Bhuvi's bowling a concern for SRH as they face RCB

The Sunrisers, over the years, have taken pride in their bowling unit and proved it by defending smaller totals. However, in the first two games, their bowling has been taken to the cleaners. The medium pacers, led by Bhuvneshwar Kumar, have been unable to rein in the rival batsmen and death bowling is now a matter of concern.

from The Times of India https://ift.tt/2JQ67ak

Jet Airways to pay pilots December salary

Jet Airways on Saturday told pilots and aircraft maintenance engineers (AME) that the remaining 87.5 per cent of December salary is being paid, while it awaits lenders to infuse the promised emergency funding to clear the remaining dues of January, February and March. Jet has, until now, paid 12.5 per cent of December salary to pilots, AMEs and senior management.

from The Times of India https://ift.tt/2CJ0vbU

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FBI and Justice Department to review Jussie Smollett's case, Trump says

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Joe Biden’s Campaign-in-Waiting Isn’t Ready for #MeToo Accusations

Politics abhors a vacuum, and Joe Biden has left one for months. So it’s getting filled without him—and not in a way that is likely to help if he decides to run for president.

Biden has teased and toyed with the idea, in public and in private. He’s talked about how close he is to getting in by percentages, slowly ratcheting it up. A few aides have gone further, saying he’s as certain as 95 percent, calling up donors and trying to nudge them into early commitments and spots on what would be his finance committee.  

But still, nothing. He says his family wants him to run. Some close supporters have been told in recent weeks that, after his aides had telegraphed that he’d wait until the first week or two of April to announce a decision so that he could slip just past the March 31 first-quarter fundraising deadline, now he might wait until after Easter. That’s April 21. Three more weeks. At least.

So, observers ask: Is there some scandal that he’s afraid will pop? Is he afraid to lose? Does he not really have the fire in the belly to do it? Is he demonstrating how his age and mentality might not be the right fit for either a presidential campaign or the presidency? All those questions are going around. One prominent elected official told me about simultaneously assuming that Biden’s about to make the leap based on the public reporting and still feeling completely confused by the apparent delays.

People who assume they’d work on a Biden campaign have been stuck wondering whether they will in fact be offered jobs, what those jobs might be, when they’d be expected to start, and how much they’d be paid, not knowing when or whether they’re going to have to uproot their lives.

It’s obvious now that the work they’re not doing is taking a toll.

Friday afternoon, New York magazine published a bombshell: a first-person account from Lucy Flores, who said that at an event in 2014, when she was running for lieutenant governor of Nevada, she felt Biden “get closer to me from behind. He leaned further in and inhaled my hair. I was mortified … He proceeded to plant a big slow kiss on the back of my head.”

Biden supporters were a mix of exasperated and expecting it. Biden has a long-established reputation for his touchy-feely ways. There are supercuts online of him at the ceremonial swearings-in of senators, rubbing shoulders, nuzzling, making comments to teenage girls about how they can’t date until they’re 30. Even if the behavior is not intended to be sexual, it can come off as creepy—especially in the context of the larger cultural shift under way in America—particularly to people who want it to come off creepy, and not, as one defender put it to me, as the actions of a man who is a “human golden retriever.”

That’s not an argument that the Biden campaign was making proactively, because there is no Biden campaign to make an argument proactively—even as everyone else in the race and every reporter covering the race treats him like it’s only a matter of time until everyone gets on the Amtrak to Delaware to see him declare.

The risks of Biden’s campaignlessness are evident in other ways, too. Friday morning, The New York Times ran a story pointing out Biden’s inconsistent record on abortion, and his public struggles earlier in his career to reconcile his Catholicism with being pro-choice. Biden, of course, hasn’t been talking much about his record on abortion rights because that would require campaigning, which he won’t do.

For all the hours he’s spent talking to allies about the polling data he has that shows a path for him right down the middle of the party and the country, Biden hasn’t spent the time doing the required diligence with many of the advocates and activists who want to hear from him. And that left the NARAL Pro-Choice America president Ilyse Hogue matter-of-factly telling the Times about his being sufficiently pro-choice, “I can’t tell you if he’s there or not,” because she hasn’t heard from him about running, or where he stands. On Wednesday night, in a speech in New York, he said “I wish I could have done something” to help Anita Hill, and was immediately mocked by many who pointed out that he was at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and had control of the hearings. For other stories about Biden’s record on the 1994 crime bill or his opposing school busing, the same general approach has applied. “Part of the issue here of only having an ongoing campaign-in-waiting is that there’s no infrastructure to adequately respond to a negative story. No political apparatus. No surrogates,” a sympathetic Democratic strategist told me on Saturday afternoon.

Here’s how an incident such as the Flores story might have played out, had there been a Biden campaign in place, in ways that are standard in presidential politics though rarely discussed publicly: Potentially even before the story ran but certainly as soon as it did, reporters covering the campaign closely would have heard from an aide, offering rebuttals and context. Maybe the aide would have pointed out that Flores was a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter in 2016, and a board member of his allied group Our Revolution until resigning last year, or that she spent Saturday morning in El Paso at the kickoff rally for Beto O’Rourke. Maybe the aide would have helped connect reporters with people who were also there that day at the Latino Victory Project event in Las Vegas, several of whom have been talking with one another since the story ran and questioning whether what Flores wrote could be true, because she was never alone with Biden, according to one of the people who’s been in the discussions.

(Flores knocked back both of these arguments when we texted on Saturday. “My piece does not say I was alone with him. It clearly says Eva [Longoria] was in front of me, Biden was behind me, as we were lined up and waiting to be called on stage. Of course no one says I was alone with him because I never was alone with him and I have never claimed to have been alone with him,” she said, adding, “I have also stated many times on the record that I am not supporting any candidate right now and I am listening and evaluating all the candidates just like everyone else. I’m allowed to go to a candidate rally.”)

Or maybe a Biden campaign would have fought the publication of the essay in the first place, arguing that it was obviously radioactive politically but impossible to fact-check. Or it might have pointed to pictures that exist online of Biden with his face in Longoria’s hair at that same event, and insisted that this was proof he is just a well-meaning nonstop nuzzler.

The response was a written statement after Flores’s piece ran. “Neither then, or in the years since, did he or his staff with him at the time have an inkling that Ms. Flores had been at any time uncomfortable, nor do they recall what she describes,” read the statement from the Biden spokesman Bill Russo. “But Vice President Biden believes that Ms. Flores has every right to share her own recollection and reflections, and that it is a change for better in our society that she has every opportunity to do so.”

Most importantly, if Biden were running already, he and his campaign would probably be on the campaign trail, talking about whatever they wanted to talk about, and taking up at least some of the attention and coverage for themselves. But Biden’s not in Iowa or New Hampshire or South Carolina this weekend. He’s out of the public eye entirely, and all the stories are out there, generating secondary and tertiary stories of their own.

Meanwhile, Biden has left the political world confused about why he’s hesitating. It’s now been two full weeks since he appeared at the state Democratic Party dinner in Delaware and seemed to let slip that he’d made up his mind—“I have the most progressive record of anybody running,” he said, to a standing ovation in response to what seemed like an announcement. “I didn’t mean it—of anybody who would run.”

There’s a sense of inevitability among Biden supporters about the Flores allegations, and other criticisms of his long record—but there’s also a sense that none of it measures up to the seriousness of what is facing the country, or shakes their conviction that he’d be by far the strongest candidate against Trump. But the other Democratic campaigns aren’t waiting for him to make up his mind to start piling on. “I believe Lucy Flores,” Elizabeth Warren said when asked in Iowa on Friday night. “And Joe Biden needs to give an answer.”

“Democratic voters are tuned in whether he’s ready or not,” said an operative on one of those other campaigns. “Waiting in the wings means others get to define the first act of his campaign and he doesn’t have the operation to prepare or fight back.” Russo, the Biden spokesman, didn’t get back to me when I asked about the downsides of not having an operation in place to respond, or whether this really is going to stretch on past Easter.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2JSNF0V

Agnès Varda’s Films Made the Invisible Visible

The Middle East’s Authoritarians Have Come for Conservationists

Amirhossein Khaleghi thought he knew danger. For much of the past 12 years, he had tracked Persian leopards and Asiatic cheetahs across the rugged splendor of Iran’s national parks. He would spend months at a time out in the bush, negotiating with sometimes hostile locals (such is his innate affability that he even persuaded notorious poachers to curtail their activities). He would spend months more setting up remote cameras to record the endangered beasts themselves.

It was in large part through Khaleghi and his colleagues’ fastidious and unglamorous work that these big cats, celebrated emblems of Iranian pride, still exist in the country at all. By persuading herders to sell their grazing rights, they’d had some success in carving out sustainable, livestock-free habitats.

