Late Edition
Today, clouds and sunshine, thun-
VOL. CLXIX . . . No. 58,739
Houston Surge
Fills Hospitals
With the Young
Race to Find Bed Space
Before the Peak Hits
By SHERI FINK
HOUSTON — Melissa Estrada
had tried to be so careful about the
coronavirus. For months she kept
her three children at home, and
she always wore a mask at the
grocery store. She and her daugh-
ter even stitched face coverings
for relatives and friends.
But over the weekend Ms.
Estrada, 37, was fighting the virus
at Houston Methodist Hospital af-
ter a week of treatments that in-
cluded an experimental drug,
steroids, intensive care and high
doses of oxygen. She probably
contracted the virus while attend-
ing a dinner with relatives who
had also been cautious, she said.
Within days, all four adults and
several children who had been at
the gathering tested positive for
the coronavirus.
“It was really, really scary,” Ms.
Estrada said of her illness. She
worried constantly about leaving
her children motherless. “You
hear about it and you think it’s the
older people or the people with un-
derlying issues,” she said. “And
I’m healthy. I don’t understand
how I got this bad.”
Coronavirus cases are rising
quickly in Houston, as they are in
other hot spots across the South
and the West. Harris County,
which includes most of Houston,
has been averaging more than
1,100 new cases each day, among
the most of any American county.
Just two weeks ago, Harris
County was averaging about 313
new cases daily.
Measures to cope with the
surge and to plan for its peak were
evident over the weekend at
Methodist, which called nurses to
work extra shifts, brought new
laboratory instruments on line to
test thousands more samples a
day and placed extra hospital
beds in an empty unit about to be
Continued on Page A8
WILLIAM D e SHAZER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Delirium overtook Kim Victory
during a 3-week hospital stay.
As Body Fights,
Virus Splinters
Patients’ Minds
By PAM BELLUCK
Kim Victory was paralyzed on a
bed and being burned alive.
Just in time, someone rescued
her, but suddenly, she was turned
into an ice sculpture on a fancy
cruise ship buffet. Next, she was a
subject of an experiment in a lab
in Japan. Then she was being at-
tacked by cats.
Nightmarish visions like these
plagued Ms. Victory during her
hospitalization this spring for se-
vere respiratory failure caused by
the coronavirus. They made her
so agitated that one night, she
pulled out her ventilator breath-
ing tube; another time, she fell off
a chair and landed on the floor of
the intensive care unit.
“It was so real, and I was so
scared,” said Ms. Victory, 31, now
back home in Franklin, Tenn.
To a startling degree, many co-
ronavirus patients are reporting
Continued on Page A7
INTERNATIONAL A9-12
‘They Did It to the Chief’
The Indigenous leader and activist
Allan Adam’s beating by the police
spurred outrage in Canada. PAGE A9
India Grapples With Colorism
Worldwide racism protests have fo-
cused attention on the country’s long-
held biases over skin tone. PAGE A10
© 2020 The New York Times Company
50 Years of Pride
People celebrated a milestone for Pride in the pouring rain, though festivities were scaled back because of the pandemic. Page A13.
Obama Is Drawn Back to a Political Battlefield He Wanted to Quit
By GLENN THRUSH
and ELAINA PLOTT
Just after Donald J. Trump was
elected president, Barack Obama
slumped in his chair in the Oval
Office and addressed an aide
standing near a conspicuously
placed bowl of apples, emblem of a
healthy-snacking policy soon to
be swept aside, along with so
much else.
“I am so done with all of this,”
Mr. Obama said of his job, accord-
ing to several people familiar with
the exchange.
Yet he knew, even then, that a
Flynn’s Lawyer
Enlisted Allies
In High Places
This article is by Mark Mazzetti,
Charlie Savage and Adam Gold-
man.
WASHINGTON — Sidney Pow-
ell, a firebrand lawyer whose pug-
nacious Fox News appearances
had earned her numerous private
phone conversations with Presi-
dent Trump, sent a letter last year
to Attorney General William P.
Barr about her soon-to-be new cli-
ent, Michael T. Flynn.
Asking for “utmost confidenti-
ality,” Ms. Powell told Mr. Barr
that the case against Mr. Flynn,
the president’s former national se-
curity adviser who had pleaded
guilty to lying to the F.B.I.,
smacked of “corruption of our be-
loved government institutions for
what appears to be political pur-
poses.” She asked the attorney
general to appoint an outsider to
review the case, confident that
such scrutiny would justify end-
ing it.
Mr. Barr did what she wanted.
He appointed a U.S. attorney six
months later to scour the Flynn
case file with a skeptical eye for
documents that could be turned
over as helpful to the defense. Ulti-
mately, Mr. Barr directed the de-
partment to drop the charge, one
of his numerous steps undercut-
ting the work of the Russia inves-
tigation and the special counsel,
Robert S. Mueller III.
The private correspondence be-
tween Ms. Powell and Mr. Barr,
disclosed in a little-noticed court
filing last fall, was the first step to-
Continued on Page A14
NATIONAL A13-19
Trump Retweets Racist Post
The president later deleted the tweet,
which showed a heated exchange be-
tween retirees, with one Trump sup-
porter yelling “White power!” PAGE A15
Leveraging Judges
President Trump has used judicial
appointments to his advantage. Should
Democrats run on the courts? PAGE A15
TRACKING AN OUTBREAK A4-8
‘Scary’ Surge in Florida
A fivefold increase over two weeks
prompted officials to impose limits for
the coming July 4 holiday.
NEW YORK, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
conventional White House retire-
ment was not an option. Mr.
Obama, 55 at the time, was stuck
holding a baton he had wanted to
pass to Hillary Clinton, and sad-
dled with a successor whose fixa-
tion on him, he believed, was
rooted in a bizarre personal ani-
mus and the politics of racial back-
lash exemplified by the birther lie.
“There is no model for my kind
of post-presidency,” he told the
aide. “I’m clearly renting space in-
side the guy’s head.”
Which is not to say that Mr.
Obama was not committed to his
pre-Trump retirement vision — a
Retiring a Flag in Mississippi
State senators embraced after passing a bill to remove an emblem of the Confederacy. Page A19.
Does N.Y.P.D. Get Too Much? Perhaps It’s Asked to Do Too Much
By MICHAEL SCHWIRTZ
and ALI WATKINS
When someone in the grip of a
mental health emergency be-
haves erratically in New York
City, it is the Police Department
that is often called in. When there
are serious disciplinary problems
in the schools, or when homeless
people are found sleeping in the
subways, police officers are asked
to take over.
BUSINESS B1-9
Hoping for Magic
Florida workers are nervous as Disney
World and other destinations start to
reopen amid surging infections. PAGE B1
737 Max Will Get Test Flights
The flights, which could begin as soon
as Monday, are a major step in getting
PAGE A7 Boeing’s plane flying again.
Tougher Line on Trump
Marks New Phase in
Unique Retirement
placid life that was to consist of
writing, sun-flecked fairways, pol-
icy work through his foundation,
producing documentaries with
Netflix and family time aplenty at
a new $11.7 million spread on
Martha’s Vineyard.
Still, more than three years af-
ter his exit, the 44th president of
The Police Department’s
purview is so vast that elite offi-
cers trained for hostage situations
sometimes find themselves as-
signed to animal control duties,
chasing a runaway deer through
the Bronx or corralling an es-
caped boa constrictor, as they did
recently at the height of the coro-
navirus pandemic.
For decades, a succession of
city governments have turned to
the department as a catchall fix
SPORTSMONDAY D1-6
A Season Under Dark Clouds
Major League Baseball is set to have a
60-game schedule. But that is not likely
to help with labor strife or with ques-
tions of a sport’s relevance.
OBITUARIES B10-11
He Captured Horrors in China
Li Zhensheng’s powerful photographs
remain a rare visual testament to the
brutality of Mao Zedong’s Cultural
Revolution. He was 79.
EDITORIAL, OP-ED A20-21
PAGE B1 Jamelle Bouie
CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES
the United States is back on a po-
litical battlefield he longed to
leave, drawn into the fight by an
enemy, Mr. Trump, who is hellbent
on erasing him, and by a friend,
Joseph R. Biden Jr., who is equally
intent on embracing him.
The stakes of that re-engage-
ment were always going to be
high. Mr. Obama is nothing if not
protective of his legacy, especially
in the face of Mr. Trump’s many at-
tacks. Yet interviews with more
than 50 people in the former presi-
dent’s orbit portray a conflicted
combatant, trying to balance deep
Continued on Page A16
ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Money to Fight Crime,
and to Chase Deer
for many of society’s ills, outside
of traditional crime-fighting. That
has meant deploying a force of
36,000 officers with a paramilitary
approach that at times can be un-
necessarily confrontational.
Now, after weeks of protests
PAGE D1
PAGE B10
PAGE A20
derstorms, high 88. Tonight, partly
cloudy, low 70. Tomorrow, partly
sunny, showers or thunderstorms
high 83. Weather map, Page B12.
$3.00
CASH DISCOVERY
TIPPED OFF SPIES
ABOUT BOUNTIES
WARNINGS IN EARLY 2020
Russian Plot Is Suspected
in at Least One U.S.
Military Death
This article is by Eric Schmitt,
Adam Goldman and Nicholas Fan-
dos.
WASHINGTON — United
States intelligence officers and
Special Operations forces in Af-
ghanistan alerted their superiors
as early as January to a suspected
Russian plot to pay bounties to the
Taliban to kill American troops in
Afghanistan, according to officials
briefed on the matter. They be-
lieved at least one U.S. troop death
was the result of the bounties, two
of the officials said.
The crucial information that led
the spies and commandos to focus
on the bounties included the re-
covery of a large amount of Amer-
ican cash from a raid on a Taliban
outpost that prompted suspicions.
Interrogations of captured mili-
tants and criminals played a cen-
tral role in making the intelligence
community confident in its as-
sessment that the Russians had
offered and paid bounties in 2019,
another official has said.
Armed with this information,
military and intelligence officials
have been reviewing American
and other coalition combat casu-
alties over the past 18 months to
determine whether any were vic-
tims of the plot. Four Americans
were killed in combat in early
2020, but the Taliban have not at-
tacked American positions since a
February agreement to end the
long-running war in Afghanistan.
The details added to the picture
of the classified intelligence as-
sessment, which The New York
Times reported Friday has been
under discussion inside the
Trump administration since at
least March, and emerged as the
White House confronted a grow-
ing chorus of criticism on Sunday
over its apparent failure to autho-
rize a response to Russia.
Mr. Trump defended himself by
denying the Times report that he
had been briefed on the intelli-
gence, expanding on a similar
White House rebuttal a day earli-
er. But leading congressional
Democrats and some Republicans
demanded a response to Russia
that, according to officials, the ad-
ministration has yet to authorize.
The president “needs to imme-
diately expose and handle this,
and stop Russia’s shadow war,”
Representative Adam Kinzinger,
Republican of Illinois and a mem-
ber of the House Foreign Affairs
Committee, wrote on Twitter.
Appearing on the ABC program
“This Week,” Speaker Nancy
Pelosi said she had not been
briefed on the intelligence assess-
ment and had asked for an imme-
diate report to Congress. She ac-
cused Mr. Trump of wanting “to ig-
nore” any charges against Russia.
“Russia has never gotten over
the humiliation they suffered in
Afghanistan, and now they are
taking it out on us, our troops,” she
said of the Soviet Union’s bloody
Continued on Page A12
against police brutality spurred
by the killing of George Floyd in
Minneapolis, a political move-
ment has gathered momentum to
curtail the New York Police De-
partment’s size and mission
creep.
Calls to “defund the police”
have resonated with the City
Council, where the speaker has
proposed cutting $1 billion from
the department’s $6 billion budget
Continued on Page A18
ARTS C1-8
Change at the Ballot Box
A new documentary followed the cam-
paigns of female politicians of color and
found much reason for hope. Above,
Representative Rashida Tlaib. PAGE C1
U(D54G1D)y+?!_!#!$!"
A2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
A. G. SULZBERGER
Publisher
Founded in 1851
ADOLPH S. OCHS
Publisher 1896-1935
ARTHUR HAYS SULZBERGER
Publisher 1935-1961
ORVIL E. DRYFOOS
Publisher 1961-1963
ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER
Publisher 1963-1992
ARTHUR OCHS SULZBERGER JR.
Publisher 1992-2017
Inside The Times
THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY
Nicolle Nordman was one of three women profiled in an episode of “The Daily” last week.
In the Time Since an Interview
On last Wednesday’s episode of “The
Daily,” Times reporters spoke with three
women — Nicolle Nordman, Analía Ro-
The joys.
dríguez and Nakitta Long — about their
experiences living with unemployment as
a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
The tribulations.
Those interviews were conducted a few
weeks ago. Below, our reporters shared a
little about the women they met, how they
The twists.
are holding on and what they have been
doing in the time since.
‘I have no idea what’s next’
Ben Casselman, an economics reporter,
met Nakitta Long, 44, who was laid off from
an automotive manufacturing facility in
North Carolina.
Back in March, when I first began speak-
ing to people who had lost their jobs in the
pandemic, I heard the same questions over
and over again: “How am I going to pay
rent? How am I going to feed my family?
What will I do if the bank takes back my
car?”
By the time I talked to Nakitta Long, in
late May, those questions were much less
common. The federal government had
stepped in with billions of dollars in aid,
including $600 per week in unemployment
Modern Love benefits for jobless workers. While the
system was plagued with problems —
Read, watch and listen to the stories.
delays and bureaucratic hurdles that kept
nytimes.com/modernlove many waiting for weeks — tens of millions
of people like Ms. Long are now relying on
the aid as a lifeline.
That lifeline expires at the end of July,
however. Which means these days I’m
facing a new question: “What happens if
the aid runs out before the crisis passes?”
Ms. Long is living the answer. Still out of
work, she is caring for her 3-year-old,
considering whether to eliminate her car
payment and worrying about her state and
federal unemployment support lapsing.
“I am not getting much sleep. I have no
idea what’s next,” she said. “So many
people are mentally and emotionally
checking out, and I do not want to be one
of those people.”
She said she had been seeking profes-
sional counseling to address her mental
health, which had been helping. “I know
I’ll be able to bounce back. I’m just not
sure how long that will take and what
sacrifices I will have to make.”
On This Day in History
A MEMORABLE HEADLINE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES
PEACE SIGNED, ENDS THE GREAT WAR
June 29, 1919. On the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand,
Germany and the Allied and associated powers signed the Treaty of Versailles, formally
ending World War I. Germany’s grievances with the terms, which assigned to it the guilt
of the war and a duty to disburse reparations, extended to the ceremony as well, The
Times reported. A German delegate said that if they knew of the public slights they were
to face (Germany had to use a separate exit), “They never would have signed.”
Subscribers can browse the complete Times archives through 2002 at timesmachine.nytimes.com.
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OPINION A20-21
TV LISTINGS C7
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CLASSIFIED ADS D4
VIDEO
Milton Glaser, the designer behind
the “I  NY” logo, died on Friday,
his 91st birthday. T Magazine
revisited a 2015 video made with
Mr. Glaser, in which he discussed
his famous contribution and the
ethics of design. tmagazine.com
LUCY HEWETT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Calling the unemployment office . . . for 11
weeks
Sabrina Tavernise, a national correspon- EVENT
dent, gave an update on Analía Rodríguez,
Covid-19 has forced many
45, who lost her job as an airport bartender
companies to rapidly adjust their
in Florida and was forced to pawn her
production to fit new circum-
wedding ring.
stances. Are there lessons learned
Analía Rodríguez met her husband,
that could help us slow climate
Gyula Fabian, in 2004. He was an actor
change? Hannah Fairfield, editor
visiting from Hungary. She was a manager
of the Times Climate desk, will
at a fitness center that he frequented.
moderate a debate between schol-
Ms. Rodríguez’s husband was in a motor-
ars, activists and business execu-
cycle accident last year, in which he sus-
tives on July 9 at 1:30 p.m. E.D.T.
tained brain injuries and lost a leg. He had
To R.S.V.P. to this audio event, visit
taken care of her for many years, so she
timesevents.nytimes.com.
felt it was her turn to do the same.
When the pandemic hit, Ms. Rodríguez
was laid off. After 11 weeks without any
income, she was finally able to secure
unemployment benefits. Now, she is be-
hind on her health insurance, trying to
figure out how to pay for her husband’s
surgery and a $500 deductible for an M.R.I.
She is not sure how they will get the
money.
AUDIO
Job hunting after nearly two decades at
On the “Book Review” podcast,
the same company
Richard Haass, president of the
Julie Creswell, a business reporter, gave
Council on Foreign Relations,
an update on Nicolle Nordman, 53, who
provides a primer to his new book
lives in Illinois and was laid off from Weight
with a broad undertaking, “The
Watchers over a roughly three-minute Zoom
World: a Brief Introduction.”
call.
nytimes.com/podcasts
The tip that landed in my inbox was
more than a little intriguing: “Weight
Watchers Mass Layoffs on Conference
Call.” That’s how I was introduced to Ni-
colle Nordman. In our first conversation, it
was clear she was still somewhere be-
tween shock and anger at being abruptly
fired by the company where she had
worked for 18 years. Now, Ms. Nordman is
sending out job applications and spends
most days worried about her children. NEWSLETTER
“It makes me nervous,” she said, think-
The Learning Network uses New
ing about her children in states where
York Times journalism to create
coronavirus cases were on the rise, like
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California, where her immunosuppressed
students. Sign up for its weekly
daughter lives. Ms. Nordman is financially
newsletter at
supporting her daughter, who cannot work
nytimes.com/newsletter
during the pandemic. “She is the one that
keeps me awake at night worrying,” she
said.
Listen to Ms. Nordman’s, Ms. Rodríguez’s and Ms.
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 THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N A3

Of Interest
NOTEWORTHY FACTS FROM TODAY’S PAPER

Investigators for the agricultural giant From 2010 to 2013, Chesapeake

Monsanto who secretly videotape
farmers, infiltrate community
meetings and recruit informants in
their hunt for patent infringement are
known as “seed police” among
farmers.
When Tech’s Security Oversteps the Bounds B1
• For years, Hu Jie, a Chinese
Last year, a survey of the Australian
Alps region showed that the
population of invasive wild horses,
known as brumbies, had more than
doubled in density in a five-year
period.
Majestic Icon or Invasive Pest?
A War Over Australia’s Wild Horses A11
• A 2017 study of 1,992 Indians
Leisure and hospitality industries
account for 25 percent of jobs in the
Orlando, Fla., area.
An Economy on Hold B1
CLAY HICKSON
found that more than half said
they were influenced by TV
advertisements to appear
lighter-skinned.
As Racism Protests Persist, India Grapples
With Biases Long Held Over Skin Tone A10
Energy, which filed for bankruptcy
protection on Sunday, spent about
$30 billion more on leasing and
drilling than it made from its
production.
Chesapeake Files for Bankruptcy B2
•
independent filmmaker, used a
battered Sony Handycam for his
films, and he almost never uses
lights or multiple cameras — largely
because he works alone.
‘To Show Reality as It Really Was’ C5
•
In Ithaca, N.Y., every other person in
town is — or used to be —
connected to Cornell or Ithaca
College.
For Homes of Colleges, Bleak Future
May Await A6

The Conversation Spotlight

FIVE OF THE MOST READ, SHARED AND DISCUSSED POSTS STORIES CONTRIBUTED
FROM ACROSS NYTIMES.COM BY READERS OF THE NEW YORK TIMES

Biden’s Best Veep Pick Is Obvious Tiny Love Stories, a Modern Love project, asks contributors
In Sunday’s most read article, the Opinion columnist Frank to share their epic love stories in 100 words or less. This
Bruni argued that Senator Tammy Duckworth of Illinois week’s batch of micro-nonfiction includes tales about a cross-
should be on Joe Biden’s ticket in November. roads, a search for the mute button and life inside a bubble.
Read one here.
Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count
The Times’s updating map with relevant information about
the coronavirus was widely read on Sunday after a week in
which the United States set a record for new cases on three
consecutive days. The Times’s Covid-19 tracking project is
also recording where clusters have broken out in meatpack-
ing plants, prisons and nursing homes around the country.

One Dead After Man Shoots Into Crowd

At Breonna Taylor Protest
Video footage from Saturday showed a man firing more than
a dozen shots at a park in Louisville, Ky., where protesters
had gathered. Officials said on Sunday a suspect was in police
custody. They did not identify him, but said he had been with
the protesters before being asked to leave “due to his disrup-
tive behavior.”

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill

U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says
A Russian military intelligence unit offered bounties to Tal-
iban-linked militants for killing coalition forces in Afghanistan
— including Americans, officials have concluded. The Trump
We met at a wedding in 2014. Chris was best man; I was maid
administration has been deliberating for months on how to
of honor. Over dinner, I learned about his greatest passion
respond. Twenty Americans were killed in Afghanistan in
(rare books) and biggest fear (“losing my mind”). Months
2019, although it is not known if any of the deaths were linked
later, it felt as if we were a couple, with our daily check-ins
to a bounty system.
and confessions, but we weren’t. He couldn’t give me more.
Starbucks Barista Gets $65,000 in Donations After With one fight, it was over. In 2017, Chris was diagnosed with
Customer’s Mask Complaint brain cancer. I emailed. He downplayed his illness but asked
if I wanted his books. “Yes,” I said. If he was going to face his
A woman who was not wearing a mask at a Starbucks in San
biggest fear, how could I deny his greatest passion?
Diego griped on Facebook about the barista, who had tried to
explain company policy. Her post unexpectedly led to an Carissa Duenas
outpouring of money for the worker. Submit your own Tiny Love Story at nytimes.com/modernlove.

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The Mini Crossword Here to Help

BY JOEL FAGLIANO VANESSA FRIEDMAN ANSWERS YOUR STYLE QUESTIONS

On Your Mark
1 2 3 4 Now that warm weather is here, I’m realizing I need to invest in shorts that can be
worn out to marches, patio seating at restaurants and the social events that have
been cleared to resume — not just for gardening in the yard. It would be nice if
5
they stood the test of time, fashion-wise, and were well made, and I have zero
interest in wearing booty shorts or golfing shorts. Any suggestions? SHANON, PROVIDENCE, R.I.
6

7 The question of what to wear and in line with a new, more conscious
for the re-emergence as the shopping model that reflects the reality of
possibility of another Covid the pandemic economy and the need to
8 P I N P O I N T DA S H
spike hangs over us, and most support smaller independent businesses.
BANGLES
people still largely work from home, is a It’s value-driven, in all meanings of the 18 K Ye l l o w,
6/29/2020 EDITED BY WILL SHORTZ complicated one. We are in a halfway word. White or Rose /
place, in suspended animation, neither My own favorite pair, for example, is a Brilliant Diamonds
ACROSS
1 Something built at a campsite
fully out — except, perhaps, when march- black silk shantung number by Duro
5 Operating system with a penguin ing — nor any longer fully sequestered. Olowu, and I got them — this is astonish-
logo So how to dress for this netherland? ing to admit — in the late 1990s. By this
6 Silly and frivolous Personally, I think shorts are best left point they are getting a little shiny, but I
7 Brewery grains for the gym or, as you point out, the yard. can’t bear to give them up. At a few inches
8 Straight supporter of the L.G.B.T. A more multipurpose alternative is the below the knee, they are the perfect
community culotte: wide enough to be as airy as a length, weigh almost nothing and have a
skirt, often in a light fabric, cut to show knife pleat and wide cuff.
DOWN just enough of the lower calf, yet practical. So I’d start by looking close to home, at
1 Semester-ending test Also ageless.
2 Collectively smaller shops or artisanal brands in your
Don’t be fooled into dismissing them as
3 Like the smallest pup in the litter neighborhood. A local tailor is also a good
not-for-summer by the fact that a higher
4 Unlikely people to invite to your option.
fabric percentage is involved. In the same
wedding
way that caftans and kurtas are actually Every week in the Open Thread newsletter — a
5 Capital of Peru
more cooling than spaghetti straps and look from across The Times at the forces that
tank tops, culottes can feel lighter than, shape the dress codes we share — The Times’s
SOLUTION TO say, a tailored pair of Bermuda shorts. chief fashion critic, Vanessa Friedman, answers a
M U G
PREVIOUS PUZZLE
Likewise, they can be dressed up or reader’s fashion-related question. Sign up for
C A R O L Open Thread at nytimes.com/newsletters.
down with T-shirts, jackets or even dressy
A R G U E
tops depending on the occasion — and the
P I E R S
shoes.
A D D
This makes them a good investment,
PA U L M O R E L L I .C OM
N YC : 8 95 M A D I S O N ( 7 2 N D & M A D I S O N )
P H L : 1118 WA L N U T S T R E E T
212. 5 8 5 . 42 0 0
A4 MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Tracking an Outbreak
N

Despite Losing
By ELIZA SHAPIRO and DAVID W. CHEN For the past few months, they got an unlucky opportunity to do just that.
No spring sports. No long-awaited trips abroad or senior spirit week. They have become indispensable beacons of information about can-
Proms delayed indefinitely, and graduations switched to Zoom. celed events and lost milestones as the coronavirus ravaged New York
City. They have tried to make sense of, and cover, a completely disrupted

A Key Chapter,
Seniors at New York City high schools have spent the past few
months watching as the semester they had anticipated for four years high school experience that has included teachers getting sick and dy-
evaporated in just a few weeks. ing, family members losing jobs and relatives and close friends battling
Despite what they had lost, newspaper and yearbook editors at two the virus on the front lines.
schools — Townsend Harris High School in Queens and Curtis High
School on Staten Island — had to keep moving.
There was work to do. Since March, they have scrambled to docu-
Seniors Manage Yearbooks and student newspapers have always defined these stu-
dents’ high school lives, but never more so than during the pandemic,
when writing, editing and designing gave them structure and purpose

ment as much of their lost semester as possible.
“Everything is on pause, but not us,” said Amanda Renzi, an editor of
the Townsend Harris paper, The Classic.
Faculty advisers at Townsend Harris and Curtis, acutely aware that
high school papers across New York City have been dying out, have long
urged their students to produce robust and consequential journalism.
To Fill Pages
as uncertainty swirled.
By late June, even after the Zoom graduations had concluded, the
students, soon to enter college, were still busy.
They still had yearbooks to distribute, a few more articles to publish
With Memories and new crop of editors to recruit and train, who themselves face an
unknown, and possibly virtual, fall semester.

Curtis High School Townsend Harris High School

NORTH SHORE, STATEN ISLAND KEW GARDENS, QUEENS

April 3 to 18.
Those were the foreign-ex-
change program dates that
Cheyanne Richardson had kept
circled for months. She had
bought gifts in preparation for her
planned stay in Milan. She and her
father had dreamed about visiting
Italy together before he died a few
years ago, and the high school trip
would have been her first out of
the country.
But then . . .
“It’s my senior year,” she said,
choking up. “I can’t do this again.”
The exchange program was one
of many milestones that vanished.
Lacrosse, softball and all the other
spring sports, gone. The spring
musical, “Legally Blonde,” and
dance show, gone as well.
Yet Cheyanne and other editors
had little time to process their col-
lective loss. As the stewards of the
school’s yearbook and newspaper,
both endeavors of the journalism
program, they had to cover the
crisis that was upending their last
semester of high school.
It was a daunting pivot, espe-
cially with everyone in quaran-
tine. But one by one, students be-
gan contacting the editors, said
Nadia Chin, another editor, with
questions like, “Are you guys still
doing yearbook? Am I in the year-
book? Do I need to do anything?”
Yes, everyone agreed, the year-
book had to be done.
“Our job is to make memories
for everyone,” Nadia said, “and if
everyone is not included, then
what’s the point?”
Curtis, near the St. George
Ferry Terminal, is Staten Island’s
oldest high school. It offers an in-
ternational baccalaureate pro-
gram and career tracks like nurs-
ing for a diverse, immigrant-
heavy student body of 2,500,
three-quarters of whom qualify
for free or reduced-price lunch.
Cadence Turner oversees the
journalism program. A 1985 Curtis
graduate, Ms. Turner is one of
about two dozen alumni who now
teach or work at the sports-crazed
school, whose graduates include
the baseball legend Bobby Thom-
son. She is also the soccer coach
and a Curtis parent. Her son, Da-
vid Garvin, the senior class presi-
dent, will play soccer for Skid-
more in the fall — if there is a fall.
Even before the pandemic, edi-
tors had talked about the poign-
ancy of this school year. As mem-
bers of the first high school class
born after the Sept. 11 attacks to
graduate, they have grown up in a
world shaped by school shootings,
climate change and racial divi-
sions.
Their sense of urgency intensi-
fied in April when Ms. Turner be-
gan setting up Google meetings at
least twice a week with journalism
students, and even more regu-
larly with Nadia, Cheyanne, Greer
Gerney, the only junior, and other
top editors.
With as many as 22 people on
some calls, the students were de-
termined to work first on the year-
book, which is more like a maga-
zine, with longer, reported arti-
cles.
Nadia said that one usual fea-
ture, “A Day in the Life” of a typi-
cal Curtis senior, should be re-
vised to reflect “A Day in the Life
of Quarantine.”
“Every day is important,” Nadia
said.
One student suggested an arti-
cle on the dress code for virtual
learning.
Another suggested one on how
students had celebrated their 18th
birthday in quarantine.
Yet another proposed some-
thing about the first time a Curtis
senior gave blood.
“The camaraderie in the class
— I just miss it so much,” Ms.
Turner told the students. “When I
sit down and do work by myself, it
really sucks, but unfortunately
that’s the way it is.”
The student newspaper, The
Curtis Log, is normally printed ev-
ery month or so, and distributed at
the school. The switch to online
publishing presented logistical
hurdles.
“Some people who have been
writing for us before are not quite
as involved because they don’t
check their email,” Greer said dur-
ing one call.
The students wrote about
sports and the musical being can-
celed, as well as the unexpected
death of an R.O.T.C. instructor.
Nothing made as big an impact as
an article on Ed Latourette, a his-
tory teacher who died of Covid-19,
according to a GoFundMe page
his family established. Most Cur-
tis Log articles do not get com-
ments, but 37 students, teachers
and alumni paid tribute to Mr. La-
tourette.
One example: “Wow, I’m at a
loss for words. He put up with me
my freshman and sophomore
year. He passed me and saw po-
tential in me.”
Even as the school year wound
down, the student journalists met
regularly, with plans to publish ar-
ticles over the summer to keep the
Curtis community informed.
One article might focus on the
killing of George Floyd, and note
that Eric Garner was also killed in
an altercation with the police not
far from the school, and that one of
his children attended Curtis. An-
other might report on undocu-
mented immigrant students at
Curtis, or students with undocu-
mented relatives, and the eco-
nomic fallout caused by the pan-
demic.
At times, the student journal-
ists, with their own plans for the
fall uncertain, said they felt as iso-
lated and exhausted as their
peers. In late May, Ms. Turner in-
vited Curtis alumni who had
worked on the yearbook and
newspaper to a virtual party with
the current students. More than
40 people attended, with former
students offering congratulations
and advice.
“I’m sure a lot of things that
were planned for this year were
thrown out the window and had to
be reinvented at the last moment,”
said one graduate, Cana Sarnes,
who is now a photographer. “But
that will stand out as being even a
little better because you had to be
creative.”
The Curtis Log,
left, is normally
printed every
month, but stu-
dents switched to
online publishing.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRITTAINY NEWMAN/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Cheyanne Richardson, left, and Nadia
Chin, right, worked on the Curtis High
School yearbook in video calls with Ca-
dence Turner, below at top left.
Above, an early design for the Curtis year-
book, which has long, reported articles.
Samantha Alzate, left, and Isabelle Gui-
llaume, right, edited The Classic, below,
the independent student newspaper at
Townsend Harris High School in Queens.
“Is everyone doing OK?”
Samantha Alzate, an editor at
The Classic, was met with ner-
vous laughter from the paper’s
writing staff when she kicked off a
Zoom meeting with a greeting
that once would have been innocu-
ous but has become one of the
most loaded questions of the pan-
demic.
Propped up on her bed and
wrapped in a white blanket on a
chilly April morning, with Christ-
mas lights strung in the back-
ground, Samantha spent a few
minutes ticking off the ways the
group could try to recreate some
of what they were missing with
each passing day.
Spring at Townsend Harris, one
of the city’s most academically
rigorous schools, brings college
acceptance season and, with it,
the annual college video. For
years, students have come to
school on a specific day decked
out in the gear of the college they
have committed to, and Classic
editors film hundreds of seniors
dancing, high-fiving and embrac-
ing.
This year, the paper had to im-
provise. Over the past two
months, editors virtually re-
corded and edited dozens of Tik-
Toks of seniors revealing their col-
lege choices.
Every Friday morning since
late March, those responsible for
the video met online and went
over every piece of minutiae they
could control to make the video
feel special.
Students occasionally called in
to the 11 a.m. Zoom meeting a few
minutes late, from bed, having
just woken up after a late night of
working on the video.
All the meticulous planning,
Samantha said, “makes me feel
like I never left school.”
When Usha Sookai, the arts edi-
tor, took on the responsibility for
trying to recreate senior events
online, she quickly realized how
much she and her classmates
would never get to experience.
“You have to come to terms
with what you’re not going to get,”
she said, “and think of ways to ful-
fill that desire and meaning with-
out being able to do it.”
That message has resonated for
the editors at Townsend Harris, a
fiercely independent school.
In 2017, students, many of
whom live in Queens and are first-
or second-generation immigrants,
staged mass sit-ins that helped
oust the school’s principal at the
time. The Classic, which played a
major role in the revolt, is one of
the new student newspapers in
the city that boasts a free press
charter, which ensures that school
administrators cannot review ar-
ticles before publication.
The virus has given The Classic
a moment to flex its journalistic
muscles.
Every year, the paper runs a se-
ries called Introducing, which fea-
tures Townsend Harris seniors re-
flecting on their years at the
school. This year, in addition to
seniors offering advice to their
younger selves, Introducing in-
cluded stories about essential
workers who are related to
Townsend students.
In March, shortly before Mayor
Bill de Blasio closed the city’s
schools, the Classic team spent a
weekend pulling together what
Samantha called a “pretty awe-
some” public records request
seeking information from the De-
partment of Education about how
many students had been sent
home sick from school earlier in
the month.
In between their online classes,
the staff, with help from student
government representatives, up-
dated an Instagram page where
students submitted photos of
themselves in plaid frocks and
oversize T-shirts for a virtual paja-
ma day.
On graduation day, The Classic
posted a story showing dozens of
decorated mortarboard caps, ar-
ranged in alphabetical order, as
The Classic built an on-
line community for
Townsend students with
Quarantine Time, a video
series, above, and an
active Instagram page.
they would have been at a tradi-
tional ceremony. The headline:
“The class of 2020 shares caps
with pomp, despite the circum-
stances.”
The editors who oversaw all
that work were constantly rally-
ing their staff, and pushing for as
joyful a crescendo to their frus-
trating year as possible.
Off camera, they oscillated be-
tween determination and weari-
ness.
Isabelle Guillaume, the paper’s
third editor in chief, worried about
her mother, who had been so excit-
ed to watch Isabelle and her sister,
a college senior, graduate this
year.
Samantha sometimes paused at
her closet to admire the prom
dress she bought the day before
schools were closed and, unless
the event happens late this sum-
mer, may never wear.
And Amanda, who, like many of
her classmates, had spent much of
her time at Townsend Harris
studying, had seen the end of sen-
ior year as a well-earned respite.
“I felt like this was finally going
to be, us, free, going out into the
world,” she said one April after-
noon. “Now it just feels like it’s ru-
ined.”
But by June, the three teen-
agers were buoyed by the fact
they had preserved at least some
traditions they had feared they
would lose altogether.
Isabelle remembered that hor-
rible day in March when schools
were closed, and thought about
how much had changed.
“I thought, wow, my second se-
mester has really gone downhill
and I’m not going to get it back,”
she said. “But the work we’ve
been doing has affirmed that I
have a purpose here.”
A6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Tracking an Outbreak The New Normal
EDUCATION
For Homes
Of Colleges,
Bleak Future
May Await
By SHAWN HUBLER
DAVIS, Calif. — The community
around the University of Califor-
nia, Davis, used to have a popula-
tion of 70,000 and a thriving econ-
omy. Rentals were tight. Down-
town was jammed. Hotels were
booked months in advance for
commencement. Students
swarmed to the town’s bar crawl,
sampling the trio of signature
cocktails known on campus as
“the Davis Trinity.”
Then came the coronavirus.
When the campus closed in
March, an estimated 20,000 stu-
dents and faculty left town.
With them went about a third of
the demand for goods and serv-
ices, from books to bikes to
brunches. City officials are ex-
pecting most of that demand to
stay gone even as the economy re-
opens.
Fall classes will be mostly re-
mote, the university announced
last week, with “reduced density”
in dorms. Davis’s incoming vice
mayor, Lucas Frerichs, said the
city was anticipating “a huge im-
pact” with a majority of the uni-
versity’s 39,000-plus students still
dispersed in September.
For “townies,” rules require
congregation to remain limited,
too, as confirmed coronavirus
cases continue to climb in Califor-
nia. One of the Davis Trinity bars
has closed, with no plan to reopen.
On a recent Sunday, downtown
was filled with “takeout only”
signs and half-empty, far-flung
cafe tables. Outside the closed the-
ater, a lone busker stood on a cor-
ner playing “Swan Lake” on a vio-
lin to virtually no one.
Efforts to stem the pandemic
have squeezed local economies
across the nation, but the threat is
starting to look existential in col-
lege towns.
Reliant on institutions that once
seemed impervious to recession,
“town and gown” communities
that have evolved around rural
campuses — Cornell, Amherst
College, Penn State — are con-
fronting not only Covid-19 but also
major losses in population, reve-
nue and jobs.
Where business as usual has
been tried, punishment has fol-
lowed: This week, Iowa health au-
thorities reported case spikes
among young adults in its two
largest college towns, Ames and
Iowa City, after the governor al-
lowed bars to reopen. And on cam-
puses across the country, at-
tempts to bring back football
teams for preseason practice have
resulted in outbreaks.
More than 130 coronavirus
cases have been linked to athletic
departments at 28 Division I uni-
versities. At Clemson, at least 23
football players and two coaches
have been infected. At Arkansas
State University, seven athletes
across three teams tested pos-
itive. And at the University of
Houston, the athletic department
stopped off-season workouts after
an outbreak was discovered.
Sports are not the only source of
outbreaks in college towns. Mis-
sissippi officials tied several cases
to fraternity rush parties that ap-
parently flouted social distancing
rules. In Baton Rouge, La., at least
100 cases were linked to bars in
the Tigerland nightlife district
near Louisiana State’s campus.
And in Manhattan, Kan., home to
Kansas State, officials said
Wednesday that there had been
two recent outbreaks: one on the
football team, and another in the
Aggieville entertainment district
Mitch Smith contributed reporting
from Chicago, and Lauryn Higgins
from Lincoln, Neb.
Above, a message of support from the Athena Theater in
Athens, Ohio, the home of Ohio University. Right, a campus vis-
itor. A census without students could knock the official popula-
tion of Athens from 24,000 down to as few as 6,000 people.
just off campus.
For the cities involved, the
prognosis is also daunting. In
most college towns, university
students, faculty and staff are a
primary market. Local economies
depend on their numbers and dol-
lars, from sales taxes to football
weekends to federal funds deter-
mined by the U.S. census.
Students at Ohio University
represent three-quarters of the
usual population of Athens, Ohio.
In Ithaca, N.Y., every other person
in town is — or used to be — con-
nected to Cornell or Ithaca Col-
lege.
The local economy in Ann Ar-
bor, Mich., takes in nearly $95 mil-
lion a year in discretionary spend-
ing from the University of Michi-
gan’s 45,000-plus students. Ari
Weinzweig, cofounding partner of
Zingerman’s, a landmark bakery
and deli, said sales have been
down 50 percent, and the com-
pany has had to furlough nearly
300 of its 700 employees since the
pandemic.
The town’s Literati Bookstore
launched a GoFundMe campaign
to keep from going out of business,
and created a virtual site for its
famed “public typewriter” so
customers could keep leaving
anonymous typed messages, a
company tradition. (“Oh how I
wish for a coffee not made by my
own hands,” someone typed on-
line in May.)
In State College, Pa., an esti-
mated 65 percent of the communi-
ty is made up of students at Penn
State’s main campus, a local jug-
gernaut that enrolls 46,000 stu-
dents, employs more than 17,000
nonstudents and injects about
$128 million a year into rural Cen-
tre County.
The university has announced
plans to reopen with double-occu-
pancy dorm rooms and at least
MADDIE M cGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
TOMMY LY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
half of its classes in person, but it
is still not known how many stu-
dents will return. Also in question
is the future of Penn State football,
a local economic linchpin that gen-
erated $100 million in 2018-19 for
the university alone.
Local governments are bracing,
too. Amherst, Mass., is scheduled
to vote this week on a proposal to
increase annual water and sewer
fees by an average of $100 per
household, a result of a precipi-
tous drop in water use as students
have abandoned Hampshire Col-
lege, Amherst College and the
University of Massachusetts in
Tax revenue dives in
towns that are now
without their gowns.
that New England college town.
Ithaca’s mayor, Svante Myrick,
said his city was preparing to cut
its $70 million budget by about $14
million, and has furloughed a
quarter of its employees, includ-
ing his assistant. He personally
has taken a 10 percent pay cut. A
resolution passed earlier this
month asked the state to let him
authorize blanket rent forgive-
ness for three months.
Unemployment in the Ithaca
metropolitan area has soared to 10
percent from 3 percent before the
pandemic. Sales tax receipts have
tanked as about $4 million per
week in student spending has dis-
appeared along with Cornell’s stu-
dents, Mr. Myrick said. About two-
thirds of the land in his jurisdic-
tion is university-owned, he said,
and therefore exempt from prop-
erty tax.
“We’re going to be looking at
TOMMY LY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Hoovervilles — or maybe Trump
Towns — all over the country,”
said the mayor, a Democrat who
clashes frequently with his up-
state area’s Republican congres-
sional delegation. “It’s bad. It’s re-
ally bad.”
Compounding the concern is
the 2020 census. Conducted every
10 years, the national head count
determines the distribution of fed-
eral funding for a vast number of
local and state programs, includ-
ing transit, public safety and Med-
icaid.
Because the window for re-
sponses has coincided with cam-
pus shutdowns, college towns are
reporting significant undercounts
of students living off-campus,
with dire financial implications.
A census without Ohio Univer-
sity students could knock the offi-
cial population of Athens from
24,000 down to as few as 6,000
people. With an Oct. 31 deadline
approaching, responses in stu-
dent neighborhoods are currently
running some 20 percentage
points lower than in 2010, with re-
sponse rates in some tracts of less
than 31 percent.
Mayor Steve Patterson of
Athens estimates an undercount
could cost his small city up to $40
million over the next 10 years “for
things like community develop-
ment block grants, jobs and family
services and senior services that
rely on a strong census count to
get a full funding.”
“We could be feeling this for the
next decade,” Mr. Patterson said.
In California, where Democrats
have prioritized the census, the
city of Davis and its surrounding
county partnered long before the
pandemic with the university to
maximize its response rate, which
is now higher than the state aver-
age. But the exodus of students
has cut sales tax revenues by 50
TOMMY LY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
The nearly deserted campus of
the University of California,
Davis, above and far left. The
shuttered box office at the
Mondavi Center for the Per-
forming Arts on the campus,
left. Some 20,000 students
and faculty members have left
town since the campus closed.
‘Long term, this could
be on par with the
great recession for us.’
LUCAS FRERICHS, incoming
vice mayor of Davis, Calif.
percent, Mr. Frerichs said.
Virtual graduation in May
slashed hotel occupancy from 90
percent to 10 percent during the
local hospitality industry’s usual
peak season. Bookings have since
rebounded slightly, Mr. Frerichs
said, but only to about 25 percent,
substantially denting hotel occu-
pancy tax revenues.
Transit ridership has dropped
so precipitously, he said, that local
authorities have been using the
buses to transport supplies to and
from food banks. The city has be-
gun reaching out to unions and
identifying budget cuts in case the
economy does not quickly bounce
back.
Already, Mr. Frerich said, the
council has opted to leave three
open positions for police officers
vacant. “That’s three sets of eyes
and ears on the street,” he said,
“but this is a legitimate concern.
Long term, this could be on par
with the great recession for us.”
Or maybe worse than the reces-
sion, he added, because in 2008 at
least the town could still gather.
Now the bike traffic is scant, the
farmers market socially dis-
tanced, and the baristas working
reduced hours at coffee shops ask
customers to alert them when
they leave so maintenance can
disinfect their tables. The virus
even canceled Davis’s annual
town-and-gown party, Picnic Day.
“Part of me is enjoying reclaim-
ing the community,” said Mr.
Frerichs, who attended the uni-
versity and has lived for 24 years
in Davis. “But one of the things
that makes a college town so won-
derful is the vibrant young popu-
lation.”
“They’re the lifeblood, and
without them — well, the squirrels
are having a field day,” he said.
“But for the rest of us, it’s just so
quiet.”
MADDIE M cGARVEY FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Around the U.S.
And the World
DISSONANT POSITIONS
Pence Disputes Experts
Over Surge in Cases
Vice President Mike Pence and
the nation’s top health official,
Alex M. Azar II, continued to
assert on Sunday that reopenings
in many states were not causing
the sharp rises in coronavirus
cases, but rather that increased
testing was uncovering more and
more infections.
But their position was disputed
by other public health experts,
who said that broadened testing is
revealing not only more total
cases, but also a higher rate of
positive cases.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Dr.
Thomas R. Frieden, the former
head of the Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention, said that
both the total number and the
percentage of positive tests for
the coronavirus had increased in
several states, saying, “There’s
also no doubt that the virus has
the upper hand.” He predicted
that the explosive spread in some
states would continue to worsen
over the coming weeks.
The comments by Mr. Pence,
Mr. Azar and Dr. Frieden exempli-
fied the contradictory positions
taken by the White House, which
is pressing full speed to reopen
the economy and for Mr. Trump to
resume in-person campaigning
for the fall election, and health
experts, who are alarmed by case
surges around the country.
FEDERAL RESPONSE
Governors Criticize Lack
Of National Policies
Two governors who have had
sometimes testy relationships
with the White House during the
pandemic expressed harsh reac-
tions to the administration’s in-
sistence on deferring to local
governments rather than offering
strong national policies to contain
the virus at a time when out-
breaks are escalating in a number
of states.
Vice President Mike Pence
strongly defended the approach
on the CBS show “Face the Na-
tion,” while attributing the rise in
cases to increased testing and
irresponsible behavior by young
people.
“We’ve made it clear that we
want to defer to governors.” Mr.
Pence said.
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo charac-
terized that approach as negligent
on the NBC program “Meet the
Press.” “They’re basically in
denial about the problem,” he
said. “They don’t want to tell the
American people the truth.”
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington
expressed frustration at the presi-
dent’s unwillingness to do more to
encourage his supporters to wear
them. “Instead of tweeting the
other day about the importance of
masks, he tweeted about monu-
ments,” he said. on “Face the
Nation.” “We need a president
who will care more about living
Americans and less about dead
confederates.”
A GRIM MILESTONE
Global Total Surpasses
10 Million-Case Mark
The global total of coronavirus
cases passed 10 million on Sun-
day, according to a New York
Times database, as countries
around the world struggled to
keep new infection rates from
reaching runaway levels while
simultaneously trying to emerge
from painful lockdowns.
The number of confirmed infec-
tions, which took roughly 40 days
to double after hitting five million
in May, may be substantially
underestimated. Data released
last week by the Centers for Dis-
ease Control and Prevention
indicated that the actual figures in
many regions of the United States
are probably 10 times as high as
reported.
In the United States, early hot
spots emerged in the Northeast
but the recent surge has occurred
primarily in the South and the
West, forcing some states to
retreat from reopening plans.
Brazil, which has reported the
second highest total of infections,
has seen its caseload surge signif-
icantly in June.
And India confirmed that cases
surged beyond 500,000 this week-
end. Last month, India moved
ahead with reopening public life
despite soaring case counts.
Experts fear that fatigue with
lockdowns and social distancing
has allowed the virus to spread
with renewed intensity across
many corners of the world.

