Richard Tuschman is a fine art photographer, whose works has appeared on a number of book covers, ad campaigns and exhibitions. In his project, Hopper Meditations he recreated famous Edward Hopper paintings in an unconventional way.
Tuschman builds dioramas and fills them with dollhouse furniture that he purchases or builds. Then he puts figurines in to match the lighting. Then the models are photographed against a plain backdrop and the two images are made into a digital composite in Photoshop.
Why Hopper? Tuschman says: “I have always loved the way Hopper’s paintings, with an economy of means, are able to address some of the psychological mysteries and complexities of the human condition. I love the humble nature of the works and their sense of quietude. The characters’ emotional states can seem to waver paradoxically between reverie and alienation, or perhaps between longing and resignation.”
By day, the waterways between the towers are thick with city traffic. By night, glittering under the lights, they are given over to the river otters, weasels, racoons and harbour seals. Whale pods pass through. At low tide, the waters withdraw, leaving the streets slick with flotsam and every block ringed with green.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel New York 2140 foresees a world some 120 years from now in which the great coastal cities have been taken by the sea. Great chunks of Antarctica and Greenland have broken away, causing ocean levels to rise by more than 50 feet. Shanghai, London, The Hague, Miami, Rio, Alexandria, Venice and Mumbai, among many others, have been partially or wholly lost. All of lower Manhattan is under the Atlantic, and much of what remains of the oldest part of the city has become the nebulous ‘intertidal’, a region reaching north from 34th Street to Central Park, dry only at low tide.
The great metropolis has been brutally disfigured. Thousands of lives have been lost, many more disrupted, and cultural treasures washed away forever. As scientists issue ever more urgent warnings about the extent of ice shelf erosion Robinson’s novel reads less like a work of apocalyptic fiction than a straightforward description of the world to come, perhaps the most forensic we have.
And yet, in the end, it is a story of hope. Robinson’s New York has been devastated, but it is still New York. A complex civilisation survives here, and even thrives, after the flood. The submerged city – the ‘SuperVenice’ – has acquired a sublime strangeness, a mesh of crowded, waterways, skywalks, floating villages, platforms and moorings in which vibrant new communities have worked out eclectic new modes of life.
Twenty-second century Lower Manhattan has become ‘a veritable hotbed of theory and practice, like it always used to say it was, but this time for real.’1 The challenge of adapting to life in the intertidal has inspired ‘a proliferation of cooperatives, neighbourhood associations, communes, squats, barter, alternative currencies, gift economies, solar usufruct, fishing village cultures, mondragons, unions, Davy’s locker freemasonries, anarchist blather, and submarine technoculture’.2
An opportunity for disaster capitalism looms as the predatory financial sector uptown tries to forcibly acquire the area to make way for gentrification. But it is too late: the freewheeling new communities have caught the city’s imagination, and they, rather than the ways of the old elites, set the template for New York’s future.
Weatherbeaten utopias
Robinson’s insistence, through a career spanning more than 30 years, that human ingenuity can open up compelling new forms of life in and against the harshest circumstances and environments, makes him one of the most consistently interesting radical writers working today in any genre. He shares a certain robust, weatherbeaten utopianism with his former teacher and colleague, the late Ursula Le Guin, another major science fiction writer who never lost faith in our capacity to use our collective intelligence and technological prowess to transcend limiting orthodoxies and open up new horizons.
In one of the best of the many fine tributes written after her death earlier this year, Jasper Bernes nominated Le Guin’s classic story of a realised utopia, The Dispossessed (1974), as ‘the most convincing portrait of communism in all of literature, a communism that is not only plausible but plausibly improvable’. Life on the desert moon of Anarres is tough: a day-to-day struggle with a pinched, parched planet, functional but flawed democratic and administrative structures, and the everyday arguments, jealousies, frustrations and heartbreaks that go with any human community.
And yet, here, there is universal access to food, shelter and community. There is no wage labour: beyond the few hours of communal service everyone must do to maintain the society’s basic functions, the Anarresti are free to pursue their particular passions, vocations and pastimes. Education, art, sport and other activities undertaken for their own sake flourish. There is gender and racial equality. Childcare is a shared duty and pleasure. In brief: Anarres is an achieved postcapitalist society, a robust federation of egalitarian communes in the tradition of Peter Kropotkin or Murray Bookchin. Le Guin’s humdrum, everyday anarchist confederation is believable precisely because it is imperfect.
In his own reflection on Le Guin, Robinson remembers ‘staying up all night to finish her novel The Dispossessed, and feeling afterward electrified by all the possibilities it opened up concerning how the utopian novel could work. I’ve been mining that vein ever since.’ And the work for which he is best known, the Red Mars trilogy (1992 to 1996), follows Le Guin in following the struggles of settlers on a barren world to establish fresh and more fulfilling ways of life than those they had left behind on their mother planet.
The series remains one of the most exhaustive exercises in worldbuilding in science fiction, drawing – in the course of more than two thousand pages – on geology, engineering, architecture, design, physics, biology, chemistry, philosophy, theology, sociology, economics and political theory to tell the story of the settlement of Mars, from the touchdown of the ‘First Hundred’ settlers, to the development of a dense network of cities and the commencement of the terraforming of the planet.
It is also, as the title intimates, an unashamedly socialist work. Fredric Jameson, another of Robinson’ teachers, gave Red Mars a prominent place in his influential study of Marxist utopian literature, Archaeologies of the Future (2005). But McKenzie Wark’s Molecular Red (2015) offers perhaps the most precise reading of Robinson’s influences, revealing the extent to which the author intended the trilogy to be read as a successor to one of the founding works of Soviet science fiction, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908).
Bogdanov, who at the time of the book’s writing vied with Lenin for the intellectual leadership of the Bolsheviks, was less concerned with developing strategies for seizing the state than considering how a post-revolutionary society should organise itself. Bogdanov’s thought significantly influenced Proletkult, the movement to develop a post-revolutionary culture that briefly flourished in the early Soviet Union.
Bogdanov turned to science fiction to give himself the intellectual freedom and imaginative space to think through the challenges a workers’ state would face in consolidating its gains and sustaining itself beyond revolution. Red Star imagines a technologically advanced Martian civilisation where capitalism has long been transcended by a kind of proto cyber-communism, an automated economy in which production is planned by powerful calculating machines. The Martians live in a state of communal luxury, devoting their time to science, education, and the arts.
But it is a utopia shadowed by looming ecological crisis. Their planet, smaller and less fecund than the Earth, was depleted of most of its resources during its capitalist era, forcing the Martians to look to other worlds for survival (their socialist sensibilities preclude a Wellsian invasion of the Earth). For Bogdanov, the transition from capitalism to socialism can only ever be the first step in the endless process of building and sustaining a new society: the struggle against nature continues as it always had and always will.
That elemental struggle between labour and recalcitrant nature also runs through Red Mars. Indeed, one of the first volume’s central characters – a charismatic Russian engineer named after Robinson’s predecessor – is a figure straight out of Proletkult.
Arkady Bogdanov, one of the First Hundred, takes the lead in emboldening his fellow pioneers to organise their new world according to democratic and economic principles that move beyond those entrenched on Earth. Arkady wants forms of organising work that will allow it to transcend its alienation in wage labour. The most advanced forms of collaborative labour humanity has devised, such as a scientific community pursuing research for its own sake, should be the template for the whole of society. For Arkady, the research institute is ‘a little model of prehistoric utopia, carved out of the international money economy by clever primates who want to live well’ allowing focus ‘on the real work, which means everything that is done to stay alive, or make things, or satisfy our curiosity, or play.’3
And as the first Martians come to realise and relish the extent of their agency, new settlements are established that break with capitalist logics. Many, following Arkady’s influence, are based on the ideals that energised pioneering socialist systems back on Earth: Mondragon co-operatives, Yugoslav self-management, Israeli kibbutzim. It soon becomes possible, as Wark puts it, to travel ‘between the underground enclaves – Gramsci, Fourier, Mauss-Hyde, Bogdanov-Visniak, Cole, Bellamy, Proudhon – as if on a caravan across the folds of the critical utopian archive.’4 Others take a more mystical turn. There are Sufi and Buddhist communities, and some that worship the ‘holy greening power’5 that brings life to the planet when the terraforming process begins.
Robinson’s vibrant, riotous new world settles into a federation of city-states regulated by a convention enshrining principles not unlike those of Le Guin’s anarcho-communism: ‘[E]veryone’s work is their own, and the worth of it cannot be taken away … the various modes of production belong to those who created them, and to the common good of the future generations … the world is something we all steward together.’6
The pull of the moon
The shock of the new – an encounter with an alien world that extends our sense of possibility – also drives Robinson’s latest novel Red Moon (2018), set 30 years into a future in which China has taken the lead in a resurgent space race. After the late President Xi Jinping prioritised lunar colonisation as an objective of the ‘China Dream’ programme at the 2022 People’s Congress, China has established a thick complex of bases with access to the precious reserves of lunar ice around the moon’s southern pole. Meanwhile, the US and a handful of other nations have established a tentative foothold in the northern hemisphere.
By 2048, the Chinese and US governments still maintain control over most of the moon’s emerging infrastructure, but here and there new settlements have been planted – tucked into crater rims, under mountain ranges or in ancient lava tunnels deep below the surface – allowing for open-ended technological, economic, political and cultural experimentation.
At this early stage in the colonisation process, these settlements are little more than playthings of the rich, funded by maverick billionaires and accessible only to wealthy futurists. But like so much tech utopianism, the new communities fascinate as well as infuriate. The most intriguing is ‘the free crater’, a domed town that exploits lunar gravity to indulge in cyber-utopianism’s wildest excesses, becoming a kind of celestial Google complex run wild. The crater is aerated and heated, lit by mirrors and floodlights set around the rim. Hundreds of platforms are suspended from the top of the dome, and plinths support houses, pod dwellings, and open floors, all connected by rope ladders, trapezes and catwalks. Inhabitants navigate the space by swinging or leaping from one platform to the next, their passage eased by near zero-gravity and the security of netting below.
The community is organised as ‘a documented anarchy’7, its activities and decisions recorded to a blockchain distributed ledger. One member enthuses that ‘their daily work in the crater was to build its infrastructure and its social system, and to make it beautiful. Life as art, the world as a poem – a poem about flying’.8
And everyone is welcome – provided they have the money. But new things are happening here. One of Red Moon’s most colourful scenes imagines a zero-gravity performance of Philip Glass’s propulsive opera Satyagraha, at which the concert-goers grasp ‘handholds like subway straps at the ends of long lines extending from a central spinner’, and are ‘cast like dandelion seeds’9 as they let go at key points in the score, creating a complex of flying dancers. The lunar environment facilitates an odd, compelling new collaborative art.
As in Red Mars, a humanity’s encounter with a new world fascinates and unsettles the billions watching below. As China, the US, and their maverick elites play with fresh possibilities elsewhere, the political and economic constructs they insist upon back on Earth are destabilised, revealed as the contingent arrangements they always were. China’s vast migrant populations march on Beijing to protest the registration system that gives them no legal status when they travel from their place of birth to look for work. In the US, millions pull their money from an over-leveraged financial sector, which is finally taken into public control as the condition for yet another government bailout.
Engineered ecologies
Red Moon engages with another of Robinson’s fundamental concerns: the use of technology to re-engineer nature for human ends. Though well-known for his love of the natural world – Robinson famously writes outside whatever the weather – and recognised for his environmental activism, he has consistently advocated limited use of geoengineering as one means of mitigating the effects of irreversible climate change. In one interview, Robinson argued that ‘there is a bad tendency among some leftists to conflate science with capitalism. They are not the same. I am against capitalism, I am for science … We need to choose to put science, technology, engineering and medicine to good human and biosphere work, rather than let it be bought to serve profit for the few most wealthy.’
In other words, he favours doing what works. Red Moon makes repeated approving references to China’s pragmatic, eclectic energy policy, with its massive land restoration programmes and selective use of nuclear power. Flying over the hills west of Beijing, one character observes how ‘a town of nuclear plants lofted thick plumes of steam at the sky, marking a cold but humid day. The solar power arrays surrounding the nuclear plants were mostly mirror fields that reflected sunlight to central heating elements, so as the jet flew over them, broad curves of diamond light sparked in his vision at the same speed as their flight … The hills farther on were cloaked with thick dark green forests. Ta Shu could remember when dropping into Beijing had looked like a descent into hell, the hillsides all cut to shreds and eroded to bedrock, the streams brown, the air black … That forest was a living result of human knowledge.’10
And in New York 2140, the leader of a desperate project to save a colony of polar bears by moving them from the disintegrating Arctic to the Antarctic explodes with rage when the effort is sabotaged by fundamentalist conservationists: ‘So now there’s a group claiming to be defending the purity of Antarctica. The last pure place, they call it. The world’s national park, they call it. Well, no. It’s none of those things. It’s the land at the South Pole, a little round continent in an odd position. It’s nice but it’s no more pure or sacred than anywhere else …There were beech forests there once, there were dinosaurs and ferns, there were fucking jungles there. There will be again someday. Meanwhile, if that island can serve as a home to keep the polar bears from going extinct, then that’s what it should be.’11
For Robinson, there is no pristine wilderness. Life survives through relentless adaptation. But the cautious planetary engineering he advocates is closer in spirit to Fabian technocracy than Soviet prometheanism. Indeed, the Red Mars series offers perhaps the most exhaustive account in literature of the process of transforming another world, and the ethical questions it raises.
The fundamental ideological divide running through all three novels pitches the quietist ‘Reds’, for whom the ancient character of another world is sacrosanct, against the radical ‘Greens’, for whom the imperative to open new spaces for life commands its transformation. After intense intellectual – and often physical – conflict, the Greens prevail. But the long, hard business of terraforming a dry, dead planet proves an unfathomable process, beyond what even their most extreme ecological projections had projected.
As Mars stirs from its immemorial slumber, the planet threatens to overcome its awakeners: superstorms rage, mountain ranges collapse, seas overflow their ancient channels and wash gleaming new domed cities away. The chief architect of the terraforming process is humbled: ‘There’s all kinds of invasions going on. Population surges, sudden die-offs. All over. Things in disequilibrium. Upsetting balances we didn’t even know existed. Things we don’t understand.’12
Building new – and lasting – worlds
Like Bogdanov’s Red Star, Robinson’s Red Mars proves the harshest of laboratories. The new world offers a space where bold new ways of life have the space to develop, but they must be carved painstakingly out of the ancient planet’s cold, stubborn rock.
His work is suffused with images of civilisation’s fragility in the face of an irresistible, indifferent nature. New York 2140 depicts a great city positioned precariously at the edge of a monstrous, careless ocean. Sometimes winter ‘comes barreling down from the Arctic and slams into New York and suddenly it looks like Warsaw or Moscow or Novosibirsk, the skyscrapers a portrait in socialist realism, grim and heroic, holding blackly upright against the storm, like pillars between the ground and the scudding low clouds.’13 In summer, there are days ‘when thunderheads solid as marble rise up until even the superscrapers look small, and the black anvil bottoms of these seventy-thousand-foot marvels dump raindrops fat as dinner plates’.14
For Bogdanov and Robinson, transcending capitalist relations is a necessary but wholly insufficient condition for prising open a space in the universe where the human ’species-being’ can find its fulfilment. Nature will always be waiting on the other side of capitalism. The construction of utopia is an engineering project without a completion date.
And yet, for Robinson it is a necessary project. He wrote recently that one way ‘of being anti-anti-utopian is to be utopian. It’s crucial to keep imagining that things could get better, and furthermore to imagine how they might get better … we have to do this work no matter how we feel about it. So by force of will or the sheer default of emergency we make ourselves have utopian thoughts and ideas.’
Robinson’s work stands against science fiction’s tendency to wallow in dystopia, or indulge in the fantasy of escape to other, kinder worlds. One of his most provocative novels, Aurora (2015), challenges a cherished assumption of the sci-fi tradition: that humanity will one day find a home among the stars. Robinson’s interstellar travellers find that perhaps the stars are not our destination – they are simply too far away. Our Earth, and perhaps in not too many years, the wider solar system, is where we must make our home, the expansive but, ultimately, limited environment within which we must fashion better ways of life, or not at all. If we continue to trash our own planet, we face extinction or an attenuated life elsewhere, finding a foothold on one of the solar system’s inhospitable worlds, or some space colony floating endlessly through the void.
Robinson captures the thought in one of Red Moon’s eeriest scenes, as two old men stand on a dead world looking back on Earth’s rise above a curve of lunar hills: ‘So far from home. Vivid blue, the colour of water, the colour of breath. The cosmic yin-yang symbol enveloping that blue line was by contrast so obviously dead. They were looking from death toward life, like ghosts trying to figure out what they should have done when they were in the world.’15
It is hard to figure that out as 2019 begins, a year that is likely to join its four predecessors as one of the hottest on record. We enter it with the starkest warnings we have yet received from the international scientific community about the consequences of failing to take meaningful action against climate change.
Indeed, we find ourselves at a very Robinsonian conjuncture, as human ingenuity is demonstrated against a background of grave ecological crisis. For Robinson, the pragmatic utopian, there is always a way forward, always a way to use our knowledge for the collective good. Perhaps, unlike his waterlogged New Yorkers, or interplanetary travellers, we won’t wait until our cities are flooded, or the prospect of conquering new worlds seems easier than trying to fix this one, before we make the effort to employ our hard-won knowledge wisely.
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York, Orbit, 2017, p.209 ↩
Kim Stanley Robinson, New York, Orbit, 2017, p.209 ↩
Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars, New York: Bantam Books, 1993, p.89 ↩
Morris Dees, shown in 2011, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971. The anti-extremist legal group, which is facing workplace complaints from women and people of color, gave no official reason for his departure.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has fired its famed co-founder, Morris Dees, over unspecified misconduct, the nonprofit announced Thursday, a stunning development at an organization that became a bedrock of anti-extremism research and activism under nearly half a century of Dees’ leadership.
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While the organization’s leadership did not disclose the reason for Dees’ departure, staff at its headquarters in Montgomery, Ala., were told in an internal email that “although he made unparalleled contributions to our work, no one’s contributions can excuse that person’s inappropriate conduct.”
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The Times has also learned that the organization, whose leadership is predominantly white, has been wrestling with complaints of workplace mistreatment of women and people of color. It was not immediately clear whether those issues were connected to the firing of Dees, who is 82.
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Also Thursday, employees sent correspondence to management demanding reforms, expressing concerns about the resignation last week of a highly respected black attorney at the organization and criticizing the organization’s work culture.
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A letter signed by about two dozen employees — and sent to management and the board of directors before news broke of Dees’ firing — said they were concerned that internal “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism threaten the moral authority of this organization and our integrity along with it.”
In a public statement, Richard Cohen, president of the SPLC, announced that an outside organization would be hired immediately “to conduct a comprehensive assessment of our internal climate and workplace practices, to ensure that our talented staff is working in the environment that they deserve — one in which all voices are heard and all staff members are respected.”
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Dees co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 and gained fame by suing members of the Ku Klux Klan, which resulted in the anti-hate organization’s offices being firebombed in 1983.
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The son of a white tenant farmer in Alabama, he cut a swashbuckling figure as a Klan-busting attorney in the Deep South, drawing scorn in some mainstream corners for his showmanship and his prodigious fundraising abilities, which he had honed in his previous life as a millionaire direct-mail marketer.
His 1991 autobiography “reads like a treatment for a Hollywood epic,” The Times wrote in a review at the time.
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In less mainstream corners, Dees’ name is loathed by white nationalists and other far-right groups that have been targeted in lawsuits or published research by the Southern Poverty Law Center’s staff of lawyers, analysts and undercover operatives. In recent years, some conservatives have accused the center of casting too wide a net in defining what is a “hate” group.
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In his statement about Dees, Cohen wrote: “As a civil rights organization, the SPLC is committed to ensuring that the conduct of our staff reflects the mission of the organization and the values we hope to instill in the world. When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.”
Asked about the nature of Dees’ alleged misconduct, a spokesman for the organization said in an email: “We can’t comment on the details of individual personnel decisions.”
In an interview Thursday, Dees told the Montgomery Advertiser: “It was not my decision, what they did. I wish the center the absolute best. Whatever reasons they had of theirs, I don’t know.”
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Lower-level staff members were caught off guard by Dees’ firing, which was announced internally in an email and a conference call Thursday morning.
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Dees was not a regular presence for low-level staff at the organization’s sleek, modern downtown Montgomery headquarters, whose lobby contains remains from the firebombing as a memento and which is guarded by security staff.
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In recent years, according to the center’s internal email to staff, Dees’ role has been focused on “donor relations” — expanding the Southern Poverty Law Center’s financial resources, which nearly totaled half a billion dollars in assets in 2017, according to the group’s most recently available public financial disclosures.
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The center’s war chest vastly overshadows the minuscule financial resources that some far-right groups are capable of assembling, making it a frequent target for criticism, though the organization has also expanded its efforts to support more traditional civil liberties litigation, including fighting for better prison conditions.
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Dees has not been involved in the liberal-leaning organization’s “programmatic initiatives,” such as the Hatewatch blog. Cohen is the top leader most often featured and interviewed in the press as the organization has geared up to face a far-right movement that has grown energized in recent years. (Cohen did not respond to requests for further comment.)
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Over his more than 40 years at the Southern Poverty Law Center, Dees formed coalitions with major civil rights groups, including the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People, and his departure took some civil rights leaders by surprise.
“Wow, that is a shocker to me,” said Benard Simelton, president of the Alabama NAACP chapter. “We don’t have a comment until we see what this is about.”
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Simelton’s organization has frequently teamed with the Southern Poverty Law Center on civil rights lawsuits. The center has faced complaints in the past that it does not employ enough black staffers. In an internal email to the organization’s legal department announcing her departure last Friday, a black attorney suggested the center needed to create a more inclusive work environment.
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“As a woman of color, the experiences of staff of color and female staff have been particularly important to me … and we recognize that there is more work to do in the legal department and across the organization to ensure that SPLC is a place where everyone is heard and respected and where the values we are committed to pursuing externally are also being practiced internally,” she wrote.
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The Times is not identifying the attorney because she could not immediately be reached to confirm the authorship of the message. The center’s leaders forwarded the attorney’s email to the rest of the center’s staff, saying that they were “grateful” for her work and that she “raised important issues of gender and race — issues that the leadership of SPLC is committed to addressing in an honest and forthright manner,” including additional training for management for “racial equity, inclusion and results.”
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“We’ll be soliciting additional ideas from across the organization on how we can be more diverse, equitable and inclusive,” the managers’ email said. It was signed by Cohen and the organization’s legal director and director of human resources.
Stephen Bright, a Yale law professor and former director of the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, has long questioned what he calls the center’s “fraudulent” fundraising.
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“The chickens have had a very long trip, but they finally came home to roost,” Bright said.
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“Morris is a flimflam man and he’s managed to flimflam his way along for many years raising money by telling people about the Ku Klux Klan and hate groups,” he said. “He sort of goes to whatever will sell and has, of course, brought in millions and millions and millions of dollars.” While the SPLC funded some good work, Bright said, he had long heard complaints about race discrimination and sexual harassment from the center’s former attorneys and interns.
“It’s remarkable,” he said, “how many people who have worked at the center have not spoken very well of the center after they left.”
Times staff writer Jenny Jarvie in Atlanta and Jaweed Kaleem in Los Angeles contributed to this report.
The firing of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the S.P.L.C., has flushed up uncomfortable questions that have surrounded the organization for years.
In the days since the stunning dismissal of Morris Dees, the co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on March 14th, I’ve been thinking about the jokes my S.P.L.C. colleagues and I used to tell to keep ourselves sane. Walking to lunch past the center’s Maya Lin–designed memorial to civil-rights martyrs, we’d cast a glance at the inscription from Martin Luther King, Jr., etched into the black marble—“Until justice rolls down like waters”—and intone, in our deepest voices, “Until justice rolls down like dollars.” The Law Center had a way of turning idealists into cynics; like most liberals, our view of the S.P.L.C. before we arrived had been shaped by its oft-cited listings of U.S. hate groups, its reputation for winning cases against the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations, and its stream of direct-mail pleas for money to keep the good work going. The mailers, in particular, painted a vivid picture of a scrappy band of intrepid attorneys and hate-group monitors, working under constant threat of death to fight hatred and injustice in the deepest heart of Dixie. When the S.P.L.C. hired me as a writer, in 2001, I figured I knew what to expect: long hours working with humble resources and a highly diverse bunch of super-dedicated colleagues. I felt self-righteous about the work before I’d even begun it.
The first surprise was the office itself. On a hill in downtown Montgomery, down the street from both Jefferson Davis’s Confederate White House and the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where M.L.K. preached and organized, the center had recently built a massive modernist glass-and-steel structure that the social critic James Howard Kunstler would later liken to a “Darth Vader building” that made social justice “look despotic.” It was a cold place inside, too. The entrance was through an underground bunker, past multiple layers of human and electronic security. Cameras were everywhere in the open-plan office, which made me feel like a Pentagon staffer, both secure and insecure at once. But nothing was more uncomfortable than the racial dynamic that quickly became apparent: a fair number of what was then about a hundred employees were African-American, but almost all of them were administrative and support staff—“the help,” one of my black colleagues said pointedly. The “professional staff”—the lawyers, researchers, educators, public-relations officers, and fund-raisers—were almost exclusively white. Just two staffers, including me, were openly gay.
During my first few weeks, a friendly new co-worker couldn’t help laughing at my bewilderment. “Well, honey, welcome to the Poverty Palace,” she said. “I can guaran-damn-tee that you will never step foot in a more contradictory place as long as you live.”
“Everything feels so out of whack,” I said. “Where are the lawyers? Where’s the diversity? What in God’s name is going on here?”
“And you call yourself a journalist!” she said, laughing again. “Clearly you didn’t do your research.”
In the decade or so before I’d arrived, the center’s reputation as a beacon of justice had taken some hits from reporters who’d peered behind the façade. In 1995, the Montgomery Advertiser had been a Pulitzer finalist for a series that documented, among other things, staffers’ allegations of racial discrimination within the organization. In Harper’s, Ken Silverstein had revealed that the center had accumulated an endowment topping a hundred and twenty million dollars while paying lavish salaries to its highest-ranking staffers and spending far less than most nonprofit groups on the work that it claimed to do. The great Southern journalist John Egerton, writing for The Progressive, had painted a damning portrait of Dees, the center’s longtime mastermind, as a “super-salesman and master fundraiser” who viewed civil-rights work mainly as a marketing tool for bilking gullible Northern liberals. “We just run our business like a business,” Dees told Egerton. “Whether you’re selling cakes or causes, it’s all the same.”
Co-workers stealthily passed along these articles to me—it was a rite of passage for new staffers, a cautionary heads-up about what we’d stepped into with our noble intentions. Incoming female staffers were additionally warned by their new colleagues about Dees’s reputation for hitting on young women. And the unchecked power of the lavishly compensated white men at the top of the organization—Dees and the center’s president, Richard Cohen—made staffers pessimistic that any of these issues would ever be addressed. “I expected there’d be a lot of creative bickering, a sort of democratic free-for-all,” my friend Brian, a journalist who came aboard a year after me, said one day. “But everybody is so deferential to Morris and Richard. It’s like a fucking monarchy around here.” The work could be meaningful and gratifying. But it was hard, for many of us, not to feel like we’d become pawns in what was, in many respects, a highly profitable scam.
For the many former staffers who have come and gone through the center’s doors—I left in 2004—the queasy feelings came rushing back last week, when the news broke that Dees, now eighty-two, had been fired. The official statement sent by Cohen, who took control of the S.P.L.C. in 2003, didn’t specify why Dees had been dismissed, but it contained some broad hints. “We’re committed to ensuring that our workplace embodies the values we espouse—truth, justice, equity, and inclusion,” Cohen wrote. “When one of our own fails to meet those standards, no matter his or her role in the organization, we take it seriously and must take appropriate action.” Dees’s profile was immediately erased from the S.P.L.C.’s Web site—amazing, considering that he had remained, to the end, the main face and voice of the center, his signature on most of the direct-mail appeals that didn’t come from celebrity supporters, such as the author Toni Morrison.
While right-wingers tweeted gleefully about the demise of a figure they’d long vilified—“Hate group founder has been fired by his hate group,” the alt-right provocateur Mike Cernovich chirped—S.P.L.C. alums immediately reconnected with one another, buzzing about what might have happened and puzzling over the timing, sixteen years after Dees handed the reins to Cohen and went into semi-retirement. “I guess there’s nothing like a funeral to bring families back together,” another former writer at the center said, speculating about what might have prompted the move. “It could be racial, sexual, financial—that place was a virtual buffet of injustices,” she said. Why would they fire him now?
One day later, the Los Angeles Times and the Alabama Political Reporter reported that Dees’s ouster had come amid a staff revolt over the mistreatment of nonwhite and female staffers, which was sparked by the resignation of the senior attorney Meredith Horton, the highest-ranking African-American woman at the center. A number of staffers subsequently signed onto two letters of protest to the center’s leadership, alleging that multiple reports of sexual harassment by Dees through the years had been ignored or covered up, and sometimes resulted in retaliation against the women making the claims. (Dees denied the allegations, telling a reporter, “I don’t know who you’re talking to or talking about, but that is not right.”)
The staffers wrote that Dees’s firing was welcome but insufficient: their larger concern, they emphasized, was a widespread pattern of racial and gender discrimination by the center’s current leadership, stretching back many years. (The S.P.L.C. has since appointed Tina Tchen, a former chief of staff for Michelle Obama, to conduct a review of its workplace environment.) If Cohen and other senior leaders thought that they could shunt the blame, the riled-up staffers seem determined to prove them wrong. One of my former female colleagues told me that she didn’t want to go into details of her harassment for this story, because she believes the focus should be on the S.P.L.C.’s current leadership. “I just gotta hope your piece helps keep the momentum for change going,” she said. Stephen Bright, a Yale professor and longtime S.P.L.C. critic, told me, “These chickens took a very long flight before they came home to roost.” The question, for current and former staffers alike, is how many chickens will come to justice before this long-overdue reckoning is complete.
The controversy erupted at a moment when the S.P.L.C. had never been more prominent, or more profitable. Donald Trump’s Presidency opened up a gusher of donations; after raising fifty million dollars in 2016, the center took in a hundred and thirty-two million dollars in 2017, much of it coming after the violent spectacle that unfolded at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that August. George and Amal Clooney’s justice foundation donated a million, as did Apple, which also added a donation button for the S.P.L.C. to its iTunes store. JPMorgan chipped in five hundred thousand dollars. The new money pushed the center’s endowment past four hundred and fifty million dollars, which is more than the total assets of the American Civil Liberties Union, and it now employs an all-time high of around three hundred and fifty staffers. But none of that has slackened its constant drive for more money. “If you’re outraged about the path President Trump is taking, I urge you to join us in the fight against the mainstreaming of hate,” a direct-mail appeal signed by Dees last year read. “Please join our fight today with a gift of $25, $35, or $100 to help us. Working together, we can push back against these bigots.”
In 1971, when the center opened, Dees was already a colorful and controversial figure in Alabama. While studying law at the University of Alabama, in the late nineteen-fifties, “Dees sold holly wreaths and birthday cakes, published a student telephone directory, dabbled in real estate,” Egerton wrote. He also worked for George Wallace’s first, unsuccessful bid for governor, in 1958. Upon graduating, in 1960, Dees teamed up with another ambitious student, Millard Fuller, who’d go on to found Habitat for Humanity. They opened a direct-mail business in Montgomery, selling doormats, tractor-seat cushions, and cookbooks. “Morris and I, from the first day of our partnership, shared the overriding purpose of making a pile of money,” Fuller would later recall. “We were not particular about how we did it.” While running their business, the two also practiced law. In 1961, they defended one of the men charged with beating up Freedom Riders at a bus terminal in Montgomery. According to Fuller, “Our fee was paid by the Klan and the White Citizens’ Council.”
