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BEYOND RIESLING
GERMAN WINES
WORTH TRYING
BACK PAGE | LIVING
Rewriting
America’s
racist past
Charles M. Blow
OPINION
So far the Republican National Con-
vention isn’t so much presenting a
record of America and an administra-
tion as it is inventing one.
The speakers at this week’s event
haven’t admitted to the pathological
pursuit of a white nationalist, white
power agenda that has become a sig-
nature of Donald Trump’s presidency.
So what we’ve heard bears little rela-
tion to the fullness of truth and is not
the correct distillation of a record.
Instead, we have been feted to a
parade of Black and brown faces that
have sought to soft-
The Black en or even erase
Trump’s overt his-
speakers at tory of racism to
this week’s falsify an American
Republican story into one in
convention which liberals are
had a job worse racial offend-
to do: erase ers than conserva-
history and tives.
cloud reality. In this inside-out
world, Trump has
been an exemplar on
racial inclusion and
his defeat would usher in an era of
racial division.
This is the Rip Van Winkle approach
to campaigning: Just pretend that
people were asleep the entire time you
called Mexicans rapists, said Islam
hates us, called Haiti and African
nations shithole countries, separated
migrant children from their parents
and locked them in cages, tried to
deport the Dreamers and attacked
Black Lives Matter.
That is exactly what happened,
particularly on the first day of the
convention.
Former football player Herschel
Walker, a Black man, said:
“It hurt my soul to hear the terrible
names that people call Donald. The
worst one is racist. I take it out as a
personal insult that people would think
I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a
racist.”
Walker’s personal relationship with
Trump is meaningless here. The per-
sonal doesn’t negate the pattern. His-
tory is full of racist white people, white
supremacists, even enslavers, who
developed friendships with Black
people.
Racism, at its base, lacks logic, so
racists constantly have to make excep-
tions and exemptions. One such ex-
BLOW, PAGE 11
The New York Times publishes opinion
from a wide range of perspectives in
hopes of promoting constructive debate
about consequential questions.
New banners by Yoko Ono grace the facade of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As its
coronavirus shutdown ends, visitors are expected to come mostly from New York City.
Y(1J85IC*KKNSKM( +\!"!$!%!\
NEWSSTAND PRICES
Andorra € 4.00
Antilles € 4.00
Austria € 3.80
Belgium € 3.80
Bos. & Herz. KM 5.80
Britain £ 2.40
Tragedy in the night The death toll is expected to rise after overnight flash flooding in Charikar, a city of 200,000 people in northern Afghanistan, killed dozens of
people and destroyed many homes. The disaster is the latest blow for a country already suffering from the coronavirus and widespread Taliban attacks. PAGE 3
Collateral victim in a bigger fight
SASSNITZ, GERMANY
German town fears threat
of U.S. sanctions over
Russian pipeline project
BY MELISSA EDDY
AND STEVEN ERLANGER
Sitting on the Baltic Sea, the small east-
ern German town of Sassnitz has been
working for years to revive its enor-
mous port, in part by supporting a Rus-
sian pipeline being laid offshore to de-
liver natural gas to Germany.
But the port, one of the last great in-
frastructure projects undertaken by the
former East Germany, now finds itself
caught up in a geopolitical competition
between the United States and Russia, a
clash that local officials and residents
say is threatening the town and region
with economic ruin.
At issue are so-called secondary sanc-
tions being proposed by powerful U.S.
senators to target companies doing
business with Russia and the Kremlin-
controlled gas giant Gazprom as they
work finish the pipeline, Nord Stream 2,
which is 94 percent complete.
The port would fall under the sanc-
Cameroon CFA 3000 Egypt EGP 36.00
Canada CAN$ 5.50 Estonia € 3.70
Croatia KN 24.00 Finland € 3.90
Cyprus € 3.40 France € 3.80
Czech Rep CZK 110 Gabon CFA 3000
Denmark Dkr 35 Germany € 3.80
TAKING FLIGHT
BETTYE LAVETTE’S
RESURGENCE
PAGE 14 | CULTURE
INTERNATIONAL EDITION | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
Edgar Taraba, right, and Peter Klemer in Sassnitz, Germany. “They are firing their
cannons at sparrows,” Mr. Taraba said of potential U.S. sanctions on the town’s port.
tions because of its role in supplying
provisions to a Russian pipe-laying ship
involved in the project. That sort of sup-
porting work is a specific target of the
proposed new sanctions.
The penalty, if the sanctions are im-
posed, would mean being cut off from
the United States “commercially and fi-
Grab a Monet face mask
and a timed gallery ticket
America’s largest museum
is reopening in New York
with new safety protocols
BY ROBIN POGREBIN
An Italian Renaissance study will be
closed to visitors because it is too small
to allow for social distancing.
Timed tickets will be scanned by
hand-held devices in the Great Hall.
And, for the first time, there will be
valet parking for bicycles, since many
people are avoiding mass transit.
It is tempting to hope that all will be
business as usual when the Metropoli-
tan Museum of Art in New York finally
swings open its Fifth Avenue doors to
the general public on Saturday, after be-
ing closed five months because of the co-
ronavirus outbreak.
But because the pandemic continues
to convulse the globe, the Met, Ameri-
Greece € 3.00 Ivory Coast CFA 3000
Hungary HUF 1050 Lebanon LBP 5,000
Israel NIS 14.00/ Luxembourg € 3.80
Friday 27.80 Malta € 3.60
Israel / Eilat NIS 12.00/ Montenegro € 3.40
Friday 23.50 Morocco MAD 31
Italy € 3.70 Norway Nkr 38
LENA MUCHA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
nancially,” and effectively excluded
from the global financial system. The
port would essentially be turned into an
international pariah, with all its busi-
ness drying up — not just its work sup-
plying the Russian ship.
To German officials and residents in
Sassnitz, the sanctions against the port
ca’s largest museum, will in many ways
reopen as a very different place.
Perhaps most notably, it will now be a
mainly New York institution, given the
pandemic’s travel restrictions. Whereas
70 percent of the Met’s seven million an-
nual visitors were tourists, now the mu-
seum expects those moving through its
galleries to be largely local residents.
Like all New York museums that are
reopening, the Met also has to play by
the state’s rules, with 25 percent occu-
pancy, timed ticketing and masks. (The
Met is selling its own masks based on its
collection, including Monet’s “Water Lil-
ies” and van Gogh’s “Bouquet of Flow-
ers in a Vase”). The museum will also re-
quire visitors to have their tempera-
tures taken before entry.
In the past, the museum could expect
on a busy day more than 5,000 visitors
per hour — especially with tour buses
arriving early in the morning. Now the
museum will limit the crowd to an
MUSEUM, PAGE 2
Oman OMR 1.50 Slovenia € 3.40 Turkey TL 18
Poland Zl 17 Spain € 3.70 U.A.E. AED 15.00
Portugal € 3.70 Sweden Skr 45 United States $ 4.00
Qatar QR 12.00 Switzerland CHF 5.00 United States Military
Republic of Ireland ¤ 3.60 Syria US$ 3.00 (Europe) $ 2.20
Serbia Din 300 The Netherlands € 3.80
Slovakia € 3.50 Tunisia Din 5.70
FARM HAZARDS INTENSIFY
LABORERS AT RISK FROM
SMOKE, HEAT AND VIRUS
PAGE 7 | BUSINESS
WAKIL KOHSAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
and the company that owns it,
Fährhafen Sassnitz, are puzzling and in-
furiating. They threaten to turn Sassnitz
into collateral damage as the town
struggles to create enough jobs to keep
young people from leaving.
“They are firing their cannons at
sparrows,” said Edgar Taraba, as he un-
loaded a morning’s catch of flounder
and sole from his dinghy. “There is noth-
ing left here to take.”
The port, called Mukran, is a shadow
of its former self, run by a company that
is 90 percent owned by the Sassnitz gov-
ernment. The rest is owned by the
northeastern state of Mecklenburg-
Western Pomerania.
The Trump administration, supported
by Poland and the Baltic nations, has
long opposed the pipeline, seeing it as an
instrument for Russian leverage over
Germany, Ukraine and Central Europe.
One U.S. fear is that Russia, which has a
history of using gas supplies as a politi-
cal tool, could cut off energy supplies at
will.
But defenders of the project say that
Russia is more dependent on the income
from the gas than Germany is on its sup-
ply, and that Washington is angling to
sell Europe its more expensive liquefied
natural gas.
Officials in Berlin and Brussels are fu-
GERMANY, PAGE 4
New York Times
Events
Make the most of your time indoors.
Better understand the world outside.
Our virtual gatherings are free to attend,
and new events are added daily.
Explore the full schedule:
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Issue Number
No. 42,752
..
In the race
for vaccines,
first might
not be best
Dozens of candidates
to defeat coronavirus
may form a second wave
BY CARL ZIMMER
Seven months into the coronavirus pan-
demic, with more than 30 vaccines rap-
idly advancing through the rigorous
stages of clinical trials, a surprising
number of research groups are placing
bets on some that have not yet been giv-
en to a single person.
The New York Times has confirmed
that at least 88 candidates are under ac-
tive preclinical investigation in labora-
tories across the world, with 67 slated to
begin clinical trials before the end of
2021.
Those trials may begin after millions
of people have already received the first
wave of vaccines. It will take months to
see if any of them are safe and effective.
Nevertheless, the scientists developing
them say their designs may prompt
more powerful immune responses or be
much cheaper to produce or both —
making them the slow and steady win-
ners of the race against the coronavirus.
“The first vaccines may not be the
most effective,” said Ted Ross, the direc-
tor of the Center for Vaccines and Immu-
nology at the University of Georgia, who
is working on an experimental vaccine
he hopes to put into clinical trials in 2021.
Many of the vaccines at the front of
the pack today try to teach the body the
same basic lesson. They deliver a so-
called spike protein that covers the sur-
face of the coronavirus, which appears
to prompt the immune system to make
antibodies to fight it off.
But some researchers worry that we
may be pinning too many hopes on a
strategy that has not been proved to
work. “It would be a shame to put all our
eggs in the same basket,” said David
Veesler, a virologist at the University of
Washington.
In March, Dr. Veesler and his col-
leagues designed a vaccine that consists
of millions of nanoparticles, each one
studded with 60 copies of the tip of the
spike protein, rather than the entire
thing. The researchers thought these
bundles of tips might pack a stronger
immunological punch.
When the researchers injected these
nanoparticles into mice, the animals re-
sponded with a flood of antibodies to the
coronavirus — much more than
produced by a vaccine containing the
entire spike. When the scientists ex-
posed vaccinated mice and monkeys to
the coronavirus, they found that it com-
pletely protected them from infection.
The researchers shared their initial
results this month in a paper that has yet
to be published in a scientific journal.
Icosavax, a start-up company co-
founded by Dr. Veesler’s collaborator,
Neil King, is preparing to begin clinical
trials of the nanoparticle vaccine by the
end of this year.
VACCINE, PAGE 4

2 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
page two
Employees making final preparations for the reopening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Occupancy will be limited to 25 percent of capacity to comply with state rules, and visitors’ temperatures will be taken.
America’s largest museum beckons
MUSEUM, FROM PAGE 1
hourly rate of 2,000 and reduce its hours,
closing Tuesdays and Wednesdays.
School groups are not yet permitted.
The Met has been eager to reopen, not
only for its own recovery — having pro-
jected a $150 million loss — but for the
larger cultural life of New York City.
“The Met plays a very important role
within New York — it’s such a strong sig-
nal for getting back to a certain level of
normalcy and getting back to life,” said
Max Hollein, who became the Met’s di-
rector two years ago. “In that sense, it’s
a signature institution. It has that kind
of responsibility, but it also has that abil-
ity to carry a city forward.”
Other museums in the city will be re-
opening this week, including the Mu-
seum of Modern Art and the Museum of
the City of New York, and more have an-
nounced opening dates, including the
Whitney (Sept. 3), the Bronx Museum of
the Arts (Sept. 9), the Brooklyn Mu-
seum, El Museo del Barrio (Sept. 12)
and the Guggenheim (Oct. 3). The Met
Cloisters will reopen on Sept. 12.
These museums have been learning
from other institutions, including the
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which
reopened in May, the first in the United
States to do so, and some in Europe that
have been back in operation since the
spring. To the extent that the Met is the
largest of its peers, the museum is at a
distinct advantage: two million square
feet of floor space to allow for social dis-
tancing. Smaller New York institutions
must reopen in more circumscribed
ways. The Tenement Museum will have
a phased reopening beginning Sept. 12,
and the Drawing Center will reopen by
appointment only, starting Oct. 7.
To be ready, once Gov. Andrew M.
Cuomo gave the state’s museums the
green light to open — which he did on
Aug. 14 — the Met has been preparing in
minute detail, training staff members
how to interact with patrons and making
sure ticket systems were operational.
Will Sullivan, the head of visitor expe-
rience, who has worked at the Met for
more than 25 years, said that he was
part of a task force of New York muse-
ums that have been working together on
how to reopen safely and effectively.
“We are now at the point of taking
months and months of work,” Mr. Sulli-
van said, “and bringing it to life.”
Some galleries may dictate circula-
tion patterns, and a few cramped
spaces, like the intimate Italian Renais-
sance wood-inlay study, may be closed.
Otherwise, just about every part of the
Met will be accessible when the mu-
seum reopens — first to members on
Thursday and Friday, then to the gen-
eral public on Saturday.
Indian performer known for his soulful voice
PANDIT JASRAJ
1930-2020
BY SHALINI VENUGOPAL BHAGAT
Pandit Jasraj, an acclaimed Indian clas-
sical vocalist who enraptured audiences
around the world, died on Aug. 17 at his
home in New Jersey. He was 90.
A spokeswoman for Mr. Jasraj, who
did not say where in New Jersey he died,
said the cause was cardiac arrest.
Mr. Jasraj’s soulful voice and multi-
octave range made him one of the most
famous performers in Indian classical
music. An exponent of the north Indian
style of Hindustani classical music, he
was the last surviving member of a gen-
eration of virtuoso singers that included
Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, Kumar Gand-
harva, Kishori Amonkar, Bade Ghulam
Ali Khan and Mallikarjun Mansur. He
continued performing until very re-
cently.
He was also a teacher, instructing
generations of musicians in the nuances
of the 19th-century style known as
Mewati gharana.
Indian history is replete with stories
of musicians who were said to summon
rains or light lamps by singing ragas.
Mr. Jasraj was one such artist.
During an early morning concert in
Varanasi, India, in 1996 on the grounds
of the Sankat Mochan temple, he was
immersed in the Todi raga when a deer
bounded up to the stage and stayed to
listen until the end, he recalled in an in-
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“Our goal was really that you have the service, organized with Transportation of external affairs and an avid cyclist,
Met experience,” Mr. Hollein said, Alternatives, a bicycle and pedestrian who thought up the idea.
“meaning that you don’t just have one advocacy group. The bikes — each of To be sure, there are reasons to be
wing open, but you see this great institu- which will be sanitized — will be parked nervous.
tion in all its different aspects, and it’s a in the plaza just north of the main steps. Will people come? Will they submit to
museum that you know and that you “This is one more way to make the temperature checks, wear masks and
love.” museum accessible to visitors,” said observe distancing guidelines? Will the
The Met will test out a free bike valet Kenneth Weine, the Met’s vice president virus eventually surge again in New
Indian citizens: the Padma Vibhushan
in 2000, the Padma Bhushan in 1990 and
the Padma Shri in 1975. Last year, he be-
came the first Indian musician to have a
minor planet named after him: Pandit-
jasraj, which orbits the sun between
Mars and Jupiter.
Mr. Jasraj spent six months of each
year in the United States and Canada,
traveling among several music schools
he helped found. This year, he left India
on Feb. 15 and was at his home in New
Jersey when the coronavirus pandemic
struck. He remained there, teaching vis-
iting disciples and giving performances
on Zoom.
After his death, his body was repatri-
ated to Mumbai, where he was cremated
on Aug. 20 with state honors, including a
21-gun salute.
In addition to his daughter, he is sur-
MILIND SHELTE/THE INDIA TODAY GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES vived by his wife of 58 years, Madhura
Pandit Jasraj performing in Mumbai in 2019. Over an eight-decade career, Mr. Jasraj Pandit Jasraj; his son, Shaarang Dev
won numerous awards, including three of the highest civilian honors for Indian citizens. Pandit; and three grandchildren.
Pandit Jasraj was born in the city of
Hisar, in the northern state of Haryana,
terview with The Hindustan Times. “It who was accompanying him on the tan- on Jan. 28, 1930, to Pandit Motiram and
was a good omen,” he said. pura, a long-necked string instrument, Krishna Bai. He was the youngest of
In May 1998, at the beginning of the recalled in a 2019 interview. “It got so three sons in a family of classical musi-
Indian summer, Mr. Jasraj was invited windy that the backdrop and marigold cians. His grandfather, father, uncles
to sing at an outdoor gathering at the garlands hung around were ripped off and brothers were all renowned singers
home of a senior bureaucrat in Delhi. Af- and sent flying. The dust storm turned and composers of the Mewati gharana,
ter performing for more than two hours, into a downpour, and all the dignitaries and his father was his first teacher.
he decided to sing the Dhulia Malhar ran for cover. When it wouldn’t subside, When he was 4 and living in Hyder-
raga, the first in a series usually sung the concert was shifted to a room in- abad, in south-central India, his father
before the onset of monsoons, when the side.” died suddenly on the day his father was
air is filled with fine dust. Over an eight-decade career, Mr. Jas- to be appointed royal musician in the
“As he sang, the climate began to visi- raj won numerous awards, including court of Osman Ali Khan. His eldest
bly change,” his daughter, Durga Jasraj, three of the highest civilian honors for brother, Pandit Maniram, became the
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY VINCENT TULLO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Left, “Perseus With the Head of Medusa”
in a sculpture gallery at the Met. Just
about every part of the museum will be
accessible to visitors.
York, possibly forcing the museum to
shut down once more?
These are the questions that have
been keeping Mr. Sullivan up at night. “I
worry — did we get all the details
right?” he said. “Did I miss something?
Am I forgetting something?”
But there have also been purely joyful
aspects of the process, Met staff mem-
bers said, such as opening the exhibition
of Jacob Lawrence’s rarely seen series
of paintings, “Struggle: From the His-
tory of the American People” (1954-56),
which highlights the experiences of
women and people of color.
“We’re trying to do right by him,” said
Randall Griffey, a curator of the show,
speaking of the artist, who died in 2000.
“The Met has been very vocal about
commitments to Black representation
and equity, and we’re very lucky to re-
open with something like this — it’s al-
most regrettably timely.”
The Met will finally be able to do a
number of things: showcase its 150th
anniversary show, “Making the Met,
1870-2020,” which focuses on the institu-
tion’s history; open its rooftop garden
exhibition of Héctor Zamora; and unveil
its costume exhibit, “About Time: Fash-
ion and Duration,” which was supposed
to happen in May — along with its annu-
al gala — but will now open in October.
While the Met’s Gerhard Richter
show at the Breuer building will not re-
open — another museum, the Frick Col-
lection, has taken over the space — four
paintings from the artist’s important
“Birkenau” series will be on view in the
main building starting in September.
In anticipation of its reopening, the
Met has dedicated, for the first time, the
facade spaces usually used for exhibi-
tion banners to display art: two new
banners that Yoko Ono created in re-
sponse to the pandemic featuring the
words “Dream” and “Together.”
Despite all the careful planning, there
are bound to be kinks; the Met — like
museums everywhere — is in uncharted
territory.
“I think about hurricanes, blizzards,
9/11, blackouts — all sorts of big New
York City events that took place and
having to get the doors open or closed
and take care of the staff,” Mr. Sullivan,
the Met’s visitor experience executive,
said.
“But I never could have pictured
something like this,” he added. “We’re
opening the doors to a completely differ-
ent world.”
head of the household and took over his
musical education.
Never interested in school, Pandit
Jasraj started skipping classes to listen
to the classical music being played at a
small roadside restaurant. His brother
Pandit Pratap Narayan decided to teach
him to play the tabla, hand drums simi-
lar to bongos, and, when he was barely 7,
he started performing with his brothers
around the country.
At 14, he gave up playing the tabla. “A
very senior musician brought my rela-
tionship with my percussion instrument
to an abrupt end by deriding me for
beating a dead animal’s skin and there-
fore utterly unqualified to talk about the
finer points of music,” he wrote on his
website. “I decided then that I would
henceforth only sing.”
He spent nearly 14 hours each day
practicing his singing. His first public
concert as a singer was in the court of
King Tribhuvan Bir Bikram Shah of Ne-
pal, in 1952. “After my very first rendi-
tion, King Tribhuvan awarded me 5,000
mohurs,” he said in an interview this
year in which he referenced the gold
coins. “I was quite stunned by the ges-
ture. It was more than I could count.”
He is credited with popularizing Ha-
veli Sangeet, a form of devotional music
dedicated to the Hindu god Krishna that
is traditionally sung in temples.
Among those paying tribute was
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who ex-
pressed his condolences on Twitter,
writing that Mr. Jasraj’s death “leaves a
deep void in the Indian cultural sphere.”
..
Crowds
waited in
line for her
tofu soup
HEE SOOK LEE
1959-2020
BY GILLIAN FRIEDMAN
Hee Sook Lee’s recipe for soondubu, a
steaming bowl of soft tofu in a spicy,
bright-red beef bone broth, was so se-
cret, she wouldn’t even share it with her
husband.
While he and her young sons slept,
Ms. Lee, who owned a restaurant in Los
Angeles, spent many long nights in the
kitchen experimenting with spices until
the dish was just right: the tofu just silky
enough that it melted not on the spoon
but on the tongue; the broth adding just
the right kick of gochugaru, or Korean
red chili pepper.
Soon it was time to introduce the soup
at her restaurant, and when she did, she
could not have foreseen its impact: It
would help her establishment grow into
a national chain while the dish itself
would become something of an Ameri-
can cultural phenomenon.
Ms. Lee, the founder of the BCD Tofu
House chain, died on July 18 in a hospital
in Los Angeles. She was 61. Her eldest
son, Dr. Eddie Lee, said the cause was
ovarian cancer. Dr. Lee helped his
mother manage the business in recent
years as its interim chief executive.
Beginning in 1996 with one restaurant
in Los Angeles, on Vermont Avenue in
Koreatown, the BCD Tofu House chain,
known for drawing line-out-the-door
crowds, now has 13 restaurants in 12 cit-
ies across the United States. Some are
open 24 hours a day, for those who work
odd hours or for young people hungry
after a night on the town and craving
Ms. Lee’s secret soondubu or other Ko-
rean dishes on the menu.
“The secret is in the seasoning,” Dr.
Lee said of the soup in a phone inter-
view. “That’s all I can say, or it won’t be a
secret anymore.”
SPENCER WEINER/LOS ANGELES TIMES
Hee Sook Lee in 2007. Her BCD Tofu
House expanded to 13 U.S. locations.
Hee Sook Hong was born in Seoul,
South Korea, on June 24, 1959, one of
four daughters of Young Pyo Hong, a
teacher, and Chun Ja Park, a home-
maker.
When Hee Sook was in middle school,
a stroke left her father paralyzed. To
support the family, her mother began
washing dishes in restaurants and sell-
ing items at flea markets. After high
school, Hee Sook began working, too, to
bring in extra income.
In 1983, she married Tae Ro Lee, a
lawyer who had become a restaurateur.
They moved to Los Angeles in 1989 so
that her sons could learn English and
gain better educational opportunities.
Once there, Ms. Lee began looking for
a way to earn a living. She enrolled in the
graphic design program at Santa Mon-
ica College and graduated in 1994.
The idea to open a restaurant came to
her one Sunday in the mid-1990s while
sitting with her family in the pews of
Berendo Street Baptist Church. During
the service, her sons’ stomachs began to
growl, and they begged to go to the soon-
dubu restaurant across the street after
church.
“My brothers and I would love eating
there,” Dr. Lee said. “That got her think-
ing that tofu soup really would be some-
thing unique that she could focus on.”
She decided to name the restaurant
BCD Tofu House, short for Buk Chang
Dong, a neighborhood in Seoul, where
her father’s aunt ran a tofu restaurant.
Ms. Lee became fiercely dedicated to
the business, waking up in the early
morning hours to handpick produce at
the wholesale market downtown.
“Anything she put out on a table, it had
to be perfect,” said Dr. Lee, “whether it
was the temperature of the rice, the col-
or of the kimchi, the saltiness of the tofu
seasoning.”
And people came. “Today, tourists
from South Korea arrive by the busload
at BCD Tofu House and snap photos,”
The Los Angeles Times wrote in 2008.
“Visiting dignitaries, sports stars and
actors frequently dine at the restaurant.
Even though the restaurant is open
around the clock, there is almost always
a wait.”
During the coronavirus pandemic,
Ms. Lee continued to provide health
benefits to laid-off workers and addi-
tional wages to those who stayed to help
with takeout orders. And knowing that
during a health crisis people might need
hot soup more than ever, Ms. Lee kept
the BCD Tofu House outlet on Wilshire
Boulevard in Los Angeles open 24 hours
a day.
In addition to Dr. Lee, she is survived
by two other sons; her husband; and her
sisters, Myung Hee Hong, Sung Hee
Hong and Sung Im Lee.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
World
The death toll is expected to rise after flash floods in Charikar, Afghanistan, killed dozens of people. Many residents were believed to be trapped under collapsed homes.
Deadly floods in the night
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN
Afghanistan suffers
another blow as dozens are
killed in a northern city
BY THOMAS GIBBONS-NEFF
AND FAHIM ABED
When the heavy rains came overnight,
setting off flash floods in northern Af-
ghanistan, the deluge quickly turned
deadly and caught many residents off
guard because they were sleeping.
On Thursday, officials said the floods
had killed 151 people in 13 provinces. In
Charikar, home to nearly 200,000 and
the capital of Parwan Province, north of
Kabul, the initial toll was nearly 80.
Mahmood Samadi, a Charikar resi-
dent, said he woke to the sound of water
rushing through his neighborhood and
quickly decided to get his family out of
the city. When he returned, nearly half
his house was flooded and six homes on
his street had been destroyed.
“I don’t know about the exact casu-
alties in our street, but I know many peo-
ple were killed and wounded,” Mr.
Samadi said.
The flash floods left a trail of mud, top-
pled houses and bodies. Photos in the
U.K. soccer star convicted of assault
BY MARC SANTORA
AND ILIANA MAGRA
A star athlete. An $82,000 restaurant bill
before a boozy encounter on a sun-
soaked island. A fight, arrests and —
less than a week later — a conviction.
But no conclusion.
The saga of Harry Maguire, the cap-
tain of Manchester United who was
found guilty by a Greek court on Tues-
day on multiple charges, has captivated
Britain even though much about the in-
cident remains shrouded in confusion.
After the verdict convicting him of ag-
gravated assault, resisting arrest and
attempted bribery, Mr. Maguire, 27, ap-
pealed the decision and posted a quote
on social media attributed to Buddha.
“Three things cannot be hidden: the
sun, the moon and the truth.”
For many observers of the high-pro-
file scandal, the truth of the moment
varies depending on the vantage point.
The case presented by Greek pros-
ecutors goes like this:
Late one night last week, on the white-
washed streets of the old town on the is-
land of Mykonos, plainclothes police of-
ficers were drawn to a disturbance. Mr.
Maguire and members of his party were
belligerent and confronted the police,
verbally abusing and physically assault-
ing them, officials said.
During the subsequent one-day trial
on the nearby isle of Syros, the capital of
the Cyclades island chain, the court was
told that Mr. Maguire tried to use his ce-
lebrity and wealth to get out of trouble,
according to media accounts.
“Do you know who I am?” he said, ac-
cording to the prosecutor’s account. “I
am the captain of Manchester United. I
am very rich. I can give you money. I can
pay you, please let us go.”
Mr. Maguire’s defense team denied he
said any such thing. In their telling, Mr.
Maguire’s party had been confronted
the previous night by hooligans who
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Afghan news media showed flattened
buildings, scattered debris and mangled
cars.
Rescue workers sifted through the
wreckage, as many residents were be-
lieved to be trapped under collapsed
homes. One hospital reported receiving
78 bodies and 105 wounded people. The
death toll in the city was expected to
rise.
The flooding is just the latest blow for
Afghanistan, which has been ravaged
by the coronavirus and bloodied by Tal-
iban attacks across the country since a
Feb. 29 peace agreement between the
United States and the insurgent group.
Tariq Arian, a spokesman for Afghan-
istan’s interior ministry, said on Tuesday
that 88 civilians had been killed in the
preceding two weeks, and he blamed the
Taliban for most of the deaths.
That same day, a Taliban car bomb in
the northern province of Balkh killed at
least eight civilians, as well as two Af-
ghan commandos whose unit was based
nearby. More than 60 people were
wounded, and the blast destroyed or
damaged several buildings, including
an agricultural center and an animal
clinic.
Nearly 1,300 civilians were killed in
fighting during the first six months of
the year, according to the United Na-
tions. A similar number of Afghans were
reported to have died from the coro-
Harry Maguire, left, was convicted in a Greek court of aggravated assault, resisting
arrest and attempted bribery and given a suspended 21-month, 10-day jail sentence.
tried to provoke Mr. Maguire by singing
songs about one of the most tragic mo-
ments in Manchester United history, the
1958 crash of the team’s airplane in Mu-
nich that killed 23 members of the team,
its staff and journalists.
The next night, Mr. Maguire’s group
was confronted again by the same men.
Mr. Maguire’s friend, Ashden Morley,
told the court that Mr. Maguire’s sister,
Daisy, had been approached by “two Al-
banian-looking” men as some of the
group went to buy kebabs.
He testified that Ms. Maguire’s eyes
“rolled” in her head, leading the group to
fear she had been slipped or injected
with some form of a “rape drug.”
Mr. Maguire and his friends tried to
leave in a minibus that the soccer star
had rented, but they were stopped by a
group of men in two cars.
“The door was pulled open by a man,”
navirus, but the true number is likely to
be significantly higher because of lim-
ited testing and the government’s di-
minished presence in more rural areas.
Since the start of the year, more than
17,000 people have been affected by
heavy floods and rains across Afghani-
stan, with nearly 2,000 homes de-
stroyed, according to a United Nations
report released in April.
Scientists have pointed to climate
change as more frequent flooding has
struck Asian countries, including China,
where riverbanks have been breached
Scientists have pointed to climate
change as more frequent flooding
has struck Asian countries,
including China and Indonesia.
and waters have strained the Three
Gorges Dam; North Korea, where the
government declined to accept interna-
tional aid for fear of letting the coro-
navirus in; Bangladesh, where tor-
rential rains recently submerged at
least a quarter of the country; and Indo-
nesia, where flash floods left hundreds
of thousands homeless earlier this year.
In Afghanistan, weak governance
puts residents in additional peril: With
little official oversight, urban planning
is often neglected. Many of the houses
POOL PHOTO BY CARL RECINE
Mr. Morley said. “We thought we were
either being robbed or kidnapped. Ev-
erybody was very scared.”
The men who stopped the minibus
might have been police officers, but if so,
Mr. Maguire and his friends were un-
aware of it, the defense maintained. It
portrayed the police as the aggressors,
but the court was not convinced.
Mr. Maguire was found guilty and
sentenced to 21 months and 10 days in
jail, although the sentence was sus-
pended for three years while legal chal-
lenges play out. Two of Mr. Maguire’s as-
sociates were also found guilty and sen-
tenced to 13 months in prison, also sus-
pended for three years.
“I remain strong and confident re-
garding our innocence in this matter —
if anything, myself, family and friends
are the victims,” Mr. Maguire said in a
statement.
WAKIL KOHSAR/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
destroyed in Charikar were built in an
area prone to flooding, said Mohammad
Khalil Fazli, a member of the Parwan
provincial council.
Nearly the entire city was devastated,
Mr. Fazli said. “There are houses de-
stroyed by flash floods in every corner
of the city,” he said.
Esmatullah Mohammadi, another
member of the provincial council, said
the government should not have let peo-
ple build their houses there, “because
everyone knows that it is a route of flash
floods.”
Heavy rains in northern and eastern
Afghanistan are common at this time of
year. On Tuesday night, three people
were killed and three others wounded in
a series of flash floods in eastern War-
dak Province, said Mohammad Sardar
Bakhtyari, a local official. Dozens of
houses and acres of agricultural land
were destroyed.
But the dense population and the fact
that the downpour happened overnight
combined to deadly effect in Charikar.
A spokesman for President Ashraf
Ghani said that the Afghan government
had pledged emergency support for
Charikar.
Flash flooding in Charikar earlier this
month affected 495 families, 152 of
which needed humanitarian assistance,
according to a report from the Interna-
tional Organization for Migration.
In fact, it may take years for the case
to go to the country’s court of appeal, ac-
cording to a Greek legal expert.
The trial and conviction, only days af-
ter the altercation, played out so quickly
because of a Greek legal process that al-
lows for speedy trials of those consid-
ered to have been caught in the act.
Christos Mylonopoulos, a professor of
law at the University of Athens and the
president of the European and Interna-
tional Criminal Law Institute, said that
because Mr. Maguire has been con-
victed of only misdemeanor crimes un-
der Greek law, the court has up to eight
years to hear the case again.
Manchester United said that because
the court accepted Mr. Maguire’s ap-
peal, he is presumed innocent and is free
to travel as he awaits a full retrial.
But for Mr. Maguire, the fallout has
been immediate. He was suspended
from playing for England’s national
team for at least two matches, and his
future has been thrown into question.
Manchester United has defended its
star player, for whom it paid more than
$100 million in acquiring him from
Leicester City, an English Premier
League rival. The team said in a state-
ment on Wednesday that he would re-
main the team’s captain for the time be-
ing.
The coverage of the saga has been
driven by reports of the lavish lifestyle
enjoyed by a privileged few.
In particular, the details of the $82,000
tab for one five-hour long bacchanal at
the ritzy SantAnna Beach Club has been
combed over by numerous news ac-
counts in British and Greek media.
More than $60,000 of the bill covered
expensive champagne, the reports said.
Most of the rest was spent on lobster,
steak and cocktails.
Marc Santora reported from London and
Iliana Magra from Athens. Tariq Panja
contributed reporting from London.
Sweden raises alarm
over Russia exercises
STOCKHOLM
Stockholm deploys
warships as Baltic Sea
military activity increases
BY THOMAS ERDBRINK
AND ANDREW E. KRAMER
Tourists in Sweden heading out Tuesday
to enjoy summer weather on Gotland, a
scenic island in the Baltic Sea, were
jolted when armored personnel carriers
and other military vehicles boarded
their ferry, which was then escorted by
Swedish fighter jets and a warship.
In addition to being a tourist destina-
tion, Gotland is also a strategically im-
portant site, sometimes referred to as
Sweden’s “fixed aircraft carrier.” The
Swedish military deployed four war-
ships and an unspecified number of
ground forces and warplanes in re-
sponse to a major Russian naval exer-
cise that has set off alarms regionally.
A United States Air Force C-130
landed briefly in the Gotland town of
Visby on Saturday, said Therese Fager-
stedt, a press officer at the Swedish
Armed Forces Headquarters. But she
denied the flight had any connection
with the Swedish military activities.
Russia may have been prompted by
recent NATO exercises in the area, mili-
tary experts said, as well as the unrest in
Belarus and President Trump’s decision
to redeploy troops from Germany to Po-
land.
The result, Jan Thornqvist, chief of
joint operations with the Swedish
Armed Forces, said in a statement, is
“extensive military activity in the Baltic
Sea, conducted by Russian as well as
Western players, on a scale the likes of
which have not been seen since the Cold
War.”
Russia’s Defense Ministry described
its exercise as a mock amphibious land-
ing of marines, with the first step being
their deployment on three large assault
vessels.
Those ships, the Korolyov, the Kali-
ningrad and the Minsk, set sail on Tues-
day from the Kaliningrad region, a Rus-
sian enclave on the Baltic wedged be-
tween Poland and Lithuania, accompa-
nied by two minesweepers and a
corvette, or small warship.
The flotilla plans to sail up the coast-
lines of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia,
former Soviet republics that are NATO
members, and near the territory of Swe-
den and Finland, which are neutral
countries. The marines will then stage a
mock amphibious assault on Russian
territory near St. Petersburg, the mili-
tary said.
Pavel Felgenhauer, a military com-
mentator for an independent Russian
newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, said the ex-
ercise is part of operation Ocean Shield,
a long-running effort to lift the Russian
navy’s preparedness.
He said it did not appear to be related
to current Russian military exercises
near the border with Belarus involving
6,000 troops and 1,500 armored vehi-
cles.
Another analyst said the Russian ex-
ercise was a response to increased
NATO activity in Eastern Europe. Inev-
itably, the analyst, Ivan Konovalov, di-
rector of the Center for Studies of Stra-
tegic Trends in Moscow, said, “our activ-
ity rises, too.”
Tensions between Russia and the
West ramped up sharply in 2014, after
Russia annexed Crimea and intervened
militarily in eastern Ukraine. The Krem-
lin staged major military exercises
along its western borders, stirring long-
dormant fears of Russian armored col-
umns rolling across Europe.
In response, NATO reinvigorated
plans to counter an old foe, strength-
ening ties to allied armies, increasing
the number of troops and spies devoted
ANTONIA SEHLSTEDT/SWEDISH ARMED FORCES, VIA AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
Swedish JAS-37 fighter jets and a Swedish Navy corvette off the island of Gotland. In
addition to being a tourist destination, Gotland is also a strategically important site.
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 3
to Russia and embracing the Pentagon’s
revamped defense strategy that focuses
more on potential threats from Russia
and China and less on terrorism.
Over the past two years, the United
States and its NATO allies have posi-
tioned about 4,500 soldiers in the three
Baltic States and Poland, and have sta-
tioned several thousand other armored
troops mostly in Eastern Europe.
In Brussels, allied defense ministers
last year approved a plan to ensure that
by 2020, at least 30,000 troops, plus ad-
ditional attack planes and warships,
would be positioned to respond to Rus-
sian aggression within 30 days.
The tensions are part of an expanding
rivalry, and corresponding military
buildup, between Washington and Mos-
cow.
Two U.S. Air Force B-1B bombers fly-
ing a long-range training mission over
the Black Sea in late May prompted Rus-
sian fighter jets to scramble and inter-
cept the American warplanes. At least
three times in the past two months, Rus-
sian fighter jets intercepted U.S. Navy
P-8 surveillance planes over the Medi-
terranean.
And last week, Russian fighter jets in-
tercepted three U.S. RC-135 reconnais-
sance planes over the Baltic and Black
seas, the Russian Defense Ministry
said. The Russian jets eventually flew
away without incident.
NATO held its annual exercise in the
Baltics in June, with Sweden and Fin-
land participating, though they are not
members of the alliance.
Over 8,600 soldiers, 50 ships, a heli-
copter carrier and two submarines were
involved. But it has not held exercises of
that size since, a NATO spokesman said.
“The Russians are showing
that they’re willing to go there.
They are trying to scare off
the West.”
Western analysts suggested that Rus-
sia could be reacting more to the recent
protests in Belarus, warning outside
powers about involving themselves in
the uprising.
The Kremlin has long accused the
United States of promoting revolutions
in former Soviet republics, particularly
Georgia and Ukraine.
“The Russians are showing that
they’re willing to go there,” said Karlis
Neretnieks, a retired, high-ranking offi-
cer and former president of the Swedish
Defense University. “They are trying to
scare off the West.”
Mr. Neretnieks said that President
Vladimir V. Putin’s government, already
dealing with protests in Siberia, is wor-
ried that the possible fall of President
Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus
might cause further demonstrations in
Russia. “They now want to divert do-
mestic attention and create an outside
threat.”
While the deployment of what the
Russian military itself described as a
battle-ready landing force was unset-
tling, Mr. Thornqvist said in a statement
published on the Swedish Armed
Forces’ website on Monday that the risk
of a military attack was still very low,
though the conditions were unpredict-
able. “We are witnessing a deteriorated
security situation in the vicinity of Swe-
den,” he said.
This was not the first time that Rus-
sian military activity had set off alarms
in Sweden. In 2017 the government an-
nounced the reintroduction of compul-
sory military service “to resist an armed
attack against Sweden from a qualified
opponent,” a letter from the Swedish
Civil Contingencies Agency said.
Thomas Erdbrink reported from Stock-
holm and Andrew E. Kramer from Mos-
cow. Reporting contributed by Eric
Schmitt from Washington and Christina
Anderson from Stockholm.