But in January 2018, Khaleghi, a tall, sweet-natured man with a wild mane of hair, suddenly found himself in the sights of a significantly more fearsome foe.

Accused of espionage by Iran’s security services, he was thrown into the notorious Evin Prison outside Tehran along with eight other prominent conservationists. One of them, Kavous Seyed Emami, soon died in suspicious circumstances. Four others have since been charged with “sowing corruption on Earth,” which can carry the death penalty. As of early 2019, they all remain in prison, confronted with no evidence other than outlandish confessions that appear to have been extracted under torture. For Khaleghi, a restless outdoorsman who’s roamed practically every corner of his country, the confinement alone must be agonizing.

Across the Middle East and North Africa, environmentalists are coming under attack like never before. Conservation NGOs have been closed or so suffocated that they’re as good as dissolved. Activists and experts have been threatened into silence—or worse. A community that had until recently mostly escaped the fate of much of the region’s civil society has suddenly fallen afoul of the authorities. Its plight mirrors the difficulties faced by environmentalists worldwide. Globally, 197 environmental defenders were killed in 2017, according to the UN Environment Programme, a fivefold increase from a decade ago.

[Read: Environmentalism was once a social-justice movement]

There’s little mystery to why this is happening. Debilitating droughts, worsening pollution, and soaring temperatures have contributed to severe resource scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa in recent years. And as environment-related unrest has proliferated, with protests in at least a dozen regional countries, people who were previously viewed as largely harmless “tree huggers” have been reappraised as spy-gear-wielding, frontier-traipsing, data-sharing threats. In a sad repetition of the security-state playbook, they, too, must now be co-opted or crushed.

“The intelligence system now feels that environment is a space that they need to be afraid of, because it can unite a lot of opposition voices, a lot of anger,” Kaveh Madani, a senior fellow at Yale University and a visiting professor at Imperial College London, told me. Madani served as deputy head of Iran’s Department of Environment until he was arrested and then fled the country last spring. “Over the years, they’ve seen the problems increase and felt that things were getting out of control.”

[Read: How to talk about climate change so people will listen]

In some ways, environmentalism is almost calculated to stir paranoia. Much of the region’s security apparatus is wary of technology—including the generally low-tech gear that researchers use. Iraqi conservationists complain, for example, that binoculars arouse suspicion: “No one believes that these are for bird-watching,” Laith Al-Obeidi, an ornithologist at Nature Iraq, an NGO whose employees have frequently been harassed, told me. In Egypt, environmentalists have told me that possession of everything from telephoto camera lenses to GPS devices can be enough to spark aggressive questioning. With drones more or less prohibited for private use across the Middle East, environment groups say that some projects, such as tracking animal-migration patterns, are almost doomed to failure from the outset.

Authorities across the Middle East also take a dim view of those who spend time in distant, sparsely populated borderlands. That damns most wildlife experts. Sudan’s leading naturalist, Abubakr Mohammad, fled to Britain in November after being arrested for what he estimates to be the 15th time in a decade of documenting fast-disappearing flora and fauna. “I was always detained for being in, on my way, or coming from a remote area,” he says.

It was Khaleghi and most of his colleagues’ fieldwork in frontier areas, some of which contain sensitive military sites, that seemingly contributed to security suspicions. “Camera traps can be tricky to explain to border guards,” Khaleghi joked to me a few years ago, referring to the remotely activated gadgets that conservationists often use to capture images of elusive animals, such as Persian leopards. Their Iraqi counterparts have run into myriad problems, too. On several occasions, water-data collectors told me they have been questioned after almost straying across the Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iraq and Iran. In 2005, a Nature Iraq team was kidnapped for nine days by a militia in the southern Mesopotamian marshes; another recounted to me how it narrowly escaped a Turkish army pincer movement against the PKK militant group while tracking rare birds in far northern Iraq in 2009.

And then there’s the environmental community’s habit of asking an awful lot of questions, while sharing an awful lot of information with foreign and domestic partners. By the blunt, sometimes xenophobic, mind-set of many security officers in the region, data are to be guarded, not distributed. That environmental issues seldom respect national boundaries, and consequently necessitate cross-border collaboration, is none of their concern.

In Egypt, statistics on everything from groundwater levels to sea level rise are so closely guarded that sometimes not even state university professors can access them. It’s illegal, too, for nongovernmental bodies there to try to collect figures of their own without a permit. And though conservationists’ own work cannot cross borders, monitoring of them often does. Officials from countries including Egypt, Iran, and Turkey police international water and environment conferences for fear that their citizens might divulge what they believe to be sensitive findings, according to half a dozen regional researchers who told me they have been threatened into altering their presentations and sometimes observe security officers in the audience.

[Read: The victims of climate change are already here]

Still, until recently, conservationists in the Middle East had been mostly spared the worst—they just weren’t taken seriously. Even Comedy Central’s The Daily Show devoted a segment to ridiculing Iraqi bird-watchers. But the region’s accelerating environmental breakdown, along with heightened post–Arab Spring repression, have changed all that.

Fierce water-related protests that left at least 20 dead in Iran in late 2017 and early 2018 sharpened Tehran’s focus on environmental NGOs, while deadly demonstrations across southern Iraq last year, largely over poor water quality and electricity shortages, culminated in the murders of several activists, including one who’d been campaigning for cleaner water. As regimes lose patience with those they deem to be stymieing their economic agendas or subverting their will, the arrests and body counts have built up. Among the recent confirmed dead: an elderly Turkish couple campaigning against a mine and at least six anti-dam protesters in Sudan.

If and when Khaleghi and his colleagues are finally freed, they might have relatively little to return to. In their absence, much of Iran’s once-thriving environmental scene has fallen into a deep freeze. Vital organizations, such as the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, have been neutered, their key personnel jailed. Others have reined in their fieldwork or stopped collaborating with international research partners. Even though they worked for years with little to no pay, and endured war, sanctions, and extensive periods apart from their families, Khaleghi and his imprisoned counterparts will have a particularly difficult time stomaching this sabotage.

From Cairo to Ankara, authorities appear to have stifled environmental NGOs into compliant futility. Egypt is in talks to build the country’s first coal-fired power plant, but despite vociferous opposition when coal was first proposed, there’s now scarcely a whisper of dissent. “We’re no longer a critical mass. We’re scattered. We don’t speak with one voice,” Laila Iskander, a former minister of environment and onetime leader of the anti-coal campaign, told me.

Some environmentalists are nevertheless holding out hope—a distant hope, they concede—that their fortunes will ultimately change. The region has a talented crop of homegrown scientists; water and conservation experts have enjoyed considerable success on the occasions when they’ve been granted a freer hand. EcoPeace Middle East, an Israeli-Palestinian-Jordanian organization, has been instrumental in pushing policy makers to make concessions and cooperate for the sake of their shared environment, including successfully persuading all parties to extract less water from the depleted Jordan river.

Above all, they imagine that a lack of alternative options will eventually force authorities to change tack. With extensive drylands and meager water resources, the Middle East is likely to be hit exceptionally hard by climate change. The environmental movement might just be the motivated and unifying force many fractured regional states so desperately need.

“You can like the government or hate the government. You can be religious or not,” Madani, the Yale scientist, told me. But the environment, he said, “unites people. It’s different to other kinds of political activism.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FNtaPb

Freedom Am Won: A Linguistic Mystery

When I was a tot, my mother made me read Alex Haley’s Roots all the way through. Even though my linguist days were far ahead of me, I was struck by one sentence: At the end of the Revolutionary War, a slave exclaims, “Freedom am won!” That seemed an off rendition of black speech to me then, and I assumed that Haley had innocently concocted that am usage.

Yet Haley was hardly alone in putting into black mouths an overgeneralized usage of am beyond the first-person singular. The Alexander in Irving Berlin’s pop hit “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” who’s supposed to be a black man, sings, “That’s just the bestest band what am!” As late as the 1950s, the cartoon character Buzzy the Crow, rendered as an African American in the vein of the crows in Disney’s Dumbo, was given to saying things like, “That cat am a tobacco-smokin’ fiend!”

Overgeneralized am sounds so gratingly unnatural to a modern ear that even experts on Black English have long assumed that this usage was created by white minstrels. After all, minstrel dialogue was dripping with these clumsy ams; one routine included the query “You’se a man with a heap of intellectualities, am you not?” Zora Neale Hurston, who did extensive ethnographic study of poor rural black people and painstakingly reproduced their speech in her literary work, memorably wrote: “If we are to believe the majority of writers of Negro dialect and the burnt-cork artists, Negro speech is a weird thing, full of ‘ams’ and ‘Ises.’ Fortunately we don’t have to believe them. We may go directly to the Negro and let him speak for himself … Nowhere can be found the Negro who asks ‘am it?’”