Tracking an Outbreak The Infected
MENTAL HEALTH COMPLICATIONS
As Body Fights, Virus-Related Delirium Splinters Patients’ Minds
From Page A1
similar experiences. Called hospi-
tal delirium, the phenomenon has
previously been seen mostly in a
subset of older patients, some of
whom already had dementia, and
in recent years, hospitals adopted
measures to reduce it.
“All of that has been erased by
Covid,” said Dr. E. Wesley Ely, co-
director of the Critical Illness,
Brain Dysfunction and Survivor-
ship Center at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity and the Nashville Veterans
Administration Hospital, whose
team developed guidelines for
hospitals to minimize delirium.
Now, the condition is bedeviling
coronavirus patients of all ages
with no previous cognitive impair-
ment. Reports from hospitals and
researchers suggest that about
two-thirds to three-quarters of co-
ronavirus patients in I.C.U.’s have
experienced it in various ways.
Some have “hyperactive deliri-
um,” paranoid hallucinations and
agitation; some have “hypoactive
delirium,” internalized visions
and confusion that cause patients
to become withdrawn and incom-
municative; and some have both.
The experiences aren’t just ter-
rifying and disorienting. Delirium
can have detrimental conse-
quences long after it lifts, extend-
ing hospital stays, slowing recov-
ery and increasing people’s risk of
developing depression or post-
traumatic stress.
“There’s increased risk for tem-
porary or even permanent cogni-
tive deficits,” said Dr. Lawrence
Kaplan, director of consultation li-
aison psychiatry at the University
of California, San Francisco Medi-
cal Center. “It is actually more
devastating than people realize.”
The ingredients for delirium are
pervasive during the pandemic.
They include long stints on venti-
lators, heavy sedatives and poor
sleep. Other factors: patients are
mostly immobile, occasionally re-
strained to keep them from acci-
dentally disconnecting tubes, and
receive minimal social interaction
because families can’t visit and
medical providers wear face-ob-
scuring protective gear and spend
limited time in patients’ rooms.
“It’s like the perfect storm to
generate delirium, it really, really
is,” said Dr. Sharon Inouye, a lead-
ing delirium expert who founded
the Hospital Elder Life Program,
Dabrali Jimenez contributed re-
porting,
FLARE-UP IN FLORIDA
A ‘Scary’ Fivefold Surge
In Cases Over Two Weeks
By FRANCES ROBLES
MIAMI — John Delgado has
slept in a tent in his backyard for
57 nights and counting.
As the inventory manager of
Farm Share, an immense South
Florida food bank, Mr. Delgado,
51, finds himself holding his
breath under his face-covering as
he speaks to the many clients who
come in without masks, for fear
that coronavirus particles will
seep through the fabric.
Because he interacts with the
public every day, Mr. Delgado
sleeps outdoors to avoid contami-
nating his wife, aging mother-in-
law, three sons and grandson. At
night, he sometimes peeks
through the window to watch his
wife sleep. By day, he does socially
-distanced yard work with his
sons.
“I want to sleep in my house,
sleep in my bed,” he said. “I want
to hug my wife, my children,
grandson, and want to go out to
the community not feeling like I’m
in ‘The Walking Dead,’ where I’m
going to be attacked by a zombie. I
want to live. Right now, I don’t feel
like I’m living.
“How long is this going to be?”
On Saturday, for the second
straight day, Florida crushed its
previous record for new coro-
navirus cases, reporting 9,585 in-
fections. Another 8,530 were re-
ported on Sunday.
The closest hospital to Mr. Del-
gado’s house in Homestead, 40
miles south of Miami, is nearing
capacity as Covid-19 cases soar.
The situation in Miami is equally
serious: One-third of all patients
admitted to the city’s main public
hospital over the past two weeks
after going to the emergency
room for car-crash injuries and
other urgent problems have
tested positive for Covid-19.
Six-hour lines formed in Jack-
sonville over the weekend as thou-
sands of people flocked to get
drive-through tests. Orlando has
seen an explosion of coronavirus:
nearly 60 percent of all cases diag-
nosed in that county came in just
the past two weeks.
Much of Florida’s new surge in
Amaris Castillo contributed re-
porting from Tampa, Fla., and Pa-
tricia Mazzei from Miami.
guidelines that have helped to sig-
nificantly decrease delirium
among older patients. Both her
program and Dr. Ely’s have de-
vised recommendations for re-
ducing delirium during the pan-
demic.
The virus itself or the body’s re-
sponse to it may also generate
neurological effects, “flipping peo-
ple into more of a delirium state,”
said Dr. Sajan Patel, an assistant
professor at University of Califor-
nia, San Francisco.
The oxygen depletion and in-
flammation that many seriously
ill coronavirus patients experi-
ence can affect the brain and other
organs besides the lungs. Kidney
or liver failure can lead to buildup
of delirium-promoting medica-
tions. Some patients develop
small blood clots that don’t cause
strokes but spur subtle circulation
disruption that might trigger cog-
nitive problems and delirium, Dr.
Inouye said.
Nails in a Rotating Head
“AK-47,” Ron Temko wrote in
shaky handwriting from his hospi-
tal bed.
Then he pointed at his neck to
show where the assault rifle
should aim.
Mr. Temko, a 69-year-old mort-
gage company executive, couldn’t
speak because of the breathing
tube in his mouth — he’d been on a
ventilator at U.C.S.F. Medical Cen-
ter for about three weeks by then.
So, on a Zoom call nurses ar-
ranged with his family, he wrote
on paper attached to a clipboard.
“He wants us to kill him,’ ” his
son gasped, according to Mr.
Temko and his wife, Linda.
“No, honey,” Linda implored,
“you’re going to be OK.”
At home now in San Francisco
after a 60-day hospitalization, Mr.
Temko said his suggestion that his
family shoot him stemmed from a
delirium-fueled delusion that he’d
been abducted.
“I was in a paranoiac phase
where I thought there was some
sort of conspiracy against me,” he
said.
When he was first placed on the
ventilator, doctors used a lighter
sedative, propofol, and dialed it
down for hours so he could be
awake and know where he was —
a “regimen to try to avoid deliri-
um,” said Dr. Daniel Burkhardt, an
anesthesiologist and intensivist
who treated him.
But then Mr. Temko’s respira-
tory failure worsened. His blood
pressure plummeted, a condition
cases appears to follow from the
reopening of beaches, bars,
restaurants and other social activ-
ities. The state’s beaches are full
and throngs of revelers pack its
waterways on boats.
Many people have had enough
of staying inside, feeling trapped
and scared. As fear subsided, co-
ronavirus grew.
Florida now joins South Car-
olina and Nevada among the
states that broke daily records
over the weekend.
“I’m one of the people who con-
tributed to the 9,000-person day,”
said Ian Scott, a 19-year-old col-
lege sophomore in Orlando who
tested positive on Friday. He has
no idea how he got it.
Mr. Scott said that for young
people, getting tested has become
an amusing pastime. They chal-
lenge each other to see who can
get the nasal swab test without
crying. About half of his fraternity
has tested positive.
“We’re seeing positive, positive,
positive, positive,” he said. “My
generation says: ‘Let’s get this
over with. Let’s suck it up for two
weeks, sit in our rooms, play video
games, play with our phones, fin-
ish online classes, and it’s over.”
Mr. Scott barely felt sick, and
was fine by the time the test re-
sults came back. Patients like him
could help account for the fact that
while Florida’s daily case count
has increased fivefold in two
weeks, the rate of deaths has not
increased so far. State records
show that hospitalization rates
have inched up but are not at cri-
sis levels.
Gov. Ron DeSantis said more
Covid-related fatalities in the
state had been people over 90 than
people under 65.
The median age of new coro-
navirus patients is now 36, the De-
partment of Health said.
“Those groups are much less at
risk for very serious conse-
quences,” Governor DeSantis said
of younger patients. But they can
spread the virus to their older rel-
atives and others who are medi-
cally vulnerable without even re-
alizing it, he stressed.
Officials have done little so far
to halt public interactions. The
mayor of one affluent Miami sub-
urb implored residents this week
THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Ron Temko had visions and conspiracy delusions while he wres-
tled with the virus for 60 days in a San Francisco hospital.
propofol intensifies. To allow the
ventilator to completely breathe
for him, doctors had him chemi-
cally paralyzed, which required
heavier sedatives to prevent the
trauma of being conscious while
unable to move.
So Mr. Temko’s sedation was
switched to midazolam, a benzodi-
azepine, and fentanyl, an opioid —
drugs that exacerbate delirium.
“We had no choice,” Dr.
Burkhardt said. “If you’re very
sick and very unstable, basically
what happens is we conclude you
have bigger problems.”
After about two weeks, the sed-
ative-weaning process began, but
other delirium-related quandaries
emerged. Mr. Temko began expe-
riencing pain and anxiety, compel-
ling doctors to balance treating
those conditions with using medi-
cations that can worsen delirium,
they said.
The repeated nursing visits Mr.
Temko needed interrupted his
John Delgado, a manager at a food bank in Homestead, Fla., has been sleeping in a tent in his backyard to avoid infecting his family.
to stop throwing house parties; on
Friday, state officials prohibited
the sale of alcohol in bars. Miami-
Dade County chose to close its
beaches for the busy Fourth of
July weekend.
Governor DeSantis said the
surge of new cases can be attribut-
ed to the huge numbers of tests re-
sults that are coming in each day.
But he acknowledged that since
the second week of June, the share
of tests coming back positive has
been creeping upward. That trend
coincided with the reopening of
the economy, and also the onset of
recent street protests.
Statewide, about 20 percent of
people aged 25 to 34 are testing
positive, he said at a news confer-
ence Sunday.
He said the risk has also in-
creased as temperatures outside
rise and people seek relief in the
air conditioning.
“As it gets warmer in Florida,
people want to beat the heat,” he
said. “They are more likely to do
that indoors, in closed spaces.
That is going to increase the risk
of transmission of the coro-
CAYCE CLIFFORD FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
sleep-wake cycle, so he’d often
take daytime naps and become
sleepless and agitated at night,
said Jason Bloomer, an I.C.U.
nurse.
At home, his wife kept her
phone by her pillow so she could
hear him via a nurse’s tablet. “He
would wake up and was confused
and anxious and he’d start getting
all worked up to where the ventila-
tor couldn’t work,” said Mrs.
Temko, who would reassure him,
“It’s OK, breathe.”
His hallucinations included a
rotating human head. “Every time
it came around, someone put a
nail in it, and I could see that the
person was still alive,” he said.
He imagined that his wrist-
watch (which was actually at
home) was stolen by a man who
turned it into a catheter. The man
played a recording of Ben
Bernanke, the former Federal Re-
serve chair, and told Mr. Temko
that because he recognized the
navirus.”
Florida public health experts
worry that the surging case num-
bers will lead to a crush of hospi-
talizations and, eventually, of
deaths. “We know that there’s a
lag,” said Natalie E. Dean, an as-
sistant professor of biostatistics at
the University of Florida.
Even though young people are
less likely to have severe cases,
the long-term consequences of
Covid-19 infection among the
young are still unknown, she said.
“Some people do get pretty sick,”
she said. “Even what’s classified
as a mild disease, some people re-
ally get the wind knocked out of
them for a week.”
Mariely Ferraro, 40, a heart-
monitor technician who lives in
Orlando, caught Covid-19 seven
weeks ago and has been unable to
shake it.
“I think the situation in Florida
is scary,” she said. “The numbers
are climbing, and the numbers are
scary. I wish there was a way that
it could be explained. If there were
9,000 people in one day, are they
symptomatic? Do they have fe-
name, “‘You know too much,
you’re not leaving the hospital.’”
When Mr. Bloomer asked “Do
you feel safe?,” Mr. Temko shook
his head no and mouthed around
his breathing tube: “‘Help me.’”
He met with Dr. Kaplan, the psy-
chiatrist, who recognized his
symptoms as delirium
Dr. Kaplan prescribed Seroquel,
which he said helps with percep-
tual disturbances and anxiety.
Mr. Temko said another turning
point came when Mr. Bloomer
said that with months of hard
work, recovery was likely.
An optimistic cognitive sign,
said Dr. Kaplan, is that Mr. Temko
can now describe his delirium in
much more detail than he could
several weeks ago.
‘I Saw the Devil’
Some coronavirus patients de-
velop delirium even after rela-
tively short I.C.U. stints.
Anatolio José Rios, 57, was intu-
bated for just four days at Massa-
chusetts General Hospital and
didn’t receive highly delirium-in-
ducing sedatives. Still, as sedation
was lifted, he heard booms, and
saw flashes of light and people
praying for him.
“Oh my God, that was scary,” he
said. “And when I opened my
eyes, I saw the same doctors, the
same nurses who were praying
for me in my dream.”
After the ventilator was discon-
nected, Mr. Rios, a normally gre-
garious man who hosts a radio
show, only responded with one- or
two-word answers, said Dr. Peggy
Lai, who treated him.
“I saw people lying on the floor
like they were dead in the I.C.U.,”
he said. He imagined a vampire-
like woman in his room. He was
convinced people in the hall out-
side were armed with guns,
threatening him.
“’Doctor, do you see that?’” he
recalled saying. “’They want to
kill me.”
He asked if the door was bullet-
proof and, to calm him, the doctor
said yes.
Like many delirious patients,
Mr. Rios warped typical hospital
activities into paranoid imagin-
ings. Watching a hospital employ-
ee hanging a piece of paper, he
said, he thought he saw a noose
and feared he would be hanged.
After 10 days of hospitalization,
he spent two months in a rehabili-
tation center because of foot in-
flammation, recently returning to
his East Boston apartment. In
May, his father in Mexico died of
vers? Are they sick?”
Ms. Ferraro’s entire family
caught the virus last month, but
only she is still ill. Her 13- and 14-
year-old daughters had very mild
symptoms, losing their sense of
taste and smell for a while.
“The whole age thing is — I
don’t want to say offensive, but it’s
untrue,” she said. “Coronavirus is
affecting everyone. People pro-
testing the masks think it’s fake.
It’s not fake. It sucks to wake up
and you can’t catch your breath, or
to have a headache you can’t get
rid of, no matter how much Advil
you take. It sucks to take a shower
and fall down because you got
dizzy.”
Shamarial Roberson, deputy
secretary of the Florida Depart-
ment of Health, said in an inter-
view on Sunday that the state is
monitoring hospital admissions
and intensive care units’ bed ca-
pacity and watching for problem
areas.
“We are working to make sure
that if we are seeing surges, that
we’re in communication with
those hospital systems to ensure
N A7
Covid-19, Mr. Rios said. He re-
flected on another hallucination in
the hospital.
“I saw the devil and I asked him,
‘Can you give me another
chance?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but you
know the price,’” Mr. Rios re-
called. “Now I think I know the
price was my father.”
‘Down a Rabbit Hole’
Two months after returning home
from her three-week hospitaliza-
tion, Ms. Victory said she’s been
experiencing troubling emotional
and psychological symptoms, in-
cluding depression and insomnia.
She has been noticing the smell of
cigarettes or wood burning, a fig-
ment of her imagination.
“I feel like I’m going down a rab-
bit hole, and I don’t know when I
will be back to myself,” she said.
Dr. Kevin Hageman, one of her
physicians at Vanderbilt Univer-
sity Medical Center, said she “was
pretty profoundly delirious.”
Ms. Victory, a Vietnamese im-
migrant and previously healthy
community college student ma-
joring in biochemistry, said she
didn’t remember yanking out her
breathing tube, which was rein-
serted. But she recalled visions
blending horror with absurdity.
One moment, scientists in Ja-
pan were testing chemicals on
her; the next she was telling them,
“‘I am an American and I have a
right to eat a cheeseburger and
drink Coca-Cola,’” she recalled,
adding: “I don’t even like cheese-
burgers.”
Along with this agitated hyper-
active delirium, she experienced
internalized hypoactive delirium.
In a recovery room after leaving
the I.C.U., she’d stare for 10 to 20
seconds when asked basic ques-
tions, said Dr. Hageman, adding,
“Nothing was quite processing.”
“It was heartbreaking,” said Mr.
Victory, who patiently told her she
couldn’t be released yet. “For four
or five days, she still couldn’t re-
member what year it was, who the
president was.”
Finally, he said, “something
clicked.”
Now, to help overcome the fall-
out from the experience, she’s
started taking an antidepressant
her doctor prescribed and re-
cently saw a psychologist.
“People think when the patient
got well and out of the hospital, it
will be OK, it’s over,” Ms. Victory
said. “I worry if the virus didn’t
kill me back then, would that have
affected my body enough to kill
me now?”
MATIAS J. OCNER/MIAMI HERALD
their capacity,” she said. “I am
keeping my eye on the entire state
of Florida.”
Rose Castanon, 35, who works
on the business side of a hospital
chain in Orlando, tested positive
June 18, after her gym alerted her
to a fellow customer who was in-
fected. “I know almost 10 people
that have tested positive,” she
said. “All of our friends are freak-
ing out, because it’s getting a little
too close to home now.”
Jeanette Matas, a 41-year-old
reading teacher in Coral Gables,
Fla., had been limiting her visits to
her 95-year-old grandmother,
Reina L. Palacios, so as not to put
her at risk. But her grandmother
wound up catching the virus from
her home health care attendant, a
woman in her 40s. Mrs. Palacios
died on June 17.
“You can’t blame them for feel-
ing trapped” Ms. Matas said of the
people who had lost patience with
isolation and had resumed social-
izing in public. “I feel like they’re
stupid. They don’t realize what
they’re doing. They’re only think-
ing of themselves.”
A8 0 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Tracking an Outbreak On the Front Lines

HOT SPOT

Houston’s Surge Is Filling Hospitals With Young Patients

From Page A1
reopened as patients filled new coro-
navirus wards.
Gov. Greg Abbott, speaking in Dallas
on Sunday, said the virus had taken a
“very swift and a very dangerous turn”
in Texas and the increase in the rate of
positive coronavirus tests, to over 13 per-
cent in the past month from less than 4
percent, was an “alarm bell.” He made
the grim assessment after meeting with
Vice President Mike Pence and Dr. Debo-
rah L. Birx, the coordinator of the White
House’s coronavirus task force, who
joined the governor in urging all Texans
to wear masks and avoid close contact in
crowds.
Mr. Pence, appearing at a Dallas rally
celebrating religious freedoms, threw
his support behind Mr. Abbott and his ef-
forts to reopen the state’s economy —
even as the governor made an about-face
on Friday in his phased plan by ordering
bars closed and capacity at restaurants
cut. Many young people had socialized in
them, standing close together, not wear-
ing masks, some expressing skepticism
that they could become infected.
During the virus’s first peak in April,
the majority of patients testing positive
in the Methodist hospital system were
older than 50. Now the majority are, like
Ms. Estrada, relatively young. Nearly
one-third of intensive care patients are
now under 50, much higher than in the
initial coronavirus surge.
The stress on medical institutions
burst into public view last week, when
Texas Medical Center — a downtown
cluster of Houston’s major public and pri-
vate hospitals, including Methodist —
announced that the baseline intensive
care unit capacity across its hospitals
was full, with 28 percent of beds occupied
by virus patients. That was nearly twice
a threshold established by the state,
which called for I.C.U.s to have a maxi- PHOTOGRAPHS BY ERIN SCHAFF/THE NEW YORK TIMES

mum 15 percent of virus patients for hos-

pitals to resume elective services.
The hospitals typically operate with
nearly full I.C.U.s, and had planned to in-
crease the number of critically ill pa-
tients they could treat. But the next
morning, the governor issued an execu-
tive order that again restricted elective
surgeries in Harris County. The order,
however, allows hospitals to continue
performing surgeries and procedures
that will not deplete their capacity to
care for coronavirus patients; some hos-
pital executives, including ones at Meth-
odist, said they were able to continue
providing those services, which they
viewed as particularly needed after be-
ing halted during the initial shutdown.
The Texas Medical Center hospitals are
collectively treating about 1,500 coro-
navirus patients, according to figures re-
leased on Saturday.
During the previous surge in mid-
April, Methodist’s system had at most
just over 200 coronavirus patients. On
Sunday, it had nearly 400 inpatients with
the virus, and about 150 more were being
tested for it. Some models predict a peak
in two to three weeks.
Roberta L. Schwartz, an executive
vice president and chief innovation offi-
cer at Methodist, who is serving as the
coronavirus incident commander,
walked from unit to unit on Saturday
“trolling for beds,” as she described it.
She spoke with nurses and doctors, trou-
bleshooting to solve problems that could
delay sending patients home or transfer-
ring them to lower levels of care when
they were ready. She informed nurses in
an intermediate care unit that it would
soon transition into an I.C.U. for coro-
navirus patients.
She visited a huge laboratory with
more than $3 million of new instrumen-
tation that she referred to as the “Taj Ma-
hal,” a former academic lab that was re-
purposed to process virus tests, and took
her first look at two recently purchased
machines that can run 1,000 tests a day.
In some parts of the country, laborato-
ries, including Methodist’s, have experi-
enced testing backlogs in recent days as
demand and new cases have increased.
The hospital is hiring traveling nurses
to bolster its staff and offering bonuses
as incentives to some employees to take
extra shifts. In recent days, hospital beds
and mobile computers were rolled into
an empty, 34-bed unit that had been shut-
tered and will now be used for coro-
navirus patients. “This is why I don’t
have to put trailers out front and mobile
hospitals out front,” Dr. Schwartz said.
The changes were also part of the hospi-
tal’s efforts to maintain capacity to safely
Mitch Smith and Michael Shear contrib-
uted reporting.
treat its many nonvirus patients.
The Methodist hospital system, with
nearly 2,400 beds in service, includes six
community hospitals across greater
Houston and the flagship academic med-
ical center downtown.
It sits near other renowned medical in-
stitutions including Baylor College of
Medicine, MD Anderson Cancer Center
and Texas Children’s Hospital, which is
opening a unit to treat adult coronavirus
patients. Methodist and several other
private hospitals have also agreed to ac-
cept virus patients from Harris County’s
inundated public hospitals, part of the
Harris Health System.
Tritico Saranathan, a charge nurse on
one of Methodist’s virus wards, said she
had noticed that patients were younger
than those first hit by the coronavirus
several months ago. “We’re seeing a lot
of people in their 30s — they’re out there
partying and not wearing their masks,”
she said. “As soon as the city opened up,
they were very eager to go to the bars, to
the clubs, to the restaurants, just to hang
out in groups. And no one was social dis-
tancing or wearing a mask.”
“What I’m seeing is that they’re pretty
sick — the younger ones are pretty sick,”
she said. “They’re struggling a lot with
respiratory issues. They’re having a
hard time breathing,” she added, “just
feeling like death.”
One of the newest coronavirus pa-
tients, Jessica Rios, 36, a mother of four
with pneumonia, was transferred to
Houston Methodist by ambulance from
an urgent care center on Saturday. She
said her husband was being treated in
the hospital, too. She worried about her
children and was frequently using Face-
Time to call them. Her 18-year-old was
looking after her 12-year-old, who has se-
vere asthma and has also tested positive
for the virus, and 5-year-old twins, one of
whom has cerebral palsy and has tested
positive, too. “It’s kind of hard to be here
when I have them at home struggling,”
she said.
Ms. Rios had not been out partying.
She said she thought she had contracted
the coronavirus while working as a clerk
in a dialysis unit for children. She said
that she has allergies that make it diffi-
cult to wear a mask, and that she would
sometimes take her mask off at the unit,
where one child later tested positive for
the virus. “I couldn’t tell you if every time
I talked to her I had a mask on,” she said.
In another room nearby was Curtis
Ezell, 37. He had come to the hospital to
be treated for heart failure, but tested
positive for the virus when he had a rou-
tine test upon admission. He sometimes
does deliveries for DoorDash, a food de-
livery service, and recently moved to
Houston, staying at hotels.
He said that he had no idea how he had
contracted the virus, and that he was not
experiencing common symptoms of the
infection. “If you know someone with
Covid, everyone should get tested,” he
said.
An even younger pneumonia patient,
Alexander Nelson-Fryar, 25, was in a
new ward for 15 coronavirus patients
that just opened last week. He said that
he worked training employees at a medi-
cal clinic nearby that sometimes saw vi-
rus patients. Mr. Nelson-Fryar said that
he had worn the same mask at work ev-
ery day, which he would keep in his car,
and that he did not know how he had be-
come infected. “I go there and I go
home,” he said. “I think I got a little un-
lucky.”
He said he feared that people his age
were not taking the illness seriously
enough, as he himself had not. “I thought
younger folks are not going to get symp-
toms; if I do get it, it’s not going to be a
big deal,” he said.
“I don’t understand how I got this
bad,” said Melissa Estrada, 37,
above, receiving oxygen at Houston
Methodist Hospital as she recovered
from Covid-19. Staff at Methodist,
left, including Tritico Saranathan,
center, a charge nurse, and Roberta
L. Schwartz, at right, are preparing
for a peak in two to three weeks.
That was not true in his case. “It hit me
like a truck,” he said. “Even if you are
young and not at risk, it’s pretty scary.”
At Methodist, the majority of the coro-
navirus patients are in designated medi-
cal wards, not in the I.C.U.s.
That might be because of the increas-
ing proportion of younger, healthier pa-
tients. Hospital leaders say they are also
getting better at treating patients, avoid-
ing the need to transfer them to I.C.U.s.
The length of hospital stays for virus pa-
tients at Methodist is about a day and a
half shorter this month than it was in
April and May.
It remains possible that the proportion
of patients in the I.C.U.s could rise, be-
cause of the time lag between when a pa-
tient first gets sick and develops critical
illness.
On Saturday evening, after making
rounds, Dr. Faisal Masud, the medical di-
rector for critical care across all of Hous-
ton Methodist’s hospitals, described the
younger virus patients in the I.C.U.s.
“Typically there are definitely 30-year
olds, 35-year olds,” he said, adding that
the most severely ill young people often
are obese or have medical problems such
as diabetes, kidney disease and high
blood pressure. One young patient was
on an external heart-lung machine
known as ECMO.
During the first surge, Dr. Masud said,
some young virus patients came to the
hospital extremely sick and died soon af-
ter they arrived. Now, he said, they are
coming earlier, but more often.
“I think that there was a sense of being
invincible or this is not their problem,
even if they caught it, no big deal,” he
said. That attitude has changed in the
past few days, he said, including among
his own three daughters, who are all in
their 20s. “They’re now paying atten-
tion,” he said.
Ms. Estrada, the mother of three who
was being treated for the coronavirus,
said she worried that there would be
more patients like her.
“They opened up our city way too
quick — our governor didn’t want to let
the bars be closed and the restaurants
and functions, and they just wanted us to
get back to normal,” she said, adding, “I
knew it was a bad idea.”

Staff are wearing protective gear, left, and receiving thank you cards as cases surge in Houston. Houston Methodist Hospital has repurposed a lab to run tests with machines that can
process up to 1,000 tests a day. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas described the increase in positive tests, to over 13 percent in the past month from under 4 percent, as an “alarm bell.”
MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Allan Adam is the chief of the Dene nation of 1,200 people in northern Alberta, Canada, and is known to “not back down from a fight.” Officers tackled and punched him over an expired license plate.
Canadian Police Officers ‘Shouldn’t Have Picked Me’
Outrage Follows Assault
Of Chief Who Is Fighter
For Indigenous Rights
By CATHERINE PORTER
TORONTO — He survived Canada’s
notoriously abusive schools for Indige-
nous children and went on to lead his
own nation. He battled governments and
oil giants over the pollution of his tradi-
tional territory, garnering him the praise
and admiration of Desmond Tutu, Greta
Thunburg and celebrities like Leonardo
DiCaprio.
But when police officers double-
teamed Allan Adam, the outspoken
leader of one of Canada’s First Nations,
tackling him to the pavement and punch-
ing him over an expired license plate, he
said they treated him as though he were
voiceless and powerless.
“They did it to the chief. Not just any
chief,” said Mr. Adam, the leader of the
Dene nation of 1,200 people in northern
Alberta, which famously fought for its
rights in the midst of an oil boom affect-
ing its territory. He was someone known,
he said, to “not back down from a fight.”
“They shouldn’t have picked me,” Mr.
Adam said in a phone interview from his
home in Fort Chipewyan on remote Lake
Athabasca. “They made a mistake.”
Mr. Adam was charged with assault-
ing a police officer and resisting arrest.
On Wednesday, the charges against him
were dropped.
But videos of the police beating an un-
armed man have prompted not just an in-
vestigation into the officers involved, but
also outrage across Canada, with grow-
ing demands for an overhaul of the coun-
try’s policing system, which imprisons
Indigenous and black people at highly
disproportionate rates.
“We have to seriously open the eyes of
every nonnative Canadian to the reali-
ties that we, as Indigenous people of the
land, have had to live with for decades,”
Mr. Adam said at a news conference last
week.
Mr. Adam was the youngest of 11 chil-
dren. His father was a hunter and trap-
per who supported the family by fishing
and harvesting furs.
Just before his sixth birthday, Mr.
Adam was dropped off at a brick building
on the edge of town: the Holy Angels res-
idential school. His three years there are
still too painful to discuss, he said in the
interview.
The schools, though mostly estab-
lished by religious orders, were used by
the Canadian government for more than
160 years to assimilate Indigenous chil-
dren forcibly, removing them from their
families and cultures.
A national Truth and Reconciliation
Commission declared them tools of “cul-
tural genocide” five years ago in a report
that documented widespread physical
and sexual abuse and thousands of
deaths.
“When I think of residential school, I
think of death, rape and physical abuse,”
said Mr. Adam, who lost fluency in his na-
tive Denesuline language while at the
The casino in Fort McMurray, Alberta, where Mr. Adam was arrested.
school, where he feared being hit for
speaking it.
“Horrific stories I suffered at the
hands of nuns and priests and school-
teachers,” he said.
Mr. Adam said he took up drinking and
smoking at age 9, after leaving. Most of
his classmates from that time, he said,
are dead.
Reconnecting to the land saved his life,
Mr. Adam said.
When he was a child, his parents
would take him out into the boreal forest
for five months a year, teaching him to
fish, trap and hunt.
His father taught him to shoot a moose
Mr. Adam, with daughter Tristan Dashcavich and Freda Courtoreille, his wife, after charges against him were dropped.
during mating season by standing still in
darkness, waiting for the crashing sound
of the animal’s approach.
“Until today, I still can’t master it,” he
said, laughing.
“If it wasn’t for the land, I wouldn’t be
here today,” said Mr. Adam, 53, now a fa-
ther of five and grandfather of 12. He add-
ed, “It taught me to become a human be-
ing again.”
After seventh grade, Mr. Adam left
school, he said, “when the trauma
started coming back.” He worked as a
firefighter and truck driver as well as for
his nation’s housing authority, among
other jobs. He went to prison four times
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMBER BRACKEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
for assault, he said, because he would not
back down from a fight.
“I’ve been run over so many times in
life, I won’t let that happen again,” he
said. “What residential school did to me,
I won’t let that happen to my kids.”
He found his calling once he was
elected to the government of his nation,
which has land in central Canada around
Lake Athabasca and the Athabasca
River.
Four years later, in 2007, he was
elected chief on an economic develop-
ment platform to exploit the nearby up-
river oil sands, which had grown from a
single mine in his childhood to a sprawl-
ing landscape of smokestacks and tail-
ings ponds.
A few weeks after his election, Mr.
Adam attended a town meeting where a
researcher detailed his troubling find-
ings about the local water quality:
heightened levels of carcinogens and
toxic substances like arsenic and mer-
cury.
It echoed a local doctor’s warning
about concerning rates of rare cancers in
the town.
“I thought to myself: ‘Oh, wow. There
goes the economic plan,’” Mr. Adam said.
Soon after, he and his council began
their first lawsuit against the govern-
ment, arguing that recently awarded oil
sands leases in their area be rescinded,
as they had been provided without con-
sulting local Indigenous communities.
They lost the case, but he garnered a
reputation as an outspoken chief who
would not back down.
Over the next decade, he helped start
more than a dozen legal actions, holding
conferences and protests.
“He steps up when he has to,” said
A9
N
Melody Lepine, the director of govern-
ment and industry relations for the
Mikisew Cree First Nation, also based
around Fort Chipewyan. “He has no fear
to do what’s right and be vocal.”
Mr. Adam became a favorite among
people campaigning against pollution
and climate change, of which Canada’s
oil sands became a growing symbol.
Tzeporah Berman first met him in
2008, with the Canadian actress Neve
Campbell.
“What he has consistently done is
bring in the most up-to-date scientific in-
formation on toxins in the air and water
and human health impacts, and bring
them into lawsuits that drag on for dec-
ades,” said Ms. Berman, a Canadian en-
vironmentalist who ran Greenpeace’s
climate and energy campaign. “Mean-
while, development is encroaching fur-
ther and further into their land.”
In 2014, Mr. Adam traveled with Neil
Young on a cross-Canada tour, raising
hundreds of thousands of dollars for his
lawsuits. Soon after, Mr. DiCaprio visited
and offered to fund the community’s wa-
ter monitoring program.
“He wanted me to play a part in his
movie ‘The Revenant,’” Mr. Adam said.
“I said: ‘No, Leo. I’m not going to do it.
I’ve got an election next year.’ ”
“It was a good movie,” Mr. Adam add-
ed. “Long in some parts, but good.”
His activism also made him enemies.
Right-wing media and oil lobby groups
labeled him a “prop.” He was regularly
confronted by angry oil sands workers in
Fort McMurray, his lawyer said, where
Mr. Adam had bought a second home
with the residential school settlement he
had received from the Canadian govern-
ment. There were death threats, Mr.
Adam said.
In 2018, Mr. Adam was criticized for
the opposite reason: signing a deal with
Teck Resources to build the biggest oil
sands mine to date, inside the area he
had long maintained should be pro-
tected.
At the time, he said, he was both heart-
broken and exhausted from fighting the
system, with no tangible results. This
way, at least, his people would get some
benefits and a seat at the table.
Teck withdrew its application earlier
this year, citing an unresolved debate in
Canada over climate change and re-
source extraction.
“If I knew all along, all we had to do to
kill these projects was to agree to them,
we would have agreed a long time ago,”
Mr. Adam said, laughing.
“That’s the gray area he has to dance
in all the time,” said Eriel Deranger, who
was Mr. Adam’s communications coordi-
nator until 2017. “It’s a total hypocrisy
that’s forced upon our nation. ”
Mr. Adam had signed agreements with
mining companies before, in exchange
for financial benefits and environmental
guarantees. That money was put into
projects like a community-owned gro-
cery store in Fort Chipewyan, but also
into a long-term trust he hopes will be
used to buy a new home for his nation.
“Our people will be environmental ref-
ugees,” Mr. Adam said, because the land
will be polluted so badly by the oil indus-
try. “I figure we’ve got 25 years left.”
A10 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Taiwan Celebrates L.G.B.T. Pride for a World Sidelined by a Pandemic

Virus in Check,
Island’s Joy Is Not
By CHRIS HORTON
TAIPEI, Taiwan — With the co-
ronavirus pandemic making large
gatherings impossible in many
places, the biggest Pride events
around the globe were mostly
forced to scale back or move on-
line.
But a march that drew hun-
dreds of people in Taiwan on Sun-
day became both a celebration of
diversity and a testament to the
self-governing island’s ability to
contain the coronavirus.
A giant rainbow flag led a pro-
cession across Liberty Square, a
large plaza in central Taipei, in an
event that Darien Chen, one of the
organizers, said he hoped would
bring comfort to the millions of
people around the world who
could not attend a big gathering
because of the pandemic.
Few participants wore masks,
as Taiwan has only five known co-
ronavirus cases, all of them in
quarantine. Taiwan, which has a
population of 23 million, has re-
corded only 446 infections and
seven deaths since its first case
was reported in January.
After traveling across the
square, marchers posed with a
rainbow flag in front of a memorial
to Chiang Kai-shek, the authori-
tarian ruler who brought martial
law to Taiwan after fleeing Mao
Zedong’s communist revolution in
China in 1949. Mr. Chen screamed
expletives at Chiang’s statue until
going hoarse, as a small number
of police officers watched. PHOTOGRAPHS BY AN RONG XU FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Under martial law, which ended
in 1987, homosexuality was a crim-
The L.G.B.T. Pride march in Taipei, Taiwan, which drew hundreds of people on Sunday, was also a testament to the island’s ability to contain the coronavirus.
inal offense. But Taiwan has since
become a leader of gay rights in a
region where such rights have
lagged, and last year its govern-
ment became the first in Asia to le-
galize same-sex marriage.
“Countries without same-sex
marriage need to maintain the
struggle — their day will eventu-
ally come” said Chi Chia-wei, who
was arrested in 1986 for coming
out as gay. “Here in Asia we’re still
waiting for the second country.”
The parade was planned on
short notice as organizers realized
that there might be no major off-
line events for the 50th anniversa-
ry of the first Gay Pride march, in
New York City, held a year to the
day after the Stonewall Riots be-
gan there. The riots and the march Chi Chia-wei, left, was arrested in 1986 for coming out as gay.
were turning points in the push for Marchers, above, headed for the Chiang Kai-shek memorial.
L.G.B.T. rights.
Taipei Pride — usually held in
late October, when the chance of not unfamiliar to Taiwan. The Chi- of masks to countries around the
storms or typhoons is much lower nese government claims the self- world, including the United
— is East Asia’s largest Pride governing island as its territory, States.
event. It regularly draws L.G.B.T. despite having never ruled it, and “Taiwanese people understand
people from countries where dis- has used its growing global influ- what it’s like to be marginalized,
crimination and unequal treat- ence to isolate and erase Taiwan so we are able to be a very cooper-
ment are far more entrenched. on the international stage. ative and compassionate commu-
Sarah Ondrus, a longtime can’t,” she said. to see Taiwan.” “Black trans lives matter.” The pandemic has increased nity,” Mr. Chen said. “Whether it’s
Taipei resident originally from Or- The parade was Taipei resident The march on Sunday held new “It’s important to use this event Taiwan’s visibility. Sports fans standing up against China alone
egon, said that while she normally Arlene Chen’s first time partici- meaning for Chloé Grolleau, a to bring visibility to Black Lives starved for live competition in the for years or our success during
attended Taipei Pride, she felt es- pating in a Pride event. French citizen who said it was her Matter, and black trans lives,” she lockdown era have sent online the current pandemic, Taiwan has
pecially compelled to march on “I want Taiwan to embrace dif- first Pride event identifying as said. “They’re the most margin- viewership of Taiwan’s profes- been doing our best to be a global
the anniversary. ferences between people,” Ms. queer. Ms. Grolleau carried a fan alized people in the world.” sional baseball league soaring. citizen and show that Taiwan can
“We’re marching for those who Chen said. “And I want the world emblazoned with the message The struggle for recognition is Taiwan has also donated millions help.”

As Racism Protests Persist, A prejudice ingrained

India Grapples With Biases
Long Held Over Skin Tone
By SAMEER YASIR
and JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
NEW DELHI — Throughout
the years she was growing up in
southern India, Christy Jennifer, a
producer with a media house in
the city of Chennai, was trauma-
tized by episodes of prejudice.
As she walked through school
corridors, classmates pointed at
her darker skin and teased her,
she said. Even friends and family
members told her never to wear
black. She said she was constantly
advised on which skin lightening
cream to use, as if the remedy to
this deep-seated social bias lay in
a plastic bottle.
“Every day, my dignity and self-
esteem were reduced to the color
of my skin,” she said. “I felt like a
worthless piece of flesh.”
Colorism, the bias against peo-
ple of darker skin tones, has vexed
India for a long time. It is partly a
product of colonial prejudices, and
it has been exacerbated by caste,
regional differences and Bolly-
wood, the nation’s film industry,
which has long promoted lighter-
skinned heroes.
But America’s intense discus-
sion of race, in the wake of the
killing of George Floyd, seems to
be having some impact here.
This past week, Unilever and
other major international con-
sumer brands, facing accusations
that they were promoting racist
attitudes, said they would remove
labels such as “fair” “white” and
“light” from their products, in-
cluding the skin-lightening
creams that are wildly popular in
India.
At the same time, a big Indian
matchmaking website, Shaadi-
.com, decided to remove a filter
that allowed people to select part-
ners based on skin tone after fac-
ing a backlash from users that be-
gan in North America.
Ms. Jennifer and several other
Indians said these were moves in
the right direction.
“This is a fantastic news — a
steppingstone toward ending col-
orism,” Ms. Jennifer said. “Now
young people won’t feel ashamed
of how they look while growing up
with dark-tone skin.”
For centuries, discrimination
over skin tones has been a feature
of Indian society. Some historians
say it was greatly intensified by
colonialism and a practice by the
British rulers of favoring light-
skinned Indians for government
jobs.
Preferences for light-toned skin
over dark — when it comes to
marriages and some jobs — are
still upending the lives of hun-
dreds of thousands of Indians.
In some families, daughters-in-
law with darker skin are called de-
rogatory names, sometimes
branded with the same words
used for thieves. Students with
dark-toned skin are more fre-
quently bullied in schools.
Such attitudes have spawned a
huge demand in India for whit-
eners and bleaching products.
Shop shelves are crammed with
creams, oils, soaps and serums
promising to lighten skin, and
some are manufactured by the
world’s biggest cosmetic compa-
nies. The king of the market is
Unilever’s Fair & Lovely cream, a
fixture in many Indian households
for decades.
But even before this past week,
the culture had been changing.
Earlier this year, India’s gov-
ernment proposed a law that
would make it illegal to market
products that make false health
claims, including those that prom-
ise to lighten skin.
Kavitha Emmanuel, the direc-
tor of Women of Worth, an organi-
zation in Chennai, started a cam-
paign in 2019 called “Dark Is
Beautiful.” Many young men and
women, she said, have com-
plained to her that their skin tone
is an impediment to social mobil-
ity.
She welcomed the moves by
Unilever and the matchmaking
website Shaadi.com, but said In-
dia was still slow in confronting
such discrimination.
“While movements like Black
Lives Matter have had a profound
impact in the West, in South Asian
countries it is still a long-drawn
battle,” she said.
Ms. Emmanuel said that skin-
tone biases had the greatest im-
pact on marriage and social issues
but that in some fields, including
entertainment, hospitality and
modeling, “the qualification goes
without saying that you need to be
fair-skinned, particularly for
women.”
Other commentators, though,
insisted that colorism in India is
different from racism in the West.
“The preference for lighter skin
is largely aesthetic and does not
have structural economic or
power consequences,” said Di-
pankar Gupta, a well-known soci-
ologist.
“It is not as if a policeman would
routinely harass darker-skinned
SANJEEV GUPTA/EPA, VIA SHUTTERSTOCK
people,” Mr. Gupta added. “Indi-
ans can recognize class and status
through a number of markers, but
skin color is not one of them.”
Still, across India, there is great
social pressure for people to seek
light-skinned spouses.
Mohinder Verma, a business-
man, defended placing an ad in a
newspaper in which he sought for
his son a “tall, good-looking” bride
with “fair skin” who has a univer-
sity degree but prefers to be a
stay-at-home wife.
Mr. Verma, 72, said parents in
India felt pressure within their so-
cial circles to find brides for their
sons who look “gori,” or fair, al-
though he agreed that “this think-
ing needs to change.”
“It’s somehow ingrained in our
minds,” said Mr. Verma, who lives
in the northern Indian state of
Punjab. “When you have a dark-
skinned daughter-in-law, people
talk behind your back. They ask
what wrong had we committed in
our previous life.”
A 2017 study of 1,992 Indians
found that more than half said
they were influenced by TV ad-
vertisements to appear lighter-
skinned.
“Indian preference for lighter
skins is a reflection of the success-
ful branding of white skin as supe-
CHRISTY JENNIFER
Christy Jennifer, above, says
she was teased as a child for
her skin color. Left, a woman
receiving a skin-lightening
treatment in Bhopal, India.
rior,” said Deepa Narayan, a com-
mentator on gender issues in In-
dia.
Ms. Narayan, who recently pub-
lished a book on how women are
treated in India, said Bollywood
had contributed to these preju-
dices.
“Every heroine and now heroes,
too, are whitewashed,” she said.
“And the villains are dark.”
For decades, matrimonial ads
in Indian newspapers displayed a
preference for lighter skin, re-
inforcing entrenched beliefs
partly rooted in India’s stubborn
caste system. Many Indians be-
lieve that lower caste people are
darker.
Social scientists say that there
is no direct relationship between
caste and skin color, but that this
perception might have been per-
petuated by a long history of
lower-caste people being relegat-
ed to menial jobs, often performed
under the sun, that made their
skin darker.
The debate over skin color bias
flared into the open after a few
women of Indian descent started a
petition drive against Shaadi.com,
the matchmaking service, which
claims to have delivered “millions
of happy stories.”
Meghan Nagpal, who lives in
by colonialism, caste
and beauty ideals.
Vancouver, British Columbia, said
that four days after the killing of
Mr. Floyd in Minneapolis, she vis-
ited Shaadi.com and was struck
by the filter that categorized
prospects based on skin tone.
She flagged the issue with the
website but got no response. She
then posted about it on Facebook,
which led Hetal Lakhani, a Dallas
resident, to open an online peti-
tion, which quickly garnered more
than 1,500 signatures. The com-
pany then removed the filter.
Ms. Nagpal said that when she
was younger, she used skin-light-
ening products.
“It was like buying jeans of size
8 when you want 10,” said Ms.
Nagpal, 28, a graduate student
who was born in Canada. “You are
never comfortable with it.”
Ms. Jennifer, the media
producer in Chennai, has spent
her adult life struggling with con-
cepts of beauty and the role of skin
color.
When she lived in Tirunelveli, in
southern India, people gave her
unsolicited advice all the time on
how to look lighter-skinned. She
then moved to Chennai, one of In-
dia’s biggest cities, and met a man
on a dating website who, she said,
was a little lighter skinned than
she is. They chatted online for
months, and she eventually trav-
eled to meet him in person.
They went to dinner, they talked
future plans, they shared laughs,
and a warmth grew between
them, she said.
But the next day, right before
she headed home, the man turned
to her and asked: “Can you do
something about your dark skin?”
Ms. Jennifer, now 42, immedi-
ately ended the relationship.
“A family wants their daughter-
in-law to be fair-skinned, even if
their son might not be?” she said.
“I would rather die than marry
someone who judges me by my
looks.”
 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N A11

Majestic Icon or Invasive Pest? A War Over Australia’s Wild Horses

By LIVIA ALBECK-RIPKA
and MATTHEW ABBOTT
ANGLERS REST, Australia —
Coming over the rise, Philip Ma-
guire gripped the mane of his
white gelding and rose on his
heels to survey the bush land. He
had hoped to be photographed
mustering wild horses, but the an-
imals weren’t playing along.
“They were sitting up there on
that ridge,” Mr. Maguire said of
the horses, now spooked by the
human intrusion. “They’ll come
back,” he huffed. “I’ll run them
again.”
Mr. Maguire, a 60-year-old cat-
tleman, is leading a campaign to
prevent the Australian authorities
from culling the wild horses,
known as brumbies. The clash
traces some of the country’s big-
gest fault lines, including its ur-
ban-rural divide and the legacy of
colonialism.
To scientists and the politicians
who support the policy, culling is a
matter of environmental protec-
tion. The horses, an invasive
species whose populations are
booming, must be removed be-
cause they are trampling ancient
ecosystems in the Australian Alps
already hurt by climate change,
they say.
To Mr. Maguire and his follow-
ers, the fight is about a way of life
they perceive to be under threat.
They see brumbies, the descend-
ants of horses introduced by Euro-
pean settlers, as symbols of a rug-
ged individualism that they be-
lieve is being lost in modern Aus-
tralia.
“It’s a culture war,” Mr. Maguire
said last month as he searched in
vain for the horses.
A burly man, he wore a brown
waterproof coat faded by years of
wear. “This is my heritage,” he
said. “All our culture is gone, by
people saying anything that’s not
native is not good.”
He was referring to the animals,
though he may well have had peo-
ple in mind, too.
Mr. Maguire’s lobbying for the
brumbies is part of a backlash to a
growing movement in Australia to
correct historical narratives that
cast white settlers as conquering
an “empty” and untilled conti-
nent. Instead, there is now broad
acceptance of Indigenous people’s
careful guardianship of the land
for tens of thousands of years, be-
fore their territories and culture
were stolen.
These efforts have been buoyed
recently by the protests against
racism in the United States, which
have inspired activists around the
Riders set out last month to find wild horses called brumbies in Alpine National Park in Australia.
world to tear down symbols of co-
lonialism.
Still, some Australians find it
difficult “to recognize the dispos-
session and genocide of Indige-
nous Australians,” said James Pit-
tock, a professor of environmental
science at the Australian National
University in Canberra. The
brumby, he said, is a kind of “talis-
man” for those holding on to na-
tionalist visions of Australia’s his-
tory.
In Australia, rural residents,
who make up less than 30 percent
of the population, have often been
at odds with city dwellers and ur-
ban politicians, seeing them as out
of touch and incompetent in their
management of the bush. Brumby
activists have taken action by lob-
bying for political favor in some
states, where they have won pro-
tections for the horses.
In New South Wales, which is
led by the center-right Liberal
Party, former politicians with fi-
nancial interests in tourism oper-
ations that depend on the
brumbies helped drive a 2018 bill
protecting the feral horses.
The move by the state, Austral-
ia’s most populous, dismayed Aus-
tralian and international scien-
tists, who said it would set a “dis-
turbing precedent.”
In the state of Victoria, which
has a center-left Labor govern-
ment, officials say they intend to
proceed with culling hundreds of
horses after Mr. Maguire lost a le-
gal battle there. He says he will
take his fight to Australia’s high-
est court.
Still, to many Australians,
brumbies are majestic, untamed
creatures that live in children’s
books, poetry and films. But leav-
ing them to thrive in the bush, sci-
entists say, would come at the ex-
pense of creatures and plants far
more precious and rare.
“Our native animals are our
brothers and sisters,” said Rich-
ard Swain, an Indigenous alpine
guide who advises the Invasive
Species Council, a conservation
group. “It’s really, really, heart-
breaking,” he added of the dam-
age done by the horses.
In Australia’s alpine region,
thousands of the feral horses
trample fragile moss beds, dam-
age the sources of major river sys-
tems and harm the habitats of ani-
mals found nowhere else in the
world — systems that are strug-
gling to recover from last sum-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW ABBOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES mer’s unprecedented bush fires.
Last year, a survey of the region
showed that the horse population
had more than doubled in density
in a five-year period. Claims by
brumby activists that the animals
are simply a scapegoat for dam-
age done by wild deer and pigs do
not hold up against extensive
studies of the region, the scien-
tists add.
“The evidence for this is not in
dispute,” said David M. Watson, a
professor of ecology at Charles
Sturt University, south of Sydney,
who quit his job advising the New
South Wales government on man-
aging the horses because he be-
lieved the science was being ig-
nored.
A general distrust of science,
fed by disinformation from the
conservative media, has deep-
Brumbies in the Snowy Mountains region of New South Wales
ened rural Australia’s divide with
last year. Cara Maguire’s father is fighting the culling of the horses. the country’s urban areas. Of Mr.
Maguire, Dr. Watson said: “Who
do you put up against that person
on a podium? Some crusty scien-
tist with a clipboard?”
He and other scientists ac-
knowledge that the culling is an
ugly task to save other species,
like the corroboree frog and the
broad-toothed rat — which are
found nowhere else in the world —
from extinction.
“This is not about vilifying
horses,” Dr. Watson said. But the
stakes are immensely high, he
added, when plants that have sur-
vived hundreds of millions of
years in the harshest conditions
are at risk of being wiped out in fa-
vor of the descendants of a com-
mon farm animal.
“In the blink of an eye, a couple
of cowboys come in, wave their
whips around, everyone gets all
misty-eyed, and those lineages
are relegated to the dustbin,” he
said.
Many brumby activists argue
that the animals should be cap-
tured and moved to sanctuaries
instead of being killed. In the
United States, park authorities
spend more than $50 million an-
nually to manage booming mus-
tang populations, which are pro-
tected from culling by federal law.
“We can catch them, that’s no
problem,” said Lewis Benedetti, a
horse tamer from Mount Taylor,
about 175 miles from Melbourne,
who has previously mustered the
feral horses on contract with the
state authorities and who advo-
cates finding new homes for them.
Mr. Benedetti leapt onto the
bare back of a brumby he had
tamed to show how placid the ani-
mal was. “They want to shoot
them,” he said. “Doesn’t that make
you upset?”
While it may be possible to
move the horses to sanctuaries in
small numbers, these programs
are difficult to scale up, experts
say, especially without adequate
funding, as the out-of-control
mustang numbers in the United
States show.
In late May, Mr. Benedetti and a
handful of other activists gath-
ered at Mr. Maguire’s property,
from which they made their way
on horseback toward the foothills
of the Australian Alps. They said
they planned to round up the
brumbies and take them to safety
on his land.
All around, the bush was deci-
mated: Buds sprang from tree
trunks blackened by the recent
fires, while other trees were top-
pled entirely. Nearly all that re-
mained of moss beds were muddy
puddles — the impact, scientists
say, of the recent fires, as well as
hard-hooved horses trampling a
landscape accustomed to native
soft-footed creatures like kanga-
roos.
Leading the group toward a cat-
tleman’s hut built by his great-un-
cle, Mr. Maguire began to recite
the poetry of Banjo Paterson, an
Australian author and journalist
who documented the decline of
pastoralism and, along with it, a
wild Australia.
“Australia has lost its affinity
for the bush,” Mr. Maguire said,
echoing Paterson in his own
words. “We’ve become a different
kind of people.”