In the late sixties, Dees sold the direct-mail operation to the Times Mirror Company, of Los Angeles, reportedly for between six and seven million dollars. But he soon sniffed out a new avenue for his marketing genius. In 1969, he successfully sued to integrate the local Y.M.C.A., after two black children were turned away from summer camp. Two years later, he co-founded the Law Center, with another Montgomery attorney, Joe Levin, Jr. He volunteered to raise money for George McGovern’s Presidential campaign, and, with McGovern’s blessing, used its donor list of seven hundred thousand people to help launch the S.P.L.C.’s direct-mail operations. The center won some big cases early on, including a lawsuit that forced the Alabama legislature to divide into single-member districts, insuring the election of the state’s first African-American lawmakers since Reconstruction. In 1975, the S.P.L.C. started a defense fund for Joan Little, a black prisoner in North Carolina who’d stabbed to death a jailer who attempted to rape her; the case became a national sensation and drew attention to the intrepid little operation in Montgomery. Dees, of course, had already positioned the Law Center to capitalize on the positive press.
A decade or so later, the center began to abandon poverty law—representing death-row defendants and others who lacked the means to hire proper representation—to focus on taking down the Ku Klux Klan. This was a seemingly odd mission, given that the Klan, which had millions of members in the nineteen-twenties, was mostly a spent force by the mid-eighties, with only an estimated ten thousand members scattered across the country. But “Dees saw the Klan as a perfect target,” Egerton wrote. For millions of Americans, the K.K.K. still personified violent white supremacy in America, and Dees “perceived chinks in the Klan’s armor: poverty and poor education in its ranks, competitive squabbling among the leaders, scattered and disunited factions, undisciplined behavior, limited funds, few if any good lawyers.” Along with legal challenges to what was left of the Klan, the center launched Klanwatch, which monitored the group’s activities. Klanwatch was the seed for what became the broader-based Intelligence Project, which tracks extremists and produces the S.P.L.C.’s annual hate-group list.
The only thing easier than beating the Klan in court—“like shooting fish in a barrel,” one of Dees’s associates told Egerton—was raising money off Klan-fighting from liberals up north, who still had fresh visions of the violent confrontations of the sixties in their heads. The S.P.L.C. got a huge publicity boost in July, 1983, when three Klansmen firebombed its headquarters. A melted clock from the burned-down building, stuck at 3:47 A.M., is featured in the main lobby of the Montgomery office today. In 1987, the center won a landmark seven-million-dollar damage judgment against the Klan; a decade later, in 1998, it scored a thirty-eight-million-dollar judgment against Klansmen who burned down a black church in South Carolina. With those victories, Dees claimed the right to boast into perpetuity that the S.P.L.C. had effectively “shut down” the K.K.K.
By the time I touched down in Montgomery, the center had increased its staff and branched out considerably—adding an educational component called Teaching Tolerance and expanding its legal and intelligence operations to target a broad range of right-wing groups and injustices—but the basic formula perfected in the eighties remained the same. The annual hate-group list, which in 2018 included a thousand and twenty organizations, both small and large, remains a valuable resource for journalists and a masterstroke of Dees’s marketing talents; every year, when the center publishes it, mainstream outlets write about the “rising tide of hate” discovered by the S.P.L.C.’s researchers, and reporters frequently refer to the list when they write about the groups. As critics have long pointed out, however, the hate-group designations also drive attention to the extremists. Many groups, including the religious-right Family Research Council and the Alliance Defending Freedom, raise considerable money by decrying the S.P.L.C.’s “attacks.”
In recent years, the center has broadened its legal work, returning to some poverty law; around eighty attorneys now work in five Southern states, challenging, among other things, penal juvenile-justice systems and draconian anti-immigration laws. But the center continues to take in far more than it spends. And it still tends to emphasize splashy cases that are sure to draw national attention. The most notable, when I was there, was a lawsuit to remove a Ten Commandments monument that was brazenly placed in the main lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court building, just across the street from S.P.L.C. headquarters, by Roy Moore, who was then the state’s chief justice. Like the S.P.L.C.’s well-publicized 2017 lawsuit against Andrew Anglin, the neo-Nazi publisher of the Daily Stormer, it was a vintage example of the center’s central strategy: taking on cases guaranteed to make headlines and inflame the far right while demonstrating to potential donors that the center has not only all the right enemies but also the grit and know-how to take them down.
These days, whenever I tell people in New York or Washington, D.C., that I used to work at the Southern Poverty Law Center, their eyes tend to light up. “Oh, wow, what was that like?” they’ll ask. Sometimes, depending on my mood, I’ll regale them with stories about the reporting I did there—exposing anti-immigration extremists on the Arizona-Mexico border, tracking down a wave of anti-transgender hate crimes, writing a comprehensive history of the religious right’s war on gays. But then, considering whether to explain what an unsettling experience it could be, I’ll add, “It’s complicated, though,” and try to change the subject.
For those of us who’ve worked in the Poverty Palace, putting it all into perspective isn’t easy, even to ourselves. We were working with a group of dedicated and talented people, fighting all kinds of good fights, making life miserable for the bad guys. And yet, all the time, dark shadows hung over everything: the racial and gender disparities, the whispers about sexual harassment, the abuses that stemmed from the top-down management, and the guilt you couldn’t help feeling about the legions of donors who believed that their money was being used, faithfully and well, to do the Lord’s work in the heart of Dixie. We were part of the con, and we knew it.
Outside of work, we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about the oppressive security regime, the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, “hate” always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. “The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,” we’d say.
It wasn’t funny then. At this moment, it seems even grimmer. The firing of Dees has flushed up all the uncomfortable questions again. Were we complicit, by taking our paychecks and staying silent, in ripping off donors on behalf of an organization that never lived up to the values it espoused? Did we enable racial discrimination and sexual harassment by failing to speak out? “Of course we did,” a former colleague told me, as we parsed the news over the phone. “It’s shameful, but when you’re there you kind of end up accepting things. I never even considered speaking out when things happened to me! It doesn’t feel good to recognize that. I was so into the work, and so motivated by it, I kind of shrugged off what was going on.” A couple of days later, she texted me: “I’m having SPLC nightmares.” Aren’t we all, I thought.
Sudan experienced the Islamic Mahdist state from the early 1880s to 1898. This was an independent, sovereign Sudanese state founded by a charismatic Islamic leader–an “Islamic fundamentalist”–which resisted the colonial British as no other state had done. The Mahdi, according to a commemoration published in the Khartoum monthly Sudanow (December 1991), “was the leader of the first African nation to be created by its own efforts” and “laid the foundations of one of the greatest states in the nineteenth century which lasted for 13 years after his death.” His “greatest achievement was his insistence on a centralized state and his success in building it.”
The Nature of the Mahdia
The Mahdia was established by Dunqulawi Muhammad Ahmad b. ‘Abdallah, in 1881, when he declared himself the Mahdi, that is, the “expected one,” inspired by the Prophet to cleanse society of corruption and the infidels. Muhammad Ahmad was born in 1844 the son of a boat-maker, in the Dongola province, and the family moved to Kereri, near the capital Khartoum, when he was a child. He showed an aptitude for religious studies and went in 1861 to study with Sheik Muhammad Sharif Nur al-Da’im, whose grandfather had founded the Sammaniya religious order in Sudan. After a disagreement separated the two, he later studied with Sheik al-Qurashi w. al-Zayn, a rival leader of the Sammaniya and, following the latter’s death in 1880, assumed his place as leader, and then as the Mahdi. The Mahdi, in Sunnite tradition, was “the guided one,” expected to appear to lead the Islamic community, and to restore justice. His coming was expected to precede the second coming of Christ.
After years in seclusion and study, Mohammad Ahmad presented himself as the Mahdi first to a small group of followers, then to the notables of Kordofan and El Obeid, its provincial capital. Then, from a retreat on the island of Aba, he sent out letters to notables, announcing that he was the Mahdi, and urging them to join him, in a hijra, a flight for faith, modelled after the Prophet’s flight from Mecca to Medina. The Mahdi moved into the Nuba Mountains, on the border of the Kordofan and Fashoda provinces, where the tribal chief welcomed him.
The Mahdi’s appeal was both spiritual and social. It was an appeal to return to the original spirit of Islam. His was also a protest against the oppressive practices of the Egyptian khedive, who had ruled Sudan since 1821, under Ottoman suzerainty. The Egyptian government, known as the “Turkiya,” bled the poor tribes through taxation, and sent the bashi-bazooks, militia tribesmen armed with hippopotamus-hide whips, to exact payment. In a proclamation issued some time between November 1881 and November 1882, the Mahdi wrote:
“Verily these Turks thought that theirs was the kingdom and the command of [God’s] apostles and of His prophets and of him who commanded them to imitate them. They judged by other than God’s revelation and altered the Shari’a of Our Lord Mohammed, the Apostle of God, and insulted the Faith of God and placed poll-tax [al-jizya] on your necks together with the rest of the Muslims…. Verily the Turks used to drag away your men and imprison them in fetters and take captive your women and your children and slay unrighteously the soul under God’s protection.”
His call to arms was based on the same protest: “I am the Mahdi,” he is quoted as saying, “the Successor of the Prophet of God. Cease to pay taxes to the infidel Turks and let everyone who finds a Turk kill him, for the Turks are infidels.”
Government forces, fearing this potential, set out to arrest him, but several expeditions ended in failure. After each military success of the Mahdi and his followers, known as the Ansar (the name also taken by the followers of Mohammed), his ranks and prestige grew.
The Mahdi organized tribal leaders, themselves in various stages of revolt against the administration, behind him into a burgeoning national movement. A campaign which started in summer 1882 in Kordofan province unfolded as a series of tribal attacks against the administration, in different areas, and a central attack on the provincial capital, El Obeid. Though repulsed during their first attack in September, the Ansar returned, equipped with captured rifles, trained military from government troops who had come over to the Mahdi (known as the Jihadiya), and in January 1883 forced the enemy to capitulate. El Obeid became the Mahdia headquarters.
British Invasions: Hicks and Gordon
Two other expeditions failed which were of immense significance to the British. In 1882, Egypt came under British occupation, and Britain ruled the Sudan as well, through Cairo. The two expeditions were those of Col. William Hicks and “the hero,” Charles “Chinese” Gordon, nicknamed for his success in defeating the Taiping rebellion in China.
Hicks, a retired officer from the Indian Army, was sent as chief of staff, on behalf of the Egyptian government, to halt the Mahdi. Equipped with a total of 10,000 men, Hicks marched from Khartoum (the Egyptian administrative capital) toward El Obeid through Bara, from the north. Among his guides, unbeknownst to him, were a number of Mahdist agents who relayed information to the Ansar. Suffering from lack of food and especially water, Hicks and his troops were harassed, their communications cut, until they were surrounded and attacked by the Ansar in November 1883 at Shaykan. When the assault started, Hicks’s troops, organized in the British square formation, fell into confusion and commenced firing on each other. All but 250 men were killed, including Hicks and a number of British journalists. The massacre of Hicks’s force was hard for the British to comprehend. Gordon is reported to have believed that they all died of thirst, and that no military encounter had even taken place! The fall of Shaykan led to the success of the Mahdist revolt in Darfur and Bahr al-Ghazal, and the continuing attachment of tribal units to the Ansar forces.
Gordon’s expedition and fate have gone down in history. Gordon had two missions in the Sudan. The first started in 1874, when he was named by the khedive as governor of Equatoria province. Backed by a European staff, Gordon worked to bring this region of the Upper Nile under centralized control, which meant, among other things, breaking the power of the slave-traders. He decreed a government monopoly of the ivory trade, banned imports of munitions, and halted the creation of private armies. He reorganized the financial system and established military stations there, with a headquarters at Lado. In 1877, Gordon received the governorship for the whole of the Sudan; in that year, while Egypt was at war with Abyssinia and popular protest against increased taxation was rising, Britain sealed the Slave Trade Convention with the khedive. It called for ending the passage of Abyssinian and other slaves through Egypt, and terminating all slave-trading in the Sudan by 1899. Gordon called in Europeans and Sudanese to replace Egyptian officials in his administration. When faced with rebellions in the Upper Nile, Gordon resorted to brutally repressive tactics, and set one tribe up against others. When the khedive was deposed in June 1879, Gordon quit his post, resigning from the Egyptian service in 1880.
Years later, after the Mahdi had swept through one province after the other, an alarmed British government again called on Gordon. The British government’s declared intention in January 1884 was to arrange for the evacuation of Egyptian officers and civilians from Sudan.
Thus, Gordon’s initial mandate was merely to go to Suakin, on the Red Sea, and “consider the best mode of evacuating the interior of the Sudan.” En route to Cairo, Gordon drafted a memo outlining his mission: Prepare Egyptian evacuation, and establish a stable successor government in an independent Sudan, by bringing back to power the petty sultans who had ruled before the Egyptian takeover. To carry out this executive function, Gordon insisted that he be named governor general. When he reached Cairo for talks with Sir Evelyn Baring, the banker agent in Cairo, Gordon got what he wanted. While in Cairo, Gordon also met with al-Zubayr Pasha, a leading slave-trader who had been imprisoned in Egypt. Gordon immediately proposed that this man be put forward as the alternative leader to the Mahdi.
By February 1894, the Mahdi’s forces had extended their control over Trinkitat and Sinkat, on the Red Sea coast, through the military campaigns of one of the Ansar’s most able leaders, Osman Digna.
On arrival in Berber, and later, in Khartoum, Gordon hastily announced the dismissal of Egyptian officials, who would be replaced by Sudanese, and the plans for evacuation. He also declared taxes for 1883 to be eliminated and those for 1884 to be halved. Finally, he announced that the 1877 convention against the slave trade was not operational. The rationale behind this sudden reversal of British policy, seems to have been, that the only way to ensure the return of the ruling sultanates would be by legalizing the slave trade they were involved in.
In Khartoum, Gordon organized a dramatic happening, whereby tax books and the hated whips used by tax-collectors were brought out into the square and burned. Adulatory accounts relate that women threw themselves at Gordon’s feet. Lieutenant Colonel Stewart, who accompanied him, wrote, “Gordon has won over all the hearts. He is the dictator here. The Mahdi does not mean anything any longer.”
Apparently convinced he was dealing with just another petty tyrant who, like all petty tyrants, has a price, Gordon sent a letter to the Mahdi, announcing his magnanimous decision to grant the Mahdi the position of sultan of Kordofan. This, to a man who not only controlled Kordofan already, but who was about to take Khartoum, thus completing his unification of the nation! Adding insult to injury, Gordon sent along with the message ceremonial red robes and a tarbush. The Mahdi responded:
“Know that I am the Expected Mahdi, the Successor of the Apostle of God. Thus I have no need of the sultanate, nor of the kingdom of Kordofan or elsewhere nor of the wealth of this world and its vanity. I am but the slave of God, guiding unto God and to what is with Him.|…”
Three dervishes of the Mahdi’s following delivered this note to Gordon, returning to him the red robes and offering the garment worn by the Ansar: a patched jubba, with the invitation that he adopt Islam and follow the Mahdi. Gordon rejected the Mahdi’s offer with indignation. This occurred in March 1884. By April, the Mahdi had decided to organize the siege of Khartoum.
In late February, responding to news that his proposal that al-Zubayr be reinstated as a puppet had been turned down in London, Gordon made the following proposal:
“If Egypt is to be kept quiet, Mahdi must be smashed up…. If you decide on smashing Mahdi, then send up another £100,000, and send up 200 troops to Wadi Halfa, and send officer up to Dongola under pretense to look out quarters for troops…. Evacuation is possible, but you will feel the effect in Egypt, and will be forced to enter into a far more serious affair in order to guard Egypt. At present, it would be comparatively easy to destroy Mahdi.”
Gordon’s Ignominious Defeat
Throughout the summer, Gordon, holed up in Khartoum, engaged the forces located there in skirmishes with the Ansar, but made no headway militarily. The Mahdi, meanwhile, was continuing to extend his control, taking the city of Berber on the Nile, thus further isolating Gordon in Khartoum. Osman Digna on the Red Sea coast, and Mohammed al-Khayr who was controlling Berber, blocked access from Khartoum to the east or the north. Gordon, for his part, dug in. He recounts that the people in the city spread broken glass on the ground, and others planted mines. Gordon concentrated on hoarding goods for the siege, and sending urgent requests to London via Baring for reinforcements. In September, Gordon sent the British and French consuls down the Nile on a steamer, in an attempt to run the blockade of the Mahdist forces, and to get news of the situation of besieged Khartoum to the world. The steamer was attacked before it reached Abu Hamed, and all the Europeans were killed. In October, the Mahdi moved with his forces to Omdurman, preparing for the assault on nearby Khartoum.
Finally, the British government decided to send a relief expedition, but by the time the steamers actually reached Khartoum, on Jan. 28, 1885, the British officers saw no Egyptian flag flying, and concluded correctly that the city had fallen to the Mahdi. The steamers turned around and fled.
The end of Gordon has remained somewhat wrapped in mystery. The common version is that he was killed in battle, on the staircase of his palace, by Mahdist forces armed with spears. Decapitated, his head was taken for identification to Rudolf Slatin, the Austrian governor of Darfur for the Egyptian administration.
The dead Gordon was to become an object of hero-worship in Britain, mostly for the purpose of whipping up jingoistic support for an expedition under Gen. Herbert (later Lord) Kitchener, to destroy the Mahdia and Sudan.
A few words about Gordon, the man, so to speak. Although painted as a quasi-god by his idolators (for example, Gordon: der Held vom Khartoum. Ein Lebensbild nach originalquellen, Frankfurt am Main, 1885), Gordon turns out to have been just one more pervert in Her Majesty’s service.
As Ronald Hyam wrote in Britain’s Imperial Century 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion: “The prince of pederasts (in the sense of small-boy lover) was unquestionably an even more important figure: Gen. Charles Gordon, hero of campaigns in the Sudan and China. Totally and irredeemably boy-oriented, he was almost certainly too honorable or inhibited ever to succumb to physical temptation, and so this emotion was heavily sublimated into serving God, the Empire and Good Works. He spent six years of his life (from 1865 to 1871) trying to create in London his own little land where the child might be prince, housing ragged urchins (his `kings’ as he called them), until packing them off to sea when the onset of puberty occurred.”
The Khalifa’s Rule
Gordon’s ignominious defeat signalled the completion of the creation of the Mahdia as a national institution. The Mahdi established his headquarters in Khartoum, but did not live long thereafter. He died on June 22, 1885, and was succeeded by the Khalifa, who was to rule the Sudan until General Kitchener’s forces invaded in 1898.
There was never any question as to who would succeed the Mahdi on his death. Modelling his reign on that of the Prophet, the Mahdi had named Khalifas (followers, or successors, deputies), and had designated Abdellahi b. Muhammed, as his successor in a proclamation on Jan. 26, 1883. But the consolidation of the national state was severely hindered by economic crises, in part triggered by the many years of a war economy, and aggravated by bad harvests leading to famine.
Following the Mahdi’s death, Abdellahi organized the construction of a tomb and, across from it, the house and related buildings from which he was to rule united Sudan. Abdellahi, like the Mahdi, was acknowledged leader (after some initial clan conflicts) by the taking of an allegiance oath on the part of the leading tribes.
The state which the Mahdi had established had three institutional branches–the high command, the judiciary, and finances.
The Khalifa served also as the Commander of the Armies of the Mahdia, a kind of chief of staff, and, like the other khalifas, headed up a division of the army under his flag. Under the khalifas were the amirs, or commanders, who functioned as military governors. Under them were muqaddams or prefects, and the followers in general were known as darawish (dervishes). They dressed in the patched jubba, with a white turban and sandals, signs of simplicity and asceticism.
The financial organization of the Mahdia was based on two sources of revenue: booty of war and taxation. The Mahdi as Imam was to receive one-fifth of all booty taken in war. The other four-fifths were to be divided up “in accordance with the commandment of God and His Apostle” and distributed through the treasury to the needy. Furthermore, the zakah, a tax established as a tenet of Islam, was levied on the crops and the cattle of the tribes. Although taxes were thus paid in kind, coined currency, issued by the Mahdia (a silver dollar and a gold pound) was used in trade.
The Mahdi (later the Khalifa) was the supreme judge of the judiciary, and his khalifas and emirs acted as judges on the provincial and local levels. The main focus of attention was the status of women and land ownership. In accordance with the Shari’a (Islamic law), laws were promulgated to legalize the status of women whose husbands had been killed in war, or whose marriages had otherwise been broken. Modesty in dress by fully covering the body was prescribed for women, who were forbidden to roam through the marketplace or in public without a male relative to guard them. Regarding land, those dispossessed by the Turks were allowed to reclaim their land (going back seven years from 1885) and those who had abandoned their land because they could not pay excessive taxation to the Turks, were allowed to repurchase their land at the price given. Finally, the Mahdia fought with legal means against various popular superstitions, outlawing amulets and the like, as well as excessive wailing at funerals.
Tribal rivalries continued to threaten the integrity of the national state and throughout 1885-87, Abdullahi had to deal with uprisings from the Madibbu, the Salih, and the Fur tribesmen. His policy was to bring recalcitrant or hostile tribal leaders to Khartoum to thrash out differences, and win them over to the national cause. Those who refused the come to terms, were threatened with military might, and most acquiesced.
The Khalifa did not initially turn outward in search of military conquests. In 1889, however, he deployed his military commander al-Nujumi in an Egyptian campaign, which turned into disaster. Due to inferior logistics and supplies, the Mahdist campaign was defeated by the Anglo-Egyptian forces at Toshki in August 1889, which was to be a turning point for the Sudan.
The combination of military defeat and serious social problems deriving from the onset of famine due to a bad crop in 1888, led the Khalifa to make a number of economic policy shifts. He forbade the army from entering houses or damaging crops, and decreed that only licensed merchants could sell grain, in order to thwart black market tendencies, and to make sure that garrisons would be adequately supplied. He relaxed trade restrictions with Egypt, which helped alleviate scarcities, and led to the return of thousands of refugees from Egypt back to their homeland.
However, Lord Kitchener in August 1890 ordered that the port of Trinkitat, held by the Egyptians, be closed, and that grain shipments be blocked, under the pretext of a cholera scare.
“It appears that cessation of supplies of grain from Suakin to the dervishes, owing to quarantine regulations, is having the effect anticipated, in breaking up the camp at Handub, as well as causing the Handub tribe to see the necessity of keeping on good terms with the government,”
Kitchener reported.
Despite this food warfare, and the general conditions of dire need for the population, the Khalifa’s rule was intact, largely because no matter how tough conditions were, they were certainly better than they had been under the Turks (via the Egyptians). As Sir Reginald Wingate, head of intelligence from Egypt, noted in 1892, a source named Mustafa al-Amin, a tradesman, stated that the Khalifa was trying to introduce “a more lenient and popular form of government,” and that the Islamic monarchy, as he saw it, which had been installed there, was much preferred to the earlier condition under Egyptian rule. Mustafa gauged that the Sudanese, though in need, were optimistic about the future, and would, in the event of an invasion from Egypt, certainly rally to defend their nation.
The threat to Sudan came in 1890 from the east, where the Italians and Anglo-Egyptians had established a presence. The Italians had taken Eritrea in 1890, and in 1891 Tukar was occupied by the Anglo-Egyptians. In 1894, the Italians took Kassala. But the most important theater was in the south, in the Upper Nile, where the British-French conflict, which was to climax at Fashoda, was to be the backdrop for the Kitchener invasion of Sudan.
Kitchener’s Invasion
After the 1881-82 nationalist uprising in Egypt under al-Arabi and the defeat of Gordon, the British were eager to deploy their military might to secure their strategic position in Egypt and Sudan. Furthermore, the British were fully aware of the strategic importance of control over the Upper Nile: Who controls the Upper Nile controls Sudan and Egypt.
The British, who took over Egypt, and therefore its territories, in 1882, signed a deal in 1890 with the Germans, whereby a British sphere of influence was recognized over Uganda and Kenya. This area was said to go up to the western watershed of the Nile and “to the confines of Egypt” in the north.
The British decision to reconquer Dongola province was communicated in a telegram to Kitchener on March 13, 1896.
The French must have been fully aware of the British plan. The French counterplan was to ensure the survival of the Mahdia state, at least until France could secure its position in the Upper Nile. The French appear to have offered a protectorate not only to Abyssinia, but also to the Sudan of the Khalifa. During a secret audience, the Abyssinians handed over a French flag to the Khalifa telling him “to raise this flag on the frontiers of his kingdom in order to be an independent king in his kingdom and France would be a protection to him.” The Khalifa did not accept the offer, because he was committed to an independent Sudan.
The British did not intend to strand Kitchener, as they had Gordon. Accordingly, to ensure supply lines, the British launched a railroad project to bring a line from the Red Sea to Abu Hamed, as a supply line for Kitchener’s army. The British-Egyptian force was equipped with vastly superior military means.
Knowing that the attack was coming, the Khalifa had concentrated his forces in Omdurman and begun to fortify the city. Kitchener’s forces advanced through Dongola province to Fort Atbara, where Kitchener attacked on Good Friday 1898. Despite their valorous resistance, the Sudanese, overwhelmed by superior military technology, were mowed down. More than 3,000 died and 4,000 were wounded, as contrasted to a reported 510 Anglo-Egyptian casualties.
In September 1898, as the French Capt. Jean-Baptiste Marchand was secure in Fashoda, the British marched hurriedly on Omdurman with 25,800 men. Kitchener had 44 guns and 20 machine guns on land, plus 36 guns and 24 machine-guns on the gunboats. The British had the Martini-Henry .450, fast-firing Maxim Nordenfeldts, and Krupp cannon. Despite their hopeless inferiority in weaponry, the Mahdist forces fought to the end. Their strategy was to attack, in three locations. In one phase of the battle, Osman Digna let a few of his forces (whom the British had dubbed the “Fuzzy Wuzzys,” in their inimitable racism!) be seen by the British cavalry, to lure them into an attack. He knew that once they charged over the ground, his men (about 700), who were concealed in a ravine, could ambush them, confuse the cavalry, and engage the enemy in hand-to-hand combat. In the battle that followed, lances and spears against guns, there occurred 40 percent of all British casualties in the war.
When the British began bombarding Omdurman on Sept. 2, 1898, they took the Mahdi’s tomb as their primary target! The British, with gunboats and machine guns, could not be stopped militarily. It is estimated that 11,000 were killed and 16,000 wounded in a few hours of British assault. The figures for the wounded have often been questioned, because it is well known that Kitchener’s forces killed the wounded.
But when the British marched into Omdurman they found that the Khalifa had eluded them. Once in the city, they dug up the grave of the Mahdi, and Kitchener ordered that the body be burned. One version has it that Kitchener ordered the bones of the Mahdi to be thrown into the Nile and that he sent the skull of the Mahdi to the Royal Surgeons College, apparently to submit it to phrenological examinations. It is said that Her Majesty Queen Victoria didn’t take to the idea, and ordered the skull buried. Other accounts have it that Kitchener had the head buried at Wadi Halfa, the border town with Egypt. On Sept. 4, 1898, Kitchener’s crew held memorial services for Gordon. On Sept. 5, they tried to capture the Khalifa, but failed.
In January 1899, Kitchener’s forces signed the Condominium Agreement with Boutros-Ghali, grandfather of the current secretary general of the United Nations. Revolts in both Sudan and Egypt followed; the British realized that unless they killed the Khalifa, they would not be able to subdue the territories taken. In November 1899, Wingate went with a well-equipped force of 3,700 men to Jadid and Um Dibekrat, where they located the Khalifa. The Khalifa withdrew with his closest followers and placed himself upon his prayer rug. According to an account in Sudanow, his 2,000 combat troops attacked Wingate’s vastly superior forces. The Khalifa, together with his amirs Ali Wad Hilu, Ahmad Fadil, Bashir Ajab Al-Fiya, Hamid Ali, Sidig Ibn Mahdi, and Haroun Mohammed, were all machine-gunned down as they prayed. Another of the khalifas, Mohammed Sherif, who was the Mahdi’s son-in-law, was arrested together with two of the Mahdi’s sons, by the British in August 1899. They were accused of a conspiracy to reinstate the Mahdia, and were promptly executed; they were probably innocent.
Wingate, Director of Intelligence from 1899, who accompanied Kitchener into Sudan, was reportedly “obsessed” by the Mahdia, and directed a propaganda war to inflame the passions of ordinary Britons, to support the genocidal attack against Sudan. To accomplish this, he organized publishers who would put out memoirs of Europeans who had been taken captive by the Mahdia, including the opportunist Slatin (Fire and Sword, 1896), the priest Ohrwalder (Aufstand und Reich des Mahdi and Ten Years Captivity, 1892), Rosignoli, and many others. Referring to the crisis in the Sudan in 1896 at the time the book Wingate co-authored with Slatin appeared, it is related that the publisher told his wife,
“It is a joke between myself and my partner here that Major Wingate has fomented this just at the right time by means of his secret agents!”
As for Kitchener, one of the many adulatory accounts of the late Lord, called With Kitchener to Khartoum, published by G.W. Stevens, in 1899, paints the picture of a superman,
“over six feet, straight as a lance…. His precision is so inhumanly unerring, he is more like a machine than a man…. So far as Egypt is concerned he is the man of destiny–the man who has been preparing himself 16 years for one great purpose. For Anglo-Egypt he is the Mahdi, the expected; the man … who has cut out his human heart and made himself a machine to retake Khartoum.”
The last characterization apparently refers to Kitchener’s famous disregard for the condition of men in battle, whether in his own army or that of the enemy.
According to the previously cited Ronald Hyam, Kitchener was one of the many “inveterate bachelors” that filled Her Majesty’s foreign service.
“Kitchener was a man whose sexual instincts were wholly sublimated in work; he admitted few distractions and `thereby reaped an incalculable advantage in competition with his fellows.’ There is no evidence that he ever loved a woman; his male friendships were few but fervent; from 1907 until his death his constant and inseparable companion was Capt. O.A.G. FitzGerald who devoted his entire life to Kitchener. He had no use for married men on his staff. Only young officers were admitted to his house–`my happy family of boys’ he called them; he avoided interviews with women, worshipped Gordon, cultivated great interest in the Boy Scout movement, took a fancy to Bothas’s son and the sons of Lord Desborough, and embellished his rose garden with four pairs of sculptured bronze boys.”
Prisoners of the Mahdi The Story of the Mahdist Revolt Which Frustrated Queen Victoria’s Designs on the Sudan … By Byron Farwell. (W. W. Norton & Company: 1989. Pg. 400.) ISBN: 0393305791.
Without doubt, the Victorian era witnessed the height of British Colonial power. Britain trampled over one civilization after another, offering the indigenous populations the ‘honor’ of serving the might of the white, British, Christian empire. The British thought that they were indestructible. Yet, they were brought down a few notches in 1885, when an aspect of the British Army, under the command of General Charles “Chinese” Gordon was defeated by a rag-tagged band of Islamic religious fanatics armed with nothing more advanced than rocks and spears until they captured their enemies weapons.
In 1874, Gordon was appointed a Governor over the Sudan and commenced upon a campaign to eliminate slavery in Sudan. This raised the ire of many Islamic slavers, both because they saw Gordon’s activities as interference into matters that he had no right to mettle in, and because he was interfering with a lucrative business. The Islamic slavers concentrated on black Africans with the Koran as justification for Allah’s call to enslave all who did not submit to Islam. Black male slaves were routinely castrated; 80% died from the barbaric operation.
In 1881, Mohammad Ahmad, a Sufi Muslim religious leader, began to organize a holy war to cleanse the Sudan and the world of evil. He started with the British. Styling himself as al-Mahdi, arabic for ‘messiah’ or ‘prophet’, the Mahdi, who was already recognized as an Islamic holy man, gathered around him a loyal group of Muslim followers. With lightening speed he gained overwhelming public support, which enabled the Mahdist revolt to sweep across the Sudan and parts of Egypt. The Mahdi promised his Islamic followers that Allah would protect them from bullets. Anyone who died simply did not believe enough to gain Allah’s protection.
On the 26th of January 1885, the Mahdist captured Khartoum, where Gordon was killed a few days later. The Mahdist had defeated the might of the British Empire.
Shortly thereafter the Mahdi consolidated his power, and established Omdurman as the capital of his new Islamic Empire.
The Mahdi, and his successor, Abdulla Ibn Mohammed (Khalifa Abdulla), ruled their Islamic kingdom, which was spread out over one million square miles, with an iron fist. Classic sharia was enforced and customs from the middle ages were revived. The Mahdist empire stood for fourteen years, until it was toppled in 1898 when General Lord Kitchener retook Omdurman for the British.