But a great deal of evidence suggests that black Americans actually did use am in this way. The minstrels vastly exaggerated it, even as they savagely distorted black speech overall. However, amid this injustice lurks an example of how stereotype can be based in fact. Historical am usage also demonstrates something counterintuitive, given the racial conflict so deeply embedded in this nation’s history: a great many of the roots of Black English reach back to the speech of rural white folk in the British Isles.

In the 1930s and 1940s, thousands of ex-slaves were interviewed under the auspices of the Works Projects Administration. One of the oddest things about their narrations is that they are replete with overgeneralized am, or what a linguist might call invariant am. “And people says now dat Aunt Harriet am de bes’ cook in Madisonville,” says one slave, while another says, “Him am kind to everybody,” and another, “The truth am, I can’t ’member like I used to.” Reminiscent of Haley’s “Freedom am won!” one slave actually describes Emancipation Day with, “Then surrender am ’nounced and massa tells us we’s free.”

These and numerous other examples led one scholar, Jeutonne Brewer, to describe invariant am as black speech in a Ph.D. dissertation back in the 1970s. However, scholars studying the WPA interviews since have largely settled on a consensus that the ams were artificially inserted into these transcriptions by people expecting to hear am when the subjects were using standard forms of be such as is and are. That’s not an unreasonable argument. For one, in actual recordings, as opposed to transcriptions, none of the ex-slaves use invariant am. Then, also, one written transcription exists in two versions, one with the ams and one with the ams “corrected” to standard forms.

The case cannot realistically rest there, however. It may have been just a matter of chance that a mere 15 people did not use invariant am amid a corpus of thousands of other interviews. Plus, the person who “corrected” that one transcription, perhaps hearing the ams as unfamiliar, may have hastily assumed they were a mistake—when they were not. Was the mistake this one person’s, or was it that of legions of other interviewers and transcribers all writing am when they were hearing is and are? The latter seems implausible, especially given that is and are don’t sound much like am.

Besides, evidence exists beyond the slave interviews suggesting that invariant am was a real historical phenomenon. At the height of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay published a hit novel titled Home to Harlem, which lovingly depicts black migrants from the South adjusting to life in a northern metropolis. McKay’s unfiltered rendition of black speech often includes invariant am: “Oh, these here am different chippies, I tell you,” “How the brown-skin babies am humping it along!” and so on. If this usage was a mere minstrel distortion, would McKay have put it in the mouths of characters meant to be taken seriously as demonstrations of the full humanity of black people?

The question becomes more urgent in that McKay was hardly alone among black writers in showing black characters using invariant am. In Sutton Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio, a black mother describes her son: “His name am Belton Piedmont, arter his granddaddy.” Note the arter for after, an inheritance from rural Britain. If Griggs’s ear was keen enough to catch this unequivocal linguistic reality, then why would he suddenly slip in a minstrelism? Or why would the NAACP’s sober house organ, The Crisis, edited by W. E. B. Du Bois, publish a poem in 1912 that includes lines such as “When de earf it am a-quakin’ / An’ de dead dey am a-wakin’ / An’ de people am-a-shakin’ in de knees”?

Either am was a part of Black English, or sober-minded black writers couldn’t tell a stereotype from a fact. Adding to the former side of the ledger is that invariant am has been transcribed from the mouths not only of black Americans, but also of rural Brits, who in the plantation era taught African slaves much of their English. (I thank the linguists Juhani Klemola and Marianne Hundt for bringing this to my attention.) People from southwestern England, for example, as late as the 1950s said things such as “Because you’m a lot older than I.” And people in the West Midlands have been documented as saying, “We drink water when we am thirsty.” Such evidence suggests that invariant am must join the long list of things that sound “black” to the American ear but that actually emerged across the Atlantic, such as ain’t, the use of be in sentences like “We be showin’ it all the time,” and the use of it in sentences like “It’s somebody at the door.”

How, then, to explain opinions such as that of Hurston? One reading is that she did not mean to suggest that invariant am was pure invention, but objected to the distorted way that black people were often depicted in using it. People perhaps did not specifically use am in questions like the “am it?” she used as an example. Hurston also mentioned Ise. Ex-slaves indeed said “I’se,” but not things like “I’se isn’t” and “I’se don’t know ’zactly,” as the servant Hannibal does in the novel What Can She Do? by E. P. Roe. (Roe apparently thought of Ise as a pronoun itself rather than a contraction.) It may have been depictions like this that disturbed Hurston.

Invariant am, then, seems not to have been a fiction. Its documentation in the historical record is too rich and unequivocal for such a verdict to make sense, as peculiar as it sounds to the modern ear, and as ticklish as its association with minstrelsy can make us. Invariant am, so saliently different from standard usage, likely came to be as stigmatized in its day as aks for ask is today, and seems to have receded into extinction after the 1920s. But the evidence suggests that it was once a thriving part of the dialect’s grammar.

Invariant am is, in the grand scheme of things, a useful indication of Black English’s coherence and legitimacy as human speech. Before people spoke Modern English, they spoke Old and Middle English; before Modern Chinese, they spoke Old and Middle Chinese. Why would Black English remain static over hundreds of years, with only slang changing up from time to time? Rather, Black English has ever been in transformation, just as all living human languages have always been, to the point that speakers from very long ago would sound peculiar to us. Despite how odd I found Alex Haley’s “Freedom am won!” in 1977, Haley got the language of the era just right.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2UaAbCx

The Federal Government Gave Up on Retirement Security

Recently, the U.S. Treasury said that it is perfectly okay for companies to swindle employees out of their pension by offering one-time payments worth less than the pension that those employees are giving up. The Department of Labor, nominally responsible for protecting workers in retirement plans, said nothing. This isn’t the first time the government stood by as American businesses shifted risks onto their employees and retirees. Treasury and Labor, whose decisions shape the retirements of millions of people, have for years been letting companies offer a one-time payment instead of the lifetime pension they committed to.

The scandal is that the one-time payment doesn’t even have to be equal in value to the pension. It can be worth less—in fact, under rules passed by Congress and regulations issued by the Treasury, it usually is.

Lawyers for Treasury and Labor are famous for requiring voluminous disclosure of incomprehensible minutiae, yet neither department has ever required companies to mention their profit-taking at their employees’ expense. Employees, in theory, are free to figure this out on their own, but companies know that most will not.

How did this happen? Traditional employer-backed pensions that paid a lifetime income used to be the main form of retirement plan in the United States. In 1974, Congress enacted the Employee Retirement Income Security Act to preserve and protect these pensions. Responsibility for implementing ERISA was then split between Labor and Treasury. (The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, which I ran from 2010 to 2014, also has some duties.) The departments turned out to be so inflexible that employers decided to abandon traditional pensions. Companies quickly learned that rather than being on the hook financially and legally for paying a lifetime pension, they could switch and offer a 401(k) savings account that pays a lump sum. Having done that, employers also wanted to unload the pension obligations they had already taken on, so Treasury gave them the option of offering employees an up-front payment instead of a lifetime guarantee.

Most people who retire today get a lump sum from their retirement plan. They then have to guess how to invest it, how long they’ll live, and how much to spend.

Labor and Treasury aren’t much help. It’s not that their employees are insensitive, but retirement security is neither department’s main job. They have different laws to administer and different views about retirement security. Labor’s focus has been on regulating employers who sponsor benefit plans, not the financial-services firms that now actually dominate retirement. Treasury’s focus has been on interpreting and implementing a ridiculously complex tax code written increasingly by lobbyists. Both are afraid of offending the financial-services industry, so neither agency has ever required even a disclosure of how long your retirement might last as you spend it down. Most of the time, you’re on your own.

Occasionally, one department or the other will step in. In 2015, the Obama Treasury, feeling guilty about being an accomplice to the destruction of retirement security one lump sum at a time, decided to limit the scam: It said that companies couldn’t offer these buyouts once an employee had already started receiving pension payments. Sadly, Treasury continued to allow the buyouts for employees who hadn’t yet started retirement. The current Treasury Department apparently doesn’t even feel that modest pang of guilt. It went back to the old practice of allowing companies to shortchange both those who are already living on a pension and those who have yet to retire.

Treasury and Labor often spend more time arguing than working together. (Their congressional oversight committees don’t often see eye to eye either.) Where Treasury and Labor do collaborate, however, it is to make sure that no one else gets on their turf. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created in 2010 specifically to help defend the average American from risks hidden in fine print, but Treasury and Labor made sure that the new entity could not regulate any retirement products—easily the most complicated consumer financial products—unless both departments agreed in advance. Thus far, that hasn’t happened.

