newyorker--2020-10-19--Moxie Marlinspike Has a Plan to Reclaim Our Privacy

In his mid-twenties , Marlinspike wrote and self-published a handful of zines reflecting on his travels and his time in the Bay Area .
I found two of them for sale on the Web site of Red Emma ’ s , a radical bookstore in Baltimore .
They had the dense feel of a Kinko ’ s production , and the distinct quality of objects that did not belong to me .
They seemed clearly intended for a subculture : friends , pen pals , the sort of people who browse radical bookstores in Baltimore .
( Inside the package @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ Nice find ☺.
” ) Marlinspike ’ s writing is earnest , funny , and occasionally swaggering .
The zines do not mention his interest in computers .
By the end of the two-thousands , Marlinspike was living in Pittsburgh , in a derelict , eight-bedroom , three-story mansion that he shared with a few people .
He occasionally ducked into a cryptography class at Carnegie Mellon , and with some friends formed a kind of haphazard research lab called the Institute for Disruptive Studies , which its members sometimes described @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Most of the work we do is in the area of privacy , anonymity , and computer security , ” the group ’ s Web site read , “ but has also taken the shape of organic gardening techniques , community bicycle repair projects , and musical experiments.
” Marlinspike had a reputation in hacker communities , but in Pittsburgh he was better known for making fireworks and growing heirloom tomatoes , for his knot-tying skills , and for events that he threw with his friends .
A popular one was Hat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by picking names out of a hat , and then performed at house shows several weeks later .
Marlinspike ’ s close friend recalled , “ You could have known someone for years before that , and you never thought of them as a musician , or a songwriter , or a poet .
It not only changes your perception but it changes who they are , and their perception of themselves.
” He said , of Marlinspike , “ I think some of the things that have always been important to him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ situations where you can build community and connections with people and have these transformative experiences.
” Jackie Wang , an assistant professor of culture and media at the New School , who described her relationship with Marlinspike as sibling-like , met him through an anarchist community on LiveJournal in the early two-thousands , and encountered him in person for the first time at a dance party in Pittsburgh .
To try to persuade friends to move to the city , she recalled , Marlinspike and a roommate had designed an “ incentive package @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stay , a blind date , and a bicycle .
“ They were really into hospitality , ” Wang said , adding that , when she stayed at the mansion , a mint had been left on the pillow .
In Pittsburgh , Marlinspike uncovered an Internet vulnerability that affected nearly every popular browser .
It enabled malicious actors to mount what is called a “ man-in-the-middle attack ” —a type of exploit in which the attacker can view and potentially alter communications between two parties and siphon data , such as log-in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Marlinspike presented the vulnerability at Black Hat D.C. , an annual security conference in Washington .
He took the opportunity to politely criticize the keynote speaker , Paul Kurtz , a homeland-security expert who had served under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush , and who had spoken about the need for the U.S. to take “ leadership in cyberspace , ” arguing for collaboration among the N.S.A.
, law enforcement , and private industry .
“ You know , ” Marlinspike said during his presentation , “ ten years ago @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been talking about protecting our communications from the state and the cops—not centralizing them in the hands of the state and the cops.
” He paused .
“ So I think a lot has changed.
” At the end of his talk , he released a new tool , SSLstrip , that automatically mounted man-in-the-middle attacks using the vulnerability he had discovered .
SSLstrip elevated Marlinspike to expert status .
These days , according to Dan Boneh , a cryptographer and a professor at Stanford , the practice of exposing vulnerabilities so that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , as SSLstrip has done , is “ the bread and butter of computer security.
” Boneh , who teaches SSLstrip to his undergraduate students , told me , “ It changed how browsers work .
His attack caused the Web to change.
” Marlinspike had long harbored concerns that the products and business models of private technology corporations—telecom firms , e-mail providers , search engines , social networks—would be built atop rapacious data-collection networks .
It was becoming increasingly clear that the state could augment its sprawling surveillance apparatus with the help @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Eric Schmidt , then the C.E.O .
of Google , articulated a common stance on user privacy : “ If you have something that you don ’ t want anyone to know , maybe you shouldn ’ t be doing it in the first place , ” Schmidt said on CNBC , noting that , under the Patriot Act , which was passed in 2001 to deter and punish terrorism , and to expand the resources available to law enforcement , Internet-service providers could be compelled to share user activity with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was emblematic of what he saw as a growing threat to everyday Internet users .
In response to Schmidt ’ s comment , and to Google ’ s business model , Marlinspike began working on a browser extension , GoogleSharing , for Firefox .
Google ’ s business model relies on tying users ’ disparate metadata to their activity , which is often achieved by having users log in to their accounts before accessing services .
GoogleSharing pooled users ’ activity on Google services and anonymized personal information , scrambling individual activity and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ This prevented Google from building user profiles , and from collecting information from services that did not require a log-in .
Marlinspike no longer maintains the software , but it is still available to download , for free , on GitHub , and has a successor , DuckDuckGo , a search engine that strips queries of identifying data .
In 2010 , Marlinspike and Stuart Anderson , a friend and a robotics Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon , left Pittsburgh and moved to the Bay Area .
They formed a small mobile-security startup @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a suite of tools , including RedPhone and TextSecure , two Android apps for encrypted communication .
In 2011 , at the height of the Arab Spring uprisings , they hurriedly designed international editions of RedPhone and TextSecure , specifically for use by Egyptian protesters .
After less than a year , Marlinspike and Anderson , Whisper Systems ’ only employees , sold the startup to Twitter , for an undisclosed sum .