Poland Likely Faces a Runoff Vote for President

By MARC SANTORA
WARSAW — Poland’s presi-
dent, Andrzej Duda, fell short of
securing a majority of the vote
Sunday in Europe’s first socially
distanced election, exit polls
showed, forcing a runoff vote in
two weeks against the second-
place finisher, Mayor Rafal Trza-
skowski of Warsaw.
Poles turned out in droves, de-
spite several obstacles. These in-
cluded sweltering heat, lingering
concerns about the spread of the
coronavirus and long lines as
polling stations gave each voter a
zone of personal space three feet
in all directions.
Both leading candidates ac-
knowledged that they will be in a
runoff, after exit polls showed Mr.
Duda receiving about 41 percent
of the vote and Mr. Trzaskowski
about 30 percent; no official re-
sults will be released until Mon-
day.
Nine other candidates repre-
senting a wide range of views,
from the far right to the ultralib-
eral, were also on the ballot. Politi-
cal analysts and public opinion
polls predict that most of their
support will go to Mr. Trza-
skowski, making the July 12 runoff
extremely close.
Mr. Trzaskowski promises to
draw the country closer the Euro-
pean Union, protect the rights of
the L.G.B.T. community, whose
members are often targets of the
government, and veto laws that
he says pose a threat to Poland’s
democratic institutions.
“It will be the choice between an
open Poland and Poland looking
for an enemy,” he told supporters
on Sunday night. Mr. Trzaskowski
reached out not only to those who
do not like the country’s direction,
but also to those who might have
supported Law and Justice in the
past, saying his goal was to unite
the country.
Mr. Duda has attacked homo-
sexuality as an ideology compara-
ble to communism. His campaign
has been was defined by singling
out the L.G.B.T. community for
the kind of vitriol that was di-
rected at migrants five years ago,
when immigration helped fuel the
rise of populist leaders across the
continent.
“I’d like to thank all my compa-
triots for the turnout, for the high
participation in the elections,” Mr.
Duda said after the polls closed.
He said he looked forward to
meeting Mr. Trzaskowski in the
runoff and was confident in his vi-
sion for Poland.
“Family is the future, security is
Anatol Magdziarz contributed re-
porting.
the future, work is the future, in-
vestment is the future, dignity is
the future,” he said. “We don’t
have a doubt that this is what Po-
land needs in the coming years.”
In many ways, the election was
a referendum on the governing
Law and Justice Party, which
swept to power in 2015 and set out
an ambitious agenda to reshape
the state. For opponents of the na-
tionalist government, the party
represents a fundamental threat
to democracy and has set the
country on a course already
charted in Hungary, where single-
party control has allowed a steady
drift toward autocratic rule.
But even as old divisions de-
fined much of the debate before
the election, it played out against a
very different backdrop, the coro-
navirus pandemic.
Voting, originally scheduled for
May, was postponed and a raft of
measures were put in place to en-
sure voters felt safe going to the
polls.
Voters were told to bring their
An 11-candidate field
will narrow to 2, with
an election on July 12.
own pens. Masks were required
for anyone entering a polling sta-
tion in Warsaw and other Polish
cities. And doors remained open
so people did not have to touch the
handles.
Poland was one of the first na-
tions to close its borders, and
when it locked down in March, it
did so completely. Military police
were even dispatched to the
streets to make sure people did
not break the rules.
It was also one of the first na-
tions in Europe to ease coro-
navirus restrictions; on May 20,
the mandatory order to wear
masks in public was lifted. Just
about everything that was open
before the pandemic has re-
opened, including gyms, restau-
rants and movie theaters.
With just 285 new Covid-19
cases reported on Friday, the re-
opening has not led to major
spikes in new infections. So far,
there have been about 34,000 con-
firmed cases and more than 1,400
total deaths — smaller figures, rel-
ative to Poland’s population, than
most European countries.
On Friday night in Warsaw’s
Old Town Square, outside the
Royal Castle that once housed Po-
land’s monarchs and was rebuilt
brick by brick after its destruction
in World War II, several hundred
people gathered to hear Mr. Trza-
skowski’s final campaign speech.
“If we lose it’s going to be dread-
ful,” said one supporter, Agata
Rzeszewska. “Democracy is go-
ing to end.”
Magda Szczawinska worried
that if the governing party lost, it
might use the pandemic to chal-
lenge the results.
“I’m very much worried,” she
said. She feared the government
would declare a state of emer-
gency and delay a runoff election
to buy time if it looked as if it
would lose.
The election is widely viewed as
one of the most important in the
history of this young democracy,
which held its first, partially free,
elections in 1989. The Allure of 18kt Gold
Mr. Duda is not technically a
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In fact, the Polish president has Perfect for anything from a day in the
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Mr. Kaczynski was often frus-
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2015, he has eroded the independ-
ence of the judiciary, moving to
undo what he sees as the mistakes
of the early years of Polish democ-
racy.
Legal experts from the Euro-
pean Commission have found that
many changes Mr. Kaczynski has
advocated pose a threat to judicial
fairness and undermine demo-
cratic values.
The fight over the courts is just
one of several pitched battles with
the European Union. Mr. Kaczyn-
ski has often cast those battles as
fights for Polish sovereignty.
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A12 N THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Cash Discovery Tipped Off Spies to Russian Bounties on U.S. Troops
From Page A1
war there in the 1980s. “This is to-
tally outrageous. You would think
that the minute the president
heard of it, he would want to know
more instead of denying that he
knew anything.”
Spokespeople for the C.I.A., the
director of national intelligence
and the Pentagon declined to com-
ment on the new findings. A Na-
tional Security Council spokes-
man, John L. Ullyot, said in a
statement on Sunday night, “The
veracity of the underlying allega-
tions continues to be evaluated.”
One senior administration offi-
cial offered a new explanation on
Sunday, saying that Mr. Trump
was not briefed because the intel-
ligence agencies had come to no
consensus on the findings. But an-
other official said there was broad
agreement that the intelligence
assessment was accurate, with
some complexities because differ-
ent aspects of the intelligence —
including interrogations and sur-
veillance data — resulted in some
differences among agencies in
how much confidence to put in
each type.
Though the White House press
secretary, Kayleigh McEnany,
claimed on Saturday that Mr.
Trump had not been briefed about
the intelligence report, one Amer-
ican official had told The Times
that the report was briefed to the
highest levels of the White House.
Another said it was included in the
President’s Daily Brief, a compen-
dium of foreign policy and na-
tional security intelligence com-
piled for Mr. Trump to read.
Ms. McEnany did not challenge
The Times’s reporting on the ex-
istence of the intelligence assess-
ment, a National Security Council
interagency meeting about it in
late March and the White House’s
inaction. Multiple other news or-
ganizations also subsequently re-
ported on the assessment.
The officials briefed on the mat-
ter said that the assessment had
been treated as a closely held se-
cret but that the administration
expanded briefings about it over
the last week — including sharing
information about it with the
British government, whose forces
were among those said to have
been targeted.
Republicans in Congress de-
manded more information from
the Trump administration about
what happened and how the
White House planned to respond.
Representative Liz Cheney of
Wyoming, the third-ranking
House Republican, said in a Twit-
ter post on Sunday: “If reporting
about Russian bounties on U.S.
forces is true, the White House
Reporting was contributed by Ju-
lian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage,
Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Michael
Schwirtz and Michael D. Shear.
With Flights Banned, Sailor Relies on Sea
For 85-Day Journey to Family in Argentina
By DANIEL POLITI
BUENOS AIRES — Days after
Argentina canceled all interna-
tional passenger flights to shield
the country from the new coro-
navirus, Juan Manuel Ballestero
began his journey home the only
way possible: He stepped aboard
his small sailboat for what turned
out to be an 85-day odyssey across
the Atlantic.
The 47-year-old sailor could
have stayed put on the tiny Por-
tuguese island of Porto Santo, to
ride out the era of lockdowns and
social distancing in a scenic place
largely spared by the virus. But
the idea of spending what he
thought could be “the end of the
world” away from his family, espe-
cially his father who was soon to
turn 90, was unbearable.
So he said he loaded his 29-foot
sailboat with canned tuna, fruit
and rice and set sail in mid-March.
“I didn’t want to stay like a cow-
ard on an island where there were
no cases,” Mr. Ballestero said. “I
wanted to do everything possible
to return home. The most impor-
tant thing for me was to be with
my family.”
The coronavirus pandemic has
upended life in virtually every
country on the planet, gutting the
global economy, exacerbating
geopolitical tension and halting
most international travel.
A particularly painful aspect of
this awful era has been the inabili-
ty of an untold number of people to
rush home to help ailing loved
ones and to attend funerals.
Friends tried to dissuade Mr.
Ballestero from embarking on the
perilous journey, and the authori-
ties in Portugal warned him he
might not be allowed to re-enter if
he ran into trouble and had to turn
back. But he was resolute.
“I bought myself a one-way
ticket and there was no going
back,” he said.
His relatives, used to Mr.
Ballestero’s itinerant lifestyle,
knew better than to try to talk him
out of it.
“The uncertainty of not know-
Ernesto Londoño contributed re-
porting.
An American helicopter over Afghanistan last year. Bounty hunting was “well known” in the intelligence community, officials said.
Russia’s leader, Vladimir V. Putin, is accused of a “shadow war.”
must explain: 1. Why weren’t the
president or vice president
briefed? Was the info in the PDB?
2. Who did know and when? 3.
What has been done in response
to protect our forces & hold Putin
accountable?”
Multiple Republicans re-
tweeted Ms. Cheney’s post. Rep-
resentative Daniel Crenshaw, Re-
publican of Texas and a former
member of the Navy SEALs, am-
plified her message, tweeting,
“We need answers.”
In a statement in response to
questions, Senator Mitch McCon-
nell of Kentucky, the majority
ing where he was for 50-some
days was very rough,” said his fa-
ther, Carlos Alberto Ballestero.
“But we had no doubt this was go-
ing to turn out well.”
Sailing across the Atlantic in a
small boat is challenging in the
best of circumstances. The added
difficulties of doing it during a
pandemic became clear three
weeks into the trip.
On April 12, the authorities in
Cape Verde refused to allow him
to dock at the island nation to re-
stock his supply of food and fuel,
Mr. Ballestero said.
Hoping he still had enough food
Turning his back on
the relative calm of
Portuguese waters.
to carry him through, he turned
his boat west. With less fuel than
he hoped for, he’d be more at the
mercy of the winds.
He was no stranger to spending
long stretches of time at sea, but
being alone on the open ocean is
daunting to even the most experi-
enced sailor.
Days into the journey, he be-
came panicked by the light of a
ship that he thought was trailing
him and seemed to be approach-
ing closer and closer.
“I started going as fast as possi-
ble,” Mr. Ballestero said. “I
thought, if it gets very close, I’ll
shoot.”
Seafaring is a Ballestero family
tradition.
From the time he was 3, his fa-
ther took him aboard the fishing
vessels he captained.
When he turned 18, he took a job
on a fishing boat in southern Ar-
gentina. Off the coast of Patago-
nia, one of the most experienced
fishermen aboard gave him a
piece of advice that would become
a way of life.
“Go see the world,” the fisher-
man said.
And so he did.
Mr. Ballestero has spent much
POOL PHOTO BY ALEXEI NIKOLSKY
leader, said he had long warned
about Russia’s work to undermine
American interests in the Middle
East and southwest Asia and
noted that he wrote an amend-
ment last year rebuking Mr.
Trump’s withdrawal of forces
from Syria and Afghanistan.
“The United States needs to pri-
oritize defense resources, main-
tain a sufficient regional military
presence and continue to impose
serious consequences on those
who threaten us and our allies —
like our strikes in Syria and Af-
ghanistan against ISIS, the Tal-
iban and Russian mercenary
of his life sailing, with stops in
Venezuela, Sri Lanka, Bali, Ha-
waii, Costa Rica, Brazil, Alaska
and Spain.
He has tagged sea turtles and
whales for conservation organiza-
tions and spent summers working
as a skipper aboard boats owned
by wealthy Europeans.
He bought his sailboat, an
Ohlson 29 named the Skua, in 2017,
hoping to take it on a loop around
the world. It proved up to the task
of traversing an ocean on a planet
plunged into crisis mode.
“I wasn’t afraid, but I did have a
lot of uncertainty,” he said. “It was
very strange to sail in the middle
of a pandemic with humanity tee-
tering around me.”
Sailing can be a lonely passion,
and it was particularly so on this
voyage for Mr. Ballestero, who
each night tuned into the news on
a radio for 30 minutes to take
stock of how the virus was rip-
pling across the globe.
“I kept thinking about whether
this would be my last trip,” he said.
The expansiveness of the ocean
notwithstanding, Mr. Ballestero
felt he was in a quarantine of sorts,
imprisoned by an unrelenting
stream of foreboding thoughts
about what the future held.
“I was locked up in my own free-
dom,” he recalled.
On a particularly trying day, he
turned to a bottle of whiskey for
solace. But drinking only in-
creased his anxiety. With his
nerves frayed, Mr. Ballestero said
he found himself praying and re-
setting his relationship with God.
“Faith keeps you standing in
these situations,” he said. “I
learned about myself; this voyage
gave me lots of humility.”
Several weeks into the trip,
when his spirits were low, Mr.
Ballestero said he was buoyed by
wildlife sightings that felt like
omens.
He found solace in a pod of dol-
phins that swam alongside his
boat, on and off, for some 2,000
miles.
“They would go and come
back,” he said. “And one day, they
seemed to say goodbye.”
During a day when he had
drunk heavily, he spotted a large
forces that threatened our part-
ners,” Mr. McConnell said.
Aides for other top Republicans
either declined to comment or did
not respond to requests for com-
ment on Sunday, including Repre-
sentative Kevin McCarthy of Cali-
fornia, the top House Republican;
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida,
the acting chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee; and Sen-
ator Jim Risch of Idaho, the chair-
man of the Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee.
In addition to saying he was
never “briefed or told” about the
intelligence report — a formula-
tion that went beyond the White
House denial of any formal brief-
ing — Mr. Trump also cast doubt
on the assessment’s credibility,
which statements from his subor-
dinates had not.
Specifically, he described the in-
telligence report as being about
“so-called attacks on our troops in
Afghanistan by Russians”; the re-
port described bounties paid to
Taliban militants by Russian mili-
tary intelligence officers, not di-
rect attacks. Mr. Trump also sug-
gested that the developments
could be a “hoax” and questioned
whether The Times’s sources —
government officials who spoke
on the condition of anonymity —
existed.
Mr. Trump then pivoted to at-
tack former Vice President Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr., who criticized
Juan Manuel Ballestero in Mar del Plata, Argentina. He Left the island of Porto Santo in April.
Mr. Ballestero, left, with his brother and their 90-year-old father.
bird cruising nearby. It turned out
to be a skua, the bird his boat is
named after.
“It was as if the bird was telling
me not to give up, to keep going,”
he said.
One day, when he tired of
canned food, Mr. Ballestero got a
fishing rod and scanned a school
of mahi-mahi. But he had a sudden
reluctance to cast out a line.
JIM HUYLEBROEK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
the president on Saturday for fail-
ing to punish Russia for offering
bounties to the Taliban, as well as
Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, who is the
target of unsubstantiated claims
that he helped a Ukrainian energy
firm curry favor with the Obama
administration when his father
was vice president.
“Nobody’s been tougher on
Russia than the Trump Adminis-
tration,” Mr. Trump tweeted.
“With Corrupt Joe Biden &
Obama, Russia had a field day,
taking over important parts of
Ukraine — Where’s Hunter?”
American officials said the Rus-
sian plot to pay bounties to Tal-
iban fighters came into focus over
the past several months after in-
telligence analysts and Special
Operations forces put together
key pieces of evidence.
One official said the seizure of a
large amount of American cash at
one Taliban site got “everybody’s
attention” in Afghanistan. It was
not clear when the money was re-
covered.
Two officials said the informa-
tion about the bounty hunting was
“well known” among the intelli-
gence community in Afghanistan,
including the C.I.A.’s chief of sta-
tion and other top officials there,
like the military commandos
hunting the Taliban. The informa-
tion was distributed in intelli-
gence reports and highlighted in
some of them.
JUAN MANUEL BALLESTERO
“I didn’t want to kill one. It felt
like killing a person,” he said. “I
used to be a fisherman but after
that experience it’s hard for me to
kill now.”
He went back to eating canned
tuna.
When he was approaching the
Americas, a brutal wave rattled
the boat some 150 miles from
Vitória, Brazil, he said. That
The assessment was compiled
and sent up the chain of command
to senior military and intelligence
officials, eventually landing at the
highest levels of the White House.
The Security Council meeting in
March came at a delicate time, as
the coronavirus pandemic was be-
coming a crisis and prompting
shutdowns around the country.
A former American official said
the intelligence analyst who briefs
the president and the national se-
curity adviser, Robert C. O’Brien,
working with his chief of staff,
Mark Meadows, would have been
involved in any decision to brief
Mr. Trump on Russia’s activities.
The director of the C.I.A., Gina
Haspel, might have also weighed
in, the former official said.
Ms. McEnany cited all three of
those senior officials in her state-
ment saying the president had not
been briefed.
National security officials have
tracked Russia’s relationship with
the Taliban for years and deter-
mined that Moscow has provided
financial and material support to
senior and regional Taliban lead-
ers.
While Russia has at times co-
operated with the United States
and appeared interested in Af-
ghan stability, it often seems to
work at crosscurrents with its
own national interest if the result
is damage to American national
interests, said a former senior
Trump White House official, who
spoke on the condition of ano-
nymity to discuss sensitive secu-
rity assessments.
Revenge is also a factor in Rus-
sia’s support for the Taliban, the
official said. Russia has been keen
to even the scales after a bloody
confrontation in 2018 in Syria,
when a massive U.S. counter-
attack killed hundreds of Syrian
forces along with Russian merce-
naries nominally supported by
the Kremlin.
“They are keeping a score
sheet, and they want to punish us
for that incident,” the official said.
Both Russia and the Taliban
have denied the American intelli-
gence assessment.
John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s for-
mer national security adviser,
said on “This Week” that he was
not aware of the intelligence as-
sessment, but he questioned Mr.
Trump’s response on Twitter.
“What would motivate the pres-
ident to do that, because it looks
bad if Russians are paying to kill
Americans and we’re not doing
anything about it?” Mr. Bolton
said. “The presidential reaction is
to say: ‘It’s not my responsibility.
Nobody told me about it.’ And
therefore to duck any complaints
that he hasn’t acted effectively.”
Mr. Bolton said this summed up
Mr. Trump’s decision-making on
national security issues. “It’s just
unconnected to the reality he’s
dealing with.”
VICENTE ROBLES/ASSOCIATED PRESS
episode forced him to make an un-
planned pit stop in Vitória, adding
about 10 days to a trip he had ex-
pected to take 75 days.
During that stop, Mr. Ballestero
learned that his brother had told
reporters in Argentina about the
voyage, which enthralled people
who were bored and cooped up at
home. At the urging of friends, he
created an Instagram account to
document the final leg of the trip.
When he made it to his native
Mar del Plata, on June 17, he was
startled by the hero’s welcome he
received.
“Entering my port where my fa-
ther had his sailboat, where he
taught me so many things and
where I learned how to sail and
where all this originated, gave me
the taste of a mission accom-
plished,” he said.
A medical professional adminis-
tered a test for Covid-19 on the
dock. Within 72 hours, after the
test came back negative, he was
allowed to set foot on Argentine
soil.
While he didn’t get to celebrate
his father’s 90th birthday in May,
he did make it home in time for Fa-
ther’s Day.
“What I lived is a dream,” Mr.
Ballestero said. “But I have a
strong desire to keep on sailing.”
MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 A13
K N

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

Celebrating L.G.B.T.Q. pride outside the Stonewall Inn on Sunday. In 1970, what is now considered the first Pride parade came on the first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.

At 50, New York’s Big Fete of Pride Is Pared Back

By MIHIR ZAVERI an estimated 5 million people to the city.
and MICHAEL GOLD As the Pride parade has grown from its
Not six months ago, the idea of this year’s more rebellious roots to a mainstream sum-
Pride March in New York City, on the 50th mer event, a segment of the L.G.B.T.Q. com-
anniversary of the first parade, would have munity has increasingly complained that
conjured images of colorful floats, elaborate the event has become too bloated, commer-
costumes and hundreds of thousands of rev- cial and bureaucratic.
elers packed into city streets. Last year, the Reclaim Pride Coalition or-
But the festivities on Sunday barely re- ganized a competing march for that same
sembled those of years past, drawing far day that was meant to hew more closely to
fewer participants and bearing the hall- the political aims of the initial Christopher
marks of a year rocked by turmoil. Street Liberation Day March.
One procession of several dozen people They raised concerns that the inclusion of
and five rainbow-colored BMWs began in the uniformed police effectively marginalized
Flatiron section of Manhattan and headed transgender people and racial minorities,
south toward the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich who have long held that they were unfairly
Village. Organizers, including members of targeted and victimized by law enforcement
N.Y.C. Pride, which runs official Pride events — a concern that has new relevance this
for the city, actively encouraged people to year after weeks of protests against police
stay away. Some signs read, “Stay Safe, Stay brutality and systemic racism in New York
Home Stay Proud.” City.
A separate event, the Queer Liberation One attendee at this year’s Queer Libera-
March, began later at Foley Square and tion March, Richard Baskin Jr., fanned him-
headed north toward Stonewall. The march, self with one sign that read “REPARA-
which drew more than 1,000 vocal demon- TIONS” and another that read, “BLACK
strators, focused on protesting police brutal- TRANS LIVES MATTER.”
ity and racism, inspired by weeks of similar “Since we’re not going to work, you know,
demonstrations nationwide. might as well be safe and come out here and
“This moment has to be seized, and we demonstrate,” Mr. Baskin said. “You know
have to keep pushing things forward,” said we read about this in high school and middle
Jay W. Walker, co-founder of the Reclaim school and I’ve been learning about it since
Pride Coalition and an organizer of the elementary school, but this is our opportu-
march. nity to change the status quo now.”
For about 10 minutes, after those marchers Mr. Baskin, 29, who lives in Harlem, said
gathered at Washington Square Park, a con- CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES he never goes to the city’s commercial Pride
frontation erupted between demonstrators celebrations.
and the police, with pushing and shoving. “I don’t feel like I’m represented, and I’m
Videos posted online showed the police push- not going to sit up here and have arguments
ing through the crowd on motorcycles, as one with anybody on it,” Mr. Baskin said. “I just
officer was knocked to the ground. Pro- celebrate who I am.”
testers said the police used pepper spray. It But for him, and many others, the Queer
was not immediately clear what sparked the Liberation March felt different.
conflict and whether there were any injuries
“We’re doing something, it’s not just like,
or arrests, but the tension quickly dissipated.
‘We’re all gay and we’re proud,’ ” Baskin
The pandemic and the recent protests said. “It’s got a little muscle on it.”
sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a
Victor Pickens, from Harlem, led chants
black man who died in police custody in Min-
in the crowd as the march moved up Sixth
neapolis, transformed festivities in New York
Avenue. He felt the risk was worth it.
City.
“Luckily I’m in good health: I’m 20 years
“We can’t be together, and we’re pained by
that right now, but there’s a tremendous old and I don’t have asthma; I don’t have
sense of solidarity in this march,” said Mayor pre-existing health conditions. So I feel as
Bill de Blasio, who made an appearance at though it’s still in my place to fight,” Mr.
the earlier procession in Manhattan. “There Pickens said. “Although I’m concerned
is an added feeling of solidarity going on right about my safety, I’m more concerned about
now with the L.G.B.T.Q. community and with my safety after this pandemic is over and
the black community, a sense of shared how I might be treated by the police.”
struggle.” The earlier procession down Fifth Ave-
This year’s march was set to mark a major nue drew far fewer people.
milestone: the 50th anniversary of the Chris-
AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMES CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES Cathy Renna, a spokeswoman for N.Y.C.
topher Street Liberation Day March, widely Pride, called it a “tiny, symbolic gesture,” in
JUSTICE AND EQUALITY, TOO lieu of the official Pride celebration that was
considered to be New York’s first Pride pa-
rade.
More than 1,000 people canceled in April. At the time, the city was
In that march in 1970, a group of L.G.B.T.Q. marched from Foley still under a strict lockdown, hospitals were
activists staged a rally to commemorate the Square to the Stonewall still flooded with virus patients and hun-
first anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, Inn as part of the Queer dreds of residents were dying daily.
an event that galvanized the modern gay Liberation March, a Pride “We couldn’t let the 50th year go by with-
rights movement. Those who assembled celebration and protest out acknowledging it,” she said. “But we’re
were in many ways staging an act of defi- doing it safely.”
against racism. The Pride
ance. At the time, homosexuality was viewed Harish Karthikeyan, 26, the director of di-
by many as a sin and a sickness; in many
March, downsized be- versity, accessibility and inclusion for N.Y.C.
states, it was a crime. cause of the pandemic, Pride, said that the group encouraged peo-
“What it will all come to no one can tell,” a stretched for about a block ple to “stay home and stay safe” while or-
flyer that announced the march said. “It is and was led by rainbow- ganizers marched on behalf of everyone.
our hope that the day will come when homo- colored BMWs. He added that while he understood why
sexuals will be an integral part of society — celebrations had to be muted this year, he
being treated as human beings.” still missed the “whole shebang” of last
In the 50 years since, the march has year’s celebration.
evolved considerably, into a miles-long pa- The city provided some hoopla Sunday
rade with ornate corporate floats, colorfully night with a five-minute fireworks display
festooned dancers, jubilant music and hordes on the Hudson River in honor of Pride.
of spectators lining the parade route. Last Toward the end of the N.Y.C. Pride proces-
year’s celebration, which marked the 50th sion, which lasted about two hours, dozens
anniversary of the Stonewall rebellion, drew gathered outside the Stonewall Inn. There,
a drag queen posed for photos and a woman
Amr Alfiky, Julia Carmel and Nate Schweber with a Chihuahua held a giant balloon that
contributed reporting. AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMES said “Black Lives Matter.”
A14 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Flynn’s Lawyer Worked to Enlist Allies in High Places
From Page A1
ward a once-obscure lawyer and a powerful
attorney general finding common cause in a
battle to dismantle the legacy of the investi-
gations into President Trump and his allies.
Ms. Powell’s slash-and-burn approach —
accusing the federal law enforcement ma-
chinery of concocting a case against her cli-
ent — failed in the courtroom last year when
a judge rejected her claims. But the same
strategy, which she amplified in frequent
media appearances, succeeded in turning
Mr. Flynn’s case into a cause for Mr.
Trump’s supporters and in securing the re-
view ordered by Mr. Barr that provided her
with fresh ammunition.
Mr. Barr’s subsequent decision to drop
the charge against Mr. Flynn threw the Jus-
tice Department into turmoil and set up a
high-stakes battle pitting the attorney gen-
eral and Ms. Powell against the trial judge,
Emmet G. Sullivan, who opened a review of
the move.
Ms. Powell and her client won a signifi-
cant victory on Wednesday when a divided
appeals court panel — in a surprise ruling
written by Judge Neomi Rao, a former
White House official whom Mr. Trump ap-
pointed to the bench — ordered Judge Sulli-
van to drop the case without scrutiny. Judge
Sullivan suspended his review but has not
dismissed the charge, suggesting that the
extraordinary legal and political saga is not
yet over.
Ms. Powell declined to discuss her con-
versations with the White House or her cor-
respondence with Mr. Barr. But she said in
an email that she had long considered
“prosecutorial misconduct and overreach”
a problem and that she viewed Mr. Flynn as
a victim of it.
At its core, Mr. Flynn’s case is a drama
about who gets to mete out justice in the
Trump era, upending the prosecution of a
man who twice had admitted guilt.
“It’s hard to think of anything remotely
like this,” said David Alan Sklansky, a Stan-
ford University law professor and former
federal prosecutor. “The Justice Depart-
ment has taken somebody who has twice
pleaded guilty, in a case where the trial
judge has considered and already rejected
claims of government wrongdoing, and
prosecutors now say we’d like to dismiss the
case and don’t think it should have been
brought in the first place.”
A Tough-Minded Judge
When Mr. Flynn stood in Judge Sullivan’s
courtroom on Dec. 18, 2018, his legal odys-
sey appeared to be over. He had struck a fa-
vorable deal with Mr. Mueller’s prosecutors
to cooperate after admitting to lying to
F.B.I. agents about conversations with the
Russian ambassador in late 2016. In ex-
change, prosecutors were recommending
he receive no prison time and not be pros-
ecuted for separate offenses related to his
lobbying for Turkish government without
registering as an agent of a foreign power.
But he did not go quietly. His defense
team, in a memo laying out what sentence
he should receive, also floated the notion
that Mr. Flynn had been set up. F.B.I. agents
had used several different tactics to essen-
tially trick Mr. Flynn, a retired Army three-
star general, into making false statements,
the memo suggested.
The Flynn defense team was trying to
have it both ways, and Judge Sullivan was
furious. He grilled Mr. Flynn about whether
he was truly taking responsibility for his
crimes and even suggested — before re-
tracting the notion — that Mr. Flynn had
been a traitor to his country. When it ap-
peared that Judge Sullivan might send Mr.
Flynn to prison, going beyond the original
recommendation of prosecutors, Mr. Flynn
and his lawyer, Robert K. Kelner, decided to
postpone the sentencing so he could contin-
ue to cooperate with prosecutors.
Judge Sullivan, appointed to the Federal
District Court by President Bill Clinton, has
a reputation as a hard-nosed jurist with a
disdain for prosecutorial misconduct. He is
known for taking guilty pleas seriously, and
he reminded Mr. Kelner that he had never
accepted one from someone who main-
tained he was not guilty and that he didn’t
“intend to start today.”
In his legal pivot, Mr. Flynn had chan-
neled the campaign led by Mr. Trump and
his allies that had portrayed the Russia in-
vestigation as a “witch hunt” and a plot to
sabotage his presidency. Since Mr. Flynn
had first pleaded guilty in 2017, Republicans
in Congress had taken up a campaign to un-
dermine the case against him and portray
him as a victim of overzealous prosecutors.
Some legal experts speculated at the time
that Mr. Flynn was accepting guilt to pocket
a sentence without prison time while also
preserving the possibility that Mr. Trump
might pardon him. His legal strategy would,
soon enough, become even more radical:
that he was innocent all along.
Flynn’s New Defense
One of Mr. Flynn’s most vocal defenders
was Ms. Powell, a Texas-based former fed-
eral prosecutor who had made no secret
about her view that the Russia investiga-
tion was a sham. She appeared frequently
on Fox News and had a website hawking T-
shirts mocking Mr. Mueller’s team as
“creeps on a mission.”
In early 2018, not long after Mr. Flynn’s
original guilty plea, Ms. Powell wrote an op-
ed alleging that “extraordinary manipula-
tion by powerful people led to the creation of
Robert Mueller’s continuing investigation
and prosecution of General Michael Flynn.”
She exhorted Mr. Flynn to drop his guilty
plea and, ironically, praised Judge Sullivan,
who had just taken over the case.
She called him the “perfect judge” for it
because of his handling years earlier of the
corruption case against former Senator Ted
Stevens, Republican of Alaska. In that case,
Judge Sullivan had been so furious after the
Justice Department disclosed that it had
failed to turn over evidence potentially
helpful to the defense that he opened an
ethics investigation into the prosecutors.
The department ended up asking Judge
Sullivan to dismiss the case despite having
won a guilty verdict — an outcome Ms. Pow-
Maggie Haberman and Katie Benner con-
tributed reporting.
Michael T. Flynn,
above, President
Trump’s first national
security adviser, twice
pleaded guilty to lying
to the F.B.I. Attorney
General William P.
Barr, far right, decided
to drop the charge
against him. But the
trial judge, Emmet G.
Sullivan, right, has not
yet dismissed the
charge.
‘It’s hard to think
of anything
remotely like this.’
David Alan Sklansky,
Stanford University law
professor and former federal
prosecutor.
Sidney Powell, Mr. Flynn’s lawyer, sent a letter to Mr. Barr, asking for “utmost confidentiality” and a special review.
DOMINIC BRACCO II/THE WASHINGTON POST, VIA GETTY IMAGES
ell seemed to view as a road map for Mr.
Flynn.
Her television advocacy on behalf of Mr.
Flynn appears to have had an influential
viewer: the president. The two spoke five
times in 2019, during the months before she
officially took on Mr. Flynn as a client, ac-
cording to a person familiar with the calls.
It is unclear what they discussed, but
when Ms. Powell persuaded Mr. Flynn and
his family to drop his original legal team
and allow her to take up the case, the presi-
dent was thrilled.
“General Michael Flynn, the 33 year war
hero who has served with distinction, has
not retained a good lawyer, he has retained
a GREAT LAWYER, Sidney Powell,” Mr.
Trump tweeted on June 13, 2019. “Best
Wishes and Good Luck to them both!”
She previewed her defense strategy in
the secret letter to Mr. Barr, asking him to
begin a hunt for materials that the depart-
ment could turn over. “At the end of this in-
ternal review, we believe there will be am-
ple justification for the department to follow
the precedent of the Ted Stevens case and
move to dismiss the prosecution of General
Flynn in the interest of justice,” she wrote.
As Mr. Flynn’s lawyer, she began de-
manding that the Justice Department turn
over more files, including documents that
were tangential to her client’s case but pro-
moted other right-wing conspiracy theories
about the Russia investigation.
She accused the F.B.I. and prosecutors of
engaging in a litany of misconduct that “im-
pugned their entire case against Mr. Flynn,
while at the same time putting excruciating
pressure on him to enter his guilty plea and
manipulating or controlling the press to
their advantage to extort that plea.”
Exasperated prosecutors attacked Ms.
Powell’s legal strategy, saying the “defend-
ant and his new counsel are in search of a
result, not the facts.”
She also made clear that her client was
done helping the Justice Department. Al-
most immediately after she began repre-
senting Mr. Flynn, he changed his story in a
prosecution in Virginia against his former
business partner about their work for Tur-
key. Prosecutors decided against calling
him as a witness, significantly weakening
their case.
A Conservative Cause
Months later, it was Ms. Powell’s defense
of Mr. Flynn that was collapsing.
In December, Judge Sullivan delivered a
stinging rebuke to her wide-ranging claims
of prosecutorial misconduct and other accu-
sations. In a 92-page opinion, he marched
through her allegations and rejected each
one.
It turned out that Judge Sullivan was not
the savior that Ms. Powell was looking for;
he even ruled that Mr. Flynn was no Ted
Stevens.
But in a different way, her strategy had
been a success: The case had become a po-
litical cause. While Judge Sullivan rejected
Ms. Powell’s claims of material law enforce-
ment misconduct as baseless, Fox News
and other conservative news outlets had
amplified them along the way.
“One of the things that General Flynn
wanted to do, he thought it was critically im-
portant that we empty out the swamp of all
the senior intelligence folks that are in
Washington, D.C.,” Representative Devin
Nunes, the California Republican on the In-
telligence Committee who has been a
staunch supporter of Mr. Trump and his the-
ories, said to applause at the Conservative
Political Action Conference in February. “So
they had a real reason to get rid of General
Flynn.”
This political chorus had already been
hard at work trying to undermine the con-
clusions of the voluminous special counsel’s
report. Mr. Mueller concluded that Russia
systematically tried to sabotage the 2016
election and that Mr. Trump’s advisers had
welcomed the help — even if he there was
insufficient evidence of a criminal conspir-
acy. He also found numerous times when
Mr. Trump tried to impede the Russia inves-
tigation, but chose not to determine
whether the president had illegally ob-
ANDREW HARRER/BLOOMBERG NEWS
JONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
DOUG MILLS/THE NEW YORK TIMES
structed justice.
Weeks after Judge Sullivan rejected Ms.
Powell’s assertions of prosecutorial miscon-
duct and was preparing to sentence Mr.
Flynn, Ms. Powell persuaded her client to
ask to withdraw his guilty plea and declare
to the judge that he was innocent.
Meanwhile, Mr. Barr was moving to take
direct control over the United States Attor-
ney’s Office for the District of Columbia,
which was handling several politically
charged matters.
Mr. Barr maneuvered the Senate-con-
firmed U.S. attorney, Jessie K. Liu, into leav-
ing early, and imposed his own aide, Timo-
thy J. Shea, as the acting head of the office.
At the same time, he appointed the U.S. at-
torney for St. Louis, Jeffrey B. Jensen, to ex-
amine the Flynn case.
It was exactly what Ms. Powell had asked
Mr. Barr to do in her secret letter six months
earlier.
Mr. Jensen scoured F.B.I. files in search of
anything that could be construed as so-
called Brady material — information Mr.
Flynn could use to argue that he was not
guilty — which had been withheld from the
defense. He found several files.
Many fell into a category of things that
made the F.B.I. look heavy-handed, but did
not change the narrow issue of whether Mr.
Flynn made false statements to the agents
who questioned him.
But Ms. Powell seized on the revelations
as proof that prosecutors had improperly
withheld exculpatory evidence, justifying a
dismissal of the case. Mr. Barr directed his
department to file a motion to dismiss the
charge.
The remarkable decision infuriated some
Justice Department officials and stunned
legal experts. Mr. Barr defended it last
week in an interview with NPR as appropri-
ate.
It also forced a showdown with Judge Sul-
livan, who had no intention of abandoning
the case so easily.
The judge ordered a new review, appoint-
ing John Gleeson, a former mafia prosecu-
tor and a retired federal judge from Brook-
lyn, to argue against the Justice Depart-
ment’s motion. In a scathing memo, Mr.
Gleeson urged Judge Sullivan to sentence
Mr. Flynn anyway, over prosecutors’ objec-
tions.
Trying to head that off, Ms. Powell asked
an appeals panel to order Judge Sullivan to
end the case without any review of the moti-
vation or legitimacy of the request. Legal
experts widely scoffed at her tactic, noting
that such orders are supposed to be re-
served for rare problems where no other op-
tion exists.
But Ms. Powell’s gambit led to a stroke of
luck. The case was randomly assigned to a
three-judge panel that included Judge Rao
and Judge Karen L. Henderson, a 1990 ap-
pointee of President George Bush, who
have both proved more willing than most of
their colleagues to interpret the law in Mr.
Trump’s favor in politically charged cases.
In a 2-to-1 ruling, the panel ordered Judge
Sullivan to shut down the case immediately,
saying he had no authority to scrutinize the
basis for Mr. Barr’s decision. The dissenting
judge on the panel accused his colleagues of
“grievously” overstepping their authority.
The ruling turned on a technical question
rather than the merits of the case, and it re-
mains to be seen whether the full appeals
court will let it stand.
But Mr. Trump and his allies have already
declared victory, inaccurately portraying
the decision as proof that Mr. Flynn has
been exonerated and should never have
been charged.

