people in this room.
Phelps has started some public
speaking on the topic and has become
an informal counselor to the stars, lend-
ing an ear to the golfer Tiger Woods af-
ter his arrest in May on charges of driv-
ing under the influence. A toxicology re-
port revealed no alcohol in Woodss sys-
tem, but rather a mix of four
prescription drugs and the active ingre-
dient in marijuana.
I feel like thats a massive scream for
help, Phelps said.
Over the summer, Phelps said, he met
an 11-year-old boy in California who had
appeared in a documentary about anxi-
ety. The boy was a swimmer, and he said
he had wrestled with suicidal thoughts
the year before. Phelps told the boy
about the days he spent curled up in bed,
literally wanting to die, after his sec- CAITLIN O'HARA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ond D.U.I. arrest.
At the end of the conversation, Phelps
said, the boy told him, I have more in
common with Michael Phelps than I
ever thought.
Hackett, a rapt listener, said, Thats
awesome.
A STAR NEEDS HELP
From 1997 to 2007, despite a collapsed
lung and a bout of mononucleosis, Hack-
ett was unbeaten in the 1,500 freestyle
and also set world records in the 200 and
800 freestyles. He won back-to-back
Olympic gold medals in the 1,500 and
missed a third one in the event by just
over one second. After he retired from
the sport, Hacketts life resembled his
freestyle stroke: He appeared to be ef-
fortlessly gliding to glory, but beneath
the surface propelling himself forward
was becoming almost too much to bear.
He was married to the entertainer
Candice Alley, and their twins a
daughter, Charlize, and a son, Jagger
arrived the year after Hackett stopped
swimming. He became a successful en-
trepreneur and hedge-fund investor,
earned a masters degree and did broad-
casting work on the side. At the same
time, he said, he was using alcohol and
sleeping pills to quell anxiety and de-
pression.
Its hard when youve done some-
thing that many people see as extraordi-
nary, but as a person youre not, Hack-
ett said. Its almost like youre sepa-
rated from the pack. Youre having to try
Grant Hackett, left, and Michael Phelps at Scottsdale National Golf Club in Arizona last month. Phelps has been helping Hackett cope with mental health problems similar to the ones he has confronted.
I want to be able to get out in
public and talk and say, Yes, Ive
done these great things in the
pool, but Im also a human.
You want to push through and al-
most win in a way, Hackett said. When
thats how you think, its hard to step
back and say: Wait, this isnt about
sports or winning and losing. Its about
my life.
After the February episode, Hackett
knew he needed more help. The day af-
ter he resurfaced, he contacted Phelps
and agreed to fly to the United States.
He also decided that after stopping in
Arizona, he would enter a recovery cen-
ter in Malibu, Calif. Phelps drove him the
400 miles to the facility.
DAVID GUTTENFELDER/ASSOCIATED PRESS Twice since his monthlong treatment,
Hackett arriving in Beijing with other Australian Olympians for the 2008 Summer Hackett has traveled to spend time at
Games. He won the silver medal that year in the 1,500-meter freestyle. the Phelpses home. Michaels been
there, and he understands, so its almost
like you can plug right into that sup-
to grow as a person and work out who His family pleaded with him to seek port, Hackett said.
you are in this really difficult set of cir- professional help, and Hackett spent a He and Phelps first crossed paths at
cumstances, under a microscope. month at the Meadows, the same treat- the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Phelps,
By 2014, his marriage had disinte- ment facility Phelps entered later that then 15, marveled at how big swimming
grated and his substance use was lead- year. But Hackett was not ready then to was in Australia and how much atten-
ing to headline-generating behavior, in- open up and acknowledge his weak- tion was paid to Hacketts success.
cluding wandering dazed and barely nesses. He was trying to conquer his As Phelpss own fame grew, he gravi-
dressed through a Melbourne hotel anxiety and depression as if they were tated toward Australian swimmers, who
lobby. swimming rivals. could understand the scrutiny he faced
better than most of his American team-
mates.
He and Hackett found that personal
relationships, even the simplest ones,
could become a minefield for anyone
with a measure of fame. It has been
years since either of them has had a
chance to make a first impression, be-
cause people assume they already know
celebrities.
I dont think you change, Hackett
said, I think the world around you
changes more than anything else.
A COMFORT ZONE
Phelps had just finished telling Hackett
the story about the boy in California
when a diner asked Phelps to record a
birthday greeting for her son. After he
obliged, she turned her smartphone to-
ward Hackett, who said, Happy birth-
day, and gday from Australia.
This sort of attention is what Hackett
came here to avoid. I just feel different
more balanced when I get out of the
fishbowl in Australia, he said.
There are few places where Phelps
and Hackett feel more at ease than at
Scottsdale National, a golf course con-
toured from the McDowell Mountains
that offers sweeping views of Phoenix
and a wellspring of tranquillity. One
morning when they played last month,
Phelps and Hackett had the course to
themselves, and the only noise compet-
ing with the birdsong was the country
and hip-hop music emanating from their
cart.
Phelps carded an 84, lowering his
handicap to single digits. Hackett, who
doesnt play much golf at home, shot 103.
A few days earlier, he broke 100 for the
first time.
Another refuge is the water. On a re-
cent morning, they swam for an hour in
an Arizona State pool. Hackett and
Phelps regularly raced in front of stand-
ing-room-only crowds. On this day, their
audience consisted of a lifeguard.
Once they swam for medals and
records, for a place in history. In retire-
ment they swim to free their minds, to
commune with the water. What used to
be a high-stress profession has morphed
into a peaceful interlude.
Sometimes at night, Hackett and
Phelps will start talking about mental
health their own and others and
the conversation will still be going
strong at 1 or 2 in the morning. The more
they give voice to their vulnerabilities,
the easier it is to imagine one day ex-
plaining their worst moments to their
children.
Yes, they messed up, but nobody is
perfect.
It doesnt matter whether youre Ti-
ger Woods or Joe Blow down the street,
Hackett said. Were all just people try-
ing to work through stuff.