( In 2016 , Marlinspike told Wired that it was the most money he had ever seen— “ but that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ At the time , Tyler Reinhard , a longtime friend of Marlinspike ’ s , and the original designer of RedPhone ( and , later , Signal ) , considered the apps to be more of a proof of concept than a business .
RedPhone and TextSecure , he said , were “ the antithesis to the dominant view that encryption would never be user-friendly .
If the goal was to make the point , the point was well made.
” Twitter , then five years old , had become a popular target @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Federal Trade Commission had investigated its user-information practices .
Reinhard saw the acquisition as a sign that Twitter wanted to take user privacy seriously .
After the acquisition announcement , Twitter temporarily shut down RedPhone .
Activists and human-rights advocates worried that revoking the service would put the app ’ s users in danger , by shutting off a secure-communication channel .
( Three weeks later , Twitter announced that it would release the code for RedPhone and TextSecure as open-source projects hosted on GitHub , enabling others to maintain the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s head of product security , and prepared to encrypt a large-scale system .
A colleague of his from the time recalled that he was quiet , and had a pronounced sense of the company ’ s responsibility to the user : “ It was a vibe of ‘ They ’ re giving us their time and their ideas , and we owe them , in return , the honor and respect of being able to use the product safely and securely.
’ ” Marlinspike is reticent about his stint at the company @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a book about Twitter ’ s chaotic early years , told me that the boardroom dynamics were constantly compared to “ Game of Thrones.
” “ There was so much backstabbing , ” Bilton said .
“ There was no one driving the ship .
It was sheer dysfunction.
” Privacy and safety took a back seat to growth .
Direct messages on Twitter are still not end-to-end encrypted .
Marlinspike and a friend owned a Hobie Cat 15 , a light fibreglass catamaran .
One day in March , 2012 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Twitter , they decided to anchor it in San Francisco Bay , to avoid paying dockage fees .
Marlinspike took the catamaran out , and his friend followed in a rowboat .
It was dusk , and the conditions were rough ; both boats were blown into the bay .
As they began to change course , a gust of wind capsized the catamaran , turning it upside down .
Marlinspike , who later wrote about the incident in a blog post , tried swimming to shore , but his body began @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bay in early spring averages fifty-four degrees .
He returned to the boat , clung to the hull , and tied a line around his wrist , to make his body easier to find .
As his vision began to tunnel and his limbs lost sensation , a tugboat passed .
The crew pulled Marlinspike out of the water and tried to warm him in the engine room .
At the hospital , he went in and out of consciousness ; his temperature was too low to register on the digital thermometers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of just under ninety degrees .
“ There ’ s a tension between how the world works and the feelings after a near-death experience , ” Marlinspike said , as we sat on the beach in our masks .
“ You ’ re sort of questioning , ‘ What are we all doing here ?
’ You can ’ t feel that forever , because you ’ re constantly confronted with a different reality.
” In early 2013 , Marlinspike left Twitter , forgoing about a million dollars in stock .
( Anderson @ @ @ @ @ @ @ . )
Soon after , Marlinspike started a nonprofit , Open Whisper Systems , returning to work on the open-source versions of RedPhone and TextSecure .
Marlinspike does not take credit for the growth of Signal in the twenty-tens .
“ I think it ’ s possible to look at technology in the same way that Marxists would talk about history , as this thing that has its own agency and force and inevitability , ” he said .
“ It ’ s this thing that ’ s just happening , and you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , he cites a number of factors as having led to a resurgence of interest in encryption , including the rise of mobile devices , which offered software engineers a new forum in which to experiment , and the proliferation of chat applications .
And , in the spring of 2013 , Snowden , at the time a National Security Agency contractor and a former C.I.A .
employee , disclosed classified information about the N.S.A.
’ s sprawling surveillance programs , which were bolstered by user data obtained from Google , Facebook , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and Verizon .
Snowden revealed that the N.S.A .
had subverted the National Institute of Standards and Technology ( N.I.S.T . )
, a government agency that , among other things , developed guidelines for cryptography .
The N.I.S.T.
’ s cryptography standards included four algorithms that generated random strings of numbers , which were used to encode data .
The N.S.A .
had created a backdoor to one of these algorithms , rendering it insecure .
Until that point , Marlinspike said , the N.I.S.T .
and other working groups “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ what was acceptable and thus what was possible.
” He described what ensued as a “ brief renaissance.
” Open Whisper Systems operated out of a rickety office in the Mission ; a CrossFit gym directly above made the ceiling shake .
It had a fiscal sponsor , the Freedom of the Press Foundation , and ran on a shoestring budget , assisted by grants from the Shuttleworth Foundation , the Knight Foundation , and the Open Technology Fund .
Marlinspike calculates that , in the organization ’ s first five years , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2.3 full-time software developers.
” He worked on the TextSecure Protocol with Trevor Perrin , another cryptographer .
Software protocols are robust descriptions of how systems should function ; Marlinspike ’ s aim was to write something straightforward and compelling enough that other messaging platforms would want to adopt it , adding end-to-end encryption to their existing tools .
At the time , most popular encryption protocols were designed for interactive applications that required all parties to be online simultaneously .
These protocols included properties such as “ forward secrecy ” : the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , which corrected the vulnerability of using a single private key across all encrypted correspondence .
TextSecure ’ s innovation was to adapt these protocols , and replicate their properties , for the mobile chat environment , in which conversations are asynchronous , long running , and unpredictable : connections drop ; people come and go .
Perrin told me , “ Most prior systems put encryption in the foreground : users had to jump through hoops to create and manage their secret keys and other people ’ s keys.
” He and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work “ so smoothly that it would be invisible.
” In late 2013 , Marlinspike met Brian Acton , a founder of WhatsApp , and expressed interest in adding end-to-end encryption to the messaging service .