When the Madhi took Omdurman, he acquired a variety of European Christian captives who were forced to endure horrific conditions while under the control of the strict Muslim Mahdist. In Prisoners of the Mahdi, Bryron Farwell chronicles their captivity by retelling their story through their letters, journals, and other writings. For the purposes of this history, Farwell concentrates primarily upon the captivity of three men, Rudolf Slatin, Father Joseph Ohrwalder, and Charles Neufeld.
Each man’s story is as unique as it is intriguing, and illustrates the wide range of experiences the European captives underwent. For example, Slatin, an Austrian, converted to Islam and, although treated as a slave, went on to take a number of wives. By contrast, Ohrwalder, who had been a missionary priest in the Sudan, became a merchant. He did this in order to support a group of nuns. Of the three, Neufeld’s experience was the worst. He displeased the Mahdi and as a result spent tens years in prison, bound in chains.
Farwell’s account is mesmerizing, and is both a historical narrative, as well as serving as a biography of Slatin, Ohrwalder, Neufeld, the Mahdi, and Khalifa Abdulla. This book not only makes fascinating reading, but it will also serve, for many, as an introduction to an almost overlooked aspect of British and Sudanese history.
The only drawback to this otherwise excellent book is that it concentrates almost solely on the lives of Europeans under the Mahdist. This is a fact acknowledged by the author, and it is a result of his almost exclusive use of English-language source material. If you wish to learn more about the Mahdi, from the Sudanese viewpoint, I’d recommend the following book:
The Great Mutiny: India 1857, by Christopher Hibbert. In 1857, three regiments of Indian troops mutinied, sparking a revolt that resulted in the slaughter of countless British residents in India. In turn, the British launched massive revenge attacks that slaughtered countless Indians. In this book, Hibbert chronicles the causes of the mutiny, the course it took, and its aftermath.
Arturo Perez-Reverte is a retired journalist in Madrid and spends his time writing fiction—all of it is spectacular, but not all in English, yet. I discovered Reverte by chance and became a junkie. He has a very distinctive writing style that’s clear and precise, almost like Hemingway except with more detail and lush prose, as the occasion calls. This author is for the thinker, the person who enjoys puzzles and intelligent writing.
The Club Dumas is a thriller. You follow Lucas Corso, rare-book hunter, as he discovers the meaning of a remaining piece of Dumas’ Three Musketeers manuscript left in the dead hands of a bibliophile. This book about books is great for readers who enjoy thrillers, Dumas, or who don’t want to put the book down until it’s over. I couldn’t put it down, and when I discovered Ninth Gate (starring Johnny Depp) is based off this book I was supremely disappointed at how much excellent material had been axed from the tale.
Handsome Father Lorenzo Quart works for the Vatican. Quart is sent to Seville to learn more about the plea that was sent by a hacker known as “Vespers” to save Our Lady of Tears, a 17th century church. People in connection with the church turn up dead and there is a real estate deal on the line… one that Vespers wants stopped. Quart gets entangled with a cast of characters right out of a Bogart film, and I gladly followed.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
The Nautical Chart was the first Reverte novel I read, hooking me for a lifetime of fandom. This nautical thriller whisks you along on a modern-day adventure as Manuel Coy, a captain without a ship, and mysterious Tanger Soto come together to seek a sunken Jesuit treasure ship off the coast of Spain. I love books that involve historical references and suspense and Arturo Perez-Reverte is lord of all when it comes to such skills.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Jull Costa
In the Flemish painting “The Game of Chess” by Pieter Van Huys, there is a Latin inscription: Who killed the knight? Julia, an art restorer, finds the painted-over inscription and determines to solve the 15th century case with the help of her ex-lover — an art professor — and Munoz, a chess master. Never has the game of chess been more intriguing for a non-player as the moves in the painting are retraced and lost history recovered. I was entranced by the mystery as well as the art described.
The Fencing Master is set in 1800s Spain and rich in historical detail. Fencing master Don Jaime Astarloa refuses to teach women until the skilled (and deadly) Adela de Otero arrives, offering to pay handsomely, to learn the secret of “the unstoppable thrust.” Soon the fencing master finds himself thrust into a new world of espionage, seduction, and many murders. I wanted to be Adela de Otero, beautiful and bold, as she, perhaps a fictional historical feminist of sorts, overturned Astarloa’s peaceful existence.
This is the tale of Teresa Mendoza, whose life is changed by a single call from her drug-running boyfriend: if the phone rings once, he’s dead and she’s next. Teresa changes overnight from an innocent and trusting girl into a hardened woman, able and willing to kill. Teresa never leaves the drug world. She flees Mexico to the Mediterranean, eventually becoming the Queen of the South. This book was a drug and I was hooked. I love Arturo Perez-Reverte’s work, but not everyone is a fan of historical fiction so I was thrilled when I discovered this novel that I could recommend to family and friends who preferred modern-day fare.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Captain Alatriste is the first in a series about the Captain, told by his ward and page Íñgio Balboa. Alatriste is a sword-for-hire in 1620s Spain and is often involved in deadly government plots and plagued by a host of dark characters, including the beautiful and dangerous Angelica de Alquezar, with whom Íñgio promptly falls in love. The description of Spain is beautiful and the plot is fast-paced, leaving me aching for more in the series — the next can never be translated quickly enough.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
This is the second in the Captain Alatriste series. Once again, I found myself unwilling to put the book down. In this tale, Alatriste is requested to rescue a young woman trapped in a convent and Íñgio is captured by the Inquisition after he and Alatriste are beset by their enemies, possibly the fault of young Angelica de Alquezar. Truly, this series has sprung from the mind of a new generation’s Dumas.
The Sun Over Breda, third in the Alatriste series, finds Captain Alatriste rejoining his Cartagena regiment, at the behest of Spain’s King Philip IV, to fight Calvinist heretics in the Flemish town of Breda. The tale is told retrospectively by an older Íñgio, who traveled with Alatriste and also fought, earning his own battle scars. This is a truly vivid tale of war and beautifully painted with no wasted words. I found the book at the public library I where I worked at the time the title was released and snatched it up before anyone else could check it out — I didn’t regret it.
Reverte continues to paint the amazing life of Captain Alatriste through Íñgio Balaboa’s eyes. Having returned to Seville penniless, Alatriste accepts a mission to intercept smuggled gold and turn it over to the king. Alatriste recruits a group of criminals to aid him and Íñgio on this adventure. Along the way they encounter Alatriste’s greatest foe, Gualtiero Malatesta. All of the books in this series, this being the fourth book, are rich in historical detail and filled with an intriguing cast of characters from courtiers and poets to assassins and dangerous women. Each time I finish reading a book in this series, I’m always disappointed to discover that the American publisher hasn’t placed the next one on the market yet.
by Arturo Perez-Reverte, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
The Painter of Battles is a departure from Reverte’s usual writing style though no less crisp in detail or less fascinating. According to the Spanish author, a one-time war journalist, this is close to an autobiography in which the main character, Andres Faulques, has retired from photographing war to hermit himself in a crumbling tower. Faulques is in the process of painting a mural, a commentary and reimagining of war, inside the tower when someone he once photographed appears out of the blue calmly stating Faulques owes the stranger his life. I was less entranced with the tale and more with the philosophical and social commentary that really made me think. The entire novel is held together by Faulques’ mural — this imaginary painting still lives in my mind today.
While I was embedded with the US Army in Iraq, I heard a story about two soldiers shooting a child in cold blood. I’ve spent 16 years trying to find out the truth about the war crime allegation. None of it has been easy.
Their story is deeply disturbing.Two American soldiers say they saw two comrades from another US unit kill a boy on a bicycle in cold blood.
The US convoy had encountered and killed six enemy soldiers on the edge of the Iraqi city of Karbala.
The boy, aged 12 to 15, was riding his bike about 15 to 20 metres away.
He was unarmed and posed no threat but the two soldiers shot him anyway.
“Wrong place, wrong time,” said one of the soldiers who shot him.
The two witnesses told all this to a military chaplain, Glenn Palmer.
Palmer recounted the story to me one day on the gruelling journey through the desert from Kuwait to Baghdad.
It was 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, and I was a reporter embedded with a US Army tank battalion.
‘Why am I doing this?’
I’ve never quite been able to let go of the story of the boy on the bike.
It set me on an international quest that has lasted 16 years, to find out if a war crime was committed that day.
I have sat opposite a soldier accused by his comrades of murder. I have asked people to revisit deeply painful memories. I have tried to find the answer to a grieving mother’s question: “Why did they kill my son?”
None of it has been easy.
I’ve had to ask difficult questions of myself too.
Why am I doing this? Is one small incident in a big war worth it? Is it even possible to reach back through the confusion of war and the fading of memories to find an answer?
And do I have the right — or the stomach — to publicly judge soldiers under great pressure in wartime?
David versus Goliath
I didn’t witness the shooting myself.
But the chaplain told me my colleague, photographer Piotr Andrews, pictured below, had taken a photo of the aftermath.
Andrews had arrived on the scene soon after the shooting on April 5.
He told me years later he felt the picture summed up the war: David versus Goliath.
The photo shows the body of the bicyclist face down in sandy dirt. His bike lies next to him, its back wheel crumpled.
At the top of the photo is the barrel of a US tank, with the words “Absolut Krieg” (“Absolute war” in rough German) stencilled in black.
The Army launched an investigation into the shooting and I wrote a short news story about that. The story was sent out on the Reuters news wires, together with Andrews’ picture.
I checked in every so often with the US military to ask about the outcome of the investigation.
Finally, in July 2004, a spokesman told me in an email that “there was insufficient evidence to determine that a crime occurred”.
He added: “A victim has never been identified.”
That sounded strange but there didn’t seem much I could do about it.
At that time, I was based in Senegal, covering West Africa.
And the boy on the bike was just one of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq by then.
I put the story to the back of my mind and got on with life and the day job.
Digging deeper
But the story of the boy on the bike gnawed away at me over the years. In 2010, I resolved to dig deeper.
I asked the US military for documents on the case, using the Freedom of Information Act.
But the military told me it had nothing that matched my request. My investigation looked to be over almost as soon as it had begun.
I contacted Andrews, the photographer, to ask if Army investigators had ever got in touch with him. He told me he’d never heard from the Army.
Then he told me something I could hardly believe — just a few months earlier, a law professor in the US had contacted him about the case.
The professor, Mehmet Konar-Steenberg, teaches at a law school in St Paul, Minnesota.
He and a friend had been so troubled by seeing Andrews’ photo online back in 2003 that they decided to look into the case.
“Maybe it’s because at that point I have a son who’s three years old and, you know, is just getting his first bicycle with training wheels,” Professor Konar-Steenberg told me when I visited him at his college.
“But something about that photograph grabbed me.”
Professor Konar-Steenberg and his friend, Jason Sack, wrote to US officials asking for details of the investigation.
Eventually, they got a letter from a US Army colonel.
It said the bicyclist had not been a boy but “a military-aged man in his early 20s” and the evidence indicated he was either “acting as an enemy combatant at the time he was killed” or at least acting in a way that meant he could reasonably be seen as one.
It said witnesses had “no doubt” he was part of a group of men ahead of him who were carrying weapons on a cart pulled by a tractor.
That account didn’t match what the witnesses had told the US Army chaplain back in 2003.
Professor Konar-Steenberg let things be for a while. Like me, though, he couldn’t quite let go.
In 2009, he asked the military for documents related to the case.
And this time, he got lucky.
The Army provided a copy of the investigation file — a thick pile of witness statements and assessments by US military lawyers.
The file revealed the colonel’s letter was not a fair summary of the witness statements.
For one thing, there was no consensus about the age of the bicyclist.
One soldier put him between 10 and 15 years old, another said he wasn’t older than 12, a third called him a “young boy”.
Others had him in his mid-teens, late teens or early 20s. One soldier even suggested he was about 30.
Soldiers also gave different accounts of how far away he had been from the group with the weapons.
Six soldiers stated he had not posed a threat. Only two said definitively he had — the two who fired at him.
‘I witnessed somebody get murdered’
To have any chance of finding out what really happened, I would have to speak to people directly involved.
In December 2012, I drove with a colleague to a small town in rural Michigan to visit Bob Grover, one of the soldiers who had talked to the chaplain about the shooting.
He had left the military and was going back to college the following month, having been laid off from his last job.
Mr Grover sported a goatee and wore a large quilted grey-and-black checked shirt over a dark T-shirt.
His partner took their children out of the house so we could talk undisturbed.
As we sat at a table in his home, Mr Grover closed his eyes and cast his mind back to that day on the edge of Karbala. He almost seemed to be in a trance.
“A young guy on a bike coming down the road, looked up at me, smiled. I waved,” Mr Grover recalled.
“As he gets closer … pow-pow, pow-pow! Somebody shot … somebody shot him, and he fell face first, didn’t move, not even an inch.”
Mr Grover was in no doubt about what he had seen.
“I witnessed somebody get murdered,” he told me.
“The guy didn’t have a gun, he was riding a bike. And that didn’t sit right with me. And I didn’t let it go, I couldn’t.”
I read Mr Grover part of the Army letter, which said the bicyclist was acting in a way that meant he could be seen as an enemy combatant.
“I think that’s an out-and-out lie. It’s ridiculous,” he said.
Mr Grover said he still thought about the shooting several times a week.
“I have problems letting things go,” he said. “I try not to think about it as much but it just runs through my head.”
I felt I also had to try to speak to the soldiers who had fired the shots.
But I didn’t relish confronting them. I found myself wondering: Who am I to dredge up this thing, years later? And for what purpose?
I’m still not sure I can answer that. One thought that kept me going was that there was a family in Iraq that deserved answers.
I thought it was very unlikely either soldier would agree to speak to me. But one of them did.
In May 2013, I left my home in London and travelled to Tennessee to meet William, one of the soldiers who had shot the bicyclist.
William was still in the Army at that time.
We met in my hotel room, along with a local journalist who had approached William on my behalf.
He wore a slightly tattered blue Chicago Cubs baseball cap, a shiny blue baseball shirt with a large red Cubs logo, blue jeans and black Adidas sneakers. His right forearm bore a tattoo of his daughter’s name. His left arm had a long scar, which he told me came from Iraq.
I should maybe have felt angry or at least fired up as I sat opposite him. But I felt nervous — and grateful, that he had agreed to talk to me. In his position, I’m not sure I’d have done the same.
William recalled the day of the shooting, how he’d felt tired but just wanting to keep going. He saw the cart with the trailer go by his truck and then heard a barrage of fire.
“I just oriented my weapon in that direction, looked and just started firing,” he said.
“You know, by that time, if we’re taking fire, you’ve got to return fire, to gain that fire superiority.
“I wanted to come home alive, that’s just the way it is, you know, and make sure my soldiers come back alive too.”
He said he hadn’t aimed specifically at the bicyclist, whom he described as a man, not a boy.
He said the bicyclist had fit the description of paramilitary fighters who wore civilian clothes but military boots.
“I did not aim at him to shoot at him. Was he in the direction of fire? Was he in that path? Yeah,” he said.
“You can’t second-guess yourself. You can’t do it, you don’t have time. ‘Well maybe should I or shouldn’t I?’ You don’t have that luxury. Especially at that time, during the actual war.
“You have to make a decision. If it’s the right decision, OK, if it’s the wrong decision, OK.”
I asked him if he was comfortable with the decision he had made that day.
“It doesn’t bother me,” he said.
Am I sorry that it happened? Yeah, I am. I mean, if I had to do it again, I’d do it again.
The boy on the bike
Even as I’d tracked down soldiers, analysed witness statements and sought to reconstruct the shooting, I had also been trying to answer the one question no-one seemed to have even tried to address: who was “the boy on the bike”?
Thanks to the investigation file, I was able to work out the rough location of the incident.
I hired an Iraqi journalist, Ali Al Mshakheel, to go there and see if anyone knew who the bicyclist was.
He took Andrews’ photo with him.
At first, Al Mshakheel drew a blank. People remembered the incident with the group on the tractor and cart. A local man told Al Mshakheel the group had looted a nearby military training centre and that’s why they’d been carrying weapons. No-one knew who the cyclist was.
But a few days later, Al Mshakheel got a call from a man who said he was a brother of the cyclist.
He went back to the Karbala area to visit the family, who live in a poor neighbourhood outside the city.
Finally, the boy on the bike had a name — Firas Khadhem.
He was the fifth of seven children. When Al Mshakheel visited, his photograph hung in the hallway.
To earn a living, Firas repaired bicycles, grew crops with his family and worked in a brick factory in the summer.
But Firas wasn’t a boy. The soldiers who fired at him had been right about that. He was 23 years old when he died.
His mother, Lilwah, told Al Mshakheel she had woken Firas on April 5, 2003 and asked him to get vegetables from a local market.
He set off on his bike around 9:00am.
The family later heard gunshots but that was normal during the war.
Then a neighbour told Sabah, his brother, that Firas had been shot.
Sabah ran to the scene of the shooting but couldn’t get to his brother’s body until US soldiers left, about 15 minutes later.
“I thought he was still alive because there wasn’t much blood but he was getting bluer and bluer with time,” Sabah told Al Mshakheel.
“I carried the body of my brother to our house where everybody was weeping and crying.”
During his visit, Al Mshakheel asked to see the clothes Firas had been wearing when he died, to be sure we had found the right family.
Sure enough, the clothes matched those in Andrews’ picture — bright blue trousers and a dark blue shirt with patterned pale blue stripes.
Another of Firas’s brothers, Jabbar, showed Al Mshakheel the bullet holes in the shirt.
While Jabbar was showing the clothes, his mother entered the room and began to weep.
“I know my son. He could never harm them or even throw a stone at them,” Lilwah said of the Americans.
“He was afraid of them even before we saw them. How could he harm them? Why did they kill my son?”
Even 16 years on, I can’t answer that question.
There are no definitive answers to the questions that would determine whether Firas could have been seen as a legitimate target, like how close he was to the group with the weapons, or even whether he was wearing military-style boots. His family says he was wearing sandals.
In the investigation file, two soldiers said ammunition was found on the bike after the shooting. One said it was in an ammunition crate. Firas’s bike had a wooden box on the back. Could that have been an ammunition crate? Could Firas have gone to the military training centre and taken some ammunition?
It’s impossible to say.
His family says Firas already had the box. And only two of 23 soldiers mentioned the ammunition in their statements.
In a sense, it doesn’t matter.
Neither of the soldiers who shot Firas mentioned ammunition on the bike, or cited the possibility of something concealed in the box as a reason to fire at him.
Over the years, people have asked me whether this is even a story worth telling.
After all, this is just one of countless civilian deaths in Iraq since the war began 16 years ago this month.
But just because we can’t tell all of those stories doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell the ones that come to us. This was the one that came to me.
When I first heard about the shooting 16 years ago, one thing above all motivated me.
It was that thought of a family somewhere in Iraq that knew their son had been killed by American soldiers but didn’t know why.
Even by publishing a short news story about the investigation back then, I wanted them to know that others within this foreign force — at least a few soldiers and a reporter — were trying to make sure justice was done.
Perhaps I wanted them to know that we weren’t as bad as we seemed. I wanted them to know that we cared.
It may be very little comfort but I hope they know that now.
There are four simple steps to the Feynman Technique, which I’ll explain below:
Choose a Concept
Teach it to a Toddler
Identify Gaps and Go Back to The Source Material
Review and Simplify (optional)
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If you’re not learning you’re standing still. So what’s the best way to learn new subjects and identify gaps in our existing knowledge?
Two Types of Knowledge
There are two types of knowledge and most of us focus on the wrong one. The first type of knowledge focuses on knowing the name of something. The second focuses on knowing something. These are not the same thing. The famous Nobel winning physicist Richard Feynman understood the difference between knowing something and knowing the name of something and it’s one of the most important reasons for his success. In fact, he created a formula for learning that ensured he understood something better than everyone else.
It’s called the Feynman Technique and it will help you learn anything faster and with greater understanding. Best of all, it’s incredibly easy to implement.
“The person who says he knows what he thinks but cannot express it usually does not know what he thinks.”
— Mortimer Adler
There are four steps to the Feynman Technique.
Step 1: Teach it to a child
Take out a blank sheet of paper and write the subject you want to learn at the top. Write out what you know about the subject as if you were teaching it to a child. Not your smart adult friend but rather an 8-year-old who has just enough vocabulary and attention span to understand basic concepts and relationships.
A lot of people tend to use complicated vocabulary and jargon to mask when they don’t understand something. The problem is we only fool ourselves because we don’t know that we don’t understand. In addition, using jargon conceals our misunderstanding from those around us.
When you write out an idea from start to finish in simple language that a child can understand (tip: use only the most common words), you force yourself to understand the concept at a deeper level and simplify relationships and connections between ideas. If you struggle, you have a clear understanding of where you have some gaps. That tension is good –it heralds an opportunity to learn.
Step 2: Review
In step one, you will inevitably encounter gaps in your knowledge where you’re forgetting something important, are not able to explain it, or simply have trouble connecting an important concept. This is invaluable feedback because you’ve discovered the edge of your knowledge. Competence is knowing the limit of your abilities, and you’ve just identified one! This is where the learning starts. Now you know where you got stuck, go back to the source material and re-learn it until you can explain it in basic terms. Identifying the boundaries of your understanding also limits the mistakes you’re liable to make and increases your chance of success when applying knowledge.
Step 3: Organize and Simplify
Now you have a set of hand-crafted notes. Review them to make sure you didn’t mistakenly borrow any of the jargon from the source material. Organize them into a simple story that flows. Read them out loud. If the explanation isn’t simple or sounds confusing that’s a good indication that your understanding in that area still needs some work.
Step 4 (optional): Transmit
If you really want to be sure of your understanding, run it past someone (ideally who knows little of the subject –or find that 8-year-old!). The ultimate test of your knowledge is your capacity to convey it to another.
***
Not only is this a wonderful recipe for learning but it’s also a window into a different way of thinking that allows you to tear ideas apart and reconstruct them from the ground up. (Elon Musk calls this thinking from first principles.) This leads to a much deeper understanding of the ideas and concepts. Importantly, approaching problems in this way allows you to understand when others don’t know what they are talking about.
Feynman’s approach intuitively believes that intelligence is a process of growth, which dovetails nicely with the work of Carol Dweck, who beautifully describes the difference between a fixed and growth mindset.
Some things aren’t worth remembering. Science is slowly working out how we might let that stuff go.
Whatever its other properties, memory is a reliable troublemaker, especially when navigating its stockpile of embarrassments and moral stumbles. Ten minutes into an important job interview and here come screenshots from a past disaster: the spilled latte, the painful attempt at humor. Two dates into a warming relationship and up come flashbacks of an earlier, abusive partner.
The bad timing is one thing. But why can’t those events be somehow submerged amid the brain’s many other dimming bad memories?
Emotions play a role. Scenes, sounds and sensations leave a deeper neural trace if they stir a strong emotional response; this helps you avoid those same experiences in the future. Memory is protective, holding on to red flags so they can be waved at you later, to guide your future behavior.
But forgetting is protective too. Most people find a way to bury, or at least reshape, the vast majority of their worst moments. Could that process be harnessed or somehow optimized?
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Perhaps. In the past decade or so, brain scientists have begun to piece together how memory degrades and forgetting happens. A new study, published this month in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggests that some things can be intentionally relegated to oblivion, although the method for doing so is slightly counterintuitive.
For the longest time, forgetting was seen as a passive process of decay and the enemy of learning. But as it turns out, forgetting is a dynamic ability, crucial to memory retrieval, mental stability and maintaining one’s sense of identity.
That’s because remembering is a dynamic process. At a biochemical level, memories are not pulled from the shelf like stored videos but pieced together — reconstructed — by the brain.
“When we recall something, the act of recalling activates a biochemical process that can solidify and reorganize the memory that is stored,” said Andre Fenton, a neuroscientist at New York University.
This process can improve memory accuracy in the long term. But activating a memory also makes it temporarily fragile and vulnerable to change. This is where intentional forgetting comes in. It’s less about erasing than editing: incrementally revising, refocusing and potentially dimming the central incident of the memory.
To intentionally forget is to remember differently, on purpose. Importantly, for scientists and therapists, intentional forgetting also may be an ability that can be practiced and deliberately strengthened.
In the new study, a team led by Tracy Wang, a postdoctoral psychology fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, had 24 participants sit in a brain-imaging machine while they conducted a memory test. Dr. Wang’s co-authors were Jarrod Lewis-Peacock of the University of Texas and Katerina Placek of the University of Pennsylvania.
In the experiment, each subject studied a series of some 200 images, a mix of faces and scenes, and identified the faces as male or female, and the scenes as indoor or outdoor. Each image appeared for a few seconds, then disappeared, at which point the participant was asked to either remember or forget it; after a few seconds delay, the next image appeared. The brain scanner focused on activity in the ventral temporal cortex and the sensory cortex, regions that are especially active when a person focuses mental attention on simple images such as these.
After the participants finished, they were given a short rest and then a test. They looked at a series of images — ones they’d seen earlier and ones they hadn’t — and rated how confident they were at having seen each one. They scored well: they recalled 50 to 60 percent of the images they’d been instructed to remember, and successfully had forgotten about 40 percent of the images they tried to erase from memory.
The payoff came with the imaging results. When a subject’s brain activity — a measure of internal mental attention — was especially high or especially low, it typically corresponded to a failed attempt to forget an image.
A concentrated effort to forget an unwanted memory did not help dim it, nor did mentally looking the other way. Rather, there seemed to be a sweet spot — neither too little mental attention, nor too much — that allowed a memory to come to mind and then fade, at least partially, of its own accord. You have to remember, just a little, to forget.
“This suggests a new route to successful forgetting,” the authors concluded. “To forget a memory, its mental representation should be enhanced to trigger memory weakening.”
“When people were successful at doing this, there was a significant drop in their recognition confidence of images,” said Dr. Lewis-Peacock. “Whether a person’s intent is to weaken memories as a part of therapy, or to change them or link them to other things as a part of daily living, this finding speaks directly to that.”
Lili Sahakyan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, who was not involved in the research, said: “This idea that memories have to be strengthened before they can be weakened is surprising in that it’s not how we presume memory works. But it’s a very solid finding, and we are following up on it.”
The insight joins an accumulating body of evidence casting doubt on a purely linear model of forgetting, which contends that less mental attention means less remembering. That model appears to hold for some kinds of memories; deliberate ignoring is central to the forgetting strategy known as suppression.
Other strategies are not strictly linear, in that they require some engagement with the memory. One is substitution: deliberately linking an unwanted memory to other thoughts, which help alter the unwanted content when it is later retrieved. For instance, a humiliating memory could be diminished by focusing less on the feeling of shame and more on the friends who provided subsequent support.
Scientists have not yet worked out which strategies are best suited to particular kinds of unwanted memories. But any clearer understanding would be a gift to therapists working with people with disabling memories of trauma, shame or neglect. Such memories don’t fade; they remain, either as vivid recollections or as subconscious or partially conscious sources of dread and despair. A therapist’s task is to guide the patient back through these memories in a way that blunts their sting, rather than reinforces them — a dicey and often painstaking process.
Dr. Lewis-Peacock said that his lab is looking at using real-time neurofeedback to nudge people who are trying to dim a memory into the mental state suggested by the new study: moderate engagement with the memory, not too much nor too little.
“We hope they can use that to say ‘Think more,’ or ‘Think less,’ to get themselves into that mental sweet spot,” he said.
Due to a wave of unrest in their homeland a number of Sleestak refugees have been allowed to resettle in the country. Local officials have assured the capital that every effort will be made to help the newcomers adapt to life in the country.
Special housing is being constructed hastily to satisfy the species needs. There has been some grumbling that there are homeless people who should be housed first before some reptilian species is taken care of.
We (Russian: Мы, translit. My) is a dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, completed in 1921.[2] The novel was first published in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York in an English translation by Gregory Zilboorg. The novel describes a world of harmony and conformity within a united totalitarian state.
We is set in the future. D-503, a spacecraft engineer, lives in the One State,[3] an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which assists mass surveillance. The structure of the state is Panopticon-like, and life is scientifically managed F. W. Taylor-style. People march in step with each other and are uniformed. There is no way of referring to people except by their given numbers. The society is run strictly by logic or reason as the primary justification for the laws or the construct of the society.[4][5] The individual’s behaviour is based on logic by way of formulas and equations outlined by the One State.[6]
One thousand years after the One State’s conquest of the entire world, the spaceship Integral is being built in order to invade and conquer extraterrestrial planets. Meanwhile, the project’s chief engineer, D-503, begins a journal that he intends to be carried upon the completed spaceship.
Like all other citizens of One State, D-503 lives in a glass apartment building and is carefully watched by the secret police, or Bureau of Guardians. D-503’s lover, O-90, has been assigned by One State to visit him on certain nights. She is considered too short to bear children and is deeply grieved by her state in life.
O-90’s other lover and D-503’s best friend is R-13, a State poet who reads his verse at public executions.
While on an assigned walk with O-90, D-503 meets a woman named I-330. I-330 smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, and shamelessly flirts with D-503 instead of applying for an impersonal sex visit; all of these are highly illegal according to the laws of One State.
Both repelled and fascinated, D-503 struggles to overcome his attraction to I-330. I-330 invites him to visit the Ancient House, notable for being the only opaque building in One State, except for windows. Objects of aesthetic and historical importance dug up from around the city are stored there. There, I-330 offers him the services of a corrupt doctor to explain his absence from work. Leaving in horror, D-503 vows to denounce her to the Bureau of Guardians, but finds that he cannot.
He begins to have dreams, which disturbs him, as dreams are thought to be a symptom of mental illness. Slowly, I-330 reveals to D-503 that she is involved with the Mephi, an organization plotting to bring down the One State. She takes him through secret tunnels inside the Ancient House to the world outside the Green Wall, which surrounds the city-state. There, D-503 meets the inhabitants of the outside world: humans whose bodies are covered with animal fur. The aims of the Mephi are to destroy the Green Wall and reunite the citizens of One State with the outside world.
Despite the recent rift between them, O-90 pleads with D-503 to impregnate her illegally. After O-90 insists that she will obey the law by turning over their child to be raised by the One State, D-503 obliges. However, as her pregnancy progresses, O-90 realizes that she cannot bear to be parted from her baby under any circumstances. At D-503’s request, I-330 arranges for O-90 to be smuggled outside the Green Wall.
In his last journal entry, D-503 indifferently relates that he has been forcibly tied to a table and subjected to the “Great Operation”, which has recently been mandated for all citizens of One State in order to prevent possible riots;[7] having been psycho-surgically refashioned into a state of mechanical “reliability”, they would now function as “tractors in human form”.[8] This operation removes the imagination and emotions by targeting parts of the brain with X-rays. After this operation, D-503 willingly informed the Benefactor about the inner workings of the Mephi. However, D-503 expresses surprise that even torture could not induce I-330 to denounce her comrades. Despite her refusal, I-330 and those arrested with her have been sentenced to death, “under the Benefactor’s Machine”.
Meanwhile, the Mephi uprising gathers strength; parts of the Green Wall have been destroyed, birds are repopulating the city, and people start committing acts of social rebellion. Although D-503 expresses hope that the Benefactor shall restore “reason”, the novel ends with One State’s survival in doubt. I-330’s mantra is that, just as there is no highest number, there can be no final revolution.
Along with Jack London‘s The Iron Heel, We is generally considered to be the grandfather of the satirical futuristic dystopia genre. It takes the modern industrial society to an extreme conclusion, depicting a state that believes that free will is the cause of unhappiness, and that citizens’ lives should be controlled with mathematical precision based on the system of industrial efficiency created by Frederick Winslow Taylor.
The novel was first published in English in 1924 by E. P. Dutton in New York in a translation by Gregory Zilboorg,[34] but its first publication in the Soviet Union had to wait until 1988,[35] when glasnost resulted in it appearing. Since 11 March 2007, the original novel is no longer copyrighted under the Berne Convention.
Brown, p. xi, citing Shane, gives 1921. Russell, p. 3, dates the first draft to 1919.
The Ginsburg and Randall translations use the phrasing “One State”. Guerney uses “The One State”—each word is capitalized. Brown uses the single word “OneState”, which he calls “ugly” (p. xxv). Zilboorg uses “United State”.
All of these are translations of the phrase Yedinoye Gosudarstvo (Russian: Единое Государство).