4 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
world
Under threat of U.S. sanctions
GERMANY, FROM PAGE 1
rious that the Trump administration is
using the same type of sanctions against
an ally and a European project in which
American companies play no part as it
employs against companies doing busi-
ness with North Korea or Iran.
Even those German officials who are
critical of Nord Stream 2 say America is
being a counterproductive bully by
threatening such secondary sanctions
against a close ally’s state-owned com-
pany, and that the European Union,
through existing regulations and diver-
sification, could handle an unexpected
Russian cutoff.
Secondary sanctions are a way of
turning up the pressure on sanctioned
countries and projects by going after
those who do business with them. The
goal is to isolate the target of the sanc-
tions, but the economic pain inflicted on
third parties, like the port at Sassnitz,
can be severe.
The senators threatened the port’s
“board members, corporate officers,
shareholders, and employees, to crush-
ing legal and economic sanctions, which
our government will be mandated to im-
pose.”
In Sassnitz, which Mr. Taraba remem-
bers as a once-thriving fishing commu-
nity with discos and bars crowded with
now-vanished Swedish tourists, atten-
tion is focused on the future of the ailing
port and what that means for the town.
Many of the best jobs in the region,
like casing pipes for Nord Stream 2 or
installing and servicing turbines for off-
shore wind farms, are linked to the port
and would be affected by the sanctions
against it.
“It has confirmed every
stereotype about capitalist
Americans that they learned
under communism.”
The senators proposing the sanctions
— Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Ar-
kansas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin —
sent a letter to the port’s owners on Aug.
5 threatening “crushing legal and eco-
nomic sanctions” if the facility contin-
ued to provide “significant goods, serv-
ices, and support” for the pipeline. Earli-
er sanctions caused a Swiss-Dutch com-
pany to stop laying the last 50 miles of
pipes off Denmark.
A senior Republican congressional
aide said the new sanctions are nar-
rowly focused to try to stop the comple-
tion of the pipeline. They are attached to
the National Defense Authorization Act
and have bipartisan support. That
means they are almost certain to be-
come law whenever Congress votes on
the act, the aide said, requesting ano-
nymity to talk about proceedings that
are still in the legislative process.
The aide said the target of the sanc-
tions was Russia, not Germany, but that
allies sometimes had to make choices to
gain access to the American market,
noting that months of diplomacy with
Germany and the European Union had
failed to come up with a solution.
“The U.S. administration is disre-
specting Europe’s right and sovereignty
to decide itself where and how we
source our energy,” said Heiko Maas,
the German foreign minister. Ger-
many’s Energy Ministry said in an
email that it considered secondary sanc-
tions a violation of international law.
The European Union’s foreign policy
chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles, said he
was “deeply concerned at the growing
use of sanctions, or the threat of sanc-
tions, by the United States against Euro-
pean companies and interests.”
New clue on why men are hit harder
BY APOORVA MANDAVILLI
The coronavirus may infect anyone,
young or old, but older men are up to
twice as likely to become severely sick
and to die as women of the same age.
Why? The first study to look at im-
mune response by sex has turned up a
clue: Men produce a weaker immune re-
sponse to the virus than do women, the
researchers concluded.
The findings, published on Wednes-
day in Nature, suggest that men, partic-
ularly those over age 60, may need to de-
pend more on vaccines to protect
against the infection.
“Natural infection is clearly failing” to
spark adequate immune responses in
men, said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunolo-
gist at Yale University who led the work.
The results are consistent with what’s
known about sex differences and the
body’s immune responses.
Women mount faster and stronger
immune responses, perhaps because
their bodies are rigged to fight patho-
gens that threaten unborn or newborn
children.
But over time, an immune system in a
constant state of high alert can be harm-
ful. Most autoimmune diseases — char-
acterized by an overly strong immune
response — are much more prevalent in
women than in men, for example.
“We are looking at two sides of the
same coin,” said Dr. Marcus Altfeld, an
immunologist at the Heinrich Pette In-
stitute and at the University Medical
Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Ger-
many.
The findings underscore the need for
companies pursing coronavirus vac-
cines to parse their data by sex, Dr. Alt-
feld and other experts said. The findings
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Top, tourists at the harbor of Sassnitz, Germany. Visitors from Sweden in the once-thriving fishing community have become rare.
Above, sections of pipe at the port. Potential American sanctions aim to prevent Russia from finishing a major pipeline project.
A German legislator, Norbert
Röttgen, has opposed the pipeline for
much the same reasons as Washington.
But he also opposes sanctions against
allies, let alone against a tiny port.
“Sanctions are for enemies, not for al-
lies, partners and friends,” he said.
Officials in Sassnitz hope that a new
high-speed ferry to Sweden will help
compensate for the decline in cargo
transport and bring more tourists, but
they fear that jobs could dry up under
sanctions, said Stefan Grunau, who sits
on both the town council and the port
company board.
“This is a structurally weak region
that is desperately searching for ways to
generate new jobs,” Mr. Grunau said.
The senators’ letter has also unrav-
eled the good will toward the United
States in Sassnitz, Mr. Grunau said. “It
has confirmed every stereotype about
capitalist Americans that they learned
under communism.”
A nurse holding a phone to a Covid-19 patient’s ear so he could speak with his daughter.
A new study finds that women produce a more powerful immune response than men do.
could also influence decisions about
dosing.
“You could imagine scenarios where a
single shot of a vaccine might be suffi-
cient in young individuals or maybe
young women, while older men might
need to have three shots of vaccine,” Dr.
Altfeld said.
Companies pursuing coronavirus
vaccines have not yet released clinical
data analyzed by the trial participants’
sex, but the U.S. Food and Drug Admin-
istration has asked them to do so, as well
as by racial and ethnic background, said
Dr. William Gruber, a vice president at
Pfizer.
Dr. Iwasaki’s team analyzed immune
responses in 17 men and 22 women who
Christian Pegel, the energy minister
for Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania,
called the senators’ threat “like some-
thing out of the Wild West.” The letter “is
very abrasive in tone and manner, and it
is not clear about where I face a risk to-
day and where risks could arise in the
future.”
Combined with other measures per-
ceived to be anti-German, like President
Trump’s recent decision to withdraw
some troops from Germany, the reaction
to the sanctions has been one of shock
and outrage, said Kirsten Westphal, an
analyst with the German Institute for
International and Security Affairs.
“It is another step up in escalation, be-
cause it exerts massive pressure on
German infrastructure and administra-
tions,” she said.There is a sense that as
with Iran, Washington is substituting
sanctions for foreign policy and “weap-
onizing interdependence,’’ she said.
Given European Union regulations
ETIENNE LAURENT/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
were admitted to the hospital soon after
they were infected with the coronavirus.
The researchers collected blood, naso-
pharyngeal swabs, saliva, urine and
stools from the patients every three to
seven days.
The analysis excluded patients on
ventilators and those taking drugs that
affect the immune system “to make sure
that we’re measuring natural immune
response to the virus,” Dr. Iwasaki said.
The researchers also analyzed data
from an additional 59 men and women
who did not meet those criteria.
Over all, the scientists found, the
women’s bodies produced more T cells,
which can kill virus-infected cells and
stop the infection from spreading.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY LENA MUCHA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
governing natural gas imports, supplies
and pipelines, as well as a transit agree-
ment with Ukraine, the ability of Russia
to influence European politics by cutting
off gas supplies is much diminished, Ms.
Westphal said.
Daniel Fried, a former U.S. ambassa-
dor to Poland who worked on sanctions
policy from 2013 to 2017, said that while
he opposed Nord Stream 2, now that it is
nearly complete it would be better to
pass conditional sanctions that would
hit Russia hard if it interfered with the
flow of gas to Europe. “There’s a better
way to go than to fight the Germans on
this one,” he said.
Mr. Fried, now with the Atlantic Coun-
cil in Washington, said: “We have a
Putin problem; we don’t have a German
problem.”
Melissa Eddy reported from Sassnitz,
Germany, and Steven Erlanger from
Brussels.
Men showed much weaker activation
of T cells, and that lag was linked to how
sick the men became. The older the men,
the weaker their T cell responses.
But “women who are older — even
very old, like 90 years old — these wom-
en are still making pretty good, decent
immune response,” Dr. Iwasaki added.
Compared with health care workers
and healthy controls, the patients all
had elevated blood levels of cytokines,
proteins that rouse the immune system
to action. Some types of cytokines were
elevated in all men but only in some
women.
Women who had high levels of other
cytokines became more seriously ill, the
researchers found. Those women might
do better if given drugs that blunt these
proteins, Dr. Iwasaki said.
The study has limitations. It was
small, and the patients were older than
60 on average, making it difficult to as-
sess how the immune response changes
with age.
“We know that age is proving to be a
very important factor in Covid-19 out-
comes, and the intersection of age and
sex must be explored,” said Sabra Klein,
a vaccine expert at the Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The study also did not offer a reason
for the differences between men and
women. Because the women were past
menopause, on average, “it is doubtful
that sex steroid hormones are involved,”
Dr. Klein said.
Still, the new findings are “exciting”
because they begin to explain why men
fare so much worse with the coro-
navirus. “The more robust T cell re-
sponses in older women could be an im-
portant clue to protection and must be
explored further,” Dr. Klein said.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
In the race for vaccines,
first might not be best
VACCINE, FROM PAGE 1
U.S. Army researchers at the Walter
Reed Army Institute have created an-
other spike-tip nanoparticle vaccine and
are recruiting volunteers for a clinical
trial that they also plan to start by the
end of 2020. Other companies and uni-
versities are creating spike-tip-based
vaccines as well, using recipes of their
own.
IMMUNE PUNCH
Antibodies are only one weapon in the
immune arsenal. Blood cells known as T
cells can fight infections by attacking
other cells that have been infiltrated by
the virus.
“We still don’t know which kind of im-
mune response will be important for
protection,” said Luciana Leite, a vac-
cine researcher at Instituto Butantan in
São Paulo, Brazil.
It’s possible that vaccines that arouse
only antibody responses will fail in the
long run. Dr. Leite and other re-
searchers are testing vaccines made of
several parts of the coronavirus to see if
they can coax T cells to fight it off.
“It’s a second line of defense that
might work better than antibodies,” said
Anne De Groot, the chief executive of
Epivax, a company based in Provi-
dence, R.I.
Epivax has created an experimental
vaccine with several pieces of the spike
protein, as well as other viral proteins,
that it plans to test in a clinical trial in
December.
The effectiveness of a vaccine can
also be influenced by how it gets into our
body. All of the first-wave vaccines now
in clinical trials have to be injected into
muscle. A nasal spray vaccine — similar
to FluMist for influenza — might work
better, since the coronavirus invades
our bodies through the airway.
Several groups are gearing up for
clinical trials of nasal spray vaccines.
One of the most imaginative approaches
comes from a New York company called
Codagenix. It is testing a vaccine that
contains a synthetic version of the coro-
navirus that it made from scratch.
The Codagenix vaccine is a new twist
on an old formula. For decades, vaccine
makers have created vaccines for dis-
eases such as chickenpox and yellow fe-
ver from live but weakened viruses. Tra-
ditionally, scientists have weakened the
viruses by growing them in cells of
chickens or some other animals. The vi-
ruses adapt to their new hosts, and in
the process they become ill-suited for
growing in the human body.
The viruses still slip into cells, but
they replicate at a glacial pace. As a re-
sult, they can’t make us sick. But a small
dose of these weakened viruses can de-
liver a powerful jolt to the immune sys-
tem.
Yet there are relatively few live weak-
ened viruses, because making them is a
struggle. “It’s really trial-and-error
based,” said J. Robert Coleman, the chief
executive of Codagenix. “You can never
say exactly what the mutations are do-
ing.”
The Codagenix scientists came up
with a different approach. They sat
down at a computer and edited the coro-
navirus’s genome, creating 283 muta-
tions. They then created a piece of DNA
containing their new genome and put it
in monkey cells. The cells then made
their rewritten viruses. In experiments
on hamsters, the researchers found that
the vaccine didn’t make the animals sick
but did protect them against the coro-
navirus.
Codagenix is preparing to open a
Phase 1 trial of an intranasal spray with
one of these synthesized coronaviruses
as early as September. Two similar vac-
cines are in earlier stages of develop-
ment.
The French vaccine maker Valneva
plans to start clinical trials in November
on a far less futuristic design. “We are
addressing the pandemic with a rather
conventional approach,” said Thomas
Lingelbach, the chief executive of Val-
neva.
Valneva makes vaccines from inacti-
vated viruses that are killed with chemi-
cals. Jonas Salk and other early vaccine
makers found this recipe to work well.
Chinese vaccine makers already have
three such coronavirus vaccines in
Phase 3 trials, but Dr. Lingelbach still
sees an opportunity for Valneva to make
its own.
Inactivated virus vaccines have to
meet very high standards for purifica-
tion to make sure all the viruses are not
A university dean of health sciences volunteered to receive an experimental coronavirus
vaccine in Soweto, South Africa. Researchers hope to lower the cost of treatment.
..
viable. Valneva has already met those
standards, and it’s not clear that Chi-
nese vaccines would.
The United Kingdom has arranged to
purchase 60 million doses of Valneva’s
vaccine, and the company is scaling up
to make 200 million doses a year.
FASTER AND CHEAPER PRODUCTION
Even if the first wave of vaccines works,
many researchers worry that it won’t be
possible to make enough of them fast
enough to tackle the global need.
“It’s a numbers game — we need a lot
of doses,” said Florian Krammer, a virol-
ogist at Icahn School of Medicine at
Mount Sinai in New York.
Some of the most promising first-
wave products, such as RNA vaccines
from Moderna and Pfizer, are based on
designs that have never been put into
large-scale production before. “The
manufacturing math just doesn’t add
up,” said Steffen Mueller, the chief scien-
tific officer of Codagenix.
Many of the second-wave vaccines
wouldn’t require a large scaling-up of
experimental manufacturing. Instead,
they could piggyback on standard meth-
ods that have been used for years to
make safe and effective vaccines.
Codagenix, for example, has entered
into a partnership with the Serum Insti-
tute of India to grow the recoded coro-
naviruses. The institute already makes
billions of doses of live weakened virus
vaccines for measles, rotaviruses and
influenza, growing them in large tanks
of cells.
Tapping into well-established meth-
ods could also cut down the cost of a co-
ronavirus vaccine, which will make it
easier to get it distributed to less
wealthy countries.
Researchers at Baylor College of
Medicine, for example, are doing pre-
clinical work on a vaccine that they said
might cost as little as $2 a dose. By con-
trast, Pfizer is charging $19 a dose in a
deal with the U.S. government, and
other companies have floated even
higher prices.
All of the first-wave vaccines
now in clinical trials have to be
injected into muscle. A nasal
spray vaccine might work better.
To make the vaccine, the Baylor team
engineered yeast to make coronavirus
spike tips. It’s precisely the same
method that has been used since the
1980s to make vaccines for hepatitis B.
The Indian vaccine maker Biological E
has licensed Baylor’s vaccine and is
planning Phase 1 trials that will start
this fall.
“They now already know they can
make a billion doses a year,” said Maria
Elena Bottazzi, a Baylor virologist. “It’s
easy-breezy for them, because it was ex-
actly the same bread-and-butter vac-
cine technology that they have been
working with for years.”
Even if the world gets cheap, effective
vaccines against the Covid-19 coro-
navirus, that won’t mean that all of our
pandemic worries are over. With an
abundance of other coronaviruses lurk-
ing in wild animals, another pandemic
may be not far off. Several companies —
including Anhui Zhifei in China, Osivax
in France and VBI in Massachusetts —
are developing “universal” coronavirus
vaccines that might protect people from
an array of the viruses, even those that
haven’t colonized our species yet.
Many scientists see their continuing
vaccine work as part of a long game —
one that the well-being of entire nations
will depend on. Thailand, for example, is
preparing to purchase Covid-19 vac-
cines developed overseas, but scientists
there are also carrying out preclinical
research of their own.
At Chulalongkorn University, re-
searchers have been investigating sev-
eral potential candidates, including an
RNA-based vaccine that will go into
Phase 1 studies by early 2021. The vac-
cine is similar to one that Pfizer is now
testing in late-stage clinical trials, but
these scientists want the security of
making their own version.
“While Thailand has to plan for buy-
ing vaccines, we should do our best to
produce our own vaccine as well,” said
Kiat Ruxrungtham, a professor at Chu-
lalongkorn University. “If we are not
successful this time, we will be capable
to do much, much better in the next pan-
demic.”
LUCA SOLA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Disenchanted Republicans put Arizona in play
Party’s rightward lurch
has suburban women
looking at the Democrats
BY ELAINA PLOTT
Cindy McCain, the widow of the Republi-
can senator John McCain, appeared last
week in a video at the Democratic Na-
tional Convention detailing her hus-
band’s “unlikely friendship” with Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr. She praised the Demo-
cratic nominee for his willingness to
reach across the aisle, calling it “a style
of legislating and leadership that you
don’t find much anymore.”
Before the clip aired, Kelli Ward, the
chairwoman of the Arizona Republican
Party, who in 2016 lost a bitter Senate
primary challenge to Mr. McCain,
filmed her own video to share her
thoughts on Mrs. McCain’s appearance.
“Well, I just say: Not a Republican,”
Ms. Ward asserted as her husband,
wearing a red “Make America Great
Again” hat, nodded alongside her.
Those dueling images — the widow of
Arizona’s most popular Republican
since Barry Goldwater lauding the
Democratic presidential nominee’s
character, and the state party’s current
leader denouncing her in response as a
“pretend Republican” who wants to
“cause the destruction of this great na-
tion” — succinctly reflected the political
identity crisis currently unfolding in Ar-
izona.
“Right now, we’re losing
Republicans and we’re losing
independents. And there’s been
no effort to appeal to them.”
The party’s rightward lurch in the
Trump era has left a growing number of
Republicans in the state disenchanted
and caused Arizona, a longtime Republi-
can stronghold, to suddenly resemble a
battleground.
That’s in large part because of wom-
en: In 2018, 16 percent of Republican
women broke with their party to help
make Kyrsten Sinema the state’s first
Democratic senator since 1995. Most
strategists in the state believe President
Trump’s chances there in November
hinge on bringing such voters back into
the fold.
And if the tenor of the Republican Na-
tional Convention is any indication —
speeches about protecting “quiet neigh-
borhoods” on Monday; attempts to ap-
peal to suburban women and mothers
on Tuesday; a lineup of prominent Re-
publican women including Kellyanne
Conway, Karen Pence and Joni Ernst on
Wednesday — Mr. Trump is beginning
to agree.
In Arizona, Mrs. McCain serves as an
avatar of sorts for many Republican
women — educated suburbanites, in-
cluding lifelong party members who
have perhaps felt alienated by the par-
ty’s Trumpist turn. But Ms. Ward, a de-
vout Trump loyalist who dabbles in the
The man in charge vows to take charge
NEWS ANALYSIS
BY MATT FLEGENHEIMER
AND KATIE GLUECK
The America that many speakers de-
scribed on Wednesday at the Republi-
can National Convention did not sound
like a desirable place: fractious, violent,
functionally lawless in some pockets.
But their case that only President
Trump could shield Americans from all
this was complicated by a nettlesome
fact. He is in charge, at present — at the
controls of government through the pur-
portedly real-time conditions these sup-
porters outlined. And they would all like
to keep him there.
“America,” Vice President Mike
Pence told a Republican convention
crowd sternly from Fort McHenry in
Baltimore, “needs four more years of
President Donald Trump.”
The third night of the Republican con-
vention steered into a bit of messaging
jujitsu that has become a dominant
theme of the week: Mr. Trump’s ability
to turn back Trump-era ills that have, in
this telling, been largely out of his
hands to date.
And so the president, the argument
has gone, can be relied upon now to
safeguard Americans against the
threats they see all around them, in the
nation he leads.
“People that can afford to flee have
fled,” Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota
said of cities like Portland, Ore., and
New York. “But the people that can’t —
good, hard-working Americans — are
left to fend for themselves.”
Mr. Pence was more explicit in draw-
ing a connection to the Democratic
nominee: “You won’t be safe,” he said,
“in Joe Biden’s America.”
Even as president, Mr. Trump has of-
ten appeared most comfortable in the
role of back-seat driver, jeering his own
government like a common bystander,
insisting that someone really ought to
do something about all this. (“When he
has an opinion,” Mr. Pence said, “he is
liable to share it.”)
The effect during a week like this one
— as a public health crisis proceeds
apace and unrest consumes Kenosha,
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
FRANCISCO KJOLSETH/THE SALT LAKE TRIBUNE, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Top, Kelli Ward, center, the chairwoman of the Arizona Republican Party, has pushed the state party to harden its allegiance to President Trump, rather than adapt to the state’s
increasingly moderate bent. Above from left, Cindy McCain, widow of the Republican Senator John McCain, and the late senator, at left, with Joseph R. Biden Jr.
occasional conspiracy theory, more were critical to the president’s success
closely resembles the kind of voter the in 2016.
party has been devoting its resources to. And for now, at least in Arizona, Mr.
It is the state-level iteration of Mr. Trump’s approach is not working so
Trump’s national strategy, targeting well. Recent polls show Mr. Biden lead-
core supporters while Mr. Biden ag- ing the president by as many as seven
gressively courts moderate Republican percentage points.
and independent women in states that With 11 electoral votes at stake, this
President Trump presided over a naturalization ceremony that was displayed during the Republican National Convention.
Wis., after another police shooting of a that images of chaos and violence will
Black man — is particularly jarring, all help persuade swing voters, especially
the more because Mr. Trump has also in the suburbs, to embrace the presi-
strained throughout the convention to dent’s emphasis on “LAW and OR-
display himself in various scenes of DER,” as he tweeted on Wednesday.
presidential busyness: issuing a par- It is not entirely “Make America
don, meeting with freed hostages, pre- Great Again,” the president’s initial po-
siding over a naturalization ceremony. litical creed, which might suggest
In the process, Mr. Trump and his team something of a failure to do so in his
have effectively ignored distinctions first term (though it remains a favored
between campaign activity and official campaign saying anyway). It is not
business — less line-blurring than os- quite “Keep America Great,” one of his
tensible law-violating — co-opting pub- newer taglines, because so much of the
lic resources for political gain. Republican case has centered on the
Through it all, the intended takeaway present turmoil.
has seemed clear: Mr. Trump is in con- Perhaps Mr. Pence hinted best at the
trol of the good but not responsible for awkwardness of the pitch with a recent
the bad, worthy of praise for America’s revision to the slogan. “We’re going to
successes and exoneration for its strug- Make America Great Again, again,” he
gles. told delegates in Charlotte, N.C., on
In particular, Republicans are betting Monday and repeated on Wednesday in
trajectory could have disastrous conse-
quences for Mr. Trump’s path to re-elec-
tion. And according to some Republi-
cans in the state, it currently shows no
signs of changing.
“In a red state like ours, you’ve got to
hold your Republicans, and convince
your independents,” said Wes Gullett, a
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
his convention address.
If calls for national order were often
the night’s central feature, several
speeches seemed calibrated to appeal
to women and people of faith.
White evangelical Americans have
been among Mr. Trump’s most loyal
constituencies, and speakers con-
stantly highlighted Mr. Trump’s opposi-
tion to abortion rights and what they
described as his support for religious
liberty. Some of the most prominent fe-
male voices on Wednesday, including
top White House aides like Kellyanne
Conway and Kayleigh McEnany, are
well-regarded among evangelical and
conservative Catholic women.
Mindful of Mr. Trump’s polling deficit
with women, convention organizers
also saw to it that Wednesday’s pro-
gramming positioned him as a cham-
JONATHAN J. COOPER/ASSOCIATED PRESS
MATT ROURKE/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Republican strategist in Arizona and a
former staff member for Mr. McCain.
“And right now, we’re losing Republi-
cans and we’re losing independents.
And there’s been no effort to appeal to
them.”
For most statewide campaigns in Ari-
zona, Maricopa County, which includes
pion for gender equality, seeing no con-
tradiction in making this case for a man
with a long trail of sexist and demean-
ing comments about women and multi-
ple allegations of sexual misconduct.
Several speakers, including Mr.
Pence’s wife, Karen, paid tribute to the
women’s suffrage movement and im-
plied Mr. Trump was a steward of the
cause. Ms. Conway and Ms. McEnany
relayed choice anecdotes of Mr.
Trump’s support for them profession-
ally and personally.
“I want my daughter,” Ms. McEnany
said, “to grow up in President Donald J.
Trump’s America.”
It is true that gauzy framing has long
been a bipartisan tradition at party con-
ventions. But often this week, Republi-
cans have engaged in something closer
to a wholesale rewriting, spinning al-
ternate histories that assume the coun-
try’s crises have passed, Senator
Bernie Sanders is their caricature-
ready progressive opponent and Mr.
Trump, depending on the issue, is not in
a position of authority.
The political decision facing Ameri-
cans? It is a choice “between the far-
left Democratic socialist agenda versus
protecting and preserving the Ameri-
can dream,” Representative Elise Ste-
fanik, Republican of New York, said
Wednesday.
The coronavirus? “It was awful,”
Larry Kudlow, the president’s top eco-
nomic adviser, said on Tuesday, relegat-
ing it misleadingly to the past tense
and, like others this week, paying no
mind to the administration’s well-docu-
mented mishandling of the pandemic,
in a convention where Republicans
turned blame for the costs of the virus
on China.
Demonstrations over racial justice?
“Make no mistake,” Patricia McClos-
key, who joined her husband earlier this
year in pointing guns at protesters out-
side their home in St. Louis, said Mon-
day, “no matter where you live, your
family will not be safe in the radical
Democrats’ America.” Left unsaid: The
two appear to have felt unsafe recently
in a Trump-led America.
Of course, Mr. Trump’s supporters
have often reasoned that he cannot be
blamed for what happens in “Demo-
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 5
world
Phoenix and accounts for about 60 per-
cent of votes cast in the state, is king.
General elections typically boil down to
a contest over who can entice the coun-
ty’s many affluent suburban voters, who
in recent years have delivered signifi-
cant rebukes to the Republican Party.
Before Mr. Trump, Republican presi-
dential candidates had won Maricopa
County four cycles in a row by at least 10
points; in 2016, Mr. Trump won by just
three. And in the 2018 Senate race, Ms.
Sinema affirmed voters’ willingness to
swing left when she won the county by
four points.
Nevertheless, Ms. Ward has contin-
ued to embrace Mr. Trump’s base-cen-
tric strategy in her leadership of Ari-
zona’s Republican Party, even as Mr. Bi-
den has climbed in the polls.
This was in some ways to be expected.
In 2016, Ms. Ward became the year’s
most prominent Republican primary
challenger when she took on Mr. Mc-
Cain, highlighting her support for poli-
cies like Mr. Trump’s proposed Muslim
ban while appearing on ultra-right-wing
platforms like Infowars.
Mr. McCain defeated Ms. Ward, but
her following became such that he de-
cided to cut an ad highlighting how as a
state senator, she had entertained con-
stituents’ concerns about “chemtrails,”
the conspiracy theory that claims the
government injects dangerous chemi-
cals into the sky via the contrails of air-
planes.
Ms. Ward, a family doctor with a mas-
ter’s degree in public health, was back
on the Senate Republican primary trail
in 2018. Again she lost, this time to
Martha McSally, but not before ponder-
ing on social media whether Mr. McCain
had deliberately timed an announce-
ment about his brain cancer to sabotage
her campaign. (Mr. McCain died on Aug.
25, 2018, just hours after Ms. Ward’s
comments.)
Ms. Ward won her position atop the
state party in 2019, and some Republi-
cans in Arizona argue that her tone and
instincts have shifted since her cam-
paign days.
“I think that chairman Kelli Ward is
very different from candidate Kelli
Ward,” said Lisa James, a veteran of Re-
publican politics in Arizona. “As a candi-
date, she tended to appeal to a certain
wing of the party, but as a chairman, she
knows you have to appeal to the entire
tent.”
In reality, rather than try to adapt the
party to Arizona’s increasingly moder-
ate bent, Ms. Ward has seemed more
committed to hardening its allegiance to
the president and his brand of politics.
Republicans’ shakier footing in Ari-
zona is not just a product of the presi-
dent or a rightward shift in party leader-
ship. Demographic changes across the
state, including a growing Latino popu-
lation and an influx of left-leaning mil-
lennials, have also weakened the party.
But should the party continue to alien-
ate more moderate members in the
months ahead, some Republicans be-
lieve it will become impossible in future
elections to offset those demographic
shifts through plays to the base alone.
crat-run cities,” as Ms. Noem put it.
“Joe Biden would double down,” Mr.
Pence said, “on the very policies that
are leading to violence in America’s cit-
ies.”
Some Trump allies plainly see a polit-
ical opportunity in the recent develop-
ments in Wisconsin, where the Demo-
cratic governor declared a state of
emergency following protests that at
times turned destructive, after the po-
lice shooting of a Black man, Jacob
Blake. “We will have law and order on
the streets of this country for every
American of every race and creed and
color,” Mr. Pence declared.
Mr. Blake was paralyzed after a
white officer fired on him multiple
times, igniting outrage among many
Americans as the latest example of po-
lice violence in a year brimming with
brutal episodes. Two people were later
killed in a shooting related to the dem-
onstrations, and a white teenager who
was not believed to be among the pro-
testers was arrested and charged.
As he has for months, Mr. Biden
sought to walk a careful line between
expressing solidarity with protesters
and condemning chaos. In a video he
released Wednesday, he denounced
systemic racism and urged all Ameri-
cans to empathize with the pain Black
parents, like Mr. Blake’s family, often
face. But he also called for calm.
“Burning down communities is not
protest, it’s needless violence,” he said.
“Violence that endangers lives. Vio-
lence that guts businesses and shutters
businesses that serve the community.
That’s wrong.”
Even before the convention, Republi-
cans sought to cast Mr. Biden as radi-
cally anti-law enforcement, falsely
claiming that he wants to defund the
police, a proposal Mr. Biden has repeat-
edly rejected.
Up until this point, Mr. Trump has
struggled to define Mr. Biden, lobbing
an onslaught of sometimes-contradic-
tory attacks at him all summer while
remaining behind him in the polls.
But Mr. Trump has succeeded many
times before in negatively defining his
opponents, and Democrats acknowl-
edge he still has time to do so with Mr.
Biden before November.