Shortly thereafter , in early 2014 , WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook , for twenty-two billion dollars .
That year , Open Whisper Systems merged RedPhone and TextSecure into a single communication tool for Android and iOS , and called it Signal .
Marlinspike spent much of 2015 making trips to Mountain View , where he worked @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Protocol in WhatsApp .
Acton is about a decade older than Marlinspike , and in some ways his foil : a Stanford graduate who worked in security at Apple , Adobe , and Yahoo before launching his own company .
Acton was taken with Marlinspike ’ s technical vision .
“ The dude can get stuff done with high quality and high output , ” he said .
“ He naturally emerges as a leader because of his capability and his proficiency .
To have done that with less formal training than the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outstanding.
” He also liked Marlinspike ’ s low-key nature .
“ He ’ s a very thoughtful and conscientious person , ” he said .
“ In corporate America , security incidents often result in what I would call the corporate freakout .
A guy like Moxie is sort of unflappable.
” In 2017 , Marlinspike and Perrin were awarded , for their work on the Signal Protocol , the Levchin Prize—a new accolade , established by the entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin , for real-world applications of cryptography .
During @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he requested go unrecorded , he deferred to history , saying that the celebration should be of technological progress rather than of any particular individual .
Boneh , the Stanford professor , who chaired the award committee , said that the message was “ really , really beautiful , ” but he didn ’ t entirely buy the idea that , without Marlinspike , widespread end-to-end encryption would have been inevitable .
“ Maybe it is true , but it would have taken many more decades , ” he said .
Acton and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ possible to build mainstream technology that is not beholden to the incentives of venture capital , or to markets , despite the overwhelming cost of producing and maintaining software .
Signal has always been remote .
Its nonprofit status protects it from outside interests demanding rapid returns .
Nonprofits can not be acquired by for-profit companies , so there will be no repeat of what happened between Whisper Systems and Twitter , or between WhatsApp and Facebook .
Acton told me , “ The user is the customer , and we can actually @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their needs and their desires are , rather than a corporate bottom line or a profit motive or anything else .
To me , it ’ s a powerful message to deliver.
” Signal is compensated for implementations of the Signal Protocol on a pay-as-you-wish basis .
Skype has used the protocol for its “ Private Conversations ” setting , and Facebook Messenger has used it in a feature called “ Secret Conversations ” ; Marlinspike declined to say how much either company donated .
He thinks a lot about how to bring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tail of the Internet ” —the galaxy of smaller apps and services that could be encrypted , given enough time and resources .
Signal ’ s employees are paid competitively ; still , the organization has trouble vying with major corporations for engineers .
As C.E.O.
, Marlinspike takes a salary in the low six figures , modest for the software industry , and makes less than the median salary at Facebook .
He is still ambivalent about Silicon Valley ’ s professional security culture .
He described recent industry conferences in Las @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ you ’ d go to this club and there ’ d be a bouncer with a velvet rope or whatever .
I ’ d always want to ask the bouncer , ‘ How can you take yourself seriously , man ?
You should be trying to prevent us from getting out .
It ’ s , like , a negative-cool space inside.
’ ” Signal now has thirty-six employees .
Marlinspike told me that he tries to find ways to facilitate collective decision-making .
Nora Trapp , Signal ’ s iOS lead @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a person who is representing us , it ’ s good that Moxie is that person .
But I also think that having just one individual serve that role is a little bit counter to the way we work and the way we function.
” Perrin told me that , despite appearances , “ Moxie leads from the front , and he just leads by doing .
One of his favorite quotes is ‘ The only secret is to begin.
’ If you want to get good at something or do @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and you figure it out along the way .
”

Marlinspike and a friend owned a Hobie Cat 15, a light fibreglass catamaran. One day in March, 2012, four months into Marlinspike’s job at Twitter, they decided to anchor it in San Francisco Bay, to avoid paying dockage fees. Marlinspike took the catamaran out, and his friend followed in a rowboat. It was dusk, and the conditions were rough; both boats were blown into the bay. As they began to change course, a gust of wind capsized the catamaran, turning it upside down. Marlinspike, who later wrote about the incident in a blog post, tried swimming to shore, but his body began to shut down; the temperature of the bay in early spring averages fifty-four degrees. He returned to the boat, clung to the hull, and tied a line around his wrist, to make his body easier to find. As his vision began to tunnel and his limbs lost sensation, a tugboat passed. The crew pulled Marlinspike out of the water and tried to warm him in the engine room. At the hospital, he went in and out of consciousness; his temperature was too low to register on the digital thermometers, which tend to have a floor of just under ninety degrees. “There’s a tension between how the world works and the feelings after a near-death experience,” Marlinspike said, as we sat on the beach in our masks. “You’re sort of questioning, ‘What are we all doing here?’ You can’t feel that forever, because you’re constantly confronted with a different reality.”
In early 2013, Marlinspike left Twitter, forgoing about a million dollars in stock. (Anderson stayed at the company for another year.) Soon after, Marlinspike started a nonprofit, Open Whisper Systems, returning to work on the open-source versions of RedPhone and TextSecure.