The provocateur president meets athletes resolve

Sports
of The Times
BY MICHAEL POWELL
Here is our not-so-happy sports and
politics recap, and all who complain
about the mixture of the two are ad-
vised to register their complaints with
the White House switchboard.
The president went to Alabama on
Friday evening to campaign for a
deeply conservative candidate and, as
is his fashion, went stream of con-
sciousness, pulling the rest of us along
to his darkest corner.
Before a vastly white audience
and race appears the inescapable
subtext here he seized on the ath-
letes, nearly all of them black, who
have protested police brutality by
silently holding a fist aloft or taking a
knee on the sidelines of football games.
He jutted his chin, squinted and curled
his lips.
Wouldnt you love to see one of
these N.F.L. owners, when somebody
disrespects our flag, to say, Get that
son of a bitch off the field right now.
Out! Hes fired. Hes fired!
The president did his faux youre
fired hand gesture the one from
that forgettable television show of his
and the audience roared. On Satur-
day morning, as an encore, President
Trump woke up and declared on Twit-
ter that he would not invite Steph
Curry, that whirling dervish star of the
Golden State Warriors, to the White
House.
This is a barely recognizable presi-
dent. It also is a barely recognizable
generation of pro athletes. Thank God
for the latter.
Just as the president lays his hand
on the third rail of race, the athletes
are responding.
The N.B.A. point guard Chris Paul:
With everything thats going on in our
country, why are YOU focused on
whos kneeling and visiting the White
House??? #StayInYoLane, he
tweeted.
To which LeBron James added his
own message: U bum @Stephen-
Curry30 already said he aint going!
Going to White House was a great
honor until you showed up!
And Bishop Sankey, a Vikings run-
ning back: Its a shame and disgrace
when you have the President of the US
calling citizens of the country sons of a
bitches.
Other athletes and the presidents of
the N.F.L. and N.B.A. player unions
have followed suit.
But in the surest and most striking
sign of tectonic movements, N.F.L.
Commissioner Roger Goodell, as care-
ful and conservative a leader as youll
find in pro sports, felt compelled to call
out the president on Saturday. (Trump,
in an Emperor Nero complaining about
the desultory quality of the gladiators
moment, also lamented in Alabama
about patriotism and the treatment of
blacks by the police. For that, the
N.F.L. owners appear to have black-
balled him from the league this year.
For that, more players have taken up
Kaepernicks cause. And for that, Pres-
ident Trump disparaged the league
and challenged the owners to fire
players for exercising their right to
free speech which they have effec-
tively done to Kaepernick already.
And now Kaepernicks once lonely
protest suddenly has many more sup-
porters.
Let me pause here. For more than a
decade, athletes have been chipping at
the shells that so many owners, college
boosters and media executives had
wished upon them. College athletes
have tried to organize unions and
challenged the N.C.A.A. in court. N.F.L.
players have revitalized their once
ANDREW BURTON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES broken-down union; N.B.A. stars have
Stephen Curry at the Golden State Warriors practice on Saturday, after President spoken out on all manner of issues.
Trump tweeted that Curry was not invited to a customary visit to the White House. They have been active citizens, and
that is stirring. This cuts both ways. If
an athlete were to engage in protests
that the N.F.L. had become insuffi- They donated many millions to against, say, abortion or gay rights,
ciently violent.) Trumps presidential campaign; the that would be no less in keeping with
Divisive comments like these dem- New England Patriots owner, Robert traditions for free speech.
onstrate an unfortunate lack of respect K. Kraft, showered $1 million on the Its striking how completely the
for the N.F.L., our great game and all of inaugural and has been a vocal ally; president has stood this principle on its
our players, and a failure to under- and the Patriots coach, Bill Belichick, head. He taunted N.F.L. owners, urging when it comes to what we tolerate in
stand the overwhelming force for good wrote a letter endorsing him last fall. them to fire players who engage in
our clubs and players represent in our To summarize this exquisite collision anthem protests.
communities, Goodell said in a state- of sports, politics and business: The Theyll be the most popular person
ment. 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick in this country, Trump said, because
Its not clear how this plays with knelt during the national anthem last thats a total disrespect of our heritage,
Goodells masters in N.F.L. ownership. season, stirring a national debate thats a total disrespect of everything
that we stand for.
The presidents invocation of her-
itage has become his favorite dog
whistle; it also deeply misconstrues
American traditions. Ill recruit my
departed father into this scrum. Like
many young men of his generation, he
volunteered to fight in World War II,
and he flew missions on a B-17 bomber.
Years later, when Vietnam and civil
rights and labor struggles bubbled,
and protesters sat out anthems and
even burned flags, his view was unwa-
vering: He had fought for an America
in which citizens could speak and
dissent freely and act morally.
Whats notable is how measured the
athletes have tried to remain, until
poked and prodded. James appeared in
a video for Michael Bloombergs global
forum. I hope and I pray that all of
you know how much all of us need you
now, he told the assembled corporate
and societal leaders.
Curry has not been as explicitly
political as James in recent years, but
he did not sidestep the moment. Presi-
dent Trump said he was barring Curry
from the White House, but Curry had
already made a case for not going.
By acting and not going, hopefully
that will inspire some change, he said,
this country and what is accepted and
what we turn a blind eye to.
The president is an expert provoca-
teur, and one does well not to under-
rate him. But notice how the athletes
eyes are so wide open.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 17

sports

After a public injury, a lonely journey back

MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

BY RORY SMITH

From the other side of the wall, the muf-

fled sounds of halftime drifted through
to Ilkay Gundogan. He could hear the
murmuring voices of his Manchester
City teammates exchanging notes, and
then his manager, Pep Guardiola, start-
ing to speak.
Gundogan had been with them only a
few minutes earlier, joining in the cele-
brations as they took the lead against
Watford, on the way to Citys first Pre-
mier League home win in three months.
Not long after the goal, he had tried to
snatch a loose ball from Watfords
Nordin Amrabat. The two collided. Gun-
dogan fell to the ground and raised a
plaintive arm to summon medical atten-
tion. MICHAEL STEELE/GETTY IMAGES