6 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
world
Clockwise from above left: Sister Barbara Hughes, who decided to join the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1955, lived in their convent until 15 years ago, when Hurricane Katrina flooded the building; the convent’s seal in terrazzo; the plan for the Mirabeau Water Garden.
How an old convent may help save New Orleans
NEW ORLEANS
Nuns offer to the city
their former home so it can
be converted to wetlands
BY MATTHEW TEAGUE
Fifteen years ago, Hurricane Katrina
flooded a convent in the heart of New
Orleans, scattering its nuns. Now the
Sisters of St. Joseph are using the ruins
of their motherhouse to create one of the
largest urban wetlands in the United
States. It will absorb millions of gallons
of runoff during storms and will, the
nuns hope, help save their city.
Two storms hit Louisiana’s coast this
week — Tropical Storm Marco on Mon-
day, followed by Hurricane Laura,
which made landfall well west of New
Orleans early Thursday — pouring rain
and reminding New Orleans residents
of the city’s vulnerability to floods. City
leaders have long scrambled to find
ways to cope with the downpours that
have so imperiled the city over the
years.
Sister Barbara Hughes recently re-
called the devastation that past floods
brought as she walked the grounds of
her old convent. She is 84 and barely five
feet tall, but she could see all 25 low-ly-
Officials weighed use of ‘heat ray’ to repel migrants
WASHINGTON
Talks in 2018 underscore
government determination
to shut down U.S. border
BY MICHAEL D. SHEAR
Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm
elections, as President Trump sought to
motivate Republicans with dark warn-
ings about caravans heading to the
United States border, he gathered his
homeland security secretary and White
House staff to deliver a message: “Ex-
treme action” was needed to stop the mi-
grants.
That afternoon, at a separate meeting
with top leaders of the Department of
Homeland Security, Customs and Bor-
der Protection officials suggested de-
ploying a microwave weapon — a “heat
ray” designed by the military to make
people’s skin feel as if it is burning when
they get within range of its invisible
beams.
Developed by the military as a crowd
dispersal tool two decades ago, the Ac-
tive Denial System had been largely
abandoned amid doubts over its effec-
tiveness and morality.
Two former officials who attended the
afternoon meeting at the Department of
Homeland Security on Oct. 22, 2018, said
the suggestion that the device be in-
stalled at the border shocked attendees,
even if it would have satisfied the presi-
dent.
Kirstjen Nielsen, then the secretary of
homeland security, told an aide after the
meeting that she would not authorize
the use of such a device and that it
should never be brought up again in her
presence, the officials said.
Alexei Woltornist, a spokesman for
the department, said Wednesday that
“it was never considered.”
It is not known whether Mr. Trump
knew of the microwave weapon sugges-
tion, but the discussion in the fall of 2018
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ing acres from that height, and she
pointed to landmarks that survived.
“It’s grown up a bit now, but there’s
the lemon tree,” she said. “A sister
planted it just outside the kitchen.”
In coming years the grounds will lie
largely submerged under an urban lake
that will rise when floodwaters drench
the city — a shelter from storms, as the
convent always was, in a sense.
The project is complex for topo-
graphical reasons. The nearby Bayou
St. John sits below sea level, for in-
stance, and the convent site sits lower
still.
But over the decades, the site has ab-
sorbed more than rainwater.
“This land has imbibed the lives of all
the people who came here,” Sister
Hughes said. “Some lived here, some
worked here, some came as children to
the school. There’s a sacredness in that.”
Only a few nuns survive today, and
they are aging, but those who remain
are determined to see this last endeavor
through.
“I’m not a religious man,” said Ramiro
Diaz, one of the architects designing it.
“But when I hear the nuns talk about
their love for the city, their love for the
land — it’s beautiful.”
Sister Hughes grew up on the Missis-
sippi River, mostly in Morganza, La.,
about two hours northwest of New Or-
leans. Morganza is known for its spill-
way, designed to relieve flooding from
Deportees arriving at a shelter in Nogales, Mexico, just across the border from Arizona.
President Trump’s immigration policies are taking center stage during his campaign.
underscored how Mr. Trump’s obsession
with shutting down immigration has
driven policy considerations, including
his suggestions of installing flesh-pierc-
ing spikes on the border wall, building a
moat filled with snakes and alligators
and shooting migrants in the legs.
The Republican National Convention
on Tuesday night featured a small citi-
zenship naturalization ceremony at the
White House clearly intended to try to
soften the president’s image as a heart-
less opponent of immigrants.
In 2018, the president’s hard immigra-
tion policies may well have backfired
when suburban women recoiled at the
images of children separated from their
families and migrants in cages. A Demo-
cratic wave that November driven by
such voters swept Republicans from
control of the House.
But for his core supporters, Mr.
Trump’s immigration agenda is again at
the heart of his campaign, and the un-
rest roiling cities from Portland, Ore., to
Kenosha, Wis., could give it more punch.
The pitch: He has delivered on perhaps
the Mississippi. Her father worked as an
excavator for a crew that traveled up
and down the river, dredging its bottom
and shoring up levees.
In summers the Sisters of St. Joseph
would visit Morganza to teach religion
classes for Catholic children, which she
attended. Then in 1955, when she turned
19, she decided to join the order.
She moved to New Orleans, where
she settled into the motherhouse — the
order’s principal convent — called Mira-
beau. There she learned how the Sisters
had come from France in the 1850s, and
kept as their motto a verse from the
Gospel of John: “That all may be one.”
Developers would have paid
millions for the 25 acres, but the
nuns are leasing the site to the
city for a dollar a year.
New Orleans is famous now for being
a city below sea level. Even people who
live there often wonder why its founders
chose to settle in a natural bowl cen-
turies ago.
But they did not. Humans sank New
Orleans, in a war with water.
For many years, even after the Civil
War in the 1860s, the entire city sat
above sea level. But developers saw an
opportunity in the city’s marshes: They
could “reclaim” wetlands, they said, and
ADRIANA ZEHBRAUSKAS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
the central promise of his 2016 run, to ef-
fectively cut off America from foreign-
ers who he said posed security and eco-
nomic threats.
Through hundreds of regulations, pol-
icy directives and structural changes,
the president has profoundly reshaped
the government’s vast immigration bu-
reaucracy.
His campaign will also concentrate on
making searing, and often false, attacks
against former Vice President Joseph R.
Biden Jr., telling voters that the presi-
dent’s rival wants to fling open the na-
tion’s borders to criminals and disease-
carrying immigrants who will take
hard-working Americans’ jobs.
“The public health necessity and the
economic necessity of controlling immi-
gration has placed the view of the Demo-
crat left even more radically outside the
pale of mainstream American thought,”
Stephen Miller, the architect of the pres-
ident’s immigration policies, said this
week in an interview.
The president tweeted last month that
“the Radical Left Democrats want Open
ABDUL AZIZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
sell the slow-draining land as real es-
tate.
It was a mistake. “While they feared
and hated the swamp, those low-lying
areas did a fine job of storing excess wa-
ter — be it from rain, storm surge or
river overtopping,” said Richard Cam-
panella, a geographer and author with
the Tulane University School of Archi-
tecture.
That mistake was compounded as in-
ventors and investors devised more effi-
cient pumps. The spongy soil settled
lower and lower as it dried, so that today
about half the city sits below sea level,
and there is a never-ending battle with
water. Pumps shunt rainfall, and levees
hold back the sea. The complex system
creates an ever-deepening bowl.
In 2005, with the arrival of Hurricane
Katrina, the bowl was breached.
The Sisters fled that storm, mostly to
Baton Rouge. When they returned they
found the first floor of their three-story
convent ruined by floodwater. They
spent more than a million dollars, raid-
ing their retirement fund, to gut the first
floor and remove muck and mold.
Then in 2006, before they could move
back in, lightning struck the roof and
burned the third floor. Then water from
Bayou St. John, scooped up and dropped
by helicopters fighting a nearby fire, de-
stroyed the second.
Their repairs had been for nothing.
Their motherhouse was gone.
Borders for anyone, including many
criminals, to come in!”
“Doubling down on divisive poison
says one thing to voters: that even after
all his devastating failed leadership has
cost us — and even though Joe Biden
has been showing him the way for
months — Donald Trump still has no
strategy for overcoming the pandemic,
the overwhelming priority for the Amer-
ican people,” said Andrew Bates, a
spokesman for Mr. Biden’s presidential
campaign.
Mr. Biden has not called for “open bor-
ders” or embraced getting rid of Immi-
gration and Customs Enforcement, as
some on the Democratic left flank have
sought. He has said that he would roll
back Mr. Trump’s immigration policies,
promising to restore asylum rules, end
separation of migrant families at the
border, reverse limits on legal immigra-
tion and impose a 100-day moratorium
on deportations.
But Mr. Biden and Democratic con-
gressional candidates are bracing for
what they expect will be a concerted fo-
cus on one of the most polarizing issues
in American politics — made even more
divisive by Mr. Trump’s embrace of ugly,
xenophobic language about foreigners.
Some of Mr. Trump’s biggest immi-
gration promises from 2016 have fallen
short. No “big, beautiful wall” stretches
the length of the southern border, paid
for by Mexico. Instead, the president
spent billions of dollars of taxpayer
money to replace about 300 miles of ex-
isting barriers with a hulking wall built
of steel slats.
Like the heat ray, many ideas — in-
cluding the moat and shooting migrants
in the legs — were thwarted by the pres-
ident’s own officials. Other policy pro-
posals have been blocked by federal
judges who have ruled that they vio-
lated existing laws, administrative rules
or the Constitution.
But even the president’s fiercest crit-
ics concede that on immigration, the
president can rightly claim that he did
much of what he said he would do.
“The Trump administration, unilater-
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
During that same time, a New Or-
leans architect named David Wag-
gonner had set out to find a solution to
the city’s water problem. He traveled to
the Netherlands, where the Dutch were
pioneering a new approach to rising
seas: Instead of fighting the water, they
are finding ways to welcome it by creat-
ing lakes and reservoirs to absorb
floods.
“Water comes first, and we have to
recognize that,” Mr. Waggonner said re-
cently at his office in New Orleans’s Gar-
den District. “Remember, the creation
myth starts with water covering the
earth.”
The difficulty of the Dutch approach,
in a dense city like New Orleans, is find-
ing land where floodwater can settle.
Mr. Waggonner’s search for such
treasure brought him to the nuns.
After the flooding and the fire, the Sis-
ters had demolished what was left of the
convent and decided to find another pur-
pose for the land. The truth was, they re-
alized, they were a dying congregation.
Their numbers in New Orleans had de-
clined to just 40 or so nuns from 120, and
they were aging. They did not need
sprawling grounds.
The site of the convent is one of the
largest privately owned parcels in New
Orleans — a full 25 acres — and develop-
ers would have paid millions of dollars
for it. But the nuns remembered their
commitment to neighborliness — “that
ally, without passing laws in Congress,
has radically reshaped immigration in
the United States,” said Omar Jadwat,
the director of the Immigrants’ Rights
Project at the American Civil Liberties
Union. “They have effectively shut
down the asylum system at the border.
They’ve reintroduced religious, racial
and national origin discrimination into
our immigration system. These are real,
radical shifts.”
The president’s fiercest critics
concede that on immigration,
he can rightly claim that he
did much of what he said
he would do.
Because of the president’s policies,
Central American migrants fleeing per-
secution and violence in their home
countries now must wait, often for
months, in squalid camps on the Mexico
side of the border while the United
States considers their requests for asy-
lum. For decades, asylum seekers were
allowed to remain in the United States
while their cases were decided.
Mr. Trump derides that as “catch and
release,” which he says allowed hun-
dreds of thousands of migrants to fraud-
ulently claim persecution as a means of
entering the United States and then dis-
appearing into the country illegally. He
repeatedly said it was his top priority to
end the practice.
Advocates say he has largely suc-
ceeded, aided in part by the coronavirus
pandemic. The president has used
emergency powers intended for public
health crises to turn away all asylum
seekers, effectively ending the role of
the United States as a place of refuge for
those fleeing their homes.
Those deeply rooted changes are a
“bell that can never be unrung,” one sen-
ior aide said.
Even before the pandemic, Mr. Trump
had lowered the annual cap for refugees
to a trickle, shutting the United States
..
ABDUL AZIZ FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
WAGGONNER & BALL
all may be one” — and instead of selling
they decided to lease the site to the city
for a dollar a year.
As part of the plan, Mr. Waggonner
and his associate Mr. Diaz drew up an
ambitious plan to recreate the old wet-
lands in a new urban landscape, sur-
rounded by thousands of acres of resi-
dential neighborhoods.
The site, which will become the Mira-
beau Water Garden, will collect 10 mil-
lion gallons of storm water into a slow-
draining lake, in the Dutch style, rather
than shunting it immediately into the
gulf. It will slow the city’s sinking, Mr.
Waggonner said, by recharging the
groundwater underfoot. Water-friendly
trees and grasses, over time, will grow
once again.
The city plans to start converting the
site in about four months at a cost of
$16.3 million, using money from the Fed-
eral Emergency Management Agency.
The project — the bureaucracy, the
building — will take a long time. But Sis-
ter Hughes already sees it in her mind’s
eye. “This corner here will have a small
memorial for the Sisters,” she said. “A
place people can pray.”
The beginning of the Christian story,
she said, is an act of sacrifice for salva-
tion. The Sisters want to embody that for
the city, she said.
“It’s not that anything miraculous
ever happened here,” she said. “We just
want to be good neighbors.”
off from war-torn countries like Syria or
Somalia.
And from the earliest days of his pres-
idency, Mr. Trump has used national se-
curity concerns to justify a crackdown
on immigration from around the globe,
imposing a travel ban on several pre-
dominantly Muslim countries only days
after taking office in January 2017. A ver-
sion of that travel ban remains in place
and served as the template for other
travel bans put in place during the pan-
demic.
Processing of visa applications from
many countries had already slowed to a
crawl before the health crisis as the ad-
ministration aggressively put in place
what the president called “extreme vet-
ting” of people from countries deemed
to harbor terrorists.
The Trump administration has also
moved aggressively to reduce the flow
of legal immigrants who have for dec-
ades sought to live and work in the
United States.
It has drafted new regulations aimed
at making it harder for poor immigrants
to qualify for entry into the United
States, arguing that they would be a fi-
nancial burden on the country. And it
has aggressively sought to eliminate
programs that allowed American com-
panies to lure foreign workers to the
United States for jobs.
David Lapan, who served briefly as
the top spokesman at the Department of
Homeland Security in 2017, said that the
president’s success in pushing through
his immigration agenda would make it
difficult for Mr. Biden, should he win in
November.
“If the president is not re-elected, and
Joe Biden becomes the president, he
and his administration are going to have
their hands full on a number of fronts,
Covid chief among them,” Mr. Lapan
said. “Trying to undo the damage that
has been done to the immigration sys-
tem is going to be a further challenge.
And how much is the next administra-
tion able to focus on that, given the pano-
ply of challenges that they’re going to
face?”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Business
Love of a bargain gets the U.K. moving
A government program
to subsidize eating out
is paying off, for now
BY ESHE NELSON
When the British government told peo-
ple they no longer had to stay home, it
needed a convincing pitch to get every-
one back outside and, crucially, spend-
ing money.
The answer: half-price food. For the
month of August, the government has
been paying for a 50 percent discount on
all meals eaten in restaurants, pubs or
cafes, up to 10 pounds ($13) per person,
on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednes-
days.
It’s a discount that Britons have taken
up with relish.
“Last Wednesday, my God, was pan-
demonium,” said David Williams, a co-
owner of Baltic Market, which houses
about a dozen street food and drinks
vendors inside a converted 19th-cen-
tury brewery in Liverpool. “There were
more people in the queue than there
were inside of the building.”
In the first three weeks of the Eat Out
to Help Out program, 64 million meals —
enough for nearly the entire British pop-
ulation of about 67 million — were eaten
using the discount, costing the govern-
ment £336 million ($441 million).
When Rishi Sunak, Britain’s top fi-
nance official, announced the discount
last month, he described it as “a first-of-
its-kind” means of supporting the 1.8
million people working in the hospitality
industry. Between April and June, the
sector’s economic output plunged 87
percent. “They need our support, and
with this measure we can all eat out to
help out,” he said.
On the first day, Aug. 3, food sales rose
100 percent, compared with the previ-
ous Monday, according to CGA, a con-
sultancy that tracks data on eating and
drinking out in Britain.
“People, and myself included, under-
estimated the effect it was going to
have,” Mr. Williams said of the discount,
which includes nonalcoholic drinks.
“Most restaurants in Liverpool now, you
can’t even get a table for the whole of Au-
gust, Monday to Wednesday.”
Before the national lockdown, Baltic
Market was open only Thursdays to
Sundays. At the start of August, it
opened on Wednesday to take advan-
tage of the discount, and after two weeks
the owners decided to open seven days a
week for the rest of the month.
The restaurant industry is grateful for
the rush of customers, but there are con-
cerns about whether a temporary dis-
count can start a sustainable recovery.
The government’s offer, aided by
some pleasant weather this August, has
encouraged customers to return to
restaurants, especially the outdoor seat-
ing offered by many establishments. If
diners retreat back to their homes once
it’s too cold to dine outdoors, however, or
unemployment rises as the furlough
program ends in October, what then?
“At the moment I’m trying to really
enjoy everything about it,” Mr. Williams
said. “But I just can’t help but feel we’re
in a bit of a honeymoon period with it all,
and that come October, with alfresco
dining ending and furlough ending, it’s
going to be a very, very different land-
scape and story.”
Kate Nicholls, the chief executive of
UKHospitality, a trade group, added:
“People are making hay while the sun
shines, and seeing it as an opportunity
to build back a degree of resilience” in
case the crowds thin out in the fall.
Battling heat, smoke and virus to feed America
STOCKTON, CALIF.
Climate change increases
the brutality of summer
work on California farms
BY SOMINI SENGUPTA
Work began in the dark. At 4 a.m., Bri-
seida Flores could make out a fire burn-
ing in the distance. Floodlights illumi-
nated the fields. And shoulder to shoul-
der with dozens of others, Ms. Flores
pushed into the rows of corn. Swiftly,
they plucked. One after the other. First
under the lights, then by the first rays of
daylight.
By 10:30 a.m., it was unbearably hot.
Hundreds of wildfires were burning to
the north, and so much smoke was set-
tling into the San Joaquin Valley that the
local air pollution agency issued a health
alert. Ms. Flores, 19, who had joined her
mother in the fields after her father lost
his job in the early days of the coro-
navirus pandemic, found it hard to
breathe in between the tightly planted
rows. Her jeans were soaked with sweat.
“It felt like a hundred degrees in
there,” Ms. Flores said. “We said we
don’t want to go in anymore.”
She went home, exhausted, and slept
for an hour.
All this to harvest dried, ocher-col-
ored ears of corn meant to decorate the
autumn table.
Like the gossamer layer of ash and
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
Soho, London. Since Aug. 3, 64 million meals have been eaten using the British government’s Eat Out to Help Out program.
On a recent Tuesday evening, the
Soho area of central London had taken
on a festive atmosphere. Rain held off,
and streets were closed to traffic to al-
low restaurants to put tables outside.
Bunting made the socially distanced ta-
bles appear more cheerful and less like a
stark reminder of the health risks.
On several streets there wasn’t a sin-
gle empty table — and they were as
noisy as on any pre-pandemic summer
evening. It almost disguised the fact
that central London is nearly devoid of
office workers and tourists, with most
theaters and other attractions still shut.
Before the pandemic, “this was the
place to be,” said Stani Visciano, the
maître d’ at Lina Stores, an Italian
restaurant in Soho. On a typical night, a
line of customers would already be wait-
ing when the restaurant opened at 5.
The pre-theater crowd morphed into the
dust that is settling on the trees in Cen-
tral California, climate change is adding
to the hazards already faced by some of
the country’s poorest, most neglected la-
borers. So far this year, more than 7,000
fires have scorched 1.4 million acres, and
there is no reprieve in sight, officials
warned.
Summer days are hotter than they
were a century ago in the already
scorching San Joaquin Valley; the
nights, when the body would normally
cool down, are warming faster. Heat
waves are more frequent. And across
the state, fires have burned over a mil-
lion acres in less than two weeks. One re-
cent scientific paper concluded that cli-
mate change had doubled the frequency
of extreme fire weather days since the
1980s.
Smoke gets stuck in the valley when
the wind blows it in from the north and
south.
Still, hundreds of thousands of men
and women like Ms. Flores continue to
pluck, weed, and pack produce for the
nation here, as temperatures soar into
the triple digits for days at a time and the
air turns to a soup of dust and smoke,
stirred with pollution from truck
tailpipes and chemicals sprayed on the
fields, not to mention pollution from the
old oil wells that dot parts of the valley.
I drove through the valley last week,
from Lodi, just below Sacramento, to
Arvin, nearly 300 miles to the south, dur-
ing a calamitous wave of heat, fire and
surging coronavirus infections. I
wanted to see it through the eyes of
those worst affected: agricultural work-
dinner crowd, and anyone without a res-
ervation faced a long wait, he said.
On this Tuesday evening the restau-
rant was fully booked — and again for
Wednesday.
But the revenue isn’t the same. The
pre-theater rush has gone. Before social
distancing, the restaurant could seat 52
people. Now, fully booked means 40 din-
ers at a time — nearly one-quarter fewer
customers.
The British economy fared worse
than any other in Europe during the sec-
ond quarter of the year, because of a
longer lockdown period and heavy reli-
ance on consumer spending. To dig itself
out of this hole, the country needs peo-
ple to return to bars and restaurants and
cafes and coffee shops in large numbers.
The government set aside £500 million
for the half-off discount, an amount that
economists didn’t consider to be partic-
ers. Most of them are immigrants from
Mexico. Mostly, they earn minimum
wage ($13 an hour in California). Mostly,
they lack health insurance and they live
amid chronic pollution, making them
susceptible to a host of respiratory ail-
ments.
Climate change exacerbates these
horrors. By noon one day last week, tem-
peratures had soared to 100 degrees
Fahrenheit (38 degrees Celsius) in Lodi,
in the valley’s northern stretch. Still,
Leonor Hernández, 38, mother of three,
A respiratory ailment is named
for the area: Valley Fever.
was at work. Dressed as usual in an
oversized full-sleeved shirt and hat, ban-
danna covering all but her eyes, water
bottle stuffed into her pocket, she
walked up and down the cherry orchard,
scooping up stray branches hacked off
after the harvest, hoisting them into a
bin. The ground had to be cleared for the
next spraying of pesticides, smoke or no
smoke.
As the week progressed and more
acres burned, the air grew increasingly
toxic. Her head and chest hurt. She was
coughing. The San Joaquin Valley Air
Pollution Control District urged resi-
dents to stay indoors.
Good advice, in theory, Ms.
Hernández said. “But we need to work,
and if we stay indoors we don’t get paid,”
she said. “We have bills for food and rent
to pay.”
ALEXANDER INGRAM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
ularly substantive, compared with the
£190 billion the government intends to
spend on the economic recovery from
the pandemic.
After spending months warning of the
dangers of indoor public spaces, the
government now has to persuade peo-
ple that it’s safe to return to their previ-
ous habits. Throughout this crisis, the
government has turned to behavioral
economists to help devise different
parts of its response — and their princi-
ples seem to be hard at work in the Eat
Out to Help Out program.
“There are two psychological forces
at play,” said Ivo Vlaev, a professor of be-
havioral science at Warwick Business
School, who has been advising the gov-
ernment and National Health Service on
its communication in response to the
pandemic. (He didn’t work on the meal
discount plan.)
A farmworker in California harvesting corn in the predawn hours during a heat wave.
Most workers earn the minimum wage ($13 an hour in California).
California is one of two states, along
with Washington, with heat standards
for outdoor workers. Employers must
provide shade, usually a bench with a
canopy, and drinking water. Many labor
contractors stop work when it gets too
hot, but the law doesn’t require a halt at
any given temperature threshold.
The problem of intensifying heat un-
derscores a more basic problem. If you
work fewer hours, you make less. And
for those who get paid at piece rates —
wine grape pickers generally get paid by
the bin — there can be a perverse incen-
The first is habit creation, he said.
When someone does something and re-
ceives a reward, like the half-off dis-
count, the next time the same situation
arises, the memory of the reward en-
courages a repetition of the action —
and this continues until the situation
alone, even without the reward, can trig-
ger the action.
The government’s dining discount
could be particularly effective at getting
people out to eat on their lunch breaks,
Mr. Vlaev said. “It’s a very powerful way
to change people by habituating their
behavior, because they then act on auto-
pilot,” he said.
The second force is known as “psy-
chological commitment,” Mr. Vlaev
said: To get people to agree to a large
request, you get them to agree to some-
thing small first. People in Britain might
agree to take advantage of the restau-
rant discount, but once they are out and
enjoying themselves, the government
can more easily ask them to return to of-
fices, gyms, theaters and so on.
So far, the experiment is working.
Once it’s too cold to dine
outdoors, or unemployment
rises as the furlough program
ends in October, what then?
A survey by CGA found that nearly 40
percent of people using the Eat Out to
Help Out discount were dining out for
the first time since the national lock-
down began in late March — a sign it is
winning over people who had gotten
used to staying at home. The discount
was also encouraging families and older
customers to go back out, Ms. Nicholls
of UKHospitality said. There have been
no reports of spikes in coronavirus
cases tied to the program.
But even if the customers want to
keep coming back, restaurants face a lot
of uncertainty.
Half of Britain’s restaurants are still
closed, Ms. Nicholls said. Across the
hospitality industry, businesses that are
open are making only about 70 percent
of their pre-pandemic revenue. The gov-
ernment has reduced the VAT, a type of
sales tax, on food and nonalcoholic
drinks, but this reduction will expire in
January. The government also put a
moratorium on forfeiture of commercial
properties because of unpaid rent for six
months, effectively allowing businesses
to delay rent payments until the end of
September, when the next three months
of rent will be due.
That heavy rent debt, building up
over the last six months, is “the single
biggest outstanding issue” facing
restaurants and the hospitality industry
generally, Ms. Nicholls said.
And while the Eat Out to Help Out pro-
gram can help change consumer behav-
ior, it doesn’t address how each estab-
lishment will make up for reduced ca-
pacity because of social distancing
measures, or what will happen when it’s
too cold to dine outside. A recent survey
by the Office for National Statistics
found that just 43 percent of people felt
comfortable eating indoors.
Baltic Market now has a capacity of
150 to 200 people, at best a third of the
number it could have fit in before. To ac-
commodate more people through the
fall and winter, the owners say, they are
building heated booths so more people
can keep dining outside.
“That’s what the big worry is,” Mr.
Williams said. “Obviously, we don’t live
in California or Dubai, we live in the U.K.
So there’s a finite amount of time that
you want to eat a bowl of pasta outside.”
BRIAN L. FRANK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
tive to work as fast as possible, even if it
means skipping a water break.
“It’s the price of cheap food,” said Ar-
mando Elenes, secretary-treasurer of
the United Farm Workers of America,
which advocated for heat standards in
California 15 years ago after a spate of
farmworker deaths. The union is push-
ing for similar national legislation.
In the cherry orchard, Ms. Hernández
yelled out to one of her co-workers, an
older woman whose face and arms were
exposed to the elements and wet with
sweat. She told her to take a break, drink
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 7
Palantir,
a tech power
that few
really know
As it readies for an I.P.O.,
investors try to discern the
company’s true value
BY CADE METZ, ERIN GRIFFITH
AND KATE CONGER
About a month before he became presi-
dent, Donald J. Trump met with the lead-
ers of the country’s top technology com-
panies at Trump Tower in Manhattan.
The meeting included the chief execu-
tives of Amazon, Apple, Google, Micro-
soft and other companies like Tesla and
Oracle. And then there was Alex Karp,
chief executive of a company, called
Palantir Technologies, that few outside
Silicon Valley and government circles
had heard of.
Palantir, the only privately held com-
pany represented in the room, had be-
come a major player among govern-
ment contractors. And, indicative of its
growing prominence, one of its
founders, the venture capitalist Peter
Thiel, had supported Mr. Trump during
the 2016 election and had helped set up
the meeting.
Now, as Palantir prepares to go public
in what could be the largest stock mar-
ket listing of a tech start-up since Uber
last year, many are wondering: What
exactly does this influential but little-
known company do?
Offering software — and, crucially,
teams of engineers that customize the
software — Palantir helps organizations
make sense of vast amounts of data. It
helps gather information from various
sources like internet traffic and cell-
phone records and analyzes that infor-
mation. It puts those disparate pieces
together into something that makes
sense to its users, like a visual display.
But it can take plenty of engineers and
plenty of time to make Palantir’s tech-
nology work the way customers need it
to. And that mix of technology and hu-
man muscle may lead to some confusion
on Wall Street about how to value the
company. Is Palantir a software com-
pany, which is traditionally a very prof-
itable business, or is it a less-profitable
consulting firm? Or is it both?
“For investors, it is a bit of a Rubik’s
Cube,” said Daniel Ives, managing direc-
tor of equity research at Wedbush Secu-
rities.
Palantir, which was founded in 2003,
has long described its technology as
ideal for tracking terrorists, often em-
bracing an unconfirmed rumor that it
helped locate Osama bin Laden. The
name Palantir is a nod to spherical ob-
jects used in the “Lord of the Rings”
books to see other parts of fictional Mid-
dle-earth.
Funded in part by In-Q-Tel, the invest-
ment arm of the Central Intelligence
Agency, the company built its flagship
software technology, Gotham, with an
eye toward use inside the C.I.A.
Palantir’s technologies can also help
track the spread of the coronavirus, as it
is now doing for the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention. And they can
help find undocumented immigrants,
which is how Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, under orders from the
White House, is using these technolo-
gies, according to recently released fed-
eral documents.
PALANTIR, PAGE 8
water. “We are taking a lot of care of
each other,” Ms. Hernández said.
Like many of her co-workers, she
doesn’t have health insurance, so seeing
a doctor is an unaffordable luxury. Twice
last year in a heat wave, Ms. Hernández
was sick: nausea, headache, stomach
ache. “I learned,” she recalled. “I said,
‘No more.’ ”
Work stopped shortly after noon. It
was 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Ms.
Hernández drove home, showered, pre-
pared to meet with her 12-year-old son’s
teacher about remote learning. School,
she hoped, would save her children from
the fields. “School is very important to
me,” she said.
Not far from the cherry orchard, the
residents of the Shady Rest mobile
home park came home in the afternoon
to find neither shade nor rest. The power
had gone off because, the residents said,
the electricity supply in the complex is
insufficient for the number of trailers.
That meant no water. No air-condition-
ing. And, with no internet, no school.
“All you want to do is shower, cook and
stay cool, but you can’t,” said Laura Vil-
lagran, who came home from her shift at
a tree nursery, covered in grime and
sweat.
The owner, Lal Singh Toor, said he did
not know why the power was out. The
complex, he said, has a 400 amp electri-
cal service, a level usually adequate for
two to three large single-family homes.
Shady Rest has 49 units.
The San Joaquin Valley is a vast bowl
of industrial farmland nestled between
FARMWORKERS, PAGE 8