In Washington, D.C., protecting your “turf” can be more important than protecting citizens.

You might ask, Where are our elected officials? Well, they do make speeches about retirement security and they sometimes make proposals—though rarely ones that require anyone to actually do anything. Recently, for example, President Donald Trump issued a “retirement-security executive order.” It will allow financial-services companies new ways to collect and, for a fee, invest our money—in addition to the thousands of plans they already offer. Ironically, the “retirement security” comes from delaying retirement and continuing to work. That’s probably not what the authors of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act had in mind.

People looking for lifetime retirement income from their retirement plans will be out of luck. Fortunately, we still have two important national lifetime retirement-security programs: Social Security and Medicare—at least until they start running out of funds (in eight years for Medicare, 15 years for Social Security). Here, too, there is more rhetoric than action. President Trump just announced a budget that purports to make no changes to Social Security. In fact, it proposes $84 billion in cuts to Social Security’s disability programs, and does nothing to make sure that Social Security is fully funded. The last president to propose actually paying for Social Security, instead of cutting it, was Bill Clinton, two decades ago. (To their credit, Democrats in the current Congress have reintroduced legislation, the Social Security 2100 Act, that would fully fund Social Security for the remainder of this century. It has, however, not a single Republican co-sponsor.)

It doesn’t have to be this way. In plenty of other industrialized countries, individual workers are not forced to be their own accountants, actuaries, and pension-fund managers. If Americans insisted on genuine security when they retire, our president and Congress could deliver it.

In the next two years, politicians will ask for our votes for president, Senate, and the House of Representatives. Ask them what they will do—concretely—to make our retirement plans, our Social Security, and our Medicare more secure. Maybe if we threaten their retirement, they’ll finally do something to protect ours.  

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FCJVes

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The ‘Caliphate’ Is Gone. Where’s the ‘Caliph’?

As the last shred of Islamic State territory in Syria fell to Kurdish-backed forces this month, thousands of people, including fighters, fled the enclave or surrendered. Yet when the exodus was over and the “caliphate” was extinguished, a mystery lingered: Where was the “caliph”?

“We don’t know where he is,” James Jeffrey, the U.S. special envoy to the global coalition to defeat ISIS, told reporters on Monday. Asked whether finding him was a priority, Jeffrey responded: “Finding the top leadership of ISIS or other terrorist groups is always a priority.”

In the four and a half years since Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi indulged in a rare public appearance, in Mosul, to declare a caliphate—the last part of that period spent with a $25 million U.S. bounty on his head—the titular chief of the Islamic State has eluded capture. He has more than once been rumored dead or incapacitated, only to be reported at large later. A voice that experts believed to be his appeared on a recording last summer, urging followers to wage attacks independently, and he hasn’t been heard from publicly since.

[Read: All ISIS has left is money. Lots of it. ]

So does getting Baghdadi matter? A spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition to defeat ISIS said two years ago that Baghdadi had been “irrelevant for a long time,” as the Associated Press pointed out. A coalition spokesman wrote to me in an email this week, “What's important to note is that his presence or absence within Daesh [ISIS] has no bearing on their current status.”

The U.S. spent nearly a decade hunting for the al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. A U.S. Navy SEAL team killed him in the spring of 2011, and President Barack Obama declared that his death marked “the most significant achievement to date in our nation’s efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.“ Even so, he said: “There’s no doubt that al-Qaeda will continue to pursue attacks against us.” The experience teaches that Baghdadi’s apprehension could take a while—and that his group can survive it.

Historically, four main factors have helped determine whether and when removing a leader—referred to as “decapitation”—has worked to end a group, explains Audrey Kurth Cronin, the author of How Terrorism Ends. “They’ve been hierarchically structured. They’ve been characterized by a personality. They’ve been on average younger than other groups. And they’ve lacked a viable successor,” she told me. The approach largely worked, for example, in the cases of Peru’s Shining Path, Japan’s Aum Shinrikyo, and Italy’s Red Brigades. “There are lots of cases where groups did end with the decapitation of a leader, but at least in the broad historical picture, it happens more often when you’re able to capture a leader and then undermine his legitimacy—very, very difficult when it comes to Islamist groups, because the question of where exactly to put someone in prison is extremely vexed.”

Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and affiliated groups have proved more complicated.

In bin Laden’s case, “he was always on the radar, always part of the effort” against al-Qaeda, Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst involved in tracking al-Qaeda, told me. Documents recovered from his compound following his death show that, even in hiding, he continued to give direction and advice to the group. By the time he died, however, the group had evolved and spread to numerous countries, and it proved resilient after that symbolic blow.

[Graeme Wood: Don’t strip ISIS fighters of citizenship.]

So resilient, in fact, that its leadership in Iraq—which had declared allegiance to bin Laden in 2004 but always charted somewhat of an independent path—laid the foundation for what would become ISIS. Al-Qaeda in Iraq survived the death of its own leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, in 2006, ultimately morphing and reconstituting itself years later as the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, under Baghdadi’s leadership.

During the Obama administration, the U.S. pursued a strategy of targeting operational ranks of ISIS leadership while it pursued Baghdadi himself. In January 2018, the Iraqi counterterrorism analyst Hisham al-Hashimi told The Guardian that Baghdadi was the last of the group’s 43 main leaders still standing, and that mid-level commanders had to keep changing positions as their cohorts kept getting killed.

That effort itself has likely limited Baghdadi’s effectiveness as a leader. Staying underground, scampering between safe houses, and avoiding the use of communications equipment makes it difficult to organize and inspire. In a group notorious for its exploitation of modern communication methods, Baghdadi reportedly has had limited access to them, for fear of giving his location away, and reportedly nearly did so several times. Yet one of the Islamic State’s key attributes has been its commitment to “leaderless jihad”—in essence, the tactic of allowing loosely connected followers to wage attacks independently of one another. Adherents could, and did, wage attacks in Baghdadi’s name without ever hearing much of what he had to say.

ISIS never pulled off anything even close to the scale of the 9/11 attacks, masterminded by bin Laden, on U.S. soil. That trauma has completely reshaped how America behaves in the world. Despite serious violence in the United States and especially Europe, either inspired by or directed by ISIS, the group has inflicted most of its carnage and horror in Iraq and Syria. The revenge- and justice-driven rationale for finding and punishing Baghdadi in particular is not as strong as it was in the bin Laden case.

[Simon Cottee: What the media won’t tell you about ISIS.]

That doesn’t mean finding Baghdadi isn’t worthwhile, just that it shouldn’t necessarily be the top priority of the fight that follows the fall of the caliphate. Indeed, U.S. officials have indicated that finding him is just one of many priorities. And as Bakos pointed out, the public doesn’t really have a good sense of what role he plays; consequently, it also doesn’t really have a good sense of what would happen to ISIS after his death. But Bakos cautioned: “These organizations learn how to function, and it’s not always in public view … [Baghdadi] still has a vision and a strategy, and he’s pushing that covertly. That’s a big deal.”

Capturing or killing Baghdadi could prove counterproductive in the long run—for instance, if he is subject to a revenge killing that looks illegitimate to a large number of his followers, or if his death itself enhances his prestige as a martyr. A pure revenge killing may just spur revenge-seeking on the other side. “I’m not saying that just capturing the leader is going to be the answer—it’s capturing the leader and ensuring that the rule of law and the basic institutions of governance prevail,” Kurth Cronin said.

Regardless, said Bakos: “You don’t focus just on one person who’s popular, and the symbolic head [of a terrorist group]. From the perspective of Baghdadi now, the bigger question is: Who’s calling the shots from an operations perspective? If it’s him, then he’s worth resources. If it’s not, then you focus where you need to.” U.S. officials acknowledge this, despite the declaration of the end of the caliphate, and the policy to withdraw most U.S. troops from Syria. James Rawlinson, a coalition spokesman, wrote in an email that ISIS is “actively transitioning to a [resurgent] network of sleeper cells in order to continue to aspire to a caliphate and threaten civilians throughout the region and the world.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2uAb5Oc

Photos of the Week: Stasi Museum, Pink Lake, Swamp Creature

A volcanic eruption in Mexico, a drifting cruise ship off Norway’s coast, a skyscraper fire in Bangladesh, “Mausoleum of the Giants” in England, the end of the ISIS “caliphate” in Syria, severe flooding in Mozambique, a festival along the Salton Sea, another crippling blackout in Venezuela, severe flooding in Nebraska, a slimy Chris Pratt in Los Angeles, a Trump rally in Michigan, and much more

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2YzrCja

Not Quite Triplets, Not Just Siblings

Five weeks ago, a 20-year-old named Arifa Sultana delivered a baby in a hospital in southwestern Bangladesh. As the BBC has reported, Sultana had received limited prenatal care in her rural village, but she had no problems during delivery and returned home with her husband and infant son. Less than a month later, on March 21, Sultana was rushed to another hospital with stomach pain and another burst of amniotic fluid. When doctors examined her, they realized she was in labor—this time with twins.