Democrats Strategize
G.O.P.-Style Hardball
To Get Judges Seated
By MATT FLEGENHEIMER
President Trump this month
celebrated the confirmation of his
200th lifetime appointment to the
federal bench, outpacing his pred-
ecessor by dozens through three-
and-a-half years.
Campaign supporters of Mr.
Trump and Senator Mitch McCon-
nell, the Republican majority
leader, have been urged to buy T-
shirts saluting the two men as
“Back-to-Back Supreme Court
Champs,” their faces rendered in
white silhouette with “Gorsuch”
and “Kavanaugh” etched on the
sleeves.
And four years after the battle
over a court vacancy helped de-
liver Mr. Trump to the White
House, the president hopes to
keep his job by playing the hits:
He has pledged to produce an up-
dated roster of would-be justices
to galvanize the right before No-
vember, warning that his Demo-
cratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden
Jr., would nominate “a radical
lefty” as a slate of major rulings
returns the judiciary to the politi-
cal fore.
“Based on decisions being ren-
dered now, this list is more impor-
tant than ever before,” the presi-
dent wrote on Twitter on June 18.
“VOTE 2020!”
By their own account, Demo-
crats have long found themselves
outmaneuvered in campaign
fights over the courts. Exit polls
from 2016 showed Mr. Trump win-
ning by double digits among those
who called the Supreme Court the
“most important factor” in their
vote.
Most memorably, Mr. Trump
made the novel choice to publish a
list of prospective nominees,
shaped by leaders from conserva-
tive groups like the Federalist So-
ciety, supplying specificity (at
least on this subject) from a candi-
date prone to ideological shape-
shifting.
“It gave certainty to people who
didn’t know the president — and I
was one of them,” said Penny
Nance, the chief executive of Con-
cerned Women for America, a con-
servative Christian group. “It was
Giovanni Russonello contributed
reporting.
Trump Amplifies ‘White Power’ on Twitter
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
WASHINGTON — President
Trump on Sunday retweeted a vid-
eo of one of his supporters yelling
“White power!,” once again using
the vast reach of his social media
platforms to inflame racial divi-
sions in a nation roiled by weeks of
protests about police brutality
against black people and de-
mands for social justice reforms.
The edited racist video shows a
white man riding in a golf cart
bearing “Trump 2020” and
“America First” signs during
what appears to be an angry clash
over the president and race be-
tween white residents of a Florida
retirement community. Mr. Trump
deleted the tweet more than three
hours after posting it.
In response to a protester
shouting “Where’s your white
hood?” and other taunts, the man
in the golf cart pumps his fist in
the air and says “White power!”
twice. The two-minute video con-
tinues to show profane exchanges
between protesters and other
Trump supporters riding on more
golf carts.
The president retweeted the
video to his millions of followers
just after 7:30 a.m., thanking “the
great people of The Villages,” the
Florida retirement community
where the clash apparently took
place. He added: “The Radical
Left Do Nothing Democrats will
Fall in the Fall. Corrupt Joe is shot.
See you soon!!!”
The tweet was widely criticized
as racist and insensitive, and
again demonstrated the presi-
dent’s willingness use social me-
dia to amplify some of the most
hateful commentary of some of his
followers, even at a moment of na-
tional unrest.
Senator Tim Scott of South Car-
olina, the only black Republican
senator, called the video “offen-
sive” and asked Mr. Trump to take
it off his Twitter page.
“There is no question he should
not have retweeted it, and he
should just take it down,” Mr. Scott
said on “State of the Union” on
CNN. “We can play politics with it
or we can’t. I’m not going to. I
think it’s indefensible. We should
take it down.”
Mr. Trump deleted it less than
an hour after Mr. Scott’s com-
ments, but he did not condemn the
“white power” statement or spe-
cifically disavow the sentiment
expressed by his supporter.
Judd Deere, a White House
spokesman, said Mr. Trump “is a
big fan of The Villages.”
“He did not hear the one state-
ment made on the video,” Mr.
Deere said. “What he did see was
tremendous enthusiasm from his
many supporters.”
probably the No. 1 issue when we
looked at the polling of what
brought conservatives to the vot-
ing booth in 2016. I think it will be a
top-of-mind issue, certainly, in
2020.”
Trailing in the polls amid over-
lapping national crises that he has
strained to corral, Mr. Trump
seems even more likely to place
the courts, an area of unambigu-
ous conservative triumph, at the
center of his case for re-election.
Whether Democrats can har-
ness their own enthusiasm on this
score is at once uncertain and po-
tentially critical to election for-
tunes this fall, both in the presi-
dential race and several competi-
tive Senate contests where the Re-
publican incumbents’ Supreme
Court votes might figure promi-
nently. (In Maine, Senator Susan
Collins’s support for Justice Brett
M. Kavanaugh in 2018 attracted
wide-scale scrutiny — and mil-
lions of dollars in donations
against her — before she had an
official opponent.)
Recent years have produced no
shortage of seminal moments to
mobilize Democrats around mat-
ters of the judiciary: the confirma-
tion of Justice Kavanaugh; the
non-confirmation of Judge Mer-
rick B. Garland; the Supreme
Court’s refusal in April to extend
the deadline for absentee voting in
Wisconsin during a pandemic.
Still, some in the party sense an
asymmetry in how urgently many
Democratic voters think about the
courts.
“I do think it has picked up in
visibility, but I don’t think it moves
millions to the polls in the way that
it really should,” said Senator
Chris Coons, Democrat of Dela-
ware and a close Biden ally.
“That’s the challenge that re-
mains before us.”
Progressives have suggested
that Mr. Biden, the former vice
president, could prompt enthusi-
asm by releasing his own list of
preferred judges. Some activists
have urged him to embrace a pro-
posal to expand the size of the Su-
preme Court.
Mr. Biden has done neither,
though he has promised to nomi-
nate a black woman to the court
and said that the judiciary was
“the single most important rea-
John R. Bolton, the former na-
tional security adviser who just
released a scathing book about
Mr. Trump, said on Sunday that
the president’s inattention to de-
tail made it possible that he did not
notice the racist comments.
“He doesn’t pay attention to a
lot of things,” Mr. Bolton said on
“State of the Union.” “It’s entirely
possible that he tweeted this video
because he saw the sign, I think it
was in the first go-kart that said
the Trump 2020 or something like
that. That’s all he needed to see.
Not paying attention. Not consid-
ering all the implications of infor-
mation he gets.”
But Mr. Bolton added, “It may
be that you can draw a conclusion
that he heard it, and it was racist,
and he tweeted it to promote the
message. It’s a legitimate conclu-
sion to draw.”
Either way, the president’s ini-
tial decision to approvingly share
the blatant support for white su-
premacy was the latest example
Sharing a video of a
supporter in Florida
yelling a racist slogan.
of his willingness to use his vast
Twitter following to inject incendi-
ary commentary into the ongoing
debate in the country over sys-
temic racism.
In May, as protests erupted af-
ter the killing of George Floyd, a
black man, by a Minneapolis po-
lice officer, Mr. Trump tweeted,
“When the looting starts, the
shooting starts,” a phrase with a
long history of connection to rac-
ism.
More recently, Mr. Trump has
used his Twitter feed to attack pro-
testers who have pulled down
statues of Confederate generals,
calling them “arsonists, anar-
chists, looters, and agitators.” On
Saturday night, he tweeted out 15
“wanted” posters for people the
U.S. Park Police were seeking in
connection with vandalism in La-
fayette Square, just outside the
White House.
The video on Sunday — which
could not be independently veri-
fied by The New York Times — ap-
peared to show a slow-moving pa-
rade through the Florida commu-
nity with supporters of Mr. Trump
riding golf carts, wearing red,
white and blue, and displaying
pro-Trump materials.
Protesters lined the street,
many of them screaming epithets,
accusing the Trump supporters of
THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
son” that his wife, Jill, wanted him
to run in 2020.
John Anzalone, a pollster and
adviser for Mr. Biden, said that
much of the modern Democratic
electorate plainly grasped the sig-
nificance of the courts. A Suffolk
University/USA Today poll in
April found that Democrats were
slightly more likely than Republi-
cans to call the Supreme Court one
of the most important issues af-
fecting their vote.
“I do think that women — col-
lege-educated women, suburban
women — are without a doubt a
much bigger part of our coalition,”
Mr. Anzalone said. “And they’re
much more awake to the ramifica-
tions of replacing a Ruth Bader
Ginsburg. That is real.”
Democrats have been bracing
for possible disappointment in
being racists and holding signs
calling the president a bigot.
In his tweet, Mr. Trump did not
specifically refer to the man who
yelled “white power.” But his ref-
erence to “the great people of The
Villages” was an eerie echo of his
comments in the summer of 2017,
when he responded to deadly vio-
lence by white supremacists in
Charlottesville, Va., by saying
there were “very fine people on
both sides.”
Former Vice President Joseph
R. Biden Jr., the presumptive
Democratic presidential nominee,
invoked the president’s com-
ments about Charlottesville in re-
sponse to the video on Sunday.
“We’re in a battle for the soul of
the nation — and the President
has picked a side,” Mr. Biden
tweeted.
Mr. Trump has repeatedly de-
nied that he was expressing sup-
port for white supremacy with his
“both sides” comment. But the
tweet on Sunday underscores
what has become a hallmark of his
presidency since he took office: a
willingness to embrace divisive
comments when they are coming
from people he perceives to be his
supporters.
The president has routinely re-
tweeted far-right messages and a
conspiracy theory known as
QAnon, which includes people
who believe that a “deep state” in
the government is filled with sa-
tanic pedophiles. Mr. Trump once
retweeted VB Nationalist, an
anonymous account that has pro-
moted a hoax about top Demo-
crats worshiping the Devil and en-
gaging in child sex trafficking.
An analysis of Mr. Trump’s Twit-
ter account by The New York
Times at the end of last year found
that the president had retweeted
at least 145 unverified accounts
that had pushed conspiracy, racist
or other fringe content, including
more than two dozen that were
later suspended by Twitter.
Recently, Twitter has begun to
crack down directly on Mr.
Trump’s feed, posting warnings
on some of his messages. In May,
when the president tweeted about
shooting following looting, the
company added a statement to the
post.
“This Tweet violated the Twit-
ter Rules about glorifying vio-
lence. However, Twitter has deter-
mined that it may be in the public’s
interest for the Tweet to remain
accessible,” the company wrote.
The quick deletion of the video
on Sunday was a rare instance in
which Mr. Trump backed down in
the face of criticism. His previous
tweets have remained online de-
spite the company’s online warn-
ings.
T.J. KIRKPATRICK FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
pending Supreme Court decisions
involving abortion and the disclo-
sure of the president’s financial
records before the end of this
court term.
But two high-profile rulings
have already come as a pleasant
surprise to liberals: one holding
that a landmark civil rights law
protects L.G.B.T.Q. employees
from workplace discrimination
and another preventing Mr.
Trump from immediately pro-
ceeding with plans to end a pro-
gram shielding young immigrants
from deportation.
While welcoming the outcomes,
activists have advised Democrats
to beware a conservative majority
bearing gifts.
“The court’s not evil 100 percent
of the time,” said Meagan
Hatcher-Mays, the director of de-
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Mitch McConnell, the Senate
majority leader, above with
President Trump, has gotten
200 conservative judges con-
firmed to the federal bench
during Mr. Trump’s term, in-
cluding Supreme Court Justice
Brett M. Kavanaugh, left.
mocracy policy at Indivisible.
“But they’re evil, like, 94 percent
of the time.”
Such occasional successes can,
paradoxically, register as some-
thing of a narrative complication
for those arguing that the court is
stacked against the left.
Brian Fallon, the executive di-
rector of Demand Justice, a pro-
gressive group, suggested that
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
understood as much — and was
steering the court accordingly.
“These rulings are enough to
convince a lot of people on the left
that they should continue to play
within the system and not offend
sitting federal judges by calling
them out as overly political,” he
said. “In some sense, that is the
exact game that Roberts is play-
ing: to side with the liberals in just
enough cases so the public misses
the larger trend of this court’s
rightward swerve.”
The chief justice has nonethe-
less angered many Republicans
who appraise his tenure as a fail-
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court’s liberal wing in cases chal-
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N A15
Progressives hope
Biden will release
a list of nominees.
Some of those critics hold high
office: “Do you get the impression
that the Supreme Court doesn’t
like me?” Mr. Trump wrote on
Twitter this month.
Conservatives say that, if any-
thing, the Roberts era has demon-
strated the need for Mr. Trump to
fill vacancies for another four
years.
“Frustration with the chief jus-
tice and concern about the direc-
tion the courts were going was
part of what galvanized conserva-
tives in the first place to elect
someone like Trump,” said Carrie
Severino, president of the conser-
vative Judicial Crisis Network.
By prizing “courage” in addition
to credentials, Ms. Severino said,
Mr. Trump’s approach “is almost
designed to avoid a future John
Roberts,” whom she accused of op-
erating with politics in mind — in
some ways echoing the charge of
his progressive skeptics.
She also joined some liberal
counterparts in calling for Mr. Bi-
den to release a list of potential
nominees.
Many Biden supporters see lit-
tle need for that step because, un-
like Mr. Trump in 2016, the former
vice president has an exhaustive
record on judicial affairs, includ-
ing an extended tenure as chair-
man of the Senate Judiciary Com-
mittee.
Those close to Mr. Biden are
rarely eager to dwell on the treat-
ment of Anita Hill before his com-
mittee at the confirmation hear-
ings for Justice Clarence Thomas.
But others cite his work to defeat
the nomination of Judge Robert H.
Bork in 1987 as a towering feat for
Democrats — and a turning point
for a chamber that had previously
been disinclined to reject a nomi-
nee for primarily ideological rea-
sons.
“I don’t think there’s ever been
any president — assuming Biden’s
elected — who knows as much
about or has been as involved in
shaping the Supreme Court as Joe
Biden,” said Mark Gitenstein, who
led Mr. Biden’s Judiciary Commit-
tee staff during the Bork fight.
And those who have doubted
Mr. Biden in 2020, he added, were
hardly the first.
“The irony of the Bork fight is
it’s not unlike what you’re seeing
now,” Mr. Gitenstein said. “People
totally underestimated Biden.”
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A16 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Election
Trump supporters listened to the president at an event at The Villages in Florida in October 2019.
Many Older White Voters
Reject the Trump Playbook
By ALEXANDER BURNS
and KATIE GLUECK
Clifford Wagner, an 80-year-old
Republican in Tucson, Ariz., never
cared for President Trump.
He supported Jeb Bush in the
2016 presidential primary and cast
a protest vote in the general elec-
tion for Gary Johnson, the Liber-
tarian nominee. An Air Force vet-
eran, Mr. Wagner described
Trump’s presidency as a mortify-
ing experience: His friends in Eu-
rope and Japan tell him the U.S. is
“the laughingstock of the world.”
This year, Mr. Wagner said he
would register his opposition to Mr.
Trump more emphatically than he
did in 2016. He plans to vote for Jo-
seph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive
Democratic nominee, and hopes
the election is a ruinous one for the
Republican Party.
“I’m a Christian, and I do not be-
lieve in the hateful, racist, bigoted
speech that the president uses,” Mr.
Wagner said, adding, “I never
thought I’d say this: I hope we get a
Democratic president, a Democrat-
ic-controlled Senate and maintain a
Democratic-controlled House.”
Mr. Wagner is part of one of the
most important maverick voting
groups in the 2020 general elec-
tion: conservative-leaning seniors
who have soured on the Republican
Party over the past four years.
Republican candidates typically
carry older voters by solid mar-
gins, and in his first campaign Mr.
Trump bested Hillary Clinton by
seven percentage points with vot-
ers over 65. He won white seniors
by nearly triple that margin.
Today, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden
are tied among seniors, according
to a poll of registered voters con-
ducted by The New York Times and
Siena College. In six battleground
states, Mr. Biden has established a
clear upper hand, leading Mr.
Trump by six percentage points
among the oldest voters and nearly
matching the president’s support
among whites in that age group.
That is no small advantage for
Mr. Biden, the former vice presi-
dent, given the prevalence of re-
tirement communities in a few of
those crucial states, including Ari-
zona and Florida.
No Democrat has won or broken
even with seniors in two decades,
since Al Gore in 2000 devoted much
of his campaign to warning that Re-
publicans would cut popular pro-
grams like Social Security and
Medicare. In 2016, Mr. Trump, now
74, seemed in some ways keenly at-
tuned to the political sensitivities of
voters in his own age group. He
bluntly rejected his party’s long-
standing interest in restructuring
government guarantees of retire-
ment security.
But Mr. Trump’s presidency has
been a trying experience for many
of these voters, some of whom are
so frustrated and disillusioned that
they are preparing to take the dras-
tic step of supporting a Democrat.
The grievances of these defect-
ing seniors are familiar, most or all
of them shared by their younger
peers. But these voters often ex-
press themselves with a sharp dis-
may and disappointment. They see
Mr. Trump as coarse and disre-
spectful, divisive to his core and
failing to comport himself with the
dignity of the other presidents that
they have observed. The Times poll
also found that most seniors disap-
proved of Mr. Trump’s handling of
race relations and the protests af-
ter the death of George Floyd.
And as the coronavirus pan-
demic continues to sweep the coun-
try, putting older Americans at par-
ticular risk, these voters feel a spe-
cial kind of frustration and betrayal
with Mr. Trump’s ineffective lead-
ership and often-blasé public com-
ments about the crisis.
The president has urged the
country to return to life-as-usual
far more quickly than the top pub-
lic-health officials in his own ad-
ministration have recommended.
Some prominent Republican offi-
cials and conservative pundits
have even suggested at times that
older people should be willing to
risk their own health for the sake of
a quicker resumption of the busi-
ness cycle.
In The Times poll, seniors in the
battleground states disapproved of
Mr. Trump’s handling of the coro-
navirus pandemic by seven points,
52 percent to 45 percent. By a 26-
point margin, this group said the
federal government should pri-
oritize containing the pandemic
over reopening the economy.
Former Representative Carlos
Curbelo of Florida, a 40-year-old
Republican deeply versed in the
politics of the retiree-rich swing
state, said many seniors were dis-
turbed by important aspects of Mr.
Trump’s record and found Mr. Bi-
den a mild and respectable alterna-
tive who did not inspire the same
antipathy on the right that Mrs.
Clinton did in 2016.
Regarded by much of his own
party as bland and conventional,
Mr. Biden’s nostalgia-cloaked can-
didacy may be uniquely equipped
to ease a sizable group of right-of-
center seniors into the Democratic
column, at least for one election.
“He’s not ever been known to be
a radical or an extreme leftist or lib-
eral, so there is certainly a degree
of comfort there,” Mr. Curbelo said.
He added: “This public health cri-
sis is so threatening, especially to
Feeling frustration
and betrayal with the
ineffective leadership.
seniors, and because the president
hasn’t earned high marks in his
handling of it, that has been a factor
in Biden’s improving numbers.”
Mr. Biden and his allies have ex-
pressed excitement about the pos-
sibilities that the shifting senior
vote could create in the fall. That is
true not only in Sun Belt retirement
havens but also in Midwestern
states where Mr. Biden is currently
running well ahead of Mrs. Clin-
ton’s 2016 performance with a
range of conservative-leaning con-
stituencies, including older whites.
In Iowa, former Gov. Tom Vil-
sack, a close Biden ally, said the for-
mer vice president had closed a
substantial deficit in the state
through his coronavirus response,
his connection with older rural vot-
ers and his ability to empathize.
“Part of it is the demeanor he has
projected during the course of this
pandemic,” Mr. Vilsack said, before
acknowledging, “As much as Joe’s
doing, it’s probably as much or
more what the president has done
or failed to do.”
He cited an ad from a group of
anti-Trump Republicans that cast
Mr. Trump’s approach to crisis as
erratic and selfish, unlike past
presidents who confronted trage-
dies like the Challenger disaster
and the Oklahoma City bombing.
“Each of those presidents was
able to connect emotionally to the
feelings of the nation,” Mr. Vilsack
said. “This president has had a re-
ally, really hard time doing that.”
Mr. Trump’s ineffective response
to the coronavirus weighed on the
thinking of many older voters sur-
veyed in the poll, including Patrick
Mallon, 73, a retired information
technology specialist in Battle
Creek, Mich.
Mr. Mallon said he was a regis-
tered Republican who had long
been unhappy with Mr. Trump but
mindful that he was presiding over
a strong economy. The pandemic
set Mr. Mallon firmly against Mr.
Trump’s re-election.
“The main reason is Donald
Trump saying, ‘Don’t wear a mask,
this thing is going to go away, we
can have large gatherings,’” he
said. “Everything he says is incor-
rect and dangerous to the country.”
When young people contract the
coronavirus, Mr. Mallon added,
“most of them will survive, but
they’re going to give it to their par-
ANNA MONEYMAKER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
ents, their grandparents — and I’m
sorry, we’re just as important as
that younger generation is.”
The abandonment of Mr. Trump
by older voters is far from univer-
sal, and he still has a strong base
among older white men and self-
described conservatives. Nation-
ally, the oldest voters approve of
Mr. Trump’s handling of the econ-
omy by 12 points, more than double
the figure for voters of all ages.
And in the battleground states,
Mr. Trump has a 10-point lead over
Mr. Biden with white men over the
age of 65, even as Mr. Biden has
opened up an advantage with white
women in the same age group.
Nonwhite seniors in the battle-
ground states support Mr. Biden
over Mr. Trump by a huge margin,
65 percent to 25 percent.
Even among some seniors sup-
portive of Mr. Trump, however,
there is an undercurrent of unease
about the way he approaches the
presidency.
Karen Gamble, 65, of Reidsville,
N.C., said that she was dissatisfied
with the overall government re-
sponse to the coronavirus outbreak
and echoed many popular com-
plaints about Mr. Trump’s persona.
She said she wished, for instance,
that Mr. Trump “wouldn’t be such a
bully and would conform to being
in a regal-like position, as our presi-
dents have always been.”
Ms. Gamble said she was plan-
ning to support Mr. Trump all the
same, describing Mr. Biden as too
old and too compromised on mat-
ters related to China. But Ms. Gam-
ble, who said she has a “severe lung
problem,” expressed hope that Mr.
Trump would change his approach
to the pandemic.
“We can’t blame him for this —
how many presidents could do any
better than what he’s done?” Ms.
Gamble said, before adding: “I just
wish he wouldn’t let the country
open up as much as it has. I see all
these teens and young people at
the beach, and I fear for them be-
cause now they’re getting sick.”
In Tucson, Gerald Lankin, a
more forceful Trump supporter,
said he would vote “against the
Democrats.” Mr. Lankin, 77, said he
found Mr. Trump’s personal man-
ner offensive but agreed with him
on most issues and saw Democrats
as “much, much, much, much too
far to the left.”
“He hasn’t really done anything
that I can say I’m against,” Mr.
Lankin said of Mr. Trump. “I think
what he’s doing is the best he can.
But, boy, he is tough to take. He is a
tough guy to take.”
There may be time for Mr. Trump
to regain his footing with seniors,
along with several other right-lean-
ing groups that have drifted away.
His ability to do so could have far-
reaching implications not just for
his chances of winning a second
term, but also his party’s ability to
keep its hold on the Senate.
At the moment, Mr. Trump’s un-
popularity with older voters ap-
pears to be hindering other Repub-
licans in states including Arizona
and Michigan.
Gayle Craven, 80, of High Point,
N.C., a registered Republican, said
she had not voted for Mr. Trump in
2016 and would reject him again
this year. She said she saw Mr. Bi-
den as an “honest man.”
“Trump is the biggest disap-
pointment,” she said. “He has made
America look like idiots. I think he’s
an embarrassment to my country.”
Other older voters leaning to-
ward Mr. Biden cautioned that they
could still change their minds, like
Frederick Monk, 73, of Mesa, Ariz.,
who said he had voted for Mr.
Trump but quickly came to see him
as “incompetent.”
Still, Mr. Monk said his mind was
not fully made up. If Mr. Biden
chooses an overly liberal running
mate, he said he could cast a vote
for Mr. Trump and hope his second
term is an exercise in futility.
“Hopefully the Democrats re-
take the Senate and make his next
four years miserable, if he lasts
that long,” Mr. Monk said.
Obama Re-enters
Political Battlefield
He Wanted to Quit
From Page A1
anger at his successor with an instinct to
refrain from a brawl that he fears may
dent his popularity and challenge his
place in history.
That calculus, though, may be chang-
ing in the wake of George Floyd’s killing
by the police in Minneapolis. As Ameri-
ca’s first black president, now its first
black ex-president, Mr. Obama sees the
current social and racial awakening as
an opportunity to elevate a 2020 election
dictated by Mr. Trump’s mud-wrestling
style into something more meaningful —
to channel a new, youthful movement to-
ward a political aim, as he did in 2008.
He is doing so very carefully, charac-
teristically intent on keeping his cool, his
reputation, his political capital and his
dreams of a cosseted retirement intact.
“I don’t think he is hesitant. I think he
is strategic,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a top ad-
viser for over a decade. “He has always
been strategic about using his voice; it’s
his most valuable commodity.”
Mr. Obama is also mindful of a caution-
ary example: Bill Clinton’s attacks
against him in 2008 backfired so badly
that his wife’s campaign staff had to scale
back his appearances.
Many supporters have been pressing
him to be more aggressive.
“It would be nice, for a change, if
Barack Obama could emerge from his
cave and offer — no wait, DEMAND — a
way forward,” the columnist Drew Mag-
ary wrote in a much-shared Medium
post in April titled “Where the Hell is
Barack Obama?”
The counterargument: He did his job
and deserves to be left alone.
“Obama has now been out of office for
three and a half years, and he is still fac-
ing this kind of scrutiny — no one is pres-
suring white ex-presidents like George
W. Bush and Jimmy Carter the same
way,” said Monique Judge, news editor of
the online magazine The Root and author
of a 2018 article arguing that Mr. Obama
no longer owed the country a thing.
Mr. Obama’s head appears to be some-
where in the middle. He is not planning to
scrap his summer Vineyard vacation and
is still anguishing over the publication
date of his long-awaited memoir. But last
week he stepped up his nominally indi-
rect criticism of Mr. Trump’s administra-
tion — decrying a “shambolic, disorga-
nized, meanspirited approach to govern-
ance” during an online Biden fund-raiser.
And he made a pledge of sorts, telling Mr.
Biden’s supporters: “Whatever you’ve
done so far is not enough. And I hold my-
self and Michelle and our kids to that
same standard.”
Days later, during an invitation-only
Zoom fund-raiser, Mr. Obama expressed
outrage at the president’s use of “kung
flu” and “China virus” to describe the co-
ronavirus. “I don’t want a country in
which the president of the United States
is actively trying to promote anti-Asian
sentiment and thinks it’s funny. I don’t
want that. That still shocks and pisses
me off,” Mr. Obama said, according to a
transcript of his remarks provided by a
participant in the event.
Mr. Obama speaks with the former
vice president and top campaign aides
frequently, offering suggestions on
staffing and messaging. Last month, he
bluntly counseled Mr. Biden to keep his
speeches brief, interviews crisp and
slash the length of his tweets, the better
to make the campaign a referendum on
Mr. Trump and the economy, according
to Democratic officials.
He has taken a particular interest in
Mr. Biden’s work-in-progress digital op-
eration, the officials said, enlisting pow-
erful friends, like the LinkedIn founder
Reid Hoffman and the former Google
chief executive Eric Schmidt, to share
their expertise, they said.
Yet he continues to slow-walk some re-
quests, especially to headline more fund-
raisers. Some in Mr. Obama’s camp sug-
gest he wants to avoid overshadowing
the candidate — which Mr. Biden’s peo-
ple aren’t buying.
“By all means, overshadow us,” one of
them joked.
‘Set a Counterexample’
From the moment Mr. Trump was
elected, Mr. Obama adopted a minimalist
approach: He would critique his policy
choices, not the man himself, following
the norm of civility observed by his pred-
ecessors, especially George W. Bush.
But norms are not Mr. Trump’s thing.
He made it clear from the start that he
wanted to eradicate any trace of Mr. Oba-
ma’s presence from the West Wing. “He
had the worst taste,” Mr. Trump told a
visitor in early 2017, showing off his new
curtains — which were not terribly dif-
ferent from Mr. Obama’s, in the view of
other people who tramped in and out of
the office during that chaotic period.
The cancellation was more pro-
nounced when it came to policy. One for-
mer White House official recalled Mr.
Trump interrupting an early presenta-
tion to make sure one staff proposal was
not “an Obama thing.”
During the transition, in what looks in
hindsight like a preview of the presiden-
cy, one Trump aide got the idea of print-
ing out the detailed checklist of Mr. Oba-
ma’s campaign promises from the official
White House website to repurpose as a
kind of hit list, according to two people
familiar with the effort.
“This is personal for Trump; it is all
about President Obama and demolishing
his legacy. It’s his obsession,” said
Omarosa Manigault Newman, an “Ap-
prentice” veteran and, until her abrupt
departure, one of the few black officials
in Mr. Trump’s West Wing. “President
Obama will not be able to rest as long as
Trump is breathing.”
When the two men met for a stilted
postelection sit-down in November 2016,
the president-elect was polite, so Mr.
Obama took the opportunity to advise
him against going scorched-earth on
Obamacare. “Look, you can take my
name off of it; I don’t care,” he said, ac-
cording to aides.
Mr. Trump nodded noncommittally.
As the transition dragged on, Mr.
Obama became increasingly uneasy at
what he saw as the breezy indifference of
the new president and his inexperienced
team. Many of them ignored the briefing
binders his staff had painstakingly
produced at his direction, former Obama
aides recalled, and instead of focusing on
policy or the workings of the West Wing,
they inquired about the quality of tacos
in the basement mess or where to find a
good apartment.
As for Mr. Trump, he had “no idea what
he’s doing,” Mr. Obama told an aide after
their Oval Office encounter.

Former President Barack Obama last week stepped up his indirect criticism of the Trump administration — decrying a “shambolic, disorganized, meanspirited approach to governance” at a fund-raiser.
Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law
and close adviser, made an equally indel-
ible impression. During a tour of the
building he abruptly inquired, “So how
many of these people are sticking
around?”
The answer was none, his escort re-
plied. (West Wing officials serve at the
president’s pleasure, as Mr. Trump
would amply illustrate in the coming
months.)
When the Kushner story was relayed
to Mr. Obama, aides recalled, he laughed
and repeated it to friends, and even a few
journalists, to illustrate what the country
was up against.
A White House spokesman did not
deny the account, but suggested Mr.
Kushner might have been talking about
security and maintenance personnel
rather than political appointees.
During other conversations with edi-
tors he respected, including David Rem-
nick of The New Yorker and Jeffrey
Goldberg of the Atlantic, Mr. Obama was
more ruminative, according to people fa-
miliar with the interactions. At times, he
would float some version of this ques-
tion: Was there anything he could have
done to blunt the Trump backlash?
Mr. Obama eventually came to the
conclusion that it was a historic inevita-
bility, and told people around him the
best he could do was “set a counterexam-
ple.”
Others thought he needed to do more.
During the transition, Paulette Aniskoff,
a veteran West Wing aide, began assem-
bling a political organization of former
advisers to help Mr. Obama defend his
legacy, aid other Democrats and plan for
his deployment as a surrogate in the 2018
midterms.
He was open to the effort, but his eye
Clockwise from far left: Mr. Obama
meeting with President-elect Donald
J. Trump in the Oval Office; at a
news conference in December 2016,
weeks before he left office; and out
on the links near Dundee, Scotland,
in retirement.
THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
was on the exits. “I’ll do what you want
me to do,” he told Ms. Aniskoff’s team,
but mandated they carefully screen out
any appearances that would waste time
or squander political capital.
Mr. Obama was, then as now, so deter-
mined to avoid uttering the new presi-
dent’s name that one aide jokingly sug-
gested they refer to him as “He-Who-
Must-Not-Be-Named” — Harry Potter’s
archenemy, Lord Voldemort.
Mr. Trump had no trouble naming
names. In March 2017, he falsely accused
Mr. Obama of personally ordering the
surveillance of his campaign headquar-
ters, tweeting, “How low has President
Obama gone to tapp my phones during
the very sacred election process. This is
Nixon/Watergate. Bad (or sick) guy!”
It was an inflection point of sorts. Mr.
Obama told Ms. Aniskoff’s team he
would call out his successor by name in
the 2018 midterms. But not a lot.
It was telling how Mr. Obama talked
about Mr. Trump that fall: He referred to
him less as a person than as a kind of epi-
demiological affliction on the body poli-
tic, spread by his Republican enablers.
“It did not start with Donald Trump —
he is a symptom, not the cause,” he said
in his kickoff speech at the University of
Illinois in September 2018. The Ameri-
can political system, he added, was not
“healthy” enough to form the “antibod-
ies” to fight the contagion of “racial na-
tionalism.”
The pandemic has, if anything, made
him more partial to the comparison.
The virus, he said during his appear-
ance with Mr. Biden last week, “is a met-
aphor” for so much else.
Golfing ‘Better Than My Book’
Mr. Obama felt one of the best ways to
safeguard his legacy was by writing his
book, which he envisioned as both a de-
tailed chronicle of his presidency and as
a serious literary follow-up to his widely
praised 1995 memoir, “Dreams From My
Father.”
In late 2016, Mr. Obama’s agent, Bob
Barnett, began negotiating a package
deal for Mr. Obama’s memoir and Mi-
chelle Obama’s autobiography. Random
House eventually won the bidding war
with a record-shattering $65 million of-
STEPHEN CROWLEY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
fer.
The process has been a gilded grind.
One former White House official who
checked in with Mr. Obama in mid-2018
was told the project “was like doing
homework.”
Another associate, who ran into the
former president at an event last year, re-
marked at how fit he looked. Mr. Obama
replied, “Let’s just say my golf game is
going a lot better than my book.”
It was not especially easy for the for-
mer president to look on as his wife’s
book, “Becoming,” was published in 2018
and quickly became an international
blockbuster.
“She had a ghostwriter,” Mr. Obama
told a friend who asked about his wife’s
speedy work. “I am writing every word
myself, and that’s why it’s taking longer.”
The book’s timing remains among the
touchiest of topics. Mr. Obama, a deliber-
ate writer prone to procrastination —
and lengthy digression — insisted that
there be no set deadline, according to
several people familiar with the process.
In an interview shortly after Mr.
Obama left office, one of his closest ad-
visers had predicted that the book would
be out in mid-2019, before the primary
season began in earnest, an option pre-
ferred by many working on the project.
But Mr. Obama did not finish and cir-
culate a draft of between 600 and 800
pages until around New Year’s, too late
to publish before the election, according
to people familiar with the situation.
He is now seriously considering split-
ting the project into two volumes, in the
hope of getting some of it into print
quickly after the election, perhaps in
time for the Christmas season, several
people close to the process said.
Mr. Obama’s other big creative enter-
prise, a multimillion-dollar 2018 contract
with Netflix to produce documentaries
and scripted features with his wife, has
been a tonic, and quick work by compari-
son.
Mr. Obama got a kick out of screening
dozens of potential projects and offered
specific suggestions — scrawled onto the
yellow legal pad he used to write his book
— to directors and writers. His produc-
tion firm, Higher Ground Productions, is
run out of a small bungalow on a Holly-
wood studio lot once home to Charlie
ANDREW MILLIGAN/PRESS ASSOCIATION IMAGES, VIA GETTY IMAGES
Chaplin’s company, and he spent a day
kibitzing with its small staff during a vis-
it in November.
One of the first efforts was “Crip
Camp,” an award-winning documentary
about a summer camp in upstate New
York, founded in the early 1970s, that be-
came a focal point of the disability rights
movement.
Mr. Obama saw the project as a vehicle
for his vision of grass-roots political
change, and provided feedback during
the 18 months the movie was in produc-
tion.
“We saw footage that the filmmakers
had just begun to cut together and sent it
to the president to look at,” said Priya
Swaminathan, co-head of Higher
Ground. “He wanted to know how we
could help the filmmakers make this the
best telling of the story and they were
into the collaboration. We watched many,
many cuts together.”
A ‘Tailor-Made’ Moment
Part of what Mr. Obama finds so ap-
pealing about filmmaking is that it allows
him to control the narrative. In that re-
spect, the 2020 campaign has been a dis-
orienting experience: His political ca-
reer is supposed to be over, yet he has a
semi-starring role in a production he has
not written or directed.
Nowhere has that low-grade frustra-
tion been more apparent than in his com-
plicated relationship with Mr. Biden, who
is concurrently covetous of his support
and fiercely determined to win on his
own.
Mr. Obama was supportive of Mr. Bi-
den, personally, from the start of the
campaign, but he promised Senator
Bernie Sanders, in one of their early
chats, that his public profession of neu-
trality was genuine and that he was not
working secretly to elect his friend, ac-
cording to a party official familiar with
the exchange.
Moreover, Mr. Obama has always been
cleareyed about his friend’s vulnerabili-
ties, urging Mr. Biden’s aides to ensure
that he not “embarrass himself” or
“damage his legacy,” win or lose.
Still, he is an enthusiastic supporter,
and played a central role in pushing Mr.
Sanders to “accelerate the endgame”
AL DRAGO/THE NEW YORK TIMES
N A17
BRIAN CAHN/ZUMA WIRE
that led to Mr. Biden’s earlier-than-ex-
pected victory in April.
He has never seen Mr. Biden’s cam-
paign as a proxy war between himself
and Mr. Trump, his aides insist. But he is,
nonetheless, tickled by the lopsided met-
rics of their competition of late.
Mr. Obama monitors their respective
polling numbers closely — he gets pri-
vately circulated data from the Demo-
cratic National Committee — and takes
pride in the fact that he has millions more
Twitter followers than a president who
relies on the platform far more than he
does, people close to him said.
The former president devours online
news, scouring The New York Times,
The Washington Post and Atlantic sites
on his iPad constantly, and keeps to his
White House night-owl hours, sending
texts and story links to friends between
midnight and 2 a.m. Even during the
pandemic he does not sleep late, at least
on weekdays, and is often on his Peloton
bike by 8 a.m., sending off a new round of
texts, often about the latest Trump out-
rage.
Mr. Obama was already stepping up
his criticism of Mr. Trump before Mr.
Floyd’s killing in May. Ms. Aniskoff orga-
nized an online meeting with 3,000 for-
mer administration officials whose pur-
pose, in part, was to soft-launch his
tougher line. (Democrats close to Mr.
Obama helpfully leaked the recording of
his remarks.)
Yet the rising cries for racial justice
have lent the 2020 campaign a coherence
for Mr. Obama, a politician most comfort-
able cloaking his criticism of an oppo-
nent — be it Mrs. Clinton or Mr. Trump —
in the language of movement politics.
Mr. Obama’s first reaction to the pro-
tests, people close to him said, was anxi-
ety — that the spasms of rioting would
spin out of control and play into Mr.
Trump’s narrative of a lawless left.
But peaceful demonstrators took con-
trol, igniting a national movement that
challenged Mr. Trump without making
him its focal point.
Soon after, in the middle of a strategy
call with political aides and policy ex-
perts at his foundation, an excited Mr.
Obama pronounced that “a tailor-made
moment” had arrived.
Mr. Obama has lately been in close
contact with his first attorney general,
Eric H. Holder Jr., sharing his outrage
over the way the current attorney gen-
eral, William P. Barr, personally in-
spected the phalanx of federal law en-
forcement officers who tear-gassed dem-
onstrators to clear the path for Mr.
Trump’s walk to a photo op at a historic
church near the White House.
Mr. Holder has few qualms about call-
ing Mr. Trump a racist in the former pres-
ident’s presence. Mr. Obama has never
contradicted him, but he avoids the term,
even in private, preferring a more indi-
rect accusation of “racial demagoguery,”
according to several people close to both
men.
His response to the Floyd killing was
less about hammering Mr. Trump than
about encouraging young people, who
have been slow in embracing Mr. Biden,
to vote. When he chose to speak publicly,
it was to host an online forum highlight-
ing a slate of policing reforms that went
nowhere in Congress in his second term.
In that sense, the role he is most com-
fortable occupying is the job he was once
so over.
On June 4, an hour or so before Mr.
Floyd’s memorial service in Minneapo-
lis, the former president called his
brother, Philonise Floyd — a reprise of
the calls he made to grieving families
over his eight years in office.
“I want you to have hope. I want you to
know you are not alone. I want you to
know that Michelle and I will do any-
thing you want me to do,” Mr. Obama
said during the emotional 25-minute con-
versation, according to the Rev. Al
Sharpton, who was on the call. Two other
people with knowledge of the call con-
firmed its contents.
“That was the first time, I think, that
the Floyd family really experienced sol-
ace since he died,” Mr. Sharpton said in
an interview.
A18 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Struggle for Racial Justice New York
‘Occupy City Hall’ Protesters Vow to Stay Until Police Budgets Are Cut
By JULIANA KIM
and AMR ALFIKY
It started on Tuesday night
when about 100 protesters began
occupying City Hall Park in Lower
Manhattan — with some spending
the night — in an effort to draw
more focus to their demand for
deep budget cuts to the Police De-
partment.
In a matter of days, a movement
took root. What started on a patch
of lawn and a few square feet has
now taken over most of the park
and drawn extensive attention
across social media, with “Occupy
City Hall” as the group’s rallying
cry. Volunteers have flocked to the
park, dropping off food, coffee and
supplies to build a kind of camp-
ground.
So far, the police have not bro-
ken up the gathering, which has
taken some inspiration from the
Occupy Wall Street demonstra-
tions of 2011 at Zuccotti Park in the
financial district in Lower Man-
hattan. But some disagreements
have resulted between protesters
and the police over the use of um-
brellas, tents and bicycles.
The City Hall encampment,
which was initially spearheaded
by Vocal-NY, a grass-roots organi-
zation, is the latest addition to the
wave of protests in New York after
George Floyd’s death at the hands
of Minneapolis police in late May.
Jawanza James Williams, direc-
tor of organizing for Vocal-NY,
conceptualized the occupation as
a way to pressure the city into re-
ducing its police budget by at least
$1 billion, a sum the group has
asked to be shifted to other re-
sources, including education and
social services.
The protesters, who are part of
a movement to defund the police,
are focusing on the July 1 deadline
for the city’s budget.
Corey Johnson, speaker of the
City Council, which must approve
the budget, has called for a $1 bil-
lion reduction in the $6 billion that
the city spends on the Police De-
partment, but Mayor Bill de Bla-
sio has not endorsed such a cut.
“We can’t leave anything to
chance,” said Mr. Williams, who
refers to “Occupy City Hall” as “a
people’s bazaar for liberation.”
In a short time, organizers,
largely black and queer, have
transformed the plaza. Hand-
drawn art covers any semblance
of government infrastructure:
subway entrances, metal barri-
cades and kiosks — a sharp con-
trast to the limestone municipal
building across the street.
A sophisticated network was
Does the N.Y.P.D. Get
Too Much? Or Perhaps
It’s Asked for Too Much?
From Page A1
and reducing the uniformed force.
Protesters and others have de-
manded that cuts go further, and
have put up an encampment in
City Hall Park.
These tensions are now coming
to a head in budget negotiations
between the Council and Mayor
Bill de Blasio, who has not ex-
pressed support for deep cuts in
the police budget. The budget
deadline is Wednesday.
The police commissioner, Der-
mot F. Shea, has said that he sup-
ports shifting some funding from
his department to youth pro-
grams and that he is open to giv-
ing up ancillary functions the po-
lice have absorbed, like school
safety and traffic enforcement.
But he has contended that dras-
tic cuts to the number of uni-
formed officers are unwise given a
recent rise in violent crime and
will deprive high-crime areas of
vital policing services. “The peo-
ple you’re trying to help the most,
potentially I believe, you are go-
ing to hurt the most,” Mr. Shea
said in an interview with PIX11.
Demands to shrink the foot-
print of the Police Department —
together with other requests, like
to increase transparency in the
disciplinary process — are com-
ing from many quarters.
Hundreds of educators signed
an open letter to Richard A. Car-
ranza, the chancellor of the city’s
Department of Education, de-
manding that school safety offi-
cers, who are unarmed, be re-
moved from buildings.
Black and Latino students still
represent roughly 90 percent of
arrests and summonses in city
schools, though overall numbers
of arrests have declined sharply
under Mr. de Blasio.
And as police shootings have
continued, a coalition of 80 mental
health organizations has declared
that a multimillion-dollar training
initiative had failed. The program
has given half of the officers on the
force 40 hours of training in han-
dling encounters with people hav-
ing mental health emergencies.
Since the program was begun in
2015, 16 people with mental illness
have been killed in encounters
created to make the space hab-
itable. Organizers built a library,
community garden and even a hut
for tea lovers. They gathered do-
nations of prepared meals, water,
hand sanitizer, blankets, vitamins
and cigarettes. And they formed
elaborate teams for safety, sanita-
tion and food distribution.
Orange armbands distinguish
the de-escalation team from the
medics, who wear a red cross em-
with the New York City police, a
higher rate than before the train-
ing started, said Carla Rabinowitz
from Community Access, an advo-
cacy group that has worked with
the Police Department to expand
mental health training for officers.
Just last week, a man with a his-
tory of mental illness was killed in
Queens when officers shocked
him repeatedly with Tasers.
“Forty hours of training can’t
counter the police mentality; it
can’t counter the police values,”
Ms. Rabinowitz said. “When
someone calls for help, they need
help. They don’t need someone
with a gun pointed at them.”
All but one of those 16 people
with mental illness killed by the
police were people of color, Ms.
Rabinowitz added.
And in the subway, heavy-
handed arrests of turnstile
jumpers and officers’ efforts to
clear sleeping homeless people
from trains — both of which dis-
proportionately affect black and
Hispanic people — have long been
criticized by advocacy groups.
No police department should be
invested with all these responsi-
bilities, said Jumaane Williams,
the city’s public advocate. Too of-
ten, he said, a law enforcement ap-
proach exacerbates a problem,
particularly in black and Hispanic
communities that receive outsize
attention from the police.
“The only tools they have are
handcuffs, a gun, a baton and a
summons book,” Mr. Williams
said in an interview. “That’s al-
ways going to be a disaster when
you have disparate policing de-
pending on the community you’re
in.”
A Catchall Solution
At a recent news conference,
Patrick Lynch, president of the po-
lice officers’ union, said it was the
failures of other city agencies that
forced the department to take on
many additional duties.
“If they want to shift responsi-
bilities reasonably, do it,” Mr.
Lynch said. “But where are you
going to put it? Who’s going to do
it? When you fail, who are you go-
ing to ask to step up? I got the an-
swer: They’re going to come back
and give it to the P.D.”
blem made from electric tape. By
Saturday, organizers had installed
internet service and set up a laun-
dry schedule.
As the movement expands, ten-
sions over strategy have
emerged, especially over whether
Vocal-NY is demanding deep
enough cuts in the budget.
Some supporters of the move-
ment to defund the police have ex-
pressed discomfort over the num-
Even critics of the department
acknowledge that there is some
truth in his assessment.
In the late 1990s, amid concern
over the Education Department’s
vetting of its school safety force,
the police were called in to take
over security in the schools.
As mental health institutions
closed down or were deprived of
funding through the 1970s, ’80s
and ’90s, the department was
called on to respond to emergen-
cies and engage with the flood of
homeless people on the streets
and in the subway.
In the city’s darkest days — dur-
ing the crack epidemic and the pe-
riod of runaway crime in the 1980s
and early ’90s, and after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks — police
officers were looked upon more fa-
vorably in many quarters.
The Police Department of today
is the result of the expansion to
meet the challenges of those eras.
The city now has fewer than 400
homicides each year, though the
size of the uniformed staff has
changed little from the early
1990s, when there were more than
2,000 murders annually.
While few would argue that the
terrorist threat has gone away
completely, some elected officials
and civil rights lawyers have
questioned the need for the de-
partment’s vast, secretive intelli-
gence-gathering apparatus. The
Police Department, for instance,
has several liaison officers sta-
tioned abroad.
Even some defenders of the po-
lice acknowledge that civilian
PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Protesters have slept in an encampment in front of City Hall,
above and left, since last week, and have transformed the plaza.
The movement has taken inspiration from Occupy Wall Street
and one organizer called it “a people’s bazaar for liberation.”
ber of young, white people who
are taking part in the gathering,
as well as over an atmosphere
that is occasionally upbeat.
Organizers responded that the
movement’s ability to accommo-
date a diverse range of opinion
was a sign of success.
The threat of the coronavirus
also looms over the gathering.
During peak hours, it’s impossible
for protesters to socially distance.
Thousands are elbow-to-elbow at
the plaza even as the occupation
sprawls farther south. At night,
protesters still cluster at the lawn,
sleeping with masks on. Others
unroll their sleeping bags and
tarps farther out when it’s time to
call it a night.
The encampment is run by a
combination of veteran organ-
izers and first-time volunteers.
Sierra Nicole, 23, from West
Harlem, didn’t think she would
end up overseeing the welcome
desk when she first arrived on
agencies were better suited to
dealing with the mentally ill, the
homeless and public health crises.
“Could some other agencies do
that better?” said Chuck Wexler,
executive director of the Police
Executive Research Forum, a law
enforcement policy nonprofit. “I
think the answer is, in some cases,
absolutely.”
‘A Moment of Reckoning’
For decades, city leaders of all
political persuasions, fearful of be-
ing blamed for a rise in crime,
have been loath to pare back the
Police Department, even as crime
has fallen. Its budget has grown
from $3 billion in 2000 to $5.7 bil-
lion today.
Mr. de Blasio came to office in
2014 promising to overhaul the de-
partment and to end the practice
of searching large numbers of
young people in high-crime areas
for weapons and drugs, which a
judge found unconstitutional.
But the department grew under
his tenure. When the coronavirus
pandemic cratered the city’s econ-
omy, it was education and youth
programs that Mr. de Blasio cut
when he released his proposed
budget in April. He left the Police
Department virtually untouched.
The mayor has shifted his
stance in the face of protests,
pledging some cuts that will free
up money that can be diverted to
social programs, particularly in
predominantly black and His-
panic neighborhoods. But he has
not said how far he is willing to go.
Thursday afternoon. On that first
day, Ms. Nicole had gone straight
to that desk to get more informa-
tion, but when she noticed a volun-
teer who appeared tired, she of-
fered to take his place. He agreed.
A few hours later, a protester
walked up to Ms. Nicole eager to
volunteer. The next available slot
was in eight hours, at 3 a.m., but
the protester, a woman, didn’t
seem to mind. Ms. Nicole signed
her up.
Many volunteers work around
the clock. At 4 a.m. on Friday,
Gregory Lecrocq, 31, from the Up-
per East Side, began his shift at
the food station, making breakfast
sandwiches for early risers. He
sleeps from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and by
4 p.m. he’s usually back at the pro-
test.
Occupy has also become a
meeting point for other marches.
Protesters from Upper Manhat-
tan and Brooklyn have stopped by
to show their support as well as to
TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMES
The City Council speaker, Corey
Johnson, and his allies said the
time had come to sharply shrink
the department’s sphere of re-
sponsibility.
Uniformed officers should not
police schoolyards or provide se-
curity at homeless shelters, Mr.
Johnson said in an interview. Nor,
he said, should the department
continue to rack up $700 million in
overtime payments, as it did last
year.
Mr. Johnson has proposed
shrinking the department by
2,000 uniformed officers.
“This is a moment of reckon-
ing,” he said. “It is a moment of
structural, systemic and transfor-
mational change, and that means
redesigning what public safety
looks like and it means not relying
only on the N.Y.P.D.”
Police officials say that most of
the budget goes to salary and
overtime for people on patrol, and
that there is no way to cut $1 bil-
lion without deep layoffs, which
they say would drive up response
times in a period when crime is
ticking upward.
Even some supporters of rein-
ing in the police have cautioned
against going too far.
Councilman I. Daneek Miller, a
Queens Democrat who is a co-
chairman of the Black, Latino and
Asian Caucus, said that he sup-
ported the council’s proposal to
cut $1 billion from the police budg-
et, but that it should not come at
the expense of progress in rela-
tions between his district and the
police.
pick up food and water.
Some protesters have said they
plan to remain at the plaza beyond
the budget deadline day, until
their demands for systemic
change are met. Mr. Williams said
he’s not opposed to people staying
longer.
Either way, Vocal-NY members
said they were optimistic that
they had organized a movement
that could sustain itself in the
long-term, said Jasmine Budnella,
34, the group’s drug policy coordi-
nator.
Still, as the week has pro-
gressed, organizers said they had
grappled with setting the right
tone. While showing joy is an im-
portant form of resistance, Mr.
Williams said, the group doesn’t
want people to forget why they
have gathered. At times, the occu-
pation can appear festival-like.
But those moments are often fol-
lowed by a speaker stressing the
need to stay alert and vigilant.
“We’re here because black peo-
ple are dying in the street,” one
speaker told the crowd on Thurs-
day night. “We’re not here to so-
cialize, we’re here for real-life
problems.”
Many protesters said they had
committed to sleeping outside ev-
ery night until the end of the
month, noting that they have ev-
erything they need to survive:
food, water, clothes, a place to
shower and restrooms.
Others said they would try to
show up every other night. Those
who didn’t want to sleep outside
said they would volunteer from
sunrise to sundown.
Organizers said the move-
ment’s ethos is centered around
anti-consumerism, inclusivity
and camaraderie. Everything is
free of charge, and protesters are
constantly on the lookout for one
another. Making the encampment
a safe space for vulnerable com-
munities has also been a top pri-
ority, they said.
On Thursday evening, Moji
Armu and her two children —
ages 6 and 9 — stumbled upon the
demonstration on their way home.
Ms. Armu said her children no-
ticed an art-making station at the
Occupy gathering and ran to the
tray of paint tubes.
A little later, she said her 6-year-
old son paused in bewilderment.
He didn’t realize that what he had
been witnessing — the art mak-
ing, dancing — could be consid-
ered protesting.
He asked his mother if he had
just attended his first protest. She
smiled and said, “You sure did.”
Arrested protesters this month
in Manhattan. The City Coun-
cil speaker has proposed cut-
ting one-sixth of the Police De-
partment’s $6 billion budget.
“It would be irresponsible for
me to dismiss all of the work the
community had done with those
precincts to get us to this point,”
he said in an interview. “We’re not
where we want to be, but we’re
damn sure better than we were.”
Change From Within
In the past, restrictions on the
Police Department’s authority
have often come as a result of out-
side intervention, and often in the
face of opposition from city lead-
ers. Court orders, for instance,
forced the city to drop its policy of
“stop and frisk” and to limit its in-
telligence gathering in mostly
Muslim neighborhoods.
Still, there are indications that
the political climate may change
the department’s reluctance to
back off aggressive enforcement
strategies that its leaders have
stuck with for decades, as crime
has steadily dropped to levels not
seen since the 1950s.
This month, Mr. Shea, the police
commissioner, announced that he
would disband and reassign 600
officers on plainclothes “anti-
crime” teams, which for nearly
two decades have focused on mak-
ing gun arrests and proactively
preventing violent crime.
Those teams have attracted a
disproportionate number of mis-
conduct complaints and have
been involved in some of the city’s
most notorious police shootings.
“We welcome reform, but we
also believe meaningful reform
starts from within,” Mr. Shea said.
“This is a policy shift coming from
me, personally.”
Further changes to the depart-
ment, however, will require other
city agencies to begin shouldering
the burden of public safety, said
those who support reducing the
role of the police.
Rory I. Lancman, chairman of
the City Council’s justice commit-
tee, said it would be easy to reduce
number of officers to meet today’s
demands, but more difficult to
teach other agencies to take over
those roles and to do a better job.
“You can’t get the police out of
the Department of Education
without reforming how the De-
partment of Education ensures
public safety,” he said. “That’s true
for homeless services, mental
health services, you name it.”