8 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
business
Agricultural workers in the San Joaquin Valley, California, live amid chronic pollution from fires, truck tailpipes, chemicals sprayed on the fields and old oil wells.
Battling heat, smoke and virus
FARMWORKERS, FROM PAGE 7
the Pacific Coast ranges and the Sierra
Nevadas. Table grapes, wine grapes,
watermelons, carrots, and blueberries
are all grown and packed here. So are
acres and acres of almonds and walnuts.
Geography and industry curse the
valley with some of the country’s worst
air. Rates of asthma and chronic ob-
structive pulmonary disease run high,
according to doctors at Clinica Sierra
Vista, a network of medical centers in
the valley. Kidney functions decline with
prolonged dehydration among many ag-
ricultural workers, doctors in the region
say. Diabetes — associated with eating
inexpensive, starchy food — is common.
There’s even a respiratory ailment
named for the area: Valley Fever,
caused by coccidioides fungus in the
soil.
Dr. Olga Meave, chief medical officer
at the Clinica Sierra Vista, spoke of the
battery of ailments that agricultural
workers face. “They’re going to be more
prone to chronic respiratory ailments,”
she said.
Little wonder, then, that coronavirus
infection rates in the valley are among
the highest in California. Latinos are dis-
proportionately infected.
“Work is seasonal,” said Jose Rodri-
guez, head of a Stockton-based group
called El Concilio, which provides serv-
ices for agricultural workers. “If they
don’t work, they’re not going to make it
through the year.” Hunger runs high.
Twice as many people showed up for his
group’s food distribution session last
week as he had food for.
In the fields outside Stockton last
week, the air became thicker and smoki-
er each day. By the week’s end, Ms. Flo-
Does that app really need to know where you are?
Brian X. Chen
TECH FIX
Is TikTok, the Chinese-owned social
network that is used mostly by teen-
agers to post dance videos, a national
security threat?
It depends on whom you ask.
President Trump has said it is and
has threatened to ban the app in the
United States.
But security experts are more reluc-
tant to draw conclusions. While there
is no direct evidence that TikTok has
done anything malicious with people’s
data, sharing information could be
fundamentally less safe with a com-
pany that might allow the Chinese
authorities to intercept it.
So I asked two companies that offer
mobile security products to take a
close look at TikTok’s app to see what
they could glean about it. They had
very different takes.
Disconnect, a San Francisco security
firm, analyzed the code of the TikTok
app for iOS. In July, the app’s code
contained references to servers in
China. Last weekend, Disconnect
reviewed the app’s latest version and
saw that the lines of code referring to
Chinese servers had been removed.
Patrick Jackson, the chief technol-
ogy officer of Disconnect, said that
while he did not witness any data
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Residents of the Shady Rest mobile home park in Stockton, Calif. Inadequate power cut children off from online classes this month.
res could feel it. “It’s really bad,” she
said. “You can smell the smoke and it
hurts your head.”
By Thursday, ash fell over Kern
County, the valley’s southernmost
stretch. The sun struggled to break
through.
In the fields near the town of Arvin,
transmission by the app to Chinese
server computers, he found the exist-
ence and subsequent removal of the
code suspicious.
But Sinan Eren, the chief executive
of Fyde, a security firm in Palo Alto,
Calif., said the references to servers in
China did not alarm him. Plenty of
apps have legitimate reasons for rely-
ing on some Chinese servers — for
example, having users in Asian coun-
tries and wanting to stream video to
them quickly cost-effectively.
“It’s not realistic for anybody to say
that they’re not going to use any Chi-
nese servers, ever,” Mr. Eren said.
TikTok said that the code discovered
by Disconnect was obsolete and that it
had updated its app as part of a con-
tinuing effort to eliminate unused
features. “We have not shared data
with the Chinese government, nor
would we if asked,” the company said
in a statement.
On Tuesday, after The New York
Times called about the code, TikTok
also published a blog post titled “Pro-
viding peace of mind” and said it was
working on “efforts around cleaning up
inactive code in the app to reduce
potential confusion or misconceptions.”
Whether or not TikTok’s code was
doing something nefarious, there is a
broader lesson here.
As increasingly digital creatures, we
often don’t think twice about giving the
apps that we love permanent access to
information about ourselves. So the
debate about TikTok is a reminder that
we must be on guard about the data we
share with any app — whether from an
American company or a Chinese one —
and get in the habit of denying re-
quests to our personal data.
“We should be minimizing the
amount of data we share,” Mr. Jackson
Alejandro Díaz clipped the last grapes
hanging on the vines. Snip. Toss. Unload
buckets into bins to make inexpensive
table wine. If he and his work partner,
Rafael Pacheco, could put in a few hours
before the heat roasted them, they
might pocket $100 each.
It was muggy among the vines. “Suf-
said. “It doesn’t matter who collects it
in the first place.”
Here’s what you can do to set up
your app defenses.
MINIMIZE DATA SHARING.
When you open a newly installed app
on your phone, notifications may pop
up asking for permission for access to
sensors and data such as your camera,
photo album, location and address
book.
When that happens, ask yourself
these questions:
• Does this app need access to my data
or sensor for it to work properly?
• Does the app need access to this
sensor or data all the time or just
temporarily?
• Do I trust this company with my
data?
Sometimes it makes sense to grant
access. An app like Google Maps, for
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIAN L. FRANK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
focating,” Mr. Pacheco said. “You can’t
breathe.”
Mr. Díaz’s face was wet with sweat.
Dust from the vines filled in the grooves.
He said they would stop at 11 a.m., before
it got to 102 degrees Fahrenheit. “My
life,” Mr. Díaz said, “is worth more than
another round of grapes.”
GLENN HARVEY
example, needs to know your location
so it can figure out where you are and
give directions.
In other instances, the need is less
clear. GasBuddy, an app that helps you
find nearby gas stations with the low-
est prices, asks for permission to know
your location. You could allow it to pull
your device’s precise location from its
GPS sensor. But it would be safer just
to enter your ZIP code so it has less
precise information about your where-
abouts.
Then there is the question of
whether an app needs permanent
access to our data and sensors —
meaning it always has permission to
get information like our location and
photos even when we are not using
features related to that data.
Usually the answer is no. As a
brand-new TikTok user, for example, I
had granted it permanent access to my
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Palantir, a tech power
that not many really know
PALANTIR, FROM PAGE 7
In recent years, Palantir has tried to
expand its work in the private sector,
serving big-name businesses like JP-
Morgan Chase, Airbus and Ferrari and
offering new software tools that busi-
nesses can use on their own. A little
more than half of Palantir’s revenue
comes from commercial businesses, ac-
cording to a filing with the Securities
and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
The 2,500-employee company holds
about a 3 percent share of what has be-
come a $25 billion “data analytics” mar-
ket, according to PitchBook, a company
that tracks the performance of private
companies. “That is a small but signifi-
cant share,” said a PitchBook analyst,
Brendan Burke.
Palantir has raised more than $3 bil-
lion in funding and is valued by private
market investors at $20 billion, but it has
not turned a profit since it was founded
in 2003. In 2019, Palantir’s revenues
topped $742.5 million, a nearly 25 per-
cent increase over the previous year.
But it lost more than $579 million, about
the same as it lost in 2018, according to
the financial documents made public on
Tuesday.
The company recently announced
that it was moving its headquarters to
Denver from Silicon Valley, which could
cut expenses.
A Palantir spokeswoman declined to
comment for this article.
Though the company has won an im-
pressive array of federal contracts — in
the last four years, it landed at least $741
million in guaranteed money and poten-
tially as much as $2.9 billion, according
to the documents — it has also stoked
controversy among competitors and
federal employees.
In 2016, the company sued the Army
over the procurement process for a new
version of an intelligence analysis sys-
tem, claiming the process was unlawful
and wasteful. Palantir ended up winning
the contract, which accounts for $1.7 bil-
lion of the $2.9 billion in potential federal
contract money it has won since 2016.
In April, an anonymous government
official sent a lengthy memo to Joseph
D. Kernan, the under secretary of de-
fense for intelligence, describing the in-
ner workings of a flagship Pentagon op-
eration, Project Maven.
An effort to remake American mili-
tary technology through artificial intelli-
gence, Project Maven has drawn on the
expertise of more than 20 American
companies, including Palantir.
The project points to how Palantir
works with customers. It often deploys
specialists, called “forward deployed
engineers,” who spend weeks, months
or years customizing and expanding its
software for the task at hand. The com-
pany builds whatever software needs to
be built — databases and software con-
nections and on-screen visual displays
that help people get their work done.
The details of Palantir projects can
vary. It usually connects different
sources of data and provides a way for
everyday employees to search through
it. But in Project Maven, it is offering
tools that help seasoned artificial intelli-
gence specialists build complex mathe-
matical systems, called deep neural net-
works, that can recognize objects in im-
ages.
Inside Project Maven, Palantir pro-
vides software that holds enormous
amounts of video footage captured by
flying drones operated by the Army and
the Air Force. A.I. specialists then use
this software to build systems that can
phone’s camera and microphone. But I
have mostly used the app to scroll
through people’s cooking videos and
have posted only two videos. And the
app doesn’t really need to know that
much about me. So I eventually dis-
abled access to those sensors.
Even if giving access makes life
easier, it may be worth putting up with
some hassle if you don’t trust the com-
pany. Mr. Eren, who said he no longer
trusted Facebook after a series of data
scandals, uses the Facebook-owned
messaging service WhatsApp. But to
avoid sharing his address book with
Facebook, he said, he manually added
his contacts to WhatsApp.
That all sounds like a lot of work.
But there’s good news: Apple and
Google are making it easier to reduce
the amount of data we share with apps.
In Apple’s next version of its mobile
operating system, iOS 14, which is due
for release this fall, apps requesting
your location will present you with the
option to share just an approximate
location.
Google said that in Android 11, its
mobile operating system due for re-
lease this year, apps requesting loca-
tion would present people with the
choice of granting access just once,
which would prevent constant location
sharing with an app. (Apple has of-
fered that option for about a year.)
Google also said that if any apps
were not used for a long period after
being granted access to sensors and
data, Android 11 would automatically
reset them to require permission
again.
BLOCK APP TRACKING.
Many apps are constantly pulling
information from our devices, such as
the model of our phone and what ver-
..
automatically identify buildings, vehi-
cles and people in the footage.
The anonymous memo to Mr. Kernan,
obtained by The New York Times, said
that although Palantir had come late to
Maven, the company had grown to
“touch almost every aspect” of the
project through contracts worth about
$40 million a year.
The document accused Maven leader-
ship of skirting Pentagon rules and
ethics in giving preferential treatment
to the start-up, whose employees had
developed unusually close relationships
with their partners inside the military.
The memo and related emails showed
the company’s considerable influence
inside the government.
Among other complaints, the memo
claimed that a Palantir employee had
sat in on a meeting where government
officials — some of whom did not know
the Palantir employee was in the room
— discussed future contracts and their
dollar amounts, which could give the
company an “astounding” advantage
when bidding for new work.
The company has considerable
influence inside the government.
After the memo was sent, the Defense
Department began a formal inquiry into
Project Maven, according to two people
familiar with the matter, who were not
allowed to speak about it publicly. The
outcome is not yet known. A Defense
Department spokesman for Project Ma-
ven declined to comment.
Palantir’s unusual business model is
not always a perfect fit for military con-
tracts. Though Palantir sells a combina-
tion of software and consulting services,
all costs are folded into a single software
license negotiated with the customer. In
other words, the consulting work done
by its engineers is layered into the soft-
ware licensing fees, according to com-
pany financial documents.
Typically, the government pays for
consulting work separately from soft-
ware licenses.
This means customers often pay for
technology that is not yet built. “It is
very unusual,” said Jeff Peters, head of
global business development at Esri, a
longtime government contractor that
competes with Palantir. “The business
model is different from almost any other
technology company.”
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Palantir’s headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif.
It has announced a move to Denver.
sion of mobile operating system it is
using, and are sharing that data with
third parties. Marketers who gain
access to that information can then
stitch together a profile about you and
target you with ads across different
apps — a practice known as app track-
ing.
So what to do? To limit this invisible
data harvesting, I recommend using
so-called tracker blockers.
Mr. Eren’s app, Fyde, which is free
for iOS and Android devices, automati-
cally blocks such trackers, for exam-
ple. Disconnect also offers tracker
blocking apps, Privacy Pro and Dis-
connect Premium, for iPhone and
Android devices.
I prefer Fyde. In my tests constantly
running the tracker blockers, it con-
sumed less battery than Disconnect’s
apps did.
Apple said that in iOS 14, apps would
be required to ask people for permis-
sion to perform tracking.
BE CURIOUS.
This last step is less technical: Stay
informed. If you wonder how a com-
pany manages to offer its app, do some
research on the business. Read its
website and send the company ques-
tions to gain a basic understanding of
what’s happening with your data and
what steps you should take to min-
imize sharing.
If it’s a free app that relies on ads for
revenue, you can usually assume that
your data is part of the transaction.
“It’s not about what they collect
today — it’s the drip over time,” Mr.
Jackson said. “Before you know it,
these apps have this huge profile about
you that they’ve sold to so many peo-
ple. Once the horse is out of the barn,
it’s going to be hard to rein it back in.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Opinion
What my life has become as an activist in Russia
As a
founding
member of
the activist
band Pussy
Riot, I’ve
fought for
years against
autocracy.
My country
has only slid
deeper.
Nadya Tolokonnikova
By now, you have probably seen the
news that Aleksei Navalny, another
leading critic of Russia’s president,
Vladimir Putin, appears to have been
poisoned. It must seem so horrible, but
also, perhaps like the kind of thing that
does happen “over there,” in Russia, in
Belarus, in authoritarian states.
It’s much more horrible up close.
Sometimes I find it hard to believe this
is my life. I have known too many
attacked in a similar way as my friend
Aleksei seems to have been. And in
what feels like a terrible instance of
déjà vu, it was less than two years ago
that we were working with the same
activists to arrange the same flight to
the same hospital in Germany to evac-
uate and treat the father of my child,
Pyotr, when he was unconscious from
poisoning.
We were getting the same run-
around from doctors in Russia, who
were putting out the same type of
ridiculous stories that it wasn’t poison,
California, we can’t go on like this
Virus, heat,
fire, black-
outs. It’s just
another
summer in
the nation’s
Farhad Manjoo
most
populous
state. Across much of California in the last
two weeks, many of my friends and
neighbors have faced a dead-end
choice: Is it safer to conduct your life
outdoors and avoid the coronavirus, or
should you rush inside, the better to
escape the choking heat, toxic smoke
and raining ash?
Such has been the gagging un-
winnability of life in the nation’s most
populous state in the sweltering sum-
mer of 2020, in what I have been as-
sured is the greatest country ever to
have existed. The virus begs you to
open a window; the inferno forces you
to keep it shut.
When the coronavirus first landed in
America, California’s lawmakers re-
sponded quickly and effectively, be-
coming a model for the rest of the
nation. But as the early wins faded and
the cases spiked, each day this sum-
mer has felt like another slide down an
inevitable spiral of failure. The virus
keeps crashing into California’s many
other longstanding dysfunctions, from
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that maybe he had done this to him-
self. And in the same way, they delayed
the transfer while the trace of toxins
vanished from his blood. It was horri-
ble to sit by his bed there in Berlin, as
Aleksei’s wife, Yulia, is doing now, and
think I may never fully get back this
person I call Petya, this person I love,
this vital, funny, kind person.
What political end could be worth
doing this to another human being? I
will tell you that there were times I
would just go outside for a walk, be-
cause what else could you do, and
there were times we would tell a joke
by his hospital bed, something to try to
have a laugh, to cut the tension, to cut
the awfulness of this thing that was
happening.
Three fellow dissidents whom I’ve
known personally have been murdered
(Boris Nemtsov, Anastasia Baburova,
Stanislav Markelov) and two beaten
almost to death (Mikhail Beketov and
Oleg Kashin). I myself was sent to
prison for two years just for singing a
song, and many, many activists in my
country have been sentenced to more
time and suffered far worse fates. This
is the reality I live with day to day, that
housing to energy to climate change to
disaster planning, and the compound-
ing ruin is piling up like BMWs on the
405.
Consider: To keep the pestilence at
bay, many of California’s children
began attending school online last
week. But to satisfy surging energy
demand linked to record-shattering
heat (and a host of other mysterious
reasons), state utilities had to impose
rolling blackouts, forcing schools to
come up with energy contingency
plans to add to their virus contingency
plans, now that millions of students
face the threat of intermittent electrici-
ty.
For decades, California has relied on
conscripted prisoners as a cheap way
to fight its raging fires. But to stave off
coronavirus outbreaks in our long-
overcrowded prisons, authorities
released thousands of inmates earlier
this year. Now, as climate change has
ushered in a new era of “megafires”
that includes some of the largest
blazes the state has ever faced, the
early release of inmates has left the
state dangerously short of prisoners to
exploit in battling the flames.
As California’s problems grow, we
risk becoming a national piñata. At the
Democratic National Convention last
week, Gov. Gavin Newsom phoned in
from Watsonville, Calif., near the scene
of a wildfire, to castigate Donald
Trump and the Republican Party for
ignoring climate change and fighting
we in Russia and my friends in Belarus
are living with day to day. You learn to
live with it, to fight it as you can, deal
with it how you can, but it becomes
your life.
And of course it’s not just activists
who are targeted by Mr. Putin’s au-
California’s efforts to reduce emis-
sions. At the Republican convention,
Kimberly Guilfoyle, a fund-raising
official for the Trump re-election cam-
paign who is also Newsom’s ex-wife,
shouted the opposite claim — that
“socialism” had turned the state into a
disaster of “discarded heroin needles
in parks, riots in streets, and blackouts
in homes.”
I found Guilfoyle’s speech hilariously
unhinged and off base, and Newsom
certainly has a point — California’s
Climate change has ushered in a new era of megafires in California.
REUTERS
thoritarianism: The greed and corrup-
tion of this president and a handful of
families that are close to him affects
everyone, every day. Inequality is
skyrocketing in Russia. Unrest is
growing. Many Russians are tired of
backward-looking, post-imperial,
efforts to solve its many problems,
including the virus outbreak, have
often been frustrated or undone by
Trump’s shortcomings.
Still, it’s worth remembering that
Trump has been president only since
2017, and the seeds of California’s
undoing were planted long before. By
reducing the cause of California’s
many issues to cartoon villains, both
Guilfoyle and Newsom obscured the
bigger picture.
What is California’s fundamental
JIM WILSON/THE NEW YORK TIMES
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 9
CASEY KELBAUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
oppressive, Cold War-style politics and Above, the
ready to become a forward-looking author. At left,
country focused on building infrastruc- Ms. Tolokon-
ture, better schools and health care. nikova with
Since the 2018 election, Mr. Putin’s Pyotr Verzilov
popularity has been on the decline, when he was
hitting an all-time low of 59 percent in hospitalized in
May. Berlin for
Our president has only just recently poisoning in
had the law changed so that he can 2018.
stay in power until 2036, but his pro-
gram of repression didn’t start out this
blatantly. These things happen in
pieces, bit by bit, small acts. And each
one may even seem relatively benign
at first, perhaps bad, but not fatal. You
get angry, maybe you speak out, but
you get on with your life. The promise
of our democracy was chipped away in
pieces, one by one: corrupt cronies
appointed, presidential orders issued,
actions taken, laws passed, votes
rigged. It happens slowly, intermit-
tently; sometimes we couldn’t see how
steadily. Autocracy crept in, like the
coward it is.
NADYA TOLOKONNIKOVA is an artist and
activist and a founder of the band
Pussy Riot.
trouble? Neither socialism nor
Trumpian neglect and incompetence,
but something more elemental to life in
the Golden State: A refusal by many
Californians to live sustainably and
inclusively, to give up a little bit of
their own convenience for the col-
lective good.
This is a hobbyhorse of mine, but
I’m committed to riding it until people
in my home state begin to change their
ways. Californian suburbia, the ideal of
much of American suburbia, was built
and sold on the promise of endless
excess — everyone gets a car, a job, a
single-family home and enough water
and gasoline and electricity to light up
the party.
But it is long past obvious that infini-
tude was a false promise. Traffic,
sprawl, homelessness and ballooning
housing costs are all consequences of
our profligacy with the land and our
other resources. In addition to a hotter,
drier climate, the fires, too, are fanned
by an unsustainable way of life. Many
blazes were worsened by Californians
moving into areas near forests known
as the “urban-wildland interface.”
Once people move near forested land,
fires tend to follow — either because
they deliberately or inadvertently
ignite them, or because they need
electricity, delivered by electrical wires
that can cause sparks that turn into
conflagrations.
As the fires blazed around us this
MANJOO, PAGE 11
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10 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION

opinion

Medics save lives. Let them.

A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher Philip Caruso
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing Six months after the coronavirus
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation began surging across the United
HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific States, closing down cities, businesses
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer and schools, it is still ravaging Ameri-
can communities. The death toll has
risen past 175,000. Hospitals are in-
creasingly overwhelmed. So far, the
federal government has abdicated
responsibility, so Americans should
look to one organization that has
shown it can have a significant impact
3 TRUMP SUPPORTERS TARGET GERMANY on saving lives: the U.S. military.
One issue must be clear: No soldier,
There is something profoundly skewed in America’s sailor, airman or Marine medic should
The United foreign relations when senators threaten “crushing be charged with policing public health
States needs legal and economic sanctions” against a port city of a guidelines like wearing masks or
allies. Pun- keeping social distance, even though
close European ally. these remain the most important tools
ishing Berlin That was what three Trump-supporting Republicans to fight Covid-19. Their contribution
over a Russian — Ted Cruz of Texas, Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Ron must be simply saving lives through
gas pipeline their mastery of logistics, crisis man-
Johnson of Wisconsin — did in a letter sent this month
agement and healing sickness.
is a needless to a German port largely owned by the Baltic coastal I am an Air Force Reserve major
provocation. town of Sassnitz and the state of Mecklenburg-Western who, for almost three months last
Pomerania. They vowed to economically destroy the spring, helped coordinate military
assistance in support of the Federal
port, town and region unless the port ceased support Emergency Management Agency
for the construction of a gas pipeline between Russia (FEMA) to a desperate New York City.
and Germany. I saw firsthand how the military can
fight Covid-19: triaging hot spots,
That pipeline, Nord Stream 2, has been controversial rapidly deploying units and shifting
from the start. It is intended to double the volume of resources in unstable environments. CHRISTOPHER LEE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

natural gas piped under the Baltic Sea directly from At the time, Mayor Bill de Blasio noted
that “the military is the best logistical Active duty medical staff from the Army and Air Force at a Covid-19 testing site at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio last month.
Russia to Germany and the European network, bypass-
organization in the nation,” with its
ing Ukraine and Eastern Europe and thus reducing the ready fleet of ships, aircraft and trucks.
transit fees they collect. And New York State’s governor, An- been the pattern since New York. important role in holding back the Ebola orchestrating the procuring and deliv-
Many critics in Europe and the United States have drew Cuomo, highlighted the Army The federal agencies responsible for virus in West Africa. ery of supplies to far-flung corners of
Corps of Engineers’ singular efficiency domestic public health disasters — The military is already playing a part the United States and its territories.
argued that the pipeline will make Europe, and Ger- in mobilizing active duty personnel to FEMA and the Department of Health & among the patchwork of states cringing Although it must keep medical units and
many in particular, in the words of President Trump, “a help his state. Human Services (H.H.S.) — are compe- under the force of Covid-19. The Penta- personnel ready to respond to any
captive to Russia,” and would help finance global mis- The result? More than 4,000 sol- tent and well trained, but not organized gon has deployed medical forces to unexpected war abroad, that capability
diers, sailors, airmen and Marines or equipped to manage a crisis on the Texas and California. The Defense is reinforced by airlift and ground re-
chief by President Vladimir Putin of Russia. Mr. Trump came to New York’s aid — many of scale of Covid-19. Their resources — a Logistics Agency is coordinating the sources in the Reserve and National
has been especially worked up by the notion that the them Reserve doctors, nurses and combined $113 procurement and distribution of ventila- Guard, which can move more equip-
United States is paying a disproportionate share of the medics who left their own ailing com- The U.S. billion and 6,500 tors and personal protective equipment ment, supplies and people on short
munities to help save thousands of public health profes- to medical professionals around the notice.
cost of protecting Europe from Russia while Germany lives in the city.
military, with sionals — can’t rival country. The Air Force has developed As the resumption of infection and
is cutting gas deals with Moscow. In just under two weeks, a herculean its experience the military’s $738 and fielded aeromedical evacuation deaths proceeds, inexplicable White
The Trump administration has also been pushing effort by the Navy moved its hospital in disasters billion budget and systems to ease the transfer of Covid-19 House decisions to shift the main virus-
ship Comfort from dry dock in Virginia and its 130,000 medical patients. In May, after early missteps fighting effort to state governments,
American exports of liquefied natural gas, which it likes
to the city. It took only 15 days after multiple personnel. slowed the progress of the Trump ad- which lack the necessary resources,
to call “freedom gas.” Texas, Mr. Cruz’s state, would be President Trump’s national emergency medical corps, Though use of the ministration’s effort to accelerate vac- have made the job extremely and un-
the biggest beneficiary. declaration to open the Javits New could do more military for domes- cine development, it brought in a four- necessarily difficult. Too many hospitals
German and European Union supporters of the pipe- York Medical Station — an extraordi- to end the tic law enforcement star Army general, Gustave F. Perna, to remain in danger of being over-
nary joint city, state and federal effort raises important help lead the effort. And the military’s whelmed, with hot spots in Florida,
line argue that Europe is already buying huge amounts to transform a huge convention center
pandemic. constitutional ques- cybernetwork defenders are helping Arizona, Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee
of Russian gas, and that only the route is changing to into a hospital. Almost 800 additional tions, it can be a protect American pharmaceutical and almost 30 other states.
make supplies more secure. To soften the blow to Reserve service members worked major asset in disas- companies from theft of Covid-19 vac- At a time when many Americans have
alongside New York City’s medical ter response. Military medical person- cine research. lost faith in their government, the mili-
Ukraine from the loss of transit fees, the Germans pre- professionals at hospitals in its hard- nel have a history of rushing to save But the military can do much more, tary is among the country’s most
vailed on Russia to agree to a five-year extension of est-hit communities, where Covid-19 others at great risk, and to improvise starting with what its organizations and trusted institutions.
shipping gas through Ukraine. has disproportionately stricken New when lives are at stake. Over the years, training are designed for: crisis man- It is armed with the best of America’s
Yorkers of color. And the rate of deaths, at least 75 medics, some of them consci- agement. medical personnel and resources, and it
These arguments have gone back and forth for many
once among the highest in the country, entious objectors, have received the The Pentagon and U.S. Northern can do more to help.
years, fanned by a perception of Russia as an enemy shrank to one of the lowest. country’s Medal of Honor for their Command, working in tandem with
that must be punished and isolated. The Obama admin- The lesson is that a national catastro- actions. And as much as any other FEMA and H.H.S., can meet the nation- PHILIP CARUSO, a major in the United
phe like this requires federal resources federal health agency, the military has wide need for flowing resources from States Air Force Reserve, previously
istration, including Joe Biden, also opposed the con-
to coordinate, especially in the hardest- had “combat” experience against pan- hot spot to hot spot, augmenting ex- served on active duty in the U.S. Air
struction of Nord Stream 2, though it did so diplomat- hit cities and states. But that has not demics; in 2014 and 2015 it played an hausted civilian doctors and nurses, and Force.
ically. Bipartisan opposition in Congress finally led to a
threat of sanctions under the 2020 National Defense
Authorization Act, which halted construction on the
last stretch of the pipeline and compelled Russia to
deploy its own pipe-laying ships. They could complete
the project in about a year.
Don’t be dense, beware Mike Pence
Whether Nord Stream 2 amounts to the “grave threat noe. When Harrison’s fans yelled
“Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” the Demo-
to European energy security and American national
crats were supposed to retort:
security” that Senators Cruz, Cotton and Johnson in- “Rumpsey Dumpsey, Rumpsey
voke is questionable. Russian gas already flows Dumpsey. Colonel Johnson killed Te-
through Ukraine and another undersea pipeline, Nord cumsey.” Neither of those slogans was
really true, but everyone apparently
Stream 1, and more will soon reach Europe through a Gail Collins loved yelling them. They were, you must
Turkish pipe. admit, more fun to shout than “Promises
At the same time, Europe has no shortage of gas, and Made, Promises Kept.”
People have generally paid attention
the European gas market has grown far more capable to the vice-presidential nomination only
of getting the gas it needs from sources other than It’s possible you failed to notice, but the when they’re waiting to see who’ll get it.
Russia. Countries from Germany to Croatia are build- Republican convention this week has a But now that Kamala Harris is such a
theme for each night. The list sounds a sensation, maybe the office will have
ing liquefied natural gas terminals to handle imports little like a Lord-of-the-Rings theme more glamour.
from around the world — not only from the United park: Land of Promise, Land of Oppor- I’ve been into veep-watching for a
States, but countries like Qatar, Nigeria and Australia. tunity, Land of Heroes and Land of long time — when I can’t sleep I try
Greatness. counting them all, like sheep. If it’s real
Germans argue that it is Russia that needs the in-
You know Donald Trump’s big day is insomnia I try to add one little factoid.
come from Europe more than Europe needs Russia’s going to be Land of Greatness, right? Like: William King,
gas. Pushing Russia away, they say, would turn Russia Well, obviously. But do you think even Just the man the only bachelor vice
more toward the east and strengthen its ties to China. the president felt a little wave of irony president, was very
when he gave Mike Pence responsibility
you don’t best friends with
The shock and fury provoked in Germany by the for Land of Heroes? want to see James Buchanan, the SAMUEL CORUM FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