George Orwell by Harold Bloom pg 54 Publisher: Chelsea House Pub ISBN978-0791094280
Zamyatin’s We: A Collection of Critical Essays by Gary Kern pgs 124, 150 Publisher: Ardis ISBN978-0882338040
The Literary Underground: Writers and the Totalitarian Experience, 1900–1950 pgs 89–91 By John Hoyles Palgrave Macmillan; First edition (June 15, 1991) ISBN978-0-312-06183-8[1]
Serdyukova, O.I. [О.И. Сердюкова] (2011). Проблема свободы личности в романе Э. Берджесса “Механический апельсин” [The problem of the individual freedom in E. Burgess’s novel “A Clockwork Orange”] (PDF). Вісник Харківського національного університету імені В. Н. Каразіна. Серія: Філологія [The Herald of the Karazin Kharkiv National University. Series: Philology] (in Russian). Kharkiv. 936 (61): 144–146.
Ginsburg trans. This term is also translated as “Well-Doer”.[citation needed]Benefactor translates Blagodetel (Russian: Благодетель).
Ginsburg trans. Numbers translates nomera (Russian: номера). This is translated by Natasha Randall as “cyphers” in the 2006 edition published by The Modern Library, New York.
Fifth Entry (Ginsburg translation, p. 21).
Randall, p. xvii.
Ermolaev.
Shane, p 12.
Myers.
“All these icebreakers were constructed in England, in Newcastle and yards nearby; there are traces of my work in every one of them, especially the Alexander Nevsky—now the Lenin;I did the preliminary design, and after that none of the vessel’s drawings arrived in the workshop without having been checked and signed:
‘Chief surveyor of Russian Icebreakers’ Building E.Zamiatin.” [The signature is written in English.] (Zamyatin ([1962]))
Wolfe, Tom (2001). The Right Stuff. Bantam. ISBN978-0-553-38135-1. “D-503”: p. 55, 236. “it looked hopeless to try to catch up with the mighty Integral in anything that involved flights in earth orbit.”: p. 215. Wolfe uses the Integral in several other passages.
ANIMAL MAGNETISM Like birds, bacteria and other creatures with an ability known as magnetoreception, humans can sense Earth’s magnetic field (illustrated), a new study suggests.
A new analysis of people’s brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a “sixth sense” for magnetism.
Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth’s magnetic field and use it for navigation (SN: 6/14/14, p. 10). Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.
These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth’s magnetic field — although it’s not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.
“The first impression when I read the [study] was like, ‘Wow, I cannot believe it!’” says Can Xie, a biophysicist at Peking University in Beijing. Previous tests of human magnetoreception have yielded inconclusive results. This new evidence “is one step forward for the magnetoreception field and probably a big step for the human magnetic sense,” he says. “I do hope we can see replications and further investigations in the near future.”
During the experiment, 26 participants each sat with their eyes closed in a dark, quiet chamber lined with electrical coils. These coils manipulated the magnetic field inside the chamber such that it remained the same strength as Earth’s natural field but could be pointed in any direction. Participants wore an EEG cap that recorded the electrical activity of their brains while the surrounding magnetic field rotated in various directions.
This setup simulated the effect of someone turning in different directions in Earth’s natural, unchanging field without requiring a participant to actually move. (Complete stillness prevented motor-control thoughts from tainting brain waves due to the magnetic field.) The researchers compared these EEG readouts with those from control trials where the magnetic field inside the chamber didn’t move.
Joseph Kirschvink, a neurobiologist and geophysicist at Caltech, and colleagues studied alpha waves to determine whether the brain reacts to changes in magnetic field direction. Alpha waves generally dominate EEG readings while a person is sitting idle but fade when someone receives sensory input, like a sound or touch.
Sure enough, changes in the magnetic field triggered changes in people’s alpha waves. Specifically, when the magnetic field pointed toward the floor in front of a participant facing north — the direction that Earth’s magnetic field points in the Northern Hemisphere — swiveling the field counterclockwise from northeast to northwest triggered an average 25 percent dip in the amplitude of alpha waves. That change was about three times as strong as natural alpha wave fluctuations seen in control trials.
ROTATION REACTION When downward-pointing magnetic fields were rotated counterclockwise, from northeast to northwest, researchers saw a significant dip in participants’ alpha brain waves (left). Alpha waves are similarly dampened when someone receives sensory input like a sound or smell. This response was not seen when downward fields rotated clockwise (center) or were held steady (right).
Curiously, people’s brains showed no responses to a rotating magnetic field pointed toward the ceiling — the direction of Earth’s field in the Southern Hemisphere. Four participants were retested weeks or months later and showed the same responses.
“It’s kind of intriguing to think that we have a sense of which we’re not consciously aware,” says Peter Hore, a chemist at the University of Oxford who has studied birds’ internal compasses. But “extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof, and in this case, that includes being able to reproduce it in a different lab.”
Questions raised
If these findings are replicable, they pose several questions — such as why people seem to respond to downward- but not upward-pointing fields. Kirschvink and colleagues think they have an answer: “The brain is taking [magnetic] data, pulling it out and only using it if it makes sense,” Kirschvink says.
Participants in this study, who all hailed from the Northern Hemisphere, should perceive downward-pointing magnetic fields as natural, whereas upward fields would constitute an anomaly, the researchers argue. Magnetoreceptive animals are known to shut off their internal compasses when encountering weird fields, such as those caused by lightning, which might lead the animals astray. Northern-born humans may similarly take their magnetic sense “offline” when faced with strange, upward-pointing fields.
This explanation “seems plausible,” Hore says, but would need to be tested in an experiment with participants from the Southern Hemisphere.
The brain’s attention to counterclockwise but not clockwise rotations “is something surprising that we don’t really have a good explanation for,” says coauthor Connie Wang, who studies magnetoperception at Caltech. Some people may respond to clockwise rotations, just like some people are left-handed rather than right-handed, or clockwise rotations generate brain activity not captured in the alpha wave signal, she says.
Even accounting for which magnetic changes the brain picks up, researchers still don’t know what our minds might use that information for, Kirschvink says. Another lingering mystery is how, exactly, our brains detect Earth’s magnetic field. According to the researchers, the brain wave patterns uncovered in this study may be explained by sensory cells containing a magnetic mineral called magnetite, which has been found in magnetoreceptive trout as well as in the human brain (SN: 8/11/12, p. 13). Future experiments could confirm or eliminate that possibility.
With this first compelling evidence that humans are subconsciously processing magnetic signals, “we can [try to] identify the brain region it originates from and try to identify the nature of the cells” responsible, says Michael Winklhofer, a magnetoreception researcher at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. “This is really the first step.”
See Voynich, Ethel Lillian. The Gadfly 1. New York: Henry Holt & Company. 1897 [13 July 2014]. via Archive.org
Cork City Libraries互联网档案馆的存檔，存档日期2007-11-18. provides a downloadable PDF of Evgeniya Taratuta’s 1957 biographical pamphlet Our Friend Ethel Lilian Boole/Voynich, translated from the Russian by Séamus Ó Coigligh. The pamphlet gives some idea of the Soviet attitude toward Voynich.
Le Taon (The Gadfly) est un roman sur un thème révolutionnaire, connu particulièrement pour le succès dont a bénéficié sa traduction en langue russe sous le titre Ovod. Ethel Lilian Voynich en est l’auteure. C’est une écrivaine irlandaise, puis américaine. La première publication du livre aux États-Unis date de juin 1897 et en Angleterre de septembre de la même année.
Le roman a comme sujet l’activité des membres de l’organisation révolutionnaire clandestine « Giovine Italia » durant la première moitié du XIXe siècle. Il raconte l’histoire d’Arthur Burton, un jeune homme naïf, passionné plein d’idées et d’illusions romantiques. Il est trompé, calomnié et rejeté par tous. Il disparaît, simulant un suicide et retourne dans sa patrie lointaine après 13 ans, mais sous un autre nom, avec une apparence physique et une personnalité transformée, le cœur endurci. Il se présente aux gens qu’il a connu autrefois mais devenu cynique et moqueur. Il prend, comme journaliste, le pseudonyme du « Taon » (Gadfly1).
Le roman était aussi apprécié dans d’autres pays même s’il n’y faisait pas partie des œuvres dont on encourageait beaucoup la lecture. Dans le roman de Nikolaï Ostrovski, Et l’acier fut trempé, le personnage principal, Pavka Kortchagine, fait plusieurs fois référence au roman Le Taon et dans un épisode il récite tout un fragment.
Prototype
Les chercheurs littéraires polonais sont convaincus de retrouver le prototype de Gadfly dans les figures du parti social-révolutionnaire polonais. Les lecteurs russes y reconnaissent, quant à eux, les traits des révolutionnaires russes. D’autres encore retrouvent les traits caractéristiques de Giuseppe Mazzini et Giuseppe Garibaldi dans l’image du héros3.
En 1955, des écrivains soviétiques ont réussi à retrouver à New York l’écrivaine E. L. Voynich et à maintenir des relations épistolaires avec elle. Dans une lettre écrite à l’écrivain russe Boris Polevoï les 11 et 14 janvier 1957 elle s’explique à propos des prototypes d’Arthur Burton (Gadfly4).
Critique
Pour l’écrivain russe Varlam Chalamov, The Gadfly est le livre qui a joué le plus grand rôle dans la vie de deux générations de russes5.
↑ On prétend que l’image du révolutionnaire du Taon a exercé une influence sur les débuts de la vie de l’espion britannique Sidney Reilly qui se livre à des activités d’espionnage en Union soviétiqueselon Robin Bruce Lockhart, Reilly: Ace of Spies, 1986, Hippocrene Books (ISBN0-88029-072-2)
↑Cork City Libraries [archive] provides a downloadable PDF [archive] of Evgeniya Taratuta’s 1957 biographical pamphlet Our Friend Ethel Lilian Boole/Voynich, translated from the Russian by Séamus Ó Coigligh. The pamphlet gives some idea of the Soviet attitude toward Voynich
↑Œuvres de E L Voynich en deux tomes Э. Л. Войнич. Избранные сочинения в двух томах. М., «Художественное издательство художественной литературы», 1958. стр.14 (предисловие — Е. Таратута)
↑E. L. Voynich : œuvres en deux tomes / Э. Л. Войнич. Избранные сочинения в двух томах. М., «Художественное издательство художественной литературы», 1958. стр.426-427
L’opera, ambientata nell’Italia risorgimentale a cavallo degli anni ’30 e ’40 dell’Ottocento, vede snodarsi la propria trama tra l’allora Granducato di Toscana (Pisa, Livorno e Firenze) e la Romagna Pontificia (Brisighella, dove la vicenda narrata ha il suo tragico epilogo). I temi dominanti del libro vanno individuati nell’eroismo e nella lotta per la libertà, ai quali va aggiunto anche un tormentato ateismo. I riferimenti topografici all’interno del romanzo sono sorprendenti: sono infatti indicate anche singole località non riportate nemmeno sugli atlanti oppure sulle carte a piccola scala.
Ispirazione e ricezione
Con tutta probabilità, la Voynich trasse ispirazione e dati per il libro dai racconti di un esule romagnolo, tal Luigi Passani o Bassani, sviluppando poi l’intreccio assecondando la propria fede repubblicana e la venerazione che la scrittrice aveva nei confronti di Giuseppe Mazzini e Giuseppe Garibaldi.
Sostanzialmente sconosciuto in Italia e attualmente dimenticato nel mondo anglosassone, grazie ad una sua rilettura in chiave marxista The Gadfly ha avuto e tuttora ha grande successo negli stati comunisti o laddove l’ideologia comunista è stata molto forte: su tutti, URSS (dove la sua lettura era obbligatoria a scuola), Paesi ex comunisti dell’Europa orientale, Repubblica Popolare Cinese, Vietnam, Cuba.
Il successo del romanzo della Voynich fu tale che esso conobbe almeno 4 trasposizioni cinematografiche (3 sovietiche ed una cinese) e innumerevoli adattamenti per il teatro, l’opera, il balletto (in massima parte sovietici).
A gennaio 2013 è uscita una nuova edizione (Castelvecchi editore) con una traduzione inedita e un cospicuo apparato critico.
Nel 2017 sono stati editi gli atti di una giornata di studio tenutasi all’Università di Pisa nel 2015, dove si approfondiscono in primo luogo la ricezione e la rielaborazione russo-sovietica del romanzo.
Bibliografia italiana
S. Piastra, Luoghi reali e luoghi letterari: Brisighella in The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich, “Studi Romagnoli” LVII, (2006), pp. 717-735.
S. Piastra, Il romanzo inglese di Brisighella: nuovi dati su The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich, “Studi Romagnoli” LIX, (2008), pp. 571-583.
A. Farsetti, S. Piastra, The Gadfly di Ethel Lilian Voynich: nuovi dati e interpretazioni, “Romagna Arte e Storia” 91, (2011), pp. 41-62.
Ethel Lilian Voynich Il figlio del cardinale , (trad. it. di A. Farsetti; saggi di A. Farsetti e S. Piastra), Castelvecchi Editore (2013), ISBN 9788876156120.
C. Cadamagnani, A. Farsetti (a cura di), Il figlio del cardinale di Ethel Lilian Voynich. Un romanzo sul Risorgimento tra storia e mito, (Atti della giornata di studio), Pisa University Press, Pisa, 2017, ISBN 978-886741-8886.
If you really love yourself, you’d keep a journal. Bold statement, I know, but I mean it.
The ultimate act of self-love is self-expression. It is confidently believing that your thoughts, both silly and serious, are worthy of note – no exceptions.
I assume I’m not alone in having spent a childhood and at least half an adolescence sporadically trying to keep a regular journal and failing at it consistently. Even as a little girl, when shame and inhibition should’ve been influencing exactly zero percent of my decisions, the act of keeping a diary filled with my daily thoughts and feelings felt frivolous and embarrassing and I never succeeded at writing more than one or two entries before I gave up.
I was perfectly fine dancing like a fool in the aisles at church or confidently yelling wrong answers out in class, but something about the act of journaling embarrassed me like nothing else could, which doesn’t make any sense, right?
Don’t we usually think of embarrassment as an emotion we only feel in a crowd, an emotion that comes as a direct product of being judged? Why then did the thought of keeping a journal, that was only ever meant for me, embarrass me to the point of giving up for most of my life? Why does the same thought still keep many adults from journaling to this day?
I think it’s because we judge ourselves more harshly than anyone else ever could. In our (at least ideally) merit-based society, we’re taught that the good ideas are worth sharing and the bad ones are worth keeping to ourselves, that the good songs should get on the album and the bad songs should get left on the cutting room floor. Now I’m not arguing that the bad songs should make it onto the album, I’m just saying that you’re never going to write a good song until you write a couple of bad ones. In your journal. Without being embarrassed about it.
We all deserve a place where we can be free to create without fear of judgment from anyone, including ourselves.
A journal is a place to keep all your bad songs, all your embarrassingly terrible love poems and all the mundane details of your day. It’s a place where you show yourself compassion by not holding yourself to a single standard other than production, a place where you make and document and keep and ramble – each word you write, a self-affirmation of your own right to be heard. Your journal can be notebook or a blog or a sketchbook or a bunch of voice memos on your phone – it doesn’t matter.
But whatever form it takes, journaling is a way to get to know the truest, most vulnerable iteration of yourself. It’s scary and intimate and weird but it’s all worth it. So much can be learned by taking the amorphous mush of thoughts and ideas and feelings and memories in your mind and materializing them in any way you can. And so much can be gained. Don’t believe me? Try it. I dare you.
I dare you to keep a journal that you write in every day. I dare you to love yourself one sentence at a time. I dare you to show yourself that your voice is worthy of being heard, even if the only person hearing it is you. I dare you to sit alone in a crowd and applaud for every one of your own bad songs, blissfully indifferent to their destiny to be left on the cutting room floor.
BOSTON—Expressing concern for the well-being of the greater metropolitan area in light of their long history of irresponsible behavior, the populace of the United States gently suggested to Boston Thursday that perhaps they should take it easy this St. Patrick’s Day. “We want you guys to have fun and celebrate, but don’t go completely overboard this year, all right?” said the apprehensive U.S. populace, reminding the nation’s most outspoken bastion of both real and imagined Irish-American culture that they could celebrate the holiday without binge drinking, bare-knuckle boxing, or climbing on top of a car to drunkenly egg on bare-knuckle boxers. “By all means, you can drink a couple beers, even green beers, and have a good time, but maybe cool it with the Jameson shots and definitely no Irish coffee, okay? Remember, you racked up $42 million in medical bills last St. Patrick’s, and that’s before accounting for fire department overtime.” The nation further emphasized that it honestly wanted Boston to enjoy itself, and did not expect the city to maintain the quiet atmosphere of sullen, resentful drunkenness with which residents observed Black History Month.
Norther Ireland Secretary Karen Bradley’s ‘Mistake’ About Derry’s “Bloody Sunday” Reveals Far More Than Just Her Ignorance
The families of the 13 innocent people shot dead by the Parachute Regiment when they took part in a civil rights march against internment without trial in Londonderry in 1972 will learn in the coming week if soldiers, who are alleged to have carried out the killings, will be prosecuted.
There is no doubt about what happened on Bloody Sunday 47 years ago since Lord Saville’s report, 5,000 words long and the fruit of 12 years’ work, was published in 2010. It concluded that none of the casualties shot by the soldiers “were posing any threat of causing death or serious injury”. It said that all soldiers bar one responsible for the casualties “insisted that they had shot at gunmen or bombers, which they had not”. Saville added that “many of these soldiers have knowingly put forward false accounts in order to justify their firing”.
Saville said the report was “absolutely clear” and there were “no ambiguities” about events in the city on that day. David Cameron later told the House of Commons that “what happened on Bloody Sunday was both unjustified and unjustifiable. It was wrong.”
But eight years after Cameron had apologised, the Commons heard another story from the Northern Ireland secretary, Karen Bradley, who said this week that the deaths caused by the British security services during the Troubles were “not crimes” but people acting “under orders and under instruction and fulfilling their duties in a dignified and appropriate way”.
This was so very different from Saville and Cameron that it was followed by a frantic row-back on the part of Bradley, followed by some some touchy-feely stuff about acknowledging the pain of the families of the dead who might be upset by her words.
Bradley’s original statement and confused apologies were greeted with derision by the media, which recalled her past gaffes, comparing her ineptitude to that of the transport secretary Chris Grayling whose pratfalls and failures – and unsackability because of Brexit – are notorious.
But Bradley’s incompetence and ignorance – her kinder critics say that “she is out of her depth” – are a diversion from a more serious failing on her part, one which has the potential to do real damage to the stability of Northern Ireland. This is simply that what she said and later apologised for reflects all too accurately the real thinking of much of the government, most Conservative MPs and the great majority of their party supporters.
Prominent Brexiteers have never liked the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), while others consider it a Labour project that they would be happy to see wither on the bough. Michael Gove compared the GFA to the appeasement of the Nazis. The former Northern Ireland secretary Owen Paterson happily retweeted an article saying that the GFA had run its course and he supports a hard border with the Irish Republic. The “Get Back Control” slogan of the pro-Brexit campaign was aimed at the EU, but it can be rapidly adjusted for use against the GFA, which undoubtedly does dilute the formal authority of the British government in Northern Ireland though expanding its real influence.
Bradley’s statement in the Commons could be dismissed as the normal Conservative knee-jerk support for the British Army. But the problem here is that its tone is in keeping with Conservative actions since they won the general election in 2010. Since then they have ignored essential parts of the GFA, such as the central role of the nationalist population in the north and, until recently, of the Irish government. Cameron may have apologised for Bloody Sunday but he sent a right winger like Paterson to Belfast as secretary of state.
Bit by bit the preconditions for peace have been chipped away. A crucial element was the declaration by the British government under John Major in 1993 that it was neutral between unionists and nationalists. This enabled it to mediate successfully between the two communities. It also enabled it to act in concert with the Irish government if the two communities could not agree.
This neutrality was carelessly abandoned long before Theresa May finally knocked it on the head when she became dependent on the DUP for her parliamentary majority in 2017. DUP MPs are now treated as if they were the sole representatives of Northern Ireland, though its voters chose decisively by 56 to 44 per cent to stay in the EU. Moreover, demographers say that Catholics and nationalists now each make up half the population of the north and will be in the majority in two years’ time.
Contrary to criticism, Bradley’s repeated gaffes, automatic support for the British Army and open ignorance of the Northern Irish political terrain are nothing out of the ordinary for politicians holding her job. Perhaps it is unfair to blame this on the Conservatives alone: the British political class has a long tradition of ignoring Ireland until it blows up in their faces.
The fact that Bradley’s ill-considered remarks were made only days before there is to be a decision by the Northern Ireland Public Prosecution Service about the prosecution of soldiers involved in Bloody Sunday is also par for the course.
A central reason why the Troubles went on for so long was that successive British governments from 1968-69 failed to realise the extent to which internment without trial, Bloody Sunday, the hunger strikes, the Birmingham Six and similar injustices delegitimised the British state in the eyes of the nationalist community. A myth was maintained that the IRA has only two or three per cent support in the nationalist community and that it was always on the verge of total defeat. But small guerrilla groups depend more on tolerance or support than they do on military capacity and this popular acceptance was underestimated by the British and Irish governments. Both were astonished when Sinn Fein started winning elections under their own name in the wake of the hunger strikes.
These grievances in Northern Ireland are often presented as “legacy” issues which are only kept alive by the historically obsessed Irish who ought to let the dead bury their dead and get on with their lives.
But this is exactly what Brexit – along with a prolonged failure by the British government to keep the GFA in good working order – is preventing people in Northern Ireland from doing. It is absurd for people in Britain to criticise anybody in Northern Ireland for undue interest in the past when Brexit is doing just that by resurrecting a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, the elimination of which was central to the peace agreement. If Britain goes backward into the past, there is no reason why the Irish should not do the same thing.
Canadian train ‘began to move on its own’ before fatal derailment
WINNIPEG, Manitoba (Reuters) – A Canadian Pacific Railway train was parked for a change of crew when it unexpectedly rolled down a steep embankment in British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains on 4 February 2019, killing three crew members, a transport regulator said.
The train, hauling 112 cars of grain, was parked for two hours at the last station before a tunnel near Field, B.C., to allow a new crew to replace one that was near its maximum hours of service, Transportation Safety Board (TSB) senior investigator James Carmichael said on Tuesday.
He said emergency air brakes were applied before three crew members, a locomotive engineer, conductor and conductor trainee, boarded the train and prepared to depart for Vancouver.
The train then “began to move on its own,” exceeding its maximum track speed of 20 miles (32 km) per hour for the tight curves and steep mountain grade, and derailed, Carmichael said.
Conductor Dylan Paradis, locomotive engineer Andrew Dockrell, and conductor trainee Daniel Waldenberger-Bulmer perished in the accident.
A preliminary investigation undertaken by the Transportation Safety Board determined that the train, which was hauling grain, had been parked temporarily on a steep grade with air brakes applied at Partridge station for about two hours to facilitate a shift change. Suddenly, around 1 AM, “the train began to move on its own,” accelerating down a steep mountain grade, before 99 hopper cars and two locomotives derailed. Handbrakes had not been applied, a practice in accordance with existing Transport Canada guidance.
In response to the tragedy, Transportation Minister Marc Garneau felt compelled to temporarily order the application of handbrakes on all trains stopped on mountain slopes as a precaution, until the cause of the derailment is determined. Even this token measure proved too much for the rail bosses, with CP Rail reportedly energetically lobbying Transport Canada to abandon the new rule as too time-consuming, i.e., costly.
“As I have said many times before, rail safety is my top priority,” claimed Garneau. This is an entirely deceptive statement, given that the Transportation Safety Board’s own studies document the hazardous conditions routinely faced by transportation crews. Worker fatigue due to long and irregular hours, faulty machinery, the movement of dangerous cargo, extreme weather conditions, faulty safety mechanisms, and poor regulatory oversight are frequently cited as serious safety issues. However, for decades Liberal and Conservative governments alike have enabled private industry to run amok, facilitating multi-billion dollar profits for the rail companies through the shredding of transportation regulations.
As early as 1986, an official inquiry into a fatal collision in Hinton, BC, where 23 people were killed, determined that the crew demonstrated a lack of alertness probably due to chronic fatigue, and described a “railroader culture” that prized loyalty and productivity at the expense of safety.
In 2012, a passenger train derailed at Burlington, Ontario, killing the 3 crew and injuring 46 passengers. An investigation determined that safety protections, as well as the crashworthiness of the cars, were inadequate.
Then in 2013, less than a year-and-a-half later, 47 people were killed in Canada’s worst train disaster at Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, when a train carrying oil, and also parked on a sharp incline, suddenly started to move, careened into the center of town and exploded. The official investigation determined that fatigue had compromised the judgment of the lone crew member. Mechanical problems with the locomotives may also have played a role.
There are on average at least 50 derailments per month across the country. On the short section of track stretching from Field to Revelstoke, British Columbia where the most recent tragedy occurred, there have been 72 derailments since 2004. During 2018, there were 57 railway-related deaths across the country.
The frequency and severity of accidents is attributable to a relentless campaign of privatization and deregulation in Canada’s rail sector. This campaign, greenlighted by government in the early 1980s, has emboldened Canada’s railway oligopoly to pursue unfettered profit at the expense of basic worker protections. The number of railway inspections has plummeted, from over 7,000 in 1984 to less than 2,000 in 2016. Meanwhile, rail accidents rose by 7 percent in 2018 from a year earlier, with 1,170 “reported accidents”, or more than three per day.
Despite regular tragedies and a mountain of evidence pointing out obvious dangers to rail worker safety, successive governments have refused to properly oversee the industry, let alone prosecute flagrant safety violations. A recent internal Transport Canada memo acknowledges that work rules are feckless, and that “fatigue is managed by a patchwork of approaches most of which are outside Transport Canada’s control.”
With the direct facilitation of government and connivance of the rail unions, CN Rail and CP have destroyed thousands of jobs over the past two decades. In 1998, CN culled half of its workforce “to become the most efficient railroad in North America.” Between 2001 and 2010, one fifth of jobs in Canada’s railway industry were eliminated. In 2013, CN Rail cut another 3,000 jobs, and CP Rail’s new CEO has promised to cut nearly one-quarter of its workforce. This past November there was another spate of layoffs at CN Rail, although the company has declined to disclose the exact figure.
Over the past decade, governments of all stripes have openly bolstered the rail industry’s assault on working conditions. In 2012, the federal Conservative government used anti-democratic strike-breaking legislation to criminalize a strike by CP Rail workers. The federal NDP responded to the law with the pathetic remark that there was not much it could do because the government had a majority in parliament.
In April 2018, Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government suspended railway workers’ right to strike under the Canadian Labour Code. After rail workers overwhelmingly repudiated a rotten concessions contract in a government-supervised vote, Trudeau intervened to declare that his government would not tolerate a lengthy shutdown of the rail system by a strike.
The trade union misleaders have also facilitated the railway companies’ decimation of work standards. In 2012, Teamsters officials ordered their membership to comply with the back-to-work law, and in 2015, on the verge of a strike deadline, agreed to have all outstanding issues decided by a Conservative government-appointed arbitrator.
In response to Trudeau’s threat of government intervention last year, the Teamsters leadership called off a strike by 3,000 CP Rail workers, and capitulated to the company’s demands.
Unifor Rail Director Brian Stevens made the equivocal and vague assertion that “I think we need to ask if CP [Rail] is putting shareholders ahead of safety here.”
As rail accidents continue unabated, the rapacious train companies are raking in massive profits. In Canada, lucrative rail freight operations generate approximately $10 billion annually. CN Rail is the biggest railway network on the continent, and in the last quarter of 2018 its revenues rose nearly sixteen percent to $3.81 billion.
The rail business in Canada is set to expand. On the subject of oil exports, Alberta NDP Premier Rachel Notley declared that “rather than produce less, we have to find ways to move more.” Her government has committed to leasing 4,400 rail cars to accommodate the projected doubling of crude-by-rail shipments over the next two years. In British Columbia, CN Rail, in league with the federal government and port authority, is increasing cargo capacity through Vancouver’s harbour.
Under increasingly perilous conditions, with rail traffic set to increase with ever-shrinking crews, further disasters leading to injury and death are inevitable, absent the political intervention of the working class.
Capitalism is a social system where the basic safety needs of workers are routinely contemptuously ignored by employers and governments.
(Undocumented Suspect In Bambi Larson Murder Makes First Court Appearance – 14 March 2019)
Cheryl Cook, or Cookie as she is known, has been capturing what happens in Chicago courtrooms for more than 20 years, most of those as the Tribune’s go-to courtroom artist.
(Tom Brady of New England Patriots in court)
After a day covering the tribulations of one larger-than-life sports figure in the courtroom (Bulls legend Michael Jordan suing Dominick’s over the use of his likeness) we asked her what she thought about another larger-than-life sports figure in the courtoom (Tom Brady up against the NFL — and a much maligned and shared courtroom sketch of the New England Patriots QB).
Cook’s first courtroom drawing was at 26th and Cal during the 1994 trial of congressman Mel Reynolds. Here’s what she had to say about the Brady situation and a sample of her work. Q&A with Tribune courtroom sketch artist Cheryl Cook
What is a typical day in court?
The best way I can describe this is to be as alert and nimble as you can muster. Always listening to the case and watching responses and other nuances occurring all around you. Typically you arrive early to get the best view possible for the day’s events. After many years of working with great people in the court system, we have gotten to know each other and every effort is made to assist us when possible. They verify with the judge what we are allowed to draw, where we can sit and any other instructions from the court. Then you just have to draw as fast as is humanly possible to record as much of what is happening as possible.
What do you think courtroom artists add to news coverage?
Court artists provide a view of what is inside the courtroom to accompany the written word. A court sketch artist can capture an entire day’s worth of action into a single sketch when necessary to tell the story. We also can hear, feel and sense what other nuances are happening in a courtroom. No camera will ever be able to replace that! One would also have to watch the entire day’s events focused on one camera angle to see what took place.
(Paul Manafort)
You’ve covered a lot of high-profile cases, do you feel extra pressure when a well-known person is involved?
My focus each time I enter this arena is to act as a human recorder visually. The pressure I feel is the same whether it is a well-known person or not. However, we all know that if you don’t get a great likeness of someone well-known no one is more disappointed than the artist. We are often in hearings that might only be a 15-minute interval of time. Now that is pressure: fast and good, very difficult.
What do you make of the crazy reaction to the Tom Brady sketch? Have there been discussions about it in courtroom artist circles?
This makes me wish everyone could attempt to do this job themselves. With no time and high expectations, creating the visual record of events is a fascinating task. Not that I would ever compare myself to the great artists who created the visual record of the signing of the Declaration of Independence but in many ways there had to be someone like us doing the job the same way. In a room trying to capture as much information as possible.
In the courtroom sketch artist circles, we have been talking about the comments made by reactions to Tom Brady’s sketch indeed. We have all had our share of sketches that did not meet our personal standards over our careers. It is hard not to, we are human after all. My heart went out the this sketch artist and at the same time I confess I was relieved it was not me, lol
Any pointers for people trying draw accurate portraits?
Strange as it sounds, studying people and how they move and practice practice practice will serve anyone well who wants to draw accurate portraits. People have rhythms to how they stand or gesture that will go a long way in identifying who they are.
See Also: Boston Marathon Bomber Courtroom Sketches –
The first one turned out to be (do you believe this?) that “the American aircraft carrier is big and fast . . . “ The second one – “it has many weapons . . . “ The third reason – “it is well defended . . .”. The fourth reason – “it acts prudently . . . “ And, finally, the fifth – “the American military technologies are the best in the world . . .”.
Such is a collection of simplistic propagandist clichés that the American propaganda machine is pounding into the head of the Western common man. It is important to understand that The National Interest in not some “yellow” paper; this is an analytical journal that is expected to offer responsible and professional publications.
A Large And Fast Coffin With A Propeller
Let us take a closer look at the way the author of the article – an expert and political analyst – explains to his readers why the American aircraft carriers are invulnerable and unsinkable . . .
OK, the first thesis. The American aircraft carries is indeed large and fast. It has 25 decks; its maximal height is 80 meters; it displaces 100,000 tons of water and can carry 70, or even up to 90, aircraft of different types.
Unfortunately, one small detail spoils this lovely picture: a large target is easier to hit! But the Americans simply cannot make their aircraft carriers smaller. The reason is simple: they are insanely expensive. The carries have to be made in such enormous size, simply because if they are made smaller, more of them will be needed. Flexibility of the American aircraft carrier fleet would in such case increase, but the price would skyrocket.