Struggle for Racial Justice Fallout in the U.S.
Mississippi Lawmakers Vote to Retire State Flag Rooted in the Confederacy
By RICK ROJAS
JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi
lawmakers voted on Sunday to
bring down, once and for all, the
state flag dominated by the Con-
federate battle emblem that has
flown for 126 years, adding a punc-
tuation point to years of efforts to
take down relics of the Confedera-
cy across the South.
The flag, the only state banner
left in the country with the overt
Confederate symbol, served for
many as an inescapable sign of
Mississippi’s racial scars and of
the consequences of that history
in defining perceptions of the
state.
Still embraced by many white
Mississippians as a proud display
of Old South heritage, the flag in-
creasingly has come to evoke seg-
regation, racial violence and a war
that had a central aim of preserv-
ing slavery.
In Mississippi, the state with
the nation’s highest percentage of
African-Americans, that has long
been the understanding of black
residents. It’s now the view of
many white Mississippians as
well. For others, the drag on the
state’s perception by outsiders
and the continuing friction within
were battles too costly to keep
waging.
The vote in the Mississippi
House was 91 in favor of removal
and 23 opposed. The vote in the
Senate was 37-14. The measure
now goes to Gov. Tate Reeves, a
Republican, who has said he will
sign it.
Mississippi began grappling
with the flag once again this
spring as a result of the death of
George Floyd in the custody of the
Minneapolis police, which rapidly
evolved into a sprawling expres-
sion of fury and exasperation over
the countless manifestations of
the nation’s tangled racial history.
“This was a long time coming,”
Nsombi Lambright-Haines said
after applause broke out in the
Capitol and a crowd huddled in-
side tossed aside coronavirus pre-
cautions for a brief second and
embraced one other.
“I’m glad to see this happen in
my lifetime, in my son’s lifetime —
in my grandmother’s lifetime,”
added Ms. Lambright-Haines, an
N.A.A.C.P. volunteer who has
been involved in efforts to take
down the flag for two decades.
(Her grandmother is 96.)
Amid a movement that has
brought down monuments of Con-
federates, colonizers and conquis-
tadors and stripped the names of
segregationists from buildings
and programs, pressure soon ze-
roed in on the flag.
Lawmakers were confronted by
a cascade of calls from inside and
outside Mississippi as opposition
coalesced across racial, religious,
partisan and cultural divides.
Football and basketball coaches
Racist Posts
On Facebook
Land Officers
In Trouble
By ALLYSON WALLER
Four police officers in San Jose,
Calif., have been placed on admin-
istrative leave after an anony-
mous blog post accused retired
and current officers of posting
racist and anti-Muslim comments
in a private Facebook group.
“While I have no control over
what former employees post on-
line, I can voice my outrage after
hearing about these comments
made online,” the police chief, Ed-
die Garcia, said in a statement.
“Any current employee involved
with bigoted activity online will
promptly be investigated and held
accountable to the fullest extent in
my power. We have no place for
this.”
A spokeswoman for the San
Jose Police Department said on
Sunday that the police were con-
ducting an “administrative inves-
tigation” after a Medium blog post
chronicled various inflammatory
posts by retired and current San
Jose police officers. The post de-
tailed discussions in the private
Facebook group “10–7ODSJ.”
In response to a Facebook post
about a Los Angeles Muslim wom-
an’s hijab being pulled off by an of-
ficer, one user said to “repurpose”
hijabs as nooses. Another post
called the Black Lives Matter
movement “racist,” saying it was
part of an “anti-American narra-
tive.” A comment on the post
reads “black lives don’t really
matter.”
Chief Garcia said officers who
engaged in misconduct online
have in the past been fired. “I have
previously responded with disci-
pline up to termination after an in-
vestigation into off-duty online ac-
No day is complete
without
The New York Times.
Applause broke out in the Mississippi Senate galleries, above, after the bill to retire the state flag
overcame a hurdle on Saturday. On the floor of the chamber, right, two state senators, Nicole Boyd,
at left, and Sarita Simmons, embraced. The bill calls for the removal of the flags within 15 days.
paraded through the Capitol urg-
ing a change. A varied assortment
that included country music stars,
the state’s black and white Baptist
conventions, civil rights organiza-
tions and associations of bankers,
manufacturers and librarians also
indicated their opposition.
“People’s hearts have
changed,” Philip Gunn, the Re-
publican House speaker who was
one of the strongest proponents of
bringing the measure to a vote in
the Legislature, told reporters on
Sunday. “We are better today than
we were yesterday, and because
we are better, we are stronger.”
The legislation sent to Mr.
Reeves proposes abolishing the
old flag and creating a commis-
sion that would design a new one.
The new banner would be forbid-
den from having the Confederate
battle emblem and must include
the phrase “In God we trust.” The
commission would be charged
with arriving at a design by Sep-
tember for it to be put up for a vote
on the November ballot.
The legislation would mandate
the “prompt, dignified and re-
spectful” removal within 15 days
of the bill going into effect.
Mr. Reeves, a Republican, said
on Saturday that he would sign a
bill, which represented the latest
evolution in his thinking. He ini-
tially said that any decision to
change the flag ought to be made
directly by voters.
“The argument over the 1894
flag has become as divisive as the
flag itself,” Mr. Reeves said in a
statement, “and it’s time to end it.”
The legislation cleared a signifi-
A protester in front of San Jose police officers last month. Racist
posts on a private Facebook page have spurred an investigation.
An investigation after
an article chronicled
inflammatory posts.
tivity that runs counter to our
standards of conduct,” he said.
A department spokeswoman
declined to disclose specific de-
tails about the four officers placed
on leave, including their ranks and
whether they were on paid or un-
paid leave.
The mayor of San Jose, Sam
Liccardo, demanded an investiga-
tion and called for the termination
of officers who post “racist, anti-
Muslim or menacing comments.”
In a statement, Mr. Liccardo noted
that an officer was previously
fired for tweets some also labeled
racist, however, the officer was re-
instated after an arbitrator found
his comments did not justify ter-
mination.
“As I articulated in my police re-
form proposal this week, I will
push for changes to a disciplinary
process that allows unaccount-
able arbitrators to reverse termi-
nation decisions of the chief,” Mr.
Liccardo said, citing a list of pro-
posals to reform the Police De-
partment. “I will further push for
independent investigation of all
racially discriminatory conduct.”
Police activity online, particu-
THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONAL MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
cant procedural hurdle on Satur-
day as a supermajority in both the
House of Representatives and
Senate voted to move ahead.
Many lawmakers said remov-
ing the flag had an air of inevitabil-
ity, as Mississippi increasingly
looked like a conspicuous holdout
as activists pushed to minimize
and contextualize the remnants of
the Confederacy that have long
been on prominent display.
The argument for changing the
flag was a moral one for some. Yet
the calls for a change resonated
more widely because of economic
concerns raised by business lead-
ers and moderate Republicans.
They contended that Mississippi,
as one of the poorest states, could
not afford to have barriers turning
away outside investment.
The financial threat had been
underscored by recent announce-
ments by the National Collegiate
Athletic Association and the
Southeastern Conference that
Mississippi would be precluded
from hosting championship
events until the flag was changed.
“I don’t know how long I want to
sit around and watch Mississippi
get kicked around because of a
piece of cloth we have hanging
over our capitol,” W. Briggs Hop-
son III, a Republican state sena-
tor, told his colleagues before the
vote.
The groundswell effort to
change the flag belied the extent
of the division that still exists over
the banner and how to interpret
the legacy it symbolizes. Various
polls show that, even as the num-
ber of people supporting a change
BEN MARGOT/ASSOCIATED PRESS
larly on social media, has drawn
scrutiny and backlash.
The Plain View Project, a data-
base tracking inflammatory posts
from the police across eight U.S.
departments, found about one in
five current officers have engaged
in Facebook activity involving bi-
ased comments and racist, Islam-
ophobic and misogynistic lan-
guage.
On Friday, a police officer in
Hoover, Ala., was fired after post-
ing a photo on Facebook that de-
picted an armed black protester in
“the cross hairs of a rifle scope,”
AL.com reported.
Paul Kelly, the president of the
San Jose Police Officers’ Associa-
tion, said he was “saddened” by
the accusations and that the union
would not offer any support or fi-
nancial help to those the depart-
ment finds to have participated in
the misconduct under investiga-
tion.
“The news that I read today
about members of our union and
former members of our union par-
ticipating in an online ring of hate
makes me sick,” Mr. Kelly said in a
statement. “I say this to anyone
that participated: The San Jose
Police Officers’ Association will
provide you no shelter, no protec-
tion. We will not represent you, be-
cause you do not represent us and
you do not represent our commu-
nity.”
ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS
has increased, nearly half of the
state was resistant to the idea.
“Whether we like it or not, the
Confederate emblem on our state
flag is viewed by many as a sym-
bol of hate — there’s no getting
around that fact,” Jason White, a
Republican state representative,
said on the floor of the House on
Saturday.
Many remain attached to the
flag because they see it as an en-
during recognition of the blood
shed by their ancestors who
fought for Mississippi and their
A groundswell effort
to remove a symbol,
and a debate on what
has yet to change.
pride in the state’s history.
Resistance to the vote has sur-
faced already: The Mississippi Di-
vision of the Sons of Confederate
Veterans, in a post on its Facebook
page, suggested rallying voters to
impede any efforts to replace the
flag. “We need to come up with
ways to make this as hard on them
as possible and make them regret
it,” the post said.
One person replied, “I have a
flag and it’s not changing.”
Chris McDaniel, a Republican
state senator who has been one of
the most ardent critics of the legis-
lation, argued that changing the
flag represented a dangerous
One Dies After Man Opens Fire at Protest
By AUSTIN RAMZY
and LUCY TOMPKINS
A fatal shooting in Louisville on
Saturday night added a grim note
to weeks of protests against police
violence and particularly against
the killing there in March of Bre-
onna Taylor, an African-American
emergency room technician shot
to death by police in her home.
The shooting victim was identi-
fied as Tyler Gerth, 27, of Lou-
isville. Mr. Gerth was a photogra-
pher who had frequented the pro-
tests and documented them with
his camera for weeks, the Lou-
isville Courier Journal reported.
The accused shooter was identi-
fied in an arrest citation as Steven
Lopez. He has been charged with
murder and first-degree wanton
endangerment, according to the
citation.
He had been a participant in the
protests and had repeatedly been
asked to leave by other protesters
“due to his disruptive behavior,”
officials said at a news conference
on Sunday. Mr. Lopez is in police
custody at a hospital.
Chief Robert Schroeder said Mr.
Lopez had been arrested “a couple
of times” in the past several
weeks.
Mayor Greg Fischer of Lou-
Praying at Jefferson Square Park in Louisville, Ky., where a man was fatally shot on Saturday.
BARBARA GAUNTT/THE CLARION-LEDGER, VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS
precedent for erasing history.
“To insist that somehow the
slippery slope is illogical is to ig-
nore the tide of history,” he said on
the Senate floor on Sunday. “Ev-
erywhere we look people are seek-
ing these changes and they can-
not, will not, be appeased.”
During the discussion in the
Legislature, much of the dissent
about changing the flag was fo-
cused less on an outright defense
of it and more about voicing sup-
port of a referendum.
Chris Brown, a Republican
state representative, said he had
heard from many constituents
who supported removing the flag
but who also wanted to use a state-
wide vote to send a message about
Mississippi.
“They want to show the world
that they’re moving on,” Mr.
Brown said.
It would be a sharp contrast
from the last time the flag was
opened to a statewide ballot, in
2001, when voters overwhelm-
ingly decided to keep the flag.
The effort was revived five
years ago after a white suprema-
cist killed nine African-American
worshipers in a Charleston, S.C.,
church, prompting the removal of
monuments to the Confederacy
across the region as well as battle
flags on statehouse grounds in
Alabama and South Carolina.
(Several other Southern states
have flags that are regarded as ob-
liquely referencing Confederate
iconography, including Alabama
and Florida.)
Many cities moved on their own
to take down the flag and all eight
isville said that Mr. Lopez had
shot no one else on Saturday aside
from Mr. Gerth. Mr. Lopez was
wounded in the leg by gunfire
from bystanders at the park who
were defending themselves, ac-
cording to his arrest citation.
Videos posted online showed a
man standing on the edge of Jef-
ferson Square Park firing more
than a dozen shots that sent pro-
testers scrambling for shelter
among tents and park benches.
The police cleared the park to in-
vestigate the shooting, and pro-
testers will no longer be allowed to
camp or set up tents at Jefferson
Square Park, said Amy Hess, chief
of public services.
“We just felt the situation that
culminated with last night’s shoot-
ing has become too dangerous to
allow this type of activity to con-
tinue any longer,” Ms. Hess said.
It has been the city’s policy
since before the protests began to
prohibit camping in the park, but
Ms. Hess said that policy had been
intentionally overlooked in order
to allow protesters to “come to-
gether to demand change.”
But when violence broke out in
the camp, the tents made it espe-
cially difficult for law enforcement
to discern what was happening,
N A19
of the state’s public universities
lowered it on their campuses.
Before they voted on Sunday,
lawmakers described wrestling
with competing emotions about
the flag’s meaning and spoke pas-
sionately about a desire to unify
Mississippi. “That’s what we’ve
all prayed for,” said Jerry R.
Turner, a Republican representa-
tive.
At least one had teared up after
the vote as he acknowledged the
symbolic power of lowering the
flag.
“This has taught us a lesson,”
Robert L. Johnson III, the House
Democratic leader, told reporters,
noting the legislation had biparti-
san support that bridged racial
and geographic lines. “We’re one
Mississippi moving forward.”
The galleries in the House and
Senate held sparse crowds be-
cause of coronavirus precautions,
but the people who were there and
waiting in the Capitol corridors
erupted into applause as soon as
the Senate tally was announced.
Arekia Bennett, a 27-year-old
Mississippi native, was over-
whelmed with emotions.
“Mississippi had some charac-
ter decisions to make, and today,
we did,” said Ms. Bennett, the ex-
ecutive director of Mississippi
Votes, a voting rights organiza-
tion.
She noted how, after years of
pushing, the balance suddenly
had shifted in the favor of those
wanting to retire the flag to his-
tory. “This is progress,” she said,
“that no one thought we could
make.”
she said.
“It’s a safety issue at this point,”
Ms. Hess said.
Louisville has been a center of
the protests against police vio-
lence following the killing of
George Floyd in Minneapolis last
month.
Mr. Floyd’s death renewed fo-
cus on Ms. Taylor, 26, who was
shot and killed by Louisville police
officers who were serving a
search warrant at her apartment.
The police were executing a “no-
knock” warrant, which allows
them to enter without identifying
themselves.
During the encounter, Mr.
Walker fired his gun, hitting an of-
ficer in the leg, and the police
opened fire, hitting Ms. Taylor at
least eight times. The warrant
was issued as part of a drug inves-
tigation but no drugs were found
in the apartment.
The Louisville police have dis-
missed one of the officers who
opened fire, Brett Hankison, say-
ing he violated their policy on the
use of deadly force by “wantonly
and blindly” firing 10 shots in Ms.
Taylor’s apartment. The Lou-
isville City Council has also voted
to ban no-knock warrants, a meas-
ure known as “Breonna’s Law.”
DYLAN LOVAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
A20
JAMELLE BOUIE
Beyond ‘White Fragility’
SINCE IT EMERGED seven years ago in re-
sponse to the acquittal of George Zim-
merman in the shooting of Trayvon Mar-
tin, the Black Lives Matter movement
has produced a sea change in attitudes,
politics and policy.
In 2016, 43 percent of Americans sup-
ported Black Lives Matter and its claims
about the criminal justice system; now,
it’s up to 67 percent, with 60 percent sup-
port among white Americans, compared
with 40 percent four years ago. Whereas
Democratic politicians once stumbled
over the issue, now even Republicans are
falling over themselves to say that
“black lives matter.” And where the pol-
icy conversation was formerly focused
on body cameras and chokehold bans,
now mainstream outlets are debating
and taking seriously calls to demilitarize
and defund police departments or to
abolish them outright.
But the Black Lives Matter platform
isn’t just about criminal justice. From the
start, activists have articulated a broad,
inclusive vision for the entire country.
This, in fact, has been true of each of the
nation’s major movements for racial
equality. Among black Americans and
their Radical Republican allies, Recon-
struction — which was still ongoing as of
150 years ago — was as much a fight to
fundamentally reorder Southern eco-
nomic life as it was a struggle for political
inclusion. The struggle against Jim
Crow, likewise, was also a struggle for
economic equality and the transforma-
tion of society.
“The black revolution is much more
than a struggle for the rights of Ne-
groes,” the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
wrote in “A Testament of Hope”:
It is forcing America to face all its
interrelated flaws — racism,
poverty, militarism and
materialism. It is exposing evils
that are rooted deeply in the whole
structure of our society. It reveals
systemic rather than superficial
flaws and suggests that radical
reconstruction of society itself is
the real issue to be faced.
Our society was built on the racial seg-
mentation of personhood. Some people
were full humans, guaranteed non-en-
slavement, secured from expropriation
and given the protection of law, and some
people — blacks, Natives and other non-
whites — were not. That unequal distri-
bution of personhood was an economic
reality as well. It shaped your access to
employment and capital; determined
whether you would be doomed to the
margins of labor or given access to its el-
evated ranks; marked who might share
in the bounty of capitalist production and
who would most likely be cast out as dis-
posable.
In our society, in other words, the fight
for equal personhood can’t help but also
be a struggle for economic justice. And
what we see, past and present, is how
that fight against the privileges and dis-
tinctions of race can also lay the founda-
tions for a broader assault on the privi-
leges and distinctions of class.
As soon as the Civil War came to a
close, it was clear there could be no actu-
al freedom for the formerly enslaved
without a fundamental transformation of
economic relations. “We must see that
the freedman are established on the soil,
and that they may become proprietors,”
Charles Sumner, the Radical Republican
senator from Massachusetts, wrote in
March 1865. “The great plantations,
which have been so many nurseries of
the rebellion, must be broken up, and the
freedmen must have the pieces.” Like-
wise, said the Radical Republican con-
gressman Thaddeus Stevens in Septem-
ber 1865, “The whole fabric of Southern
society must be changed, and never can
it be done if this opportunity is lost.” The
foundations of their institutions, he con-
tinued, “must be broken up and re-laid,
or all of our blood and treasure have been
spent in vain.”
Presidential Reconstruction under
Andrew Johnson, a Democrat, would im-
mediately undermine any means to this
end, as he restored defeated Confeder-
ates to citizenship and gave them free
rein to impose laws, like the Black Codes,
which sought to reestablish the eco-
nomic and social conditions of slavery.
But Republicans in Congress were even-
tually able to wrest control of Recon-
struction from the administration, and
just as importantly, black Americans
were actively taking steps to secure their
political freedom against white reac-
tionary opposition. Working through the
Union Army, postwar Union Leagues
and the Republican Party, freed and free
blacks worked toward a common goal of
political equality. And once they secured
something like it, they set out to try as
much as possible to affect that economic
transformation.
“Public schools, hospitals, penitentia-
ries, and asylums for orphans and the in-
sane were established for the first time
or received increased funding,” the histo-
rian Eric Foner wrote in “Reconstruc-
tion: America’s Unfinished Revolution,
1863-1877.” “South Carolina funded medi-
cal care for poor citizens, and Alabama
If you want to let freedom
ring, hammer on
economic injustice.
provided free legal counsel for indigent
defendants.”
For blacks and Radical Republicans,
Reconstruction was an attempt to secure
political rights for the sake transforming
the entire society. And its end had as
much to do with the reaction of property
and capital owners as it did with racist
violence. “The bargain of 1876,” W.E.B.
Du Bois wrote in “Black Reconstruction
in America,”
was essentially an understanding by
which the Federal Government
ceased to sustain the right to vote
of half of the laboring population
of the South, and left capital as
represented by the old planter
class, the new Northern capitalist,
and the capitalist that began to
rise out of the poor whites, with a
control of labor greater than in
any modern industrial state in
civilized lands.
Out of that, he continued, “has arisen
in the South an exploitation of labor un-
paralleled in modern times, with a gov-
ernment in which all pretense at party
alignment or regard for universal suf-
frage is given up.”
Du Bois was writing in the 1930s. A
quarter-century later, black Americans
in the South would launch a movement to
unravel Jim Crow repression and eco-
nomic exploitation. And as that move-
ment progressed and notched victories
against segregation, it became clear that
the next step was to build a coalition
against the privileges of class, since the
two were inextricably tied together. The
Memphis sanitation workers who asked
Martin Luther King Jr. to support their
strike in 1968 were black, set against a
white power structure in the city. Their
oppression as black Americans and sub-
GABRIELA BHASKAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
jugation as workers were tied together.
Unraveling one could not be accom-
plished without unraveling the other.
All of this relates back to the relation-
ship between race and capitalism. To end
segregation — of housing, of schools, of
workplaces — is to undo one of the major
ways in which labor is exploited, caste
established and the ideologies of racial
hierarchy sustained. And that, in turn,
opens possibilities for new avenues of
advancement. The old labor slogan “Ne-
gro and White, Unite and Fight!” con-
tains more than a little truth about the
necessary conditions for economic jus-
tice. That this unity is fairly rare in Amer-
ican history is a testament to how often
these movements have “either advocat-
ed, capitulated before, or otherwise
failed to oppose racism at one or more
critical junctures in their history,” as
Robert L. Allen and Pamela P. Allen note
in their 1974 study of racism and social
reform movements.
Which brings us back to the present.
The activists behind the Black Lives
Matter movement have always con-
nected its aims to working-class, egali-
tarian politics. The platform of the Move-
ment for Black Lives, as it is formally
known, includes demands for universal
health care, affordable housing, living
wage employment and access to educa-
tion and public transportation. Given the
extent to which class shapes black expo-
sure to police violence — it is poor and
working class black Americans who are
most likely to live in neighborhoods
marked by constant police surveillance
— calls to defund and dismantle existing
police departments are a class demand
like any other.
But while the movement can’t help but
be about practical concerns, the predom-
inating discourse of belief and intention
overshadows those stakes: too much
concern with “white fragility” and not
enough with wealth inequality. The chal-
lenge is to bridge the gap; to show new
supporters that there’s far more work to
do than changing the way we police; to
channel their sympathy into a deeper un-
derstanding of the problem at hand.
To put a final point of emphasis on the
potential of the moment, I’ll leave you
with this. In a 1963 pamphlet called “The
American Revolution: Pages from a Ne-
gro Worker’s Notebook,” the activist and
laborer James Boggs argued for the rev-
olutionary potential of the black struggle
for civil rights. “The strength of the Ne-
gro cause and its power to shake up the
social structure of the nation,” Boggs
wrote, “comes from the fact that in the
Negro struggle all the questions of hu-
man rights and human relationships are
posed.” That is because it is a struggle for
equality “in production, in consumption,
in the community, in the courts, in the
schools, in the universities, in trans-
portation, in social activity, in govern-
ment, and indeed in every sphere of
American life.” 0 Generation Z: Challenges and Preoccupations
ALYSSA SCHUKAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
LETTERS
It’s Time for OSHA to Do Its Job
TO THE EDITOR:
Re “OSHA Has Been AWOL” (edito-
rial, June 22):
As noted in your excellent edito-
rial, meatpacking plants, hospitals
and industries that put workers in
contact with the public have be-
come “hot spots” for the spread of
Covid-19. Workers who become
infected then carry infection home
and spread the virus to their fam-
ilies and communities — sometimes
even before they know that they
are sick. If we fail to provide proper
safeguards for workers, workplaces
will continue to be reservoirs of
disease and will sustain this pan-
demic.
Fortunately, we know how to
protect workers against Covid-19
and other occupational diseases. A
safely designed workplace is the
single most effective control. Ad-
ministrative measures such as
hiring enough workers to do the
job, so they don’t have to work
longer hours with additional expo-
sure, and safe work practices are
next in efficacy.
Personal protective equipment
(P.P.E.) is always important, but
also least effective. Paid sick leave
and protection of salary and bene-
fits during quarantine will encour-
age symptomatic workers to stay
home and keep Covid-19 out of the
workplace.
Employers have a legal duty
under the Occupational Safety and
Health Act to provide a safe, health-
ful workplace for every worker. We
strongly agree that OSHA must
enforce this responsibility.
EDWARD L. BAKER
PHILIP J. LANDRIGAN
GREGORY R. WAGNER
DAVID H. WEGMAN
The writers are doctors who have
served in senior leadership positions in
the National Institute for Occupational
Safety and Health and/or in university
occupational health programs.
TO THE EDITOR:
The pandemic has shown a bright
light on many of America’s inequi-
ties that were hidden or ignored.
Awareness for the health and safety
of workers has finally come out
from the shadows. Unfortunately,
OSHA’s refusal to issue any new
health and safety standards to meet
the pandemic, and its failure to
A Consensus on Gay Rights and Religion?
TO THE EDITOR:
Re “We Can Find Common Ground
on Gay Rights and Religious Lib-
erty,” by Jonathan Rauch and
Peter Wehner (Op-Ed,
nytimes.com, June 22):
Now that L.G.B.T.Q. workers
cannot be fired simply because of
who we are, Mr. Rauch and Mr.
Wehner claim that Congress must
pass “new safeguards” for those
who seek exemptions from the
nondiscrimination law based on
religion.
True, there is tension between
our country’s promise of equality
and some religious beliefs. But that
conflict is not new, and the solution
to it already exists.
When the Civil Rights Act of
1964 banned race discrimination,
some business owners objected.
The law included religious exemp-
tions in some contexts, but not for
public-facing businesses like
restaurants.
The Supreme Court declined to
create a new exemption in 1968,
leaving intact the balance struck in
the Civil Rights Act. The Equality
Act wouldn’t change that.
What it would do is expressly
protect L.G.B.T.Q. people under
federal law. The true source of
today’s debate is not religious
TO THE EDITOR:
Re “Gen Z Will Not Save Us,” by
Charlie Warzel (Opinion, June 23):
As a high school counselor, I
spend the majority of my time with
teenagers who plan to vote in the
presidential election. Their mes-
sage is clear: They face huge eco-
nomic, health and climate chal-
lenges in their adult lives and don’t
have time for partisan politics.
They want the most qualified and
smartest minds focused on solu-
tions.
My students don’t care where
these solutions come from as long
as they are sound, effective and
ensure a future that is livable for
them and their children. They don’t
expect to be rich; they just want to
survive this political, economic and
climate mess and feel that if adults
won’t or can’t lead, they will do it
because their future actually does
depend on it. And, Mr. President,
they plan to vote green.
VALERIE FEIT, MAMARONECK, N.Y.
TO THE EDITOR:
My New York City school has never
MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
investigate even the worst corpo-
rate offenders who put profits
ahead of worker safety, are not
news to those who follow America’s
workplace health and safety issues.
Almost from its passage in 1970,
OSHA has been underfunded and
understaffed and a target for repeal
actions by G.O.P. politicians, leaving
workers at risk for injury and death
by just showing up to work. Recent
government statistics confirm that
before the pandemic, an average of
275 American workers died each
day from preventable causes. Be-
cause of the lack of masks and
other P.P.E., workplace social dis-
tancing and enforceable standards,
that number will surely and unnec-
essarily rise in this pandemic.
America needs to make OSHA a
robust and reformed federal agency
that will finally protect workers and
not “sit on the sidelines” any longer.
JONATHAN D. KARMEL, CHICAGO
The writer, a lawyer, represents unions
and workers and is the author of
“Dying to Work: Death and Injury in
the American Workplace.”
TO THE EDITOR:
OSHA’s failure to protect workers
exposed to Covid-19 is even more
disgraceful than your editorial
suggests. Just as previous adminis-
trations anticipated a pandemic like
Covid-19 and developed action
plans that were ignored by the
Trump administration, previous
OSHA leaders were developing an
airborne transmissible disease
standard after the H1N1 outbreak to
protect workers. A draft rule was
provided to the new administration,
which promptly killed it.
It is ludicrous for OSHA to claim
that its current rules are sufficient,
when it was well known that new
specific measures to protect work-
ers from diseases like Covid-19
were urgently needed and a new
rule was moving toward adoption.
Although much time has been lost,
OSHA can still act to save lives by
using its existing authority to issue
an emergency temporary standard
for airborne transmissible diseases
based on this earlier work.
MICHAEL SILVERSTEIN
OLYMPIA, WASH.
The writer, a doctor, was director of
policy for OSHA in the 1990s.
liberty but opposition to full
L.G.B.T.Q. equality.
RIA TABACCO MAR, BROOKLYN
The writer is the director of the
A.C.L.U. Women’s Rights Project and a
lawyer for Aimee Stephens and Don
Zarda, whose cases were decided as
part of the recent Supreme Court
ruling.
TO THE EDITOR:
Jonathan Rauch and Peter Wehner
got it right. It really doesn’t have to
be all or nothing.
Between the Equality Act and
the Fairness for All Act, there is
plenty of room to find common
ground and meet in the middle.
The L.G.B.T.Q. and conservative
faith communities — which overlap
in myriad ways and places — have
been in a bitter stalemate for too
long. The endless cycle of inconclu-
sive litigation needs to end.
The partisans on the far ends of
the spectrum need to stop fueling
bitterness, get out of the way and
let those who truly value L.G.B.T.Q.
equality and religious liberty take
over and work toward resolution.
JAMES LAMKIN, ATLANTA
The writer is senior pastor at the
Northside Drive Baptist Church.
been more adamant in demanding
change. There’s an Instagram ac-
count to call out racist incidents;
students are drafting institutional
demands; and practically all of my
friends have either marched with or
donated to Black Lives Matter.
But since I’ve relocated tempo-
rarily to the suburbs of Long Island,
to my old town, I’ve noticed that
only a few of my high-school peers
actively support Black Lives Mat-
ter. Students get together not to
protest but to throw parties. Most
simply don’t care about activism.
I agree with Charlie Warzel.
Many people, including me, have a
skewed view of Generation Z. A
very active, small group of young
people is prominently featured in
news sources and gains attention
on social media, but we underesti-
mate how many teenagers remain
silent in the background.
Until we’re of age to vote, I can’t
say to what extent my generation is
different from those who came
before, or if we’re repeating the
actions, or lack thereof, of our par-
ents and grandparents.
TALIA WINIARSKY, WOODMERE, N.Y.

JENNIFER SENIOR
Trump’s Nasty
Politics Began
With Newt
APPROXIMATELY ONE BILLION news cycles
ago — which is to say, on June 9 — a busi-
nesswoman named Marjorie Taylor
Greene finished first in the Republican
primary in Georgia’s deeply conserva-
tive 14th Congressional District, north-
west of Atlanta, which means that after a
runoff she’s all but assured a seat in the
House of Representatives next year.
Unfortunately, she is a cheerful bigot
and conspiracy-theory fluffernutter. She
subscribes to QAnon, the far-right fever
dream that says Donald Trump is under
siege from a cabal of deep-state saboteurs,
some of whom run a pedophile ring; she
says African-Americans are being held
back primarily by “gangs.”
The House Republican leadership is
trying to distance itself from this woman,
as if she belongs to some other party from
a faraway galaxy. But her politics are
Trumpism distilled. And Trumpism itself
isn’t a style and philosophy that began in
2016, or even in 2010, with the Tea Party. It
began 40-odd years ago, in Greene’s own
state, with the election of a different poli-
tician just two districts over.
I’m talking about Newt. You really
could argue that today’s napalm politics
began with Newt.
The normalization of personal destruc-
tion. The contempt for custom. The media-
baiting, the annihilation of bipartisan co-
mity, the delegitimizing of institutions.
“Gingrich had planted; Trump had
reaped,” writes the Princeton historian
Julian Zelizer in the prologue to his forth-
coming book, “Burning Down the House:
Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and
the Rise of a New Republican Party.”
I recently read Zelizer’s book with mor-
bid fascination. My first real job in journal-
ism was as a reporter for the The Hill
Gingrich wrote the
playbook: contempt for
norms and institutions.
newspaper the year it launched, in 1994,
which happened to be the same year Re-
publicans won control of the House, over-
turning four decades of Democratic rule.
(I wrote nothing memorable that day, but I
did come up with our banner headline:
“It’s Reigning Republicans.”)
Gingrich became speaker the next Jan-
uary. It was a stunning development. Pre-
vious speakers, no matter how partisan
they were, tended to work, lunch and even
drink across the aisle. The only kind of
cocktails Gingrich knew were Molotovs.
He conceived of governing as war. Dem-
ocrats were not merely to be defeated
ideologically. They were to be immolated.
Even as an inexperienced kid, I could
see his ascension was bad news. Looking
back, the parallels between then and now
couldn’t be clearer.
Democrats were devastated that a man
with so much malignity and anger in his
heart could suddenly be at the helm; but
in Republicans, Gingrich had a cult.
Gingrich despised the mainstream
press, breaking with tradition and giving
valuable real estate in the Capitol to con-
servative, nativist-populist radio hosts
who spoke loudly and carried a big
schtick, just as Trump gives coveted space
to One America News Network.
Gingrich was my introduction to Or-
wellian newspeak. He had this tic of start-
ing every other paragraph with “frankly”
and then telling a lie; it was his poker tell.
He freely trafficked in conspiracy theo-
ries. His PAC circulated a pamphlet for as-
piring politicians who wished “to speak
like Newt.” It advised them to repeat a
long list of words to describe Democrats,
including sick, pathetic, corrupt.
Like Trump, Gingrich was a thrice-
married womanizer who’d somehow se-
duced the evangelicals. He too had a
skyscraping ego, nursed grudges as if
they were newborns, and lacked impulse
control. In 1995, Bill Clinton made him sit
in the back of Air Force One; he re-
sponded with a tantrum and shut down
the government.
Gingrich turned the politics of white
racial grievance into an art form. They
may have started with Nixon’s Southern
Strategy, but Gingrich actually came
from the South. He intuited the backlash
to globalization, to affirmation action; the
culture teemed with stories about white
men under siege. It wasn’t long before
1994 became known as “The Year of the
Angry White Male.”
Most of Zelizer’s book is about Ging-
rich’s Javert-like quest to bring down the
House speaker, Jim Wright, for his shady
ethics. (Gingrich succeeded, only to later
be reprimanded and fined for his own
ethical breaches.) Zelizer never mentions
individual parallels to Trump once he
starts telling Gingrich’s story, because
there’s no need. They hop off the page
like frogs.
But the one that goosepimples me even
as I type, is this: Gingrich was the first
true reality TV politician. He understood
that the C-Span cameras didn’t have to be
a passively recording set of eyes. You
could operatically perform for them.
“Conflict equals exposure equals power,”
became one of his favorite sayings.
Which may as well be the motto of reality
television. And Trump.
Assuming she wins in November, Mar-
jorie Taylor Greene will likely be relegat-
ed to the margins of her caucus. But if
Gingrich — and Trump — have taught us
anything, it’s that there’s no telling where
the last exit is on the expressway to ex-
tremism; we know only that the guard-
rails get lower with each passing mile.
“These are the depths to which we’ve de-
scended,” Zelizer told me in a phone call.
“No one ever thinks that an outlier will
one day be the party’s future.” 0 eliminate a mosquito breeding ground —
THE NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Can Covid Damage the Brain?
Melinda Wenner Moyer
F
OR THREE months, Chelsea
Alionar has struggled with fevers,
headaches, dizziness and a brain
fog so intense it feels like early de-
mentia. She came down with the worst
headache of her life on March 9, then lost
her sense of taste and smell. She eventu-
ally tested positive for the coronavirus.
But her symptoms have been stranger,
and lasted longer, than most.
“I tell the same stories repeatedly; I for-
get words I know,” she told me. Her fin-
gers and toes have been numb, her vision
blurry and her fatigue severe. The 37-
year-old is a one of the more than 4,000
members of a Facebook support group for
Covid survivors who have been ill for
more than 80 days.
The more we learn about the coro-
navirus, the more we realize it’s not just a
respiratory infection. The virus can rav-
age many of the body’s major organ sys-
tems, including the brain and central ner-
vous system.
Neurologists don’t think that every
Covid patient will suffer brain damage —
far from it. But the virus may injure and
thereby age the brain through a number of
mechanisms that aren’t yet fully under-
stood.
It’s likely that these brain injuries aren’t
that different from other kinds of insults
that might accumulate over a person’s life-
time; the problem is that “Covid is a large
bolus of these things at once,” said Dr. Ma-
jid Fotuhi, a neurologist and neuroscien-
tist affiliated with Johns Hopkins.
Dr. Igor Koralnik agrees. He runs the
Neuro Covid-19 Clinic at Northwestern
Memorial Hospital in Chicago. He expects
that when recovered Covid patients go on
to develop cognitive issues later in life,
“their presentation is going to be worse
because of the damage to the brain that
was caused by Covid-19.”
How does this happen? Research sug-
gests that the coronavirus can directly in-
fect neural cells, said Dr. Jeffrey Cirillo, a
professor of microbial pathogenesis and
immunology at Texas A&M University.
Not All Will Get to Swim This Summer
Andrew W. Kahrl
L
IKE other crises in the past, the coro-
navirus pandemic has provided
an opportunity for communities
to act on their most exclusionary
impulses. This summer, private pools and
beach clubs, as well as public facilities in
wealthier areas, are reopening with new
measures to ensure that the general pub-
lic stays out: hiring more security, ag-
gressively checking beach tags and re-
stricting access to residents only.
Exclusionary measures that predomi-
nantly white and wealthier communities
have eagerly adopted, combined with the
fact that many cities and towns are keep-
ing public swimming pools closed to help
narrow budget gaps, mean many Ameri-
cans who rely on public facilities for out-
door recreation — disproportionately
lower income families and people of color
— will find that there are few places left for
them to go.
This has happened before. Throughout
American history, in times of heightened
racial tension and rising inequality, the so-
cially advantaged tend to retreat into pri-
vate spaces, withdraw taxpayer support
for public recreation and work to restrict
access to public space within their com-
munities, often using concerns about pub-
lic health and safety as justification.
In the summer of 1929, residents of the
town of Westport along Connecticut’s
Gold Coast reported a “new menace”
threatening the health and safety of their
community: New Yorkers fleeing the
squalid, scorching city and flocking to a
new state beach located on neighboring
Sherwood Island. Because it was state-
owned land, all the residents could do, one
reporter noted, was “to make access as
difficult as possible.”
Westport officials hired a contractor to
dredge a creek and flood the road connect-
ing the state beach to the mainland. They
insisted that they were simply seeking to
The virus most likely replicates inside the
cells and affects how they function. This
viral invasion could cause patients to
“have a persistence of cognitive problems,
or maybe they will have persistent
seizures,” Dr. Koralnik said. In April, a 40-
year-old Los Angeles woman with a head-
ache, seizures and hallucinations was
found to have the RNA from the coro-
navirus in her cerebrospinal fluid.
Another way the coronavirus can dam-
age the nervous system is i through wide-
spread inflammation caused by the body’s
immune response. Inflammation “is bad
for the brain, and we know that for a fact,”
Dr. Fotuhi said. One of the leading theories
in Alzheimer’s research is that inflamma-
tion drives the disease.
Brain inflammation can also spark the
creation of blood clots. Studies suggest
that clots occur in up to 30 percent of criti-
“I tell the same stories
repeatedly; I forget
words I know.”
cally ill Covid patients. These clots can
permeate the brain, causing it “to function
at a lower level,” Dr. Fotuhi said. They can
also lead to strokes that starve the brain of
oxygen. Studies from China and Italy have
suggested that as many as 5 percent of
hospitalized patients with Covid experi-
ence strokes, though a more recent N.Y.U.
study found the figure to be lower, at 1 per-
cent, in hospitalized New York patients.
If the inflammation becomes so severe
as to involve a “cytokine storm,” in which
a patient’s body in effect turns on itself,
the blood brain barrier can be breached,
allowing more viruses and cytokines into
the brain and ultimately killing brain cells.
“It’s like the defense system is called to
quiet a small riot in one neighborhood, and
all of a sudden, the whole military is ticked
off and they don’t know what’s going on,
they just go bomb everything,” Dr. Fotuhi
said.
A small number of patients with the co-
but as another state official remarked,
“the real object is to keep the people off
state property.”
The people in question were the blacks,
Jews, Italians and others denied member-
ship to country clubs, who had few options
for summertime relief. As America
slipped deeper into the Great Depression,
the nation’s swelling homeless population
was added to the list. A state park, one res-
ident decried, “would be an invitation to
the scum.” Sherwood Island, another be-
moaned, “looks like a gypsy camp and
new tents are being erected every day.”
It was no coincidence that during these
same years, several towns along Connect-
icut’s Gold Coast first adopted ordinances
Pools, beaches and clubs
open — but mostly for
the privileged few.
restricting access to town beaches and
other places of outdoor recreation to resi-
dents only.
As black uprisings engulfed urban
America in the 1960s, white suburbanites
placed new restrictions on access to out-
door public space. On Long Island, Nas-
sau County banned nonresidents from all
of its parks, pools and golf courses, and re-
quired residents to purchase a “leisure
pass” to enjoy the county’s outdoor ameni-
ties.
Beginning in the 1970s, social activists
and civil liberties groups fought to dis-
mantle the barriers exclusive communi-
ties had used to keep the public out of its
public-in-name-only spaces. In 1973, the
New York Civil Liberties Union success-
fully fought to overturn the town of Long
Beach’s ordinance banning nonresidents
from its public beaches. In 2001, Connecti-
cut’s highest court ruled that Greenwich’s
ordinance banning nonresidents from its
town beaches was unconstitutional.
In both cases, the towns claimed that
ROBERT BEATTY
ronavirus have gone on to develop Guil-
lain-Barré syndrome, in which a person’s
immune system attacks that person’s own
nerves, causing paralysis. Michele Hart, a
41-year-old psychotherapist in Colorado,
is one of them.
She began experiencing electrical,
shocklike pains in her body, numbness in
her extremities and stabbing pains down
the side of her face in April. She went to
the E.R., worried she might have the coro-
navirus, but they sent her home, saying
her neurological symptoms weren’t con-
sistent with the infection. When her blood
pressure skyrocketed a few days later, she
returned to the E.R. and this time was giv-
en a coronavirus test that came back pos-
itive. She was also diagnosed with Guil-
lain-Barré syndrome.
In addition to memory problems and
dizziness, she struggles with nerve pain.
“I have pins and needles and shooting
nerve pain constantly, as well as burning
sensations in my skin,” she told me.
Given all of these concerns, neurolo-
gists argue that it is crucial to study Covid
patients in order to understand how their
nervous systems recover — or don’t. Dr.
Cirillo, Dr. Koralnik and Dr. Hornig are all
undertaking studies on the topic, but more
research will be essential, they say.
Among other things, research on the
topic may be able to identify drugs or
other treatments that can be given to
Covid patients to reduce the risk of ner-
vous system injury.
Physicians also need to keep in mind
that their Covid patients could benefit
from cognitive and neurological assess-
ments and prompt neurological treat-
ment. Dr. Fotuhi, for one, believes that all
patients hospitalized for the coronavirus
should receive brain MRIs to identify
nascent issues.
So far during this pandemic, the medi-
cal community has largely — and under-
standably — been focused on keeping
Covid patients alive. But we need to con-
sider how the virus could shape the rest of
their lives, too. 0 These voyages regularly lasted over a
MELINDA WENNER MOYER is a science and
health writer and the author of a forth-
coming book on raising children.
these measures were motivated by con-
cerns over public health and safety, or in
order to protect fragile environments
from overuse — anything but the racial
and class composition of the people they
were locking out.
Some of the same communities that
fought to keep nonresidents and other
“undesirables” out of public spaces in the
past are today adopting some of the most
restrictive measures in response to the
pandemic.
After New York City announced that it
would be keeping its beaches closed this
summer, the town of Long Beach enacted
what a reporter for The New York Times
described as the “most sweeping rebuke
of outsiders” of any suburban munici-
pality in the greater New York area. Simi-
larly, Greenwich and other wealthy com-
munities along the Connecticut coast have
used the pandemic to once again ban non-
residents from town beaches, in defiance
of the courts.
Public health experts agree that so long
as people take precautions, outdoor activi-
ties are not only safe but also necessary
for coping with the stress of the pandemic.
But the exclusionary tactics of privileged
communities and cost-cutting measures
of underresourced ones this summer will
force many Americans to suffer inside or
seek out unsupervised, potentially dan-
gerous bodies of water to cool off. And it’s
not hard to imagine that pools and
beaches with restricted access could be-
come flash points of conflict with law en-
forcement officials, endangering black
and brown youths.
It’s simple, really. Our ability to find re-
lief from the heat, and to enjoy time out-
doors this summer, should not be deter-
mined by where we live and the social and
economic advantages we enjoy. 0 or she has inflicted on others.
ANDREW W. KAHRL is a professor of history
and African-American studies at the
University of Virginia and the author of
“Free the Beaches: The Story of Ned Coll
and the Battle for America’s Most Exclu-
sive Shoreline.”
N A21
CHARLES M. BLOW
Yes, Even
George
Washington
ON THE ISSUE of American slavery, I am
an absolutist: enslavers were amoral
monsters.
The very idea that one group of people
believed that they had the right to own
another human being is abhorrent and
depraved. The fact that their control was
enforced by violence was barbaric.
People often try to explain this away
by saying that the people who enslaved
Africans in this country were simply
men and women of their age, abiding by
the mores of the time.
But, that explanation falters. There
were also men and women of the time
who found slavery morally reprehensi-
ble. The enslavers ignored all this and
used anti-black dehumanization to jus-
tify the holding of slaves and the profit-
ing from slave labor.
People say that some slave owners
were kinder than others.
That explanation too is problematic.
The withholding of another person’s
freedom is itself violent. And the en-
slaved people who were shipped to
America via the Middle Passage had al-
ready endured unspeakably horrific
treatment.
One of the few written accounts of the
atrocious conditions on these ships
comes from a man named the Rev.
Robert Walsh. The British government
outlawed the international slave trade in
1807, followed by the United States in
1808. The two nations patrolled the seas
to prevent people from continuing to kid-
nap Africans and bringing them to those
countries illegally. In 1829, one of the pa-
trols spotted such a ship, and what Walsh
saw when he boarded the ship is beyond
belief.
The ship had been at sea for 17 days.
Slavery was a cruel
institution that can’t be
excused by its era.
There were over 500 kidnapped Africans
onboard. Fifty-five had already been
thrown overboard.
The Africans were crowded below the
main deck. Each deck was only 3 feet 3
inches high. They were packed together
so tight that they were sitting up be-
tween one another’s legs, everyone com-
pletely nude. As Walsh recounted, “there
was no possibility of their lying down or
at all changing their position by night or
day.”
Each had been branded, “burnt with
the red-hot iron,” on their breast or arm.
Many were children, little girls and little
boys.
Not only could light not reach down
into the bowels of those ships, neither
could fresh air. As Walsh recounted, “The
heat of these horrid places was so great
and the odor so offensive that it was quite
impossible to enter them, even had there
been room.”
These people, these human beings, sat
in their own vomit, urine and feces, and
that of others. If another person sat be-
tween your legs, their bowels emptied
out on you.
month, meaning many women onboard
experienced menstruation in these con-
ditions.
Many of the enslaved, sick or driven
mad, were thrown overboard. Others
simply jumped. In fact, there was so
much human flesh going over the side of
those ships that sharks learned to trail
them.
This voyage was so horrific that I can
only surmise that the men, women and
children who survived it were superhu-
man, the toughest and the most resilient
our species has to offer.
But of the people who showed up to
greet these reeking vessels of human tor-
ture, to bid on its cargo, or to in any way
benefit from the trade and industry that
provided the demand for such a supply, I
have absolute contempt.
Some people who are opposed to tak-
ing down monuments ask, “If we start,
where will we stop?” It might begin with
Confederate generals, but all slave own-
ers could easily become targets. Even
George Washington himself.
To that I say, “abso-fricking-lutely!”
George Washington enslaved more
than 100 human beings, and he signed
the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, authoriz-
ing slavers to stalk runaways even in
free states and criminalizing the helping
of escaped slaves. When one of the Afri-
can people he himself had enslaved es-
caped, a woman named Ona Maria
Judge, he pursued her relentlessly,
sometimes illegally.
Washington would free his slaves in
his will, when he no longer had use for
them.
Let me be clear: Those black people
who were enslaved by George Washing-
ton and others, including other founders,
were just as much human as I am today.
They love, laugh, cry and hurt just like I
do.
When I hear people excuse their en-
slavement and torture as an artifact of
the times, I’m forced to consider that if
slavery were the prevailing normalcy of
this time, my own enslavement would
also be a shrug of the shoulders.
I say that we need to reconsider public
monuments in public spaces. No per-
son’s honorifics can erase the horror he
Slave owners should not be honored
with monuments in public spaces. We
have museums for that, which also pro-
vide better context.
This is not an erasure of history, but
rather a better appreciation of the horri-
ble truth of it. 0
2 FINANCE 3 CORNER OFFICE 8 SMARTER LIVING

Hobbled by debt and low The chief executive of A plethora of apps promise
demand for natural gas, Feeding America on fighting to help users build
Chesapeake Energy files for hunger amid a pandemic and contentment during chaos
bankruptcy protection. surging unemployment. through meditation.

TECH ECONOMY MEDIA FINANCE MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 B1

0N

‘We live from the tourists. When we stop getting money, how are we
going to go to support those restaurants or support those stores?’
ESTEFANIA VILLADIEGO, who manages attractions at Disney’s Magic
Kingdom, with her daughter, SARA CANCINO, 10
‘Paying rent on time. Paying anything on time. Trying to decide ...
just really with the funds that I have left, trying to decide if I
should pay anything or not.’
SERENA JAMES, a Disney World wig stylist, with GABRIEL AUSTRIE,
who works at SeaWorld’s Discovery Cove
‘I could read everybody’s face, the fear of not knowing what was
going to happen. It was tense, it was sad, it was uncertain.’
NANCY LUNA, a convention center employee

An Economy on Hold
Virus Throws Orlando’s Tourism Workers Into Limbo
By EVE EDELHEIT
and BROOKS BARNES
ORLANDO, Fla. — Four thousand phone calls.
To be more specific, Paul and Julia Cox figure
they called the Florida Department of Economic Op-
portunity 4,480 times between April 19, when Walt
Disney World furloughed them, and June 7, when
glitches with their state and federal unemployment
benefits were finally sorted out.
The Coxes are among the lucky ones. While most
people have received one-time stimulus payments
from the federal government, UNITE HERE, a un-
ion representing 30,000 hospitality workers in the
Orlando area, recently said that at least 1,500 of its
members had yet to receive any unemployment pay-
ments from the state. Florida has been one of the The magic is gone
slowest states to process jobless claims, in part be- — for now. Streets
cause its system was designed to be arduous. are empty at
One housekeeper in late May sent UNITE HERE Disney’s Magic
a three-word plea: “Please help me!!!!” Kingdom.
Few areas of the country rely on tourism more
CONTINUED ON PAGE B5

He Made The Post Great. When Tech’s Security
Now the News Is Changing. Oversteps the Bounds
Presidents and the Legacy of
Ben Smith Watergate.”
THE MEDIA EQUATION Mr. Woodward was planning to
expose Mr. Kavanaugh because
the judge had publicly denied —
Almost anyone who works in The in a huffy letter in 1999 to The
Washington Post newsroom can Post — an account about Ken-
look inside its publishing system, neth Starr’s investigation of
Methode, to see what stories are President Bill Clinton that he had
coming. And at the height of the himself, confidentially, provided
furor over Brett Kavanaugh’s to Mr. Woodward for his book.
nomination to the Supreme Court (Mr. Kavanaugh served as a
in 2018, some who did saw a lawyer on Mr. Starr’s team.)
shocking article awaiting publi- The article, described by two
cation. Post journalists who read it,
In the article, Bob Woodward, would have been explosive,
The Post legend who protected arriving as the nominee battled a
decades-old sexual assault alle-
the identity of his Watergate
gation and was fighting to prove
source, Deep Throat, for 30
years, was going to unmask one his integrity.
of his own confidential sources. The article was nearly ready
He was, in particular, going to when the executive editor, Mar-
disclose that Judge Kavanaugh tin Baron, stepped in. Mr. Baron
had been an anonymous source urged Mr. Woodward not to
in his 1999 book “Shadow: Five CONTINUED ON PAGE B4
By NICOLE PERLROTH
Last summer, members of eBay’s
private security team sent live
roaches and a bloody pig mask to
the home of a suburban Boston
couple who published a niche e-
commerce newsletter.
The harassment campaign,
which also included physical sur-
veillance, sending pornographic
videos to the couple’s neighbors,
posting ads inviting sexual part-
ners to the couple’s home and an
attempt to attach a tracking de-
vice to their car, was detailed ear-
lier this month in a federal indict-
ment against six former eBay em-
ployees.
The lurid, 51-page indictment,
describing how the employees of a
multibillion-dollar company were
loosed in what authorities de-
scribed as an unhinged and illegal
effort to intimidate critics, drew
national attention to the stunning
lengths some tech companies will
go when responding to their crit-
ics.
Silicon Valley companies have
stacked what they often call their
“trust and safety” teams with for-
mer police officers and national
intelligence analysts. More often
than not, their work is well within
the law: protecting executives
and intellectual property, fending
off blackmail attempts and spot-
ting theft. They conduct back-
ground checks on companies that
could be acquisition targets and
they ensure employees aren’t do-
ing anything illegal.
But the industry’s intense focus
on reputation can lead their secu-
rity units astray. Those perils
were laid bare when federal au-
thorities revealed the charges
against the eBay employees.
“Most companies, especially
CONTINUED ON PAGE B2
Boeing Receives Approval
To Test Troubled 737 Max
By NIRAJ CHOKSHI
and DAVID GELLES
Boeing has received Federal Avia-
tion Administration approval to
start test flights of its 737 Max to
demonstrate that it can fly safely
with new flight control software.
The flights, which could begin as
soon as Monday, represent a ma-
jor step in the company’s effort to
get its best-selling plane flying
again.
The Max was grounded in
March 2019 after a pair of fatal
crashes — in Indonesia and Ethi-
opia — that killed 346 people. The
resulting crisis cost Boeing bil-
lions of dollars, including compen-
sation paid to victims and airlines.
It also led to the ouster of the com-
pany’s chief executive, set off gov-
ernment inquiries and raised
questions about the rushed effort
to build and approve the Max.
The certification flights, con-
ducted by F.A.A. pilots, will proba-
bly take place in the Seattle area,
where the plane is made. A top
Boeing test pilot will also be on the
flights. “Testing is expected to
take several days, and will include
a wide array of flight maneuvers
and emergency procedures to en-
able the agency to assess whether
the changes meet F.A.A. certifica-
tion standards,” the agency said in
an email on Sunday to Senate and
House oversight committee staff
members.
If the flights are successful, it
could still be months before the
planes are deemed ready to fly
again. If the F.A.A. identifies fur-
ther problems, Boeing may need
to make additional changes. The
crashes were caused in part by
anti-stall software on the Max,
known as MCAS, which automati-
cally pushed the nose of the
CONTINUED ON PAGE B3
B2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

FINANCE | TECHNOLOGY

Chesapeake Files for Bankruptcy When Tech’s Security

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS
HOUSTON — Chesapeake Energy, a
pioneer in extracting natural gas
from shale rock across the coun-
try, filed for bankruptcy protec-
tion on Sunday, unable to over-
come a mountain of debt that be-
came unsustainable after a dec-
ade of stubbornly low gas prices.
The company helped convert
the United States from a natural
gas importer into a major export-
er under the swashbuckling lead-
ership of Aubrey McClendon, a
company co-founder and former
chief executive.
But Mr. McClendon over-
extended the company and
amassed over $20 billion in debt
before he was forced out in 2013,
and the company, based in Okla-
homa City, never fully recovered.
Chesapeake Energy lost $8.3
billion in the first quarter of this
year, and had just $82 million in
cash at the end of March. With
$9.5 billion in debt at the end of
last year, it has bond payments of
$192 million due in August.
In a statement, Chesapeake
said it was filing for Chapter 11
protection to facilitate a complete
restructuring. As part of its agree-
ment with lenders, the company
said it had secured $925 million in
financing under a revolving credit
facility, and eliminated roughly $7
billion of debt. It also secured a
$600 million future commitment
of new equity.
“We are fundamentally reset-
ting Chesapeake’s capital struc-
ture and business to address our
legacy financial weaknesses,”
said Doug Lawler, Chesapeake’s
president and chief executive.
“Chesapeake will be uniquely po-
sitioned to emerge from the Chap-
ter 11 process as a stronger and
more competitive enterprise.”
Chesapeake has 1,900 employ-
ees.
It is the latest heavily indebted
Chesapeake Energy built a luxurious campus in Oklahoma City before it ran
into financial and legal trouble under its former chief executive.
oil and gas business to seek bank-
ruptcy protection since the coro-
navirus pandemic crippled de-
mand for energy.
Under its former chief execu-
tive, Mr. McClendon, the company
drilled across Texas, Oklahoma,
Ohio, Wyoming and Louisiana.
Mr. McClendon was audacious as
he aggressively outbid competi-
tors on land leases and explored
widely in the early 2000s, al-
though he also drilled many wells
that disappointed investors. By
2011, he and others who followed
in his footsteps had produced a
glut of natural gas that sent Ches-
apeake and other companies to
the brink of collapse.
To find a use for all that natural
gas, Mr. McClendon went on a
campaign to promote compressed
natural gas vehicles, but the effort
went nowhere. He tried to make
alliances with environmentalists,
arguing that gas could replace
coal and be a bridge fuel to a
cleaner energy future.
Before his ouster in 2013, Mr.
STEVE SISNEY/REUTERS
McClendon built a luxurious cam-
pus for the company in Oklahoma
City, complete with a community
garden, deluxe dining facilities
and two parking garages that
alone cost $100 million to build.
He acquired trophy assets like
the Oklahoma City Thunder bas-
ketball team, interests in a French
winery and a $12 million antique
map collection. The basketball
team still plays in Chesapeake En-
ergy Arena, which was a symbol
of Oklahoma City’s revival as a
gas hub.
From 2010 to 2013, the company
spent about $30 billion more on
leasing and drilling than it made
from its production.
Mr. McClendon was also known
to cut corners, which got him and
his company in trouble. Chesa-
peake executives complained of a
lack of a formal budgeting process
or employee performance man-
agement system. The company
borrowed money to fund charities
and real estate projects.
Mr. McClendon was charged in
2016 with conspiring to suppress
prices for oil and natural gas
leases. The indictment said he had
orchestrated a conspiracy in
which two oil and gas companies
colluded not to bid against each
other for several leases in north-
western Oklahoma from late 2007
to early 2012.
A day after the indictment, Mr.
McClendon, at age 56, died in a
crash in Oklahoma City after his
car hit a bridge at high speed. On
news of Mr. McClendon’s death,
the oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens,
who died in 2019, said, “No indi-
vidual is without flaws, but his im-
pact on American energy will be
long lasting.”
When Mr. Lawler, a veteran
Anadarko executive, took over the
company in 2013, he called his new
job “the biggest challenge in the
entire industry.”
Mr. Lawler had been trying to
turn around the company by pro-
ducing more oil and selling gas as-
sets. But the shale drilling boom of
recent years has unleashed more
crude oil than the world needs,
sending prices lower. The coro-
navirus pandemic and a decision
by Saudi Arabia and Russia this
year to ramp up production were
the latest blows.
The economic downturn also
has cut demand for natural gas in
the United States, and slashed ex-
ports to foreign markets.
There had been rumors of a
bankruptcy for months. Roughly
20 American oil and gas
producers have already filed for
bankruptcy this year, including
Ultra Petroleum and Whiting Pe-
troleum. A total of 227 producers
have filed for bankruptcy in the
five years that ended May 31, in-
volving more than $134 billion in
aggregate debt, according to the
Haynes and Boone Oil Patch
Bankruptcy Monitor.
Oversteps the Bounds
FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
established high-tech companies,
have units within them that do
this kind of work, respond in as
close to real time as they can to on-
line criticism of the company, to
take steps to protect the brand,”
Andrew Lelling, U.S. attorney for
the District of Massachusetts,
said. But, he added, “I can tell you
that at least internally, we have
never seen a company that did
something like this before.”
Prosecutors charged the six
eBay employees with conspiracy
to commit cyberstalking and wit-
ness tampering, but noted that
eBay’s campaign against the hus-
band-and-wife publishing duo
was ordered up by senior execu- MIKE COPPOLA/GETTY IMAGES
tives. Steven Wymer, eBay’s former
“I want her DONE,” Steven communications chief.
Wymer, eBay’s former communi-
cations chief, told James Baugh,
the company’s former senior di-
rector of safety and security. “She
is a biased troll who needs to get
BURNED DOWN.”
In case there was any confu-
sion, Mr. Wymer added, “I want to
see ashes.”
Contacted this past week, Mr.
Wymer, who was not one of the
employees charged in the indict-
ment, said, “I would never con-
done or participate in any such ac-
tivity.” He added that he was con-
strained in what he could say be-
yond that. EBay said in a
statement that “neither the com-
pany nor any current eBay em-
ployee was indicted.”
Private security teams have
EMMA HOWELLS FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
long been part of corporate Amer-
Justin Zeefe, the president of Nisos,
ica, among them insurers’ fraud
a security firm in Virginia.
investigators and the “seed po-
lice,” as farmers call investigators
for the agricultural giant Mon-
eign hackers. Yet another hired
santo who secretly videotape Nisos to determine the source of
farmers, infiltrate community
multiple cyberattacks. It turned
meetings and recruit informants out to be the work of a competitor
in their hunt for patent infringe- that had intercepted the compa-
ment. ny’s Wi-Fi from an apartment
These private detective teams, rented across the street.