senators’ letter has been deafening. “Completely out- Lots of ways you could celebrate
rageous,” “blackmail,” “declaration of economic war” Pence’s renomination. Male fans might
consider announcing that they’ll be
are just a few of the reactions from German and E.U. following his lead and will go to events
officials. Even those who oppose Nord Stream 2 have where alcohol is served only when
been stunned by the arrogance and audacity of being they’re accompanied by their wives.
The presidential campaign themes are
treated like a lawless colony.
“Keep America Great” and “Promises
That fury may be where the real threat to American Made, Promises Kept.” A “Little Wom-
national security lies. By effectively substituting sanc- an, Big Chaperone” T-shirt for the vice
tions, bluster and threats for foreign policy the Trump president’s female followers might be
next.
administration and its acolytes in Congress have alien- The vice presidency has had its ups
ated the very allies the United States needs to shape a and downs. We started out very well
viable resistance to Mr. Putin or any other dangerous indeed with John Adams and Thomas
Jefferson. Then, whoops, Aaron Burr.
actor. You may remember him as the guy who
More than likely, Nord Stream 2 will be completed shot Alexander Hamilton. The only
soon. Only a 90-odd mile stretch of pipe remains to be thing we can say about comparing
Aaron Burr and Mike Pence is that our
laid, and in their anger the Germans may be less likely current vice president is very unlikely
to back away. But even if the senators’ threat to destroy to ever be featured as a lead character in
Sassnitz is not carried out, it’s already done great dam- a Broadway musical.
One of my favorite veeps is Richard
age.
Johnson, a 19th-century adventurer
A critical American ally has been alienated, widening who was Martin Van Buren’s Number
a trans-Atlantic rift that is one of Mr. Putin’s major Two. Johnson was apparently picked
pursuits. Interest in American “freedom gas” has no solely because Van Buren was running
against William Henry Harrison, who
doubt fallen; Russia has been nudged closer to China. was famous for defeating the feared
That’s not what foreign policy is meant to achieve. chief Tecumseh at the battle of Tippeca-
next in line. only bachelor presi-
dent. Yeah, people
talked. But not for
long since King died 25 days into his
term.
Pence is very, very conservative on
social issues — or at least as conserva-
tive as it’s possible to be when your
running mate is a well-known former
womanizer who conducted his adulter-
ous affair with one future wife on the
front pages of the New York tabloids.
In his current job Pence is pretty
much tied up with the White House
crises of the day, but it’s important to
remember he’s very possibly a Republi-
can presidential nominee for 2024. If we
have an election in 2024. One of the
reasons he’s worth watching is trying to
imagine what he’d do if the boss decided
to ignore the election results this No-
vember.
Back in days of yore nobody cared
much about the vice presidency. John
Nance Garner said it was “not worth a
bucket of warm spit.” Garner, who
served for eight years under Franklin
Roosevelt, apparently figured that
F.D.R. would retire after two terms and
hand over the nomination to his second-
in-command. Imagine his surprise when
Vice President Mike Pence.
F.D.R. went for number three.
Now there’s a history lesson Pence
should keep in mind.
Thomas Marshall, who was Woodrow
Wilson’s veep, used to tell the story of
two brothers: “One ran away to sea; the
other was elected vice president. And
nothing was ever heard of either of them
again.” You could appreciate his attitude
since he was frozen out of everything in
the Wilson administration, even after
the president himself was paralyzed
from a stroke.
But these are stories from the old
days, when a vice president counted
himself reasonably lucky if he was given
a project — an agency or an issue — that
gave him an excuse for coming into
work in the morning. The job turned into
something very different in modern
times. Joel Goldstein, a professor at
Saint Louis University who has written
a book about the vice presidency, notes
that Richard Nixon almost never per-
formed the traditional job of presiding
over the Senate, preferring to travel and
do political work for his boss, Dwight
Eisenhower. Which was sort of ironic
given that, when Nixon was running to
succeed him, Eisenhower was asked
about any major ideas his vice presi-
dent had contributed to the adminis-
tration. And Ike replied, “If you give
me a week, I might think of one.”
The real change began with Walter
Mondale, Jimmy Carter’s second-in-
command. “Mondale became an
across-the-board troubleshooter,”
Goldstein said in a phone interview.
Having a relatively powerful, activ-
ist vice president worked very well
when the guy in question was Mon-
dale. But pitfalls abounded. You may
remember that the Republican Dan
Quayle made headlines when he cor-
rected a schoolchild for spelling “pota-
to” without an e at the end. “There you
go,” he advised the kid after adding the
extra vowel. There was some applause
from the adults in the room, which just
goes to show you that politicians
should not always trust the instincts of
the base.
Quayle was, by the way, from Indi-
ana. As was Thomas Marshall and —
yes! Our man Mike Pence.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 11

opinion

Women would abolish child labor (and other anti-suffrage excuses)

Elaine Weiss
Last week, on Aug. 18, the U.S. cele-
brated the 100th anniversary of the
ratification of the 19th Amendment,
which gave American women the con-
stitutional right to vote. This week, the
country marked the day when the
amendment officially entered the Con-
stitution. We pay little attention to what
happened during that curious, chaotic
week in between. Why the delay?
It took that extra week for women to
gain the right to vote because suffrage
opponents launched a brute-force
campaign to nullify the ratification and
cast doubt upon its legality. The tale of
this strange interlude involves racism,
legal obstruction and political dirty
tricks; it also offers an alarmingly
relevant glimpse into what can happen
when a bitter and well funded faction
refuses to accept the outcome of a
political decision involving race, sex
and voting rights.
The cheers in the Tennessee House
chamber following the very narrow
victory for ratification — the deciding
vote delivered by its youngest member,
the 24-year-old freshman delegate
Harry T. Burn — were still echoing
when the backlash began. The stakes
had been high: Tennessee was the last
state needed to propel the 19th Amend-
ment into the Constitution. Burn’s aye
had extended the vote to women citi-
zens in every state.
The young delegate was booed and
hissed. The commotion in the chamber
grew so heated that the governor or-
dered the sergeant-at-arms to protect
Burn. Burn managed to escape the
chamber unscathed, but he wasn’t safe
yet: Powerful interests were after him.
Among them were racist forces in
the South. The 19th Amendment, in
theory, extended the vote to Black
women. Most other Southern states
had already rejected it, considering it a
federally imposed racial equality edict.
(Southern Black men, who’d won the
right to vote with the 15th Amendment
in 1870, were by this time disenfran-
chised by Jim Crow laws and violent
intimidation.)
Corporations, convinced that women
at the ballot box would be bad for their
bottom lines, were also feverishly at
work. Manufacturers feared female
voters would want to abolish child
labor; liquor interests thought they’d
push for stronger enforcement of Pro-
hibition; railroads feared women might
derail their influence-peddling efforts
in state legislatures and Congress.
They all sprang into action.
Immediately, opponents tried to
discredit the legitimacy of the ratifica-
tion by accusing Burn of taking a bribe.
They manufactured witnesses and
affidavits, threatening to publish the
smears unless Burn recanted his aye
vote. (The plot was eventually exposed,
and Burn never budged.)
Meanwhile, anti-suffrage forces in
the legislature made parliamentary
maneuvers to trap the ratification
resolution in limbo, imposing three
days of “reconsid-
A century ago, eration” during
which the amend-
opponents ment might be
unleashed brought up for
chaos to try to another vote. If the
sabotage the antis, led by the
expansion of speaker of the
U.S. voting House, Seth
rights. The Walker, could con-
strange vince just a couple
of delegates to
interlude still switch to the nay
holds lessons in side, Tennessee’s
how backlash assent could be
works today. reversed.
The antis tried to
persuade legisla-
tors with cash bribes, job offers, black-
mail and bare-knuckled threats. They
tried to lure pro-ratification delegates
away from Nashville with faked tele-
grams warning of dire family emergen-
cies: Their house was on fire or their
wife taken ill.
At the same time, they worked on
what today might be called an “Astro-
Turf” campaign to manufacture grass-
roots outrage: Recall petitions were
circulated for delegates who had voted
for ratification; demands for the gover-
nor to resign grew shrill; “indignation
meetings” began, which swelled into
torch-lit protest rallies around the state
fueled by incendiary populist and racist
language.
Nevertheless, the ratification coali-
tion held firm. In frustration, more than
two dozen anti delegates tried to pre-
vent a quorum for the “reconsid-
eration” vote by absconding in the
middle of the night over the state line
into Alabama. The ruse failed; ratifica-
tion held.
Now the conflict moved to the courts.
Anti-suffragist lawyers obtained an
injunction against the governor, re-
straining him from signing the ratifica-
tion resolution. When a judge lifted it
and the governor signed, the lawyers
elevated their attack to the federal
level.
First they tried to restrain the U.S.
secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby,
from accepting Tennessee’s certifica-
tion of its vote and proclaiming the
19th Amendment fully ratified, but
their plea was dismissed. Then they
took their petition to the District of
Columbia Court of Appeals. That ap-
peal was pending as the mail train
carrying the certification papers
chugged toward Washington on Aug.
25.
Now it was a race against time: If
Colby couldn’t make the official procla-
mation before the Court of Appeals
took up the injunction plea in the morn-
ing, the injunction might be granted,
and the amendment put in limbo again.
In many states, voter registration
deadlines for the November presiden-
tial elections were looming. Anti law-
yers warned that if women were al-
lowed to vote, the dispute over Ten-
HARRIS & EWING, VIA UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP/GETTY IMAGES
nessee’s ratification might invalidate
the election results, throwing the na-
tion into chaos.
The mail train was expected to
arrive in Washington in the early
morning of Aug. 26. Post Office head-
quarters ordered that no matter the
time, the envelope should be rushed to
the State Department. Employees at
State waited through the night. It
arrived at 4 a.m., and Colby signed the
proclamation of the 19th Amendment
in his own home, with only an aide as
witness. No suffragists were in attend-
ance; there are no photos.
The fight was over. But anti-suffrage
forces still refused to accept the ver-
dict.
“Tennessee has not ratified 19th
Amendment,” Speaker Walker insisted
in a furious wire to Colby. The official
proclamation “will not cause any ces-
sation of the fight in this state.”
Walker made good on that threat.
Just days after the 19th Amendment
became law, Tennessee actually re-
scinded its ratification. In a sneaky
move, the speaker called his troops
home from Alabama and rammed
through the repeal while House
amendment supporters were at home,
then convinced the Senate to join by
tying the legislators’ per diem pay to
the nullification measure. The gover-
nor, facing re-election, signed on, but it
was moot: There are no do-overs in the
federal ratification process.
But that didn’t stop anti-suffragists
taking their legal crusade all the way
to the Supreme Court, where it was
finally dismissed in 1922. And as we
know, Tennessee and the other South-
ern states would subvert the 19th
Amendment by applying Jim Crow
voting restrictions — literacy tests, poll
taxes, intimidation and violence — to
Black women as well as to Black men
for 45 more years.
On Wednesday we saluted the 19th
Amendment with lights and ceremony,
but the rage and backlash unleashed
by the amendment’s expansion of
voting rights and promise of a more
inclusive democracy should not be
ignored.
A national election is just weeks
away, and racial justice and the protec-
tion voting and women’s rights are
again front and center. We hear mur-
murs raising doubts about the legiti-
macy of the election and we see overt
moves — including crippling the Post
Office — to make voting more difficult.
There have been angry rallies and real
threats of intimidation at the polls. The
president, according to his spokes-
woman, is still considering whether he
will abide by the results of the election.
In 1920, the nation was deeply divid-
ed on questions of voting rights and
racial justice; in 2020, we still are, and
progress is often met with resistance.
That angry week in August a century
ago might be a useful warning.
ELAINE WEISS is the author of “The Wom-
an’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the
Vote.”

California, we can’t go on like this

MANJOO, FROM PAGE 9
time last year, I warned of the “end of
California as we know it” — that if we
didn’t begin to radically alter how we
live, the climate and the high cost of
living would make the state uninhabit-
central to our way of life.
And perhaps, this year, the dis-
turbing national political conversa-
tion might finally force my fellow
Californians to reckon with how they
live. In many ways the 2020 election
with the McCloskeys, but their ugly
spectacle has helped unmask NIMBY-
ism, one of California’s most reckless
ideologies, for the racist vision it has
long been.
It just isn’t true that Joe Biden and

able for large numbers of people.
Of course, California hasn’t yet
ended. Through virus and flame, the
state has kept lurching along in the
same haphazard way it always has,
and here we are again to face another
burning season.
It is my hope, though, that with each
year we burn, each new wildfire year
that we live through, Californians start
to recognize the mistakes that are
is shaping up to be a fight over the
soul of the suburbs — their role in
America’s future, and who they are
for. At the Republican convention this
week, Mark and Patricia McCloskey,
the couple who brandished guns at
protesters in St. Louis, asserted that
liberals want to “abolish the sub-
urbs” by ending single-family home
zoning. The liberals who live in Cali-
fornia’s suburbs may not identify
Unprecedented times.
the Democrats want to abolish the
suburbs, or even improve them, which
is a shame. Neither Biden nor his party
nor just about anyone else in national
or state politics has been willing to
honestly discuss the incalculable dam-
Unparalleled coverage.
age that California-style suburban life
has wreaked on our world. In Califor-
nia, if anything is going to ruin the Subscribe to The New York Times
suburbs, it is more likely to be a wild-
fire than a new president. International Edition.
nytimes.com/subscribeinternational

Rewriting America’s racist past

BLOW, FROM PAGE 1
emption is the Exceptional Negro
Clause that releases a particular indi-
vidual, by their merit, from the univer-
sality of the racist’s conceptions.
Trump famously frolicked with
young, successful Black pop culture
figures like rappers and athletes in
New York. None of that altered the fact
that he was a racist being sued for
housing discrimination or demanding
the death penalty for the Central Park
Five.
Walker went on to say:
“People who think that don’t know
what they’re talking about. Growing up
in the Deep South, I’ve seen racism up
close. I know what it is and it isn’t
Donald Trump.”
I too grew up in the Deep South, and
I’ve also seen racism. I too know that it
is and it is precisely Donald Trump.
Republican Senator Tim Scott of
Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina at the Republican National Convention on Monday.
South Carolina, a Black man and the
Republican lead on now-stalled police
reform, referred to the “deaths of
George Floyd and Breonna Taylor,” an
innocuous descriptor, rather than
calling them killings or making clear
that they were carried out by law
enforcement officers. Furthermore, he
said:
“We live in a world that only wants
you to believe in the bad news racially,
economically and culturally polarizing
news. The truth is, our nation’s arc
always bends back toward fairness.”
Scott said that he believes “in the
goodness of America, the promise that
all men and all women are created
equal,” and that “over the past four
years, we have made tremendous
progress toward that promise.”
In what reality has tremendous
progress been made on universal
equality under the Trump administra-
PETE MAROVICH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
tion? We have seen the largest racial
protests in American history under the
Trump administration. Trump has used
massive force against these protesters.
He has demonized them.
Former United Nations ambassador
Nikki Haley, an Indian-American wom-
an, went even broader with her revi-
sionism, saying, “In much of the Demo-
cratic Party, it’s now fashionable to say
that America is racist. That is a lie.
America is not a racist country.” She
says this was personal to her as a
“brown girl in a Black and white
world.”
“Not a racist country?” What pre-
cisely does that mean? Was its found-
ing caught up with enslavement? Yes.
Were many of the men who signed the
Declaration of Independence enslav-
ers? Yes. Were some of our presidents
enslavers? Yes. Were many of them
white supremacists? Yes. Was lynch-
ing allowed, sometimes by law enforce-
ment itself? Yes. Was Jim Crow legal
in this country? Yes. Was mass incar-
ceration a thing that the country en-
gaged in? Yes. Are Black people still
the recipients of worse treatment than
white people on a broad range of met-
rics? Yes.
Now, is everyone in the country
openly, consciously, maliciously racist?
No. But, do they have to be? No. Has
the country, and does the country,
operate in a way that disadvantages
Black people and advantages white
ones? Absolutely.
These Black and brown people at the
Republican convention know this, but
they had a job to do: the erasure of
racism, the clouding of it so that one
way reasons it away.
This show had two audiences: edu-
cated suburbanites who don’t want to
be labeled racist and to a lesser degree
Black men who have been slipping a
bit away from Democrats in recent
elections.

12 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
well
With a motor, it’s still moderate exercise
Fitness
GRETCHEN REYNOLDS
Is riding an e-bike good exercise? Is
riding an e-bike safe?
With interest in and sales of pedal-
assisted electric bikes surging during
the pandemic, those questions share a
growing urgency. Two timely and
soothing new studies of e-bike riders’
exertions and injuries suggest that the
answer to both questions can be a
qualified yes, though anyone riding an
e-bike needs to remain aware that the
experience is certainly cycling with a
kick to it.
As most of us are likely aware, bike
riding has become extremely popular
and aspirational this year, since so
many of us are otherwise housebound.
Riding gets us outside, active and
heading somewhere — anywhere —
else. But it also involves distance, hills,
wind and sometimes leaden legs,
which can be daunting.
Enter e-bikes. Short for electric
bikes, these are road or mountain bikes
with an added battery-powered motor
that gooses our pedaling power. Most
e-bikes fall into one of three types.
Class 1 e-bikes provide assistance
while you pedal, up to a top speed of 20
miles per hour. Class 2 models power
your ride even if you are not pedaling,
but click off at 20 miles per hour. And
A back-to-school list
with tips for parents
Basic steps to help ease
teenagers through changes
during the pandemic
BY LISA DAMOUR
In a sea of Covid-19 confusion, this
seems certain: The pandemic will dis-
rupt school this fall. Attending school
part time, sporadically as viral out-
breaks allow, or completely remotely
may make excellent medical sense.
But learning from home, or being con-
strained by in-school safety protocols,
will reduce students’ exposure to the or-
dinary magic — the woven-in forces that
promote healthy adolescent develop-
ment — that happens at school.
Can parents help compensate for
what will necessarily be lost? Yes.
Forget the backpacks and binders.
Here are the essential supplies teen-
agers will need for the strange school
year ahead.
SAFE WAYS TO SEE FRIENDS
The healthy adolescent trajectory to-
ward independence involves loosening
emotional ties to parents and strength-
ening ties to peers. This critical transi-
tion almost certainly happens best
when teenagers can get together in per-
son. While communication technology
has been a welcome asset for many ado-
lescents since the pandemic began, a re-
cent survey found that 61 percent of
teenagers reported feeling more lonely
as a result of the pandemic.
Given that adolescents cannot, at
present, count on hanging out with
peers during the school day, we should
make sure they still have ways to see
their friends. Unfortunately, teenagers
often fail to observe social-distancing
guidelines, even if they start off with the
best of intentions. They may need su-
pervision or specific guidance, such as
having them meet outdoors or go on
bike rides with friends, wearing masks
when appropriate.
When teenagers bristle at these rules
for socializing, explain that you are not
trying to be at odds with them. Rather,
the shared enemy is Covid-19.
TIME WITH OTHER ADULTS
Teenagers benefit from spending time
with adults who aren’t their parents; it’s
not easy to establish independence and
take guidance from one’s parents at the
very same time. Adolescents will often
accept the same advice from a mentor or
boss that they would reflexively rebuff
from their parents. And though they can
be quick to dismiss praise from their
parents on the grounds that we cannot
possibly be objective, they’ll take to
heart compliments from teachers,
coaches and advisers.
Now, more than ever, raising children
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Sales of e-bikes, which come with a battery-powered motor, have soared by 70 percent
or more each month since the pandemic began, according to industry statistics.
Class 3 e-bikes assist pedaling up to a
top speed of 28 miles per hour. (Local
regulations vary about which bikes are
allowed on bike paths, trails or roads.)
E-bike sales have soared by 70 per-
cent or more each month since the
pandemic began, according to industry
statistics. But this popularity may
carry a price. Simon Cowell, the acer-
bic judge on “America’s Got Talent,”
reported on Twitter that he was hospi-
talized this month after fracturing his
back during his first ride on a new
electric trail bike, an exceptionally
may take a village. Include your teen-
agers when spending time with adults
they like while social distancing. Offer to
engage their teenager around a shared
interest and see if they will do the same
for yours. If your teenager can safely
hold a job, volunteer in the community
or be active at your place of worship un-
der the watchful eye of a trustworthy
adult, help make that happen.
RELIABLE ROUTINES
Routines are the best way to ensure that
critical needs get met. They are good for
everyone, including teenagers. A reli-
able daily schedule with designated
time for learning, leisure, physical activ-
ity and sleep promotes overall
well-being and reduces the stress of
making plans on the fly.
Under normal conditions, going to
school forces students into routines that
usually keep them busy, growing and ac-
tive. In contrast, during the unstruc-
tured time of weekends and summers
young people are more likely to be sed-
entary, eat poorly and fall into irregular
sleep patterns.
Handing your teenager a carefully
crafted agenda of what you expect them
to do hour by hour probably wouldn’t
work. A better bet would be to stipulate
what should be part of their daily sched-
ule — studying, physical activity, pitch-
ing in around the house — and then let
them come up with a plan you get to ap-
prove.
SUPPORT AT HOME
School is stressful, and stress is cumula-
tive. Remember your teenager’s mood
on the roughest day he or she had at
school before the pandemic began? Now
imagine a day like that on top of the emo-
tional wear and tear of living under pan-
demic conditions for six months or
more. It’s probably smart to expect a
bumpier ride.
Here’s the good news. Research
shows that strong, supportive relation-
ships at home help young people to man-
age — and even thrive — in the face of
persistently difficult circumstances.
Having parents who are kind, patient
and predictable can help teenagers buf-
fer the chronic stress of living during the
pandemic.
That said, it’s not always easy to bring
our parenting A-game when we, too, are
feeling worn down by the pandemic.
These steps will help.
First, remember that teenagers often
want nothing more than our quiet and
steady presence, even when they are in
the midst of an emotional meltdown.
Second, be compassionate in these diffi-
cult times and resist the impulse to fire
off solutions and suggestions when they
have a problem. Finally, do your best to
take excellent care of yourself so that
you’ll have the energy you’ll need to
take care of your teenager.
JO ZIXUAN ZHOU
LAURENT GILLIERON/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
high-powered British version of an
electric bicycle.
Many of us have heard other (some-
times apocryphal) stories about e-bike
accidents. And some people wonder if
riding an e-bike, with its pedal assist-
ance, even counts as a workout.
On that last count, though, the first
of the new studies is reassuring. Pub-
lished in July in The International
Journal of Environmental Research
and Public Health, it involved 101
healthy adult men and women in Ham-
burg, Germany, who agreed to alter-
Lessons from the ring
How pro wrestling taught
resilience to me and my
immigrant grandmother
BY JENNIFER CHEN
“Your grandmother would’ve loved the
Rock,” said my husband, Brendan, as
he turned on “The Titan Games,” and I
sank into our living room couch.
During the coronavirus lockdown,
the reality show, hosted and produced
by the Rock, was my comfort because
it reminded me of what I loved about
professional wrestling: the showman-
ship, bravado and clear-cut winners.
After Brendan mentioned my grand-
mother — my ahma — I was trans-
ported to another couch: a white
wicker sofa with green floral print. The
TV is a massive brown piece of furni-
ture — the thick screen the size of a
love seat and black buttons for on/off
and volume. My petite Taiwanese
ahma paces. I ditch my sixth-grade
homework and join.
She knows the schedule by heart,
even though her English is limited.
Today’s match: Randy “Macho Man”
Savage against some random guy. We
cheer when Macho Man appears on-
screen. He struts along the aisle in
wraparound sunglasses, a silky ban-
danna around his forehead and a black
satin cape with “Savage” embossed on
the back with red sequins.
My 72-year-old grandmother, nor-
mally quiet, claps with a teenage boy’s
energy. We boo when his sequin-less
opponent attempts to pin the “Savage”
to the mat. When Macho Man inevita-
bly wins, we shout as if we are in the
front row, not in our living room in
suburban New Jersey.
We adored Hulk Hogan, Andre the
Giant and Rowdy Roddy Piper. When I
was 12, the highlight of my weekend
was renting WrestleMania VHS tapes
from our local video store. My grand-
mother and I watched those tapes on
nate riding either a standard bicycle or
an e-bike over two separate two-week
periods.
Each volunteer chose his or her
preferred e-bike model, with most
picking road bikes having top assisted
speeds of about 20 miles per hour. To
compensate for the novelty factor,
participants spent a couple of weeks
getting used to their e-bikes before the
study period. The researchers also
provided their volunteers with activity
monitors, heart rate monitors and a
specialized phone app where the riders
could record their trips, distance and
how physically draining each ride had
felt.
The scientists did not offer their
volunteers any suggestions, however,
about where, when or how often to
ride, says Hedwig Stenner, a research
associate at the Institute of Sports
Medicine at Hannover Medical School,
who led the new study. The re-
searchers wanted to see how people,
on their own initiative, would use the
different bikes and whether their rid-
ing would change with the e-bikes.
Electric assistance did change their
habits, the researchers found. In gen-
eral, the men and women rode more
often during the two weeks with e-
bikes, averaging about five rides a
week then, versus three a week with
the standard cycles. The distances of
most people’s rides did not budge,
whichever type of bike they rode; their
rides were not lengthier on the e-bikes,
but they were more frequent.
Their heart rates also differed. In
repeat, delighting in hours of glorious
matches, culminating in a final battle
where one man was awarded a magnif-
icent gold belt he lorded over other
wrestlers. I scored tickets to a live pro
wrestling event at my high school, and
my white-haired ahma hollered like a
wrestling coach, fists in the air.
Gradually, I watched it less. When I
left for college at New York University,
I stopped altogether. On school breaks
I saw that ahma still watched with
religious fervor. I joined occasionally,
but it seemed childish to clap for what
I now saw as a misogynist soap opera.
As my grandmother’s health and
cognitive abilities declined in her 90s
— she called me by my cousin’s name
and thought her 6-foot-tall caregiver
was stealing her petite clothes — I saw
her feisty spirit slip away. Wrestling
matches faded into background noise.
She watched with a blank stare. Before
long my mother was calling to warn
me that “today might be the day,” until
it finally was.
In August 2013, I wrote her eulogy. I
bore witness to her life because my
childhood bedroom was next to hers. I
spoke about her love of professional
wrestling, and how I never got to tell
her that Brendan had spotted Hulk
Hogan in a yellow Volkswagen Beetle
in Los Angeles. My cousins chuckled.
It was a known fact that if ahma came
over, you had to watch wrestling.
When I saw her body in the coffin at
the funeral, she was unnaturally still,
like a statue.
She had not been still in life. She was
a woman who walked two miles every
day to the grocery store. A mother who
raised six children and lost two sons,
one to a plane crash and one to cancer.
On the anniversaries of her sons’
deaths, I sat with her and listened to
her loud wails as she clutched their
black-and-white photos. The statue in
the funeral home was not my ahma.
Three years passed. The next time I
saw her, my belly was round with two
girls who loved to kick at night. I cried
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
general, people’s heart rates were
about 8 percent lower when they ped-
aled e-bikes, but still consistently
hovered within the range considered
moderate exercise. As a result, during
the two weeks when the volunteers
rode e-bikes, they accumulated suffi-
cient minutes of moderate physical
activity to meet the standard exercise
recommendation of 150 minutes of
moderate activity. When they rode the
standard bikes, they did not.
But whether e-bikes might pose a
greater risk for injuries than standard
bicycles remains an open question.
“No serious injuries were reported to
us” during the research, Ms. Stenner
said.
The other new study of e-bikes,
which was published in December in
Injury Prevention, is more cautionary.
To compile it, researchers at New York
University’s School of Medicine
combed a national database of emer-
gency room visits for information
about accidents related to riding a
standard bicycle, motorized scooter or
an e-bike from 2000 to 2017.
They found plenty of reports. More
than nine million men, women and
children showed up in an emergency
room after being hurt while riding a
standard bike during those 17 years.
Another 140,000 injured themselves on
scooters, and about 3,000 on e-bikes
(an uncommon novelty in the early
years of the study). In general, the
e-bike injuries were the most severe
and likely to require hospitalization.
Why e-bikers tended to hurt them-
one day over the fact that ahma would
never press her lips to my daughters’
cheeks and suck in their round baby
cheeks like she could swallow their
cuteness, which she did with her
grandchildren no matter how old we
were. That night, she appeared in a
dream, taking a bath. I told her about
my pregnancy and she smiled. The
next morning, I felt like she knew I
was becoming a mother.
This past winter, Brendan and I took
our twins, by then 3, to a kid-friendly
New Year’s Eve party. I sheepishly told
the hostess I was departing early.
“I am doing the most L.A. thing
ever: A ‘sound bath journey’ in Eagle
Rock,” I said. I kissed my daughters
and husband goodbye and hopped into
a Lyft. Fifteen min-
utes later, I arrived
We adored at a yoga studio/cafe
Hulk Hogan, that sold tarot cards,
Andre the superfood shakes
Giant and and glass jars filled
Rowdy with manifestation
Roddy Piper. tea. Years earlier, I
would’ve mocked
modern me, but now,
at 40, I fully accepted
the woo-woo lifestyle common here.
I joined 54 other people who had
signed up for the sound journey, which
promised to connect us with “ancestors
and spiritual guides,” banish what was
no longer serving us and “prepare for
new seeds of manifestation and birth.”
After working nonstop through the
holidays to hit an impossible deadline,
I desperately wanted to sow new
seeds.
What I carried into the room: a book
I was ghostwriting that was haunting
me, my postpartum body, and a crip-
pling thought: “You are not good
enough.” My own professional wrestler,
Self-Doubt Savage, took over as I lay
on my pink yoga mat. Tibetan chakra
bowls played. A drummer beat out a
steady rhythm.
We were squished together so
closely that a man’s feet were hovering
..
selves more seriously than other riders
is not clear from the injury data, said
Charles DiMaggio, an injury epidemiol-
ogist at NYU Langone Health, who led
the new study. But speed likely played
a role. “We know that e-bikes can go
faster than traditional pedal cycles,” he
said, unless you are a bike racer who
bombs down hills at more than 20 or 30
miles per hour. “And we know that
increased speed often results in more
severe injuries.”
But there is encouraging news em-
bedded within the injury statistics, he
said. In the earliest years covered by
the study, a majority of e-bike injuries
involved children under the age of 18,
who seem to have been the earliest
adopters of this new cycling technol-
ogy. The incidence among this group
declined precipitously in the later
years of the study, even as it rose
among people aged 45 to 65.
This shift could indicate that the
younger riders became more familiar
with how to ride e-bikes safely, Dr.
DiMaggio said, a development that,
with time and experience, should
reduce injuries among other, older
riders. Or the numbers could suggest
that fewer young people are now using
e-bikes, leaving their parents or grand-
parents to be the ones to try them out,
and fall off.
In either case, the study’s takeaway
is clear, Dr. DiMaggio said. Before
venturing out onto roads or paths on
an e-bike, “familiarize yourself with the
bike,” he said. “Wear a helmet. Follow
traffic rules. Don’t drink and ride.”
LUCY JONES
over my head, but I slipped into a calm
state. I felt an overwhelming presence
of my ahma. An internal voice said,
“Your grandmother lives inside of
you.” The tears came hot and instant.
In my mind’s eye, I saw ahma: Four-
foot-10-inches of her, in a satin dress
she wore at 19, newly married in Tai-
wan. Jet black hair. Short like she
always wore it. Slips of white paper on
which she practiced writing English.
Shaky blue penmanship, like a child
learning the alphabet, even though she
was in her late 70s. When I got home
from high school, I wrote words for her,
which she studiously copied.
I had forgotten her resilience. “Your
grandmother lives inside of you,” re-
peated like a mantra as the chakra
sound bowls washed over me.
I felt love. The kind of love doting
Asian grandmas showered on their
grandchildren as if we were golden.
Love in the form of small bowls with
white rice and sweet potato slivers
because it was my favorite. “So smart,”
she said when I fixed her gold watch.
The kind of love that Self-Doubt
Savage hated. Hollered against. He, a
true showman, shook the rafters with
his brazenness. He stood at the top of
the ring, beating his chest. He was
used to winning.
But in that moment, my grand-
mother grabbed hold of my Savage.
She swung him against the elastic red
ropes of the ring Macho Man-style and
body slammed him to the blue mat. He
attempted to get up like any worthy
opponent. I couldn’t deny any longer
that if I came from a woman who ar-
rived in America from Taiwan with six
children and no formal education, and
who walked every single day until her
90s, then I could kick Self-Doubt Sav-
age out of my mental arena. In that
Los Angeles yoga studio, surrounded
by strangers, my ahma and I pinned
him into submission.
Jennifer Chen is a freelance writer and
novelist based in Los Angeles.
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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 13