Marlinspike does not take credit for the growth of Signal in the twenty-tens. “I think it’s possible to look at technology in the same way that Marxists would talk about history, as this thing that has its own agency and force and inevitability,” he said. “It’s this thing that’s just happening, and you’re moving with it.” Instead, he cites a number of factors as having led to a resurgence of interest in encryption, including the rise of mobile devices, which offered software engineers a new forum in which to experiment, and the proliferation of chat applications. And, in the spring of 2013, Snowden, at the time a National Security Agency contractor and a former C.I.A. employee, disclosed classified information about the N.S.A.’s sprawling surveillance programs, which were bolstered by user data obtained from Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, A.T. & T., and Verizon. Snowden revealed that the N.S.A. had subverted the National Institute of Standards and Technology (N.I.S.T.), a government agency that, among other things, developed guidelines for cryptography. The N.I.S.T.’s cryptography standards included four algorithms that generated random strings of numbers, which were used to encode data. The N.S.A. had created a backdoor to one of these algorithms, rendering it insecure. Until that point, Marlinspike said, the N.I.S.T. and other working groups “had a sort of monopoly on defining what was acceptable and thus what was possible.” He described what ensued as a “brief renaissance.”
Open Whisper Systems operated out of a rickety office in the Mission; a CrossFit gym directly above made the ceiling shake. It had a fiscal sponsor, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and ran on a shoestring budget, assisted by grants from the Shuttleworth Foundation, the Knight Foundation, and the Open Technology Fund. Marlinspike calculates that, in the organization’s first five years, there were, on average, “2.3 full-time software developers.” He worked on the TextSecure Protocol with Trevor Perrin, another cryptographer. Software protocols are robust descriptions of how systems should function; Marlinspike’s aim was to write something straightforward and compelling enough that other messaging platforms would want to adopt it, adding end-to-end encryption to their existing tools. At the time, most popular encryption protocols were designed for interactive applications that required all parties to be online simultaneously. These protocols included properties such as “forward secrecy”: the regular changing of secret keys over time, which corrected the vulnerability of using a single private key across all encrypted correspondence. TextSecure’s innovation was to adapt these protocols, and replicate their properties, for the mobile chat environment, in which conversations are asynchronous, long running, and unpredictable: connections drop; people come and go. Perrin told me, “Most prior systems put encryption in the foreground: users had to jump through hoops to create and manage their secret keys and other people’s keys.” He and Marlinspike had wanted their end-to-end encryption to work “so smoothly that it would be invisible.”
In late 2013, Marlinspike met Brian Acton, a founder of WhatsApp, and expressed interest in adding end-to-end encryption to the messaging service. Shortly thereafter, in early 2014, WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook, for twenty-two billion dollars. That year, Open Whisper Systems merged RedPhone and TextSecure into a single communication tool for Android and iOS, and called it Signal. Marlinspike spent much of 2015 making trips to Mountain View, where he worked closely with Acton on implementing the Signal Protocol in WhatsApp. Acton is about a decade older than Marlinspike, and in some ways his foil: a Stanford graduate who worked in security at Apple, Adobe, and Yahoo before launching his own company. Acton was taken with Marlinspike’s technical vision. “The dude can get stuff done with high quality and high output,” he said. “He naturally emerges as a leader because of his capability and his proficiency. To have done that with less formal training than the normal guy, I think, is outstanding.” He also liked Marlinspike’s low-key nature. “He’s a very thoughtful and conscientious person,” he said. “In corporate America, security incidents often result in what I would call the corporate freakout. A guy like Moxie is sort of unflappable.”
In 2017, Marlinspike and Perrin were awarded, for their work on the Signal Protocol, the Levchin Prize—a new accolade, established by the entrepreneur and PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, for real-world applications of cryptography. During Marlinspike’s acceptance speech, which he requested go unrecorded, he deferred to history, saying that the celebration should be of technological progress rather than of any particular individual. Boneh, the Stanford professor, who chaired the award committee, said that the message was “really, really beautiful,” but he didn’t entirely buy the idea that, without Marlinspike, widespread end-to-end encryption would have been inevitable. “Maybe it is true, but it would have taken many more decades,” he said.
That year, Acton left Facebook, later attributing his departure to intractable differences about privacy practices. At the heart of the conflict was tension with Facebook’s top executives, Sheryl Sandberg and Mark Zuckerberg, who wanted to extend Facebook’s targeted-ad network to WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption precluded the collection of message content that would be valuable to advertisers. In early 2018, Acton and Marlinspike announced the formation of the Signal Foundation, a nonprofit. Acton, the foundation’s chairman and sole member, seeded it with a no-interest, fifty-million-dollar loan.
Acton and Marlinspike wanted to demonstrate that it is possible to build mainstream technology that is not beholden to the incentives of venture capital, or to markets, despite the overwhelming cost of producing and maintaining software. Signal has always been remote. Its nonprofit status protects it from outside interests demanding rapid returns. Nonprofits cannot be acquired by for-profit companies, so there will be no repeat of what happened between Whisper Systems and Twitter, or between WhatsApp and Facebook. Acton told me, “The user is the customer, and we can actually put them first in terms of what their needs and their desires are, rather than a corporate bottom line or a profit motive or anything else. To me, it’s a powerful message to deliver.”
Signal is compensated for implementations of the Signal Protocol on a pay-as-you-wish basis. Skype has used the protocol for its “Private Conversations” setting, and Facebook Messenger has used it in a feature called “Secret Conversations”; Marlinspike declined to say how much either company donated. He thinks a lot about how to bring the Signal Protocol to the “long tail of the Internet”—the galaxy of smaller apps and services that could be encrypted, given enough time and resources. Signal’s employees are paid competitively; still, the organization has trouble vying with major corporations for engineers. As C.E.O., Marlinspike takes a salary in the low six figures, modest for the software industry, and makes less than the median salary at Facebook. He is still ambivalent about Silicon Valley’s professional security culture. He described recent industry conferences in Las Vegas, where, he said, “you’d go to this club and there’d be a bouncer with a velvet rope or whatever. I’d always want to ask the bouncer, ‘How can you take yourself seriously, man? You should be trying to prevent us from getting out. It’s, like, a negative-cool space inside.’ ”
Signal now has thirty-six employees. Marlinspike told me that he tries to find ways to facilitate collective decision-making. Nora Trapp, Signal’s iOS lead, said, “If there has to be a person who is representing us, it’s good that Moxie is that person. But I also think that having just one individual serve that role is a little bit counter to the way we work and the way we function.” Perrin told me that, despite appearances, “Moxie leads from the front, and he just leads by doing. One of his favorite quotes is ‘The only secret is to begin.’ If you want to get good at something or do something, you just do it, and you figure it out along the way.”