Initially, he was sure it was not too Left, Manchester City midfielder Ilkay Gundogan in a pool at the clubs Etihad Stadium
serious. There had been a strange sen- in March, when he was in the early stages of a 10-month rehabilitation from a torn
sation, coming from the outside of his anterior cruciate ligament. He injured his right knee in a game in December, above.
right knee. The same feeling as when
you click your fingers, but without the
noise, he said. Aided by Max Sala, Citys staff for company, and two more in the proach. By August, Gundogan believed
team doctor, Gundogan got to his feet. apartment, under the watchful eye of he was ready.
He could stand. He could walk to the side Arthur Jankowski, his fitness coach, Citys preseason tour came and went;
of the field. gently exercising his knee. Gundogan did not play. He was given a
Sala thought it better if his game For months, the best part of the day few minutes in a friendly game against
ended there, but Gundogan insisted he KIERAN DODDS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
was the first part. Every morning after Girona on Aug. 15, but by the end of the
felt O.K. Despite the doctors doubts, he returned from Barcelona at the end of month, he had still not played in a com-
Gundogan convinced Sala he should be January, Gundogan had arrived at Man- petitive match.
allowed to continue and trotted back timidating. There would be the delicate assistants to turn the video screen to- not to a hotel but to an apartment on chester Citys training facility in the He was afraid, at the start, that he
into the game. The first few touches, the hours of surgery, the endless days of ward Gundogan, so that he could follow Passeig de Gracia. Gundogan stayed for shadow of the Etihad at the same time might be forgotten while he was away.
first few passes, went fine, but as soon rest, the long, slow weeks and months the process: two small incisions above a month. He felt less isolated here, more as the rest of the team. He was daunted by the prospect that
as Gundogan tried to turn, he felt the that would teach him first to walk, then and below the knee; the insertion of a a part of things. His schedule was physically exacting, perhaps he would never be quite the
sensation again. to run, and finally to play again. tiny camera probe; the removal of part Gundogan, 26, is not especially loud his life mapped out for him by Cugat, same again. As he waited, though, he no-
I thought something was wrong, he It would be painful, repetitive, ex- of his patella tendon, which was then or notably garrulous. Born to Turkish Sala and Citys medical staff. Monday ticed a change. As the months wore on,
said. I knew I had to come out. hausting. He would struggle to stave off fixed in place as a substitute for the parents in the industrial German town and Friday were for conditioning; Tues- he worried less.
A few minutes later, in the treatment the shadow of loneliness, to keep at bay A.C.L., completely torn and unrepair- of Gelsenkirchen, he jokes occasionally day, Thursday and Saturday were for It sounds sarcastic, but if I had to
area that sits on the other side of the wall the dread that in his absence from the able. about his Southern nature a passion strength; Wednesday was cardio work. stop now, I would say, O.K., I have to
from the first-team locker room at Citys team, he would be forgotten. Most of all, A lot of it was too complicated for On Sunday, he rested. stop, Gundogan said. Maybe this was
Etihad Stadium, Salas on-field suspi- he would have to learn to handle it all not me, Gundogan said of the procedure. I The principal target, as explained by an experience I had to have.
cion a ruptured anterior cruciate liga- as one of the team, but on his own, didnt watch all the time, but they Many athletes fear a torn A.C.L. James Baldwin, the City physiothera- On Sept. 16, 276 days after he had left
ment was confirmed with a few cur- trapped on the other side of the wall. wanted me to watch. I still dont know if more than any other injury. pist overseeing his recovery, was to re- the field and disappeared into the si-
sory tests. Dr. Ramon Cugat knows how to put that was a good thing. The most inter- store the mechanics of the knee. Bald- lence and the shadows, Gundogan
Many athletes fear a torn A.C.L. more players, in deep distress and full of fear, esting thing was the camera coming out win talked about gait re-education, emerged into the light again. With 66
than any other injury. It is not as visibly at ease. For years, his clinic at Bar- of the knee: I could see the screw. and emotion rooted in his ancestry. But and proprioception, making sure all the minutes gone in a Premier League game
painful, or as gruesome, as a broken celonas Quiron Hospital has been the It was 48 hours before he was allowed he is, in many ways, typically Teutonic. disparate parts of the body are working against Watford, Guardiola turned to
bone, but it is much more menacing. Not first port of call for high-profile victims to stand up, but when he did, the pain He is soft-spoken, calm, happy to blend in unison. In simpler terms, Gundogan him and asked if he was ready. Of
so long ago, it was more often than not of knee injuries. Cugats expertise has was so intense he had to sit down imme- into the background. Often, he sinks into was learning to walk again. course, Gundogan replied.
the end of a career; even now, many who restored a host of others to their former diately. The rehab work, though, began his own thoughts, contented in his intro- Everything Gundogan did, every ex- He was aware of the curious poetry of
suffer it find they are never quite the glories. right away. His leg was packed in ice, as version. ercise in the gym with Baldwin, every coincidence, that he should make his re-
same. For such a major operation, the recon- it had been in the hours after the injury, He is most at ease, though, when he session in the heat chamber or the pool, turn against Watford.
As Gundogan watched the second half struction of a cruciate ligament is sur- or blasted with cold air; he was put has company. He spends little time was designed to take him to the point of Maybe it had to be that way, he said.
of that December game against Watford prisingly quick: just a couple of hours in through a series of gentle movements to alone. His cousin Ilkan is often by his pain. The pain was not a punishment, Most of all, though, he was just glad to
on a laptop in silence, his knee packed in theater, no general anesthetic. Gundo- start to extend his range of motion. Gun- side, and his friends and family visit reg- but a reward. The pain was progress. be back on the other side of the wall. His
ice, he knew what was coming. He tried gans whole lower body was numb, but, dogan referred to it as his work. This ularly. It was in the final weeks, as he inched cleats skittered on the floor. He walked
to be optimistic. aside from the first few minutes, he was was his job now. He spent two hours of every day at the closer and closer to the field, that he saw out to the edge of the field, and the noise
What he was facing, though, was in- awake throughout. Cugat instructed his When he left the hospital, he repaired hospital, with only a member of Cugats the true value of the day-by-day ap- of the crowd hit him.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1989

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2509

WIZARD of ID DILBERT
(c) PZZL.com Distributed by The New York Times syndicate
Created by Peter Ritmeester/Presented by Will Shortz

KENKEN CROSSWORD | Edited by Will Shortz 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Fill the grid so Solution No. 2309
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 26 Ones sacrificing for a 57 How relaxing! 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or 1 Puff ___ (snake) cause
58 With 48-Down,
box contains column, and so that the digits 28 Santa ___ winds affectionate
17 18 19

each of the within each heavily outlined box 6 Bit of Brylcreem, say
will produce the target number 29 Firm (up), as muscles 59 Part of the Freudian 20 21 22 23
numbers 9 Following
psyche
1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 14 Prince Harrys mum
30 Long, hard journeys
once. subtraction, multiplication or 33 Coupon for the needy 60 With 51-Down, weak 24 25 26 27

division, as indicated in the box. 15 It hatches from a big and indecisive

egg 38 Greeting from a
A 4x4 grid will use the digits
28 29
For solving tips parade float 62 Trapped on a branch
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 16 Unmanned aircraft 63 Screw things up
www.nytimes.com/ 39 With 29-Down, 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37
sudoku 17 With 3-Down, useful sophisticated 64 Walk leisurely
For solving tips and more KenKen
18 ___ Keane, The 40 Listening device on a
38 39 40
puzzles: www.nytimes.com/ Family Circus
65 Authority
narc
kenken. For Feedback: nytimes@ cartoonist 66 Man cave, maybe 41 42 43
kenken.com 41 Realtors showing
67 Crust, mantle or core,
19 With 11-Down,
43 Murdered for the earth 44 45
snobbish
KenKen is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 44 Grand Ole ___
Copyright 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
20 Californias old Fort Down 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53
___ 45 Put on, as a TV show 1 ___ committee
21 Soupy Oliver Twist 46 Patron of France 2 Book that might 54 55 56 57
fare 50 Produces a large body require a key to open
Answers to Previous Puzzles 58 59 60 61
23 Cosmetician Lauder of work? 3 See 17-Across
24 Award named for the 54 It is my desire 4 Finish 62 63 64
winningest pitcher of 55 Word that can follow 5 Sci-fi weapons
all time sea, solar or staying 65 66 67
6 Fix, as software
Solution to September 23 Puzzle
7 French female friend PUZZLE BY BRUCE HAIGHT
H I G H S C O R E S P S A T 8 Symbol of Teddy 29 See 39-Across 37 Its mightier than the 48 See 58-Across
A R E Y O U D O N E A W L S Roosevelts political 30 What it takes to sword
D E E P F R E E Z E W E E K party 49 Fencing blades
tango 39 Arizona tribe
9 Sticks (to)
U N S E A T Y I P P E E
P E E R C O M F O R T 31 Genre for Big Sean or 42 ___ list (tasks for 50 Bound by an oath
D R A P E W I S P S 10 Ice, as a cake Biggie Smalls ones spouse) 51 See 60-Across
S P I C I E S T P E N P A L 11 See 19-Across 32 She raised Cain 43 Active during the
N O T O N C E P A R T O N E
12 Go inside daytime 52 Ping-Pong surface
A L F R E D D I G E S T E D 33 Like most manual
P O I N T S A T E D 13 Spanish kings transmissions in the 45 Card that beats a 53 More timid
1970s and 80s king
22 Genetic initials
G E T B U S Y J A M B
T U R E E N B M O V I E 34 Spin, as a baton 56 Grotesque folklore
25 Like some wooden 46 River deposits
G I R L H O U S E P L A N T
35 First-___ kit figure
O R E O A C R O B A T I C S buckets 47 ___ Birch, American
V E S T R O N W E A S L E Y 27 Roddick or Rooney 36 CT scan alternative Beauty actress 61 Org. for docs
 ..
18 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