Judge by yourself: a modern aircraft carrier costs the US approximately $13 billions (that is how much the newest “Gerald Ford” cost), and the carrier air wing (the Navy version of F-35) based of the carrier costs additional $7 billions.
Plus, there are the ships of the “carrier strike group” – multiple guided missile warships, destroyers equipped with Aegis combat system, and stealthy attack submarines. Thus, one such groups costs the Americans around $50 billions! And, by the way, these $50 billions are never able to move as quickly as the “expert” in the National Interest asserts . . .
But in America nobody is concerned with such details.
The author does not shy away from stating: “The aircraft carriers are constantly moving when deployed at up to 35 miles per hour – fast enough to outrun submarines – finding and tracking them is difficult.
Within 30 minutes after a sighting by enemies, the area within which a carrier might be operating has grown to 700 square miles; after 90 minutes, it has expanded to 6,000 square miles”.
It sound great but in reality not one American aircraft carrier can reach this speed. The maximal speed that it can maintain – for a limited time – is 30 knots. The key word here is LIMITED time.
If anyone thinks that an aircraft carrier can immediately upon entering the open sea accelerate to 30 knots (almost 56 km per hour) and keep racing on the waives, he is very much mistaken.
This is impossible. In reality, 95% of their time American aircraft carriers move in an economy mode at the speed no faster than 14 knots (about 26 km/hour). When airplanes take off or land on the carrier, the carrier is seriously limited in its ability to change speed or course. An aircraft carrier is not a bike. If this floating airdrome turned from side to side all the time, pilots would not be able to make landings.
Another small detail: who would give to an aircraft carrier 30 min so it could escape from the battle zone? Even the old Soviet missile “Granit” (note that the American still do not have anything like it), which our nuclear submarine cruisers of 949-project “Antey” type are armed with, fired from its maximal distance would reach its target in just slightly more than 500 second.
This means that when a missile is fired, an American aircraft carrier would have time to get away from the point of its detection at its maximal speed to no more than 7.5 km. Such distance is definitely within the range covered by the self-targeting mechanism of “Granit”. Thus, the missile will reach its target and, if not neutralize by the air defense systems (which is not very probable), destroy the target.
Furthermore, as the American “expert” should know, no one will fire at an aircraft carrier group just one missile! Every our “Antey” submarine is equipped with 24 such missiles. Additionally, I believe, if the Chief of Staff of our Navy plans an operations to destroy an American aircraft carrier, such operation will involve more than one “Antey”.
If all 24 “Granit” missiles are fired simultaneously, it will be all but impossible to intercept them. Most of them fly at a very low altitude: they creep just above the surface of the ocean. Just one missile flies above – it guides the whole pack to the target. If the adversary destroys the guiding missile, it is immediately substituted by one of the remaining missiles flying below.
When the Soviet engineers designed these missiles, they incorporated elements of the artificial intelligence in their design: the missiles communicate with each other selecting their targets in such a way, so that two missiles accidentally do not hit the same small target.
For example, our missiles know how to select the main target, and if that target is an aircraft carrier, the “Granits” would not self-target the accompanying warships – they will target specifically the carrier.
In addition, the missiles know other little tricks that certainly will come as a “pleasant” surprise for the Americans, such as the ability to interact with the Naval Space System of Intelligence and Guidance (NSIG).
It seems, however, that the author of this American article has no idea that NSIG exists. However, such a system existed back in the Soviet Union – named “Legend”. Its Russian descendant is “Liana” that has broad capabilities to detect and follow American aircraft carrier groups in the ocean. This system is capable of guiding missiles to targets even after their have been launched.
Obviously, no matter how good the weapons are or how sophisticated the detection system is – there is no 100% guarantee that an aircraft carrier will be destroyed by the first missile launch. However, the probability that by using all means at our disposal we will sink it is pretty high.
Armed To The Teeth And Very Careful
Let us find out who provides serious American journals with such analytical trash. Who is this fantastic American “expert” that has no problem misleading his readers? He is Loren Thompson, Chief Operating Officer of the Lexington Institute, a well-known organization, by the way. He is also a Deputy Director of the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University where he taught strategy to graduate students and lectured at the Harvard University’s School of Government.
We can only guess what kind of strategy this expert in strategic thinking taught his students. I think we can appreciate the quality of the government officials trained on the lecture of this illustrious “expert”.
But let us return to the reasons why we, supposedly, will never be able to sink an American aircraft carrier.
The second and third reasons, according to Thompson, is that an American aircraft carrier “has lots of weapons and can defend itself . . .” Who could have thought? Really, one immediately senses that he is dealing with a true professional looking into the heart of the matter
An aircraft carrier is indeed loaded with weapons. Thompson, however, does not seem to understand that these are offensive and not defensive weapons. A carrier is completely incapable of defending itself! The air defense and defense against submarines are expected to be provided by the accompanying ships.
Loren Thompson says that these ships are numerous and well armed, and that is why a carries will never be sunk. I am almost afraid to remind that an attack on the carrier will not be conducted singlehandedly, either!
In the Soviet time, a whole regiment of missile-armed Ty-22 aircraft were designated for the destruction of one American aircraft carrier. This means a few dozens of airplanes. Plus submarines armed with cruise missiles. Plus other means of attack and destruction at our Navy’s disposal.
As history teaches us: 70 years ago during the World War II the presence of a large number of accompanying ships did not prevent the Japanese from sinking many an American aircraft carrier. In two years from 1942 to 1944 they successfully sunk as many as 11 of them! We should think the offensive weapons advanced significantly since those times.
For example, the fighter-interceptor Tu-22 M3 (long distance supersonic missile-armed bomber – editor note). These Soviet-time airplanes are being thoroughly modernized, and the equipment of these newly modernized machines Tu-22 M3M will include, in particular, anti-ship new generation missiles X-32. For some reason, they are rarely mentioned in press, but these are fantastic missiles. After launch, they come up to 40 km and fly at the speed almost 5 time faster than the sound. After coming upon the target, they descend on it almost vertically.
Today, the United States Navy does not possess any weapon even remotely close in its characteristics to our X-32. The Americans also do not have any air defense system capable of intercepting this missile .
That is why the fourth reason that, as The National Interest asserts, makes the enemy incapable of destroying American aircraft carriers is particularly important. What is this reason? Oh yes – they “do not take chances”. When, perhaps, it would be better not to leave the base and go into the open ocean at all? It is so much safer .
But if you are out there . . . Take chances or not, but on the way to the area of conflict with our Navy (in the North Atlantic, for example) the American aircraft carries would have to pass through straits, narrow channels, where, naturally, our submarines and other forces would be waiting for them and, according to the Russian customs, welcome them with the “bread-and-salt” of cruise missiles seasoned with torpedoes, mines, and bombs . . . In any case, the traditional Russian welcome for the aircraft carriers will be assured!
Whether you are careful or not, but you cannot arrive from Jacksonville, an American Navy base on the US East coast, to our shores (for example, to the area of responsibility of the Northern Navy with its mane bases on the Kolsky peninsula) bypassing several well-known narrow channels and straits.
The Americans themselves during the Cold War constructed anti-submarine barriers in those places with the goal of preventing our subs from getting into the Atlantic. The best-known examples – the barrier along the line the North Cape – Medvezhyi (Bear) island and between Iceland and Faroe islands .
The last, fifth, reason of the invincibility of the American aircraft carriers, according to Loren Thompson, is the greatest achievement of his expert-analytical approach. The reason is a fact self-evident for every American that the Americans are generally the best in the world and they possess the best technologies, including the military ones. However, this is not exactly a fact. For example, the Russian technologies of the anti-ship cruise missiles are definitely better than their American counterparts. Everyone who knows anything and learned anything knows that. In particular, the military experts are paying close attention to the Russian hypersonic missiles of the new generation.
Farsighted Alarmists
The American do not appear to be amenable to reason but some of their allies are more or less adequate. Thus, recently the media in the Great Britain created a veritable hysteria on the subject of the new Russian missile “Zircon”.
The first to raise alarm was the British newspaper The Independent. It stated: “It is impossible to stop “Zircon”. Even the newest air defense systems are yet to come to the British Navy will only be able to destroy target at the maximum speed of 3700 km/hour, whereas “Zircon” can reach 6000 or even 7400 km/hour”.
The Daily Star offered further development of the theme about the scary Russians: “Russia produces deadly missiles capable of destroying the entire Royal Navy in one hit. A representative of the British Foreign Ministry believes that the Russian “Zircon”, which can carry a nuclear warhead, completely changes the rules of war at sea. Our aircraft carriers simply could not be deployed where the Russians have these missiles . . .”
Another British newspaper, The Mirror, carried on in the same alarmist tone. It wrote: “The Russian missile moves with the speed twice as fast as the speed of the sniper bullet. It can send the most advanced ships to the bottom of the sea. The experts say that our Navy today has no defense against this terrible weapon. The appearance of “Zircon” in the Russian arsenal make both our aircraft carriers costing $7 billion each useless”.
The Daily Mail added the final accord to this panicky choir:
“Russia created an invincible cruise missile that travels at 4600 miles per hour and is capable of destroying a British aircraft carries with one hit. This deadly missile “Zircon” can be launched from the land, sea, or air carriers.
It covers 155 miles in 2.5 minutes. Its appearance make the very idea of the aircraft carrier groups meaningless, and we simply do not have anything to counter it with”.
The Americans might, of course, hope that our “Zircon” is a threat exclusively to the British aircraft carriers. Regardless of what they think, the facts say differently: any attempt by the American Navy to test in the real battle conditions whether or not the Russians can sink their aircraft carrier will most likely end quite badly for the US of A.
Cops survey a scene of conflict in California’s capital, a struggle between fascists and antifascists. Blood is on the ground, and webcam recordings show images of members of the Ku Klux Klan and related groups, not only armed with knives but actually showing some men stabbing downward at writhing bodies beneath. One side has knives. One side has signs. Guess which side received charges of violating the law? Guess which side had been surveilled by state and federal agents long before the events of the day? I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t the Ku Klux Klan. According to published reports in The Guardian (London), police accounts concentrated on two major groups: Antifascists and members of Black Lives Matter.
In June 2016, antifascists assembled at a neo-Nazi rally in Sacramento. As expected, this rally was the site of intense emotions. Violence erupted between the two sides, with at least 8 antifascists stabbed, beaten–or both. How did it happen that none of the neo-Nazis were charged with anything; while antifascists were charged with everything? The answer is Donovan Ayres, a California Highway patrolman who was ordered to investigate the melee. He wrote hundreds of pages of notes, advocating charges against the antifascists. As for the neo-Nazis, nothing.
They have every right to protest, but what of those who oppose them? They, it seems, are simply troublemakers. Ayres did extensive research on the antifascists, including email, Facebook and even metadata. His research included Native Americans and Chicano antifascists. At the end of a hearing where Ayres testified, the DA was thanked by one courtroom observer for protecting white supremacists. One wonders, how does such a thing as this happen? How does something so outrageous occur? History provides an excellent answer, for police and fascists have ever been brothers beneath their respective uniforms.
During the 1920s, groups like the Industrial Workers of the World (known as the IWW, or “Wobblies”) tried to organize agricultural workers, especially in California’s fertile Central Valley. There, to protect the profits of landowners, police and klansmen joined to attack Wobblies, by beating, shooting and arresting them, as klansmen attacked and assaulted their children. Justin Akers Chacón and Mike Davis, in their book, No One is Illegal (Haymarket: 2006) pen a chilling portrait of the role of the Klan in this 1924 IWW union raid: “Three hundred men, women and children were in the hall attending a benefit for several men who had died in a recent railroad accident. The vigilantes viciously sapped down the surprised men and women, then turned their fury upon the terrified IWW kids, some of them barely more than toddlers” (pp.41-42). Chacón and Davis cite a contemporary source describing the Klan “dipping the children into the urn of boiling coffee”, scalding and injuring the children severely. Similarly, about a decade later, acclaimed historian Robin D. G. Kelley, in his multi-award winning book, Hammer & Hoe, recounts multiple instances of cop/Klan/vigilante allegiances, which served to intimidate Black workers in Alabama who dared to fight for militant, independent unions in the fields of agriculture and industry. It is also similar to the impunity shown by domestic terrorists allied with the police, who seldom faced charges for their acts of violence.
That’s the case for fascists. But what of the anti-fascists? After 3 long years of hearings on the Sacramento protests, 3 antifascists face charges, and an upcoming trial. Yvette Felarca, Filipina American school teacher, faces a felony assault charge, as does Black American Michael Williams. Latino-American antifascist, Porfirio Paz faces misdemeanor assault. All 3 face misdemeanor riot charges, the social costs of opposition to American fascists.
Today, once again, fascists have friends among American police, in California, in Oregon and beyond.
On Saturday April 6 there will be a special event in Berkeley, “Mumia Abu-Jamal: An Evening for Justice and Freedom” to raise money for the International Concerned Family and Friends of Mumia Abu-Jamal. It will be held at the Bancroft Hotel Main Ballroom, 2680 Bancroft Way. This fundraiser is requesting $10-20 donations. No one will be turned away for lack of funds. Speakers will include Angela Davis, Alice Walker, Pam Africa, Jeff Mackler, Judith Ritter and a phone connection with Mumia.
Infants spend twice as much time in REM sleep as adults—but experts still know little about what happens in their brains during those hours.
Infants spend most of their time sleeping, waking up for just a few hours total every day. A lot of growth happens during those spans of shut-eye, though. Research shows that sleep is just as formative for babies’ development as are the scattered bouts of consciousness when their eyes are open and their ears are perked up. As with adults, sleeping likely helps infants retain or protect memory and learn language; some evidence also suggests it promotes healthy physical growth. Technological advances are helping to shed more and more insight on, as the University of Washington professor of early-childhood learning Patricia Kuhl has put it, “the infinite number of secrets” contained in babies’ brains.
One secret that those advances have yet to uncover: whether babies dream—and, if they do, what they dream about. “Getting inside the head of a baby,” wrote the science journalist Angela Saini in a 2013 piece for The Guardian, “is like deciphering the thoughts of a kitten.” Brains are composed of so many intangible phenomena, and the technologies used to measure the stuff that is tangible (like brain-scanning machines) are difficult to use on babies. The resulting mystery has made the topic an endless source of intrigue—and of pointed disagreement— among many researchers.
In the 1960s, as the journalist Alice Robb explains in her forthcoming book Why We Dream, the psychologist David Foulkes theorized that children seldom remember their dreams before age 9. Foulkes continued his research into pediatric dreaming over the decades and in his 2002 book on the topic concluded that humans are dreamless in their first few years of life.
Just because they can “perceive a reality,” he wrote, doesn’t mean they “can dream one as well.” Instead, he found that children don’t start dreaming until they’re a few years old and can imagine their surroundings visually and spatially. Even then, he argued, the dreams tend to be static and one-dimensional, with no characters and little emotion. It isn’t until age 7 or so, according to Foulkes, that humans start to having graphic, storylike dreams; this phase of life is also when children tend to develop a clear sense of their own identity and how they fit into the world around them.
Still, in recent years, there’s been growing scientific recognition of babies’ capacity to “know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible,” writes the UC Berkeley child psychologist Alison Gopnik. Insight into the science of dreaming has also evolved, with the body of research broadening and challenging some of Foulkes’s conclusions. In 2005, for example, The New York Timespublished a Q-and-A with Charles P. Pollak, the director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. “Yes, as far as we can tell,” he said when asked whether babies dream, noting that “it is a well-based inference” that they do so during the phase of sleep characterized by rapid eye movements, or REM.
REM sleep is when most dreaming occurs for humans. During this phase, the body becomes immobile and breathing and heart rate become irregular. According to Kelly Bulkeley, a psychologist of religion who studies dreams, REM sleep is also believed to help people consolidate their memories and mentally digest them, though sometimes in strange and seemingly illogical ways. Research dating back to the 1960s on the purpose of REM sleep for babies in particular has found that it supports brain development, helping infants to convert their experiences and observations during conscious hours into lasting memories and skills. Perhaps that’s why babies experience much more REM sleep than adults do—about half of babies’ sleeping hours are spent in REM sleep, compared with about 20 to 25 percent for older humans. “The commonsense view,” as a result, “is that yes, babies are dreaming—they just don’t have language to be able to communicate that,” Bulkeley says.
Those who dispute the idea that babies dream, according to Bulkeley, often point to the fact that the visual images humans create in their brains during sleep are informed by their waking realities. That’s partially what Foulkes may have been getting at: Since babies have such little emotional and sensory experience to draw from, there’s not a lot of material to transform into a dream. But Bulkeley cited evidence suggesting that dreams serve at least in part as the body’s instinctive mechanism for protecting itself from hypothetical dangers. “The biological functtion of dreaming is to simulate threatening events, and to rehearse threat perception and threat avoidance,” wrote the Finnish neuroscientist who first advanced this theory, in 2000; in “our ancestral world,” he concluded, short life spans and constant danger made this dreaming mechanism advantageous.
In this view, when a person has a nightmare in which she’s running away from someone, for example—a dream theme that’s found across cultures and especially among children—that may be a way for her mind to practice in case she needs to escape a threat in reality. If that’s the case, then it’s conceivable that babies dream as a result of natural selection. After all, some studies indicate that other mammals and birds dream, too.
But getting a definitive answer to this question of whether babies dream isn’t feasible, at least with today’s technology. Some of the best available data on adults’ dreams come from self-reporting in the form of surveys or daily journals, notes Rebecca Gomez, a psychology professor who directs the University of Arizona’s Child Cognition Lab—information that’s impossible to get from babies, who don’t begin to use abstract words until age 3 or so. Scientists who study dreams have benefitted from significant technological advances like those in machine learning that are starting to help empirically illustrate what’s happening in the brain during that process. But again: “You can’t just put infants in a scanner and have them do a test,” Gomez says.
Still, Bulkeley is optimistic that these scientific obstacles will start to recede as the technology continues to evolve, helping to solve a puzzle wondered about not only by psychology researchers but also by everyday moms and dads. Witnessing a sleeping newborn twitch her finger or flutter her eyelid is one of the myriad moments that emphasizes for parents that they’re raising a human—a person who is developing consciousness and reasoning, a sense of morality and social intelligence. Until that science comes around, though, just what they may dream about on their way to full personhood will remain a mystery.
What are dreams for? A handful of theories predominate. Sigmund Freud famously contended that they reveal hidden truths and wishes. [1] More recent research suggests that they may help us process intense emotions, [2] or perhaps sort through and consolidate memories, [3] or make sense of random neuron activity, [4] or rehearse responses to threatening situations. [5] Others argue that dreams have no evolutionary function, but simply dramatize personal concerns. [6]
Despite being largely unsupported by evidence, Freud’s view maintains a strong following around the world. Researchers found that students in the U.S., South Korea, and India were much more likely to say that dreams reveal hidden truths than to endorse better-substantiated theories. [7] Relatedly, people put great stock in their dreams: In the same study, respondents said that dreaming about a plane crash would cause them more anxiety than an official warning about a terrorist attack.
Even if dreams can’t foretell the future, they seem to expose our shared fascinations. The majority of dreams occur during REM sleep cycles, of which the average person has four or five a night. Eight percent of dreams are about sex, a rate that holds for both women and men—though women are twice as likely as men to have sexual dreams about a public figure, while men are twice as likely to dream about multiple partners. [8] Anxiety is also rife: A study of Canadian university students found the most common dream topics, apart from sex, to be school, falling, being chased, and arriving too late for something. [9]
For all the commonalities dreams exhibit, they vary across time—people who grew up watching black-and-white TV are more likely to dream in black and white [10]—and culture. A 1958 study determined that compared with Japanese people, Americans dreamed more about being locked up, losing a loved one, finding money, being inappropriately dressed or nude, or encountering an insane person. Japanese people were more likely to dream about school, trying repeatedly to do something, being paralyzed with fear, or “wild, violent beasts.” [11] (For their part, beasts almost certainly have nightmares too: Just about all mammals are thought to dream, as are birds, some lizards, and—unique among invertebrates—cuttlefish. [12] The dreamiest member of the animal kingdom is the platypus, which logs up to eight hours of REM sleep a day. [13])
If human dreams sound bleak, bear in mind that even negative ones can have positive effects. In a study of students taking a French medical-school entrance exam, 60 percent of the dreams they had beforehand involved a problem with the exam, such as being late or leaving an answer blank. But those who reported dreams about the exam, even bad ones, did better on it than those who didn’t. [14]
So the next time you dream about an education-related sexual experience in which you are both falling and being chased, don’t worry: It’s probably totally meaningless. Then again, your brain might be practicing so you’ll be ready if such an event ever comes to pass.
The Studies
[1] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1913)
[2] Van der Helm et al., “REM Sleep Depotentiates Amygdala Activity to Previous Emotional Experiences” (Current Biology, Dec. 2011)
[3] Wamsley and Stickgold, “Memory, Sleep and Dreaming: Experiencing Consolidation” (Sleep Medicine Clinics, March 2011)
[4] Hobson and McCarley, “The Brain as a Dream State Generator” (American Journal of Psychiatry, Dec. 1977)
[5] Antti Revonsuo, “The Reinterpretation of Dreams” (Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Dec. 2000)
[6] G. William Domhoff, “A New Neurocognitive Theory of Dreams” (Dreaming, March 2001)
[7] Morewedge and Norton, “When Dreaming Is Believing” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Feb. 2009)
[9] Nielsen et al., “The Typical Dreams of Canadian University Students” (Dreaming, Dec. 2003)
[10] Eva Murzyn, “Do We Only Dream in Colour?” (Consciousness and Cognition, Dec. 2008)
[11] Griffith et al., “The Universality of Typical Dreams” (American Anthropologist, Dec. 1958)
[12] Frank et al., “A Preliminary Study of Sleep-Like States in the Cuttlefish” (PLOS One, June 2012)
[13] Siegel et al., “Monotremes and the Evolution of Rapid Eye Movement Sleep” (Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, July 1998)
[14] Arnulf et al., “Will Students Pass a Competitive Exam That They Failed in Their Dreams?” (Consciousness and Cognition, Oct. 2014)
If I didn’t love you I’d hate you Watching you play in the bath A soap suds stickle back navy A scrubbing brush landing craft Your skin gets softer and warmer I pat you down with a towel Tonight it’s love by the fire My mind goes out on the prowl If I if I if I if I if I
If I didn’t love you I’d hate you I’m playing your stereogram Singles remind me of kisses Albums remind me of plans Tonight it’s love by the fire The wind plays over the coals Passionate looks are my fancy But you turn the look into stone
If I didn’t love you Would you sit and glow by the fire If I didn’t love you Would you make me feel so Maybe love me Oh if I didn’t love you
If I didn’t love you I’d hate you Cocoa mugs sit side by side It’s time to poke at the fire But it’s not tonight Looks I find Taking a bite on a biscuit The record jumps on a scratch Tonight it’s love by the fire The door of your love’s on the latch
If I, if I, if I Didn’t, didn’t, didn’t Love you, love you, love you
Songwriters: GLENN MARTIN TILBROOK, CHRISTOPHER HENRY DIFFORD
Like sneaking veggies into dessert, these board games teach STEM, strategy, and executive functions through the joys of play.
Many popular board games offer little more than colorful distractions, lacking both thoughtful design or quality learning principles.
However, the recent board game renaissance has resulted in a host of new games that teach children a range of hard and soft skills through play.
We look at some of the best new board games and offer tips to find even more.
Monopoly is the worst. No, we’re not talking protracted game sessions or sore losers tossing the board across the room like a vengeful titan. We’re talking game design.
Thing is, Monopoly asks little thought from its players. They roll the dice, move the appropriate number of spaces, and whether that move helps or hinders their game is ultimately a matter of luck. The only true strategy is to trick, exploit, or intimidate fellow players into making deals against their best interests. (We said it was bad game design, not that it wasn’t true to metropolitan real estate milieu.)
Nor does Monopoly stand alone. Many classic board games fail to engage children beyond bright colors and mechanical play. Trouble, Mouse Trap, and The Game of Life require little of players beyond letting the pips to divine success or failure—what game enthusiasts call “roll your dice, move your mice.”
Parents looking for something more in their children’s entertainment are in luck. We’re currently living through a board game renaissance. New games come out yearly that help children develop skills in STEM, strategy, and executive functions. Less about luck and more about engaging with core mechanics, these games challenge children to plan their moves around probability, cause and effect, and reading other players.
Two quick notes on our thought process. First, to keep this family friendly, every game here can be played with at least four players. This means otherwise excellent board games like Go and Chess will be absent. The games also need to be playable by the average 10-year-old. Sorry, Twilight Imperium. We love you, but your table-top spread is too intimidating for this list.
Settlers of Catan
Catan
List Price: $48.99
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Settlers of Catan is Monopoly done right. The game tasks players with settling the island of Catan by securing the resources to build roads and settlements. Children must plan around the probability that they can extract the resources necessary to meet their rural-planning goals. If they can’t extract a resource, they’ll need to trade with others in nonzero-sum deals. Unlike Monopoly, Settlers’ mechanics prevent a single Uncle Pennybags from hording everything for himself.
Yet, Settlers’ best quality is its infinite replayability. The game’s board features hexagonal tiles that can be rearranged to keep the experience fresh, and its many expansions add new gameplay elements. This requires children to master the the game’s mechanics, not its exploits.
Settlers of Catan by Kosmos/Catan Studio. Designed by Klaus Teuber. 3-4 players (standard game). Winner of Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year (1995). (Photo: Catan Studio)
“[Settlers is] teaching Americans that board games don’t have to be either predictable fluff aimed at kids or competitive, hyperintellectual pastimes for eggheads,” wrote Wired magazine. “Through the complex, artful dance of algorithms and probabilities lurking at its core, Settlers manages to be effortlessly fun, intuitively enjoyable, and still intellectually rewarding.”
Parents of younger children should consider Catan Junior. This reimagining reduces the complexity of trading and building, while maintaining the core principles. It even includes the one thing the other games on this list lack: a ghost pirate.
Evolution
North Star Games Evolution Strategic Game
List Price: $39.99
New From: Too low to displayin Stock
In Evolution, players shepherd an entire species through its evolutionary history in the hopes of staving off extinction. To do so, children will need to evolve their species traits to ecological limitations while outmaneuvering their opponents’ ever-adapting beasties.
The game introduces children to biological concepts, such as adaptations and evolutionary arms race, with an airy excitement that’s certainly lighter than a school textbook.
Evolution by North Star Games. Designed by Dominic Crapuchettes, Dmitry Knorre, and Sergey Machin. 2-6 players (standard game). (Photo: North Star Games)
“Evolution features sophisticated biology. Traits can be put together in a dizzying array of combinations, so each game can be very different. The theme of evolution is not just tacked on: it drives play,” writes Stuart West, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Oxford, for Nature.
Like Settlers, younger siblings can enjoy a toned-down version of the game, Evolution: the Beginning.
Kingdomino
Blue Orange Games Kingdomino Award Winning Family Strategy Board Game
List Price: $19.99
New From: $14.99in Stock
Don your crown! In Kingdomino, children play as royalty trying to carve out the most valuable kingdom in all the land. Drawing dominos featuring differing landscape types, they’ll have to construct their kingdoms one piece at a time.
Simple enough, but the game requires foresight and executive planning to succeed. Players who pick the least valuable property this round will have first dibs the next. And with only a 5×5 grid to work in, children will need to learn spatial organization skills to know which land type to invest in.
Add to that a multiplication-based scoring system reinforcing mathematics, and you’ve got some quality learning for all knee-high kings and queens.
Kingdomino by Blue Orange Games. Designed by Bruno Cathala. 2-4 players (standard game). Winner of Spiel des Jahres Game of the Year (2017). (Photo: Kevin Damske/Wikimedia)
Dragonwood
Dragonwood A Game of Dice & Daring Board Game
List Price: $14.99
New From: $10.99in Stock
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This one’s for the younger kiddos. Dragonwood tasks players with venturing into the titular forest to fight vicious, yet cartoon-y, monsters. The game centers on collecting cards in runs, pairs, or color combinations that allow players to attack. The more enemies they defeat, the higher their score.
Dragonwood has a fair amount of luck involved, as kids never know what they’ll draw. Yet, this mechanic in turn teaches children to adapt their strategy based on the resources available.
It further combines probability and risk-reward with decision making. A child may want to tackle that dragon before another player gets the chance, but if they wait to draw another card, they may be able to attack with an additional die, increasing the chances of success. Decisions, decisions.
And now something for the older crowd. 7 Wonders puts players in charge of an ancient kingdom currently constructing one of the Ancient Wonders of the World. They’ll have to manage their kingdoms’ armies, trade, natural resources, and civic institutions, while checking the clout of those dastardly civilizations in the offing.
What’s great about 7 Wonders is that it offers many pathways to victory. A kingdom can dominate through its trade, scientific advancement, civil development, and military conquest. Since players take turns drawing from a shared pool of cards, kids must consider how their choices not only affect their kingdom, but their opponents’. As a bonus, it introduces children to some of history’s most fascinating civilizations.
7 Wonders by Repos Production. Designed by Antoine Bauza. 2-7 players (standard game). Winner of the Spiel des Jahres connoisseurs’ award (2011). (Photo: Schezar/Flickr)
Century: Golem Edition
Plan B Games Century Golem Edition
List Price: $39.99
New From: $31.74in Stock
If your rascals ever wanted to create giant golems to do their chores, then here’s their game. In Century: Golem Edition, players embody a caravan leader who must trade for magic crystals to create epic golems. Each one nets victory points, and whoever has the most impressive gaggle of golems wins.
The game features hand-building mechanics, meaning children will need to collect cards that synergize well. The key to success is to craft a hand that allows for quick acquisition or transmutation of crystals. Without careful planning and an understanding of how cards play in sequence, another player may snag that much coveted golem.
Century: Golem Edition by Plan B Games. Designed by Emerson Matsuuchi. 2-5 players. (Photo: Plan B Games)
Photosynthesis
Blue Orange Games Photosynthesis Strategy Board Game
List Price: $44.99
New From: $30.17in Stock
Used From: $27.47in Stock
Arguably the most eye-catching game on this list, Photosynthesis is all about planting trees. Using sunlight as a resource, players must plot a forest to prevent their opponents from rooting in on their territory. The more of the forest that belongs to their species of tree, the higher their score. But to succeed, children will need to develop spatial organization skills and an understanding of how members of an ecology affect one another.
Like Evolution, this game is about introducing children to science with fun, colorful presentation. Children become horticulturists and discover botanical concepts like, well, photosynthesis with playful mechanics.
Photosynthesis Board Game
What board game to play next?
These seven board games will get your family’s collection started, but as we said, we’re living through a table-top renaissance. Many great games could have found a home on this list: Azul, Dominion, Carcassonne, Splendor, and Ticket to Ride to name a few. And we could have added even more by considering different skills, such as the jazzy creativity of Dixit or the jolly cooperation of Forbidden Desert, or looking at a wider age range.
But with new games coming out every year, many of them excellently designed, the contemporary board game scene can be as unnerving as it is promising. The paradox of choice tells us too many options can foster anxiety, and resplendent box art looks nice on a shelf but tells you nothing about the game inside.
To help, here are a couple tips for finding the best board game for your family:
Look to the awards. In the board game world, the Spiel des Jahres holds all the prestige of an Academy Award (sans the needless self-importance). Some of the best board games have claimed the award, among them Kingdomino and Settlers of Catan. Another one to research is the Mensa Select. Presented by Mensa Mind Games, this award goes to games with designs that are both creative and mentally challenging.
Try before you buy. With the recent increase in board game sales, community toy, hobby, and comic book stores house more board games than ever before. These stores often feature demonstration events or house store copies you can play. Some library chains have started to diversify their board game collections, too.
Visit BoardGameGeek.BoardGameGeek is an online database and forum. It offers gameplay information, age rankings, and complexity ratings. You can also find reviews written by parents and game enthusiasts. These reviews will often feature in-depth discussions of gameplay and mechanics, which can help you determine if a game is right for your family.
With these tips, you can find the best board game for your family, one that will hopefully become a new classic.
The two governments have repeatedly interfered in each other’s domestic politics during the past 100 years – and it’s not all bad.
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Even though the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee found “no direct evidence of a conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia,” Russiagate allegations of “collusion” between candidate and then President Donald Trump and the Kremlin have poisoned American politics for nearly three years. They are likely to continue to do so for the foreseeable future, and due not only to the current subpoena-happy Democratic chairs of House “investigative” committees.