Your Relative Is Asking for Money. Now What?
By TAMMY LaGORCE
As a financial adviser, Elyse Fos-
ter helps clients navigate tricky
personal issues around managing
their money. But the coronavirus
has brought an extra layer of com-
plexity — especially where family
is concerned.
One client lent a newly unem-
ployed sibling $10,000. But that
good intention went awry quickly
when the client later learned that
his son needed money, too. “The
son resented the father for not re-
alizing” it, said Ms. Foster, chief
executive of Harbor Wealth Man-
agement in Boulder, Colo.
Other gainfully employed cli-
ents who have relatives in sudden
need of financial help are also con-
fronting minefields over whether
and how to lend.
“We’ve had parents who are
maybe considering making loans
to one child, and another child will
say, ‘So he’s getting rewarded for
spending too much, or not work-
ing, or making bad decisions?’ ”
Ms. Foster said. “We’ve seen fam-
ilies almost torn apart since the
pandemic.”
As the coronavirus continues to
dismantle livelihoods across the
country, advisers can expect fam-
ily financial dramas to keep sur-
facing, according to a new survey
from Commonwealth, a nonprofit
group that researches financial
opportunities and security for the
financially vulnerable.
The survey, conducted in late
April, collected responses from
944 people throughout the United
States with household incomes
under $75,000. Among them, 16
percent of those who had been
permanently laid off reported re-
ceiving more financial support
from family or friends than they
had before Feb. 1.
The rules for how much to lend
and when, if ever, to expect repay-
ment are being written in real
time, like so much of life during
the pandemic. “Twenty percent of
people will call and say, ‘Can I af-
ford to do this?’” Ms. Foster said.
“But the other 80 percent are very
determined and have already
committed to making a loan. So
we’re immediately thrown into
‘Where are you in the process, and
how is the loan going to be paid
back?’”
Worries that relatives will be
more generous than they can af-
ford to be may not be misplaced.
“It depends on how close the
family members are, but some
won’t bat an eye to lend more than
they should,” said William Car-
rington, an adviser in Fort Lau-
derdale, Fla., who works with U.S.
Foreign Service workers.
For example, when one of his
moderate-income clients was
asked to lend hundreds of dollars
to a sibling in her 40s who had
been laid off from a blue-collar job
because of the virus, the response
was an instant yes.
“There was a real expectation
on the part of the sibling, like, ‘You
have a steady job, so you kind of
owe me,’” Mr. Carrington said. His
client, also in her 40s, had been
saving to send her children to col-
Before lending to a loved one, take a moment to reflect on whether you really need to be paid back, says Mariel
Beasley, a founder of the Common Cents Lab, a financial behavior research lab at Duke University.
Getting Help
■ More than a dozen advis-
ers affiliated with the XY
Planning Network are offer-
ing pro bono services to peo-
ple struggling during the
pandemic.
■ Free financial guidance is
available to underserved
populations through the Fi-
nancial Planning Associa-
tion.
■ The nonprofit National
Foundation for Credit Coun-
seling offers free initial
budget counseling sessions
online or on the phone.
lege. But she immediately set that
goal aside.
Mr. Carrington did not try to
dissuade her. “As a certified finan-
cial planner, I’m not allowed to
convince,” he said. “You just ex-
plain the consequences.” But like
Ms. Foster, he would have pre-
ferred that his client tell her rela-
tive the ramifications of her loan
in specific detail, to avoid misun-
derstandings.
Relatives “should make it
known what they gave, and the ef-
fect on them of what they gave,”
Ms. Foster said. “Let’s say I have
six to nine months of emergency
reserve money. If I gave you three
months of it, I could tell you: ‘This
is what I saved, and this is why I
need it back. I could be in trouble
without it.’ That way the recipient
understands this isn’t funny
money.”
Mr. Carrington recommends a
tight cap on dollar amounts. “If
you get a call that so-and-so can’t
make rent this month, and you
have $35,000 in emergency funds
and the rent is $2,000, you could
draw a red line where you say, ‘I
can’t get below $25,000 in emer-
gency funds, so I can afford to help
you another four months if you
need it, but that’s as far as I can
go,’” he said. “If you have that
kind of conversation, you’re not in
the position where you get a call
one day and you have to abruptly
say, ‘I can’t help anymore.’ ”
Repayment plans should also
be laid out before money leaves a
bank account, financial profes-
sionals say. But even then, lenders
should prepare for lapses.
“In this situation, with Covid
specifically, reflecting on would
you be OK if you never got this
money back is probably a good
idea,” said Mariel Beasley, co-
founder of the Common Cents
Lab, a financial behavior research
lab at Duke University. “People
tend to be over-optimistic. They
plan a best-case scenario, where
they say, ‘Great, they’ll be back to
work in two months and they’ll be
able to pay me back 50 bucks a
month.’ They forget unexpected
expenses and setbacks can hap-
pen.”
They may also forget that re-
sentments can pile up alongside
them. Mr. Carrington has seen cli-
ents whose relatives begrudge
them their savings for a post-virus
vacation.
“They’ll say, ‘Why can’t you
cancel that?’ ” he said. “When that
happens, mostly you want to calm
them down and say, ‘I’m not going
to let you starve.’ ”
Self-scrutiny, Ms. Foster said,
can go a long way toward preserv-
ing relationships tested by newly
rocky financial ground.
“Before you make the loan,
think about what your intent is,”
she said. “Is it a gift, or is it a
loan?” If it’s a loan, she advises
writing a formal note about the
terms and filing it with a third
party. “And then let it go. Don’t
bring it up at holiday dinners.
Don’t give reminders. If you can’t
JEREMY M. LANGE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
do that, we suggest you not make
the loan at all.”
A sliding scale of expectations
may be key to keeping the peace,
she added. When a client recently
asked her to transfer $10,000 to
his stepchildren, who had agreed
to a loan with interest attached, he
told her that he didn’t expect the
stepchildren to comply.
“He said he thinks he isn’t ever
going to get the money back,” she
said. “And I bet he’s right. With fa-
milial lending, oftentimes it does-
n’t.”
Still, Ms. Beasley said people fi-
nancially hobbled by the virus
should borrow from family if they
could.
“If the person lending is going
to be OK if that money doesn’t get
paid back, I say by all means, that
is a better loan option for people
than going through a formal finan-
cial institution, which won’t pro-
vide as much flexibility,” she said.
As the Covid recession deepens
and Americans turn to whatever
resources they can tap to pay bills,
they may find that relatives’ flexi-
bility is cushioned with greater
compassion.
“What’s unique about this fi-
nancial crisis is its cause — a virus
beyond any individual’s control,”
said Melissa Gopnik, senior vice
president at Commonwealth, the
organization that found the uptick
in borrowing among laid-off work-
ers. “It appears to be bringing
people around to the idea that ev-
eryone has a role to play in peo-
ple’s financial challenges, includ-
ing the government, employers
and financial institutions.”
Despite what Mr. Carrington
predicted would be years of hurt
feelings within families, espe-
cially if one relative is perceived to
have more money than the rest,
Ms. Gopnik sees a silver lining. “I
think this crisis has brought us to
a moment of collective empathy,”
she said.
which typically operate under
fraud divisions, are projected to
grow into a $23.3 billion global in-
dustry this year from a $17.3 bil-
lion industry in 2018, according to
Grand View Research.
Few industries have embraced
the notion of private security as
much as tech. One Silicon Valley
investigator, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity because of
nondisclosure agreements, said a
start-up executive had paid his
firm $50,000 over one weekend to
root out employees he believed
were plotting his ouster. (They
Silicon Valley’s focus
on reputation can
lead some companies’
units astray.
were.) The total tab for the work
was as much as half a million dol-
lars.
But as with the eBay team,
these private security groups are
sometimes accused of crossing le-
gal lines.
In 2006, for example, investiga-
tors hired by Hewlett-Packard
were caught riffling through re-
porters’ trash cans and phone
records. About a year ago, Tesla
made headlines for its aggressive
efforts to root out and punish an
employee, Martin Tripp, who had
tipped reporters off to waste at the
carmaker’s Nevada factory.
According to police reports and
whistle-blower complaints filed
by two Tesla security operators
with the Securities and Exchange
Commission, Tesla was accused of
hacking into Mr. Tripp’s phone,
having him followed by private in-
vestigators and passing along an
anonymous, false tip to the local
authorities that Mr. Tripp planned
to shoot up Tesla’s factory.
“Tesla’s investigators were tail-
ing him, showing up at weird
places, and completely spooked
him,” Robert Mitchell, Mr. Tripp’s
lawyer, said in an interview. Mr.
Tripp has since moved to Hungary
out of fears for his family’s safety.
Tesla did not respond to re-
quests for comment, but the com-
pany has sued Mr. Tripp for $167
million for what it has said was
data theft. Mr. Tripp has filed a
countersuit for defamation and
unspecified damages. Both suits
are ongoing.
When working for tech compa-
nies, private investigators have
advantages over traditional law
enforcement: They have access to
more data, deal with far less red
tape, and they have the ability to
quickly cross jurisdictions and
borders.
Justin Zeefe, a former intelli-
gence officer who is now the presi-
dent of Nisos, a security firm in
Virginia, said his company has
worked for tech companies on a
wide range of cases. On one occa-
sion, they learned that a compa-
ny’s overseas suppliers had ties to
foreign intelligence agencies.
Another client asked his firm to
determine whether an acquisition
target had been infiltrated by for-
Joe Sullivan, the chief informa-
tion security officer at the internet
company Cloudflare, still remem-
bers the frantic call he received
from a colleague while working as
a security executive at Facebook
several years ago.
She had met a man on Match-
.com who claimed to work in con-
struction in San Jose, Calif., and he
had convinced her to send him a
topless photo. He was threatening
to email the photo to the entire
company if she did not pay him
$10,000.
With her permission, Mr. Sulli-
van’s team took over her account
and redirected her extortionist to
a payment scheme that they knew
would reveal his identity. They de-
termined he was a former Google
intern living in Nigeria.
Mr. Sullivan’s team hired Ni-
gerian contractors to confront
him. He confessed and surren-
dered access to his computer and
online accounts, which showed he
was extorting female executives
across Silicon Valley. Investiga-
tors were able to destroy the nude
photos and warned his victims not
to pay.
It could have taken years, Mr.
Sullivan said, for law enforcement
to identify the extortionist and
even longer for Nigerian authori-
ties to do something about it.
Mr. Sullivan learned that lesson
as a security executive at eBay in
2006. Romanian fraudsters were
running rampant on eBay, and Ro-
manian authorities refused to ad-
dress the problem. It was only af-
ter Mr. Sullivan’s team shut off
eBay access to all of Romania —
with a message blaming eBay’s
shuttering on Romanian law en-
forcement’s refusal to pursue on-
line criminals — that Romanian
police took action.
But Mr. Sullivan’s experience
shows how easily tech’s ag-
gressive security tactics can run
into trouble. In 2016, two hackers
approached Uber with security
flaws that allowed them to obtain
login credentials for more than 57
million riders and drivers, and the
pair demanded a $100,000 payout
in return.
Mr. Sullivan, who had recently
joined Uber from Facebook, ran
the same playbook he used in the
Nigerian extortion case, pushing
the hackers into a payment
scheme to deduce their identities.
Uber’s security team eventually
confronted the men at their homes
with nondisclosure agreements
and asked them to destroy the
data.
The plan, which was approved
by Uber’s chief executive at the
time, Travis Kalanick, was ini-
tially celebrated. But after Uber
hired a new chief executive, Mr.
Sullivan was fired and accused of
covering up a data breach.
Uber later settled an investiga-
tion of the breach and the compa-
ny’s behavior surrounding the in-
cident for $148 million. The two
hackers pleaded guilty last Octo-
ber to charges of computer hack-
ing and extortion.
Natasha Singer and Sheera Frenkel
contributed reporting.
 THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N B3

CORNER OFFICE | TRANSPORTATION

Soul-Searching Leads to a New Career

need when you see a parking lot with
David Gelles 10,000 families lined up for food. Mr. Bezos
CORNER OFFICE didn’t have a lot of preconditions on his
contribution. He needed to have confi-
dence that the organization could deliver
value with a sense of urgency.
The leader of Feeding America Something that Feeding America did at
found a job with a mission the beginning of this pandemic was we
created our Covid-19 fund. And we com-
after a health scare prompted mitted that every bit of the money that
her to assess her life. Now goes into that fund would make its way
into local communities, that we would not
she’s using her unique extract one dime of administrative costs.
upbringing to inform her role. And the public has really responded. Be-
cause I think part of the challenge in a
situation like this is people have to trust
some place to make their investments.

Tell us a little bit about the remarkable cir-

Claire Babineaux-Fontenot has 107 broth-
ers and sisters.
When she was growing up in central
Louisiana, her parents had children of
their own, adopted others and raised
many in foster care. Not all of them grew
up to be as successful as Ms. Babineaux-
Fontenot, the chief executive of Feeding
America. Many had gone hungry before
they joined her family, and Ms. Babineaux-
Fontenot was raised with an acute aware-
ness of the devastating effects of poverty,
hunger and inequality.
After graduating from college and re-
ceiving advanced degrees in law and
taxation, Ms. Babineaux-Fontenot joined
the corporate world. She spent 13 years in
executive roles at Walmart, before a
health scare and some soul-searching led
her two years ago to join Feeding Amer-
ica, which runs a network of more than
200 food banks.
Over the past four months, tens of mil-
lions of Americans have lost their jobs. As
a result, what was already a pervasive
hunger problem was made substantially
worse. Around the country, food banks
have been overwhelmed. Feeding America
has been racing to meet the surge in de-
mand, an effort that was helped by a re-
cent $100 million gift from Amazon’s
founder, Jeff Bezos.
This conversation, which was con-
densed and edited for clarity, was part of a
series of live Corner Office calls to discuss
the pandemic and the protests. Visit
timesevents.nytimes.com to join upcoming
digital events.
We’ve all seen these harrowing photographs
of cars lined up for miles at food banks. Can
you give us a sense of just how dire the
hunger crisis in America is at this moment?
It’s unprecedented. The peak was about a
70 percent increase in need, but right now
it seems to have stabilized at about a 60
percent increase. And 40 percent of the
people coming to us for help are people
who’ve never before relied upon a charita-
ble food system. And all of this in the
midst of the pandemic, which has created
additional challenges around making
certain that the people that we serve are
safe and that those of our members who
are out there on the front lines are safe as
they provide that service to people.
Even before Covid, there were 37 million
people in the U.S. who were food-insecure,
according to the U.S.D.A. We also know
that there were 22 million kids who re-
ceive free and reduced lunch. So when you
start shutting down schools and you have
children who were relying upon schools as
a chief source of food, children start get-
ting impacted nearly immediately.
Those numbers are hard to accept. Who is it
that is going hungry? It’s not just homeless
people and those at the absolute margins of
society, is it? For many of us, these are our
friends and neighbors.
That’s absolutely true. If there is a silver
lining to this, I do believe that the Ameri-
can public has a raised consciousness
around food insecurity. There are tens of
millions of people in this country who have
been struggling with food insecurity. And
while we have an image of someone who is
food insecure as being homeless, there is
food insecurity among people who have
full-time jobs, some of them with more
than one full-time job. That was true be-
fore the pandemic. Now add on top of that
the fact that there is a relationship be-
tween rising unemployment and food
insecurity, especially for that 40 percent
who have never before relied on a charita-
ble food system.
Hunger is not an isolated problem. It can lead
to this whole host of other challenges, compli-
cating education, other health issues, mental
well-being.
Absolutely. Food insecurity has a signifi-
cant negative impact on the fiscal health of
our country. There’s a direct correlation
between food insecurity and medical
health outcome for children and for adults.
If you want to have meaningful progress
for educational outcomes for our society,
then we’re going to have to confront food
insecurity. I can’t think of anything that
matters, that we want for our country, that
would not be made better if we were to get
really serious about addressing food inse-
curity in this country. When people have
consistent, predictable access to a nutri-
tious mix of food, there’s so many positive
things that flow from that one thing.
The fund-raising environment for so many
nonprofits has become extremely challenging.
Have people been stepping up to contribute to
cumstances of your upbringing. Where did
you grow up? What was it like?
I was born into a family that is rather
unique in many, many ways. And among
the ways that we were unique is the inor-
dinate number of my siblings that came to
us not through biology but through adop-
tion and foster care. I am one of over a
hundred children. My grandparents on
both sides were sharecroppers. Neither of
my parents graduated even from high
school. So I grew up in an environment
where I understood so keenly that not
everybody gets dealt the same hand. So
many of my siblings had significant chal-
lenges to overcome. And I witnessed how
my parents, through their dedication and
their commitment to others, even without
a lot of educational sophistication, were
able to make a meaningful impact on the
lives of other people, including me.
Most of my siblings who joined my
family throughout the course of my child-
hood came into our family having been
malnourished. Most of them were food
insecure before they joined our family. So I
witnessed firsthand the devastating impli-
cations of a lack of access to a nutritious
mix of food on a child. I also witnessed the
restorative powers of food on their bodies
and their spirits as well. So I bring all of
COOPER NEILL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
that into the moment that I’m in right now.
I have to imagine that not all of your 100 or
Feeding America and give you the resources so siblings have been as successful profes-
you need to meet this demand? sionally as you. What do you believe allowed
People absolutely have been stepping up.
you to go so far against such long odds?
We’ve seen an incredible outpouring of The fact that I have so many brothers and
support across the board from individuals sisters who suffered from the ravages of
to corporations. We’ve had meaningful food insecurity so early in their lives,
partnerships with the U.S.D.A. in relaxing putting them in a position which they were
regulations that might have made sense never able to fully overcome. When I was
before Covid but absolutely don’t now. inclined to give up, all I had to do was
Between March 1 and May 24, we pro- think about one of my siblings who had
vided 1.3 billion meals. Last year, we pro- been dealt just a completely different set
vided 4.5 billion meals in the entire year. of cards, to remind me of the remarkable
But our data shows us that the meal gap privileges that I had now. We were not
over the course of the next 12 months is wealthy. And I wouldn’t say that the
going to be eight billion meals. So there’s schools that I went to would be blue-rib-
still a huge need. bon schools. But I definitely was condi-
‘If there is a silver So I want to honor the investments that tioned to make the best of what I had,
lining to this, I do have been made and that outpouring of
support. But I’ve got to tell you, this is a
knowing that there were so many people
who didn’t have what I did.
believe that the marathon, not a sprint. We’re going to
need more in order to provide that food. You had come so far at Walmart and taken a
American public series of really important executive roles.
has a raised You recently received the single largest gift in
the organization’s history, a $100 million
Why leave such a place of prominence in
corporate America to join Feeding America?
consciousness contribution from the Amazon founder Jeff If I had to say it in a word: cancer. In 2015,
Bezos. How did that gift come about and what when I was in the best shape of my life, I
around food did you do? learned that I had cancer. I was at Wal-
insecurity.’ It’s a good problem to have. I was sur-
prised and delighted by the opportunity to
mart, in Bentonville, Ark., and I was doing
very well professionally. But I’d been
help Mr. Bezos and his team understand walking around all my life knowing about
why they should make a bet that the Feed- these issues and challenges.
ing America network was going to be After I got through my surgeries and
uniquely positioned to provide value to my chemo, my prognosis was great. I had
people facing hunger if they made that a conversation with myself, and I asked an
investment. important question, which was: What if
A combination of things gave rise to the the last thing that you ever get to do pro-
question of whether that investment fessionally is the last thing that you might
would be made through Feeding America. possibly do at Walmart? Would that be
One of them was that you can’t deny the OK? And my answer was no.

Boeing Receives Approval for Tests of Its Troubled 737 Max

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
planes downward. Boeing devel-
oped a fix for the software, though
regulators have identified other
problems since.
F.A.A. officials will spend a
week or more preparing a report
detailing their findings from the
flights. Once that is complete,
Boeing will submit a package of
materials to the agency that will
include details of the new soft-
ware and how it was designed and
tested.
The F.A.A. — as well as an out-
side group of experts — will then
review that submission, a process
that could take weeks longer. The
agency, working with interna-
tional counterparts, will also de-
termine what, if any, new training
it will require for pilots. The
agency can then issue orders to in-
stall the software update and al-
low the Max to fly again.
Even then, it will be weeks, or
perhaps more than a month, be-
fore airlines can fly the Max again.
The planes are in storage, and will
require maintenance and testing
before they are ready for commer-
cial flights. Boeing will also have
to receive approval from regula-
tors around the world.
The Max has been grounded for
longer than Boeing and the air-
lines initially expected. In April,
Boeing said that its work on the
software fix was delayed after an
internal review process identified
problems with the work that had
been done. And the F.A.A., which
has faced scrutiny from lawmak-
ers, has been especially thorough
in its review.
At a Senate hearing on June 17,
lawmakers from both parties
sharply criticized the F.A.A. ad-
ministrator, Steve Dickson, for
what some have described as a too
cozy relationship with the compa-
nies the agency regulates.
“It is hard not to conclude your
team at the F.A.A. has deliberately
attempted to keep us in the dark,”
Roger Wicker, the Republican
chairman of the Commerce Com-
mittee, told Mr. Dickson. Senator
Maria Cantwell, the committee’s
top Democrat, described the
agency’s communication and
oversight as “fragmented.”
The Max crisis has dealt a dev-
astating blow to Boeing’s busi-
ness. In January, the company es-
timated that costs associated with
the grounding will exceed $18 bil-
lion, but that was before the disas-
trous spread of the coronavirus.
INVESTMENT
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10 Resi Units + 1 CML Gut Renovated
$1.65M Call: 954-546-2107
The three carriers in the United
States that operate the Max —
Southwest Airlines, American
Airlines and United Airlines —
have canceled thousands of flights
in recent months. At Air Canada,
some pilots who were licensed to
fly the Max but not other planes in
the carrier’s fleet, had to stop fly-
ing after the grounding.
So far this year, Boeing has seen
net orders for the Max decline by
IN THE UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT
FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE
In Re: LVI INTERMEDIATE Chapter 11
HOLDINGS, INC., et al.,1 Case No. 20-11413 (KBO)
Debtors. (Jointly Administered)
NOTICE OF BID PROCEDURES, AUCTION DATE
AND SALE HEARING
PLEASE TAKE NOTICETHAT:
On June 4, 2020, the above-captioned debtors and debtors in
possession (the “Debtors”) filed the Debtors’ Motion for Entry of
Order (I)(A) Approving Bid Procedures Related to the Sale of all
or Substantially all of the Assets of the Debtors, (B) Establishing
Procedures in Connection with the Assumption and Assignment of
Certain Executory Contracts and Unexpired Leases, (C) Approving
Notice Procedures, and (D) Granting Related Relief; and (II)(A)
Approving Sale of Debtors Assets Free and Clear of Liens, Claims,
Interests and Encumbrances, (B) Authorizing Assumption and
Assignment of Unexpired Leases and Executory Contracts and (C)
Granting Related Relief [Docket No. 65] (the “Motion”)2 with the
United States Bankruptcy Court for the District of Delaware (the
“Bankruptcy Court”).
By an order dated June 25, 2020 the Bankruptcy Court approved
the Bid Procedures [Docket No. 209] (the “Bid Procedures Order”).
The Debtors are seeking bids for all or substantially all of their Assets.
All interested parties are invited to submit a Written Offer to purchase
some or all of the Assets in accordance with the terms and conditions
of the Bid Procedures attached as Exhibit 1 to the Bid Procedures Order.
The deadline to submit aWritten Offer (the“Bid Deadline”) is July 20,
2020 at 4:00 p.m. (prevailing EasternTime).
Prior to the Bid Deadline,a Potential Bidder that desires to purchase
the Assets shall deliver its Written Offer in accordance with the Bid
Procedures. Pursuant to the Bid Procedures Order, in the event that
the Debtors receive two or more Qualified Bids by the Bid Deadline,
the Debtors shall conduct an Auction to determine the highest and
otherwise best bid with respect to the Assets. The Auction shall
commence at 9:30 a.m. (prevailing Eastern Time) on July 23, 2020
at the offices of Cole Schotz P.C., 500 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1410,
Wilmington, DE 19801, or at such other place, including by telephone
or video conference,as selected by the Debtors,after consultation with
the Consultation Parties,and time as the Debtors shall notify all parties
in interest attending the Auction.
Objections, if any, to the Sale of the Assets to any Successful Bidder
and/or the other relief requested in the Motion, other than the relief
approved in the Bid Procedures Order,must be in writing and filed with
the Court on or before July 21, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. (prevailing Eastern
Time) and be served such that they are actually received by (i) counsel
to the Debtors, Cole Schotz P.C., 500 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1410,
Wilmington,DE 19801,Attn:David Dean and Norman L.Pernick,e-mail:
DDean@coleschotz.com and NPernick@coleschotz.com; (ii) counsel to
more than 300 jets, with thou-
sands remaining, amid industry-
wide belt-tightening as the coro-
navirus pandemic has ground
most air travel to a halt. In April,
Southwest, Boeing’s largest single
customer for the Max, said it had
more than halved the number of
the jets it would take this year and
next, to just 48.
Boeing’s sales, profit and share
price have slumped in recent
the DIP Agent and Prepetition Senior Agent, Goldberg Kohn Ltd., 55
East Monroe,Suite 3300,Chicago,IL 60603 (Attn:Randall Klein),e-mail:
Randall.Klein@goldbergkohn.com and Morris, Nichols, Arsht & Tunnell
LLP, 1201 North Market Street, 16th Floor, P.O. Box 1347, Wilmington,
DE 19899-1347 (Attn: Robert J. Dehney), e-mail: rdehney@mnat.com;
(iii) proposed counsel to the Committee, Morrison & Foerster LLP, 250
West 55th Street,NewYork,NY 10019 (Attn:Todd M.Goren,Esq.,Mark A.
Lightner,Esq.and Andrew Kissner,Esq.;tgoren@mofo.com,mlightner@
mofo.com, akissner@mofo.com); and Morris James LLP, 500 Delaware
Avenue, Suite 1500, Wilmington, DE 19801 (Attn: Eric J. Monzo, Esq.
and Brya M. Keilson, Esq.; emonzo@morrisjames.com, bkeilson@
morrisjames.com); and (iv) the Office of the United States Trustee, J.
Caleb Boggs Federal Building & Courthouse, 844 N. King Street, Room
2207,Wilmington,DE 19801 (Attn:Richard L.Schepacarter,Esq.),email:
Richard.schepacarter.usdoj.gov;provided that (i) objections solely with
respect to the conduct of the Auction, including the Debtors’selection
of the highest and best bid(s) at the Auction, may be made on or
before July 27, 2020 at 12:00 p.m. (prevailing Eastern Time), and
(ii) objections by non-Debtor counterparties to adequate assurance of
future performance under section 365 of the Bankruptcy Code may be
made up to and including at the Sale Hearing.
The Sale Hearing shall be conducted by the Bankruptcy Court on
July 28, 2020, at 1:00 p.m. (prevailing Eastern Time), or on such
other date as the Bankruptcy Court may direct. Requests for a copy of
the Purchase Agreement or for any other information concerning the
Motion or the Sale of the Assets should be directed,by written request,
to the Debtors’ undersigned counsel at the contact information listed
below.
COLE SCHOTZ P.C., Norman L. Pernick (No. 2290), G. David Dean (No.
6403), 500 Delaware Avenue, Suite 1410, Wilmington, DE 19801,
Telephone: (302) 652-3131, Facsimile: (302) 652-3117, E-mail:
npernick@coleschotz.com, ddean@coleschotz.com, Counsel for
Debtors and Debtors-in-Possession
1
The Debtors and the last four digits of their respective federal
taxpayer identification numbers are as follows: LVI Intermediate
Holdings, Inc., (7674); Total Vision Institute, LLC (7571); QualSight, LLC
(3866);The LASIK Vision Institute, LLC (7564); Cataract Vision Institute,
LLC (7697); Healthcare Marketing Services, LLC (9982); Cataract Vision
Institute Florida,LLC (3423);TLC Vision Center Holdings,LLC (5400);TLC
Whitten Laser Eye Associates,LLC (0182);TLCVision Centers,LLC (8271);
TruVision,LLC (3399);TruVision Contacts,LLC (3399);Laser Eye Surgery,
LLC (3448);TLC Laser Eye Centers (Refractive I),LLC (2702);TLCThe Laser
Center (Pittsburgh) L.L.C. (2881); TLC The Laser Center (Indiana) LLC
(8456); TLC The Laser Center (Institute), LLC (0959); LVI Missouri, LLC
(7088). The Debtors’executive headquarters are located at 1555 Palm
Beach Lakes Blvd.,Suite 600,West Palm Beach,Florida 33401.
2
Capitalized terms not otherwise defined herein shall have the
meanings ascribed to them in the Motion.
months. In Renton, Wash., Boeing
continues to produce the Max,
though at a slower pace. With the
planes grounded, Boeing has not
been able to deliver the new
planes, and instead is stockpiling
them.
Spirit Aerosystems, a key Boe-
ing supplier, said this month that
Boeing had slashed an order for
fuselage parts, cutting its request
to 72 shipsets from 216 earlier this
UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT
DISTRICT OF DELAWARE
In re SUPERIOR AIR CHARTER, LLC,1 Chapter 11
Debtor. Case No. 20-11007 (CSS)
NOTICE OF ENTRY OF ORDER ESTABLISHING BAR
DATES FOR FILING PROOFS OF CLAIM INCLUDING
SECTION 503(b)(9) CLAIMS
PLEASE TAKE NOTICE THAT, the United States Bankruptcy Court for
the District of Delaware (the“Bankruptcy Court”) has entered an order (the
“Bar Date Order”) [D.I. 125]: (i) establishing July 27, 2020 at 4:00 p.m.
(ET) (the“General Bar Date”) as the deadline for all persons and entities,
other than governmental units (as defined in section 101(27) of the
Bankruptcy Code), holding or asserting claims (as defined in section
101(5)) of the Bankruptcy Code and explicitly including claims under 11
U.S.C. § 503(b)(9)) against the above-captioned Debtor to file such proof
of claim; (ii) establishing October 26, 2020 at 4:00 p.m. (ET) (the
“Governmental Bar Date”) as the deadline for all governmental units (as
definedinsection101(27) oftheBankruptcy Code)in theabove-captioned
casetofilesuchclaims;and(iii)grantingcertainotherrelatedrelied.
ENTITIES WHO MUST FILE PROOFS OF CLAIM. If you have a claim2
that arose or is deemed to have arisen prior to April 28,2020 or if you have
a claim under 11 U.S.C.§ 503(b)(9) for goods delivered to the Debtor in the
twenty day period before April 28,2020,you MUST file a proof of claim by
the General Bar Date to share in distributions from the Debtor’s estate and
voteonanyplan,unlessoneoftheexceptionsdescribedbelowapplies.
ENTITIES NOT REQUIRED TO FILE PROOFS OF CLAIM. The following
persons or entities are not required to file proofs of claim:(i) any person or
entity whose claim is listed on the Debtor’s schedules of assets and liabili-
ties (the“Schedules”) and (a) whose claim is not described thereon as dis-
puted, contingent, or unliquidated; (b) who does not dispute the amount
or priority of the claim set forth in the Schedules,and (c) who does not dis-
pute that the claim is an obligation of the Debtor;(ii) any person or entity
whose claim has been paid in full, including, but not limited to any claim
of an employee of the Debtor for ordinary course wages or benefits to the
extent already paid; (iii) any person or entity that holds an interest in the
Debtor,which interest is based exclusively upon ownership of common or
preferred stock, membership interest, partnership interest, or warrants or
rights to purchase,sell,or subscribe to such a security or interest;provided,
however, that interest holders that wish to assert claims (as opposed to
ownership interest) against the Debtor other than with respect to owner-
ship or purchase of an interest,including claims arising out of or relating to
the sale issuance or distribution of the interest,must file Proofs of Claim on
or before the General Bar Date,unless another exception identified herein
applies;(iv)anyholderofaclaimallowableundersections503(b)or507(a)
of the Bankruptcy Code as an administrative expense of this chapter 11
case,with the exception of the 503(b)(9) Claims,which are subject
to the General Bar Date;(v) any person or entity who holds a claim that
has been allowed by an order of this Court entered on or before the appli-
cable Bar Dates; (vi) any holder of a claim for which a separate deadline
is fixed by the Court; (vii) the DIP Lenders with regard to all claims arising
under the DIP Credit Facility or the DIP Credit Agreement (each term in
year. The aviation slowdown cou-
pled with a recovery that could
take years has led Boeing to cut
about 10 percent of its work force,
or about 16,000 jobs worldwide.
“The global pandemic has
changed the way we live and
work,” Boeing’s chief executive,
David L. Calhoun, said in a note to
staff in April. “It is changing our
industry. We are facing utterly un-
expected challenges.”
this subparagraph as defined in the Debtor’s postpetition financing order
[D.I. 115]) and UT Finance Corporation with regard to claims related to
the Financed Aircraft (as defined in the First Day Declaration); or (viii) any
holder of a claim who has already properly filed a Proof of Claim with the
Clerk of this Court or the Claims Agent against the Debtor, using a claim
formwhichsubstantiallyconformstoOfficialFormB410.
WHAT TO FILE. If you are the holder of a claim against the Debtor,you
may assert your claim by completing the Proof of Claim Form attached to
the Bar Date Order or downloading a proof of claim form from http://www.
uscourts.gov/forms/bankruptcy-forms or from the claims agent’s website
athttps://cases.stretto.com/superiorair/file-a-claim/.Youmustuseaproof
ofclaimformthatconformssubstantiallytoOfficialBankruptcyFormB410.
WHEN AND WHERE TO FILE. Pursuant to the terms of the Bar
Date Order, and except as otherwise provided herein, each person or
entity desiring to file a proof of claim must send the Proof of Claim Form
consistent with this Notice,to the claims agent (the“Claims Agent”):(a) by
Electronic Submission through the Claims Agent’s website (https://cases.
stretto.com/superiorair/file-a-claim/);or (b) by First-Class Mail,Overnight
Mail, or Hand Delivery to Superior Air Claims Processing, c/o Stretto, 410
Exchange,Suite 100,Irvine,CA 92602. Proof of Claim Forms will be deemed
timely filed only if actually received by the Claims Agent on or before the
applicableBarDate.
CONSEQUENCES OF FAILURE TO FILE. Any entity that is required,
but fails, to file a proof of claim in accordance with the Bar Date Order
on or before the applicable bar date shall be precluded from voting on
any plan filed in this chapter 11 case and/or receiving distributions
fromtheDebtoronaccountofsuchclaimsinthischapter11case.
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION. Additional information, including
questions concerning submitting proofs of claim and requests for Proof
of Claim Forms should be directed to the Claims Agent at (855) 424-
9776 or submit an inquiry via e-mail to: TeamSuperiorAir@stretto.com.
Copies of the Schedules and the Bar Date Order can also be viewed and
downloaded free of charge on the Claims Agent’s website at https://
cases.stretto.com/superiorair/.Finally, copies of these documents may be
obtained by contacting in writing counsel for the Debtor,Bayard,P.A.(Attn:
Daniel N. Brogan), 600 N. King Street, Suite 400, Wilmington, DE 19801,
dbrogan@bayardlaw.com. You should consult your own attorney
for assistance regarding any other inquiries, such as questions
concerningthecompletionorfilingofaproofofclaim.
1
The Debtor in this chapter 11 case,together with the last four digits of
the Debtor’s federal tax identification number, is as follows: Superior Air
Charter,LLC (2081). The mailing address for the Debtor,solely for purposes
of notices and communications, is:1341 W.Mockingbird Lane, Suite 600E,
Dallas,Texas.
2
A“claim”is:(a) a right to payment,whether or not such right is reduced
to judgment, liquidated,fixed,contingent,matured, unmatured, disputed,
undisputed,legal,equitable,secured or unsecured;or (b) a right to an equi-
table remedy for breach of performance if such breach gives rise to a right
to payment, whether or not such right to an equitable remedy is reduced
to judgment,fixed,contingent,matured,unmatured,disputed,undisputed,
securedorunsecured.
B4 0 N
He Made The Post Great. Now the News Is Changing.
FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE
breach his arrangement with Mr. Kava-
naugh and to protect his old source’s
anonymity, three Post employees said.
(The three, as well as other Post jour-
nalists who spoke to me, insisted on
anonymity because The Post prefers
that its employees not talk to the me-
dia.)
Mr. Baron and other editors per-
suaded Mr. Woodward that it would be
bad for The Post and “bad for Bob” to
disclose a source, one of the journalists
told me. The piece never ran.
And the steadfast adherence to the
longstanding rules of newspaper jour-
nalism and the defense of the institu-
tion, which have defined Mr. Baron’s
tenure at The Post, prevailed.
Happy newsrooms are all alike but
every unhappy newsroom is unhappy
in its own way. And in this moment of
cultural reckoning, most American
newsrooms are unhappy places.
They’re reeling from the coronavirus
pandemic and under attack from the
president of the United States even as
they reckon with America’s racial in-
equalities in their own institutions. At
The Post, black staff members’ discon-
tent burst onto Twitter, as a set of high-
profile journalists who have left the
paper discussed how they felt pushed
aside or pushed out. Their complaints,
along with previously untold stories
recently shared with me, paint a picture
of an essential American institution
caught in fierce cultural crosscurrents.
The revival of The Post by Mr. Baron
and its owner, the Amazon founder, Jeff
Bezos, is perhaps the greatest news
business success story of the past dec-
ade. But that journalistic revival has in
some ways masked a messier story, one
of many contradictions.
The Post has published some of the
best reporting in the 20th century
‘The Post is more than a
collection of individuals
who wish to express
themselves.’
Martin Baron, editor of The Post, in a
recent memo.
American newspaper tradition that’s
ever been done like the sprawling ex-
posé of America’s war in Afghanistan —
all wrapped in a digital marketing,
advertising and publishing machine
that The Post licenses lucratively to
news organizations around the world.
It’s a faceless institution in an era of
influencers and personal brands. It’s a
place where one of the managing edi-
tors, Tracy Grant, still hands new re-
porters a copy of Katharine Graham’s
1997 memoir, though, of course, The
Post is no longer owned by the beloved
Graham family, but by the world’s
richest man. Mr. Baron’s fearless focus
on White House coverage and investi-
gations has put it at the center of the
American media’s response to Presi-
dent Trump.
But it’s also a top-down institution
whose constrained view of what jour-
nalism is today has frustrated some of
the industry’s creative young stars.
At the heart of The Post’s identity is
Mr. Baron, 65, the ultimate old school
editor. He rose through the ranks of The
Miami Herald and The Los Angeles
Times, then arrived at The New York
Times in 1996, where he took over the
powerful role of night editor, the stern
gatekeeper and final approver of any
article headed into the print newspaper.
But he frustrated reporters with his
punctiliousness, and didn’t play the
internal politics of succession. He left
The Times in 2000 to take over The
Miami Herald, leading its staff to a
Pulitzer Prize, and then The Boston
Globe, where he published a historic
investigation of sexual abuse within the
Catholic Church. That showdown be-
came the movie “Spotlight,” in which
Liev Schreiber played Mr. Baron as
introverted, irascible, and unbending —
a depiction that Post employees de-
scribe as uncannily accurate.
He arrived at The Post in 2013 “stub-
bornly retro,” according to a National
Journal profile, but when the Amazon
founder, Mr. Bezos, bought the paper
later that year, Mr. Baron proved the
perfect ballast: He wasn’t personally a
man of the internet, but he made clear
he was all for it. And his journalistic
gravitas gave the newsroom comfort
during its frantic, overdue shift to the
digital age. When other publications
seemed unnerved by the election of
President Trump, Mr. Baron’s assertion,
“We’re not at war with the administra-
tion, we’re at work,” seemed to fortify
journalists everywhere.
Mr. Baron’s opposition to Mr. Wood-
ward’s story, people who work with him
said, wasn’t about favoring Mr. Kava-
naugh, or being afraid of a fight. Pub-
lishing the article would simply violate
the traditional principle that sources
should be protected. And it would veer
into an uncomfortable and potentially
embarrassing new form of journalism,
and, in Mr. Baron’s view, imperil the
reputation of the institution.
When I asked, for an interview with
Mr. Baron, The Post’s spokeswoman,
Kris Coratti, instead sent me 4,000
words of excerpts from his many
speeches about journalism. The
speeches reflected his sophisticated
articulation of the importance of open-
minded, rigorous and brave journalism.
But the speech excerpts didn’t include
the credo that stuck with me from a
recent memo written by Mr. Baron.
THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
At the heart of The Washington Post’s identity is Martin Baron, top, the paper’s executive editor since 2013. The Washington Post
newsroom in 2017, above. Simmering unhappiness from black staff members at The Post burst into public on Twitter last week.
“The Post is more than a collection of
individuals who wish to express them-
selves,” Mr. Baron wrote. “The reputa-
tion of The Post must prevail over any
one individual’s desire for expression.”
This principle reflects Mr. Baron’s
frequently expressed frustration that
his reporters’ tweets could undermine
The Post’s journalism. It sometimes
seems that Mr. Baron is standing
athwart Twitter yelling, “Stop!” and
nobody’s listening.
The intensity of the debate inside The
Post over its journalists’ tweets
emerged in an internal survey of re-
porters’ attitudes, commissioned by the
national editor, Steven Ginsberg, with-
out Mr. Baron’s participation. The re-
port, which was circulated in April,
described Post management as “ill-
equipped to deal with
social media in the
modern era” and
suggested that man-
agers are more for-
giving of mistakes
“by white men and
newsroom stars than
they are of women,
minorities and less
Bob Woodward
high-profile report-
of The Post.
ers.”
(The Times, where
management has cultivated stars and
taken a relatively softer line on Twitter,
has its own challenges, and was forced
last week to try to purge the vitriol
from its internal conversations on
Slack. Its chief executive, Mark Thomp-
son, asked employees to avoid “saying
insulting and threatening things about
co-workers.”)
The Post survey presaged the more
intense concerns expressed this month
by current and former black journalists
about the news industry, in general, and
The Post, in particular. Such concerns
are not new.
But many Posties (which is how
some on the staff refer to themselves)
date the current gap between black
staff members and leaders of The Post
— Mr. Baron and his three managing
editors, Cameron Barr, Ms. Grant and
Emilio Garcia-Ruiz — to the departure
in 2015 of Kevin Merida, then The
Post’s managing editor, to lead the
ESPN sports and culture site The Un-
defeated. A handful of black journalists
followed him.
The union that represents newsroom
employees, The Washington Post Guild,
now says it has assembled 32 pages of
concerns from current and former
black journalists. Black staff members
active with the union are pushing for a
Twitter campaign to highlight the is-
sues, modeled after a similar recent
MEDIA
demonstration at The Los Angeles
Times. But such a step would be more
provocative at The Post, given the
paper’s institutional unease about
expressing opinions on Twitter.
Some have already surfaced. Kim-
briell Kelly, who left The Post last year
for The Los Angeles Times after being
passed over for an editing job, tweeted
that she was the “only black investiga-
tive reporter on WaPo’s Investigative
Unit for most of my 7 years there.”
“The notion that only you had to
prove yourself as an editor, while sooo
many others who didn’t look like you,
never did, steamed many of us,” replied
Dana Priest, a white veteran national
security reporter.
Questions have also arisen within
The Post’s video operation which, like
other areas outside Mr. Baron’s core
obsessions, has suffered from a lack of
clear strategy. Employees said in a
meeting earlier this month that person-
al favoritism has substituted for clear
goals, according to detailed notes of the
meeting by a participant. One employee
said black video editors felt they had to
ask permission to get up even to go to
the bathroom, when white producers
didn’t. Two black editors, who spoke on
the condition they not be named, said
they’d felt that difference in treatment.
“Staff are always free to take breaks,”
Ms. Coratti said. “They are just asked
to give others a heads-up that they will
be away to ensure that the video hub is
not unoccupied in the event of unantici-
pated news developments.”
A particularly striking issue arose
from the coverage of the 2018 killing of
a Post columnist, Jamal Khashoggi, by
Saudi agents. Karen Attiah, Mr.
Khashoggi’s editor, who rallied support
for him on Twitter, on television and on
The Post’s op-ed pages. But when it
came time to apply for a Pulitzer Prize
— an unscientific process that often
serves as an X-ray of newsroom politics
and power — Ms. Attiah’s work wasn’t
among the 20 pieces submitted. The
exclusion, she told me, “stung,” and
surprised people who had been follow-
ing The Post’s work closely.
“I was appalled,” said Mohamed
Soltan, a former Egyptian political
prisoner and friend of Mr. Khashoggi,
who described Ms. Attiah as one of the
key journalists on the story.
The Post’s editorial page editor, Fred
Hiatt, defended the decision in an email
to me: “What you have to leave out in
such situations, in this case including
excellent work by Jackson Diehl, Karen
Attiah and several others, is never
easy.”
One thing that is clear is that The
Post — which prides itself on providing
JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
JUSTIN T. GELLERSON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
not just jobs for its staff but long enrich-
ing careers — has lost some people any
newsroom would want to keep, includ-
ing Ms. Kelly and Wesley Lowery, who
left to become a correspondent for a
new “60 Minutes” project on the
streaming service Quibi. Another is
Soraya Nadia McDonald, who said she
had hoped to stretch beyond blogging
twice a day on pop culture, which she
did at The Post, and wanted “permis-
sion and support to be ambitious.” She
followed Mr. Merida to The Undefeated,
where she was a Pulitzer finalist this
year for “essays on theater and film
that bring a fresh, delightful intelli-
gence to the intersections of race and
art.”
”I don’t think any of that would have
been published there,” she said of The
Post. “This place just
seems to run off its
best people.”
The last time Mr.
Baron faced sus-
tained complaints
from his black staff
was in 2016, after Mr.
Merida left. Then, a
group of black Posties
Soraya Nadia
sent Mr. Baron a
McDonald left.
memo making the
case for a new deputy
managing editor for diversity. Mr. Bar-
on responded that The Post was rela-
tively diverse compared with other
newsrooms and that Ms. Grant had
diversity issues in hand. “They repre-
sent the bulk of her work and the most
rewarding aspects of her job.’' Mr.
Baron wrote in the memo. “I can’t
imagine taking them away from her.”
This time, as The Post rushed to quell
the kind of staff uprising that broke out
at The New York Times and The Los
Angeles Times, that role suddenly held
appeal to Mr. Baron. The Post an-
nounced on June 18 that it would hire
for the role, and an internal email says
the deadline for applying is July 3. Mr.
Baron would vet applications himself,
and he reached out to Shani O. Hilton,
my former colleague who is now a
deputy managing editor at The Los
Angeles Times overseeing The Times’s
Washington bureau, its national cover-
age and its foreign desk, suggesting she
apply.
“You may have seen the announce-
ment of our new initiatives focused on
race, ethnicity and identity,” Mr. Baron
wrote to Ms. Hilton.
Ms. Hilton was not interested.
"I have seen over the years that
diversity roles, particularly for black
women, are the fastest way to be side-
lined out of the most important conver-
sations about coverage and hiring,” she
wrote back. “The moniker lets other
managers think the work of improving
representation and newsroom culture
doesn’t fall on them."
Mr. Barr, one of the managing edi-
tors, said the job would, in fact, focus on
coverage, even if it may not involve
directly managing reporters. “This is a
job that brings together the journalism
and the leadership of the room,” he
said.
That new editor will face questions
about identity and journalism that
extend beyond race. Two Post employ-
ees said editors have barred a Post
reporter who publicly accused another
journalist of sexual assault, Felicia
Sonmez, from writing about the subject,
citing the appearance of conflict of
interest in her public comments. But it’s
hard to imagine reporters are expected
to be neutral on the issue of sexual
assault — and the decision seems al-
most a caricature of the old idea that
only people imagined to have no stake
in an issue, often white men, can cover
it.
It can, in this fraught moment, be
difficult to untangle the forces driving
the arguments about newsroom cul-
ture, objectivity and fairness. There
are, no doubt, real disagreements
around the issue of how much journal-
ists’ opinions, identities and experi-
ences should shape coverage and be
shared with their audience, and when
“objectivity” simply means a dominant
point of view.
But one clear strain in the tensions at
The Post is simply, and sometimes
hilariously, generational. In the happier
times of early January 2020, the writer
Maura Judkis blew up the internet with
the article, “People are seeing ‘Cats’
while high out of their minds.” It fea-
tured irresistible testimonials from
people who described watching the
Andrew Lloyd Webber film while on
marijuana, psilocybin mushrooms or
other substances, such as: “The most
terrifying experience of my life. I swear
to God my soul escaped me.”
Mr. Baron, who had not seen the
piece before it was published, erupted,
two Post employees said, furious that
the story was “glorifying recreational
drug use,” one of them said.
Ms. Coratti said that Mr. Baron was
not “upset” but did “advise that we
should be careful not to be seen as
celebrating or championing recrea-
tional use of drugs.” So the dispute
seems to be less about journalistic
principle than about whether you like
edibles.
Even those frustrated by Mr. Baron’s
strong-willed style of management
speak with reverence of his obsessive
commitment to reporting. Still, some of
The Post’s challenges will probably be
left to his successor. Mr. Baron has told
colleagues he will be around through
next year’s presidential inauguration,
but perhaps not much longer. “Marty
will give us a great deal of notice before
he retires, and that notice has not been
given,” Ms. Coratti said.
But what separates today’s cultural
conflicts inside newsrooms from previ-
ous generations’ is that they now play
out, in real time, in public on social
media. And they offer a window into an
industry, and society, struggling to find
its moral footing around racism issues.
That seemed a painful takeaway from
the recent Post article about a white
woman who came as Megyn Kelly-in-
blackface to a 2018 Halloween party at
the home of a Washington Post cartoon-
ist. The woman lost her job when she
told her employer about the coming
article, which readers reacted to with
outrage and questions about its news
value.
“Was this story intended to be a
spoof of our culture?” Patrick Gaspard,
who served as ambassador to South
Africa during the Obama administra-
tion and is now the president of the
grant-making Open Society Founda-
tions, asked on Twitter. “Did they really
invest all this Investigatory resource on
this piece to shame this average person
who holds no discernible power?”
The story’s handling inside The Post
underscores some of the paper’s under-
lying tensions.
After a guest at the party who be-
lieved the woman was a Post employee
complained to the paper, editors as-
signed it to two trusted veterans: Syd-
ney Trent, an experienced former edi-
tor, and Marc Fisher, a reporter whom
The Post also turned to when someone
had to write about Mr. Bezos’s explicit
text messages. Mr. Fisher, who is white,
reportedly told people he had doubts
about the news value of the costume
party story, though he led the reporting
and writing. Ms. Trent, who is black,
saw it as worth doing, three Post jour-
nalists said.
White senior editors, including Mr.
Baron and Mr. Barr, signed off on the
story and sided with Ms. Trent on some
questions of tone. That played to old
reflexes and new ones: They chose to
address a complex moment with the
most traditional reportorial form, and
they trusted the judgment of a black
reporter with a long history of writing
and reporting about race. And while
many Posties were conspicuously silent
about the story on social media, Ms.
Trent stood by it, and posted it to her
Facebook page to a positive reception.
But black reporters are, of course,
not monolithic, and many reporters of
all backgrounds at The Post found the
3,000-word investigation puzzling. A
random person “dressing like a famous
lady in blackface at a party 2 years ago
seems the least of our concerns right
now,” Ms. Attiah tweeted.
 THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N B5