Sports
Preparing for the challenge ahead
ately before the return of the Bun- ished in each country, players were al-
Europe’s leagues survived desliga, no team had to go into quaran- lowed out of their bubbles. The strict
tine or see a string of matches post- protocols that had governed their lives
a season in the pandemic, poned or rescheduled. since March were loosened, and social
but it won’t get any easier Most found that players followed the media feeds have since filled with im-
rules to the letter, doing little more than ages of players on beaches, at parties,
BY RORY SMITH cloister in their homes — except for reunited with their extended families.
AND TARIQ PANJA training sessions and games — during That freedom brings with it, of course,
the two months it took to finish the sea- an increased risk of exposure. There
Dr. Jonathan Van-Tam made no attempt son. have been a number of positive tests in
to sugarcoat it. During soccer’s coro- “We expected them outside of the Spain as teams not involved in Euro-
navirus hiatus, as sports leagues around training grounds to follow the govern- pean competition returned to preseason
the world tried to figure out a way to re- ment advice in relation to social distanc- training. Sides contesting the early
turn to the field as a pandemic raged, Dr. ing at the time, in relation to hygiene, in rounds of the forthcoming Champions
Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical offi- relation to where they would visit,” Rich- League and Europa League have seen
cer of Britain, had been invited to join a ard Garlick, the Premier League’s direc- games canceled because of outbreaks.
Zoom call with the captains of the Eng- tor of football, said. “They were doing In France — the only one of Europe’s
lish Premier League’s 20 clubs. that with the mind-set of, ‘We want to major leagues to cancel its season, and
Dr. Van-Tam was there to explain the get restarted; we have got these proto- the first to return to action in the new
measures that would be needed to make cols in place.’ They did all the right one — the curtain-raiser, a game be-
it possible for soccer to return. He reeled things.” tween Marseille and St. Étienne, was
through the many sacrifices players postponed after the former confirmed
would have to make. It would not be that four players had tested positive.
easy, he told the captains: They and “When people come back “When people come back from vaca-
their teammates would be subjected to from vacation there will be tion there will be a number of people
more oversight than anyone except a number of people who who come back with coronavirus,”
British special forces troops on high- Martín, of La Liga, said. “Already in
alert status.
come back with coronavirus.” Spain we are seeing more positives with
In those long, bleak days of spring, as the increased number of tests, but it will
the soccer authorities tried to conjure a There were occasional “aberrations,” be manageable.”
road map back to the field, the idea that as Garlick called them: a handful of Pre- As players return, they are finding
the overwhelming majority of domestic mier League players caught holding that the strict controls that governed
leagues in Europe might be able to finish lockdown parties, or visiting friends, or their lives in the summer remain in
their seasons — and that a new Euro- CLAUDIO GIOVANNINI/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK inviting acquaintances to their homes. place, even if their communities are
pean champion might be crowned — Players released from strict rules after their suspended seasons were completed are returning to find the rules are back in place. In Germany, the coach of Augsburg, slowly, gingerly trying to find ways to
seemed a distant, fanciful one. The risk Heiko Herrlich, missed his team’s re- reopen. Martín considers the strict rules
appeared too great. Too much could go start after he broke quarantine to buy no great burden on players: it is, in-
wrong. issued each of its players a handbook view of his club, need to change resi- outbreak could not only derail months of toothpaste. In Spain, La Liga officials stead, just part of the job. “They have to
On Sunday night in Lisbon, though, containing precise instructions on “pri- dence. planning and undermine the sport’s im- scoured social media for potential vio- sacrifice some things which really, re-
Bayern Munich won the Champions vate hygiene,” guidance that in some The rules applied not only to the play- age, but also potentially cost lives. lations after some Sevilla players were ally aren’t that great,” he said.
League, bringing the curtain down on cases went above and beyond the advice ers, but to their families: no visitors, no There were, after all, plenty of voices in pictured enjoying a barbecue together. But like Garlick in the Premier
the 2019-20 campaign. European soccer issued by the government to the public. public transportation, no conversations those early weeks calling on soccer not “We quickly contacted the clubs and League, he is aware that expecting play-
made it through. The rules were as stringent, and com- with neighbors. No chances were to be to even think about returning until the reminded them very strongly what re- ers to adhere to the most stringent
That it did is testament to the prehensive, as possible, and governed taken. pandemic had abated. sponsibility they had,” Martín said. measures imaginable for the course of a
progress their countries had made almost every aspect of how players The authorities elsewhere took much Martín, who was charged with over- The Premier League posted a perma- few weeks is one thing. Hoping they will
against the virus; to the detailed, foren- lived. Hand towels were to be used once the same approach, adopting what Vic- seeing the return of Spanish soccer, re- nent delegate at each club’s training fa- be able to maintain that discipline over
sic planning of the leagues and federa- only and to be washed at 140 degrees tor Manuel Martín Ortega, a vice presi- membered the fear well: the nerves cility to ensure compliance and to pre- the course of a season is quite another. “I
tions; and to the spirit of “unity,” as the Fahrenheit as soon as they were damp. dent at the Spanish league, called “a cas- when he would wake every morning vent any team from bending the rules to think it’s harder in some ways now,”
president of Serie A in Italy, Paolo Dal Rooms were to be kept well ventilated. cade of strictness.” In each country, the waiting for the newest batch of test re- gain any advantage over its opponents Garlick said.
Pino, put it, that the continent’s clubs Toothbrushes were to be cleaned with rules emphasized the importance of sults and then the sense of relief that at a time when the type of training that For months, all European soccer fo-
managed to foster in an extremely diffi- hot, soapy water. players’ taking individual responsibility. would wash over him — at least for 24 was permitted was governed by social cused on was not ending its season with
cult situation. But none of it could have Some bordered on the intimate: Play- “La Liga was very demanding on the hours. distancing. “It was just making sure a question mark, an asterisk. It has, to
happened without the willingness of ers were ordered to ensure that they clubs, and the clubs were in turn very The moment Martín was dreading there was a level playing field and no the credit of both its authorities and its
thousands of players to observe some of took vitamins, drank plenty of water and demanding on the players,” Martín said. never arrived. The same was true else- one was secretly doing anything,” Gar- participants, succeeded. What comes
the toughest controls imposed on any in- kept their airways warm. A few took a “So the players saw how demanding the where. Most leagues reported only a few lick said. “And they weren’t, because next, though, may well be more difficult.
dividuals in any industry. hard line: Any player who suspected his clubs were with them, and the clubs saw dozen positive tests, at most, as they fin- they realized the risks.” Finishing in the middle of a pandemic
The German Bundesliga — the first bubble might have been breached by a how demanding the league was with ished their schedules. Aside from Dyna- Like his colleagues across Europe, was one thing. Now, with the virus an
major sports league to return — blazed person infected with the coronavirus them. That is what was important here.” mo Dresden, a German second division though, Garlick knows that a greater ever-present threat, Europe’s leagues
the trail. Before resuming play in May, it was told that he might, depending on the Everyone involved knew that a single team that reported an outbreak immedi- challenge lies ahead. As the seasons fin- have to find a way to start again.

NON SEQUITUR PEANUTS DOONESBURY CLASSIC 1994

GARFIELD CALVIN AND HOBBES

SUDOKU No. 2808

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

Fill the grid so
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13
Solution No. 2708
that every row,
column 3x3 box Fill the grids with digits so as not Across 26 Bedouin, say 51 E.U. member since 14 15 16