At the core of the Russiagate narrative is the allegation that the Kremlin “meddled” in the 2016 US presidential election. The word “meddle” is nebulous and could mean most anything, but Russiagate zealots deploy it in the most ominous ways, as a war-like “attack on America,” a kind of “Pearl Harbor.” They also imply that such meddling is unprecedented when in fact both the United States and Russia have interfered repeatedly in the other’s internal politics, in one way or another, certainly since the 1917 Russian Revolution.
For context, recall that such meddling is an integral part of Cold War and that there have been three Cold Wars between America and Russia during the past one hundred years. The first was from 1917 to 1933, when Washington did not even formally recognize the new Soviet government in Moscow. The second is, of course, the best known, the forty-year Cold War from about 1948 to 1988, when the US and Soviet leaders, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, declared it over. And then, by my reckoning, the new, ongoing Cold War began in the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration initiated the expansion of NATO towards Russia’s borders and bombed Moscow’s longtime Slav and political ally Serbia.
That’s approximately eighty-five years of US-Russian Cold War in a hundred years of relations and, not surprisingly, a lot of meddling on both sides, even leaving aside espionage and spies. The meddling has taken various forms.
In the period from 1917 to 1933, such interference was extreme on both sides. In 1918, President Woodrow Wilson sent approximately 8,000 US troops to Siberia to fight against the “Reds” in the Russian Civil War. For its part, Moscow founded the Communist International (Comintern) in 1919 and urged the American Communist Party to pursue revolutionary regime change in the United States, an historical analogue of the “democracy promotion” later pursued by Washington. During these years, both sides eagerly generated, and amply funded, “disinformation” and “propaganda” directed at and inside the other country.
During the second Cold War, from 1948 to 1988, the “meddling” was expanded and institutionalized. At least until the McCarthyite attempted purge of such activities, the American Communist Party, now largely under the control of Moscow, was an active force in US politics, with some appeal to intellectuals and others, as well as bookstores and “schools” – all amply supplied with English-language Soviet “propaganda” and “disinformation” – in many major cities.
US meddling during those years took various forms, but the most relevant in terms of the role of social media in Russiagate were nearly around-the-clock Russian-language short-wave radio broadcasts. When I lived in Moscow off and on from 1976 to 1982, every Russian I knew had a short-wave radio as well as a nearby place where reception was good. Many were enticed by the then-semi-forbidden rock music—Elton John was the rage, having surpassed The Beatles—but stayed tuned for the editorial content, which was, Soviet authorities complained, “disinformation.”
Suspect “contacts” with the other side was another Cold War precursor of Russiagate. Here too I can provide first-hand testimony. By 1980, my companion Katrina vanden Heuvel—now my wife and publisher and editor of the Nation—joined me on regular stays in Moscow. Most of our social life was among Moscow’s community of survivors of Stalin’s Gulag and the even larger community of active dissidents. In mid-1982, both of us were suddenly denied Soviet visas. I appealed to two sympathetic high-level Soviet officials. After a few weeks, both reported back, “I can do nothing. You have too many undesirable contacts.” (Our visas were reissued shortly after Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in March 1985.)
In the post-Soviet era since 1992, at least until Russiagate allegations began in mid-2016, almost all of the “meddling” has been committed by the United States. During the 1990s, under the banner of “democracy promotion,” there was a virtual American political invasion of Russia. Washington openly supported, politically and financially, the pro-American faction in Russian politics, as did American mainstream media coverage. US government and foundation funding went to desirable Russian NGOs. And the Clinton administration lent ample support, again political and financial, to President Boris Yeltsin’s desperate and ultimately successful reelection campaign in 1996. (For more on the 1990s, see my Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia.) Conversely, there was almost no Russian meddling in American politics in the 1990s, apart from the pro-Yeltsin lobby, largely made up of Americans, in Washington.
As for Russia under Vladimir Putin, since 2000, again there was virtually no notable Russian “meddling” in American politics until the Russiagate allegations began. (Not surprisingly, in light of the history of mutual “meddling,” Russian social media was active during the 2016 US election, but with no discernible impact on the outcome, as Aaron Maté has shown and as Nate Silver has confirmed.) American meddling in Russia, on the other hand, continued apace, or tried to do so. Until more restrictive Russian laws were passed, US funding continued to go to Russian media and NGOs perceived to be in US interests. Hillary Clinton felt free in 2011 to publicly criticize Russian elections, and, the same year, then–Vice President Joseph Biden, while visiting Moscow, advised Putin not to return to the presidency. (Imagine Putin today advising Biden as to whether or not to seek the US presidency.)
Indeed, the Kremlin may be more tolerant of American “meddling” today than Washington is of Russian “interference.” Maria Butina, a young Russian woman living in the US, has been in prison for months, much of the time in solitary confinement, charged with “networking” on behalf of her government without having registered as a foreign agent. Hundreds of Americans have “networked” similarly in Russia since the 1990s, myself among them, to the indifference of the Kremlin, though this may now be changing, largely in reaction to US policies.
How should we feel about US-Russian “meddling” of the kind that involves dissemination of their respective information and points of view? We should encourage it on both sides.
Attempts to suppress it is leading to censorship in both countries, while the more conflicting information and dialogue we have the better—better understanding and better policymaking and more and better democracy on both sides. (Disclosure: All of my own books and many of my articles have been published in Moscow in Russian-language translations. The reactions of Russian readers are exceptionally valuable to me, as they should be to any American author.)
By Stephen F. Cohen
This article was originally published by The Nation.
Stephen F. Cohen is a professor emeritus of Russian studies, history, and politics at New York University and Princeton University. A Nation contributing editor, he is the author, most recently, of War With Russia? From Putin & Ukraine to Trump & Russiagate and Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives: From Stalinism to the New Cold War.
“My prettiest contribution to my culture,” the writer Kurt Vonnegut mused in his 1981 autobiography Palm Sunday, “was a master’s thesis in anthropology which was rejected by the University of Chicago a long time ago.”
By then, he said, the thesis had long since vanished. (“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut explained.) But he continued to carry the idea with him for many years after that, and spoke publicly about it more than once. It was, essentially, this: “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes.”
That explanation comes from a lecture he gave, and which you can still watch on YouTube, that involves Vonnegut mapping the narrative arc of popular storylines along a simple graph. The X-axis represents the chronology of the story, from beginning to end, while the Y-axis represents the experience of the protagonist, on a spectrum of ill fortune to good fortune. “This is an exercise in relativity, really,” Vonnegut explains. “The shape of the curve is what matters.”
The most interesting shape to him, it turned out, was the one that reflected the tale of Cinderella, of all stories. Vonnegut visualizes its arc as a staircase-like climb in good fortune representing the arrival of Cinderella’s fairy godmother, leading all the way to a high point at the ball, followed by a sudden plummet back to ill fortune at the stroke of midnight. Before too long, though, the Cinderella graph is marked by a sharp leap back to good fortune, what with the whole business of (spoiler alert) the glass slipper fitting and the happily ever after.
This may not seem like anything special, Vonnegut says—his actual words are, “it certainly looks like trash”—until he notices another well known story that shares this shape. “Those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament.” Cinderella’s curfew was, if you look at it on Vonnegut’s chart, a mirror-image downfall to Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden. “And then I saw the rise to bliss at the end was identical with the expectation of redemption as expressed in primitive Christianity. The tales were identical.”
Vonnegut, in his ever charming way, was quite pleased with himself for making this connection. And 35 years later, his idea had resonated enough with a group of mathematicians and computer scientists that they decided to build an experiment around it. Vonnegut had mapped stories by hand, but in 2016, with sophisticated computing power, natural language processing, and reams of digitized text, it’s possible to map the narrative patterns in a huge corpus of literature. It’s also possible to ask a computer to identify the shapes of stories for you.
That’s what a group of researchers, from the University of Vermont and the University of Adelaide, set out to do. They collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist):
1. Rags to Riches (rise)
2. Riches to Rags (fall)
3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)
4. Icarus (rise then fall)
5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)
6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)
Their focus was on the emotional trajectory of a story, not merely its plot. They also analyzed which emotional structure writers used most, and how that contrasted with the ones readers liked best, then published a preprint paper of their findings on the scholarship website arXiv.org. More on that in a minute.
First, the researchers had to find a workable dataset. Using a collection of fiction from the digital library Project Gutenberg, they selected 1,737 English-language works of fiction between 10,000 and 200,000 words long.
Then, they ran their dataset through a sentiment analysis to generate an emotional arc for each work. “We’re not imposing a set of shapes,” said Andy Reagan, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Vermont and the lead author of the paper. “Rather: the math and machine learning have identified them.”
They did this by training the machine to take all the words of the book, section by section, and measure the average happiness of a given bag of words based on how an individual word scored. The researchers assigned individual happiness scores to more than 10,000 frequently-used words by crowdsourcing the effort on the website Mechanical Turk. This portion of the research is fascinating in and of itself: The 10 words that people ranked as happiest were laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, and joy. The 10 words that people ranked as least happy were terrorist, suicide, rape, terrorism, murder, death, cancer, killed, kill, and die. (You can see how all the words ranked by visiting this site.)
There are several theories that say every story known to man can be reduced to one of just a handful of archetypes—a quest, overcoming the monster, rebirth, to name a few—but there’s no consensus on what those stories are. In this case, researchers picked six from a mix of popular lists based on what shapes the computer identified most. And though the researchers were focused on a book’s emotional arc—not the structure of its plot, per se—they found overlap in how plot points reflected emotional highs and lows as measured by the sentiment analysis.
While the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for instance, is “nested and complicated,” they wrote, “the emotional arc associated with each sub-narrative is clearly visible.” (That said, emotional moments discussed briefly—the first kiss between Harry and Ginny, let’s say—didn’t register.)
Photo by: Hedonometer / Andy Reagan / Kirsch
All in all, “Rags to Riches” stories represented about one-fifth of all the works analyzed. This isn’t surprising. It’s easy to think of examples of such tales in classic literature. The canons of Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen are arguably defined by them.
“The ‘Rags to Riches’ emotional arc embodies a story that we all love to believe in, widely popular in the American dream itself,” Reagan said. “It’s a story of hope and fairness, where regardless of beginning in bad times, with effort things will get better and eventually result in good fortune.”
In this case, the prototypical example, according to the researchers, is Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Under Ground—which would later be published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. An 1890 novel by the writer Olive Schreiner, Dreams, was another clear match for the “Rags to Riches” model. For both stories, the computer found a near-identical match to “Rags to Riches” with few if any connections to other kinds of emotional arcs. Here’s how the top 20 stories that fit the “Rags to Riches” mode appear on a graph in their paper:
“Rags to Riches” may be popular among writers, but it isn’t necessarily the emotional arc that readers reach for most. The categories that include the greatest total number of books are not the most popular, the researchers found. They examined total downloads for all books from Project Gutenberg, then divvied them up by mode. Measured this way, “Rags to Riches” is eclipsed by “Oedipus”, “Man in a Hole” and, perhaps not surprisingly, “Cinderella,” all of which were more popular. Reagan told me he and his colleagues now plan to analyze how different arcs are sequenced together in a single story, like in the Harry Potter example above.
Eventually, he says, this research could help scientists train machines to reverse-engineer what they learn about story trajectory to generate their own compelling original works. Already, there are competitions for story-writing bots. (Incidentally, I attempted a similar experiment and it didn’t exactly go as planned.)
“This is an active area of research,” Reagan says, “and there are a lot of hard problems yet to be solved. In addition to the plot, structure, and emotional arc, to write great stories, a computer will need to create characters and dialogue that are compelling and meaningful.”Vonnegut, of course, always made it sound easy. Consider how he describes the “Man in a Hole” narrative, which is characterized by M.R. James’s Ghost Stories of an Antiquary—or pretty much any 22-minute sitcom: “Somebody gets in to trouble, gets out of it again,” Vonnegut once said in a lecture. “People love that story. They never get sick of it.”
(A frame grab released by the animation studio Wawayu shows characters from the online cartoon series ‘The Leader’, German philosopher Karl Marx (center), his wife Jenny von Westphalen (right) and German philosopher Friedrich Engels.)
The Chinese Communist Party is trying a new way to woo younger people, commissioning an anime series whose hero is clean-shaven, slim and a hopeless romantic — Karl Marx.
Called “The Leader”, the online cartoon series is designed to make Marx more palatable to China’s younger generation, which usually encounters the bearded German philosopher through thick textbooks and classes.
“There is a lot of literary work about Karl Marx, but not as much in a format that young people can accept,” Zhuo Sina, one of the scriptwriters behind the online series, told AFP.
“We wanted to fill this gap,” she added. “We hope more people can have a more positive understanding of and interest in Marx and his biography.”
Created by animation studio Wawayu but backed by China’s central propaganda department and the state-run Marxism Research and Construction Programme Office, the release of The Leader comes as the Chinese Communist Party ramps up its push for ideological rigour — especially in classrooms and on university campuses.
With its Ferrari-driving elites cashing in on an economic boom that has revolutionized China since the economy was opened to market forces in 1978, Beijing’s allegiance to Marx may seem like an anomaly.
But the Communist Party is still loyal to its ideological forefather, dismissing the apparent contradiction and framing its evolution through a prism of “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics”.
Students start learning the theories of Marx and Lenin in middle school, and civil servants -– even journalists in state-run media –- have to take mandatory courses in Marxist theory to secure promotions.
Last year, Chinese President Xi Jinping also urged party members to cultivate the habit of reading Marxist classics and regard it as a “way of life” and “spiritual pursuit”.
That also means that the scriptwriters of “The Leader” have had to compromise some aspects of storytelling for the sake of accuracy, said Zhuo.
“You can’t just write whatever,” she emphasized, explaining that Marxism scholars were involved in the whole process of scriptwriting.
She said the story of Marx should not pander to the demands of the entertainment industry, where there is “no way to make very careful and precise or very accurate descriptions.”
After debuting at the end of January on Bilibili, a video streaming platform popular among young anime, comic and gaming fans in China, the online serial has been streamed more than five million times.
The Leader starts with Marx’s university years where shots of the young philosopher — dressed in a dapper beige blazer — feverishly studying the work of Hegel are spliced between tender moments with Jenny von Westphalen, his wife.
But the masses have been tough critics — on popular Chinese film and literature site Douban, users gave The Leader a two-star rating out of five.
Some criticized the storytelling as “awkward”, while others used more colorful language — one likened the experience of watching the series with “shoving” excrement in their mouth.
Jeroen de Kloet, professor at the University of Amsterdam, who has researched Chinese youth culture and media, said there was too much talking in the series and not enough scenes that “humanize” Marx.
“It’s the government lecturing young people on what Marxism is about”, he said.
Still, despite its propaganda bent, the TV series has opened a surprising space for discussion on Marxism and even labor rights in China.
Among the many comments scrolling across the screen as each episode plays — a popular feature in China known as “bullet” comments — some users commented on religious freedom and labor rights.
In one comment, a user wrote about the forced shutdown of a social media account that follows labor activism.
Others mentioned the Marxist society at Peking University, which has seen several attempts by local police and school authorities to silence and suppress the student-run group’s activities.
Last year, recent graduates from Peking University, namely those affiliated with the Jasic Solidarity Group, a labor rights movement in southern China, disappeared altogether.
“That’s why propaganda is interesting, because you can also read it against the grain,” de Kloet told AFP.
With its wealthy businessmen and capitalist culture, modern day China is in stark contrast with the cartoon, which advocates for workers and the proletariat, he said.
“You step out of your door in Beijing and you see a whole different reality… So there’s a tension there.”
The Leader is not the Chinese Communist Party’s first attempt to make Marxism more mainstream.
Last year, like the cartoon, which was commissioned in commemoration of Marx’ 200th birthday, China’s central propaganda bureau released a TV talk show called Marx Got It Right, where theory experts, professors, and university students discuss Marxism.
In January, official news agency Xinhua lauded the success of a children’s version of Marx’s seminal work, Das Kapital — a 150-page illustrated book intended for children between eight and 14 years old.
And while online ratings of The Leader are lackluster, it’s a “first step on the way to the government figuring out messaging in a way that will actually appeal to young people,” said Christina Xu, who researches and writes about Chinese internet culture.
The Marx anime is also “part of the push for soft power”, she added, noting the prominence of “guo chuang” or domestically produced animations on Bilibili, which also streams shows from state broadcaster CCTV.
The makers of The Leader aren’t planning to stop at cartoon series, either. Zhuo said the team is planning to create a standalone animated film on Marx, though the release date has not yet been decided.
Police: U. of R. student issued citation for white supremacist materials found in Brighton
Brighton, N.Y. – The Brighton Police Department said it has identified and issued a citation to a student at a local college in connection to white supremacist propaganda found in the town last year.
Last fall, stickers advocating white nationalism were found in separate locations in the town. Similar stickers were later found in Pittsford.
Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson says officers, through forensic means, identified the individual believed to be responsible as Christopher Hodgman, 23, of Bethesda, Maryland.
Police, in conjunction with the New York State Attorney General’s Office and the Monroe County District Attorney’s Office, determined placing such fliers and stickers in public places is not a criminal act, but violated Brighton Town Code.
At a news conference Monday, Chief Henderson said fingerprints recovered through the adhesive on the stickers helped them track down their suspect.
“Our investigator was able to work with adhesive material associated with three other flyers to identifying characteristics, specifically fingerprints were recovered,” Henderson said.
Henderson was joined at Monday’s news conference by Brighton Town Supervisor Bill Moehle and Pittsford Town Supervisor Bill Smith, both of whom said the belief espoused in the materials go against what the people of their towns believe.
“Brighton’s diversity makes us strong,” said Moehle. “We learn and grow together from actions intended to tear us apart, and as a community we will not accept actions that glorify hate.”
Smith says he believes the materials found in his town were distributed by the same individual in the Brighton case.
“It’s a tragedy we have to be at one more press conference talking about this kind of material being disseminated in our community,” he said. “It does not reflect the values of the people of either community.”
Ira Jevotovsky lives a few blocks away from where stickers were found in Brighton.
“It’s happening more and more frequently,” said Jevotovsky. “As long as we pursue it and go after it the world is a better place.”
Hodgman, a student at the University of Rochester, was charged with three counts of violating town code. He is due back in court later this month.
A spokesperson for the University of Rochester says Brighton Police have reached out regarding the case. The university released a statement that read, in part:
The flyers are associated with Identity Evropa, a white nationalist organization identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The University has made clear its commitment to diversity, inclusion, and respect. We unequivocally condemn acts of hatred or intimidation. University community members are strongly encouraged to report any incidents motivated by discrimination of a person or target group. Full information is found at https://www.rochester.edu/care/reports.html. We ask each member of our University community to work to ensure that our institution is one where everyone feels welcomed and valued.
The president of the University of Rochester College Republicans chapter, Jose Fernandez, tells 13WHAM News that Hodgman was the chapter’s previous president.
Fernandez said he and the rest of the chapter denounce Hodgman’s alleged actions.
“I want to be as clear as possible: Our entire chapter condemns as forcefully as possible racism and prejudice of any form,” Fernandez said in a statement to 13WHAM. “As the son of Hispanic parents, including my father who left the Dominican Republic for America at 17 years old, I was blessed to understand what image America must seek to attain: A country where anyone who truly seeks a better life can seek refuge.”
University of Rochester President Richard Feldman sent the following statement to the university community Monday:
Rochester – the University and the City – has been my home for more than 40 years. Today’s news regarding the arrest of a member of our campus community for improper posting of Identity Evropa propaganda in Brighton saddens, disappoints, and frightens me, as I expect it does many of you. As a professor and a citizen, I am deeply disturbed by the views expressed by the leaders of this organization, which describes itself as “identitarian,” but which I see as hateful and divisive. My visceral reaction is compounded by the anonymous method of spreading these views, which I believe is meant to intimidate. In my current role as president, and prior to that in my role as dean of the College, I’ve seen it as my responsibility to do whatever I could to make our campus as welcoming and supportive as possible. But my reaction transcends my professional capacity: for me, this is personal. Over the years, I have come to appreciate how structures and circumstances, both here at the University and in society more broadly, can marginalize people, making them unwelcome and unsafe. I believe I’ve gained at least some understanding of the ways in which I have been privileged in not having to overcome the obstacles others face, due to race or gender or religious belief or other characteristics. I want to do what I can to remove these obstacles.
The vexing issues we face now, both in this case and in society at large, present a puzzle of a sort that intrigues philosophers like me. When you advocate for inclusion, it may seem unclear what your attitude should be toward those who advocate for exclusion. From my perspective, the answer is clear: in our democracy, all people are permitted to hold and express their views, even those others may disagree with and find offensive. This does not mean that people are permitted to harass, intimidate, threaten, or harm. Nor does this mean that we cannot call out hateful and bigoted views for what they are. I realize that the boundaries between protected free speech and unprotected speech can be hard to draw, but drawing them is one of the challenges – and advantages – of a free society.
So where do we go from here? As I see it, we must take this moment as an opportunity to increase our efforts to identify and bridge some of the divides we see and experience every day on our campus. We may not always come to agreement but we must actively seek a deeper understanding and respect for others. In the coming days I will be consulting with the University Diversity and Equity Council and other members of the University community for their ideas about meaningful action in response to this incident and how we can strengthen our commitments to the University’s Vision and Values. I encourage you to reach out to one another, and to redouble your efforts to better understand the lived experiences of your classmates, your teachers, and your colleagues. We are all in this together.
Hodgman’s lawyer, Don Thompson said his actions are not a crime but a violation of town code. According to Thompson, the message on the flyers were not hate speech, adding that the violation is the same as posting a lost puppy poster on a public structure.
Hodgman faces a $250 fine and possibly 15 days in jail, though jail time is unlikely.
He is scheduled to appear in town court on March 27 at 2:15 p.m.
Christopher Seider (or Snider) (1758—1770) was the first American killed in the political strife that later became the American Revolution. Only eleven years old at the time, Seider was shot and killed by loyalist Ebenezer Richardson in Boston on February 22, 1770. His funeral became a major political event, with his death heightening tensions that erupted into the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770.
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Seider was born in 1758, the son of poor German immigrants. On February 22, 1770, he joined a crowd mobbing the house of Ebenezer Richardson located in the North End. Richardson was a customs service employee who had tried to disperse a protest in front of Loyalist merchant Theophilus Lillie’s shop. The crowd threw stones which broke Richardson’s windows and struck his wife. Richardson tried to scare them by firing a gun into the crowd. Seider was wounded in the arm and the chest and died that evening. Samuel Adams arranged for the funeral, which over 2,000 people attended. Seider was buried in Granary Burying Ground; the victims of the Boston Massacre, killed just 11 days later, are buried near him.
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Seider’s killing and large public funeral fueled public outrage that reached a peak in the Boston Massacre eleven days later. Richardson was convicted of murder that spring, but then received a royal pardon and a new job within the customs service, on the grounds that he had acted in self-defense. This became a major American grievance against the British government.
On a cold morning in February 1770, eleven-year old Christopher Seider was one of several hundred adults and youths surrounding the house of ebenezer Richardson. Richardson was a known Tory informer for the British customs commissioners. Mob demonstrations protesting the Townshend Acts were common, some spontaneous and some organized. At Richardson’s house the crowd was becoming unruly and started breaking windows and one stone thrown hit Richardson’s wife. Richardson grabbed an unloaded musket and shoved it through one of the broken windows.
Seeing the musket just seemed to add fuel to the fire and the crowd knocked down the front door. Richardson loaded and fired into the mob fatally wounding Seider who died that evening. Four days after Sieder’s funeral, a British soldier named Thomas Walker of the 29th Regiment inquired about a job at John Gray’s Ropewalk. It was common for a British soldier to moonlight while off duty to supplement their incomes. Ropemaker William Green told Walker “to go clean the outhouse”. In response to the insult, a fistfight broke out between Walker and Green . Walker was beaten very badly and when he had the chance ran and enlisted some of his British peers into the fight. The fray was renewed and the soldiers were bested again. The only advantaged to either side gained from the altercation was a few aches and pains.
Christopher Seider was just 11 in 1770, a working boy in Boston at a time when the city was awash in the debate over the Massachusetts colony’s relationship with England.
In 1770, throughout the American colonies resistance to British Townshend Acts — which taxed goods coming from England such as lead, paper tea, paint and glass — was strong. However, so was the desire for British goods.
American-made clothing and other products were often rougher in appearance and less appealing, and some goods could only be had by importing them.
The question of whether Boston merchants would continue to honor non-importation agreements that stopped the sale of British goods in protest of the tax was on minds throughout the colony. Boston had played a leading role in implementing the non-importation strategy and convincing other colonies to join in. But the cost was taking its toll.
Frustrated by several years of struggling to make a profit, the stage was set for merchants to announce they would no longer honor non-importation agreements and would resume selling British goods.
Theophilus Lillie, a dry goods merchant, was one of the earliest to break the non-importation agreements. Though some merchants disregarded the ban altogether, most did it quietly. Lillie, though not political, did so with a flourish, announcing his intentions in a letter to the Boston Chronicle.
His decision led to dueling letters and articles in the newspapers and, on the night of February 22, a protest in front of his house.
“A number of boys had been diverting themselves with the exhibition of a piece of pageantry near the house of Theophilus Lillie,” the Boston-Gazette and Country Journal reported. They placed a sign, ‘IMPORTER,’ in front of his home.
It wouldn’t be long before their protest turned explosive. Ebenezer Richardson, a British customs officer, stepped in and tried to stop the protest. He urged several passing men to tear down the sign and effigies used in the protest.
The passersby declined to help, and Richardson was driven back by the protesters, pelted with dirt and stones as he fled to his own house with the crowd in pursuit.
Richardson went to a window and first fired his musket without shot to disperse the crowd. He returned to the window to shoot again — this time his gun loaded with “swan shot,” pea-sized lead balls.
The shot injured teenager Samuel Gore, but it killed 11-year-old Christopher Seider, the blast striking him in the chest.
The news raced through the city, with newspapers halting their presses to include accounts of the shooting. More than 1,000 people attended his funeral procession days later, which started at Boston’s Liberty Tree. Poet Phillis Wheatley memorialized him in a poem.
“It is hoped the unexpected and melancholy death of young (Seider) will be a means for the future of preventing any, but more especially the soldiery, from being too free in the use of their instruments of death,” the Boston-Gazette, and Country Journal opined. However, 11 days later the Boston Massacre would take place and the march to Revolution continued.
As for Richardson, he was tried and convicted of killing Seider and imprisoned for a time, but was later pardoned by the king and offered a post in Philadelphia in 1773. In that city, publishers attacked Richardson with a broadside and spread the story that he had fathered a child out of wedlock and allowed a Woburn pastor to be blamed for it.
Richardson, widely reviled, would later flee to England.
London, England: Like something out of the 1930’s on the streets of Berlin anti-Semitic mobs are terrorizing any and all Jewish people in the United Kingdom. Under the Leninist flavored Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbin anti-Zionism was practically official policy. Corbin was nominated to be considered for the Labour Party leadership several years ago as an inside joke to the Tony Blair types who see the Labour Party as their bailiwick. But due to some miscalculations and ‘socialist nostalgia’ among the Labour Party membership and Trotskyist hangers-on Corbyn actually won. The mainstream media cried foul. They had not seen a Left wing victory in the Labour Party. No one they associated with or read shared Corbin’s looney left ideas. Apparently a lot of low-income nobodies share Corbyn’s ‘pie in the sky’ socialist promises. Nationalized railways won’t work in Britain – the UK is not China.
Of all the problems encountered under the Corbyn regime in the Labour Party few are as menacing as the growing attacks on Jewish people. Day after day the press online and in newspapers are filled with new stories about a Labour Left caught in anti-Semitism. UK Leftists can’t seem to go a day without complaining about Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Any criticism of the Israeli Army is obviously a criticism of all Jewish people. Hitler used the same techniques.
Corbyn and his co-thinkers who took over the Labour Party have been exposed and the publicity they get may help Jewish people in London feel safe enough to come down from the attic and out of the cellars. Corbyn’s reign of anti-Semitic hate will be ended.
This preference drives my daughters crazy. It drives my brothers crazy. My loving friends think I am crazy. They think that I can’t mean what I say; that I haven’t thought clearly about this, because there is so much in the world to see and do. To convince me of my errors, they enumerate the myriad people I know who are over 75 and doing quite well. They are certain that as I get closer to 75, I will push the desired age back to 80, then 85, maybe even 90.
I am sure of my position. Doubtless, death is a loss. It deprives us of experiences and milestones, of time spent with our spouse and children. In short, it deprives us of all the things we value.
But here is a simple truth that many of us seem to resist: living too long is also a loss. It renders many of us, if not disabled, then faltering and declining, a state that may not be worse than death but is nonetheless deprived. It robs us of our creativity and ability to contribute to work, society, the world. It transforms how people experience us, relate to us, and, most important, remember us. We are no longer remembered as vibrant and engaged but as feeble, ineffectual, even pathetic.
By the time I reach 75, I will have lived a complete life. I will have loved and been loved. My children will be grown and in the midst of their own rich lives. I will have seen my grandchildren born and beginning their lives. I will have pursued my life’s projects and made whatever contributions, important or not, I am going to make. And hopefully, I will not have too many mental and physical limitations. Dying at 75 will not be a tragedy. Indeed, I plan to have my memorial service before I die. And I don’t want any crying or wailing, but a warm gathering filled with fun reminiscences, stories of my awkwardness, and celebrations of a good life. After I die, my survivors can have their own memorial service if they want—that is not my business.
Let me be clear about my wish. I’m neither asking for more time than is likely nor foreshortening my life. Today I am, as far as my physician and I know, very healthy, with no chronic illness. I just climbed Kilimanjaro with two of my nephews. So I am not talking about bargaining with God to live to 75 because I have a terminal illness. Nor am I talking about waking up one morning 18 years from now and ending my life through euthanasia or suicide. Since the 1990s, I have actively opposed legalizing euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. People who want to die in one of these ways tend to suffer not from unremitting pain but from depression, hopelessness, and fear of losing their dignity and control. The people they leave behind inevitably feel they have somehow failed. The answer to these symptoms is not ending a life but getting help. I have long argued that we should focus on giving all terminally ill people a good, compassionate death—not euthanasia or assisted suicide for a tiny minority.
I am talking about how long I want to live and the kind and amount of health care I will consent to after 75. Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. This has become so pervasive that it now defines a cultural type: what I call the American immortal.
I reject this aspiration. I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive. For many reasons, 75 is a pretty good age to aim to stop.
What are those reasons? Let’s begin with demography. We are growing old, and our older years are not of high quality. Since the mid-19th century, Americans have been living longer. In 1900, the life expectancy of an average American at birth was approximately 47 years. By 1930, it was 59.7; by 1960, 69.7; by 1990, 75.4. Today, a newborn can expect to live about 79 years. (On average, women live longer than men. In the United States, the gap is about five years. According to the National Vital Statistics Report, life expectancy for American males born in 2011 is 76.3, and for females it is 81.1.)
In the early part of the 20th century, life expectancy increased as vaccines, antibiotics, and better medical care saved more children from premature death and effectively treated infections. Once cured, people who had been sick largely returned to their normal, healthy lives without residual disabilities. Since 1960, however, increases in longevity have been achieved mainly by extending the lives of people over 60. Rather than saving more young people, we are stretching out old age.
The American immortal desperately wants to believe in the “compression of morbidity.” Developed in 1980 by James F. Fries, now a professor emeritus of medicine at Stanford, this theory postulates that as we extend our life spans into the 80s and 90s, we will be living healthier lives—more time before we have disabilities, and fewer disabilities overall. The claim is that with longer life, an ever smaller proportion of our lives will be spent in a state of decline.
Compression of morbidity is a quintessentially American idea. It tells us exactly what we want to believe: that we will live longer lives and then abruptly die with hardly any aches, pains, or physical deterioration—the morbidity traditionally associated with growing old. It promises a kind of fountain of youth until the ever-receding time of death. It is this dream—or fantasy—that drives the American immortal and has fueled interest and investment in regenerative medicine and replacement organs.
But as life has gotten longer, has it gotten healthier? Is 70 the new 50?
The author at his desk at the University of Pennsylvania. “I think this manic desperation to endlessly extend life is misguided and potentially destructive.”