There are inherent privacy challenges to digital communication: messages can still be screenshotted; devices can be stolen or hacked. Some members of the privacy community, including Snowden, criticize Signal’s requirement that each user sign up with a phone number; others object to Signal’s default setting that alerts users every time a contact joins the service. And, although all of Signal’s source code is open-source and peer-reviewed, most users cannot be certain whether it is identical to the code deployed in the apps they download, or to the code that is actually running on Signal’s servers. Others argue that Signal should be federated, or decentralized: rather than trusting a single organization to remain stable, invulnerable, uncompromised, and oriented toward their needs, participants should be able to run their own servers. (Signal maintains that this would be prohibitive to everyday users, and potentially more insecure.) Signal Fails, an anonymous zine recently published on several anarchist Web sites, warns against dependency on a centralized service, particularly one running on mobile devices. “If your device is compromised with a keylogger or other malicious software, it doesn’t really matter how secure your communications are,” the zine reads. Were anarchists to “pose a major threat to the established order,” the government would “come for us and our infrastructure without mercy.”
Cartoon by Roz Chast Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
Marlinspike defends centralization as a necessary condition for Signal’s widespread adoption, and for its ease of use. He is acutely aware that the reason encryption did not catch on in the nineties was that the cypherpunks expected users to adopt the conventions of software engineers, rather than the other way around. Most people did not want to teach themselves about cipher suites and ASCII armor in order to send a secure e-mail; they did not want to attend key-signing parties and exchange public cryptographic keys in order to build a web of trust. They just wanted to log on and talk to their friends. “Everyone who wasn’t Steve Jobs was wrong in the same kind of way,” Marlinspike said. Signal offers unusual features, such as messages that disappear after a set period of time; users recently asked for stickers, and these, too, needed to be end-to-end encrypted. For now, Signal’s engineers are working on improvements, such as developing a group-video-chat feature and making the app’s group-chat systems faster and more robust.


The Mail

I enjoyed reading the magazine ’ s multipart endorsement of Joe Biden for President , in which your editors and writers expressed their support for the candidate and provided him with an urgent to-do list addressing health care , the climate crisis , the rule of law , civil rights , and foreign policy ( The Talk of the Town , October 5th ) .
I completely agree with the notion that the United States must address threats to justice , freedom , and prosperity on its own turf , but I took issue somewhat with Susan B. Glasser ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ which she expresses hope that “ a commitment to universal freedoms and human rights will once more be a foundation of U.S. foreign policy.
” The truth of the matter , of course , is that the U.S. has a checkered history in this regard .
For example , it ’ s now widely acknowledged that the U.S. , by playing an essential role in the lead-up to Chile ’ s military coup , in 1973 , helped contribute to the destruction of the country ’ s democracy .
( After this event @ @ @ @ @ @ @ U.S. schools in three countries and learning some aspects of the nation ’ s governance . )
Returning to the old order , in which the U.S. government dictates to a large extent the direction that the world takes , seems to me to be simply a continuation of earlier negative conduct , including highly funded militarism and inaction on solving the increasingly urgent climate crisis .
To survive as a species on a damaged planet , we will have to espouse new forms of coöperation between nations .
What is needed is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not a restoration of U.S. world power .
Louis Menand , in his entertaining essay on Jane Austen , writes , in relation to recent academic criticism that describes Austen as both conservative and subversive , that “ it ’ s hard to see how the novels can be ‘ equally ’ endorsements of patriarchy and criticisms of it ” ( Books , October 5th ) .
But isn ’ t that often the conundrum of critical thought—that writers must participate in , and sometimes even endorse , that which they wish to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ want a social revolution , but she did identify egregious flaws in institutions that she would have been loath to abandon entirely .
The British reading public may have seen a similar-seeming contradiction a generation later , when Matthew Arnold supported the conservative principle of “ force till right is ready ” as a way of preserving order , without which a revolution can not be accomplished .
Menand ’ s essay on Austen and her perception of the world around her was as thorough as any master ’ s thesis .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Austen is that she , like Anthony Trollope , expertly wrote pleasant , character-driven , articulately rendered novels showcasing authentic human beings ; rarely , if ever , did they resort to sensationalism .
This is a compelling reason that her books are still read—for the exquisite pleasure of the experience , especially when one needs an escape from strife and mayhem .
In fact , Austen ’ s narrator explains this to the reader at the beginning of the final chapter of “ Mansfield Park ” : “ Let other pens @ @ @ @ @ @ @ quit such odious subjects as soon as I can , impatient to restore everybody , not greatly in fault themselves , to tolerable comfort , and to have done with all the rest.
” Letters should be sent with the writer ’ s name , address , and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail @ newyorker.com .
Letters may be edited for length and clarity , and may be published in any medium .
We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we can not reply to every letter .