Sultana, it turns out, has two uteruses. In one, she’d been carrying her first son, and in the other, a second baby boy and a baby girl, each with their own amniotic sac. It was a rare type of pregnancy that begins in a way similar to the conception of any other fraternal triplets: three embryos, conceived within the same ovulation cycle (if not at the same time), gestating simultaneously. Which uterus each baby ends up in is as random as which mature egg a sperm cell happens to go for.

The story of how a woman can carry three babies in two separate uteruses begins when the mother is inside her own mother’s uterus. In little female embryos, the reproductive tract begins as two thin tubes called müllerian ducts, the tops of which eventually become the fallopian tubes. Over time, the bottom of each tube grows wider, like an inflating balloon animal. Once they swell to meet in the middle, the puffed-up sections of the ducts fuse to become the top of the vagina, the cervix, and the uterus, leaving the still-narrow fallopian tubes dangling off each side.

[Read: The high-tech future of the uterus]

In most women, this fusion occurs without a hitch. But in somewhere between 0.5 and 4 percent of the population, the walls of the müllerian ducts never really melt away into the surrounding tissue. A failed or incomplete fusion results in one of a few different anomalies. Some can be so minor that they’re never diagnosed: Plenty of women give birth from a uterus that has a small barrier protruding in from the top or a uterus that forks into two. But one of the less common müllerian abnormalities comes up again and again as a viral medical oddity. Women with a condition known as uterine didelphys don’t just have a misshapen uterus: They have two completely separate uteruses, cervixes, and sometimes even two parallel vaginas, with one ovary on each side.

Some cases of didelphys can cause issues such as menstrual blockage during adolescence, but the condition often remains a secret until a woman’s first pregnancy. Sultana reportedly wasn’t told about her didelphys until her second delivery. The doctor who delivered the young mother’s twins told the BBC that she was shocked to see the babies on Sultana’s ultrasound, and chose to deliver them via C-section for safety. In the United States, ob-gyns rely heavily on tools such as ultrasound technology to monitor pregnancies, keeping an eye out for risk factors such as didelphys so that they can plan ahead for any unique challenges expected during pregnancy and delivery. In Bangladesh, rural areas often lack access to diagnostic technologies, and the neonatal mortality rate is more than four times that of the United States. Pregnancy complications that are easily manageable elsewhere can be much more serious there.

Sultana’s story is remarkable because she faced the hazards of her rare condition without serious complication. For one, there’s that risk of miscarriage, says Beth Rackow, an assistant professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Columbia University’s Irving Medical Center. “Each uterus is more like half a uterus, not full-size. So we worry about space constraints, we worry about blood supply, and we worry about the placentas working as well.” Even if a pregnant woman with didelphys is only carrying one child, the resources her body provides to that smaller uterus can fall short of what a growing fetus needs.

Carrying more than one child at a time comes with its own set of risks. Deborah Levine, a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School, says that Sultana is “incredibly lucky” to have given birth to three healthy triplets, with only one preterm birth. Twin pregnancies in didelphic uteruses aren’t unheard of—journals seem to publish one or two case studies a year similar to Sultana’s, often from less developed countries. But safely carrying triplets in two uteruses is that much more unlikely. “Usually, twins deliver early and triplets deliver even earlier,” Levine says, which poses a risk to the infants that hospitals like to be prepared for ahead of time. “Somebody once said that if ultrasounds did nothing besides diagnose twins, it would be worth it, because of the extra care they need.”

[Read: The twins that are neither identical nor fraternal ]

Both Rackow and Levine were astonished that Sultana was able to deliver her first child and walk out of the hospital without anyone realizing that she was still pregnant. Though didelphys isn’t always noticeable during delivery or pelvic exams—barring menstrual complications, it can go undetected well past adolescence—it’s difficult to imagine why hospital staff might not be able to feel or see that someone was carrying around two nearly full-term babies, no matter where she was keeping them. (Members of the OB-GYN department at Khulna Medical College, where Sultana delivered her first baby, did not respond to requests for comment.)

Even with all of the risks Sultana and her triplets were fortunate enough to elude, there’s one key mystery in this case that, above all else, defies explanation, Rackow says—and it’s all about hormones. When a woman goes into labor, the brain’s hormone mission-control center sends a deluge of important chemicals coursing throughout the body to help move along the physically intensive process. The uterus in particular gets hit with wave after wave of oxytocin, which tells the muscles to push and push for all they’re worth. When that message comes in, there’s really no good way around it: Babies come when they come.

In the case of didelphys, says Rackow, there’s no reason the oxytocin produced during and after labor should be able to signal to one uterus but not the other. “The brain doesn’t know whether there’s one uterus or two,” she says. “And the uterine tissue just knows to react to that.” Labor in one uterus should absolutely trigger simultaneous labor in the other, she says. “It totally doesn’t make sense physiologically. In my wildest dreams I really can’t imagine what the explanation could be.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2CJhIlr

Veep’s Final Season Ponders a Horrifying Thought

This article contains minor plot details for the first three episodes of Veep, Season 7.

It’s no spoiler to say that the once and possibly future President Selina Meyer (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) finds herself in a colossally embarrassing situation early in the seventh season of Veep. Her life is generally a parade of mortification and mishaps, interrupted by moments of power-grabbing glory that are almost always brought on by accident (who can forget those immortal words: reform, reaffirm … repel!). But this particular low point—at an Aspen ideas festival (not that one) held by a record exec turned political kingmaker (not that one)—is, well, particularly low. “That was the most humiliating experience of my entire life,” she spits afterward, “and I have been vice president!” To the frenemy who caused her screwup through a wild feat of manipulation, she asks this: “What are you, some sort of sociopath?”

Some sort of sociopath—it’s a line she delivers with even more venom than usually accompanies her insults. It’s, in a way, more withering than her reference to a campaign worker as “Frigid von Pole-up-her-ass,” or a rival politician as a “triracial twat,” or her pregnant chief of staff, Amy, as “that Fatty McFatty.” Who is she to call anyone a sociopath anyway? In Season 7, she treats a mass shooting as good news because it distracts from her latest failure. She shows utter disinterest in her baby grandson except when using him as a PR prop. This is a woman who appears to be without a conscience.

And Veep has, always, been chock-full of other apparent sociopaths—which is what makes the show’s resemblance to America’s actual political reality so troubling. For the HBO comedy’s exceptionally devilish final season, Selina enters a presidential primary that looks a lot like the nascent 2020 Democratic race: a logarithmically expanding field of candidates, a simmering generational feud over identity politics, and even hints that candidates might declare a running mate before winning the nomination. A shiver that might be called “anticipatory déjà vu” comes from watching Selina glad-hand at Iowa county fairs and trade jabs on a crowded debate stage just as Kamala, Bernie, et al. are gearing up for the same. At this point in the show’s run and our democracy’s wobbles, Veep doesn’t simply evoke real life. Real life inevitably evokes Veep.

One can only hope that real-life players are a smidgen less horrible than Veep’s are, but again, certain resemblances are uncanny. Jonah Ryan, the moronic intern turned presidential candidate, proves a font of hateful jokes that culminates in the mocking imitation of intellectually disabled people. Ben, the veteran campaign manager, says that if Selina’s bid fizzles, he has a gig lined up getting a neo-Nazi elected in Sweden. Dan, the slickest hack in Washington, has no compunction about pressuring Amy to get an abortion. More than ever, the show’s quest for laughs overlaps with a quest for offense; it sometimes seems like the show’s ticking through a list of sensitive topics to riff on. If you’re wondering whether it’s okay to laugh, that’s probably healthy—and another way in which the show evokes the queasiness of simply watching the news these days.

The yet creepier implication of the three Season 7 episodes I’ve seen, though, is that these characters are not completely without humanity. Rather, they’ve been repressing it, and cracks are starting to show. You see this in Amy, who toys with the idea—preposterous to everyone around her—of keeping her baby. You see it when Dan, rebuffed in his attempts to seduce a power broker, wonders whether there’s more to life than sex. You see it in the psychodrama between Selina and her former running mate Tom James, who relentlessly betray each other but—in brief flashes—seem to wish they could just settle down together. What if they weren’t always doomed to be awful people? What if politics did this to them? What if it could do the same to you?