Not quite. It is true that compared with their counterparts 50 years ago, seniors today are less disabled and more mobile. But over recent decades, increases in longevity seem to have been accompanied by increases in disability—not decreases. For instance, using data from the National Health Interview Survey, Eileen Crimmins, a researcher at the University of Southern California, and a colleague assessed physical functioning in adults, analyzing whether people could walk a quarter of a mile; climb 10 stairs; stand or sit for two hours; and stand up, bend, or kneel without using special equipment. The results show that as people age, there is a progressive erosion of physical functioning. More important, Crimmins found that between 1998 and 2006, the loss of functional mobility in the elderly increased. In 1998, about 28 percent of American men 80 and older had a functional limitation; by 2006, that figure was nearly 42 percent. And for women the result was even worse: more than half of women 80 and older had a functional limitation. Crimmins’s conclusion: There was an “increase in the life expectancy with disease and a decrease in the years without disease. The same is true for functioning loss, an increase in expected years unable to function.”This was confirmed by a recent worldwide assessment of “healthy life expectancy” conducted by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington. The researchers included not just physical but also mental disabilities such as depression and dementia. They found not a compression of morbidity but in fact an expansion—an “increase in the absolute number of years lost to disability as life expectancy rises.”
How can this be? My father illustrates the situation well. About a decade ago, just shy of his 77th birthday, he began having pain in his abdomen. Like every good doctor, he kept denying that it was anything important. But after three weeks with no improvement, he was persuaded to see his physician. He had in fact had a heart attack, which led to a cardiac catheterization and ultimately a bypass. Since then, he has not been the same. Once the prototype of a hyperactive Emanuel, suddenly his walking, his talking, his humor got slower. Today he can swim, read the newspaper, needle his kids on the phone, and still live with my mother in their own house. But everything seems sluggish. Although he didn’t die from the heart attack, no one would say he is living a vibrant life. When he discussed it with me, my father said, “I have slowed down tremendously. That is a fact. I no longer make rounds at the hospital or teach.” Despite this, he also said he was happy.
As Crimmins puts it, over the past 50 years, health care hasn’t slowed the aging process so much as it has slowed the dying process. And, as my father demonstrates, the contemporary dying process has been elongated. Death usually results from the complications of chronic illness—heart disease, cancer, emphysema, stroke, Alzheimer’s, diabetes.
Take the example of stroke. The good news is that we have made major strides in reducing mortality from strokes. Between 2000 and 2010, the number of deaths from stroke declined by more than 20 percent. The bad news is that many of the roughly 6.8 million Americans who have survived a stroke suffer from paralysis or an inability to speak. And many of the estimated 13 million more Americans who have survived a “silent” stroke suffer from more-subtle brain dysfunction such as aberrations in thought processes, mood regulation, and cognitive functioning. Worse, it is projected that over the next 15 years there will be a 50 percent increase in the number of Americans suffering from stroke-induced disabilities. Unfortunately, the same phenomenon is repeated with many other diseases.
So American immortals may live longer than their parents, but they are likely to be more incapacitated. Does that sound very desirable? Not to me.
The situation becomes of even greater concern when we confront the most dreadful of all possibilities: living with dementia and other acquired mental disabilities. Right now approximately 5 million Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimer’s. And the prospect of that changing in the next few decades is not good. Numerous recent trials of drugs that were supposed to stall Alzheimer’s—much less reverse or prevent it—have failed so miserably that researchers are rethinking the whole disease paradigm that informed much of the research over the past few decades. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementia—a nearly 300 percent increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050.
Half of people 80 and older with functional limitations. A third of people 85 and older with Alzheimer’s. That still leaves many, many elderly people who have escaped physical and mental disability. If we are among the lucky ones, then why stop at 75? Why not live as long as possible?
Even if we aren’t demented, our mental functioning deteriorates as we grow older. Age-associated declines in mental-processing speed, working and long-term memory, and problem-solving are well established. Conversely, distractibility increases. We cannot focus and stay with a project as well as we could when we were young. As we move slower with age, we also think slower.
It is not just mental slowing. We literally lose our creativity. About a decade ago, I began working with a prominent health economist who was about to turn 80. Our collaboration was incredibly productive. We published numerous papers that influenced the evolving debates around health-care reform. My colleague is brilliant and continues to be a major contributor, and he celebrated his 90th birthday this year. But he is an outlier—a very rare individual.
American immortals operate on the assumption that they will be precisely such outliers. But the fact is that by 75, creativity, originality, and productivity are pretty much gone for the vast, vast majority of us. Einstein famously said, “A person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so.” He was extreme in his assessment. And wrong. Dean Keith Simonton, at the University of California at Davis, a luminary among researchers on age and creativity, synthesized numerous studies to demonstrate a typical age-creativity curve: creativity rises rapidly as a career commences, peaks about 20 years into the career, at about age 40 or 45, and then enters a slow, age-related decline. There are some, but not huge, variations among disciplines. Currently, the average age at which Nobel Prize–winning physicists make their discovery—not get the prize—is 48. Theoretical chemists and physicists make their major contribution slightly earlier than empirical researchers do. Similarly, poets tend to peak earlier than novelists do. Simonton’s own study of classical composers shows that the typical composer writes his first major work at age 26, peaks at about age 40 with both his best work and maximum output, and then declines, writing his last significant musical composition at 52. (All the composers studied were male.)
This age-creativity relationship is a statistical association, the product of averages; individuals vary from this trajectory. Indeed, everyone in a creative profession thinks they will be, like my collaborator, in the long tail of the curve. There are late bloomers. As my friends who enumerate them do, we hold on to them for hope. It is true, people can continue to be productive past 75—to write and publish, to draw, carve, and sculpt, to compose. But there is no getting around the data. By definition, few of us can be exceptions. Moreover, we need to ask how much of what “Old Thinkers,” as Harvey C. Lehman called them in his 1953 Age and Achievement, produce is novel rather than reiterative and repetitive of previous ideas. The age-creativity curve—especially the decline—endures across cultures and throughout history, suggesting some deep underlying biological determinism probably related to brain plasticity.
We can only speculate about the biology. The connections between neurons are subject to an intense process of natural selection. The neural connections that are most heavily used are reinforced and retained, while those that are rarely, if ever, used atrophy and disappear over time. Although brain plasticity persists throughout life, we do not get totally rewired. As we age, we forge a very extensive network of connections established through a lifetime of experiences, thoughts, feelings, actions, and memories. We are subject to who we have been. It is difficult, if not impossible, to generate new, creative thoughts, because we don’t develop a new set of neural connections that can supersede the existing network. It is much more difficult for older people to learn new languages. All of those mental puzzles are an effort to slow the erosion of the neural connections we have. Once you squeeze the creativity out of the neural networks established over your initial career, they are not likely to develop strong new brain connections to generate innovative ideas—except maybe in those Old Thinkers like my outlier colleague, who happen to be in the minority endowed with superior plasticity.
Maybe mental functions—processing, memory, problem-solving—slow at 75. Maybe creating something novel is very rare after that age. But isn’t this a peculiar obsession? Isn’t there more to life than being totally physically fit and continuing to add to one’s creative legacy?
One university professor told me that as he has aged (he is 70) he has published less frequently, but he now contributes in other ways. He mentors students, helping them translate their passions into research projects and advising them on the balance of career and family. And people in other fields can do the same: mentor the next generation.
Mentorship is hugely important. It lets us transmit our collective memory and draw on the wisdom of elders. It is too often undervalued, dismissed as a way to occupy seniors who refuse to retire and who keep repeating the same stories. But it also illuminates a key issue with aging: the constricting of our ambitions and expectations.
We accommodate our physical and mental limitations. Our expectations shrink. Aware of our diminishing capacities, we choose ever more restricted activities and projects, to ensure we can fulfill them. Indeed, this constriction happens almost imperceptibly. Over time, and without our conscious choice, we transform our lives. We don’t notice that we are aspiring to and doing less and less. And so we remain content, but the canvas is now tiny. The American immortal, once a vital figure in his or her profession and community, is happy to cultivate avocational interests, to take up bird watching, bicycle riding, pottery, and the like. And then, as walking becomes harder and the pain of arthritis limits the fingers’ mobility, life comes to center around sitting in the den reading or listening to books on tape and doing crossword puzzles. And then …
Maybe this is too dismissive. There is more to life than youthful passions focused on career and creating. There is posterity: children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
But here, too, living as long as possible has drawbacks we often won’t admit to ourselves. I will leave aside the very real and oppressive financial and caregiving burdens that many, if not most, adults in the so-called sandwich generation are now experiencing, caught between the care of children and parents. Our living too long places real emotional weights on our progeny.
Unless there has been terrible abuse, no child wants his or her parents to die. It is a huge loss at any age. It creates a tremendous, unfillable hole. But parents also cast a big shadow for most children. Whether estranged, disengaged, or deeply loving, they set expectations, render judgments, impose their opinions, interfere, and are generally a looming presence for even adult children. This can be wonderful. It can be annoying. It can be destructive. But it is inescapable as long as the parent is alive. Examples abound in life and literature: Lear, the quintessential Jewish mother, the Tiger Mom. And while children can never fully escape this weight even after a parent dies, there is much less pressure to conform to parental expectations and demands after they are gone.
Living parents also occupy the role of head of the family. They make it hard for grown children to become the patriarch or matriarch. When parents routinely live to 95, children must caretake into their own retirement. That doesn’t leave them much time on their own—and it is all old age. When parents live to 75, children have had the joys of a rich relationship with their parents, but also have enough time for their own lives, out of their parents’ shadows.
But there is something even more important than parental shadowing: memories. How do we want to be remembered by our children and grandchildren? We wish our children to remember us in our prime. Active, vigorous, engaged, animated, astute, enthusiastic, funny, warm, loving. Not stooped and sluggish, forgetful and repetitive, constantly asking “What did she say?” We want to be remembered as independent, not experienced as burdens.
At age 75 we reach that unique, albeit somewhat arbitrarily chosen, moment when we have lived a rich and complete life, and have hopefully imparted the right memories to our children. Living the American immortal’s dream dramatically increases the chances that we will not get our wish—that memories of vitality will be crowded out by the agonies of decline. Yes, with effort our children will be able to recall that great family vacation, that funny scene at Thanksgiving, that embarrassing faux pas at a wedding. But the most-recent years—the years with progressing disabilities and the need to make caregiving arrangements—will inevitably become the predominant and salient memories. The old joys have to be actively conjured up.
Of course, our children won’t admit it. They love us and fear the loss that will be created by our death. And a loss it will be. A huge loss. They don’t want to confront our mortality, and they certainly don’t want to wish for our death. But even if we manage not to become burdens to them, our shadowing them until their old age is also a loss. And leaving them—and our grandchildren—with memories framed not by our vivacity but by our frailty is the ultimate tragedy.
The author at base camp with two nephews this summer, as the three climbed Mount Kilimanjaro Photo by: Courtesy of Ezekiel J. Emanuel
Seventy-five. That is all I want to live. But if I am not going to engage in euthanasia or suicide, and I won’t, is this all just idle chatter? Don’t I lack the courage of my convictions?
No. My view does have important practical implications. One is personal and two involve policy.
Once I have lived to 75, my approach to my health care will completely change. I won’t actively end my life. But I won’t try to prolong it, either. Today, when the doctor recommends a test or treatment, especially one that will extend our lives, it becomes incumbent upon us to give a good reason why we don’t want it. The momentum of medicine and family means we will almost invariably get it.
My attitude flips this default on its head. I take guidance from what Sir William Osler wrote in his classic turn-of-the-century medical textbook, The Principles and Practice of Medicine: “Pneumonia may well be called the friend of the aged. Taken off by it in an acute, short, not often painful illness, the old man escapes those ‘cold gradations of decay’ so distressing to himself and to his friends.”
My Osler-inspired philosophy is this: At 75 and beyond, I will need a good reason to even visit the doctor and take any medical test or treatment, no matter how routine and painless. And that good reason is not “It will prolong your life.” I will stop getting any regular preventive tests, screenings, or interventions. I will accept only palliative—not curative—treatments if I am suffering pain or other disability.
This means colonoscopies and other cancer-screening tests are out—and before 75. If I were diagnosed with cancer now, at 57, I would probably be treated, unless the prognosis was very poor. But 65 will be my last colonoscopy. No screening for prostate cancer at any age. (When a urologist gave me a PSA test even after I said I wasn’t interested and called me with the results, I hung up before he could tell me. He ordered the test for himself, I told him, not for me.) After 75, if I develop cancer, I will refuse treatment. Similarly, no cardiac stress test. No pacemaker and certainly no implantable defibrillator. No heart-valve replacement or bypass surgery. If I develop emphysema or some similar disease that involves frequent exacerbations that would, normally, land me in the hospital, I will accept treatment to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the feeling of suffocation, but will refuse to be hauled off.
What about simple stuff? Flu shots are out. Certainly if there were to be a flu pandemic, a younger person who has yet to live a complete life ought to get the vaccine or any antiviral drugs. A big challenge is antibiotics for pneumonia or skin and urinary infections. Antibiotics are cheap and largely effective in curing infections. It is really hard for us to say no. Indeed, even people who are sure they don’t want life-extending treatments find it hard to refuse antibiotics. But, as Osler reminds us, unlike the decays associated with chronic conditions, death from these infections is quick and relatively painless. So, no to antibiotics.
Obviously, a do-not-resuscitate order and a complete advance directive indicating no ventilators, dialysis, surgery, antibiotics, or any other medication—nothing except palliative care even if I am conscious but not mentally competent—have been written and recorded. In short, no life-sustaining interventions. I will die when whatever comes first takes me.
As for the two policy implications, one relates to using life expectancy as a measure of the quality of health care. Japan has the third-highest life expectancy, at 84.4 years (behind Monaco and Macau), while the United States is a disappointing No. 42, at 79.5 years. But we should not care about catching up with—or measure ourselves against—Japan. Once a country has a life expectancy past 75 for both men and women, this measure should be ignored. (The one exception is increasing the life expectancy of some subgroups, such as black males, who have a life expectancy of just 72.1 years. That is dreadful, and should be a major focus of attention.) Instead, we should look much more carefully at children’s health measures, where the U.S. lags, and shamefully: in preterm deliveries before 37 weeks (currently one in eight U.S. births), which are correlated with poor outcomes in vision, with cerebral palsy, and with various problems related to brain development; in infant mortality (the U.S. is at 6.17 infant deaths per 1,000 live births, while Japan is at 2.13 and Norway is at 2.48); and in adolescent mortality (where the U.S. has an appalling record—at the bottom among high-income countries).
A second policy implication relates to biomedical research. We need more research on Alzheimer’s, the growing disabilities of old age, and chronic conditions—not on prolonging the dying process.
Many people, especially those sympathetic to the American immortal, will recoil and reject my view. They will think of every exception, as if these prove that the central theory is wrong. Like my friends, they will think me crazy, posturing—or worse. They might condemn me as being against the elderly.
Again, let me be clear: I am not saying that those who want to live as long as possible are unethical or wrong. I am certainly not scorning or dismissing people who want to live on despite their physical and mental limitations. I’m not even trying to convince anyone I’m right. Indeed, I often advise people in this age group on how to get the best medical care available in the United States for their ailments. That is their choice, and I want to support them.
And I am not advocating 75 as the official statistic of a complete, good life in order to save resources, ration health care, or address public-policy issues arising from the increases in life expectancy. What I am trying to do is delineate my views for a good life and make my friends and others think about how they want to live as they grow older. I want them to think of an alternative to succumbing to that slow constriction of activities and aspirations imperceptibly imposed by aging. Are we to embrace the “American immortal” or my “75 and no more” view?
I think the rejection of my view is literally natural. After all, evolution has inculcated in us a drive to live as long as possible. We are programmed to struggle to survive. Consequently, most people feel there is something vaguely wrong with saying 75 and no more. We are eternally optimistic Americans who chafe at limits, especially limits imposed on our own lives. We are sure we are exceptional.
I also think my view conjures up spiritual and existential reasons for people to scorn and reject it. Many of us have suppressed, actively or passively, thinking about God, heaven and hell, and whether we return to the worms. We are agnostics or atheists, or just don’t think about whether there is a God and why she should care at all about mere mortals. We also avoid constantly thinking about the purpose of our lives and the mark we will leave. Is making money, chasing the dream, all worth it? Indeed, most of us have found a way to live our lives comfortably without acknowledging, much less answering, these big questions on a regular basis. We have gotten into a productive routine that helps us ignore them. And I don’t purport to have the answers.
But 75 defines a clear point in time: for me, 2032. It removes the fuzziness of trying to live as long as possible. Its specificity forces us to think about the end of our lives and engage with the deepest existential questions and ponder what we want to leave our children and grandchildren, our community, our fellow Americans, the world. The deadline also forces each of us to ask whether our consumption is worth our contribution. As most of us learned in college during late-night bull sessions, these questions foster deep anxiety and discomfort. The specificity of 75 means we can no longer just continue to ignore them and maintain our easy, socially acceptable agnosticism. For me, 18 more years with which to wade through these questions is preferable to years of trying to hang on to every additional day and forget the psychic pain they bring up, while enduring the physical pain of an elongated dying process.
Seventy-five years is all I want to live. I want to celebrate my life while I am still in my prime. My daughters and dear friends will continue to try to convince me that I am wrong and can live a valuable life much longer. And I retain the right to change my mind and offer a vigorous and reasoned defense of living as long as possible. That, after all, would mean still being creative after 75.
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This post originally appeared on The Atlantic. This article is republished here with permission.
Paris (AFP) – A nude drawing that bears a striking resemblance to the “Mona Lisa” was done in Leonardo da Vinci’s studio and may be the work of the master himself, a French museum said Monday.
Experts at the Louvre in Paris, where the world’s biggest collection of Leonardo’s work is held, have been examining a charcoal drawing known as the “Monna Vanna” which has long been attributed to the Renaissance painter’s studio. But the charcoal preparatory work for a painting of a semi-nude woman, held at the Conde Museum at Chantilly north of Paris, may now have to be reclassified.
“There is a very strong possibility that Leonardo did most of the drawing,” Mathieu Deldicque, a curator at the Paris museum, told AFP. “It is a work of very great quality done by a great artist,” added Deldicque, who initiated a investigation over several months by historians and scientific specialists at the renowned C2RMF laboratory under the Louvre.
The large drawing has been held since 1862 in the huge collection of Renaissance art at the Conde Museum, once the home of one of France’s oldest noble families.
“It is almost certainly a preparatory work for an oil painting,” Deldicque said, with the hands and body almost identical to the “Mona Lisa”, Leonardo’s inscrutable masterpiece which hangs in the Louvre.
Exceptional artist –
Microscopic examinations have shown that it was drawn from the top left towards the bottom right, the curator said — which points to a left-handed artist.
Leonardo, who died in France in 1519, is the most famous left-handed painter in history.
The drawing will be shown at a special exhibition at Chantilly later this year to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of the artistic genius, who was born in the Medici-ruled Republic of Florence in 1452. Louvre conservation expert Bruno Mottin had earlier confirmed that the work dated from Leonardo’s lifetime. But he was thrown by “hatching on the top of the drawing near the head done by a right-handed person”.
Since then “we have discovered lots of new elements”, Deldicque said, most notably “left-handed charcoal marks pretty much everywhere”. Tests had already revealed that the drawing on paper, using Leonard’s beloved “sfumato” technique, was not a mere copy of a lost original. But Deldicque said that “we must remain prudent” about definitively attributing the work to the great polymath.
“We want to be serious and scientific about this,” he told AFP. “The quality of the drawing, both to the naked eye and under imaging analysis” shows it was the work of an exceptional hand. But experts cannot be “absolutely certain (it was by Leonardo) and we may never be,” he admitted.
The first launch of a person into orbit in space around the Earth: Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin described hearing a whistle and an ever-growing din as the rocket trembled all over, and tore itself off the launchpad. “The noise was no louder than one would expect to hear in a jet plane, but it had a great range of musical tones and timbres that no composer could hope to score, and no musical instrument or human voice could ever reproduce.”
If you’re an ambitious, goal oriented person, it’s possible that one of your New Year’s resolutions was to read more books. Books are the gateway to imagination, to worlds we may not be able to access physically, but can emotionally. Books help us to expand what we’re capable of being and experiencing. Based on the math, which I’ll explain below, I’ll likely have read 100 books this year. In order to be a prolific writer, I have to be a voracious reader.
1. Schedule it on your calendar
I’ve said before that calendars are more effective than to do lists. If you want to read more, schedule it on your calendar. The Google calendar app even has a goals feature that can help you to do this. Start by scheduling 10 mins a day. Then work your way up to 30 mins, and an hour. As you do this you’ll build your deep work muscle, which in turn will help you sustain the attention needed to read more books.
2. Leverage the Principle of Activation Energy
The principle of activation energy says that the more energy it takes to do something the less likely you are to do it, and the less energy it takes to do it, the more likely you are to do it. You can leverage this by putting books in places that they’ll be easily accessible and you’ll see them.
Put a book on your desk or breakfast table the night before and you’ll be more likely to read it in the morning.
If you want to read before you go to bed, put a book on your nightstand.
Reduce the activation energy it takes to read a book, and you’ll be more likely to read.
3. Always Carry a Book with You
This is something I learned in an article written by Ryan Holiday. There are plenty of times in our lives when we’re idly waiting (doctor’s offices, the DMV, waiting to board a flight etc, etc). Instead of spending that time on your phone, use it to read a book.
4. Read 50 Pages a Day
If you read 50 pages a day, that’s 350 pages a week. It’s roughly the equivalent of two books. Multiply that times 52 weeks in a year, and you’ve read 100 books. How you read those 50 pages is really up to you. You can spend an hour reading. Or you can schedule 5 10 minute sessions a day and read 10 pages during that time.
5. Listen to Audiobooks
Some books are dense, long and difficult reads. When Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography was released, I knew I wanted to read it. So I decided to listen to the audiobook on a 3-day road trip across the country. The great thing about audiobooks is that you can listen to them while you’re driving, in the gym, or even going on a run.
Combine all of these ideas together, and the idea of reading 100 books in a year won’t seem like such a daunting task. Take it one day at a time. You might not reach 100 books, but you’ll end up doing quite a bit of reading.
Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums, amassed a collection of treasures worth more than $1.4 billion, and became perhaps the most prolific art thief in history. And as he reveals to GQ’s Michael Finkel, how Breitwieser managed to do all this is every bit as surprising as why.
“Don’t worry about parking the car,” says the art thief. “Anywhere near the museum is fine.” When it comes to stealing from museums, Stéphane Breitwieser is virtually peerless. He is one of the most prolific and successful art thieves who have ever lived. Done right, his technique—daytime, no violence, performed like a magic trick, sometimes with guards in the room—never involves a dash to a getaway car. And done wrong, a parking spot is the least of his worries.
Just make sure to get there at lunchtime, Breitwieser stresses, when the visitors thin and the security staff rotates shorthanded to eat. Dress sharply, shoes to shirt, topped by a jacket that’s tailored a little too roomy, with a Swiss Army knife stashed in a pocket.
Be friendly at the front desk. Buy your ticket, say hello. Once inside, Breitwieser adds, it’s essential to focus. Note the flow of visitor traffic and memorize the exits. Count the guards. Are they sitting or patrolling? Check for security cameras and see if each has a wire—sometimes they’re fake.
When it comes to museum flooring, creaky old wood is ideal, so even with his back turned, Breitwieser can hear footsteps two rooms away. Carpeting is the worst. Here, at the Rubens House, in Antwerp, Belgium, it’s somewhere in between: marble. For this theft, Breitwieser has arrived with his girlfriend and frequent travel companion, Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus, who positions herself near the only doorway to a ground-floor exhibition room and coughs softly when anyone approaches.
The Rubens House in Antwerp. The site of one of Breitwieser’s more memorable heists.
The museum is the former home of Peter Paul Rubens, the great Flemish painter of the 1600s. Breitwieser isn’t interested in stealing a Rubens; his paintings tend to be extremely large or too overtly religious for Breitwieser’s taste. What sets Breitwieser apart from nearly every other art thief—it’s the trait, he believes, that has facilitated his prowess—is that he will steal only pieces that stir him emotionally. And he insists that he never sells any. Stealing art for money, he says, is stupid. Money can be made with far less risk. But stealing for love, Breitwieser knows, is ecstatic.
And this piece, right in front of him, is a marvel. He had discovered it during a visit to the museum two weeks previous. He wasn’t able to take it then, but its image blazed in his mind every time he sought sleep. This is why he’s returned; this has happened before. There will be no good rest until the object is his.
It’s an ivory sculpture of Adam and Eve, carved in 1627 by Georg Petel, a friend of Reubens’s, who, according to Breitwieser, gifted him the piece for his 50th birthday. The carving is a masterpiece, just ten inches tall but dazzlingly detailed, the first humans gazing at each other as they move to embrace, Eve’s hair scrolling down her back, the serpent coiled around the tree trunk behind them, and the unbitten apple, cheekily, in Adam’s hand, indicating his complicity in the fall of man, contrary to the book of Genesis. “It’s the most beautiful object I have ever seen,” says Breitwieser.
Georg Petel’s ivory sculpture of Adam and Eve, stolen from—and later returned to—the museum at the home of Peter Paul Rubens in Antwerp.Picasa
The ivory sculpture is sealed beneath a plexiglass dome fastened to a thick base, resting on an antique dresser. Breitwieser’s first objective is to remove the two screws that connect the dome and the base. There’s no camera here, and only one guard is in motion, poking her head in every few minutes.
The tourists, as usual, are the problem—too many of them, lingering. The room is filled with items Rubens had amassed during his lifetime, including marble busts of Roman philosophers, a terra-cotta sculpture of Hercules, and a scattering of 17th-century oil paintings.
Patience is needed, but a moment soon comes when it’s just Kleinklaus and Breitwieser alone, and in an instant he unfolds the screwdriver from the Swiss Army knife and sets upon the plexiglass dome. Breitwieser is shorter than average and tousle-haired, with piercing blue eyes that, for all his stealth, are often animate with expression. He is lithe and coordinated, and uses athleticism and theater in his work. Maybe five seconds pass before Kleinklaus coughs and he vaults away from the carving, reverting to casual-art-gazing mode.
It’s a start. He has turned the first screw twice around. Each job is different; improvisation is crucial—rigid plans do not work during daytime thefts, when there are variables too numerous to preordain. During his previous trip to the museum, he had studied how the Adam and Eve was protected and had also spotted a convenient door, reserved for guards, that opened into the central courtyard and did not appear to have an alarm.
Over the course of ten minutes, progressing fitfully, Breitwieser removes the first screw and pockets it. He does not wear gloves, trading fingerprints for dexterity. The second screw takes equally as long.
Now he’s set. The security guard has already appeared three times, and at each check-in Breitwieser and Kleinklaus had stationed themselves in different spots. Still, the time elapsed in this room has reached his acceptable limit. There’s a group of visitors present, all using audio guides and studying a painting, and Breitwieser judges them appropriately distracted.
He nods to his girlfriend, who slips out of the room, then lifts the plexiglass dome and sets it carefully aside. He grasps the ivory and pushes it into the waistband of his pants, at the small of his back, adjusting his roomy jacket so the carving is covered. There’s a bit of a lump, but you’d have to be exceptionally observant to notice.
Then he strides off, moving with calculation but no obvious haste. He knows that the theft will swiftly be spotted. He’d left the plexiglass bell to the side—no need to waste precious seconds replacing it—and the guard will surely initiate an emergency response. Though not, he’s betting, quickly enough.
From the room with the ivory, the museum layout encourages visitors to ascend to the second floor, but Breitwieser pushes through the door he’d seen on his earlier trip, crosses the courtyard toward the main entrance, and walks past the front desk onto the streets of Antwerp. Kleinklaus rejoins him before they reach the car, a little Opel Tigra, and Breitwieser sets the ivory in the trunk and they drive slowly away, pausing at traffic lights on the route out of town.
Stéphane Breitwieser robbed nearly 200 museums to amass his secret art collection.
Crossing international borders is stressful but low-risk. They travel from Belgium to Luxembourg to Germany to their home in France without incident, just another young, stylish couple out for a jaunt. It’s the first weekend of February 1997, and both are only 25 years old, though Breitwieser’s already been stealing art for a while.
The road trip ends at a modest steep-roofed house built amid the sprawl of Mulhouse, an industrial city in eastern France. The ivory might be worth a million dollars, but Breitwieser is broke. He does not have a steady job—when he is employed, it’s often as a waiter. His girlfriend works in a hospital as a nurse’s aide, and the couple live in his mother’s house. Their private space is on the top floor, an attic bedroom and small living area that Breitwieser always keeps locked.
They open the door now, cradling the ivory, and a wave of swirling colors seems to break over their heads as they step inside their fantasy world. The walls are lined with Renaissance paintings—portraits, landscapes, still lifes, allegories. There’s a bustling peasant scene by Dutch master Adriaen van Ostade, an idyllic pastoral by French luminary François Boucher, an open-winged bat by German genius Albrecht Dürer. A resplendent 16th-century wedding portrait, the bride’s dress threaded with pearls, by Lucas Cranach the Younger, may be worth more than all the houses on Breitwieser’s block put together, times two.
In the center of the bedroom sits a grandiose canopied four-poster bed, draped with gold velour and red satin, surrounded by furniture stacked with riches. Silver goblets, silver platters, silver vases, silver bowls. A gold snuffbox once owned by Napoleon. A prayer book, lavishly illuminated, from the 1400s. Ornate battle weapons and rare musical instruments. Bronze miniatures and gilded teacups. Masterworks in enamel and marble and copper and brass. The hideaway shimmers with stolen treasure. “My Ali Baba’s cave,” Breitwieser calls it.
Entering this place, every time, dizzies him with joy. He describes it as a sort of aesthetic rapture. Breitwieser sprawls on the bed, examining his new showpiece. The Adam and Eve ivory, after a four-century journey to arrive in his lair, appears more stunning than ever. It goes on the corner table, the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes.
During the week, while his girlfriend is working, he visits his local libraries. He learns everything he can about the ivory, the artist, his masters, his students. He takes detailed notes. He does this with nearly all his pieces—he gets attached to them. Back home, he meticulously cleans the carving, with soapy water and lemon, his thumb passing over the sculpture’s every nubbin and ridge.
But this is not enough. His love for the ivory doesn’t fade, that’s not fair to say—he just has room in his heart for a little more love. So he consults his art magazines and auction catalogs. The Zurich art fair is about to begin. He plots a route into Switzerland, avoiding tolls to save money, and early the next Saturday morning they’re back on the road.
Sibylle of Cleves by Lucas Cranach the Younger, thought to be worth roughly $4.8 million, was perhaps the most valuable piece in Breitwieser’s collection.
A still life of flowers by Jan van Kessel the Elder that was stolen from a village museum in Belgium, a country Breitwieser says attracted him “like a lover.”
All his life, inanimate objects have had the power to seduce him. “I get smitten,” Breitwieser says. Before artwork, it was stamps and coins and old postcards, which he’d purchased with pocket money. Later it was medieval pottery fragments he’d find near archaeological sites, free for the taking.
When he covets an object, says Breitwieser, he feels the emotional wallop of a coup de coeur—literally, a blow to the heart. There are just things that make him swoon. “Looking at something beautiful,” he explains, “I can’t help but weep. There are people who do not understand this, but I can cry for objects.”
His interactions with the world of the living were far less fulfilling. He never really understood his peers, or almost anyone else for that matter. Popular pastimes, like sports and video games, baffled him. He’s never had any interest in drinking or drugs. He could happily spend all day alone at a museum—his parents often dropped him off—or touring archaeological sites, of which there are dozens in the area where he grew up, but around others he was sometimes hotheaded and temperamental.
Breitwieser was born in 1971 in the Alsace region of northeastern France, where his family has deep roots. He speaks French and German and a little English. His father was a sales executive in Switzerland, just over the border, and his mother was a nurse. He’s an only child. The family, for most of his youth, was well-off, living in a grand house filled with elegant furniture—Louis XV armchairs, from the 1700s; Empire dressers, from the 1800s. His parents had hoped he’d become a lawyer, but he dropped out of university after a couple of years.
The Alsace region of France, where Breitwieser grew up, sits in the northeastern corner of the country, along the borders of Germany and Switzerland.
His first museum heist came shortly after a family crisis. When he was 22 years old, still living at home, his parents’ marriage ended explosively. His father left and took his possessions with him, and Breitwieser and his mother tumbled down the social ladder, re-settling in a smaller place, the antiques replaced by Ikea.