A New Foreign Policy
I enjoyed reading the magazine’s multipart endorsement of Joe Biden for President, in which your editors and writers expressed their support for the candidate and provided him with an urgent to-do list addressing health care, the climate crisis, the rule of law, civil rights, and foreign policy (The Talk of the Town, October 5th). I completely agree with the notion that the United States must address threats to justice, freedom, and prosperity on its own turf, but I took issue somewhat with Susan B. Glasser’s discussion of foreign policy, in which she expresses hope that “a commitment to universal freedoms and human rights will once more be a foundation of U.S. foreign policy.” The truth of the matter, of course, is that the U.S. has a checkered history in this regard. For example, it’s now widely acknowledged that the U.S., by playing an essential role in the lead-up to Chile’s military coup, in 1973, helped contribute to the destruction of the country’s democracy. (After this event, I became an exile, attending U.S. schools in three countries and learning some aspects of the nation’s governance.) Returning to the old order, in which the U.S. government dictates to a large extent the direction that the world takes, seems to me to be simply a continuation of earlier negative conduct, including highly funded militarism and inaction on solving the increasingly urgent climate crisis. To survive as a species on a damaged planet, we will have to espouse new forms of coöperation between nations. What is needed is substantive change to the status quo, not a restoration of U.S. world power.
Juan Carlos Chirgwin
Montreal, Quebec
Plain Jane
Louis Menand, in his entertaining essay on Jane Austen, writes, in relation to recent academic criticism that describes Austen as both conservative and subversive, that “it’s hard to see how the novels can be ‘equally’ endorsements of patriarchy and criticisms of it” (Books, October 5th). But isn’t that often the conundrum of critical thought—that writers must participate in, and sometimes even endorse, that which they wish to criticize? Clearly, Austen did not want a social revolution, but she did identify egregious flaws in institutions that she would have been loath to abandon entirely. The British reading public may have seen a similar-seeming contradiction a generation later, when Matthew Arnold supported the conservative principle of “force till right is ready” as a way of preserving order, without which a revolution cannot be accomplished.
Paul H. Schmidt
Avondale Estates, Ga.
Menand’s essay on Austen and her perception of the world around her was as thorough as any master’s thesis. The plainest truth with regard to making sense of Austen is that she, like Anthony Trollope, expertly wrote pleasant, character-driven, articulately rendered novels showcasing authentic human beings; rarely, if ever, did they resort to sensationalism. This is a compelling reason that her books are still read—for the exquisite pleasure of the experience, especially when one needs an escape from strife and mayhem. In fact, Austen’s narrator explains this to the reader at the beginning of the final chapter of “Mansfield Park”: “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery. I quit such odious subjects as soon as I can, impatient to restore everybody, not greatly in fault themselves, to tolerable comfort, and to have done with all the rest.”
Richard Orlando
Westmount, Quebec
•
Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to themail@newyorker.com. Letters may be edited for length and clarity, and may be published in any medium. We regret that owing to the volume of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.


newyorker--2020-10-19--How to Spot a Military Impostor

How to Spot a Military Impostor

In December , Bart and his wife , Amber , read in the local paper that Leroy Foley , a police officer in the nearby town of Clyde , was running for sheriff of Callahan County .
In Foley ’ s public filings , he listed the neighboring house as his residence .
To Bart , it seemed obvious that Foley didn ’ t live there but was merely using it as a place to switch out his vehicle after work .
The Kendricks did a little digging and discovered that Foley lived fifty-five miles away , in another county @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ineligible for the position .
Bart is a deliberate man with a long , wiry beard .
If something strikes him as wrong , he feels obligated to fix it .
Just before my visit , one of the family ’ s cats was killed by a raccoon .
After Bart buried her , he reviewed his security-camera footage to identify the culprit , then spent several nights perched in a tree with a pistol until he got his revenge .
Foley ’ s apparent lie about his residence offended Bart .
He @ @ @ @ @ @ @ door and getting no answer .
He photographed the trash can by the road to show that its contents never changed .
Foley promised to professionalize the sheriff ’ s department .
He called the current deputies “ a bunch of yahoos ” and mocked them for wearing cowboy boots instead of tactical shoes .
A tall man with a square jaw and closely cropped hair , he touted his eleven years as a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment , an élite special-operations Army unit .
He talked about his sniper training @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for his country .
On his campaign Facebook page , he displayed his medals : a Silver Star , for valor in combat , and a Purple Heart .
“ I was born a protector and an overwatcher , ” he told a local television station .
Foley ’ s opponent in the Republican primary was Rick Jowers , a mild , approachable sheriff ’ s deputy with a handlebar mustache .
Jowers was well known , and largely well liked , throughout the county ; I heard stories of people calling him @ @ @ @ @ @ @ family disputes .
“ He was a darn good deputy , ” Terry Joy , who had been the sheriff of Callahan County since 2013 , told me .
“ He did his job good , got along with people good.
” Jowers had worked for the sheriff ’ s office for eight years , five of them as chief deputy .
“ He was just a good old country boy who wanted to help you .
Someone you could actually call and feel comfortable about it , ” said Marcia Shumway , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who , with her husband , Paul , supported Jowers in the race .
Foley repeatedly invoked his time in the Army .
“ I ’ m not cop-trained , I ’ m military-trained , ” he said , during a debate in Cross Plains , in January .
“ I ’ m on time , like all military people are .
I ’ m respectful , like all military people are.
” Jowers seemed thrown by his opponent ’ s tough-guy posturing , and offered a different vision for law enforcement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ doesn ’ t have nothing to do with what I ’ m doing for the county right now , ” he said .
He added that he , like Foley , was an Airborne Ranger with combat wounds : “ I served my country , I took a bullet for my country .
.
.
but we ’ re not going to try to run our sheriff ’ s department like the military.
” Around Christmas , Bart Kendrick went public on Facebook with his accusation about Foley ’ s residency , sure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instead , people called Bart a stalker .
He was disheartened by the community response , but his wife was energized .
She scoured Foley ’ s social-media accounts , trying to find other holes in his story .