More than anything else, the sense of moral vertigo comes through in Louis-Dreyfus’s performance. After Season 6’s depressive spiral—Selina tried and failed to conceive of a life after politics—the return to the campaign trail means a return to Louis-Dreyfus’s greatest mode: eager bullshitting. She flicks from cruel to chipper in a millisecond; she marbles her smiles with sneers. But it’s a blank, tight-lipped panic that greets each reminder of mortality or hints that her horribleness might have consequences—both of which seem to be mounting in quantity. There’s an investigation into the Meyer fund; there’s her own eventual state funeral to plan; there are reminders of the random acts of violence that mark America, and hints that the Secret Service isn’t totally awake. Comeuppance must lie in wait. Or at least, as with Tony Soprano at the end of his run, her punishment might simply be that she’s left fearing so.

Which is not to say she and her team are experiencing reckonings of the soul—not yet. But the characters are, like the show itself, being forced to consider the notion of an end point. Selina ran for president and lost, then gained the presidency by a fluke, then ran for reelection and lost, and now is trying to regain the office. If she fails—and it seems perfectly likely that she will, given that, say, her campaign staff mixes up the Iowa cities of Cedar Rapids and Cedar Falls—what then? When this series closes for good, the most fitting feeling will not be one of culmination or climax. It’ll be one of free fall into a void.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2V36y2j

The Subversive Thrills of Hanna

The title character in Hanna, played by Esme Creed-Miles in Amazon’s eight-part series, is part cartoon character, part horror-movie wraith. All vast, dark eyes and heavy black hair obscuring her face, Hanna speaks softly and blinks infrequently. In the show’s first scene, she’s just a baby, stolen from a sinister facility and hidden by her father (played by Joel Kinnaman) deep in the snowy Romanian woods. But any fairy-tale allusions are dispelled the first time the 15-year-old Hanna appears, fixing her gaze on an adorable baby deer. Within a fraction of a second, she’s pulled her gun and blown its head off.

Hanna is drawn from the 2011 movie of the same name, expanded by the same writer (The Night Manager’s David Farr), and its first few episodes are taken almost beat by beat from the same story. Erik, Hanna’s father, has raised her entirely alone, replacing the fundamentals of childhood education with a more specific program. He’s trained her to fight, run, shoot, and maim anyone who threatens her; to speak multiple languages; to never go farther in the woods than the trees painted with red lines; and to pretend to be a normal teenage girl (this part involves naming your favorite Beatles songs and pretending to have seen The Godfather). Human beings, he tells her, are “dangerous and not to be trusted.” The same people who killed her mother want to kill her, too, and if they find her, they will.

But because Hanna is a teenage girl, she disobeys him, leaving the sanctioned area of the woods, talking to a boy, and drawing the entire might of a clandestine CIA army right to her. Hanna and her father are separated, and it quickly becomes clear once Hanna’s in official custody that she’s even stranger and more powerful than she seems.

[Read: “The Hunger Games” crosses child warfare with class warfare]

Joe Wright, the director of the 2011 Hanna, leaned heavily on the mythology of the story—of children enduring rites of passage on their path toward adulthood. The movie was a zippy, gory, exhilarating action parable, as Hanna shattered bones and slashed throats to the beat of a thumping score by the Chemical Brothers. The series, by contrast, uses songs by Karen O and her band, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and the difference in aesthetics speaks volumes. With many more hours at his disposal, Farr seems to want to go deeper under Hanna’s skin, exploring the loneliness and the poignancy of a motherless girl who will always feel like an alien. “You’re unique,” the CIA dark-ops agent Marissa Wiegler (Mireille Enos) tells Hanna in one episode. “Unique just means alone,” Hanna replies.

The only problem with this approach is that there are action thrillers and there are heartfelt coming-of-age dramas and there are “special girl” mysteries (Stranger Things being the most recent), but pulling off all three at once is exceedingly challenging. Expanded into almost eight hours of television, Hanna also suffers from the streaming-show curse of having a gripping beginning, a propulsive conclusion, and a saggy pile of nothing in between. In its opening episode, as Hanna sweats through push-ups in the snow and shins up vast pine trees and runs up jagged mountains with rocks in her backpack, the scene feels like a gratifying twist on every training montage in every underdog movie. Creed-Miles, grunting and grimacing, makes you feel every strain, every splinter. A few episodes later, when Hanna’s somehow embedded with a family in England and is hiding in a camper van while a middle-aged man cries about his marriage, the energy has rather left the building.

What makes Hanna worth sticking through is the performances from its three principals. Creed-Miles, the daughter of the ferociously talented actor Samantha Morton, is riveting in an otherworldly way as Hanna, imbuing the character with emotional vulnerability and physical power. Even more striking is how she communicates Hanna’s intelligence, how fleet and observant and hyperalert she is. Her chemistry with Kinnaman reverberates through the screen, lifting every scene in which they’re together. However angry Hanna is with him, however frustrated, it’s obvious that she trusts him implicitly, and no one else.

Kinnaman, too, is conspicuously good as Erik, leaping through his action scenes with balletic efficiency but bringing poignancy and sadness to Erik as a father. Enos is fascinating to watch as Marissa, changing her voice to fit her various roles at work and at home, and stretching her face into a wide, joyless smile that always portends danger. Marissa could easily feel ripped out of a Jason Bourne movie, but in Enos’s hands, she’s much more complicated and interesting than the one-note, deep-state baddies of yore.

In the scenes when all three are engaged, stalking through European cities, joyriding helicopters, and shooting out genteel outdoor cafés, Hanna feels explosively good, the rare intelligent action thriller that subverts storytelling tropes and surfs on its own ingenuity. (As with Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Hunger Games franchise, there’s still something entirely satisfying about watching a teenage girl possessed with such improbable power.) In other scenes, that ingenuity gets lost in a mood board of decorative visuals (light dappling through fabric, leaves dancing in the wind) that bloats the series’ running time and hobbles its pace, especially given that the central mystery is easy to decipher. But when the show lets Hanna loose, it’s undeniably something to see.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2I0YmM3

Readers Remember W. S. Merwin

In Memory of W. S. Merwin

On March 15, W. S. Merwin—the Pulitzer Prize–winning former U.S. poet laureate—died at the age of 91. On TheAtlantic.com, Annika Neklason and Walt Hunter wrote about the impact of Merwin’s words. Neklason focused on Merwin’s poems that were published in The Atlantic. Many of his early poems in the magazine, she wrote, are “weighted with melancholy expectations of a premature ending,” but his “body of work remains, after his death, as its own hopeful continuation.” For Hunter, “the very power of Merwin’s poetry is that it passes on its power to its readers, in the same way that it amplifies the voices of the dead and silent.”

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Not sure why I’m writing, except to second the sadness we all feel at the passing of W. S. Merwin. I won’t quote any of his poetry, but simply say that in the late ’70s when I used to sit Zen with him at Roshi Aitken’s Diamond Sangha Maui Zendo meditation center, and whenever I would house sit for him when he traveled, which I did a number of times, I always encountered a quiet, unassuming, gentle observer of his world and the people in it. His writing inspired me to continue writing poetry as well, mostly for my own sanity.

Neklason’s piece captures the man I knew a little in daily life, and more so through the poetry he willed into the world. I am grateful to even carry the memory of brief contact, and the distant experience of those same stars.

Eliot Kaplan
Seattle, Wash.

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In my first years teaching at the University of Hawaii, I somehow pried money from deans for a program to bring writers to read their work and meet with students. They became long-term friends and mentors: Robert Bly, John Logan, Gary Snyder, Galway Kinnell, and Bill (later William) Merwin, who came twice. The second time, he stayed for a time at my cottage in the mountains above Honolulu, on a ridge called Mount Tantalus, often joined by student editors of the journal I’d founded to give voice to local writers and celebrate Hawaiian culture, Hawaii Review.

Merwin was not simply a guest. He was always doing something: showing a French way of making scrambled eggs, keeping a health regimen with headstands against the wall. With visitors, we read our poems in the evenings. His poems were typed on onionskin, a savings of some measure of paper, lifted somewhere in the air, like his poems. We met on occasion over the years, as at the University of Iowa, where I was a visiting professor. With the poets I’ve named above, he was part of a generation whose influence was unparalleled since Pound and Eliot; they contributed to the counterculture, brought spirituality and ecology into public dialogue, and contributed to healthy changes in the direction of our culture—desperately needed again. Hunter’s article is an important celebration.

Peter Nelson
Altadena, Calif.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FLcXtS

A DNA Company Wants You to Help Catch Criminals

Give us your DNA. Help catch a criminal. That’s the message of a recent ad from the genetic-testing company Family Tree DNA. The video stars Ed Smart, whose daughter Elizabeth Smart was abducted at age 14, exhorting viewers to upload their DNA profiles to the company’s website.