VIRUS FALLOUT

‘I feel excited, knowing that I will receive my salary every week and
will be able to cover my needs without the anguish of wondering
when they will pay me unemployment, since that system is very bad
and we workers lived desperately.’
KARINA LIRA, Walt Disney World cast member
‘We know Florida’s economic health is all based on the tourists,
because everyone comes from other places. It’s going to be a huge
impact. Nobody is going to be able to trust anyone to come here
now, because everyone is worried about their life.’
KIKI PIERRE, cook at Orlando Airport
‘Down here, everybody speaks to everybody and talk and all that. Now,
nobody does that because everybody’s scared. Nobody wants to come
out, nobody wants to talk to anybody. And if you go in these stores right
now, people are standoffish, and Southern people are not like that.’
RONNIE JACKSON, cook at Orlando Airport

Pandemic Throws Orlando’s Tourism Workers Into Limbo

FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE

than central Florida, which is

home to Disney World, SeaWorld,
Universal, Gatorland, Legoland
and a plethora of smaller attrac-
tions. An estimated 250,000 peo-
ple work in the leisure and hospi-
tality industries, accounting for 25
percent of jobs in the area, accord-
ing to the trade organization Visit
Orlando.
Most workers whose liveli-
hoods depend on Orlando’s ability
to attract tourists in large num-
bers have managed to get by as
the amusement economy shut
down around them — though for
some it has been a struggle.
Recent weeks have brought a
new kind of purgatory for tourism
workers in the region. Will spiking
coronavirus cases in Florida halt
the reopening that was beginning
to happen? Disney, for instance,
has been calling back employees
ahead of a limited return to opera-
tions on July 11.
“To Disney’s credit, they have
done everything in their power to
mitigate our safety concerns
about returning to work,” said Mr.
Cox, who also serves as president
of Disney World’s stagehand un-
ion. “People are mostly terrified
that the company is going to stop
the recalls. That would be a disas-
ter. People are barely hanging on
as it is, and unemployment bene-
fits will end soon.”
Others are worried that going
back to work will lead to infection.
With the coronavirus now ram-
paging in Florida, one Disney em-
ployee started an online petition
asking the company and govern-
ment officials to reconsider their
reopening timelines. It had about
16,200 signatures on Sunday. Empty seats at SeaWorld’s Orca Encounter attraction in Orlando. Animals at the theme park are being taken care of during the temporary closure.
Before the coronavirus halted
travel in March, Orlando was
booming. The convention center, of new theme park attractions and With local officials estimating projects are being scaled back or level since Florida began its cur-
Eve Edelheit reported and pho- the second largest in North Amer- hotels were on the way; and Or- that it could take five years for vis- postponed. Unemployment in the rent estimating process in 1976.
tographed from Orlando, and Brooks ica, had announced a $605 million lando International Airport was itation to rebound from the pan- Orlando metropolitan area was Universal Orlando made sweep-
Barnes reported from Los Angeles. addition; billions of dollars’ worth working on a $3 billion expansion. demic, many of those growth 22.6 percent in May, the highest ing layoffs last week.

Photographs by EVE EDELHEIT

for The New York Times

Few areas of the country rely on tourism more than central Florida, which is home to attractions like the Starflyer swing, left, and a roller coaster at Fun Spot America.

‘I really want to go back to work. I want to be a part of rebuilding
everything that we lost. I want to be a part of the new beginning.’
JAVIER LOPEZ, employee at Budget Rent A Car
‘When I’d feel safe going back to work would be when all of this is over,
when they’ve actually been able to detect that there’s no more cases and
that everything can basically go back to normal for everybody. Because
until then, nobody’s going to feel safe going back to work.’
OLIVIA WILLIAMS, Starbucks at the Orlando Airport
‘My hope is if we can get a vaccine or if we can get this under
control, that people could come back. The only hope you can have.’
MICHAEL BOYLE, electrician for Bob Carr Theatre
B8 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Finding Some Contentment Amid the Chaos
As the pandemic swirls, pick
the right meditation app.
By ANNA GOLDFARB
If you want to steal a few minutes of Zen
and achieve something like contentment
in the face of chaos and uncertainty, you
might be tempted to download a medita-
tion app.
Studies show that meditation can
decrease stress and reduce symptoms
associated with depression, anxiety, pain
and insomnia. The vast majority of medi-
tation apps are relatively affordable and
convenient. But it can be overwhelming
to know where to start, especially if your
goal is to find one that will meet your
individual needs.
Before you download one of these
apps, however, be aware of what these
meditation apps can — and can’t — do.
What Is Mindfulness?
The content provided on many medita-
tion apps is relaxing to listen to — bab-
bling streams, lapping waves and chirp-
ing birds — but mindfulness meditation
is an active exercise. You focus on
thoughts and sensations as they bubble
up in the moment and observe them
without judgment; you don’t zone out. If
your attention wanders, you gently
return your focus to your breath. The
more you practice training your atten-
tion in this way, the more robust the
benefits of mindfulness meditation.
Meditation isn’t designed for you to
“bliss out and escape,” said Amishi Jha,
an associate professor of psychology at
the University of Miami and a neurosci-
entist who studies attention. “You might
actually unnecessarily frustrate yourself
by thinking that goal is something this
app is going to get you to do.”
For many people, feeling happy in the
midst of this pandemic isn’t a realistic
goal. In fact, you might feel worse about
yourself if you’re unable to sustain a
positive mentality when you feel like you
should. Instead, she recommends adopt-
ing a more mindfulness-based stance:
Accept that things are what they are.
This, she said, tends to be more restor-
ative.
Mindfulness meditation may improve
your attention. When your attention
span is increased, many other positive
effects tend to follow, Dr. Jha said. Filter-
ing out distracting thoughts will allow
you to be more productive. The satisfac-
tion from being able to accomplish what
you need to accomplish in a day is what
makes people feel better, she added.
Increased attention also allows us to
“notice our own mind wandering when
we’re getting into these bad ruminative
loops,” she said. Two Harvard re-
searchers conducted a study in 2010 that
found that people reported that they
were thinking about something other
than what they are doing 47 percent of
the time: things that happened in the
past and things that may or may not
happen in the future. This mind-wander-
ing typically makes people unhappier. By
interrupting that cycle, which mindful-
ness meditation aims to do, we can reap
the emotional benefits of focusing only
on the here and now.
Terrific Supplement
For those learning how to practice mind-
fulness meditation, experts said you
need personalized one-on-one instruction
to make sure you’re on the right track.
You can read about meditation and think
“it’s really simple and easy to do. But I
think what people don’t understand is
that it’s really easy to do it incorrectly,”
said Sara Lazar, an assistant professor in
psychology at Harvard Medical School
who studies the neuroscience of yoga
and meditation. However, experts agreed
that the right meditation app can be a
Turns Out, Givers Are Smarter Than Takers in Negotiations
By ADAM GRANT
In 2010, a Costa Rican diplomat named
Christiana Figueres set out to do some-
thing that many people saw as impossi-
ble. The United Nations had appointed
her to build a global agreement to fight
climate change. She needed to get 195
countries on board, and one of the
biggest challenges was Saudi Arabia.
Its economy was dependent on oil and
gas exports, so it had every incentive to
keep profiting from that rather than
reducing its carbon footprint.
When the pie seems fixed, it’s com-
mon to panic and treat resources as
scarce. In crisis, we often do whatever
it takes to protect ourselves. That’s
especially clear today: In the past few
weeks, we’ve seen hoarders collect
thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer,
and spreaders ignore warnings to
maintain physical distance to avoid
infecting vulnerable groups. We’ve
watched policymakers withhold emer-
gency funds. “It’s give and take, but it’s
got to be mostly take,” President Trump
said in 2015, summing up his negotia-
tion philosophy. “You got to mostly
take.”
That was the art of the deal: Be a
taker. But now there’s a science of the
deal, with decades of evidence on what
separates great negotiators from their
peers. It tells a different story: Being a
giver may actually be a sign of intelli-
gence.
In one of my favorite studies, re-
searchers tested people’s intelligence
with a series of quantitative, verbal and
analytical reasoning problems. Then
they sent them off to negotiate. Intelli-
gence paid off — but not in the way you
terrific supplement to a real-life teacher
you’re also working with, even remotely.
Experts warn that meditation apps do
not replace clinical treatment. If you
have any kind of clinical mental health
diagnosis, you should always consult
with your medical professional.
Not ‘Proven’
There is a misconception that meditation
apps are widely studied and supported
by science. They’re not. “There’s proba-
bly 10 studies that have been done on
apps that are good, that actually meet
the standards of clinical trials,” Dr. Jha
said. We’re just at the beginning of
studying them for effectiveness.
There is a movement to certify and
accredit mindfulness teachers through
an independent accreditation organiza-
tion called the International Mindfulness
Teachers Association, said Diana Win-
ston, director of mindfulness education
at the U.C.L.A. Mindful Awareness Re-
search Center and author of “The Little
Book of Being.” But these important
standards have not yet made it into the
apps, so there’s an issue of quality con-
trol. “You have no idea whether the
teacher who’s leading the meditation on
the app is someone who has 20 years of
experience or someone who just started
trying to teach this and run the app a
week ago,” she said.
While there aren’t any official organi-
zations that oversee these apps, there
are a few websites that can help you
evaluate them. PsyberGuide is a non-
profit project that aims to give accurate
and unbiased reviews and ratings to
mental health apps. The American Psy-
chiatric Organization has an app evalua-
tion model as well. Its website helps
might expect. The smarter people were,
the better their counterparts did in the
negotiation. They used their brain-
power to expand the pie, finding ways
to help the other side that cost them
nothing.
Smarter Living
walk you through how an app is posi-
tioned: if there is scientific support, if
there is transparency about how your
data will be used, and how easy to use it
is. These tools will help make sure any
apps you download are safe, vetted and
enjoyable to use.
“Don’t be afraid of downloading an
app,” Dr. Wilhelm said. “Just do a little
bit of research on it and pick the right
one.”
Choosing an App
IDENTIFY YOUR GOAL Just as you’d proba-
bly head to a department store with an
idea of what you want to buy, have an
objective in mind before you wade into
the app store. Experts said some goals
could be: reducing stress, minimizing
anxiety, quitting smoking, fighting in-
somnia and cultivating mindfulness. If
you’re not sure what you’re looking for,
you could get overwhelmed with the
choices.
PRIVACY SETTINGS Some apps will exploit
sensitive personal data. Your private
information could be sold to third parties
or stored in places you may not want it
to be stored. “There are very few apps
that have no risks,” said Sabine Wilhelm,
the chief of psychology at Massachusetts
General Hospital and a professor of
psychology at Harvard Medical School.
Before you download an app, review
its privacy policy. Look for transparency
with how data you input is collected,
stored and exchanged. If there’s any
confusion or an absence of a transparent
privacy policy, then reconsider down-
loading it.
LIVE COACH “Inevitably, you will have
DO
MIN
IC
KE
ST E
RT
ON
This isn’t an isolated result. In a
comprehensive analysis of 28 studies,
the most successful negotiators cared
as much about the other party’s success
as their own. They refused to see nego-
tiations as win-lose or the world as
questions,” Dr. Jha said. In the same way
you talk with a trainer to make sure your
form is not off at the gym, you want
somebody to consult to see if you’re
practicing meditation properly.
DIVERSE OFFERINGS Seek out a diversity
of offerings. This is helpful, Ms. Winston
said, because then you can try different
modules at different times. Some apps
offer guided meditations, breathing
exercises or even just timers and you
may appreciate the variety.
WAY OUT Look for an off-ramp. Hopefully,
any app you download will be a supple-
ment to a meditation habit you’re looking
to grow. You shouldn’t think about buy-
ing this app to depend on forever, Dr. Jha
said. Over time, try to reduce the amount
of guidance you need to get to the point
where you might just have a bell ring at
the beginning and at the end.
TESTING Try a few out. Ms. Winston
recommends listening to a variety of
teachers from each app and seeing if you
connect with any of them. “No one per-
son is going to be for everybody,” Ms.
Winston said. “Different people are
attracted to different teachers.”
Dr. Lazar suggests being open to the
fact that your mindfulness preferences
could change over time. She recom-
mends articulating what it is you liked or
disliked about what you tried. That will
help you seek out which ones are a good
fit for you.
Popular Apps
All of these are available on iOS and
Android devices.
HEADSPACE Wirecutter, a New York
Times Company that reviews and recom-
zero-sum. They understood that before
you could claim value, you needed to
create value. They didn’t declare vic-
tory until they could help everyone win.
This isn’t limited to negotiation.
Economists find that the higher that
Americans score on intelligence tests,
the more they give to charity — even
after adjusting for their wealth, income,
education, age and health. Psycholo-
gists demonstrate that the smarter
people are, the less likely they are to
take resources for themselves — and
the more likely they are to give to a
group. I’ve discovered in my own re-
search that when success is a sprint,
givers may well finish last. But if it’s a
marathon, the takers tend to fall behind
and the givers often finish first.
But what if you’re stuck dealing with
a taker? In the midst of a pandemic,
some establishments are going to un-
usual lengths to discourage selfishness.
One store in Denmark has apparently
posted a sign under hand sanitizer with
the price for one bottle at about $4 and
the price for a second bottle at $95.
There’s a time and a place to be
tough on takers. If you’ve studied game
theory, you know the classic result:
Tit-for-tat was the dominant strategy.
But the latest science of the deal sup-
ports a different approach.
Tit-for-tat works fine in one-shot
interactions. But when ongoing rela-
tionships and reputations are formed,
tit-for-tat often loses to generous tit-for-
tat. If the other party takes a selfish
stance three times, instead of compet-
ing all three times we seem to be better
off cooperating anyway once. When we
give unconditionally from time to time,
MARK PERNICE
mends products, selected Headspace as
its favorite all-around meditation app. In
addition to a charming interface, there’s
a robust library of guided courses and a
variety of targeted meditations to please
both beginners and experts alike. After a
free two-week trial, it costs $69.99 a year
to access the full programming.
CALM This app has more of a new-age-y
vibe, with ambient music, nature sounds
and scenery. There’s lots of individual
exercises and multiday guided medita-
tions, as well as progress tracking and
soothing sleep stories. There is also
content for kids and experts available for
subscribers. There’s a seven-day free
trial, and a $69.99 annual membership
fee gives you access to all sessions.
SIMPLE HABIT This app is designed for
those who are looking to make their
meditation habit stick. After filling out a
questionnaire to evaluate your goals, the
app suggests a personalized meditation
program. Expect lots of notifications to
make sure you’re keeping on track. If
you’re not the type of person who enjoys
alerts, look elsewhere. It costs $11.99 per
month or $89.99 a year. A lifetime mem-
bership costs $299.99.
INSIGHT TIMER Marketed as an app for
sleep, anxiety and stress, Insight Timer
has an immense catalog of over 45,000
guided meditations and music tracks.
Unlike other popular meditation apps,
you can access this app’s content without
creating a profile. However if you do
create an account, you can connect with
friends, track your progress and book-
mark favorite meditations. There’s
plenty available free, but after a 30-day
free trial, it costs $60 a year.
we give them a reason to change.
Believing in a fixed pie is a self-
fulfilling prophecy. When we expect the
worst in others, we bring out the worst
in others. When we recognize that
everyone feels the impulse to help
(unless they’re a sociopath) we have a
chance to bring out what Lincoln called
the better angels of their nature.
That’s what Christiana Figueres did
when she flew to Saudi Arabia to see if
she could get it on board for the Paris
Agreement. When she arrived at oil
fields and Bedouin tents, she wasn’t
trying to make a deal. As she explains
on my TED podcast, “WorkLife,” she
didn’t even go in with a negotiating
strategy — she went in with an “under-
standing strategy.”
Ms. Figueres wanted to know what
help Saudi Arabia needed from other
countries. One day on a flight with its
representatives, she asked about its
long-term interests and goals. A Saudi
official reached for a napkin and started
sketching a plan. Where it needed help
was in diversifying its economy.
Other countries were willing to give.
They stepped up to create opportunities
for Saudi Arabia to invest in other
exports, and that became a key ingredi-
ent in the Paris Agreement.
ONLINE: NEWSLETTER
Every Monday, Tim
Herrera, Smarter Living
editor, emails readers with
tips and advice for living a
better, more fulfilling life.
Sign up to get it in your
inbox at nytimes.com/SLnewsletter.

Business of Books
Was Not Created
For Remote Work
By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS
During a normal week, Jordan
Pavlin, the editorial director at
Knopf, seldom ate at her desk. De-
pending on the day, she might be
meeting with literary agents over
lunch, catching up with an author
over an after-work drink or hav-
ing a quick bite before a cocktail
party for a newly released title.
She still doesn’t eat at her desk.
Since her office closed because of
the coronavirus pandemic, lunch
You can read alone,
but publishing is a
very social business.
is at her kitchen table, with her
three teenagers, every day. “I’m
driving them crazy,” she said.
You can read alone, you can
write alone, but publishing is a
very social business. Heavily con-
centrated in New York City, a lot of
the work was traditionally done
face to face — before the outbreak
forced most offices to close. So
while books are a good match for
this moment when people are
spending so much time at home,
book publishing, in many ways, is
not.
There is a certain intimacy to
the book business. For many au-
thors, turning in a manuscript is
like handing over a chunk of their
soul, and delicate conversations
about revisions are generally best
when you can look someone in the
eye. Editors and agents build rela-
tionships over the course of years,
Apps for a Socially Distant Outdoor Getaway, From Routes to Trails to Lodging
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM
Planning to escape to the great
outdoors for a socially distant
summer? There are a few apps
you may want to download before
you go. After all, the tools below
won’t just help you travel from
here to there, they’ll help you get
off the beaten paths in national
parks, learn about road and trail
closures, discover nearby pre-
serves and beaches, find scenic
rest stops, satisfy cravings for
takeaway food and keep you up-
to-date on the latest travel and
health information.
To be sure, there are many prac-
tical apps for outdoor adventure
and road tripping, like Waze (for
navigation), GasBuddy (for find-
ing affordable gas stations) and
Flush (for locating public bath-
rooms). And planning and book-
ing apps, like TripAdvisor Hotels
& Vacation, have been updated
with notices and guidance about
travel amid Covid-19. But the fol-
lowing apps may prove to be par-
ticularly useful by helping trav-
elers stay socially distant yet still
savor the timeless pleasures of
summer — hiking, biking, camp-
ing and dinners under the stars in
wide open spaces.
Discovering the Outdoors
Wondering what lies just around
the bend? Roadtrippers uses your
location to show you beaches,
parks, lakes, nature preserves,
farms, botanical gardens, public
art, monuments, vacation photo-
ops, camping and R.V. spots, to
name but a few. You can easily
search for attractions near you, or
along a route you set, then navi-
gate there with turn-by-turn driv-
ing directions.
Roadtrippers is especially
handy because you can filter for
the types of places you want to
see, outdoor activities and desti-
nations. Tap an attraction for
more information and photos, and
select “add to trip” to include in
your itinerary, which you can save
and export to a PDF if you like.
The app also has inspirational
travel guides, like “Classic USA
Road Trips.” And you can choose
from nearby itineraries such as
“The Coolest Attractions and
Stops Along I-80,” so you can be-
gin to feel as if you’re on vacation
long before you reach your desti-
nation. Cost: free; $29.99 a year to
upgrade to Roadtrippers Plus,
which has features such as offline
maps, live traffic information, itin-
eraries with numerous way points
and no advertisements.
For those with a yen for oddities
— an outdoor bathtub in West Vir-
ginia’s Berkeley Springs State
Park, said to have been used by
George Washington; a memorial
stone in Hampton, N.H., for a
woman accused of witchcraft in
the 1600s; the Jell-O Museum in
Le Roy, N. Y., where the jiggly des-
sert was invented — there’s the
Roadside America app, which dis-
learning each other’s tastes in
writers, themes and ideas. The
meandering conversations that
lead there just don’t work as well
on Zoom.
“I don’t necessarily need to take
Eric to lunch for him to think of me
for his next great novel,” Ms.
Pavlin said of Eric Simonoff, a lit-
erary agent she’s known for al-
most 30 years whose clients in-
clude Jonathan Lethem and
Jhumpa Lahiri. “But for the next
generation, it would be harder. To
create that bond without going for
drinks and spending the time and
saying the indiscreet things, all
the stuff you need to do early on in
your career to build lasting rela-
tionships.
“Of course, these are business
relationships,” she said. “But it’s a
business based on the stories you
love.”
Chelcee Johns, an assistant edi-
tor at 37 Ink, an imprint at Simon
& Schuster, is relatively early in
her career. Before everyone be-
gan working remotely, she had
been making an effort to meet
agents for lunch at least once a
week to build her connections and
get more manuscript submissions
coming in. As a young editor, she
said, it was also easier for her to
take advantage of the expertise
around the office when she could
pop by senior editors’ desks and
not have to compete with their
child-care obligations at home.
Now she’s trying to network from
a distance.
“The relationships are key, and
I have seen agents be open to a
Zoom coffee hangout. That’s what
plays (occasionally dubious) at-
tractions (i.e., a 22-foot so-called
“evil clown” sign in Middletown,
N. J.) by city, route and theme
such as “ghost towns,” “railroad”
and “freaky hoo-ha.” Cost: $2.99
for one region, such as the North-
east; $6.99 to unlock the remain-
ing regions.
Making Pit Stops
Need to fill the tank? Craving
pizza? Want to stretch your legs
somewhere scenic? For years, the
Iexit Interstate Exit Guide app
has helped travelers see what’s
coming up at major exits, be it
food, coffee, lodging, attractions
or gas (nowadays, prices are in-
cluded so you can pick the cheap-
est station). Allow the app to ac-
cess your location, or search by
state and highway. Cost: Free;
$1.99 for the ad-free version.
On the Allset app you’ll find
restaurants and coffee shops with
banners that say “no-contact
pickup” (meaning that they have
a dedicated contactless pickup
area inside) and “curbside
pickup” (your order will be
brought to your car), enabling you
to swing by for burgers, Indian,
even a glass of sangria (to be en-
joyed once you’ve exited the car, of
course). Cost: Free.
Yes, you know Google Maps of-
fers navigation. But you may not
have noticed that the app has add-
ed “Takeout” to its home screen,
which means you can now tap to
find participating restaurants.
Google Maps can also locate
nearby grocery stores, parks,
A.T.M.s, gas stations and parking
lots, making it an essential road
tripper’s companion. (It can even
be helpful when striving for social
distance. Tap on a New York City
subway station, for example, and
you’ll see information about serv-
ice modifications because of
Covid-19, and be able to check out
how busy that particular station is
at different times.) Cost: Free.
Listen to narrated audio tours
— thoughtful stories of history,
wildlife, geology, people and
points of interest — as you drive
through national parks and other
stirring landscapes (like Inter-
state 15 between Los Angeles and
southern Utah) with the Just
Ahead: Audio Travel Guides app,
which uses your smartphone’s
GPS. No internet connection is re-
quired, and you can play the
stories manually as well. The
guide to Great Smoky Mountains
National Park, for instance, takes
passengers from the park’s low-
lands to its peaks, past mountain
vistas, wildflowers and waterfalls,
offering pointers about hiking
various trails, less-visited areas
and the most likely places to spot
wildlife. There are more than a
dozen guides so far (to parks such
as Badlands, Capitol Reef, Death
Valley, Yosemite and Zion), with
more on the way. Cost: You can lis-
ten to free samples before pur-
THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
VIRUS FALLOUT
Chelcee Johns, an assistant editor at 37 Ink, outside her Brooklyn apartment. Before the lockdown, she had been
meeting agents for lunch to build her connections. “This is our new normal for a lot longer than we thought,” she said.
I’ve been trying to do,” Ms. Johns
said. “I think two months in, peo-
ple started to realize, ‘Oh, we’re in
this,’ and everything picked back
up, whether it’s submissions from
agents or ‘OK, let’s get these
meetings back in the books.’ This
is our new normal for a lot longer
than we thought.”
Jacey Mitziga, an assistant at
the New York literary agency De-
Fiore and Company, was meeting
regularly with agents, editors and
other publishing employees
around her age, hoping that as
they climbed to more senior posi-
tions, they would grow together.
“We’re the next face in publish-
ing, and I’m thinking about who I
want to know and starting to build
those relationships now,” she said.
“But I would say that’s been a
challenge. I feel like it’s been on
pause.”
chasing a guide (up to $19.99
each); a one-year pass to access
all guides is $29.99.
There are official National Park
Service apps for a number of
parks, each with their own fea-
tures and notices, like alerts about
Covid-19-phased reopenings. The
NPS Yellowstone National Park
app, for instance, has self-guided
audio walking tours, things to do,
cultural history, a detailed park
map and updated geyser predic-
tions. The best way to find the var-
ious apps is to search your app
store by park name or “National
Park Service.” Cost: Free. Tip:
Some aspects of publishing are
well suited to remote work. With-
out her commute from Brooklyn
to Midtown Manhattan, Ms. Johns
said she finds more time to edit
during the workweek by sitting
down with manuscripts from
roughly 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. Indeed,
many editors already worked
from home one day a week so they
could focus on actual editing, a
part of the job that is often sub-
sumed by the meetings and inter-
ruptions of office life. Alvina Ling,
editor in chief of Little, Brown
Books for Young Readers, previ-
ously spent Mondays through
Thursdays at the office, punctuat-
ed by business lunches two or
three times a week at places like
Morrell Wine Bar in Rockefeller
Center.
“A lot of people from outside
think editors read and edit all day,
For up-to-the-minute information
about trail closures and parking
availability, it’s generally a good
idea to follow a particular park’s
Twitter updates.
Choosing the Best Hike
With more than 100,000 trails for
hiking, running and biking, All-
Trails makes it a breeze for trav-
elers around the world to discover
nearby trails and sort them by fea-
tures such as length, difficulty, ele-
vation, attractions (waterfalls,
caves, wildlife), dog-friendliness
and trail traffic. There are photos
and reviews from fellow app users
DEMETRIUS FREEMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
and that’s not the case,” she said.
On Fridays, Ms. Ling would set
up at her kitchen table for mara-
thon editing sessions. When she
started working from home in
mid-March, that much wasn’t
new, but she did have to make
some adjustments to her worksta-
tion. “I’ve switched sides of the ta-
ble on videoconferencing because
this one side has a little bit more of
an attractive backdrop,” she said.
“In the first couple of meetings
people said, ‘Oh, I see your bike!’ ”
Like many industries, publish-
ing is trying to figure out what
from this forced experiment in re-
mote work makes sense to keep.
Can companies be more flexible
about their staff working from
home? Do they have to keep rent-
ing so much office space? And did
that meeting really need to be a
meeting, or could it have just been
JOANNE KIM
(“Very challenging on the knees,
but worth the effort”), and helpful
information like weather, UV in-
dexes, and sunrise and sunset
times. You can track where you
go, record your route on a map,
and share the details with friends
and family. Cost: Free. (Note:
Beachgoers who regularly walk,
run and swim might like the inter-
active and eye-pleasing Tide alert
(NOAA)-USA app, which has tide
charts, sunrise and sunset times,
and a moon phase calendar. Cost:
Free.)
National parks lovers may want
to try the National Park Trail
N B9
an email?
“I miss seeing authors and
agents,” Ms. Pavlin of Knopf said
in an email, “and I still believe
there are aspects of sitting togeth-
er over a meal that foster intimacy
and trust in ways that are genu-
inely essential to how we do busi-
ness in this particular industry, an
industry based on personal pas-
sions. But in retrospect, that
schedule seems unnecessarily
overstuffed.”
Publishing is also about manu-
facturing physical objects that are
beautiful, a process that relies on
people working together across
departments and with particular
tools on hand. Production and de-
sign teams are equipped with
high-end printers that are pre-
cisely calibrated to look like the
finished product, for example, and
light rooms with graphite gray
walls that create a consistent and
particular quality of light.
At home, Dave Caplan, the cre-
ative director at Little, Brown
Books for Young Readers, nudges
Legos out of the way and spreads
illustrations under a skylight in
his sons’ bedroom. It’s not quite
the light rooms and fancy printers
he’s used to, but it does give him
both natural light and a big
enough surface to see all the
pages in a New York City apart-
ment.
Like so many parents, Mr. Cap-
lan is balancing working from
home with taking care of his sons,
Silas, 8, and Sebastian, 6. So he
has set up an “office” in a closet in
their bedroom. “It’s all of nine
square feet, but it’s all mine,” he
said.
But he has found some unique
advantages to this arrangement:
a built-in focus group.
“Every night after dinner, I’ll be
working, and my son pops in and
says, ‘What can I help you with to-
day?’” Mr. Caplan said of Silas. “I
show him what I’m working on,
different versions of covers. Ev-
erybody’s an art director.”
Guide app, a user-friendly col-
lection of thousands of trails
through some of the nation’s most
breathtaking places — Acadia,
Badlands, Mount Rainier, Zion —
with no cell signal required. Cost:
Free.
GPS Tracks is a favorite of out-
door enthusiasts who want to
track their routes, navigate to way
points, share their location, and
see and save maps of precisely
where they’ve been. Cost: $3.99;
more features through in-app sub-
scriptions, from $19.99.
Staying Safe
The Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention mobile app has
broad information about Covid-19,
as well as a link to a “Travel in the
U.S.” page that addresses the risks
of traveling now (be it the risks to
different people, or the different
risks of various types of trans-
portation); provides questions to
ask yourself if you’re considering
traveling; touches on state and lo-
cal travel restrictions; offers guid-
ance for protecting yourself and
others, as well as tips for cleaning
and disinfecting your lodgings;
and answers frequently asked
questions about the safety of
camping, and of traveling to visit
family and friends. Cost: Free.
Citymapper has updated times,
maps and advisories, including
those about Covid-19, for trans-
portation in major cities. For in-
stance, in New York, a recent alert
pointed out that face masks are re-
quired, that the state was advising
people to use public transporta-
tion only when essential and that
there were reduced services (de-
tails about subway lines, trains,
buses and ferries are included).
Cost: Free.
Reserving R.V.s and Campsites
Whether it’s a camper van, motor
home or pop-up trailer, if you’re
thinking about renting an R.V.,
consider the Outdoorsy app. A
peer-to-peer marketplace, it en-
ables you to search by location
and filter results by things like ve-
hicle type and size, as well as
kitchen features (oven, mi-
crowave, dining table); amenities,
including bike racks and washer/
dryers; and entertainment op-
tions like televisions and Wi-Fi.
Cost: Free.
Once you’ve got a recreational
vehicle, the question becomes:
Where will you go? RV Parks &
Campgrounds makes planning
(or winging it) easy by showing
you nearby R.V. parks and camp-
grounds, including photos, re-
views and amenities (water, elec-
tric, Wi-Fi, pool, pets allowed),
along with grocery stores, sports
shops and places to fuel up. Cost:
Free.
You may also want to check out
the Recreation.gov app, where
you can search and see availabil-
ity for tent camping, R.V. camping
and cabins. Cost: Free.
B10 N THE NEW YORK TIMES OBITUARIES MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Li Zhensheng, 79, Who Captured the Horror of China’s Revolution, Dies

By AMY QIN
Li Zhensheng, a photographer who at
great personal risk documented the dark
side of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution,
producing powerful black-and-white im-
ages that remain a rare visual testament
to the brutality of that tumultuous period,
many of them not developed or seen for
years, has died. He was 79.
His death was confirmed on Tuesday
by Robert Pledge, a founder of Contact
Press Images and editor of Mr. Li’s photo
book “Red-Color News Soldier,” who said
that Mr. Li had been hospitalized on Long
Island. He lived in Queens. Further de-
tails, including the date of his death, were
not released.
Mr. Li was a young photographer at a
local newspaper in northeastern China
when Mao started the Revolution in May
1966. Wearing a red arm band that said,
“Red-Color News Soldier,” Mr. Li was giv-
en extraordinary access to official events.
“I was excited like everyone else,” he
recalled in a 2003 interview with The New
York Times. “The happiness was real. We
felt lucky to be living the moment.”
But his excitement quickly gave way to
anxiety. What began as a political cam-
paign aimed at consolidating power soon
engulfed the entire country, unleashing
decade-long turmoil that upended Chi-
nese society. Factions of radical youths
known as “Red Guards” roamed the coun-
try battling one another and perceived
“class enemies.”
Countless historical sites and relics
were destroyed in the name of stamping
out China’s “feudal” and “bourgeois” cul-
ture. Mr. Li began to have doubts after
witnessing Red Guards in the northeast-
ern province of Heilongjiang ransacking
churches and temples, burning scrip-
tures and criticizing monks.
“I realized that I had to document this PHOTOGRAPHS BY LI ZHENSHENG/CONTACT PRESS IMAGES

tumultuous period,” he wrote. “I didn’t re- A local peasant leading the crowd in chanting slogans during a “fight against the enemies” rally in China’s Heilongjiang Province on May 12, 1965.
ally know whether I was doing it for the
sake of the revolution, for myself or for
the future, but I knew I had to use a cam-
era as a tool to document it.”

Amassing nearly 100,000

photos at great personal
risk and hiding many of
them under floorboards.

Mr. Li took not just the propaganda

photos — the raised fists, the revolution-
ary fervor, the mass assemblies — that
were required by his newspaper, but also
less flattering ones. He amassed about
100,000 photos during that period, stash-
ing many of the negatives under the par-
quet floorboards in his home in Harbin,
the capital of China’s northernmost prov-
ince, where they remained undeveloped
for years.
His collection remains one of the most
complete and nuanced visual chronicles
of how the Cultural Revolution upended
daily life far away from the capital, Bei-
jing. Among the photos are numerous
ones of “struggle sessions,” in which peo-
ple were criticized, abused and made to
stand for hours with their heads bowed
before a sea of accusers.
At times Mr. Li participated in the criti-
cisms, too, shouting slogans to get a
crowd going so that he could take photos.
During these sessions, many people were
forced to wear placards around their
necks detailing their supposed crimes:
“big property owner,” “black gang ele-
ment,” “counterrevolutionary revisionist
element.” Some were sentenced to hard
labor or death. Mr. Li documented the ex-
ecutions.
Though he had only one chance to pho-
tograph Mao, the “great helmsman” is
omnipresent, seen in portraits, busts and
badges. In one photo, people shouted
praises to Mao as they swam in the
Songhua River. In another, a newlywed
couple decorated their bedroom with pho-
tos and quotations of the chairman. Ac-
cording to the official caption, the couple
were later criticized for making love un-
der Mao’s eyes, but they defended them-
selves by saying that they had always
turned out the lights first.
By the end of the Cultural Revolution, in
1976, tens of millions of people had been
persecuted and up to 1.5 million had died
according to some estimates. Many were
driven to suicide.
“No other political movement in Chi-
na’s recent history lasted as long, was as
widespread in its impact, and as deep in
its trauma as the Cultural Revolution,”
Mr. Li said in a 2018 interview with The
Times.
In 1988, China was in the midst of a brief
period of openness when Mr. Li exhibited
20 of his previously hidden images for the
first time in Beijing. His series, “Let the
Past Speak to the Future,” won the top
prize in the competition.
In the decades since, the Cultural Revo-
lution has become an increasingly taboo
topic in China. Officials had repeatedly
blocked Mr. Li’s attempts to publish the
photos, part of a broader effort by the rul-
ing Communist Party to whitewash that
turbulent chapter.
“Li Zhensheng gave a face, an image
and a texture to the horrors of a period of
incredible importance in modern Chinese
history,” said Geremie R. Barmé, an Aus-
tralian Sinologist. “He is part of a large
body of men and women of conscience in
China who have pushed to remember and
reflect on a period of history that the au-
thorities would rather distort or silence.”
In 2003, Mr. Li published a book of his
photos called “Red-Color News Soldier.”
Since then, the photos have been exhib-
ited in more than 60 countries.
“I think we must try, through serious
reflection, through contemplation, to re-
lieve those whose souls were tortured,” he
wrote in the book. “I want to show the
world what really happened during the
Cultural Revolution.”
Bella Huang contributed research.
Three men in Harbin on Sept. 12, 1966, with placards Li Zhensheng in a risky 1967 self portrait A young woman attacking a fellow peasant,
that listed their names and their alleged crimes (from left, during the Cultural Revolution, when people Zhang Diange, for “unreasonably” pressuring
black gang element, local despot, counterrevolutionary). were expected to put party before self. her father to repay a debt on March 25, 1965.
Swimmers praising Mao Zedong while floating along the Songhua River. Mao figured The staff of The Heilongjiang Daily in 1966 accusing the
into many of Mr. Li’s photographs — not in person but in portraits, busts and badges. head of a local work group of “following the capitalist line.”
Li Zhensheng was born to a poor family empty aluminum toothpaste tubes. While ally found a job as a photojournalist at had passed. He went back at the newspa-
in the northeastern port city of Dalian on in middle school, he traded a prized stamp The Heilongjiang Daily in Harbin. per, though it wasn’t until after Mao’s
Sept. 22, 1940. His father, Li Yuanjian, was collection for his first camera. Friends He married Zu Yingxia, an editor at the death, in 1976, that he finally felt safe.
a former cook on a steamship. Mr. Li was sometimes pooled their money to buy a newspaper, in 1968. That year — two In 1982, Mr. Li began teaching photog-
3 when his mother, Chen Shilan, died. roll of film so that Mr. Li could take their years into the Cultural Revolution — Mr. raphy at a university in Beijing, where he
Not long afterward, the family moved photos. Li was accused of being a “new bour- met Mr. Pledge, of Contact Press Images,
back to their ancestral hometown in the He went on to study cinematography at geois.” He was criticized before 300 em- in 1988. They kept in touch and began
eastern province of Shandong. Mr. Li the Changchun Film School in the north- ployees of the newspaper for more than working on Mr. Li’s photo book a decade
grew up with his younger sister and elder eastern province of Jilin. But because of six hours and demoted. later.
half brother, who was killed in 1949 fight- Mao’s disastrous economic policies dur- The next year, he and his wife were sent At his death, they were working on a
ing in Mao’s revolutionary army. ing the program called the Great Leap to the countryside for “rectification” and new book, of self-portraits that Mr. Li took
Mr. Li’s interest in cinema and photog- Forward and the mass famine that fol- forced into manual labor. By the time they during the Cultural Revolution — a risky
raphy was sparked at a young age. To pay lowed, there were few job opportunities in were permitted to return to Harbin, in act at a time when people were expected
for movie tickets, he collected and sold the field. After graduation, Mr. Li eventu- 1971, the height of the Cultural Revolution to put party before self. Mr. Li also docu-
mented the pro-democracy protests in
Beijing that led up to the Tiananmen
Square crackdown in 1989, though he
never published the photos.
“It had been his obsession all his life —
to be a witness to history and to record it,”
Mr. Pledge said.
In his later years Mr. Li split his time
between New York and Beijing, where he
could be closer to his son, Xiaohan, and
daughter, Xiaobing. Information on his
survivors was not immediately available.
Mr. Li’s lifelong wish was to make his
fellow Chinese remember the Cultural
Revolution. That mission became more
difficult in recent years as the Chinese au-
thorities reversed efforts to reckon with
modern history, resulting in what some
have called a nationwide collective amne-
sia.
Still, he took a step closer to the goal in
2018, when the Chinese University of
Hong Kong Press published the first Chi-
nese-language edition of “Red-Color
News Soldier.” Though it was distributed
mainly in Hong Kong and Taiwan, some
copies found their way to mainland China
through unofficial channels.
“Some people have criticized me, say-
ing I am washing the country’s dirty laun-
dry in public,” Mr. Li said in 2018. “But
Germany has reckoned with its Nazi past,
America still talks about its history of
RAY TANG/SHUTTERSTOCK slavery, why can’t we Chinese talk about
Mr. Li at the Barbican Gallery in London in 2012. His collection chronicles the dark side of the Cultural Revolution. our own history?”
2 MUSEUMS 6 BOOKS

TikTok at the gallery. Three decades later,

BY ALEX MARSHALL

5 FILM
a victim affirms
A Chinese moviemaker gets control with a
his due. BY IAN JOHNSON memoir. BY SARAH LYALL

NEWS CRITICISM MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 C1

N

BEN BRANTLEY THEATER REVIEW

MANUEL HARLAN

Matt Smith and Claire Foy, shown during a

Chasing Love in the Dark

rehearsal, collapse decades of love and angst into
90 minutes in a Zoom performance of “Lungs.”

In a play that streams live, Claire Foy and Matt Smith
portray a contradictory couple in an age of isolation.
THE WOMAN AND MAN who make up the en-
tire cast of Duncan Macmillan’s “Lungs,”
which is streaming in a beautifully acted
(and socially distanced) live production
from London’s Old Vic Theater, are people
who seldom think before they talk. Feelings
— big, sloppy, mixed, unedited, self-incrimi-
nating feelings — slosh out of them like the
contents of overfilled, foaming beer mugs
on a wobbly tray.
This nameless couple, longtime romantic
partners who probably shouldn’t be yet
have to be together, are portrayed by Claire
Foy and Matt Smith. As I watched them
break and reassemble each other’s hearts
with such seemingly spontaneous fervor, I
thought what a relief it must be for them af-
ter all that bottled-up time together in Buck-
ingham Palace.
Foy and Smith are best known these days
for playing another, less demonstrative set
of partners who have definite, very recog-
nizable names: Queen Elizabeth II and her
consort, Prince Philip, whom they embod-
ied exquisitely in the first two seasons of
“The Crown,” the popular Netflix series
about life among the Windsors. For that
royal pair, emotions were something to be
kept in check or manifested most discreetly. Lungs
Streaming through
Nonetheless, these performers were
skilled enough to let us sense the discom-
Saturday from the
Old Vic Theater.
fort, doubt and resentment beneath the sur-
oldvictheatre.com
face of their stoical characters. I am happy
to report that Foy and Smith are equally
adept at delivering such ambivalence, com-
mon to nearly all long and intimate relation-
ships, at high volume and in equally high
gear. Occupying a dark and empty stage
that feels as vast as an endless night, they
transmit this complexity with a delicacy
and clarity well suited both to probing close-
ups and to long shots that suggest what the
view might be like from the Old Vic balcony.
Of course, there is no one sitting in the
CONTINUED ON PAGE C2

On the Trail, Faces of Change A City Museum

A two-part documentary
produced by Ava DuVernay
follows the campaigns of
female politicians of color.
By MAYA PHILLIPS
When the directors Grace Lee and Marjan
Safinia talk about their new two-part docu-
mentary series, “And She Could Be Next,”
they compare the process of getting it
greenlit to mounting a political campaign.
They would know: In the series, which
was executive produced by Ava DuVernay
(premiering Monday on PBS and POV.org),
Lee and Safinia track the actual campaigns
— the door knocking, signposting, rallies
and forums — of several women of color
who ran for office in 2018.
The producers originally considered
telling a story about women in politics,
pegged to the first female president — Hil-
lary Clinton was eying the White House at
the time, and she was widely considered the
favorite. But 2016 had different plans. So
Lee reframed the project as something she
found more enticing anyway: a documenta-
ry not only about women but more specifi-
cally about women of color and their com-
munities, and the changes they are making
in American politics.
While pitching the series to networks and
CONTINUED ON PAGE C6
Struggles and Hopes
Looking past losses and
cutbacks and planning
for life beyond Covid.
By COLIN MOYNIHAN
Near the top of New York’s Mu-
seum Mile, north of the Cooper
Hewitt, a gem from the Gilded
Age, and the Guggenheim, itself a
Frank Lloyd Wright work of art,
and the classical majesty of the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, sits
the Museum of the City of New
York.
It, too, occupies a building of ar-
chitectural distinction, a five-
story, red brick and marble Geor-
gian Colonial-Revival, completed
in 1932 and the home of the mu-
seum ever since.
But it can be overlooked amid
the star power of its cultural
neighbors, even when it punches
above its weight with expansive
exhibitions like “New York at Its
Core,” which examines the city’s
history since 1609 or “Activist
PBS
New York,” which reviews the city
Representative Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, as seen in the documentary “And She Could through the prism of social justice
Be Next,” which tracks the 2018 political campaigns of several women of color. and political agitation.
“If you had to pick one place to
learn about New York City, it
would probably be the Museum of
the City of New York,” said Ken-
neth T. Jackson, a former presi-
dent of the New-York Historical
Society and editor of the Encyclo-
pedia of the City of New York.
Though many museums are
struggling financially since the
pandemic forced them to close,
the city museum is among medi-
um or smaller ones that are facing
a particularly difficult path for-
ward. Like other institutions its
size, it has a modest but growing
endowment — $27 million — and
does not have a board of ex-
tremely wealthy donors who can
be called on to shore up its reve-
nue with immediate gifts.
Since closing in March, the mu-
seum has laid off 20 percent of its
100 full-time and full-time-equiva-
lent employees. Others have been
furloughed or are working fewer
hours.
Executive salaries were cut by
25 percent, said Whitney Don-
hauser, the museum’s director.
CONTINUED ON PAGE C4
C2 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Screen grabs
from the Uffizi
Gallery’s TikTok
account use
details from
paintings in its
collection,
clockwise from
left, such as
Bronzino, Titian,
Botticelli and
Caravaggio.