One evening , she mentioned Foley ’ s military medals to her father , a retired colonel in the Air Force .
“ He said , ‘ A Silver Star—that ’ s , like , never given out , ’ ” Amber told me .
“ And he said , ‘ There are places @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this.
’ ” On January 13th , Amber filled out a form on Military Phonies , one of a number of Web sites dedicated to exposing people who invent or inflate their military service .
“ I am concerned that he may not have received [ the medals ] but is implying that he has , ” she wrote .
“ My father served 30 years in the Air Force and I have regard for servicemen .
I just need help in finding out if he does indeed have these medals.
” That @ @ @ @ @ @ @ e-mailed Amber , saying that it usually took the group several weeks to put together a complete record , and pointing her to a list of Silver Star recipients compiled by a military historian named Doug Sterner .
Foley was not on the list .
Three weeks later , Military Phonies published the results of its investigation , concluding that Foley was indeed an Army veteran but that his career was much less élite than he had claimed .
There was no evidence that he was an Airborne Ranger or a sniper , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or a Silver Star , or that he had been wounded in combat .
The Facebook page for the Clyde Police Department was soon flooded with comments from angry people across the country : “ Hey Clyde PD , you have a POS Poser in your midst ” ; “ Leroy Grant Foley those brand new cuff links will look good on you.
” Foley was placed on administrative leave .
It turned out that he had submitted a doctored DD 214—the record of military service—when he applied for his position , crediting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Arabian Liberation Medal and the Sniper Badge , neither of which exist .
Within a few days , Foley resigned .
“ I can ’ t answer why somebody would do those types of things .
In reality , he ’ s an honorably discharged military veteran , ” Robert Dalton , the Clyde police chief , told me .
“ It doesn ’ t make sense.
” Politicians lie to get us into wars ; generals lie about how well things are going ; soldiers lie about what they did during their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Washington awarded ribbons and badges to valorous Revolutionary War troops , he was already worrying about pretenders .
“ Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them they shall be severely punished , ” he wrote .
When Walter Washington Williams , thought to be the last surviving veteran of the Confederate Army , died , in 1959 , President Eisenhower called for a national day of mourning .
It turned out that Williams had fabricated his service , and that the second-longest-surviving @ @ @ @ @ @ @ In fact , according to the Civil War historian William Marvel , “ every one of the last dozen recognized Confederates was bogus.
” But it ’ s only recently that lying about military service has been considered a particularly heinous form of lying , one with its own name : stolen valor .
The phrase originated with B. G. ( Jug ) Burkett , a Texas stockbroker and a Vietnam veteran , whose attempts , in the nineteen-eighties , to raise funds for a memorial to Vietnam veterans from Texas were made @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stereotype that soldiers who returned from the war were “ losers , bums , drug addicts , drunks , derelicts—societal offal who had come back from the war plagued by nightmares and flashbacks that left them with the potential to go berserk at any moment.
” In 1988 , Burkett read a story in the Dallas Times Herald about Carl Dudley Williams , a homeless man who had shot and killed a police officer .
The Times Herald reported that Williams was a Vietnam veteran ; one of the paper ’ s columnists @ @ @ @ @ @ @ him.
” On a whim , Burkett filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Williams ’ s military records and discovered that he had never served in Vietnam .
Burkett began FOIA-ing with abandon .
He requested the records of a Green Beret who signed autographs for kids at parades : faker .
He looked into the Navy SEAL and the Green Beret who operated San Antonio ’ s Vietnam War Museum : both liars , although each thought that the other was legit .
He found that the actor Brian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s law-enforcement antagonist in “ First Blood , ” had lied about suffering combat wounds in Vietnam .
( Dennehy served five years in the Marines , but never in Vietnam ; he apologized after Burkett went public with his accusation . )
Burkett caught so many people distorting or inventing their military service that he wondered whether the dissemblers might be evidence of “ a national phenomenon , a weird ripple in the American psyche.
” By 1989 , Burkett was averaging one FOIA request a day .
He wrote that an @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that he was “ probably the Archives ’ number one individual FOIA user.
” In 1998 , Burkett self-published “ Stolen Valor : How the Vietnam Generation Was Robbed of Its Heroes and Its History , ” which he wrote with the investigative journalist Glenna Whitley .
The nearly seven-hundred-page book explored many of Burkett ’ s preoccupations—that P.T.S.D .
was an overdiagnosed condition cooked up by antiwar leftists ; that accusations of war crimes in Vietnam were overstated—but what captured readers ’ attention was his exposure of military fakers .
“ This @ @ @ @ @ @ @ going kind of viral , ” Whitley said .
Even so , there were only a handful of people regularly investigating false military claims .
“ Basically , there were three of us—myself , Jug Burkett , and a couple out of Missouri , ” Doug Sterner , who calls himself an “ accidental stolen-valor researcher , ” told me .
Sterner , who returned from Vietnam with two Bronze Stars , learned how to navigate the military-records system while compiling a database of people who ’ d been given the Medal of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ military award .
Like Burkett , Sterner verged on the obsessive .
By day , he managed an apartment building in Pueblo , Colorado ; in his spare time , he maintained lists of medal recipients and wrote eighty-one books , the majority about military history .
( His best-sellers are not about war , however .
“ My wife is a big fan of ‘ Fifty Shades of Grey , ’ so I wrote some books in that vein for our fortieth anniversary , and they sell more than all my other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , sounding a little abashed . )
Sterner had never intended to expose fakers—he was more interested in the real heroes—but he kept running across them .
At a gathering for honorees , in the nineties , a short man approached Sterner , holding a photograph of a man wearing a medal .
“ I hear you ’ re something of a Medal of Honor historian , ” he said .