Not so long ago, DNA-testing companies were known only for their promise to unlock medical secrets or trace family histories. What’s changed is the arrest of the alleged Golden State Killer. Since police tracked down a suspect in the notorious case by uploading crime-scene DNA and finding distant relatives on a genealogy website, the same technique has led to dozens more arrests for rapes and murders. Forensic genealogy has become, if not exactly routine, very much normalized.

The Ed Smart ad is, implicitly, an argument that consumer DNA databases should be used for law enforcement. Family Tree DNA came under fire in January when BuzzFeed News revealed that the company had been quietly working with the FBI. Family Tree DNA sells at-home DNA test kits, but it also allows people to upload genetic profiles from competitors such as 23andMe and AncestryDNA to its website. In late 2018, the company’s CEO later told Forensic Magazine, it discovered that the FBI was trying to upload genetic profiles from crime scenes. Rather than fighting the FBI, Family Tree DNA changed its terms of service to allow law-enforcement use in cases of “violent crimes”—without notifying its customers, until BuzzFeed News started asking.

Genealogists were shocked that Family Tree DNA would keep this secret. (Investigators in the Golden State Killer case and others had used the same methods with another genealogy database, called GEDmatch, which became aware of their involvement at the same time as the public.) But on the underlying question of law enforcement using genealogy databases at all, genealogists have had fewer qualms. A poll of 639 genealogists by Maurice Gleeson last year found that 85 percent were “reasonably comfortable” with law enforcement using GEDmatch to identify serial rapists and killers. And in October, bioethicists at Baylor College of Medicine published the results of a more generalized survey: Of the 1,587 respondents, 91 percent supported forensic genealogy for violent crimes, and 46 percent for nonviolent crimes.

[Read: ]The false promise of DNA testing

So instead of backing off, Family Tree DNA appears to have leaned into the controversy. (The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) While other major players in DNA testing, such as 23andMe, AncestryDNA, and MyHeritage, have resisted law enforcement, Family Tree DNA now allows investigators to upload the suspect’s DNA profiles to find potential relatives. Their access to full DNA profiles of everyone in the database is restricted, though, and customers can opt out of law-enforcement matching. Forensic Magazine reports that less than 1 percent of U.S. customers chose to opt out after one week. GEDmatch did not see an exodus of users after the Golden State Killer case either.

Americans, it seems, are not that concerned about sending a relative to prison. In most cases, the suspect’s DNA profile will match only distant relatives, such as second or third or fourth cousins, who might not even know each other. (A distant-relative match, in combination with social media and public records, can be enough to ultimately ID the suspect.) A woman in Washington State recently found out her DNA on GEDmatch had led to the arrest of her second cousin twice removed for murder in Iowa. Before she shared her DNA, her brother had worried about getting a family member arrested. But now, she told The Gazette of Cedar Rapids, “I feel OK about it … I want someone to have to do time if [he/she] did something like that. I don’t regret it now.” She had never met and did not know the man arrested.

Christi Guerrini, an ethicist at Baylor who co-authored the October survey, told me she had been surprised to see such high support for law-enforcement use of genetic genealogy. The survey is prefaced by a description of the Golden State Killer, and she acknowledged that mentioning such a “notorious” case could bias respondents.

On the other hand, that is exactly how the American public as a whole was introduced to forensic genealogy. Genealogists told me they feared a public backlash to other possible test cases—such as identifying a baby abandoned by his mother. Arresting a suspected serial killer who murdered at least 13 people and raped at least 50 made the technique a much easier sell.

[Read: ]How a tiny website became the police’s go-to genealogy database

Erin Murphy, a law professor at NYU, says it’s common to see new, potentially controversial forensic techniques tested in cases that will bring out the most public sympathy. She points to the example of law enforcement building their own DNA databases in the 1990s, which have expanded considerably in scope since then. “DNA databases did not start with collecting DNA from people at traffic stops,” she says. “They started with collecting DNA from repeat sexual offenders and people convicted of serious crimes.” Now some local police departments are using “stop and spit” to build largely unregulated DNA databases.

The victims in the cases solved by genetic genealogy are often very young, often female, and often white. There are practical reasons for this: The victims of rapists who left behind their DNA are likely to be women. The people in genealogy databases are disproportionately white. And the forensic genealogy work can run thousands of dollars, so law enforcement is submitting cases deemed the highest priority. This means that law-enforcement use of genealogy is being sold to us with the victims who arouse the most attention in the media and among the public.

That’s true of the victims of the Golden State Killer, who terrorized California suburbs. It’s also true of Elizabeth Smart, whose blond-haired, blue-eyed face was all over the news before and after she was found in 2003. These are the cases, perhaps, easiest for Americans to get behind—even if it means giving up a measure of privacy.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2FM0juB

The Indefatigable Spirit of Agnès Varda

Agnès Varda was a peerless giant of French cinema. Her diminutive stature and impish personality could belie the breadth of her influence, but there’s no ignoring the sheer artistry of the movies she made over the past six decades, spanning entire movements in film history that she helped pioneer. Varda died Thursday night at the age of 90 after a short battle with cancer; just this year, she had premiered a new work at the Berlin International Film Festival. A woman who began her directing career when the idea of women directing was still practically unheard of, Varda made challenging art through every phase of her life.

“I am still alive; I am still curious. I should not be treated like an old piece of rotting flesh!” she said last year, remarking on a career resurgence of sorts that came with her documentary Faces Places, which snagged her an Oscar nod in 2018 (she was the oldest person ever nominated). Varda first emerged in 1955 with the film La Pointe Courte, a slice-of-life drama about an unhappy couple working in a small French fishing town and reconsidering their relationship. It’s widely considered to be the first entry in the French New Wave, a cinematic movement that upended the medium—even though the movie was released years before the term was invented.

Varda favored a documentary-like style for her fiction films. She often used nonprofessional actors, evocative still images (thanks to her origins as a photographer), and plots that feel a little aimless before building to something more pointed or devastating. Her second feature, 1962’s Cléo From 5 to 7, is a 90-minute jaunt following a mundane day in the life of a woman awaiting pivotal news from a doctor. It’s told practically in real time, following her from café to café as she chats with friends, ponders her fate, and ignores the darker political news spilling out of the radio. It’s a masterpiece of existentialism that creeps up on the viewer, matching Varda’s realistic style with her intellectual heft.

Cléo From 5 to 7 was part of the “Left Bank” movement in French cinema, an offshoot of the New Wave that was more politically driven. Unlike the movie-obsessed Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Claude Chabrol, Varda and her contemporaries (including Jacques Demy, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker) were less referential and more focused on the experimental limits of cinema. Varda saw herself as merging the literary arts and cinema, calling her approach “cinécriture,” or “writing on film,” combining her backgrounds as a writer and photographer.

Through the decades, Varda sometimes struggled to attract the same attention as some of the New Wave’s biggest names, but she worked consistently, producing gems such as Le Bonheur (1965); One Sings, the Other Doesn’t (1977); and Vagabond (1985), a collaboration with the actor Sandrine Bonnaire that is one of the director’s most overtly feminist works. Varda’s interest in documentary filmmaking persisted. In the 1960s, she produced two short works on the arrest of Huey P. Newton (Black Panthers and Huey), and arguably her finest achievement is the free-form 2000 documentary feature The Gleaners and I, in which Varda herself plays a prominent role.

Faces Places arrived nine years after Varda’s 2008 documentary, The Beaches of Agnès, which seemed like it could have been the director’s final, elegiac work. But she kept on filming through her 80s, and the success of Faces Places likely opened her oeuvre up to another, younger generation. She was given an honorary Academy Award in 2018, the same year she was nominated for Faces Places. But rather than taking that honor as her cue to retire, she set to work on Varda by Agnès, which premiered at Berlin in 2019 and will now stand as her actual cinematic farewell.

“I was out of the world of cinema and I didn’t know anybody around and I don’t even see film. So out of the blue, I invented the film,” Varda said in a 2017 interview, reflecting on the creation of La Pointe Courte. “The New Wave is everywhere now, thank God. In every country, new filmmakers have the field. … We need people who don’t make film as a business. That’s what we have in common cause—we have tried to achieve something.”

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2uBPbty

The Books Briefing: As the Good Book Says

The Steele Dossier Set the Stage for a Mueller Letdown

The seeds of the disappointment that many adversaries of Donald Trump felt this week, when Attorney General William Barr published his summary of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, were sown in January 2017, with the publication of what would become known as the Steele dossier.