IMAGES BY UFFIZI GALLERIES

Put a Mask on Medusa: Museums Get on TikTok

The Uffizi in Italy and others
are posting irreverent videos to
promote a livelier image.
By ALEX MARSHALL
LONDON — Last month, the Uffizi Gallery in
Florence — long a bastion of tradition —
posted a video to its TikTok account featur-
ing Botticelli’s “Spring.” The painting de-
picts Venus and other mythological figures,
and has been gawked at by tourists and
studied by academics for centuries.
On TikTok, users were treated to a new
perspective on this masterpiece of the Ital-
ian Renaissance: Set to Todrick Hall’s ex-
pletive-filled club track “Nails, Hair, Hips,
Heels,” each time a body part is mentioned
— “thin waist, thick thighs” — the video
jumps to a corresponding part of the paint-
ing. “Purse full, big bills,” Hall sings, and the
TikTok zooms in on the flowers held by
Flora, the goddess of spring.
As the song ramps up, the video is edited
so the 15th-century figures dance along in
time.
The irreverent clip is one of several on the
Uffizi’s TikTok account poking fun at its col-
lection of masterpieces, as the museum
tries to transform its image from a dusty
home of Renaissance art to a place Italy’s
teenagers want to explore.
“Maybe it looks a little stupid,” said Ilde
Forgione, 35, who runs the account, in a
telephone interview, “but sometimes you
have to give people a different point of view,
something that says, ‘Art is not boring. Art
is not something you just learn at school. It’s
something you can discover for yourself.’ ”
There are now 11 museums on TikTok, ac-
cording to the booming social media plat-
form, where (mostly young) people make
and share short videos. Amsterdam’s Rijks-
museum joined in April, and the Prado Mu-
seum in Madrid joined earlier this month
(the Metropolitan Museum of Art used the
platform last year for a couple of projects,
but its account is now dormant). The Uffizi
is an especially unlikely member of this se-
lect group, given that until a couple of years
ago, it acted like the internet didn’t exist.
The museum only got a website in 2015
(ticket scalpers used to take advantage of
its absence by running their own “official”
websites) and it didn’t set up a Facebook
page until March when the museum closed
because of the coronavirus, as part of an ef-
fort to reach people stuck at home during
Italy’s lockdown.
“We were pretty much in the Stone Age,”
said Eike Schmidt, the museum’s director,
in a telephone interview, saying the Uffizi
had gone from being a laggard to at the
“avant-garde” of museum social media in a
few months.
He decided to give TikTok a try, he said,
because the platform reaches younger us-
ers than Twitter, Facebook or even Insta-
gram. He asked Ms. Forgione, an adminis-
trative assistant, to lead a team producing
material for the account after learning she
loved funny social media posts, he said.
Ms. Forgione’s videos have certainly
been funny, and, at times, surreal. In one
post, a cartoon coronavirus dances through
the Uffizi and stops at Caravaggio’s paint-
ing of “Medusa,” the mythical being that
turned those who dared gaze at her into
stone. The virus turns into a rock and drops
to the floor, smashing in half. Then the
painting is wearing a face mask. All this
happens to a soundtrack of Cardi B shout-
ing “coronavirus.”
In another video, Bronzino’s 1552 paint-
ing of the dwarf Morgante escaped from its
frame and went hunting, naked, through the
Uffizi’s gardens to The Weeknd’s song
“Blinding Lights.” The real Morgante, a
jester for the court of the Medicis in the 16th
century, had gone hunting in those gardens,
Ms. Forgione said, insisting many of her
posts were based on historical fact.
The account, set up on Apr. 28, has 22,000
followers. Ms. Forgione said she was
pleased with that number, considering that
on Twitter the museum has built up 42,000
followers over the last four years. On June
12, Martina Socrate, an Italian TikTok star,
did a livestream from the museum’s ac-
count, during which she pointed out paint-
ings she liked and accidentally set off the
museum’s emergency alarm. It got 60,000
views.
TikTok helped arrange that livestream as
part of its “Week of Museums,” providing a
list of “creators” for the museum to choose
from. The Uffizi chose Ms. Socrate because
her TikTok video had the same values of be-
ing “funny with intelligent things,” Ms. For-
gione said.
TikTok is trying to increase the presence
of museums and educational figures on its
platform. In April, it announced a $50 mil-
lion fund to give grants to such groups to
make content, and in May it announced
partnerships with Bill Nye and Neil de-
Grasse Tyson to develop educational posts.
Ms. Forgione said the hardest thing about
running the account was getting the right
tone for TikTok’s young audience. “I’m 35,”
she said, “and the others in the team are old-
er.” She has run ideas past two cousins, who
are 20 and 22, she said (they have also
helped at times with Photoshop). Col-
leagues have also consulted their teenage
children about clips, she added.
The Uffizi’s approach to TikTok — filled
with manic humor and often featuring
songs that are trending in Italy — is not
typical of museums on the platform. Since
January, the Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh has been posting a
stream of gentle, educational videos to its
account, often featuring employees stuck at
home in lockdown. Recent posts have in-
cluded a museum educator showing a
bunny nest in her yard and a scientist ex-
plaining what biodiversity means with the
help of her pet cat.
Sloan MacRae, the museum’s marketing
director, said in a telephone interview that
the museum had never considered wacky
clips or dance videos. “That’s just not us,” he
said. But its “slightly goofy” educational ap-
proach has helped it gain 160,000 followers,
he said, with many commenting that they
want to visit the museum once it reopens. In
June, the museum received a grant from
TikTok under the Creative Learning Fund,
he added.
“It can be accused of being lowbrow,” Mr.
MacRae said of TikTok, “but we do intellec-
UFFIZI GALLERIES
tual and we do gravity all the time and we
thought if this worked out, it could be a gate-
way drug to learning.”
‘We were pretty much Ms. Forgione said she would continue
in the Stone Age.’ making her more irreverent TikTok posts.
EIKE SCHMIDT Last Friday, her team posted a new video,
DIRECTOR OF THE UFFIZI
MUSEUM
which used two paintings from the muse-
um’s collection to present a guide to “bad
ways to flirt.” It quickly racked up 2,500
likes.
The museum reopened on June 2 after It-
aly eased its lockdown, and Ms. Forgione
said she hopes fans of the TikTok account
will pay a visit. “It’d be great if they made
their own TikToks here and tagged us,” she
added. Serious, or silly, she said, she’s open
to all.

BEN BRANTLEY THEATER REVIEW

A Contradictory Couple, Chasing Love in the Dark

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
balcony as Foy and Smith collapse decades
of love and angst into 90 minutes of stage
time. Like most theaters in England, the
202-year-old Old Vic has been dark since
the pandemic lockdown began in March.
This production of “Lungs,” staged by the
Old Vic’s artistic director, Matthew
Warchus, is the maiden offering of the Old
Vic: In Camera series of live performances,
which try to approximate the feelings of be-
ing in that theater, in the audience, in the
present tense.
This means that the show is preceded by
the murmuring sound associated with
packed houses before curtain time, a noise
contradicted by the image of an achingly
empty expanse of seats. And since new in-
come is essential to the survival of the Old
Vic, theatergoers are asked to pay West End
ticket prices to watch, from 20 to 65 pounds.
(That’s approximately $25 to $80.) The
show streams through Saturday, though
most performances — which are booked to
reflect the theater’s normal capacity — are
sold out.
For the record, I paid for my ticket, and I
won’t be expensing it, and yes, I believe it
was good value. This is partly for nostalgic
reasons. I love the Old Vic — the birthplace
of the last show I saw on Broadway, “Girl
From the North Country” — and dearly
hope it survives this crisis. And I was to
have seen this production of “Lungs,” which
had been staged at the Old Vic last fall, at
the Brooklyn Academy of Music this spring.
But as reconceived by Warchus and his
accomplished technical team, “Lungs” also
turns out to be a natural for the Zoom for-
mat and the restrictions of the pandemic
age. This might not be immediately appar-
ent. Macmillan’s script, which premiered in
2011 at the Studio Theater in Washington,
D.C., feels almost annoyingly slight and
Claire Foy and Matt
Smith, who played Queen
Elizabeth II and Prince
Philip in “The Crown” on
Netflix, star as a couple
paralyzed by
self-consciousness in
“Lungs,” at London’s Old
Vic Theater.
conventional when it begins.
A couple, shopping at Ikea, have begun
what one identifies as an argument and the
other as a conversation about whether they
should have a baby. However it’s defined, it
is a discussion I have been asked to listen to
too many times — in sitcoms, movies and
novels.
What’s more, this particular pair is very
white, very good-looking and comfortably
middle class, with arty-slash-intellectual
accents. (He’s a musician, she’s a doctoral
candidate.) Is this convulsive chapter in
world history really the time for a drawn-
out dialogue by such a pair on the exist-
ential and moral implications of childbirth?
Yet Macmillan (“People, Places &
Things”) is a probing sentimentalist with a
gift for lending cosmic context and psycho-
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MANUEL HARLAN
logical texture to ostensibly slick banalities.
He, and the characters in “Lungs,” know
that we might find them easy to dismiss.
“We’re good people, right?” they keep
asking each other anxiously. Maybe not;
they’re aware of classist and even racist
tendencies that sporadically seep into their
conversation. Besides, what is good?
What’s evil? (She points out that most peo-
ple believe that they are good, even Hitler
and Simon Cowell.)
They are both products of an age of para-
lyzing self-consciousness, in which every
life choice must be examined through a mi-
croscope. They can’t turn on a water tap
without worrying about its effects on an en-
vironmentally beleaguered world. As for
the impact of having a baby, that’s stagger-
ing, and she has even done the math to cal-
culate the carbon footprint it would leave.
As you may have gathered, she is the
more loquacious and analytical. He is con-
fused, annoyed and enraptured by her.
There’s no denying that there’s a warming
chemistry in their differences. They are a
good fit.
Except that they’re never allowed to fit
together entirely, not even when they’re
making love. Macmillan’s script is written
as a series of fragments in time (spoiler: a
Lungs
Streaming through Saturday from the
Old Vic Theater. oldvictheatre.com
relationship’s lifetime), without traditional
segues. It’s human existence as a mix tape
of moments on fast forward.
While their closeness is palpable, com-
plete and total connection is impossible. “I
feel like you’re standing behind a wall, just
this sheet of glass, and I can’t reach you,” he
says. It’s a fear that’s echoed in the ever-
shifting but unbridgeable physical distance
between them, which we see in the long
shots. When they pass each other onstage,
it’s as if they were two planets, skirting peri-
gee, on different trajectories.
In Zoom close-up, in which they’re con-
fined to separate frames, they seem espe-
cially alone because Foy’s and Smith’s faces
are such legible maps to the contrasting
ways their characters think. Though they
talk a lot — her, especially — it’s their si-
lence that keeps resonating, with the desire
to know, to truly know another person.
Many of us have never been more aware
of that longing, with its insistent pain and
hope, than during these months of pan-
demic. That there’s a touch of divinity in this
noble, futile aspiration is confirmed by the
play’s final image. See it and weep.
 THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N C3

When Reality Overtakes Science Fiction

Naomi Alderman By ALEX MARSHALL
was writing a novel LONDON — For two years, Naomi Alderman,
about a fictional the author of the 2017 dystopian novel “The
Power,” had been working on her next book.
plague. Then came Then in February, with 40,000 words al-
the coronavirus, and ready written, she decided she had to stop.
The story she had devised, about tech bil-
at first she couldn’t lionaires fleeing a pandemic, now seemed a
touch the book. little too close to reality.
“I just thought, ‘Bollocks! I am not going
to be able to write this book,’ ” Alderman
said in a phone interview. “It just felt incred-
ibly disrespectful to the many people who
had lost loved ones. And I thought, ‘God
knows where this pandemic is going to land,
and what is possibly going to be the world
that comes after it.’ ”
In her book, tentatively titled “The Sur-
vivals,” she had conjured a pandemic that
was much worse than the coronavirus.
“News services called it pigeon flu,” one
passage of the draft went, “because for a
while they thought that the rapid spread of
the illness was caused by pigeons. In Paris,
there was a series of photographs of local
militia using flame throwers against the pi-
geons. In the images, the birds are trying to
fly, their wings on fire. They look like they
are screaming, gouts of flame.”
For weeks, Alderman didn’t touch the
book, focusing instead on writing exercises.
She eventually reconsidered and has de-
cided she can finish it, but with potentially a
lot of changes. Likely to be left on the cut-
ting-room floor is the first third of the novel,
which explained what a pandemic was and
gave the emotional kick so people realized
just how scary they are. “That might end up
being summarized in about two sentences,”
ANNABEL MOELLER
she said with a laugh.
“Don’t stress,” Naomi In the interview, she talked about how ary, much of February, I thought, “This is And I did have a horrifically, surprisingly back from Europe where there was an out-
Alderman advises writers. ““If she shifted course with the book, whether very topical. This is great. When people accurate bit where things go very, very bad break of a disease. And Dickens never gets
you have characters meeting novelists should incorporate the coro- come to read this, they’ll go, ‘Oh, she’s look- in Italy, and the trains are being turned back into what the rules on social distancing
incidentally in a pub, that’s navirus into their fiction and why it’s per- ing at what’d have happened if that small and the hospitals get overwhelmed. were or how exactly they got into that quar-
going to come back.” haps time for science fiction writers to be pandemic got out of control.’” Then by mid- What I found surprising is how tiring it is. antine or how they were housed. It’s just,
kinder. These are edited excerpts from the
February, I was just thinking, “Oh dear.” I’ve compared it in my mind to the experi- “Well that happened, so let’s now push on
conversation.
ence of moving to a foreign country where with the story.” That seems a very good
So what made you feel able
How did you come to write about a pan- you’ve got to relearn everything: how to an- model.
to come back to it?
demic in the first place? swer the door, how to walk down the street,
In mid-April, I suddenly had a thought that As someone who spends her time envision-
I’m interested in what people do in extreme how to get your groceries. There’s a perva-
although Covid is not fun, by the scale of ing the future, can you see this having any
situations. I’d read a piece in The New sive internet fantasy that we’re all going to
plagues, it is actually quite kind. We forget impact on science fiction?
Yorker about technology billionaires in- use this time to become proficient in a new
vesting in bunkers in New Zealand in order that it’s perfectly possible for a plague to language and perfect our archery skills. It’s not going to have an effect on the kind of
to survive any breakdown of society that disproportionately kill babies, or children. deep future, sci-fi space operas with alien
So I thought, “How about if this book is writ- The Guardian published an article this invasions and spaceships. But I think for
they may themselves have ended up cata- month featuring authors discussing whether
lyzing or causing. That struck me as ex- ten in a world after Covid, 10 or 15 years lat- the social science fiction, it might. There’s a
er, and what I’m writing about is a much less they should change their books to include strand of apocalyptic science fiction which
tremely fertile territory, the massive gap things like face masks or remove scenes
between the rhetoric of Silicon Valley and kind plague?” seems to imagine that most people are just
It also seemed to me it would be very use- where their characters are in pubs. What waiting for an excuse to become a cannibal.
the reality. would your advice to them be?
It also seemed to me that we were due for ful, and enjoyable and rewarding, to try to [Cormac McCarthy’s] “The Road” is a very,
think about what a world after Covid might Don’t stress. Or set it in 2017. Or 2023. very good book, but I do not actually think it
a pandemic. They come along roughly once
every 100 years or so, and the last was the be like, and what should be different in or- If you’re writing a novel where the main is true that what most of us are going to do if
1918/19 one. So I sort of put these two things der to help it be better. character runs a chain of pubs, and the the world goes nuts is go, “Hurrah, a chance
together: What if I were to follow these tech So that’s how I’m looking at it. But I would whole plot concerns his ability to keep his at long last to fulfill my ambition to eat hu-
billionaires on their attempts to get to their say that the book is still in flux, which I think chain of pubs afloat, and you very much man flesh!” That’s not how human beings
bunker? one has to allow when it’s suffered a bit of a want it to be contemporary realist, you have survived the past several million
I did not anticipate this would actually blow to the head as this has. might have to really get into social-distanc- years. How we’ve actually survived is by
happen. ing rules. But if you have characters meet- working together, forming into communi-
What did you get right and wrong ing incidentally in a pub, that’s going to ties, working out how to trade with others,
You heard about coronavirus in January. about the pandemic? come back. mostly trying to keep the peace.
How did that affect your writing at first? I got the YouTube videos right. In my novel, At the start of Dickens’s “Little Dorrit,” a
In the draft, I had a pandemic starting in people find out about what’s happening group of characters are saying farewell to And that’s true even for the tech billionaires
South America. And when I saw this break- around the world not so much from the each other. Why have they been acquainted in your book?
ing out in China, I thought, “Ooh, why don’t I news as from people uploading videos. I for the past two or three weeks? Because Well, I think tech billionaires are a very par-
change it to there?” So for probably Janu- also got the feeling of panic right, I think. they were all in quarantine, having come ticular subset of humanity.

Two Not Touch Crossword Edited by Will Shortz

ANSWERS TO
PREVIOUS PUZZLES PUZZLE BY PETER GORDON
ACROSS 32 Chinese-born 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

1 Part of a architect who

constellation won a 43-Across 14 15 16

5 Facing the
33 Well-behaved
17 18 19
pitcher 35 Odometer button
10 Top Olympic 37 Vietnamese New 20 21 22
medal Year
23 24 25
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15 Digestive aid phone message
brand after 31 32 33 34

16 Song for a diva 40 Got out of bed

35 36 37 38
17 Prefix with knock 42 Home heating
or lock option
39 40 41 42
18 Position sought
43 Annual award for
Put two stars in each row, column and region of the grid. No two stars may touch, not even diagonally. every six years architects 43 44 45 46
Copyright © 2020 www.krazydad.com
20 Close guy friend
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47 48
48 Chaney of silent
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49

56
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57 58
52

59
53 54 55

acceptance 52 Safest course of

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59 Vogue competitor
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a sushi bar 60 Savings plans for
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old age, in brief ___ apples?” 19 Red Muppet on producing organs
24 2014 film in “Sesame Street”
61 : 44 Like most
which David centers in
Oyelowo played DOWN 21 Kind of badge for
62 Cape Canaveral
KenKen 1 Close
with a bang a scout basketball
Martin Luther org.
King Jr. 2 FunnyFey 24 One expressing 45 Louisiana
63 Erotic contempt
ANSWERS TO 26 Home theater 3 Intermission
music typically
PREVIOUS PUZZLES 64 Newspaper 25 Newspaper featuring an
feature, maybe pieces collected preceder
worker accordion
31 “To thine ___ self in the book “The 4 Director Rob
be true” Last Word” 26 Clean with a 46 Purpose
5 Son of David
in the Old broom 49 Thrift shop
Testament 27 Al ___, four-time caveat
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE Indianapolis 500
6 One starting 50 Taxi charge
college, typically winner
S A L T C A P S J O G S Big-screen film
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28 Slow on the ___ 51
H A I R T O N I C P A N I C format
H A T E W A T C H A C E L A 8 Santa ___ winds
29 Product for
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30 Motherless calf 53 Lackluster
I L L S T I T L E D E E D 10 Dashboard dial
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P L Y N O C A M E R A S 54
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J A S O N M R A Z D A Y 11 Cookie since
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Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each P A N E S O N D O U R E R 12 Polygraph flunker 38 Long lunches? 58 Ring master?
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication or E V E R E T T A S K S I N
division, as indicated in the box. A 4x4 grid will use the digits 1-4. A 6x6 grid will use 1-6. P E D A L H O N O R C O D E Online subscriptions: Today’s puzzle and more than 9,000 past puzzles,
For solving tips and more KenKen puzzles: www.nytimes.com/kenken. For feedback: nytimes@kenken.com S L O G S A N N U A L F E E nytimes.com/crosswords ($39.95 a year).
KenKen® is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. Copyright © 2020 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved. I S E E T S A R Y O R K Read about and comment on each puzzle: nytimes.com/wordplay.
 C4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A City Museum Struggles and Hopes

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Ms. Donhauser, who makes $371,000 in sal-
ary, said she and the museum’s deputy di-
rector had both taken pay cuts of 35 percent.
Ms. Donhauser summed up the financial
situation in an email last month to the staff.
“With the closing of the Museum,” she
wrote, “came the loss of all of our major
streams of income, including admissions,
venue rentals, and important fund-raising
events.” To address this, she continued,
costs were cut in “all areas of the Museum
— staff, exhibition and education program-
ming, collections and building operations.”
Museum officials said it incurred a deficit
of $1.9 million this year and faces a possible
deficit next year as well. A museum spokes-
woman, Meryl Cooper, said this year’s
deficit was addressed by part of a $1.7 mil-
lion federal Paycheck Protection Program
loan that the museum hopes to turn into a
CHANG W. LEE/THE NEW YORK TIMES KRISTA SCHLUETER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
grant and by about $850,000 from the en-
dowment. The museum has also received Top, the Museum of the City funding from the city’s Department of Cul- in 2015 and in 2017 the Thompson Family ries. Those might be accompanied by a
additional financial help from the New York of New York’s Fifth Avenue tural Affairs and is housed in a city-owned Foundation donated $10 million to the mu- reading list, she said, as well as online con-
Community Trust and the Terra Foundation home. Above: left, the building seum, its biggest gift ever. The museum’s versations moderated by curators.
for American Art. statue of Alexander The city museum, panned years ago by endowment is now at $27 million, she said, Meanwhile, she and others were starting
Though the museum has often operated Hamilton outside the some as too staid in its programming, was up from about $9 million a few years ago. to think about the museum’s reopening,
with tight margins, Ms. Donhauser said she museum follows the advice widely seen as having become more ener- The museum’s annual budget has hov- which is planned for July 23 if the city con-
believed it would emerge from the pan- of health officials. Right, getic in the 2000s. Exhibitions, including ered around $15 million for most of the last tinues to progress in stemming the coro-
demic in good shape. Whitney Donhauser, the one that detailed the physical transforma- several years, but Ms. Donhauser said that navirus. Curators are now preparing a fall
“I do feel confident,” she said. “I do be- museum’s director, tours an tion of New York by Robert Moses and an- it was projected to be about $11.5 million for
lieve that the museum is in a solid place.” exhibition to be called “New York Re-
exhibit with Kareem other that featured tens of thousands of vin- the fiscal year beginning in July. sponds: Beyond Covid.”
When the city museum was founded in Abdul-Jabbar. tage photographs of the city, drew interna- There were also bright spots. While the
1923, its mission overlapped in some ways A model for that sort of exhibition could
tional attention. museum has been closed it has drawn large
with that of the older New-York Historical be the 2018 show “Germ City,” which exam-
In 2011 the museum was secure enough to audiences for its online programming,
Society. At points there was talk about take over the operations of the beleaguered ined epidemics in the city including the 1918
which includes a series called “Curators
merging the two institutions, but they have South Street Seaport Museum, using a $2 From the Couch,” featuring talks with art- flu epidemic that killed more than 20,000
remained independent and on opposite million grant from the Lower Manhattan ists and others, and “Covid Stories,” which people.
sides of Central Park, with the city museum, Development Corporation. But that ar- has collected more than 4,000 photographs “There are a lot of challenges ahead of us
on Fifth Avenue between 103rd and 104th rangement dissolved two years later after and accounts documenting a socially dis- but there is also a great opportunity to
Streets, concentrating exclusively on his- Hurricane Sandy caused serious damage to tanced city. present the complexities of New York,” Ms.
tory within the five boroughs. the Seaport museum and the city museum’s Among the possibilities being discussed Donhauser said. “We have the curatorial
Although the museum’s name makes it board decided to concentrate on its own af- at the museum, Ms. Donhauser said, are on- expertise and knowledge to present a very
sound a bit like a municipal entity, it is run fairs. line adult education courses on New York nuanced discussion about what the city is
by a private nonprofit. It does receive some Ms. Donhauser was named the director topics that could cost around $20 for a se- going through.”

THE PLAYLIST

The Moment Can Be Heard in the Latest Releases CLUE OF THE DAY
Pop critics for The New York Wonder, Terrace Martin, Kamasi Arkestra’s forthcoming LP is is more than just a phase.” It’s
Times weigh in on notable new Washington and Robert Glasper. “Seductive Fantasy,” a slow- effective, but perhaps not quite as
songs. Phoelix joins them to sing “Freeze moving, blood-pumping vamp catchy as his recent commercials FAMILIAR
ARTPHRASES
Tag,” about an all-too-common that first appeared on the 1979 for Subway.
Beyoncé scenario: “They told me put my album “On Jupiter.” On the new JON CARAMANICA
BLACK PARADE hands up behind my head/I think version, the first sound you hear ORIGINALLY A FOLK
they got the wrong one,” he re- is the steady baritone saxophone The Chicks TERM FOR A CHRONIC
.....................................................................
counts in a high, gentle croon. line of Danny Ray Thompson, MARCH MARCH RASH, THIS PHRASE
Beyoncé released “Black Parade”
“Then they told me if I move, they who played on the original too; he
on Juneteenth, and it makes ambi- . ................................................................... GOT A NEW MEANING
gon’ shoot me dead.” The music is died just months after this newer
tious, far-reaching connections. The Chicks — they have dropped AS A TITLE FOR A 1952
quiet-storm R&B, complete with recording was made. Across a
The lyrics allude to black Ameri- Dixie in this moment of rejecting STAGE COMEDY &
wind chimes, but as the chord quick four minutes, saxophones
can achievement, culture and references to the Civil War-era LATER A MOVIE
progression circles and Phoelix carry a simple melody, then join
struggle, to African history and South — are a long way from
sings the verse again and again, up with the reeds to make a
deities, to the power of women, traditional country in “March
the fraught, frozen moment grows messy gouache of harmonies
and to this month’s protests: March” from their coming album, FOR THE CORRECT
harrowing. while Marshall Allen’s alto saxo- RESPONSE, WATCH
“Rubber bullets bouncin’ off me/ “Gaslighter.” The initial beat is an
JON PARELES phone nearly flies off the handle, JEOPARDY! TONIGHT
Made a picket sign off your picket electronic thump and blip, and the
KEVIN MAZUR/GETTY IMAGES
squealing its way toward liftoff. OR LOOK IN THIS
fence/Take it as a warning.” The lyrics are topical and sometimes
music pulls its own connections —
Beyoncé’s new song is
purposeful, and full of allusions
Sun Ra Arkestra GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
profane, praising the teenage
SPACE TOMORROW
SEDUCTIVE FANTASY IN THE TIMES.
to trap electronics, African songs, to achievement and struggle. activists who are demanding gun
brass bands, gospel choirs — . ................................................................... Charlie Puth control and environmental action:
GIRLFRIEND Friday’s Response:
while Beyoncé flaunts new melo- More than 25 years after Sun Ra’s “Watching our youth have to
WHAT IS BERMUDA?
dy ideas in each verse. Voices Dinner Party death, the Afrofuturist pioneer’s . ................................................................... solve our problems/I’m standing
gather around her, as her solo ensemble continues to uphold his Some pleasant falsetto funk from with them, who’s coming with
strut turns into a parade, or a
featuring Phoelix legacy in performances around Charlie Puth, a formalist with a me?” sings Natalie Maines. Fid-
more purposeful march: “Put
FREEZE TAG
the world, but it hasn’t released a lithe voice and a cloying demean- dle and banjo do arrive, but the Watch JEOPARDY!
studio album of new music in two or. “Baby would you ever want to song sends a message for right
your fists up in the air/Show black
7 p.m. on Channel 7
. ...................................................................

love,” she insists. Dinner Party is the alliance of the decades. That will change later be my girlfriend?” he coos. “I now.
JON PARELES producers and musicians 9th this year. The first single from the don’t want to play no games/this JON PARELES
 THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020 N C5

Left, the filmmaker Hu Jie in

“The Observer,” a
documentary by Rita
Andreetti. Below, clockwise
from right, stills from Hu’s
films “Searching for Lin
Zhao’s Soul,” “Spark” and
“Though I Am Gone.”

tion. The film is shockingly brutal, as the

teacher’s widow explains how he pho-
tographed his wife’s corpse so the crime
would never be forgotten.
Hu’s films shed light on events that have
been only partly understood before, with
Hu unearthing witnesses and documents
that tell in excruciating detail how the
events unfolded. Hu is also present, giving
his point of view and passing judgments in a
way that doesn’t fit the pattern of most Chi-
nese documentary films, which tend to be
cooler and more detached.
“He uses some of what might be called
the official style, with voice-over narratives
and a sense of moral justice,” said Zhen
Zhang, a professor of film studies at New
York University. But he also allows people
to speak at length, allowing the story to un-
fold naturally. “It became an organic assem-
blage of different methods,” she said.
Zhu Rikun, a filmmaker and festival cura-
tor who splits his time between New York
and China, said that despite Hu’s stripped-
down style, his movies have an appeal:
“He’s not a theoretician. He’s not a profes-
sional. He doesn’t necessarily know all the
ways to use the equipment. But when you
look at how he films, it has a beauty.”
Hu is more modest. He said his goal was
simply to preserve history that has long
PHOTOGRAPHS BY ICARUS FILMS
been written out of China’s official narra-
tive.

‘To Show Reality as It Really Was’

Harrowing films about Maoist
China by Hu Jie are being
released in the United States.
By IAN JOHNSON
For more than 20 years, the filmmaker Hu
Jie has been trawling the deep waters of
Chinese history to create a series of harrow-
ing documentaries about the early years of
Communist Party rule.
Though Hu is largely unknown outside
Chinese intellectual and foreign academic
circles, two films, to be released on June 30,
should increase the visibility of his work
and help make it accessible to outsiders.
“Spark” — a film that has undergone many
iterations, alternations and expansions —
reconstructs the fate of a group of young
people who started an underground journal
60 years ago. And “The Observer,” a docu-
mentary about Hu by the Italian director
Rita Andreetti, is at once a sympathetic por-
trait of the filmmaker and an introduction to
his films.
Both are being distributed by Icarus
Films as part of dGenerate Films’ collection
of independent Chinese movies, curated by
the American film producer Karin Chien.
Their release — along with three other im-
portant Hu works that Icarus has released
— makes it possible for audiences to see the
sweep of his body of work.
“My goal is to excavate hidden history
and show reality as it really was,” Hu, 62,
said in a telephone interview from his home
in Nanjing. “I feel it’s my duty to history to
tell these stories.”
Though Hu has made more than 30 mov-
ies, he is not well known even in China,
partly because of censorship — his films
have never been distributed in China — and
partly because his work is hard to catego-
rize.
Hu’s films are personal takes on several
critical turning points in modern Chinese
history, especially the persecution of inde-
pendent thinkers in the 1950s, the famine
that followed, and the Cultural Revolution a
decade later. He hunts down survivors,
finds rare written material, and creates a
composite history in which he is also
present as a narrator and judge, clearly tak-
ing sides with the victims of Maoist China.
Almost all of his films come across as rad-
ically low-tech. For years he used a battered
Sony Handycam, and he almost never uses
lights or multiple cameras — largely be-
cause he works alone, but also to give the
feeling of authenticity and discovery, as if
the viewer were on a journey with Hu to dis-
cover a forbidden past.
By contrast, independent Chinese film di-
rectors like Jia Zhangke and Wang Bing
make films that are more easily understood
by foreign art-house audiences, and are reg-
ularly shown at film festivals.
Hu, an autodidact, has an overtly crusad-
ing spirit. A native of Nanjing, he was ini-
‘If no one dares
speak the truth, a
mistake will continue
for a long time.’
HU JIE
CHINESE FILMMAKER
tially an artist in a military propaganda unit
but he quit to pursue a career as an inde-
pendent artist. In Beijing, he mixed in artis-
tic circles — he made a film about the influ-
ential Yuan Ming Yuan artists’ colony — but
returned to Nanjing to work, relatively cut
off from the mainstream.
He honed his craft in the 1990s with a se-
ries of documentaries about China’s under-
class, like illegal coal miners and trash col-
lectors.
But he became famous among China’s in-
telligentsia for his 2004 film, “Searching for
Lin Zhao’s Soul,” one of the films being re-
leased by Icarus. It recounts the story of a
political prisoner who was executed in 1968
for refusing to renounce her political con-
victions. Hu traces Lin’s story through her
classmates and friends, and especially
through letters that she wrote with her own
blood for lack of ink.
That led to “Spark,” about the magazine
for which Lin Zhao wrote an epic poem de-
scribing the struggle for freedom from tyr-
anny. First released in 2013, “Spark,” like all
of Hu’s films, has been added to and re-
edited, most recently to include testimony
by a witness to the famine who wanted to
wait until retiring to speak out.
“Though I Am Gone,” another of the Ica-
rus releases, tells the story of Bian
Zhongyun, a teacher beaten to death in 1966
by her students during the Cultural Revolu-
“I’m not really that kind of professional
picture maker, so I don’t really try to figure
out how to handle questions like technique,”
he said. “My style is quite simple.”
But he said he hoped his films would res-
onate today. “Spark,” he said, shows how
even in the darkest era of the Mao period —
the great famine of 1958 to 1961, which killed
at least 30 million people — some were will-
ing to stand up and be counted.
“This story has great significance today,”
Hu said. “This country is a country with a
unified governing structure, so if no one
dares speak truth, a mistake will continue
for a long time.”
Andreetti said Hu’s commitment to the
truth is what drew her to him. She met him
in 2013 shortly after moving to Nanjing with
her husband, who had been sent there by
his company.
“It was overwhelming to me, the power of
his words and his movies,” she said by
phone from Italy, where she is staying dur-
ing the coronavirus crisis. “I couldn’t be-
lieve that he is basically unknown in China.”
Chien praised Andreetti for getting Hu,
who is hard to pin down for an interview, to
talk. Closely monitored by public security,
he often leaves town at the drop of a hat to
meet people. He’s also hard to reach be-
cause he shuns email and social media.
“He’s one of the most difficult filmmakers
to communicate with,” Chien said. “You ba-
sically had to be in Nanjing to make” a docu-
mentary about him.
Though Hu’s critical works are now being
made available to foreign audiences, pres-
sure from the Chinese government makes it
hard to arrange public showings there,
Chien said.
This scrutiny began around 2015 when
she and others put together a touring film
festival called “Cinema on the Edge.” Hailed
as “beyond the censors’ reach,” the film se-
ries ended up coming under intense pres-
sure from the Chinese government. Film-
makers in China were warned to drop out
and when the festival went ahead, but with
less publicity, foreign outlets, especially
universities, were told that screening the
films could endanger their chance to work
with China.
“It’s about access and money,” Chien said.
Despite the limitations, which also in-
clude a ban on using foreign money and
closing all possibilities to show films in pub-
lic, Professor Zhang said, directors like Hu
continue to work.
“The more collective forms of China’s in-
dependent film movement are being eradi-
cated — the screenings, the independent
film festivals,” she said. “But people are still
making films; they’re still coming out.”

Broadway League Pledges to Address Diversity Shortfall

A sweeping survey is one
response to the uproar over
systemic racism.
By MICHAEL PAULSON
The Broadway League, a trade association
that is the closest thing to a governing body
presiding over America’s biggest stages,
has decided to undertake a sweeping audit
of diversity in the industry in response to
the unrest over racial injustice that is
sweeping the nation.
The League, whose members include
Broadway theater owners and producers,
as well as presenters of touring shows
around the country, will hire a company to
survey all aspects of the industry — on-
stage, backstage and in the many offices
that power the productions, according to
Charlotte St. Martin, the League president
and chief executive.
She said the League could not mandate
participation by other companies and orga-
nizations but that its leadership would
strongly encourage all affected entities, in-
cluding labor unions and nonprofits, to co-
operate with the researchers.
“I think we have done a good job onstage,
and we’ve done a good job with the Tony
Awards, but in a lot of our backstage areas
we haven’t done as good a job, and if people
are frustrated, they have the right to be,” St.
Martin said. “We have to change, and we
will change.”
The audit is one of several measures the
League’s board has decided to take in re-
sponse to the uproar over racism that has
roiled the country since George Floyd was
killed in police custody last month in Minne-
apolis. Many theater artists have taken to
social media to detail instances in which
they felt mistreated because of race, and
several have formed new organizations to
press for change.
St. Martin said the League had also de-
cided to change its bylaws to make it easier
for industry leaders of color to join its board.
In addition, she said, the League will hire an
executive to oversee its equity, diversity
and inclusion efforts; undertake an assess-
ment of its 19 existing diversity initiatives;
make unconscious bias and anti-racism
training mandatory for its staff and leader-
ship; and offer the training to its members.
The League currently has a board of
about 50, two of whom are black. Both of
them welcomed the changes.
“I’m very proud that there are actions be-
ing taken, and it isn’t just talk,” said Colleen
Jennings-Roggensack, the longtime execu-
tive director of Arizona State University
Gammage, a large performing arts center
whose programming includes touring
Broadway shows.
“It’s been a long time coming,” she added.
“As wonderful as the field is, I often am the
JOSEPH MARZULLO/WENN RIGHTS LTD, VIA ALAMY
only one in the room.”
Stephen Byrd, a Broadway producer who
also serves on the League board, described
similar experiences. “When I walk into a
general manager’s office, I don’t see anyone
like me; when I walk into an audition, I don’t
see anyone at the table that looks like me,”
he said. “We do need new voices.”
The League is a relatively small trade as-
sociation — it had 37 employees before the
pandemic, and now has 20 — but it is influ-
ential because it is the body through which
theater owners and producers negotiate la-
bor contracts, interact with government of-
ficials and, together with the American The-
ater Wing, oversee the Tony Awards.
Its existing diversity programs are fo-
cused in two areas — work force develop-
ment, aimed at encouraging and assisting
people of color interested in careers in the
industry, and audience development, aimed
at persuading people of color to become
more frequent theater patrons.
But St. Martin said the current discussion
about injustice has convinced the League’s
leadership that it needs to do more.
“There’s no question that what we all just
experienced has educated us all,” she said.
“We have accepted the responsibility to in-
sure that we change the industry through
our members.”
Drew Shade, the founder and creative di-
rector of Broadway Black, a digital platform
highlighting black theater artists working
The Broadway League in the industry, welcomed the move, but
board member Colleen with a note of caution.
Jennings-Roggensack, “It sounds like a really great beginning —
left, with the association’s a first step,” he said. “But the Broadway
president, Charlotte St. League has all the power, and it will be inter-
Martin. esting to hear how they plan to distribute
control and power within the industry. May-
be there’s a conversation to be had about
what else they can do.”
C6 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020

Coming Forward
As She Looks Back
In her new memoir, the writer
Lacy Crawford addresses
being assaulted at 15.
By SARAH LYALL
There are so many upsetting things about
the assault Lacy Crawford suffered in 1990,
when she was 15 and a junior at St. Paul’s
School in New Hampshire, but one of the
most upsetting is how commonplace she be-
lieves it was.
“This may sound disingenuous, but I
don’t think my assault is particularly inter-
esting,” she said in an interview this month.
She speaks deliberately, calmly, as if ob-
serving her feelings at a remove. “There are
so many stories of abuse and assault. Mine
is one of just a dime a dozen.”
Crawford has had 30 years to grapple
with what happened that day. But her mem-
oir, “Notes on a Silencing,” out July 7 from
Little, Brown, focuses much more on what
came afterward. For her, St. Paul’s response
only compounded the attack, piling a sec-
ond trauma on top of the first.
“The way they came to their own conclu-
sions about what happened,” Crawford, now
45, said by phone from Southern California,
where she lives with her husband and three
sons, “that was breathtaking to me and re-
mains breathtaking to me.”
She added, “The edge has not come off
that.”
The details are horrible to repeat and hor-
rible to read: how two senior boys pinned
Crawford down, grabbed her breasts, un-
zipped her jeans and penetrated her with
but she felt like a ghost of a person,
shrouded in private misery, rendered voice- ‘The thing about assault
less even as her throat healed. Her friends is that it devastates so
drifted away; other students whispered many people, not just
about her; someone threw things at her
from a dorm window as she walked by. She
the victim.’
LACY CRAWFORD
made herself “as silent and slender as I
AUTHOR OF ‘NOTES ON A
could,” she writes. “I was diseased; I was SILENCING’
disgraced; I was alone.”
St. Paul’s, like a number of other private
boarding schools — including Phillips Acad-
emy, Choate Rosemary Hall, Phillips Exeter
Academy, the Hotchkiss School and St.
George’s School — has in recent years had
to face up to and answer for decades of sex-
ual abuse and misconduct. In 2017, a report
commissioned by St. Paul’s found substanti-
ated abuse reports by faculty members of
students stretching back as far as 1948.
In 2018, the school reached a settlement
with the New Hampshire attorney general
that put the institution under the state’s
oversight for five years — and installed a
compliance officer on campus — to ensure
that it followed basic protocols about pro-
tecting students and investigating com-
plaints. Crawford was interviewed as part
of the attorney general’s investigation. A
spokesman for the attorney general’s office
said her participation had helped provide
the basis for “what we continue to believe is
an unprecedented settlement with the
school.”
Kathy Giles, who last year became St.
Paul’s rector, as the principal is called, said
in an interview that the school did not dis-
pute Crawford’s account.
“We respect Lacy’s courage and we ad- ROZETTE RAGO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

their fingers; how they jammed their
penises deep into her mouth; how they
bragged about it afterward. The attack left
her feverish and with a chronically raw,
bleeding throat that made talking and eat-
ing painful, she writes. It turned out that she
had been infected with herpes.
The school’s story — at least the story of-
ficials told Crawford’s devastated parents
— was that the encounter was consensual,
that their daughter brought it on herself,
that she was promiscuous and hardly a vic-
tim. They never asked Lacy for her own ac-
count, she writes, and they made it clear
that unless she dropped the matter she
would not be able to return to school.
“Trust me,” one official told her father.
“She’s not a good girl.”
As far as St. Paul’s was concerned, the is-
sue was then closed. The boys who attacked
her weren’t accused of wrongdoing, and
Crawford doesn’t name them in her book.
She returned to school, graduating in 1992,
mire her voice,” Giles said. “There’s a truth
to her experience that’s powerful and im-
portant.”
The school is committed to doing better
by its students, she added. “Who would
want that experience for anyone — for Lacy,
for her family, for her friends?” she said. “If
there’s anything we’ve learned, it’s that we
have to receive the stories and respect the
experience and then take what steps we
need to address the hurt and pain.”
After Giles read an advance copy of the
book, she requested a meeting with Craw-
ford. The two had lunch in California last
winter.
“She apologized,” Crawford said. “I said
thank you, and I thought that that and my
Starbucks card could get me a latte. But so
far, the quality of our discourse makes me
hopeful.”
For years, Crawford kept her story pri-
vate. She went to Princeton, volunteered as
a rape crisis counselor, wrote her master’s
thesis on the use of rape testimony in legal
cases, and worked as a high school teacher
and environmental campaigner, among
other jobs. Before “Notes on a Silencing,”
she wrote “Early Decision,” a satirical novel
about the college admissions process based
on her work as a private admissions coun-
selor.
She never planned to write a book about
her attack. It was only after she learned
about Chessy Prout, a St. Paul’s student
who was sexually assaulted in 2014, when
she was 15, and who waived her anonymity
to discuss the case publicly, that Crawford
began to think afresh about telling her own
story. (Owen Labrie, the St. Paul’s student
convicted of Prout’s assault, served six
months in jail.)
Crawford started writing her book in fall
2017, working while her three young sons
were at school, and on weekends, when her
husband took them on daylong outings. By
March 2018, she had most of a first draft. For decades, Lacy
“The thing about assault is that it devas- Crawford kept her
tates so many people,” she said. “Not just story private. Then
the victim, but also the people who are told she decided to write
and who share the pain; and the people who what would become
are told and don’t know how to respond; her memoir.
and the people who aren’t told but feel that
something really bad has entered the room
but can’t put it into words.”
Therapy, a loving marriage, raising her
children and writing the book all helped
Crawford come through to the other side of
her experience — to redress the balance of
power between herself and the boys who as-
saulted her, between herself and the school
that betrayed her. The thing about a book is
that you get to have the last word.
“I felt utterly exposed and shamed,” she
said of her younger self. “It was a very small
community, and it was all I had at that age.
But for me now, I’m not going to hold on to it
any more. I’m done with shame.”

On the Campaign Trail, Faces of Change

CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
some investors, however, the team faced
pushback and questions about the rele-
vance of such a narrative. Some suggested
to Lee and Safinia, both women of color, that
they focus on female politicians overall. But
the filmmakers refused, Safinia said, be-
cause they had decided that keeping the fo-
cus on women of color was a “nonnegotiable
point of clarity.”
“I think that there’s narratives that we
hear, particularly in documentaries — they
define entire communities, and as we know,
these narratives have far too long been told
from a white male gaze,” she said. Commu-
nities of color are too often relegated to vic-
tim narratives, she added, which “wasn’t the
story we wanted to tell.”
The story being told is of the women who
are pushing back against institutions at all
political levels, their journeys interwoven to
convey the sense of a larger shift, toward
what Lee and Safinia call the “new Ameri-
can majority.” This, the series tells us, is
what systemic change looks like.
There’s the cast of heroines: Stacey
Abrams, running for governor in Georgia;
Bushra Amiwala, for county commissioner
in Illinois; Maria Elena Durazo, for Califor-
nia State Senate; Veronica Escobar, for a
congressional seat in Texas; Lucy McBath,
for a congressional seat in Georgia; and Ra-
shida Tlaib, for a U.S. congressional seat in
Michigan. “Episode One: Building the
Movement” centers on the sprint toward the
finish lines of their respective races, while
“Episode Two: Claiming Power” focuses
more on the end of Abrams’s campaign and
on the poll closures, voter purges and voter
ID laws that prompted accusations of ramp-
ant voter suppression in contests through-
out Georgia.
The documentary spends plenty of time
on the campaign trail. In California, Durazo
delivers a speech in both English and Span-
ish while wearing a “Defeat Trump” T-shirt.
Amiwala, a 19-year-old college student, tries
to keep up with her studies when she’s not
shaking hands and giving speeches.
More intimate moments are captured as
well, particularly with Tlaib’s campaign. We
watch her explain the workings of Congress
to her two young sons in the car (and offer
her elder son a position as her policy ana-
lyst), and we follow her through the night as
she and her team anxiously await the re-
sults of a neck-in-neck race.
Lee, who had worked with Tlaib before on
the PBS documentary “Makers: Women in
Politics,” pushed for the close-quarters view.
“She really wanted to know me as a wom-
an, as a mother, as a person, as a daughter,”
Tlaib said in a phone interview earlier this
month. In one scene, Tlaib gathers with her
family to celebrate the end of Ramadan; the
camera follows the family members as they
break their fast and also float campaign
strategies.
There are also glimpses of the opposition
the candidates face along the way. McBath,
Clockwise from above,
Bushra Amiwala was a
college student when she
began campaigning to be
a county commissioner
in Illinois; Stacey
Abrams, who lost
narrowly in the Georgia
gubernatorial race in
2018; and Nse Ufot, the
executive director of the
New Georgia Project.
who campaigns for common-sense gun
laws because her son was killed in a sense-
less act of gun violence, faces backlash and
personal attacks on social media. Abrams
gives an unruffled response to a man in the
crowd who demands to know how much
money she owes to the IRS. (Abrams’s op-
ponents tried to use a $54,000 federal tax
debt, which she has since repaid, as a cudg-
el during the campaign.)
And Amiwala, while putting on makeup
in her bathroom before an event, recounts
how a man once criticized how much lip-
stick she wore in a campaign video — the
kind of petty microaggression female poli-
ticians routinely endure. She also recalls
the time when a debate tournament judge
complimented her for being an “articulate”
Muslim.
But this is part of what it looks like to dis-
rupt a system in which you are “an anom-
aly,” DuVernay said by phone.
“The American political system was not
built for or by us,” she said. “It was actually
built against us. The actual architecture of
the American political system was ex-
pressly built to oppress, to subjugate and to
create a whole narrative of racial bias and
oppression.”
“And She Could Be Next” depicts not only
the experiences of candidates but also what
Lee and Safinia call a whole campaign
“ecosystem,” including activists, organ-
izers, volunteers and other people who also
soldier against the status quo but often go
overlooked.
Early in the series, Nse Ufot, the execu-
tive director of the New Georgia Project, a
nonprofit group dedicated to getting Geor-
gians civically engaged and registered to
vote, says, “I am so sick of people with lim-
ited imaginations and small minds telling
us what’s possible, when I see how excited
people are.”
IMAGES VIA PBS
Lee and Safinia say this focus on the
teams behind the women is what makes the
film unique. It took a team of their own,
composed entirely of women of color, to pull
it off. Lee and Safinia oversaw the operation
while field directors and their crew followed
the campaigns across the country. It was no
small logistical task, but the producers be-
lieved a panoramic view was necessary to
capture the scale of this political evolution.
“To me, it was never a film about ’18,” Lee
said. “It’s about a movement, about women
of color who have always been organizing.”
The word “movement” surfaces many
times throughout the series, connecting the
dots between these women and implying
some transcendence of the immediate mo-
ment in which their races are happening.
The future envisioned by “And She Could Be
Next” isn’t just female; it’s African-Ameri-
can, Asian-American, Latino, multiracial. It
looks a lot like the diverse and equally rep-
resentative America the country declares
itself to be.
In the beginning of the second episode, in
front of the podium after her congressional
win, Tlaib tells a room full of women of all
ages: “It’s going to be this movement that is
going to be in front of us, actually. You are in
front of us, and we have to follow your lead.”
In the phone interview, Tlaib brought up a
famous quote by Shirley Chisholm, the first
African-American woman to serve in Con-
gress: “If they don’t give you a seat at the
table, bring a folding chair.”
But as the country endures a pandemic,
mass unemployment and widespread pro-
tests, Tlaib said, she thinks it might be time
for a revision.
“I don’t know if it’s about bringing your
own chair and making the table bigger,” she
said. “I think it’s about shaking the table
and taking someone else’s chair from
them.”