Culture
How an art extravaganza overspent
BERLIN

Documenta found itself

in financial straits after
it expanded to Greece
BY CATHERINE HICKLEY

Documenta 14, this years edition of the

pace-setting quinquennial exhibition of
contemporary art traditionally hosted
in Kassel, Germany, ran $8 million over
budget primarily due to costs incurred
at a second venue this year in Athens,
officials have said.
Christian Geselle, the mayor of Kas-
sel, said at a news conference on Thurs-
day that auditors were still reviewing
the finances but that costs attributable
to the Greek part of the exhibition had
been higher than anticipated.
Prior reports in the German media
had indicated that the expense of air-
conditioning venues in Athens was to
blame for a portion of the cost overruns.
The budget deficit had become a
source of irritation between the creative
team of the exhibition and the govern-
ment of Kassel and the state of Hesse,
which are shareholders in the company
that operates the exhibition.
The budget agreed for the exhibition,
called Learning From Athens, was 37
million euros (nearly $50 million) half
to be financed by Hesse, Kassel and the
German federal government and the
other half to be raised by Documenta
from ticket and merchandise sales and
sponsors.
The governments stepped in earlier
this month to guarantee loans of 8 mil-
lion to avoid bankruptcy and to provide
the company with something of a safety
net.
Documenta is one of the biggest
strokes of cultural fortune for Hesse,
Kassel and beyond, the Hesse culture
minister, Boris Rhein, told the news con-
ference. It is our duty to ensure that it
continues.
The 2017 exhibition was the first to be
spread evenly over two locations, and GORDON WELTERS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Mr. Geselle was careful not to suggest
that the concept of utilizing a second lo-
cation was itself a problem.
Documenta is firmly anchored in
Kassel and will remain so, Mr. Geselle
said. We have to beware of jealously
guarding Documenta all for ourselves,
or we will look provincial and petty. We
want to be open to the world.
Founded in 1955, Documenta brings
hordes of art lovers to Kassel, a city
south of Hanover that is otherwise off
the tourist map.
With a tradition of granting its cre-
ative team a free hand, the exhibition
has a reputation for identifying new ar-
tistic developments and for displaying
challenging political comment. Often
described as the most important art ex-
hibition in the world, it is seen as a bell-
wether for the relevance and direction of
art internationally.
This years edition, which closed Sept.
17, ran from April to July in Athens and
from June to September in Kassel and
drew record crowds. The organizers
said that, with more than 1 million vis-
itors in total, it became the most at-
tended contemporary art exhibition of
all time. About 891,500 people visited the
Visitors to Documenta 14 overlooking The Parthenon of Books by the Argentine artist Marta Minujin in Kassel, Germany, where the event closed this month. Below left, the artistic director of Documenta, Adam Szymczyk.
the exhibition, which he described as
interesting, controversial and well at-
tended.
Adam Szymczyk, the artistic director
of the exhibition, said in an earlier inter-
view that its economic plan was created
before he was appointed, that it had not
been sufficiently adapted to take ac-
count of the double-venue costs and that
his team had been forced to work under
terrible budget constraints.
What is happening now is an attempt
to make this a problem exhibition be-
cause of some financing issues at the
end, he said.
Mr. Szymczyk and the rest of the cre-
ative team had objected to suggestions
that they were at fault for the budget
RONNY HARTMANN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES deficit and had themselves suggested
that the depth of the financial crisis had
Kassel exhibition venues, while 339,000 been exaggerated.
attended the Athens show. Unfortunately, politicians have
The work of some 160 artists was prompted the media upheaval by dis-
presented, with themes that encom- seminating an image of imminent bank-
passed debt crises, migration, war and ruptcy of Documenta and at the same
the rise of right-wing populism. time presented themselves as the sav-
Mr. Rhein praised the artistic team for iors of a crisis they themselves allowed
to develop, a Sept. 14 statement from
the curatorial team said.
Mr. Szymczyks decision to stage Doc-
umenta in Kassel and Athens faced what
he described in an essay in the catalog
as pre-emptive and at times disheart-
ening critique from the start.
We have to beware of jealously
guarding Documenta all for
ourselves, or we will look
provincial and petty.
The Kassel branch of the Christian
Democratic Union, the party of the Ger-
man president, Angela Merkel, had
campaigned against the double-venue
plan in local elections last year, seeing
the Athens offshoot particularly that
the exhibition opened there as a
threat to Kassels identity as Documen-
tas home.
Norbert Wett, a local C.D.U. politician,
said that it had been a mistake to take
the focus of the exhibition off Kassel,
whose taxpayers are helping to pay the
bills and that it had been predictable
that the budget would be inadequate.
We would like to know where the
money went, Mr. Wett said in an inter-
view.
Mr. Szymczyk criticized Documentas
reliance on increased attendance to help
underwrite each edition and noted that
the Kassel part of this years show had
surpassed what he called the already
insane 2012 figure of 850,000 visitors.
It is good to be democratic and art is
for everyone, but the capacity of the in-
frastructure is an issue, he said.
Mr. Szymczyk said he was concerned
that the political establishment would
use Documentas financial woes as a
punitive instrument against the exhibi-
tion itself, reaching the point where no
crazy ideas are possible anymore. His
curatorial teams statement went a step
further, accusing the authorities of con-
ducting what amounted to a political
takeover of Documenta. It criticized the
authorities for asking, as the statement
put it, a public cultural institution to be-
come primarily an economic institution
subject to the demands of profit and suc-
cess.
Mr. Szymczyk did not attend the news
conference and could not be reached for
comment.
Lawmakers in Kassel are scheduled
to meet on Monday and will need to ap-
prove any cash injection the mayor may
propose.
Mr. Rhein said Documenta would look
closely at what caused the budget over-
run and how it could have been foreseen
sooner. It is clear that Documenta is
reaching its limits, organizationally, fi-
nancially and in size, he said. We have
to watch out for that. It will be a part of
our discussions.
The companys shareholders will re-
think Documentas structure to take ac-
count of its growth, Mr. Rhein said, add-
ing that Hesse and Kassel would wel-
come participation by the federal gov-
ernment as a third shareholder.
Jason Farago contributed reporting
from Paris.