Cushioning the trauma was a woman Breitwieser met through an acquaintance, a fellow archeology buff. Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus was the same age as Breitwieser, and similarly introverted, with a kindred sense of curiosity and adventure. She had a sly smile and an irresistible pixie cut. They shared a passion for museums, thrilled to be immersed in beauty. Breitwieser finally experienced a coup de coeur for an actual person. “I loved her right away,” he says. Soon after Breitwieser’s father departed, Kleinklaus moved in.
A few months later, the couple were visiting a museum in the French village of Thann when Breitwieser spotted an antique pistol. His first thought, he recalls, was that he should already own something like this. Breitwieser’s father had collected old weapons but had taken them when he’d left the family, not bothering to leave a single piece for his son. The firearm, exhibited in a glass case on the museum’s second floor, was hand-carved around 1730. It was far nicer than anything his father had owned.
He felt an urge to possess it. The museum was small, no security guard or alarm system, just a volunteer at the entrance booth. The display case itself, Breitwieser noted, was partially open. He was wearing a backpack and could easily hide the pistol in there.
One must resist temptation, he knew. It even says so in the Bible, not that he was particularly religious. What our heart really wants, we must often deny. Maybe this is why so many people seem conflicted and miserable—we are taught to be at constant war with ourselves. As if that were a virtue.
What would happen, he wondered, if he did not resist temptation? If, instead, he fed temptation and freed himself from society’s repressive restraints? He had no desire to physically harm anyone or so much as cause fright. He contemplated the flintlock pistol and whispered a few of these thoughts to his girlfriend.
Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus has never spoken to the media about her relationship with Breitwieser and any possible role in the crimes, and neither has Breitwieser’s mother, Mireille Stengel. Though there exist supporting documents and reported accounts, much of this story is based primarily on interviews with Breitwieser. While he was in the museum, in front of the pistol, Kleinklaus’s response, the way Breitwieser remembers it, made him believe that they were destined to be together.
“Go ahead,” she said. “Take it.” So he did.
From that moment on, he catered to his impulses in an unimaginable way. His only goal was to obey temptation. By the time he pilfers the Adam and Eve ivory, three years after stealing the pistol, he’s amassed some 100 objects, all on display in his hideout. He is ecstatic beyond measure, cosseted like a king. He feels as though he and his girlfriend have discovered the meaning of life.
A curious thing about temptation, at least in Breitwieser’s case, is that it never seems to abate. If anything, the more he feeds it, the hungrier it gets. The weekend after the ivory theft in Belgium, Breitwieser and Kleinklaus drive through the snow-streaked Alps to the Zurich art fair. Behind a dealer’s back, quick as a cat, he steals a spectacular goblet, filigreed with silver and gold, from the 16th century.
Then they head to Holland for another fair, and at one booth, while the vendor is eating lunch and not keeping careful watch, Breitwieser takes a brilliant rendering of a lake bobbing with swans, dated 1620. At another booth, again with the dealer present, he removes a 17th-century seascape painted on copper.
A few weeks later, it’s back to Belgium, to a village museum with a single security guard, where he takes a valuable still life, butterflies flitting around a bouquet of tulips, by Flemish master Jan van Kessel the Elder. This is followed by a trip to a Paris auction, where, at the pre-sale show, he steals a painting from the school of Pieter Brueghel the Elder and Pieter Brueghel the Younger, two polestars of Renaissance art.
Once again he returns to Belgium—a country whose museums, says Breitwieser, “attract me like a lover”—and filches a vivid tableau of a rural market, then over to Holland to snatch a droll 17th-century watercolor of house cats chasing hedgehogs, followed by a journey to the northern French city of Lille for another Renaissance oil work, and finally, for good measure, one more raid in Belgium.
All of this in a matter of months. These paintings alone represent a haul worth millions of dollars. And it’s not just paintings—he also steals a gold-plated hourglass, a stained-glass windowpane, an iron alms box, a copper collection plate, a brass hunting bugle, a cavalry saber, a couple of daggers, a gilded ostrich egg, a wooden altarpiece, and a half-dozen pocket watches. Everything is crammed into the hideout, filling the walls top to bottom, overflowing the end tables, displayed in his closet’s shoe rack, leaning on chairs, stuffed under the bed.
The collection is not random. Virtually everything he steals was made before the Industrial Revolution, in an age when items were all still formed by hand; no machines stamped out parts. Everything finely crafted in this way, Breitwieser believes, from medical instruments to kitchenware, is its own little work of art, the hand of the master visible in each chisel mark and burr. This, to Breitwieser, was the height of human civilization.
Today the world is wed to mass production and efficiency, much to our benefit. But a side effect is that beauty for beauty’s sake seems increasingly quaint, and museums themselves, small ones especially, can have the whiff of the dying. Stocking pieces in his room, Breitwieser feels, is rescuing them, like pets from a shelter, giving them the love and attention they deserve.
The more he steals, the better he gets. He learns, with precision, the limits of a security camera’s vision. He hones his timing and perfects his composure. “You have to control your gestures, your words, your reflexes,” Breitwieser says. “You need a predatory instinct.” He pounces the instant he senses everyone’s attention is diverted. “The pleasure of having,” says Breitwieser, “is stronger than the fear of stealing.”
He tries to take only smaller pieces—with paintings, no more than about a foot by a foot—and if time allows, he prefers to remove the frame and hide it nearby, often in a bathroom, so the artwork disappears more completely beneath his jacket. He purchases new frames for most of the works. Sometimes he steals weapons, but he wouldn’t think of brandishing one. To walk into a museum with a gun, he says, is disgusting.
The set of thefts he describes as the most exquisite of his career are a study in simplicity and sangfroid. They take place in Belgium, his beloved target, at the vast Art & History Museum in Brussels, which Breitwieser estimates employs 150 guards. There he and Kleinklaus spot a partly empty display case, with a laminated card inside that reads “Objects removed for study.” Nothing in the case interests them, but Breitwieser has an idea and steals the card.
The Historical Museum of Mulhouse.
Breitwieser understands how security guards think. At age 19, he was employed for a month as a guard at the Historical Museum of Mulhouse, near his home. Most guards, he realized, hardly notice the art on the walls—they look only at people. Breitwieser’s brashest thefts, like the Adam and Eve ivory, are spotted in minutes, but when he’s furtive, hours often pass, and sometimes days, before anyone realizes what’s happened.
In the Brussels Art & History Museum, he carries the “Objects removed” sign to a gallery with a display case of silver pieces from the 16th century. To break into this case, Breitwieser uses a screwdriver and levers the sliding door off its tracks. Other times, he carries a box cutter and slices open a silicone joint. For museums with antique display cabinets, he brings a ring of a dozen old skeleton keys he’s amassed—often one of his keys is able to tumble the lock. Also handy is a telescoping antenna, to nudge a ceiling-mounted security camera in a different direction.
He selects three silver items, a drinking stein and two figurines; then he sets the “Objects removed” card in the case and re-attaches the sliding door, and they leave the museum. They’re already at the car before he realizes he’s forgotten the lid to the stein.
Breitwieser detests missing parts or any sign of restoration. The items in his collection must be original and complete. Kleinklaus knows this, says Breitwieser, and she abruptly removes one of her earrings and heads back to the museum, her boyfriend in tow. She marches up to a security guard and says she’s lost an earring and has a feeling she knows where it is. The couple are permitted back inside. They return to the case and he takes the stein’s lid and, why not, two additional goblets from another case.
Two weeks later, they’re back. Kleinklaus has changed her hairstyle, and Breitwieser has grown out his beard and added a pair of glasses and a baseball cap. At the display case, the “Objects removed” card still there, he grabs four more items, including a two-foot-tall chalice so breathtakingly gorgeous that Breitwieser suspends his size-limitation preference and, with nowhere else to put it, stuffs the item up the left sleeve of his jacket, forcing him to walk unnaturally, his arm swinging stiffly like a soldier’s.
On their way to the exit, they’re stopped by a guard. They feign calm, but Breitwieser has a terrible feeling that the end has come. The guard wants to see their entrance tickets. Breitwieser, unable to move his left arm, awkwardly reaches across his body with his right to fish the tickets from his left pocket. He wonders if the guard senses something amiss.
A guilty person would cower and try to leave, so Breitwieser boldly tells the guard that he’s heading to the museum café for lunch. The guard’s suspicion is defused, and the couple actually eat at the museum, Breitwieser’s arm held rigid the entire time.
They rent a cheap hotel room and wait two days and return yet again, newly disguised, and he steals four more pieces. That’s a total of 13, and such is their level of euphoria that on the drive home they can’t contain themselves and stop at an antiques gallery displaying an immense ancient urn, made of silver and gold, in the front window.
Breitwieser enters, and the dealer calls from atop a staircase that he’ll be right down, but by the time he descends no one is there. Nor is the urn. They return to France plunder-drunk and giddy, and for fun, Breitwieser recalls, Kleinklaus phones the gallery and asks how much the urn in the window costs. About $100,000, she’s told. “Madame,” says the dealer, “you really must see it.” He hasn’t yet noticed it’s gone.
Of course the police are after them. Investigations are opened after many of their thefts—witnesses questioned, sketches made. Yet no one’s ever quite sure what they saw. Breitwieser is videoed in action in a museum in France, but the images are grainy. The best the French authorities are able to deduce is that several times a year, in seemingly random places, a man and a woman steal art together; they envision the criminals as a retired couple, nowhere close to their actual age.
The couple themselves keep tabs on their peril by reading newspaper coverage of their crimes. Some articles mention that law enforcement is sure that a large network of international traffickers are systematically stealing. The authorities, much to Breitwieser’s satisfaction, seem to have no clue as to whom they are chasing—the sheer scale of the thefts is so far beyond that of nearly every other case as to be practically inconceivable.
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In the annals of art crime, it’s hard to find someone who has stolen from ten different places. By the time the calendar flips to 2000, by Breitwieser’s calculations, he’s nearing 200 separate thefts and 300 stolen objects. For six years, he’s averaged one theft every two weeks. One year, he is responsible for half of all paintings stolen from French museums.
By some combination of skill and luck, Breitwieser and Kleinklaus are doing everything right to avoid capture. They constantly shift the countries they target, alternating between rural and urban locations, large museums and small, while further mixing things up by stealing from churches, auction houses, and art fairs. They don’t kick down doors or cover their faces with masks—actions that would trigger a much greater police response. Crime works best, Breitwieser believes, when no one realizes it’s being committed.
Several times, he steals while they’re on a guided tour, then casually continues the tour while holding the item. At an art fair in Holland, Breitwieser hears a shout of “Thief!” and sees security guards tackle a man. It’s another burglar. Breitwieser takes advantage of the commotion and slips a painting under his coat.
There are, inevitably, several close calls. Once, Breitwieser accidentally shatters a glass display case. Another time, he returns to his car while holding sections of a 16th-century wooden altarpiece only to encounter a police officer in the process of giving him a parking ticket. While hiding the artwork beneath his jacket, he manages to persuade the officer to withdraw the ticket. Soon after a theft in France, roadblocks are set up on some of the routes leading from the museum, but Breitwieser and Kleinklaus manage to avoid being stopped.
Then they visit an art gallery in Lucerne, Switzerland. It’s a hot day, and Breitwieser is not wearing a jacket that he can use to hide a stolen object—and even worse, they are the gallery’s only visitors. The place is also directly across the street from a police station. Kleinklaus, according to Breitwieser, issues a warning. “Don’t do anything,” she says. “I don’t feel it, I’m telling you.”
But Breitwieser has spotted a 17th-century still life by Dutch painter Willem van Aelst that is simply too tempting. And it seems so easy to take. He puts the painting under his arm and walks out as casually as if he’s carrying a baguette. A gallery employee instantly spots the theft, accosts the couple outside the gallery, and escorts them across the street to the police. Breitwieser and Kleinklaus remain in custody overnight but manage to convince the authorities that this is the first time they’d ever stolen and that they are terribly, deeply sorry. They are released with hardly any punishment.
Rattled, the couple make a vow never to steal in Switzerland again and decide to take a break from thieving entirely. The respite lasts all of three weeks before Breitwieser, at an auction in Paris, steals a scene of a grape harvest by Flemish painter David Vinckboons. After that, he returns to stealing as frequently as before.
An art thief Breitwieser admires, he says, is Thomas Crown, from the two Thomas Crown Affair movies. But that’s fiction. Breitwieser is furious at nearly all actual art thieves, especially people like those who broke into Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990. The two thieves took 13 works worth a total of $500 million, but they used knives to slice some of the paintings from their frames. Breitwieser would never consider cutting out a painting—that, he says, is vandalism. He wouldn’t even roll up a canvas, an action that risks cracking the paint. “You roll up an old painting,” he says, “and you kill it.”
About 50,000 artworks are stolen each year around the world, and according to the director of the London-based Art Loss Register, the most comprehensive database of stolen art, more than 99 percent of art thieves are motivated by profit rather than aesthetics. This is why art crimes are typically solved on the back end, when the thieves try to sell the work. But with Breitwieser, law enforcement’s chief strategy—poring over art-market data, waiting for the stolen items to reappear—is dead on arrival.
Still, a multi-million-dollar collection of stolen art concealed in an attic bedroom in a middle-class suburb seems too extraordinary to remain secret forever. If just one friend found out, it’s inevitable others would learn and the game would be finished.
Breitwieser and Kleinklaus, though, have no friends. “I’ve always been a loner,” he says. “I don’t want any friends.” Kleinklaus, he claims, feels the same. They occasionally spend time with acquaintances but never invite anyone over. If repairs are needed in his room, he does them himself. Nobody is allowed to enter, ever, except him and his girlfriend. “We lived in a closed universe,” Breitwieser says.
They’re both nearing 30 years old when their universe starts to crumble. A notion had been building in Kleinklaus ever since the night they spent in police custody in Switzerland—that perhaps there’s something more fulfilling than life as an outlaw and rooms filled with riches. She’d like to start a family. But not, she realizes, with the man she’s been dating for almost a decade. There is no option for a child in their conscribed existence. They could be arrested at any minute; they can’t even entertain visitors. She begins to feel suffocated.
Breitwieser, meanwhile, says he feels “invincible.” Tension between the two intensifies, ugly fights erupt, and Breitwieser starts stealing alone. Any restraining influences Kleinklaus once provided are shed. From a village church not far from their house, he unbolts an enormous wooden carving of the Madonna and Child, weighing 150 pounds, and hauls it away, one strained step at a time, without the slightest attempt at stealth. If anyone had entered the church during the theft, he’d have been caught.
Later, in February 2001, at a hilltop castle, he removes a monumental 17th-century tapestry, larger than ten feet by ten feet, assuming ridiculous risk to steal it. There’s no room in their lair for a trophy this size—it’s left rolled up on a dresser—but Breitwieser tells his girlfriend they’ll display it as soon as they are free of his mother and residing in a place of their own. By this point, Kleinklaus knows it’s a fantasy. Living amid a mountain of stolen art, no matter where, can never offer true freedom at all.
After the police had taken their fingerprints in Switzerland, Breitwieser says, Kleinklaus fears that the prints are now filed in every nation’s database. Even if she leaves him, she’ll be hunted forever. What will they ever do with all this stuff? What’s the endgame? She wants him to quit, but he doesn’t even agree to abate. The best deal she can wrangle is a sworn promise that from now on, when stealing, he’ll always wear surgical gloves, which she’ll bring home from her job at the hospital. There is no endgame, Breitwieser says. He plans to keep going and going.
Albrecht Dürer’s gouache of a bat, which dates to 1522, was a prominent component of Breitwieser’s illicit collection.
He returns from another thieving trip with a little curled bugle, dated from the 1580s, once used by hunters on horseback to communicate. It was a stylish theft, Breitwieser balancing atop a radiator to cut open a display case high on the wall, then delicately snipping the nylon cords holding the bugle in place. Kleinklaus is unimpressed. They already have one like it.
“Did you wear gloves?” she asks, suspicious.
“I’m really sorry,” he says.
The one thing she’d been promised. Then she learns that he’d stolen the bugle in Switzerland, the one country where they’d vowed never to steal from again. He had even gone to a museum near Lucerne—the same city in which they’d been caught. They argue bitterly, and in the morning Breitwieser says he’ll go back to Switzerland and erase the prints.
Breitwieser says that this idea doesn’t work for Kleinklaus; she wants to go to the museum and clean the prints herself. It’s too risky for him. Breitwieser says that at least he should drive, and she consents.
They’re frosty to each other on the trip, but as they pull into the Richard Wagner Museum, housed in a country manor where the composer once lived, their spirits are buoyed. The one thing that can stir Breitwieser as much a magnificent artwork is a sublime sweep of nature, and this museum is on a lake cupped in the spiked mountains of Switzerland. He feels for a moment, as Kleinklaus opens her door, a handkerchief and a bottle of rubbing alcohol in her bag, that maybe they can again find their love.
“Stay in the car,” she pleads.
“I’m just going to take a little walk,” he says. “Don’t worry.” And he, too, gets out, handing her the car keys to hold in her purse.
She enters the museum, pays the entry fee, and walks up to the second floor. Breitwieser, circling around the outside of the building, watches her progress as she appears in one window, then another. There’s only one other person around, an older man walking a dog, who seems to stare curiously at Breitwieser before moving away.
A few minutes later, Kleinklaus exits the museum. She walks quickly toward him, nearly jogging, which is odd. They never wanted to appear as if they were fleeing. He has the impression that she’s attempting to tell him something, but she is too far away to hear. He tries to decipher the anxious expression on her face as the police car pulls to a stop behind him. Two officers approach, handcuff Breitwieser, who is startled but doesn’t resist, and place him in the back seat of the squad car and drive off.
The Richard Wagner Museum in Lucerne, Switzerland, where Breitwieser was taken into custody.
He spends that night, November 20, 2001, in jail, and the next morning the interrogation begins. At the start of the questioning, says Breitwieser, he denied everything. After all, he didn’t have any stolen items on him when he was arrested. But both the cashier at the museum and the dog walker who’d been on the grounds, says Breitwieser, have provided formal statements to the police.
The dog walker, a retired journalist, had read in that morning’s paper about the Richard Wagner Museum theft, and when he saw a man there acting oddly, he went inside and mentioned it to the cashier. She looked out the window. The day the bugle was stolen, a total of three visitors had come to the museum, and this, she was certain, was one of them. He was wearing the same jacket. So she called the police. No one realized that Kleinklaus, who had overheard the conversation and was trying to warn him, had traveled with Breitwieser, and she was able to drive off in her car unnoticed.
Breitwieser realizes that to wriggle free from this jam, he needs to ensure that the authorities do not find out who he really is or send anyone to search his home. He tells the police that he’d come to Switzerland by train, alone, and admits to stealing the bugle. He explains, sorrowfully, that he is short of money and just wanted a nice Christmas gift for his mother. He has no idea, he adds, that the bugle is valuable; he was only attracted to it because of how shiny it was.
In the course of his conversation with the officers, he learns that the police never even considered dusting for prints.
Days drip by, then weeks, as he waits alone in his cell, worry mounting. He’s not permitted to make phone calls, and he has the impression, he says, that the entire world has abandoned him. No one will give him any news.
What’s happened is that the police have uncovered the report of Breitwieser’s previous brush with the law in Switzerland. This was very intriguing. They’d at first assumed that Breitwieser was nothing more than a small-time thief who’d hoped to make an easy profit from a lightly guarded museum. Could he be something more?
Swiss authorities pursue an international search warrant for Breitwieser’s residence in France. It takes a while to complete the warrant, but four weeks after his arrest, it’s ready. A group of French and Swiss officers arrive at the house, hoping to find the bugle, and perhaps more. Breitwieser’s mother is there and says she has no idea what they’re talking about.
The officers enter the house, climb the stairs to the hidden lair, and open the door. And there, inside, they see no hunting bugle, no silver objects, no Renaissance paintings, no musical instruments. Not so much as the trace of a picture hook. Nothing but clean, empty walls surrounding a lovely four-poster bed.
Breitwieser remains in jail, knowing nothing. No one visits or writes. Christmas comes and goes without even a holiday card. He feels sick; he cries frequently. He has admitted to only the theft of the bugle, but he knows that he’s close to breaking.
Soon after New Year’s Day 2002, he is escorted from his cell and seated in an interrogation room, across the desk from a Swiss police lieutenant named Roland Meier. The officer opens a drawer, removes a single photo, and places it in front of Breitwieser. It’s of a large commemorative medal that he had stolen from a different Swiss museum, a week before he’d taken the bugle. Breitwieser had imagined it could serve as a good-luck charm. The medal appears a little rusty and worn, and Breitwieser wonders what happened to it.
“We know you also stole this,” says Lieutenant Meier. “Tell us, and after that everything will be okay. We’ll let you go home.”
Breitwieser swiftly confesses.
Just one more thing, says Lieutenant Meier, opening the drawer again and placing another photo before Breitwieser. This one is of a golden snuffbox, also slightly oxidized.
Breitwieser confesses to taking it as well.
And then, according to Breitwieser’s version of these events, the officer pulls out a huge stack of photos, and Breitwieser realizes it’s checkmate. There are pictures of an ivory flute from Denmark, an enameled goblet from Germany, silver pieces from Belgium, and even the very first item he stole, nearly eight years before—the flint-lock pistol from France.
He confesses to every one of them, providing details and dates. When the stack of photos is exhausted, he’s admitted to stealing 140 objects. The lieutenant is staggered—he’d doubted this kid had stolen a single one of the items, let alone all of them.
Only now does Breitwieser see the police report that accompanied the photos. At the top it says “Objects found in the Rhone-Rhine Canal.” He’s confused. The canal, part of the system built under Napoleon to connect the rivers of France, is a murky, slow-moving waterway not far from his home.
Then he realizes why the pieces seemed discolored—they must have been rescued from water. One more thing dawns on him as well. There were no photos of any paintings he stole. “What about the paintings?” he asks the lieutenant. And it’s only then that he starts to find out.
In a partially-drained section of the Rhone-Rhine Canal, crews search for stolen artwork that had been tossed into the murky water.
What happened exactly remains a mystery. And because Breitwieser’s mother and girlfriend have never talked to the media, the details may never be fully revealed. Breitwieser himself, though, has learned as much as he can, and combining his insights with police investigations and interviews, it’s possible for him to piece together the events as he believes they may have occurred. Some specifics are lacking, and the precise time line is hazy, but not the result. The end, Breitwieser says, is always the same.
He envisions his girlfriend driving back from Switzerland, alone in the car, terrified. She’s just witnessed his arrest and has not been caught herself. At least not yet. When she gets home, Breitwieser suspects, she tells his mother at least some part of the truth about the extent of the crimes. The fact that Breitwieser is in custody means the authorities will surely soon arrive and probably arrest both of them as well.
It’s now, Breitwieser presumes, that his girlfriend takes his mother upstairs to their hideout. When Breitwieser visualizes his treasures through his mother’s eyes, they look different. She’s not spellbound by color or entranced by beauty. His mother works full-time to house and feed her 30-year-old unemployed son and his girlfriend, and he’s repaid her by breaking the law in a way that will likely ruin her life.
To her, his treasure is poison. She’s always had a temper, and his mother’s reaction, he’s sure, is a boiling rage. Once she decides something, there’s no bending her will. “She’s like a wall,” Breitwieser says. And she makes a decision now, one of finality and force.
It likely began that evening. First, Breitwieser thinks, his mother and possibly his girlfriend clear off the furniture, empty the closet, and collect everything under the bed. It’s all piled in bags and boxes, then carried downstairs and crammed into his mother’s car until the vehicle is completely full.
It must be very late, Breitwieser believes, when they drive to the canal. They go to a spot where the waterway runs plumb straight through a quiet, rural area, bordered on both sides by sheltering trees, the trail alongside it often busy by day with cyclists and joggers. The two women, Breitwieser thinks, then toss piece after piece into the dark water. Even in these panicked, angry actions, Breitwieser sees a filament of love—his mother, in some way, is trying to protect him, to hide what he’s done.
Some pieces aren’t thrown far enough from shore, and a few days later a passerby notices an intriguing shimmer in the water. He returns with a rake and finds a gold-plated chalice. Then he rakes out three more pieces of silver and a jewel-handled dagger. He tells the police, and they eventually drain a section of the canal and discover a collection of objects likely worth millions.
Back at Breitwieser’s house, probably the same night as the canal dump, his mother and perhaps his girlfriend again load the car, possibly this time with the bigger items, including the heavy Madonna and Child, the tapestry, and three paintings on copper panels. The Madonna and Child is deposited in front of a local church—his mother is observant—while the tapestry is discarded aside a road and the coppers are tossed into a wooded area.
All these items are eventually recovered. A passing motorist spots the tapestry and turns it in to the local police, who are not aware of its significance and unfurl it on the floor of their break room and play billiards on it for a while. The three 17th-century coppers are found by a logger, who brings them home and hammers them onto the roof of his henhouse, which had been leaking. They remain there until Breitwieser’s story hits the news.
The paintings, Breitwieser believes, were the final step. His Renaissance paintings formed the heart of his collection and represented the majority of its value. Breitwieser is sure that as the pictures are pulled from the walls, Kleinklaus is in shock—all he’d wanted to do was protect them from an uncaring planet—but his mother, he knows, is unstoppable. Later his mother will purchase putty and wall paint to cover the holes, and she will also throw away everything else in the rooms, including his clothing and books. But for now his mother drives all the paintings to a secluded area.
She creates a big pile, Breitwieser imagines, the portraits and still lifes and landscapes all jumbled, the luminaries of Renaissance art—Cranach, Brueghel, Teniers, Dürer, van Kessel, Dou—gathered as one. Every piece has survived some 300 years, through Europe’s bloody centuries, carrying its singular image to the world. Sixty-six paintings in total. In a haphazard heap.
A lighter is sparked and the flames rise, slowly at first and then wildly, oil paint bubbling, picture frames crackling, the great mass burning and burning until there’s almost nothing left but ash.
After that, what does anything matter?
Breitwieser is so shattered that he’s medicated and placed on suicide watch in the jail. Later he’s just numb. He is charged with theft and goes to trial twice, in Switzerland and in France, and serves a total of four years in prison, the punishment modest because no one has been physically injured, and the value of his loot, which some sources placed at over a billion dollars, didn’t affect the penalty—in the eyes of the law, there’s little difference between mass-produced baubles and Renaissance masterworks.
In prison he meets with several psychologists. He’s described in reports as an “arrogant” and “hypersensitive” man who believes he is “indispensable to humankind” but is never given a diagnosis and is not considered mentally ill at his trials. Because he specifically selected his loot, rather than randomly grabbing, and never displayed guilt about his actions, he doesn’t fit the criteria for being a kleptomaniac.
Breitwieser’s mother goes to trial for her role in destroying the works and is found guilty. She spends just a few months in jail. In court it was stated that she thought it was “just a bunch of junk” and that until her son’s arrest, she had no clue he’d been stealing. Breitwieser supports these claims, testifying that his mother is unfamiliar with the art world and that he told her he’d picked up trinkets at flea markets. Even though he’d shared a house with her, he’d made sure, he adds, to keep his mother mostly shut out of his life and completely shut out of his room.
Anne-Catherine Kleinklaus spends just a single night in jail. The story she tells the court strains credulity. She had no idea, she says, that her boyfriend was a thief. “I never played the role of the lookout,” she adds. “There were paintings and objects in his room, but nothing struck me as unusual.” Breitwieser, testifying at the trial, doesn’t contradict her, gallantly trying to protect her. If he can spare her some punishment, he will.
He believes his gesture may have worked, at least for her. She is never charged with destroying the art or convicted for direct involvement in the thefts, only for handling and knowledge of the stolen goods. Breitwieser realizes he’s still in love and writes her repeatedly from jail. She’s his last hope that something worthwhile will remain in his life. But there’s never a reply to his letters, and eventually he finds out why. Shortly after his arrest, Kleinklaus had started another relationship, and soon thereafter she was pregnant. By the time Breitwieser learns this, she’s the mother of a baby, and he vows never to see her again.
He’s released from prison in 2005, and at the age of 33 he feels defeated. He had lived a hundred lifetimes while stealing, and now everything is colorless and dumb. He cuts trees for a while, he drives a delivery truck, he mops floors. The relationship with his mother is mended, though he rents a cheap apartment of his own.
As a result of his crimes, he says, he’s not permitted to enter a museum or any other place showing art. He muddles away a couple of years, the bare walls of his apartment a kind of slow-drip torture, until, as it must with a mania like his, the deep-seated desire breaks through.
He goes to Belgium, and at an antiques fair, he sees a landscape that slays him—three people strolling through a wintry forest, by one of his favorites, Pieter Brueghel the Younger. He doesn’t even try to stop himself and finds that his skills are still sharp.
With the painting hanging in his apartment, suddenly there’s joy in his life. “One beautiful piece,” he says, “makes everything different.” A relationship blooms with a woman he’s met, and he admits to her what he’s done. She seems to accept the one theft—and, he insists, it’s just this one theft—but when the romance ends, she informs the police, and Breitwieser is put in prison again.
By the time he gets out, he’s 41 years old, creases at his eyes and a hairline in retreat. He has an idea that he’ll launch a career as a museum-security consultant, but he’s the only one who doesn’t find this a joke. To hell with everyone, he thinks. “I can live on an island like Robinson Crusoe and it wouldn’t bother me,” he says. He eats lunch most days with his mother and then wanders alone in the woods.
The problem is that he knows exactly what he wants. Just one more sensual blast like the thump he felt every time he unlocked the door to his lair. But when he closes his eyes and tries to conjure the scene, all he can see is a fire.
Then one day in early 2018, he comes across a brochure for the Reubens House Museum. And there it is, like a slap in the face—a photo of the Adam and Eve ivory, the first thing he’d once regarded every morning. It had been thrown in the canal, but ivory is sturdy and it hadn’t been damaged. Now the piece is evidently back on display.
Just looking at the photo pries open some box inside him that he’d hoped had been forever sealed. He’s not sure if he ever wants to see the ivory again or if he has to run immediately to the museum. For more than a month, he fights an internal battle before deciding that he needs to go.
In 2018, Breitweiser returned to the Reubens House Museum in Belgium and came face-to-face with the Adam and Eve ivory sculpture that he had stolen two decades prior. The ivory had been recovered, undamaged, from the Rhone-Rhine Canal.
He travels to Belgium, enters the Rubens House Museum, and heads to the rear gallery. And there it is, in the same spot, in a reinforced case. Twenty-one years have elapsed since he’d stolen it, but the ivory’s power to enchant is unlimited. Breitwieser leans forward, knees bent, so that his face is directly in front of the carving. His eyes widen, his forehead scrunches—the look on his face a jumble of awe and distress. An electric intensity seems to build in him until it appears as if he’s ready to combust.
He doesn’t want to make a scene in the gallery, so he hurries out to the museum’s courtyard. The air is warm, spring is coming. He shuffles foot to foot on the pale cobblestones; the wisteria on the walls is just starting to bud. The last time he’d been here, the ivory was under his jacket. This time he stands with nothing at all, tears blurring his eyes, mourning the lost years of his life—not when he was stealing, but since he’s stopped.
He says he only realizes now, in hindsight, what he couldn’t possibly have known then: His previous visit to this museum may have marked the high point of his entire life. The absolute pinnacle.
He aches for what he once was—“a master of the world,” as he puts it—and he weeps for what will never be again. The paintings especially. But also the sheer thrill of it. “Art has punished me,” he says.
Then he heads to the exit, through the gift shop, where the museum catalog is sold, with a photo of the ivory and a story of its theft. He has no cash—just to get here, he’d borrowed gas money from his mother—and out of habit he notes the positions of the cashier, the security guard, the customers. He checks to see if there are any security cameras. There aren’t. He picks up a copy of the catalog and walks discreetly out the door.
Just recently, in early February of 2019, Breitwieser was arrested yet again. French police had reportedly been suspicious for several years that Breitwieser had resumed stealing and searched his residence in northern France. There, French authorities allegedly discovered Roman coins and other objects that police say may have been taken from museums in France and Germany. Breitwieser is currently incarcerated, pending further investigation, and has yet to respond to these newest allegations.
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Brighton Police Chief Mark Henderson says officers, through forensic means, identified the individual believed to be responsible as Christopher Hodgman, 23, of Bethesda, Maryland.
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