Less than two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, CNN reported on the existence of a memo summarizing intelligence reports about Trump and Russia, compiled by a former British-intelligence operative named Christopher Steele for the research firm Fusion GPS. And a few hours later, BuzzFeed published the document, a collection of unverified intelligence that ran the gamut from troubling to salacious, in full.

The BuzzFeed editor in chief Ben Smith told me Thursday that he doesn’t regret the decision to publish it in the first place—and that the ramifications now are beside the point. “Our responsibility to the readers is to share with them what we know, not to game out the political consequences of every story,” he said.

But the dossier set the stage for the political response to investigations to come—inflating expectations in the public, moving the goalposts for Trump in a way that has fostered bad behavior, and tainting the press’s standing. Publishing the dossier at the time seemed like a mistake to many people, including me, and the aftermath has only confirmed that judgment.

BuzzFeed explained its decision at the time by noting that “BuzzFeed News is publishing the full document so that Americans can make up their own minds about allegations about the president-elect that have circulated at the highest levels of the US government.” I explained why I disagreed the same day. First, I noted that it was unfair to Trump, or any public figure, to respond to allegations that might be entirely scurrilous, and which the reporters, by their own admission, had not verified. Moreover, it was an abdication of journalistic responsibility. I wrote:

The reporter’s job is not to simply dump as much information as possible into the public domain, though that can at times be useful too, as some of WikiLeaks’ revelations have shown. It is to gather information, sift through it, and determine what is true and what is not. The point of a professional journalist corps is to have people whose job it is to do that work on behalf of society, and who can cultivate sources and expertise to help them adjudicate it. A pluralistic press corps is necessary to avoid monolithic thinking among reporters, but transparent transmission of misinformation is no more helpful or clarifying than no information at all.

Now, it’s clear how the release played out. It didn’t matter that no one had verified many of the claims in the dossier—or that, in retrospect, no one could verify large portions of it. While most responsible news organizations approached the document warily, sidestepping the most lurid and unsupported claims, the allegations had already been injected into the discourse. Outlets that wouldn’t have published them in their original form (including some outlets that had reviewed the dossier and decided against publishing it) began to cover the claims as a meta-story—Here’s a thing people are talking about—which of course only drove people to talk about them more. Improbably, pee tape became a part of the national lexicon. There’s plenty of blame to spread around the press for hyping the dossier, but its publication was the original sin.

[Read: The trouble with publishing the Steele dossier]

The dossier did not, contra Trump, launch the investigations into the president and his team. The FBI had already been probing the Trump campaign adviser George Papadopoulos’s contacts with Russians by the time BuzzFeed pressed Publish. Carter Page, another Trump adviser, had been under government scrutiny for years. And Trump fired FBI Director James Comey of his own accord well after the dossier was made public, drawing investigators’ scrutiny. The legal process seems to have worked effectively. But public expectations for what the legal process would produce were jacked way up and then, perhaps inevitably, disappointed.

That’s unfortunate and dangerous, because what’s already known about Trump’s behavior is, as I wrote before Barr’s summary emerged, very bad. There’s an arsenal of smoking guns in plain sight. Regardless of what Barr and Mueller concluded, there’s extensive evidence of Trump aides colluding with Russia. Since January 2017, the country has seen the firing of National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying to the FBI (and Vice President Mike Pence) about contacts with the Russians; Trump pressuring Comey to drop an investigation into Flynn, then firing him; the revelation of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting; Trump’s attempt to mislead the public about that meeting; the news that Trump lied about his attempts to build a tower in Moscow; Roger Stone’s alleged communications with WikiLeaks; and the entire Stormy Daniels matter, including the president’s implication in a violation of campaign-finance law.

These are enormous stories, and together they compose perhaps the biggest political scandal in American history, including Watergate and Teapot Dome. They are only underwhelming if you were expecting a pee tape, and yet the prevailing narrative at this moment is that Trump was vindicated.

Of course, we don’t know what else the public will learn about the Mueller probe when the report itself is released, or from other investigations. But the consequences of the shifted goalposts are already in effect. In the aftermath of the Barr summary, the White House has signaled that it will ratchet up its demonization of the press, if that’s even possible. Much of the press coverage of the administration has been solid, and to hear the Trump White House howl about distortion of facts is to hear howls of hypocrisy. But BuzzFeed, and others afterward, published a dossier of unverified, damaging allegations about the president—making it hard to claim that the press is not willing to publish unverified but damaging allegations about the president.

[Read: Americans don’t need the Mueller report to judge Trump]

David French, writing in National Review this week, accurately identifies the release of the dossier as a pivotal moment, but he gets his diagnosis only partly right. French, like some others on the right, lays the responsibility on the Hillary Clinton campaign. “The dossier, however, in its sheer negative impact on American public life, may be her most infamous ‘achievement,’” he writes. “Her campaign—and ultimately Hillary herself—bears responsibility for the chaos it sowed.” There are several problems with this. First, the dossier originated as research commissioned by the conservative Washington Free Beacon, only later to be taken up by the Clinton campaign. And campaigns commission all types of opposition research. From what’s publicly known, the Clinton team didn’t dump the dossier during the campaign, and top Clinton officials say they hadn’t read it until BuzzFeed published it.

The murkiness of the dossier’s origins and path to the public has made BuzzFeed’s decision the subject of accusations by partisans of various stripes that it was acting out of partisan motivation. But BuzzFeed has given every indication that its decision was a sincere journalistic judgment. Smith maintained then, and has maintained since, that he believes that, because the document was circulating in the upper levels of government—Comey has written about awkwardly informing President-elect Trump about it—the public deserved to know.

“It’s fundamentally counter to your responsibility as a journalist to game out the political consequences,” Smith said.

He’s right. But the political consequences that have emerged two years down the line are simply manifestations of the error in judgment that was apparent in January 2017.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2JPHpHe

Five Editors and Staff Writers Joining The Atlantic’s Politics, Global, and Culture Sections

As The Atlantic continues its newsroom expansion, editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg and executive editor Adrienne LaFrance announced today five new editors and reporters joining the Politics, Culture, and Global teams: Helen Lewis and Tom McTague as staff writers with The Atlantic’s bureau in London; Shirley Li as a staff writer covering culture, based in Los Angeles; and on Politics, John Hendrickson as senior editor in New York and Saahil Desai as associate editor in Washington.

“The Atlantic, I am proud to say, is a talent magnet, and these five journalists are all excellent additions to our growing team,” Goldberg said.

The five editors and writers will contribute to coverage areas that have been growing markedly in the past 12 months. Earlier this month, Goldberg also announced a restructure of his editorial leadership team, promoting LaFrance to executive editor overseeing all of digital, podcasting, and video; and both Swati Sharma and Sarah Yager to managing editors running day-to-day coverage and editorial operations, respectively.

Helen Lewis and Tom McTague join The Atlantic’s bureau in London, where international editor Prashant Rao oversees the site’s coverage of foreign policy, democracy, and global conflict as well as its team of reporters in London, Paris, and Washington. Lewis has been associate editor of  the New Statesman, and was previously its deputy editor. At The Atlantic she will continue to focus on some of the biggest issues shaping a changing world—the decline in democracy, the culture wars, toxicity in public discourse, and feminism.

McTague has covered a period of almost unparalleled upheaval in British politics as a member of the U.K. parliamentary press corps, from the formation of Britain’s first post-war coalition government to the seemingly endless drama of Brexit. He will continue to have this as his focus at The Atlantic, after nearly three years as Politico’s chief U.K. correspondent. Before joining Politico, McTague was the politics editor at the Independent on Sunday.

Shirley Li, who was a 2014-2015 editorial fellow, is returning to The Atlantic as a staff writer in Los Angeles. She will cover the shifting culture of Hollywood and report at the intersection of filmed entertainment, business, politics, and technology. Li has been a staff writer at Entertainment Weekly, where she has reported on the making of Crazy Rich Asians and its ensuing impact on Asian representation in Hollywood; the shifting landscape of superhero TV in the streaming era; and the rise of industry-changing stars like Mahershala Ali, John Cho, and Awkwafina.

On politics, John Hendrickson brings his deep understanding of politics and magazine journalism to The Atlantic as a senior editor. He spent the past year as politics editor at Rolling Stone after four years at Esquire where, as digital deputy editor, he led the outlet’s 2016 presidential campaign coverage. Hendrickson began his career at The Denver Post and later worked at the paper's parent company in New York.

Also announced today: Saahil Desai will join the Politics team as an associate editor. In this role, Desai will play a key role in shaping and executing coverage of the 2020 presidential campaign and beyond. Since August, Desai has been an assistant editor on The Atlantic’s Family and Education desks.

from The Atlantic https://ift.tt/2UjT9pp