A painting becomes a cautionary tale

AMSTERDAM
The disputed Mondrian
has moved unchecked
among art institutions
BY NINA SIEGAL
When the cultural historian and Piet
Mondrian biographer Lon Hanssen
visited the Bozar Center for the Arts in
Brussels in the spring of 2016, a painting
stopped him dead in his tracks.
It looked remarkably similar to an un-
titled 1923 Mondrian that the Nazis had
displayed as an example of degenerate
art in a famous 1937 Munich exhibition.
It was thought to have been destroyed in
the Berlin air raids at the end of World
War II. But could this be it?
Without any information about its his-
tory, the painting, which is owned by a
Swiss collector, had been included in a
show devoted to Mondrians contempo-
rary, the Dutch artist Theo van Does-
burg. Mr. Hanssen asked to have a
closer look.
The painting had not been restored,
and it was really very fragile, nearly a
ruin, he explained in a phone interview.
It really made an impression of a paint-
ing from 1923 that was as original as you
can imagine. It was as if you could shake
hands with Mondrian.
Mr. Hanssen, a professor at the
Tilburg School of Humanities in the
Netherlands, asked permission to re-
search the provenance of the painting
from the Stedelijk Museum in Amster-
dam, which was scheduled to receive it
next. The Stedelijk and the anonymous
collector granted him the opportunity.
Based on this research, Mr. Hanssen has
revealed in a book released this month
that the work he thought was a signifi-
cant find is not and in fact appears not
to be a Mondrian at all.
What started out as a potentially ma-
jor cultural discovery turns out instead
to be a cautionary tale about the dan-
gers of presenting works of art owned
by private collectors that have not been
systematically vetted. In this case, art
experts seem to have passed the buck
on conducting basic due diligence on the
artwork before displaying it as a Mon-
drian putting their own reputations
on the line because they gave such cre-
dence to a private collector.
When Mr. Hanssen inquired with the
Bozar about the provenance of the Mon-
drian on display, they could not provide
him with a detailed history, he said. The
arts center explained only that the loan
from the Swiss collector had been sug-
gested by the Stedelijk, which was con-
sidering exhibiting the work as well.
But information provided to The New
York Times from the Netherlands Insti-
tute for Art History, known as the RKD,
indicates that the Swiss owner of the
work, who has lent the painting to three
art institutions the Bozar, the
Stedelijk and the Zentrum Paul Klee in
Bern, Switzerland has known since
2006 that the attribution to Mondrian
has been questioned.
The records show that the Mondrian
expert Joop Joosten, who co-wrote a de-
finitive 1998 catalog of Mondrians ab-
stract works, inspected the painting
himself in 1994 and again in 2004. Both
times he rejected it. In 2006, according
to the RKD, Mr. Joosten informed the
paintings owner that it was most likely
a copy. Mr. Joosten, who is over 90 years
old and in poor health, could not be
reached for comment, according to the
RKD.
VIA THE NETHERLANDS INSTITUTE FOR ART HISTORY
Left, Piet Mondrian and the Dutch artist Nelly van Moorsel, wife of the artist Theo van Doesburg, in 1923, the year Mondrian painted
an untitled work that the Nazis later displayed as degenerate art. Right, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, which was lent a
canvas said to be that painting.
None of the art institutions or individ-
uals involved would disclose the name of
the collector, but Beatrix Ruf, director of
the Stedelijk Museum, said in an inter-
view that he was an established figure
whose works have never been ques-
tioned before.
Ms. Ruf said that she first saw the
work at the home of its Swiss owner in
2015 and discussed the possibility of ex-
hibiting it. In 2016, the work was sent to
the Stedelijk for research. At the time,
according to a statement issued by the
museum, the Stedelijk was unaware of
any doubts about the paintings authen-
ticity.
Sophie Lauwers, head of exhibitions
at the Bozar, explained in a phone inter-
view that her institution isnt a museum
but rather a center for the arts, and that
it doesnt have capacity to do authenti-
cation research but always partners
with established curators and muse-
ums. We labeled it according to the in-
formation we got from the Stedelijk,
she said, adding, I think both of us were
really handling it in good faith.
Hans Janssen, a Mondrian expert and
the curator of modern art at the
Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which
owns more works by the artist than any
other museum in the world, said he
found it odd that he had not been con-
sulted, because the Gemeentemuseum
has studied hundreds of Mondrians. It
makes the acting and policy of the
Stedelijk Museum a bit amateurish, he
wrote in an email.
John T. Spike, chief curator at the
Muscarelle Museum of Art in Williams-
ILVY NJIOKIKTJIEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
burg, Va., and a specialist on issues of
authentication, said that the Stedelijk
seemed to have followed a fairly typical
protocol for handling a potential loan. It
did not exhibit the painting without re-
search and allowed Mr. Hanssen to
carry it out when he asked.
But, he added, the Stedelijk did rec-
ommend the painting to the Bozar. This
thing does boil down to: Why did they
recommend it when it didnt come with
any authoritative backing, to our knowl-
edge? he said. Considering that
theres an expertise center on Mondrian
no more than an hour away, why didnt
they rely on that expertise? Thats a def-
inite lapse there.
The Stedelijks statement says it be-
lieves the task of a museum is to pro-
mote art, try to show works that are not
yet known to the public and in order to
do so, build connections with private col-
lectors. It is not the role of a museum to
determine authenticity of a work.
In response to this statement, France
Desmarais, director of programs and
partnerships for the International Coun-
cil of Museums in Paris, which has es-
tablished codes of ethics for art institu-
tions, said, Its more complicated than
that.
If museums are trusted, its because
we have a track record of honest and
ethical conduct that is based on scientif-
ic and academic research, she said.
Research, due diligence, are part of the
museums prime responsibility.
We need to be wary of our interaction
with the private market, which includes
private collectors and dealers, Ms. Des-
marais said. Theyre an important
source of collection from museums and
theres a really important relationship
that needs to be cared for and pre-
served, but we cannot take for granted
that what a reputable collector collects
is all authentic or has all good prov-
enance.
Fewer art institutions these days
have in-house authentication experts
who can do the kind of vetting that used
to be a more common part of museum
practice, said Mr. Spike.
We have a scarcity of experts in the
world, and for years art graduate
schools have taught that connoisseur-
ship is a kind of mumbo jumbo magic,
he said. When I started in the 1970s,
there were generations of people who
were connoisseurs, and they were very,
very good.
Ultimately, he added, when trying to
make sure that a painting is properly at-
tributed, its like going to the doctor,
you always need more than a second
opinion. Sometimes even a third.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017 | 19

culture

CHRISTOPHE RAYNAUD DE LAGE

Above, Holland Andrews, left, and Dorothe Munyaneza in Unwanted. Below, Ms. Munyaneza, who also choreographed the work, in Portland, Ore.