and shaded 3x3 to repeat a digit in any row or 1973

column, and so that the digits
  1 Locale with a vaulted 28 One might be left in
box contains
17 18 19
roof 52 Lets have it
within each heavily outlined box
the dust
each of the
will produce the target number
  5 Auto roof options 30 Rebound 54 Sleep on it 20 21 22 23
numbers
1 to 9 exactly shown, by using addition, 10 Band boosters, 31 Get on board? 55 Theme park
subtraction, multiplication or
perhaps conveyance 24 25 26 27
once. 32 Camera film speed
division, as indicated in the box. 14 [C’mon, the light
inits.
57 Water from a water
A 4x4 grid will use the digits turned green!] fountain 28 29 30
For solving tips
and more puzzles: 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. 15 Dish that might be 33 “___ Quiet Uptown” 58 Persians, e.g.
www.nytimes.com/ (song from 31 32 33
garnished with nori or
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14 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
Culture
She’s flying with new wings
Bettye LaVette has redone
tracks other Black women
originally popularized
BY DAVID PEISNER
In the summer of 2010, the soul singer
Bettye LaVette stepped onstage at the
Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles with a
32-piece string section behind her and
performed a four-decade-old song she’d
only just learned: the Beatles’ “Black-
bird.”
At the time, LaVette was about seven
years into a long-overdue career re-
surgence. As a teenager in the 1960s,
she had scored a few memorable R&B
hits, including the slinky, aching “Let
Me Down Easy,” but she failed to make
the kind of impact that many of the art-
ists she came up alongside in Detroit —
Diana Ross, Marvin Gaye, Martha
Reeves, Aretha Franklin — enjoyed. To
many record collectors, LaVette was a
great forgotten singer whose earthy
voice could transform any song into
something more than even its author
imagined. To most everyone else, she
was just forgotten.
For decades, she’d had albums
shelved, projects scuttled and even one
manager shot. LaVette calls this seem-
ing yen for misfortune “buzzard luck,”
but beginning around 2003, her fortunes
began to change with a string of criti-
cally acclaimed albums.
“I’m such an arrogant singer.
When I hear your song, if I
like it, I don’t even hear you
anymore. I hear how I’m going
to sing it.”
Preparing for the Beatles tribute, her
husband, Kevin Kiley, suggested she
perform “Blackbird.” “I’d never heard
the song before in my life,” LaVette said
in a phone call from her home in West
Orange, N.J., where she has been riding
out the coronavirus pandemic. “Kevin
played it for me and I said, ‘I wonder if
people know he’s talking about a Black
woman?’”
Performing to a packed crowd 10
years ago, LaVette felt a deep connec-
tion to the signature lyric. “I just said,
‘All my life I’ve waited for this moment
to arrive.’ That is exactly how I felt.”
LaVette rejiggered the song into the
first person, slowed the tempo to a crawl
and added a bed of strings. Her whole-
sale reinvention of the classic tune be-
came the foundation for an album that
would take another decade to blossom.
“Blackbirds,” due Friday, is a collection
of songs celebrating the formative work
of — as LaVette calls them — “black
birds.” All the songs, save for the Beatles
song that inspired it, were originally
popularized by Black female singers, in-
cluding Nina Simone, Billie Holiday and
Dinah Washington.
“These women are the first Black
women singers I heard,” she said.
“Knowing what all these women went
through, I can find myself in each of the
songs because I’m a black bird, too.”
Steve Jordan, who produced and
played drums on the album, heard
LaVette’s performance of “Blackbird”
from the Hollywood Bowl and got goose
bumps. “A lot of people don’t realize Paul
McCartney wrote this song about the
civil rights movement, and now you
have an African-American woman who
lived through the civil rights movement,
so you’re getting a taste of what the song
Ai Weiwei shines a light on what Wuhan endured
LONDON
The artist and activist
directed ‘Coronation’
remotely from Europe
BY IAN JOHNSON
In January, the Chinese city of Wuhan
became the first in the world to undergo
a lockdown to fight the coronavirus pan-
demic. In many ways, this crucial period
remains a mystery, with few images es-
caping the censors’ grasp.
A new film by the Chinese artist and
activist Ai Weiwei helps fill in some of
that missing history. Although now liv-
ing in Europe, Ai remotely directed doz-
ens of volunteers across China to create
“Coronation,” a portrait of Wuhan’s dra-
conian lockdown — and of a country
able to mobilize huge resources, if at
great human cost.
“The audience has to understand that
this is about China,” Ai said in a tele-
phone interview from Portugal. “Yes,
it’s about the corona lockdown, but it is
trying to reflect what ordinary Chinese
people went through.”
Despite early missteps, China has
fared better than many other countries
in taming the epidemic, with 4,700
deaths compared with more than
172,000 in the United States. The Com-
munist Party goes to great lengths to
squelch displays of grief and anger, but
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
was really about,” he said.
LaVette’s albums over the past 15
years have often been thematic. There
are LPs of songs by female writers,
British Invasion hits, Bob Dylan covers
still retains broad domestic support for
its efforts.
The film reflects this broader story
through vignettes that follow the events
chronologically: It begins on Jan. 23
with a couple driving through a snowy
night to return home to a suburb of Wu-
han, and ends on April 8 with people
burning paper money — a traditional of-
fering to the dead — on a street corner.
In between are scenes and stories re-
markable for their rare access into the
machinery of the Chinese state. These
include up-close images of a hospital be-
ing built in a matter of days and an in-
side look at an intensive-care unit, as
well as scenes of medical staff being re-
warded with membership in the Com-
munist Party and of workers at a crema-
tory kneading bags of human ashes so
they will fit into urns.
The overall impression, especially in
the film’s first half-hour, is one of awe-
some efficiency. Crews quickly bolt pre-
fabricated rooms together, I.C.U. ma-
chines beep and purr. The new party
members are sworn in with their right
fists raised up, and the crematory labor-
ers work so hard that they complain that
their hands ache.
As the film progresses, the human
costs become more apparent. A volun-
teer worker whose job is finished is not
allowed to leave the quarantine zone, so
he sleeps in his car in a parking garage.
Mourners wail inconsolably at a crema-
tory, and a man fights to be allowed to
collect his father’s urn without govern-
ment officials present — something the
and a disc recorded at the Southern soul
incubator FAME Studios in Muscle
Shoals, Ala., with the Drive-by Truckers.
She admits that she doesn’t even listen
to much music these days, and relies
authorities do not permit because they
are afraid the mourning will turn to an-
ger at the government for having al-
lowed the virus to spin out of control.
Though best known as an artist for his
large installations, Ai has often investi-
gated sensitive issues in China on film,
including in a documentary about a man
who murdered six police officers in
Shanghai and one about why so many
schools collapsed in the 2008 Wenchuan
earthquake.
“I had a team that could start quickly,”
Ai said of making “Coronation.” “They
didn’t have to ask what I wanted.”
Besides volunteers, and paid crews,
Ai said he was aided by his partner,
JAY L. CLENDENIN/LOS ANGELES TIMES, VIA GETTY IMAGES
heavily on her husband, who’s both a
musician and a record collector, to cata-
log songs she might one day like to sing.
“I’ll call her in and say, ‘Listen to this
song,’” said Kiley. “If the bit she hears
AI WEIWEI STUDIOS
Wang Fen, who has siblings living in
Wuhan. “She had a deeply emotional in-
volvement,” he said.
The hardest footage to shoot was in-
side the I.C.U., Ai said, but he could not
divulge how it was filmed. He said much
of it was done with hand-held video cam-
eras about the size of a smartphone that
are able to stabilize images. It helped, he
said, that many people were wearing
masks: That made them feel less ner-
vous about getting in trouble for speak-
ing on camera.
Ai said he amassed nearly 500 hours
of footage that he and his team cut down
to make the roughly two-hour documen-
tary.
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
GIONCARLO VALENTINE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Above, Bettye LaVette at home in New
Jersey. From far left, Brian Stokes
Mitchell, Patti Austin, Todd Rundgren,
Rob Laufer and LaVette at the 2010 Beat-
les concert that inspired her new album.
makes sense, we’ll put it in a folder. I’ve
got folders of George Jones songs, Beat-
les songs, country songs, just tons of
them.”
For LaVette, liking a song isn’t the
most important metric. “I have to find
me in it somewhere,” she said. “I’m such
an arrogant singer. When I hear your
song, if I like it, I don’t even hear you
anymore. I hear how I’m going to sing
it.”
Once LaVette chooses a song, she’s all
in. “She doesn’t take on anything she
can’t fully own,” said Joe Henry, who has
produced two of LaVette’s albums. “And
thus, there’s a really intense intimacy
that her albums offer.”
At her best, she manages to recast a
song in a way that often changes its
meaning or at least shades it differently.
When Nina Simone sang “I Hold No
Grudge,” her target was an ex-lover, but
when LaVette opens “Blackbirds” with
the song, the source of her deep well of
hurt is different.
“At this point, if a man hurt me, I’d
smother him in his sleep,” she said,
laughing. “I’m singing about the pain
I’ve suffered in this business. The ‘you’
is the music industry.”
LaVette, who remains slender and
EDGARD GARRIDO/REUTERS
Left, an I.C.U. team consulting on a case
in Wuhan, China, in “Coronation.” Above,
Ai Weiwei in Mexico City last year.
The film is available in the United
States on Alamo on Demand and in
other parts of the world on Vimeo on De-
mand. Ai said he had hoped to show it
first at a film festival, but festivals in
New York, Toronto and Venice, after
first expressing interest, turned him
down. He said that Amazon and Netflix
also rejected the movie.
He says his impression is that this
was because many of these festivals and
companies want to do business in China
and so avoid topics that might anger
Beijing, something other Chinese direc-
tors say is common.
The Venice International Film Festi-
val declined to comment, while the To-
..
feisty at 74, has a well-earned reputation
as someone who, as Henry put it, “does-
n’t suffer fools.” In conversation, she’s
chatty and punctuates many of her
thoughts with a raspy laugh. It’s easy to
read her 2012 memoir, “A Woman Like
Me,” a freewheeling, dishy marvel that
gleefully calls out those who’ve wronged
her, and wonder if her bad breaks were
less “buzzard luck” than the industry’s
predictable response to a Black woman
speaking her mind. But back then,
LaVette said, she was less bold.
“I’ve gotten more outspoken as the
years have gone by. A lot of the things
that were happening to me in terms of
racism, I didn’t speak out on them be-
cause I didn’t realize they were happen-
ing,” she said. “I was doing better than
any other Blacks I went to school with.
So when I started to want more, I real-
ized what I didn’t have and what I didn’t
get a chance to do. There’s a gene in us
that keeps us from feeling entitled, and
that’s the systemic racism. We’re on
autopilot now. We don’t even have to be
whipped. We know what to do.”
Despite the many executives,
producers and others who went out of
their way to help LaVette during her
leanest years, the prejudice she often
faced was more insidious. “Systemic
racism is when I have a record in 1969
and only Black stations can play it, and
Bobbie Gentry did the same recording
six months later and had a No. 1 record
because it was heard all over the world.”
In the time since “Blackbirds” was re-
corded last year, the project has taken
on a poignancy LaVette never envi-
sioned. The killing of George Floyd in
police custody, the widespread protests
that followed it and the heavy-handed
federal response have reminded
LaVette of the civil rights protests she
lived through in the 1960s. “I thought we
were further along than we apparently
are,” she said. “We all thought that until
this administration got in.”
Against the backdrop of the summer
of 2020, LaVette’s soaring “Blackbird”
comes across as a pained but hopeful la-
ment. Her stark take on Billie Holiday’s
“Strange Fruit” — written in 1937 about
the lynchings of African-Americans —
feels haunting and anguished. “It
sounds like they wrote it last week about
this situation,” LaVette said.
The tumult of the past few months
frightens LaVette. Back in the ’60s, she
was an unapologetic militant who occa-
sionally cooked grits for a breakfast pro-
gram run by the Black Panthers. “Mal-
colm was speaking so much more to me
than Martin was,” she said. “I wasn’t for
marching and singing and praying and
crying. Now, I’m old. I want to march
and sing and pray and cry.”
Watching millions of people rise up in
protest has at least provided her with a
measure of optimism. “This looks and
feels different,” she said. “My neighbor
sent me a note saying he was sorry. It
made me cry. I was raised with a mother
who was born on a plantation in Louisi-
ana and I felt the whole ’60s thing, but
I’ve never felt this before.”
At the moment, LaVette is anticipat-
ing the day she can leave her home with-
out fear and get back to performing. Al-
though she once longed for the super-
stardom many of her peers achieved,
her career aspirations now are more
pointed.
“I’d love to have a very big record, or
for ‘Strange Fruit’ to somehow become
some kind of social statement,” as long
as the success was “something where
there wouldn’t have to be a lot of noise
and moving about,” she said with a
sharp laugh. “I just want to look gor-
geous but stand a little stiller.”
ronto Independent Film Festival and
Amazon did not return calls or emails.
Others denied that politics played a role.
A spokeswoman for Netflix said it was
working on its own documentary about
the virus, while a press officer for the
New York Film Festival said in an email
that “we want to emphasize that politi-
cal pressures do not and have never
played a role in the festival’s curatorial
selection.”
Ai said the film points to how China’s
technocratic successes present a formi-
dable challenge to open societies. Its
brand of state capitalism has delivered
decades of fast economic growth, and
has helped raise tens of millions of peo-
ple out of absolute poverty.
“But it’s not just how efficiently you
make decisions but what you deliver to
human society,” Ai said. “China has no
answers there.”
Rather than providing the world with
a model for how to govern, China’s re-
sponse to the virus shows an increas-
ingly nervous, fragile country, he said.
In the scenes where mourners collect
ashes, for example, Ai said viewers
should note that all the people in white
suits and full personal protective gear
lurking in the background are members
of state organizations trying to make
sure that a lid is kept on the grief.
“China has this very clear view that
once you lose control, then chaos fol-
lows,” Ai said. “It has not roots to stabi-
lize itself because it has no nongovern-
mental organizations, just the govern-
ment.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Building a future with the Indigenous past
WALLAGARAUGH, AUSTRALIA
An Australian writer hopes
to cultivate the inclusion
of Aboriginal people
BY DAMIEN CAVE
Bruce Pascoe stood near the ancient
crops he has written about for years and
discussed the day’s plans with a handful
of workers. Someone needed to check on
the yam daisy seedlings. A few others
would fix up a barn or visitor housing.
Most of them were Yuin men, from the
Indigenous group that called the area
home for thousands of years, and Pas-
coe, who describes himself as “solidly
Cornish” and “solidly Aboriginal,” said
inclusion was the point. The farm he
owns on a remote hillside a day’s drive
from Sydney and Melbourne aims to
correct for colonization — to ensure that
a boom in native foods, caused in part by
his book, “Dark Emu,” does not become
yet another example of dispossession.
“I became concerned that while the
ideas were being accepted, the inclusion
of Aboriginal people in the industry was
not,” he said. “Because that’s what Aus-
tralia has found hard, including Aborigi-
nal people in anything.”
The lessons Pascoe, 72, seeks to im-
part by bringing his own essays to life —
and to dinner tables — go beyond appro-
priation. He has argued that the Indige-
nous past should be a guidebook for the
future, and the popularity of his work in
recent years points to a hunger for the
alternative he describes: a civilization
Above, Terry Hayes, a Yuin man and one of Pascoe’s team members, at work on the
farm. Below, Hayes with a handful of yam daisy seedlings.
where the land and sea are kept healthy
through cooperation, where resources
are shared with neighbors, where kind-
ness extends even to those who seek to
conquer.
“What happened in Australia was a
real high point in human development,”
he said. “We need to go back there.”
Writing, he added, can do only so much.
“Dark Emu” is where he laid out his
case. Published in 2014 and reissued
four years later, the book sparked a na-
tional reconsideration of Australian his-
tory by arguing that the continent’s first
peoples were sophisticated farmers, not
An unsung war hero
BOOK REVIEW
The Indomitable Florence Finch:
The Untold Story of a War Widow
Turned Resistance Fighter
and Savior of American POWs
By Robert J. Mrazek. 342 pp. Hachette.
$25.98.
BY TARA MCKELVEY
Luckily, Carl Engelhart kept a journal.
As a prisoner of the Japanese military
during World War II, he wrote in “a
spiral steno pad” while in a camp. The
Japanese Army had defeated the
American forces in the Philippines in
1942, and Engelhart had been taken
captive.
In this notepad, Engelhart recorded
his dreams and how he lived, as well as
the horrifying death toll around him.
As he recounts, his former secretary,
Florence Finch, smuggled money to
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roaming nomads.
Australia’s education system tended
to emphasize the struggle and pluck of
settlers. “Dark Emu” shifted the gaze,
pointing to peaceful towns and well-
tended land devastated by European
aggression and cattle grazing. In a na-
tion of 25 million people, the book has
sold more than 260,000 copies.
Pascoe admits he relied on the work of
formal historians, especially Rupert
Gerritsen, who wrote about the origins
of agriculture, and Bill Gammage,
whose well-regarded tome “The Biggest
Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made
him in the camp and helped him and
other prisoners to make it through the
war. Finch, the daughter of an Ameri-
can father and a Filipino mother, was
constantly in danger, and was eventu-
ally captured and tortured by the
Japanese. But she never caved, refus-
ing to reveal the names of the people
who worked with her. After the war,
she moved to the United States, and in
1947 was awarded the Medal of Free-
dom, the highest honor a civilian can
receive, for the way she had risked her
life to save American prisoners and
perform other acts of resistance. She
died in 2016 at the age of 101.
Robert J. Mrazek, a writer and for-
mer congressman, uses Engelhart’s
diary, together with Finch’s letters, to
construct “The Indomitable Florence
Finch,” a riveting story of courage and
sacrifice. Finch comes across as impos-
sibly good, almost saintlike. The por-
trayal seems truthful enough but
makes it tough to warm up to her.
The Wallagaraugh River from Pascoe’s farm, which is a day’s drive from Sydney or Melbourne.
Australia” (2012) tracked similar terri-
tory. Both books cited early settlers’
journals for evidence of Aboriginal
achievement. Both argued that Aborigi-
nal people managed nature in a more
systematic and scientific fashion than
most people realized, from fish traps to
grains.
What made Pascoe’s version a best
seller remains a contentious mystery.
Critics, including Andrew Bolt, a con-
servative commentator for News Corp
Australia, have accused Pascoe of seek-
ing attention and wealth by falsely
claiming to be Aboriginal while peddling
what they call an “anti-Western fan-
tasy.”
Asked by email why he’s focused on
Pascoe in around a dozen newspaper
columns since November, Bolt replied:
“Have fun talking to white man and con-
gratulating yourself on being so broad-
minded as to believe him black.”
Pascoe said “Bolty” is obsessed with
him and struggles with nuance. He’s of-
fered to buy him a beer, discuss it at the
pub and thank him: “Dark Emu” sales
have doubled since Bolt’s campaign
against Pascoe intensified.
Engelhart, however, emerges as a
vivid character, someone you root for
and feel lucky to have known — even if
only through the pages of the book.
Before the war, Engelhart gave
Finch advice: If she played hard to get
with the man she was dating, an Amer-
ican officer, he would want her even
more. During the war, Engelhart con-
tinued to provide advice. And after the
Japanese had conquered the Phil-
ippines, Finch, now a widow in her 20s,
smuggled a note into the camp asking
her former boss if he thought it would
be acceptable for her to work for the
Japanese occupiers. She was afraid
that he would see her as a collaborator,
but Engelhart told her to go ahead. He
wanted her to survive.
She started working for the Phil-
ippine Liquid Fuel Distributing Union.
Her job was to maintain ledgers and
fill out ration coupons for fuel. Almost
immediately, she began giving part of
her earnings to an underground
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANNAMARIA ANTOINETTE D’ADDARIO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
His fans argue that kind of banter ex-
emplifies why he and his book have suc-
ceeded. His voice, honed over decades
of teaching, writing fiction and poetry —
and telling stories over beers — is that of
neither an academic nor a radical. He’s a
lyrical essayist, informative and sly.
To some Aboriginal readers, he’s too
Eurocentric, with his emphasis on sed-
entary agriculture. “It is insulting that
Pascoe attempts to liken our culture to
European culture, disregarding our own
unique and complex way of life,” wrote
Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a politician in
the Northern Territory who identifies as
Warlpiri/Celtic, last year on Facebook.
To others, Pascoe opens a door to mu-
tual respect.
“He writes with such beautiful de-
scriptions that let you almost see it,”
said Penny Smallacombe, the head of In-
digenous content for Screen Australia,
which is producing a documentary ver-
sion of “Dark Emu.” “It follows Bruce
going on this journey.”
A telling example: Pascoe’s take on
early explorers like Thomas Mitchell.
He introduced Mitchell in “Dark Emu”
as “an educated and sensitive man, and
UNITED STATES COAST GUARD, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
Florence Finch.
great company.” Later, he darkened the
portrait: “His prejudice hides from him
the fact that he is a crucial agent in the
complete destruction of Aboriginal soci-
ety.”
At the farm, tugging at his long white
beard, Mr. Pascoe said he wanted to
guide more than scold, letting people
learn along with him. It’s apparently an
old habit. He grew up working-class
around Melbourne — his father was a
carpenter — and after university taught
at a school in rural Mallacoota, just
down the winding river from where he
now lives. He spent years guiding farm
kids through “The Grapes of Wrath”
while writing at night and editing a fic-
tion quarterly, “Australian Short
Stories,” with his wife Lyn Harwood.
In his 30s, he said he started to ex-
plore his heritage after recalling a child-
hood experience when an Aboriginal
neighbor yelled that she knew who his
real family was so it was no use trying to
hide. Talking to relatives and scouring
records, he found Indigenous connec-
tions on his mother and father’s side. His
publisher, Magabala, now describes him
as “a writer of Tasmanian, Bunurong
courier who delivered them to Eng-
elhart. He used the cash to bribe a
guard and to obtain “scraps of meat
and a few fish heads” — not much, but
enough to keep him alive. Later, she
aided the resistance by falsifying
records, stealing from her Japanese
bosses and diverting about 250 gallons
of fuel a week from the Japanese. She
also continued to send Engelhart
money, allowing him to buy food for
himself and others.
Malnutrition was the leading cause
of death in the camp. But other dan-
gers included shootings, beheadings
and disease. The number of casualties
was staggering. In May 1943, Mrazek
reports, Engelhart and his friends held
a memorial service in an area to the
south of the camp. The place was
called Bone Hill: Thousands of men
were buried in hastily dug graves, 40
to a plot, marked by mounds of earth
with bones sticking out. Engelhart and
the other prisoners brought wildflow-
FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020 | 15
culture
Left, Bruce Pascoe at his farm in Austral-
ia. Above, a tree there that burned and fell
down during last season’s fires.
and Yuin descent.”
“Dark Emu” followed more than two
dozen other books — fiction, poetry, chil-
dren’s tales and essay collections. Pas-
coe said he had a hunch it would be his
breakthrough, less because of his own
talent than because Australia was, as he
was, grappling with the legacy of the
past.
In 2008, a year after his book about
Australia’s colonial massacres, “Con-
vincing Ground,” Prime Minister Kevin
Rudd apologized to Indigenous people
on behalf of the government. In the
months before “Dark Emu” was pub-
lished, all of Australia seemed to be de-
bating whether Adam Goodes, an Ab-
original star who played Australian
rules football for the Sydney Swans, was
right to condemn a 13-year-old girl who
had called him an ape.
“There was just this feeling in the
country that there’s this unfinished
business,” Pascoe said. Pointing to the
protests in the United States and else-
where over racism and policing, he said
that much of the world is still trying to
dismantle a colonial ideology that in-
sisted white Christian men have domi-
nion over everything.
The deep past can help by highlight-
ing that “the way Europeans think is not
the only way to think,” he said.
Pascoe now plans to make room for a
dozen people working or visiting his 140-
acre farm. Teaming up with academics,
Aboriginal elders and his wife and his
son, Jack, who has a Ph.D. in ecology,
he’s set up Black Duck Foods to sell
what they grow.
The bush fires of last summer slowed
them all down — Pascoe spent two
weeks sleeping in his volunteer fire-
fighter gear and battling blazes — but
the small team recently completed a
harvest. Over lunch, Pascoe showed me
a container of the milled grain from the
dancing grass, shaking out the scent of a
deep tangy rye.
Out back, just behind his house, yams
were sprouting, their delicate stems
making them look like a weed — easy for
the untrained eye to overlook, in the 18th
century or the 21st.
Terry Hayes, a Yuin employee, ex-
plained that they grow underground in
bunches. “If there are five, you’ll take
four and leave the biggest one,” he said.
“So they keep growing.”
That collective mind-set is what Pas-
coe longs to cultivate. He likes to imag-
ine the first Australians who became
neighbors, sitting around a fire, dis-
cussing where to set up their homes and
how to work together.
That night, we sat on his porch and
watched the sun set. On a white plastic
table, in black marker, Pascoe had writ-
ten Yuin words for what was all around
us: jeerung, blue wren; marru, moun-
tain; googoonyella, kookaburra. It was
messy linguistics, with dirt and ash-
trays on top of the translations — an im-
provised bridge between times and peo-
ples.
Just like the Pascoe farm.
“I’d love people to come here and find
peace,” he said, shaking off the evening
chill after a long day of work that did not
involve writing. “It would give me a lot
of deep satisfaction for other people to
enjoy the land.”
ers and sang “Rock of Ages.” Then
they returned to the camp.
At some point, Engelhart was loaded
onto a ship, a vessel that sank. He and
other survivors were herded into a
Subic Bay tennis court, and while he
was there, he somehow managed to
preserve the pages of his sodden
notepad by drying them in the sun.
When Japan surrendered in 1945,
Engelhart was freed. He and his
notepad had made it through ship-
wreck and more than three years of
captivity — thanks to Finch and the
money smuggled into the camp.
Mrazek’s book is a treasure, an emi-
nently readable tribute to the wartime
heroism of one brave woman and the
astonishing endurance of one deter-
mined man.
Tara McKelvey, the author of “Monster-
ing,” a book about United States coun-
terterrorism, is a journalist with the
BBC.

16 | FRIDAY, AUGUST 28, 2020
living
There’s more to German wine than riesling
The Pour
BY ERIC ASIMOV
Plunging into German riesling is like a
great high dive into a pool of dazzling
wines — graceful, complex and utterly
delicious.
Some people gladly leap over the
edge. Others hang back, mistakenly
believing that all rieslings are sweet,
or shrinking from the supposedly
indecipherable nomenclature of Ger-
man wine labels.
Regardless of where they stand,
most consumers share the perception
that riesling represents the entirety of
German wine.
But a whole other Germany exists,
of myriad reds, rosés and whites that
make clear that riesling is only part of
that nation’s wine story. These wines
offer many of the joys that attract
riesling lovers. Best of all, they also are
often great values.
Fürst Mosel Elbling Trocken 2018 $13.96
1 liter
The Mosel is best known for its delicate, lacy
rieslings, but this wine is made of elbling, an
ancient grape that may have come to Ger-
many with the Romans. It’s planted in the
southernmost part of the Mosel Valley, near
the border with Luxembourg, which Anne
Krebiehl, in her excellent book “The Wines
of Germany,” calls “the relatively unknown
Obermosel.” This Fürst family, not to be
confused with the excellent producer Rudolf
Fürst in the Franken region, has been mak-
ing wine there since the 13th century. This
bottle is fresh and gentle, yet vibrant and
textured, refreshing and a great deal. (Willie
Glückstern Selections/Bowler Wine, New
York)
Julia Bertram Ahr Spätburgunder Hand-
werk 2017 $27.96
Here’s another interpretation of pinot noir,
from the Ahr, a narrow valley that extends
northwest from Koblenz toward Bonn.
Spätburgunder is the grape of choice there.
This one, the entry-level bottle from Julia
Bertram, a young producer born into a
winemaking family, is earthy, floral and a
touch tart, yet lively and refreshing. Try it
lightly chilled. (Schatzi Wines, Milan, N.Y.)
UPLOADED BY "What's News" vk.com/wsnws TELEGRAM: t.me/whatsnws
Yet, astoundingly, these wines are
practically unknown in the United
States except to a tiny band of import-
ers who seek them out and a small
group of aficionados who adore them.
Count me among them. Inspired by a
delicious German pinot blanc I found
for a recent 20 Under $20 column, I
shopped at Manhattan wine stores and
came up with 12 superb bottles that
demonstrate the appeal of German
wines beyond riesling.
Some of these wines might seem
familiar, like pinot noir, though they
may seem surprising to find in Ger-
many, where the grape is often called
spätburgunder.
Red wine in Germany? Pinot noir
has been there since only the 13th
century, when it was first planted
along the Rhine by Cistercian monks,
who performed the same good deed in
Burgundy.
Pinot noir frequently has struggled
to ripen in the cool German climate. It
was often lean and pale, not unattrac-
tive but without much depth or com-
plexity. But climate change, while a
Jochen Beurer Württemberg Trollinger
Trocken 2019 $21.99
Trollinger generally makes a light red wine
that goes down easily. But this is no simple
thirst-quencher even if it is eminently glug-
worthy. Though light and graceful, it still has
plenty of spicy red fruit flavor with an under-
lying note of refreshing, stony bitterness that
sends you back for another sip. It’s not
Italian (some identify trollinger more with
Italy than Germany). And it’s not what’s
typically thought of as German. But perhaps
it’s very much Württemberg, the area in
southwestern Germany where this wine was
produced. (Vom Boden, Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Roterfaden Landwein Lemberger Trocken
2017 $29.99
Germany and Austria may share a language,
but they divide on what to call one particular
grape. In general, Austria uses
blaufränkisch, which, if not familiar to many,
has at least become known. Germany
generally opts for the more obscure lem-
berger. Either way, if farmed with care and
vinified with a light touch, it makes a lovely
wine. Roterfaden, in the northern part of the
Württemberg appellation, near Stuttgart,
makes small amounts of wine, essentially by
hand. This one is bursting with fresh cherry
flavors that keep you returning to the glass.
(Vom Boden)
menace to humanity, has enhanced
German pinot noir, as have improved
farming methods and skills.
Many other grapes are making
delightful wines in Germany. They
include pinot blanc, known as weiss-
burgunder in German; blaufränkisch,
which in Germany is generally called
lemberger; silvaner, often rendered
sylvaner; and trollinger, better known
in Italian as schiava.
You’ll also find obscure grapes like
elbling and blauer portugieser, which
have no aliases of note.
“Riesling is still the benchmark in
Germany, the way Burgundy or Bor-
deaux is in France,” said Stephen
Bitterolf, whose import company, Vom
Boden, specializes in German wines,
rieslings and more. “But I think what
is happening is the realization that all
of this other stuff has a deeper value
that should be brought to the attention
of the greater public.”
It wasn’t that long ago that a great
wine homogenization seemed to be
occurring around the world. Countries
like Italy and Spain, rich with tradi-
Stein Mosel Rosé Trocken 2019 $21.99
Ulrich Stein’s wines are among the most
interesting and idiosyncratic I’ve seen from
the Mosel region. I love them. This is made
from pinot noir, along with some of the few
cabernet sauvignon and merlot vines in the
region. It’s typical of Stein’s intuition and
sense of experimentation to blend these
grapes, which have no historical basis
together, to make a rosé. This is light
enough to drink poolside in the hot sun, yet
full of flavor and character. (Vom Boden)
Schäfer-Fröhlich Nahe Pinot Noir Blanc de
Noir Trocken 2019 $31
This is white wine made of pinot noir. How
do you make white wine from a red grape, a
blanc de noir? The color-causing pigments
are contained in the skins. You make red
wine by allowing the juice to macerate for
days with the skin. If you limit the macera-
tion, you’ve got rosé. No maceration, and
the wine is white. That’s how Champagne is
made when using the red grapes pinot noir
and pinot meunier. This wine has the faint
whiff and flavor of flowers and red berries,
yet it has the texture of a white wine. It’s
vivacious and refreshing. Schäfer-Fröhlich,
by the way, is one of the Nahe region’s
foremost riesling producers. (The German
Wine Collection, Carlsbad, Calif.)
tional wines, seemed to reject their
indigenous grape varieties in favor of
internationally known grapes like
cabernet sauvignon, merlot and
chardonnay.
In the past 20 years or so, these
countries and many
Many other others — even the
United States —
grapes are have rediscovered
making the diversity of their
delightful grapes and wines,
wines in the breadth of which
Germany. now seems to be
cherished world-
wide.
Germany, though, lagged. Riesling
was always on an elevated plane, but
other grapes, for the most part, were
given the back of the market’s hand.
Mr. Bitterolf calls it a “vicious circle of
cheap wines.”
“You planted the grapes in the worst
area, farmed them badly, then you say,
‘These are terrible wines,’ ” he said.
There were exceptions, of course.
Grape growers like Stefan Vetter
sought out old vineyards of silvaner,
Kraemer Franken Silvaner 2017 $21.99
I love silvaner, a perennially underrated
grape. It can make straightforward, delight-
fully refreshing wines that are perfect for a
warm-weather lunch. Beyond that, dedi-
cated producers are exploring its potential.
Stephan Kraemer is one of those producers,
as is Stefan Vetter (see below). This bottle,
however is Mr. Kraemer’s entry-level wine,
made simply of organically grown silvaner,
fermented in steel tanks and not filtered or
clarified. It’s subtle and delicious. (A Fatboy
Selection/Super Glou, Brooklyn, N.Y.)
Dr. Heger Baden Ihringer Winklerberg
Spätburgunder 2014 $34.99
This bottle offers a chance to try a spätbur-
gunder with a little bit of age, from the 2014
vintage. I found it earthy and floral, and just
beginning to display some of the forest
underbrush flavors associated with Bur-
gundies reaching maturity. It’s nuanced,
balanced and delicious. This wine is made
from a small plot of vines on a steep, ter-
raced portion of Winklerberg, one of the
historic vineyards in the Baden region.
(Schatzi Wines)
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
for example, nursed them back to
health and then proved how good the
wines could be.
Mr. Bitterolf also cited younger wine
consumers in Germany, who were
more open to exploration, who em-
braced the notion that these grapes,
once consigned to the cheapest
shelves, could make excellent wines.
Germany also has not been un-
touched by the world’s embrace of
natural wines. One of the great
achievements of that movement has
been the resurrection of indigenous
grapes and local customs that had long
been cast aside.
Some of the bottles I found fit
squarely in the natural-wine category.
They may not have been filtered or
clarified, but they are absolutely deli-
cious.
Along with a new cast of grapes,
looking at Germany’s diversity also
requires a new look at its wine geogra-
phy beyond the quintet of prime ries-
ling regions: Mosel, Rheingau, Pfalz,
Nahe and Rheinhessen.
The wines I’ve chosen come from
2Naturkinder Kleine Heimat Landwein
2017 $24.96
As you might guess from the name of the
winery, 2Naturkinder (meaning two children
of nature), this is a natural wine, farmed
organically and made without additives.
Kleine Heimat is also made with the silvaner
grape, although in a different style than the
Kraemer. The husband-and-wife proprietors,
Michael Völker and Melanie Drese, allow the
juice of these grapes to ferment with the
skins for a week as if it were a red wine,
deriving a bit of color and structure. In other
words, it’s an orange wine, with a slightly
amber cast and a bare hint of tannin. It’s
richer and rounder than the Kraemer, lively,
refreshing and pure. (Jenny & François
Selections, New York)
Enderle & Moll Baden Pinot Noir Liaison
2018 $36.99
In a sense, Sven Enderle and Florian Moll
helped put Baden pinot noir on the map. No,
they weren’t the first producers to make
pinot noir there, but they were among the
first to capture the attention of the English-
speaking world. This wine couldn’t be more
different from other pinot noirs in this round-
up. It’s bigger, fuller, riper and richer. Yet it’s
still juicy, focused and complex. (Vom Bo-
den)
..
places like Ahr, a river valley that
stretches southeast from Bonn, and
Baden and Württemberg in the south-
west, along with some of the more
familiar regions.
Some of these producers don’t use
the names of the appellations on their
labels, preferring the generic term
Landwein, just as many excellent
producers use Vin de France in France
or Vino di Tavola in Italy. In some
cases it indicates nonconformity, or a
disdain for the bureaucracies that
decide what’s an acceptable represen-
tation of a particular appellation.
One important thing: These dozen
bottles all come from small family
producers. They will not be easy to
find. If you have access to good wine
shops, however, you may find many
other German bottles beyond riesling.
Don’t hesitate to try them. My
choices are not at all intended to be
seen as the best bottles. They are
simply 12 excellent examples of Ger-
man wines other than riesling.
Here they are, in order from least to
most expensive.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Holger Koch Spätburgunder Kaiserstuhl
2018 $25.99
As I mentioned, spätburgunder is the Ger-
man word for pinot noir. You’ll see both the
German and the French term used on Ger-
man pinot noirs, depending on the
producer’s preference. Holger and Gabriele
Koch make exquisite wines in the Baden
region. This spätburgunder is sheer, graceful
and juicy, with stony, earthy red berry flavors
that are both lip-smacking and thought-
provoking. (Super Glou)
Stefan Vetter Rosenrain Sylvaner 2016
$79.95
This wine is not for the faint of heart. The
pale amber color and a faint whiff of caramel
at first suggest that the wine might be
oxidized. But it’s absolutely not. The stony,
saline flavor is gorgeously savory, and the
wine has a tightly coiled core worthy of an
excellent young white Burgundy. The
producer, Stefan Vetter, who uses the alter-
nate spelling “sylvaner” on his labels, is
devoted to small plots of old silvaner vines in
the Franken region, often rehabilitating the
vineyards himself. Rosenrain is one such
place, where old vines are planted on a
mixture of limestone and red sandstone
soils. Sure, it’s expensive. But it’s silvaner
like few others. (Vom Boden)