Making dance out of the unspeakable
Dorothe Munyaneza,
born in Rwanda, deals
with rape and genocide
BY ROSLYN SULCAS
Dorothe Munyaneza was 12 when the
genocide in Rwanda began in April
1994, forcing her and her siblings to flee
the capital, Kigali, where her father
was a pastor. She was witness to hor-
rific crimes; many of her friends and
neighbors and their families were
killed. But the Munyanezas were lucky.
Their mother, already working for an
N.G.O. in London, was able to get the
family out of Rwanda in July of that
year. By September, the children were
with her and their father and in school
at the citys French lyce.
Today, Ms. Munyaneza is a choreo-
grapher and musician living in France,
whose new work, Unwanted, played
in New York last week and has engage-
ments in Paris and elsewhere in France
lined up in October and November. In
the piece, she presents the testimonies
of women who were raped, and later
had children, during the four months of
devastating horror that saw almost a
million people killed in Rwanda.
Ms. Munyaneza, 35, who collabo-
rated as a musician on the Hotel
Rwanda score and soundtrack, began
to dance only after participating, as a
singer and storyteller, in a work by the
Ouramdane and Robyn Orlin, develop-
ing a movement style that came out of
the dancing she had done as a child.
Unwanted is the second work in
which Ms. Munyaneza has taken the
Rwandan genocide as her subject.
(The first was Samedi Dtente, in
2014.) In it, Ms. Munyaneza performs
alongside the American singer Holland
Andrews and the French electronic
music composer Alain Mah.
In a recent telephone interview from
Portland, Ore., where she was
presenting Unwanted, she spoke
about her belief in the body and move-
ment as repositories of meaning and
about bearing witness to the Rwandan
tragedy.
Below are edited excerpts from the
conversation.
The Rwandan genocide is clearly a
difficult subject to tackle, particularly
in dance. What made you go back to
it in Unwanted?
Rwanda is in me, its very deep. My
KYLE JOHNSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES creativity is linked to the past, my
childhood there. There is much to be
contemporary choreographer Franois said and told, not just through dance
Verret in 2006. Although she had no and music, but that is one way to ad-
formal training, Mr. Verret asked her dress it. Its a question of creating,
to dance in a later piece. She went on mending, performing, witnessing,
to work with Alain Buffard, Rachid sharing.
This piece was also fed by stories of
other women from Congo, Chad,
Syria, the former Yugoslavia. Its true
that men who invade territories also
want to annihilate the physical body,
the social body. But I decided to zoom
into the stories of the Rwandan women
and let that spread out and speak of
the others.
How did you approach the subject of
rape when you were talking with
these women?
The women I met surprised me. They
have been wounded deeply and vio-
lently, and they were my elders, so I
thought they might not confide in me.
But they completely opened up. They
spoke of how hard it was to love their
children, how hard it was to live alone,
because most were rejected by their
families. They, and their children, who
are now young adults, offered me their
most painful moments.
But there were also wonderful mo-
ments: I would ask if I could take a
photo after talking to them, and most
would change into a beautiful dress.
They wanted me to carry beauty and
hope with me.
How have you used these experi-
ences to make a dance piece?
I recorded their voices and really tried
to capture how they held themselves,
how they walked, how they wiped
away their tears. It all became physi-
cal, choreographic, material. We hear
some of their testimonies in the piece,
and I had to find a way for the body to
navigate through these spoken words.
At first it was going to be a solo
piece, but I wanted music to play an
important role. When I met Holland
Andrews, I knew she had the vocal
qualities I was looking for: a high
soprano voice which would resonate
above a multitude of sounds and
voices, but the ability to also produce
deep guttural sounds.
Was it difficult or redemptive to work
with this material?
For me, the journey has been painful,
even physically painful. The choreog-
raphy was about digging into the phys-
ical memories of these womens ten-
sion, their rage, their sorrow. I tried to
honestly remember my feelings and
the emotional journey I went through
in their presence.
I am not trying to reproduce rape; I
want to cut through the trauma so that
people can receive and understand
these experiences. The body speaks
when testimony has been suspended.

Travels with Homer

BOOK REVIEW
AN ODYSSEY: A FATHER, A SON
AND AN EPIC
By Daniel Mendelsohn. 306 pp. Alfred A.
Knopf. $26.95.
BY DWIGHT GARNER
Daniel Mendelsohn is a classics schol-
ar, a translator, a memoirist and a
quick-witted literary and television
critic. The idea of reading his account
of being trapped on a theme cruise
the theme is Homers Odyssey is
an attractive one.
Along on the cruise is Jay, the au-
thors 81-year-old father. Jay lives on
Long Island. He can be vinegary. Hes
close at times to the sort of character
Philip Roth has described as a letter-
to-the-editor madman.
Theres an early scene in Mendel-
sohns new book, An Odyssey: A
Father, a Son and an Epic, in which
Daniel, a natty gay man, looks on in
horror as Jay buttons himself into a
shiny brown shirt.
I said, Daddy, were on a Mediterra-
nean cruise, you cant wear brown
polyester, and I took the shirt and
walked to the balcony and threw it into
the sea. Whaaat!?! he cried, that was
an expensive shirt! He strode across
the stateroom to the balcony and
looked forlornly down as the shirt,
which on contact with the water had
taken on a dense animal gleam, like
the skin of a seal, briefly bobbed along
until it finally sank under its own
weight.
These sentences well made, re-
vealing and funny are typical of
Mendelsohns book. What catches you
off guard about this memoir is how
moving it is. It has many complicated
things to say not only about Homers
epic poem but about fathers and sons.
If you have not read the Odyssey,
or have not read it since you were 30
pounds lighter and regularly wore
sandals, this is a rich introduction or
reintroduction. Mendelsohn makes
Homers epic shine in your mind.
This book partakes of at least four
genres:
a) It is a classroom drama, a bit like
Alan Bennetts play The History
Boys or the movie Dead Poets Soci-
ety, in that it recalls what happened
when Jay decided to sit in on the au-
thors undergraduate seminar on the
Odyssey at Bard College.
b) It is travel writing. Father and
son decide to take the cruise shortly
after the completion of the seminar.
c) It is a work of biographical mem-
oir that investigates the circumstances
of Jays life.
d) It is a work of literary criticism.
Homers hero, Odysseus, employed the
trick of the Trojan horse. Mendelsohn,
similarly, smuggles his moral and
textual ideas past you when you are
distracted by the other things hes
doing.
Jay is a retired research scientist
and an exacting man. He prizes diffi-
culty and durability. He and the author
drifted apart for many years, begin-
ning when Daniel was in high school.
The son felt he was too mushy and
imprecise to please his father.
Daniel found a series of surrogate
fathers and mentors; they were often
charismatic gay teachers. It was only
later in life that Daniel and Jay recon-
nected.
The scenes of Jay at Bard, in his
sons classroom, are vivid. He wears
Old Spice cologne and white baggy
sweaters and occasionally breaks into
song.
He shuffles around with his iPad and
says, Books are an obsolete technol-
ogy! He continues: Get with the
times. Homer on an iPad, now thats an
adventure.
MATT MENDELSOHN
The classicist Daniel Mendelsohn.
Jay sits in the back but hes a buttin-
sky, leaping into every argument. In
his Long Island accent, the word
beer comes out as baihhr. Here he
is in class, commenting on Odysseus:
I dont know why hes supposed to
be such a haihhro, he says. He cheats
on his wife, he sleeps with Calypso. He
loses all of his men, so hes a lousy
general. Hes depressed, he whines. He
sits there and wants to die.
Jay embarrasses his son. But the
students love him. And Daniel begins
to come around. This book does not
bake its lessons up into a tidy platter of
macaroons, but they are there none-
theless.
Mendelsohn comes to realize that he
and his siblings have benefited from
my fathers conviction that the world is
available to anyone who does the work
to know and learn it.
He goes on: The confidence we
have in our ability to enjoy what is in
the world, country music and
oenophilia, species rhododendra and
Shelley teacups, Jewish genealogy and
Greek syntax, vintage posters and
Jacques Demy, is, I now see, a kind of
ironic birthright from our father, who
showed us that it could be thus, as his
own father had not done for him.
Homer composed the Odyssey in
dactylic hexameter, the six-beat meter
that gives the poem its elevated oom-
pah-pah, oom-pah-pah cadence.
Mendelsohns cadences in An Odys-
sey are softer and fonder, but theres a
brisk undercurrent. You feel youre
reading the literary equivalent of a
Rodgers and Hart song.
Despite my admiration for Mendel-
sohns writing, over the years I have
occasionally rolled my eyes while
beginning to read one of his essays.
His classical erudition can be too much
with him. You get the sense that, were
he sent to review an Olive Garden, he
would remark, in his opening para-
graph, that the breadsticks reminded
him of the oars on a trireme.
I was impressed, then, by how
lightly yet superbly he wears his learn-
ing in An Odyssey. He evokes again
and again the joys of academic work.
If youre a classicist, he writes,
merely to open a copy of the Iliad or
the Odyssey is to be reminded of this
vast lineage of scholarship, of the
immense hivelike labor that has slowly
added drops of knowledge over the
course of 25 centuries to our under-
standing of what the poems are and
what they say.
At the same time, hes written a book
thats accessible to nearly any curious
reader. In her memoir Slow Days,
Fast Company, Eve Babitz remarks
that early in life I discovered that the
way to approach anything was to be
introduced by the right person.
For Homer, that person is Daniel
Mendelsohn, with this blood-warm
book.

20 | MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2017
travel
The writers children at Luxembourg Gardens on the Left Bank of Paris, left, and on giant chairs at the Riverside Museum in Glasgow, right.
Family bonding every spring, like clockwork Dean and Paulina, who just turned 14,
PERSONAL JOURNEYS
Taking advantage
of synchronized breaks
to travel the world
BY WENDELL JAMIESON
Clearly, the GPS had gone haywire.
We were sitting in our rental car in
Belgium, in search of Bruges. After di-
recting me down a series of increasingly
narrow country roads, it now wanted me
to head into the driveway of a modest
suburban house. The children in the
back seat were laughing; my wife, to my
right, was not.
Its getting dark. What are we going
to do?
It was April 2015 it is always April
when we take these trips and the sky
had turned a striking orange behind the
just-budding branches of the trees and
the occasional windmill that glided by
the windows of our rental car. My wife,
Helene, poked with increasing aggrava-
tion at the malfunctioning device on the
dashboard.
Mommy whats going to happen? was to Ireland for the simple reason that
Belgian bandits? This was my son,
Dean, who sat behind me. This is fun.
We hadnt seen a soul for at least a
half-hour. And the engine shut off every
time I stopped. So at the moment: com-
plete Belgian silence.
O.K. Id dead-reckon, I said. were $1,400. Also, Id learned in Ireland
Lets go into the driveway! said my that Im pretty good at driving on the
daughter, Paulina.
No! my wife said.
Dead-reckon I did. Bruges is on the
water, right, and the water had to be to
the west, right? I backtracked to the last
major road and kept the waning sun in
front of us. And then 30 minutes later,
emerging in the distance in jagged blue-
gray shapes and unmistakable
were the sharp spires of the medieval
city, piercing that orange and announc-
ing that wed arrived, modern devices
be damned.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
The episode has become legendary in
my little family, one of those moments
from our travels that we all recall in
short hand The crazy Belgian GPS! and the frenzied train journey around
and probably always will.
There are quite a few others.
Like the English couple running a
bed-and-breakfast in Normandy who
kept their place shiveringly cold; did not
speak French; had never been to Paris;
and went on and on, unbidden, about
how much they disliked the French.
Or the time, in Shirakawa, Japan,
when I asked the man who owned the
thatched-roof farmhouse where wed
spent the night if he could provide a dis-
count coupon for the local onsen (hot
springs resort). He didnt understand
me, so he called up a translation app on
his iPhone. I spoke into it and technol-
ogy failed us again. Instead of request-
ing an onsen discount, the app told
him I wanted unscented pork.
We could hear him laughing as we
headed down the hill. For the remainder
of our time in Japan, whenever we sat
down to a meal, Unscented Pork! was
a family rallying cry.
Im writing this now because that trip
to Japan, in April of this year, was some-
thing of a final chapter for Helene, Dean
and Paulina and myself. Dean is 17 and
off to college. For seven years, we have
taken an ambitious trip during spring
break. Everyone has had a vote in our
destination Europe four times, Ha-
waii, the West Coast of the United
States, and Japan.
Their public school vacations always
lined up, making planning a snap. But
that wont happen anymore with Dean
in college. Also, well be broke.
Helene and I went all in on these trips
dipping into the home equity account
some years, and letting my American
Express travel account grow alarmingly
because we saw a brief window when
would be old enough to get a lot out of
these journeys, and be fully mobile, yet
young enough that they enjoyed spend-
ing time with us. These windows snap
close fast.
We developed a model, and certain
patterns emerged. Weve mixed food
and history with views and long walks
and mastered transit systems. We plan
but not too much. We try to fly nonstop,
and accept that at some point someone
will get sick. We dont worry about the
weather. And weve accepted that to-
getherness is great, but so is breaking
down into smaller units, even units of
one.
It seems a shame not to be able to put
this knowledge to use; so maybe I can
pass it on to other parents whose sons
and daughters are nearing the late sin-
gle digits, and who want to get back
there and see the world, along with the
fresh eyes of children. It can be done.
Debt or not these trips were worth ev-
ery penny.
A HOME BASE WHILE ABROAD
First, the destination.
Serendipity, individual interests and
price always play roles. The first trip
we saw an ad for $400 round-trip flights
on Aer Lingus.
Scotland came next because Helenes
niece was in school in Glasgow, but also
because the flight was $1,000 per person,
and flights to Paris Deans top choice
dos, and he had an elaborate virgin cock-
tail. He asked about my drink and I let
wrong side of the road, and I wanted to
have another go.
A year later, Paris was $1,000 a per-
son, so off we went. Paulinas dream was
Hawaii, so that came next; at $750 a per-
son on Hawaiian Airlines, it felt like a
bargain. Japan is my thing, so wed de-
cided that it would be the grand finale. I
booked the roughly $1,000 fare on Japan
Airlines nine months in advance.
The basic model was to stay in one
place and take trips: Paris for 10 days,
with a night in Normandy; Amsterdam
for five days, Bruges for two. We saw
much of Ireland from our bed-and-
breakfast base in Oughterard. But some
trips involved more running around:
driving a circle route around Scotland
Japan, rail passes in hand.
We plan but not too much. We
try to fly nonstop and accept that
at some point someone will get
sick.
Sometimes Helene took the lead in re-
searching and booking hotels, some-
times I did. She did better. Wed poll
friends and family, search the Travel
section and put the internet to use.
We bunked together at the Falls of
Dochart Inn in Killin on our first night in
Scotland, the falls themselves just audi-
ble through the windows; stretched out
in a suite at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel
in San Francisco (a splurge), the trolley
cars clanging on Powell Street; and
slept deeply in that Japanese farmhouse
(stone cold silence). The former sugar
plantation workers cottage in Kauai
(my find) was cheap at roughly $250 a
night, and truly memorable red sun-
sets behind palm trees lining the black-
sand beach; Paulina in the pool for
hours.
Not quite so successful was the apart-
ment I rented through a friend near the
Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, where
the heat was out for three days and
where I broke the washing machine.
MINIMAL STRUCTURE
The key to making plans is not making
too many.
Too little structure and wed end up
wandering the same neighborhoods;
too much and the trip becomes a forced
march. We always book a few restau-
rants and, in more recent years, as the
crowds have increased, a museum or
two.
But thats all. We reserved a specific
time at the Rijksmuseum our first day in
Amsterdam, and it was a great morning.
Enthused, we decided to try for two mu-
seums in a row but balked when we saw
the long lines at the nearby Van Gogh
Museum. So we had a rijsttafel lunch at
an Indonesian restaurant we stumbled
across. Then we spent some time in a
Tesla showroom, for no particular rea-
son.
We dont have to be together, all of us,
every minute. Dean started taking long
walks by himself in Japan, especially
along the river in the mountain city of
Takayama, and Helene and I sneaked
out to a jazz bar in Kyoto one evening
while the two of them luxuriated in their
yukata robes back at our ryokan (Japa-
nese hotel).
In Paris, Dean was laid low for a day,
so Paulina and I went up to Montmartre
to take in the views and have lunch at a
cafe on the Place des Abbesses. Two
days later, Dean and Paulina went off on
their own with a friend of Deans from
school.
That night I decided to go have a drink
at Le Select, my favorite of the grand ca-
fes. I invited Dean, and the two of us
spent the next 45 minutes negotiating
the quiet streets of the Left Bank before
emerging into the bright lights of the
Boulevard du Montparnasse.
We sat at a small table inside. (It was
an especially chilly April.) I had a Calva-
him dip his pinkie in and try it. He
winced.
Do you drink that because you like it,
or because you want to be a cool guy?
Good question.
Hmmm. I guess a little of each.
The next night I went back myself
he was exhausted and I sat at the bar,
the waiter with a rag over his shoulder
telling his colleague as he cleaned a
glass, Il etait ici hier soir avec son fils.
(He was here last night with his son.)
RECOGNIZING EXHAUSTION
But even if you only make a few plans,
there comes a moment to let them go.
The pattern is familiar. At some point,
Helene starts to wind down. I have come
to strangely enjoy watching her vaca-
tion energy arc switch from Lets-get-
going exuberance to exhaustion.
On our second to last night in Ireland,
we took the kids to a pub to hear music. I
detected at least one other pub goer, per-
haps a grandmother herself, looking
askance at us. Did she mutter under her
breath to her companion, Shouldnt
those wee ones be home in bed?
The next day, our last, Helene had
planned a boat trip to Inishmore, one of
the Aran Islands off the coast. She had
seemed really excited about it. But Id
begun to see familiar signs: the blank
expression, the decreasing eye contact,
the inability to engage in a coherent con-
versation. I suggested that we instead
return to Aughnanure Castle, which was
nearby and had been a hit with the kids
on our first day.
She agreed, and we sat beside a glass-
clear stream on the castle grounds as
Dean and Paulina played with the resi-
dent Shorthaired Pointer. Helene fell
asleep on the grass - the start of an epic
nap that, after a brief interruption, was
continued back at our bed-and-break-
fast. I went in to check on her several
times to make sure she was alive. Then I
took the kids back down to the pub.
Various members of the family can
also stage mini revolutions. In Kyoto,
looking for a restaurant for our penulti-
mate dinner, we walked past an Italian
cafe and everyones eyes lit up. Pizza! I
objected forcefully We were in Japan!
When would we all be in Japan together
again? We have to have Japanese food.
How about okonomiyaki? Or ramen? Or
yakitori?
I got three dirty looks and we were
soon taking our seats, English menus in
hand.
Paulina said what was on everyones
mind.
Do they have unscented pork?
THE FINAL TRIP
And so, despite all the great food, and
the spectacular views, and the visits to
pubs and grand cafes, and the muse-
ums, the most rewarding parts of these
trips have been the explorations of my
own family.
As theyve gotten older, acquiring
friends and devices, Dean and Paulina
have become less the little team they
used to be. Their main interaction when
we are all together in our house seems to
be about who stole the others head-
phones, or keys, or subway card.
I hate you! shell tell him with steely
eyed rage at the dinner table over this or
that imagined slight.
NYTLive conferences
bring together leaders
from around the world to
deepen understanding
of vital topics, advance
innovative solutions to
major challenges, and
explore new opportunities
for businesses in myriad
industries.
Through provocative
interviews, dynamic
interactive sessions and
high-level networking, we
address the worlds most
important issues.
Find out more at
nytconferences.com
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY HELENE STAPINSKI
Hey! Ill jump in. I dont want to night before at Deetjens Big Sur Inn, or
hear that word. Dont say hate. Just the ricotta-stuffed roast chicken we had
say, I really, really, really, really dont the next night at Tosca Cafe in North
like you. Beach. Opinions, insights and observa-
Ok I really, really, really, really dont tions fly around the dinner table. Wed
like you. talk about past trips each remembering
Thats better. details that the others had forgotten.
But not on our trips. They revert to the Its a shame these trips have to end,
wee ones who played with that Short- that spring breaks will cease to line up,
haired Pointer on the castle grounds. that life is so expensive, or that we never
What sounded like an argument in the made it to several places wed all wanted
backseat as we drove up the Pacific to go Kenya, Germany or Istanbul or
Coast Highway Our Grand California Cairo.
Road Trip was actually some game Although, then again . . .
theyd invented. I forget if they were try- Well all still be free around Christ-
ing to touch the others arm, or grab mastime, right? And isnt that the off-
something the other had, or win a thumb season in places?
war it didnt matter. Given time, chil- Hmm.
dren fill it. Excuse me a minute while I check
But they are old enough, too, to enjoy prices on Expedia. Wheres my credit
the fine meal we had in candlelight the card?
Upcoming Conferences
Oil & Money
October 1719, 2017
London
DealBook
November 9, 2017
New York City
International Luxury
Conference
November 1314, 2017
Brussels
ClimateTech
November 2930, 2017
San Francisco
Global Strategy Summit
December 45, 2017
London
New Work Summit
February 1213, 2018
Half Moon Bay, California
Luxury Travel Conference
March 2223, 2018
Singapore
Art Leaders Network
April 2526, 2018
Berlin
Higher Ed Leaders Forum
May 3031, 2018
New York City