“ Can you identify this man for me ?
” Sterner peered at the image .
“ I said , ‘ Well @ @ @ @ @ @ @ design of the Medal of Honor .
There ’ ve only been thirteen Medals of Honor awarded by the Air Force in history .
Only five of them are still living , and he ’ s not one of them , so this guy ’ s a phony.
’ And he stuck his hand out and said , ‘ Glad to meet you , I ’ m Tom Cottone with the F.B.I.
’ And that started our friendship .
”

Callahan County, an agricultural region outside Abilene, Texas, is a place where people pay attention to their neighbors. Bart Kendrick, whose family has lived in the county since the nineteenth century, takes particular notice of vehicles. (When I visited him, he greeted me by saying, “Nice truck. What year is it?”) Last summer, Bart saw something odd at a nearby house. In the morning, a pickup truck was parked in front of the garage. In the evening, the truck had been replaced by a patrol car. When Bart went to introduce himself to his new neighbors, no one answered the door. The yard was weedy; the windows were covered with aluminum foil.
In December, Bart and his wife, Amber, read in the local paper that Leroy Foley, a police officer in the nearby town of Clyde, was running for sheriff of Callahan County. In Foley’s public filings, he listed the neighboring house as his residence. To Bart, it seemed obvious that Foley didn’t live there but was merely using it as a place to switch out his vehicle after work. The Kendricks did a little digging and discovered that Foley lived fifty-five miles away, in another county, which under Texas law made him ineligible for the position.
Bart is a deliberate man with a long, wiry beard. If something strikes him as wrong, he feels obligated to fix it. Just before my visit, one of the family’s cats was killed by a raccoon. After Bart buried her, he reviewed his security-camera footage to identify the culprit, then spent several nights perched in a tree with a pistol until he got his revenge. Foley’s apparent lie about his residence offended Bart. He began to film himself knocking on the door and getting no answer. He photographed the trash can by the road to show that its contents never changed.
Foley promised to professionalize the sheriff’s department. He called the current deputies “a bunch of yahoos” and mocked them for wearing cowboy boots instead of tactical shoes. A tall man with a square jaw and closely cropped hair, he touted his eleven years as a member of the 75th Ranger Regiment, an élite special-operations Army unit. He talked about his sniper training and the bullets he’d taken for his country. On his campaign Facebook page, he displayed his medals: a Silver Star, for valor in combat, and a Purple Heart. “I was born a protector and an overwatcher,” he told a local television station.
Foley’s opponent in the Republican primary was Rick Jowers, a mild, approachable sheriff’s deputy with a handlebar mustache. Jowers was well known, and largely well liked, throughout the county; I heard stories of people calling him for help wrangling loose goats and managing family disputes. “He was a darn good deputy,” Terry Joy, who had been the sheriff of Callahan County since 2013, told me. “He did his job good, got along with people good.” Jowers had worked for the sheriff’s office for eight years, five of them as chief deputy. “He was just a good old country boy who wanted to help you. Someone you could actually call and feel comfortable about it,” said Marcia Shumway, a local stay-at-home mom and home-school teacher, who, with her husband, Paul, supported Jowers in the race.
Foley repeatedly invoked his time in the Army. “I’m not cop-trained, I’m military-trained,” he said, during a debate in Cross Plains, in January. “I’m on time, like all military people are. I’m respectful, like all military people are.” Jowers seemed thrown by his opponent’s tough-guy posturing, and offered a different vision for law enforcement in the county. “My military doesn’t have nothing to do with what I’m doing for the county right now,” he said. He added that he, like Foley, was an Airborne Ranger with combat wounds: “I served my country, I took a bullet for my country . . . but we’re not going to try to run our sheriff’s department like the military.”
Around Christmas, Bart Kendrick went public on Facebook with his accusation about Foley’s residency, sure that it would tank his candidacy. Instead, people called Bart a stalker. He was disheartened by the community response, but his wife was energized. She scoured Foley’s social-media accounts, trying to find other holes in his story. One evening, she mentioned Foley’s military medals to her father, a retired colonel in the Air Force. “He said, ‘A Silver Star—that’s, like, never given out,’ ” Amber told me. “And he said, ‘There are places out there that will research things like this.’ ”
“These are just as good as, if not better than, jelly beans.” Cartoon by Amy Hwang Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop
On January 13th, Amber filled out a form on Military Phonies, one of a number of Web sites dedicated to exposing people who invent or inflate their military service. “I am concerned that he may not have received [the medals] but is implying that he has,” she wrote. “My father served 30 years in the Air Force and I have regard for servicemen. I just need help in finding out if he does indeed have these medals.”
That night, a representative from Military Phonies e-mailed Amber, saying that it usually took the group several weeks to put together a complete record, and pointing her to a list of Silver Star recipients compiled by a military historian named Doug Sterner. Foley was not on the list.
Three weeks later, Military Phonies published the results of its investigation, concluding that Foley was indeed an Army veteran but that his career was much less élite than he had claimed. There was no evidence that he was an Airborne Ranger or a sniper, that he had received a Purple Heart or a Silver Star, or that he had been wounded in combat.
The Facebook page for the Clyde Police Department was soon flooded with comments from angry people across the country: “Hey Clyde PD, you have a POS Poser in your midst”; “Leroy Grant Foley those brand new cuff links will look good on you.” Foley was placed on administrative leave. It turned out that he had submitted a doctored DD 214—the record of military service—when he applied for his position, crediting himself with such honors as the Saudi Arabian Liberation Medal and the Sniper Badge, neither of which exist. Within a few days, Foley resigned. “I can’t answer why somebody would do those types of things. In reality, he’s an honorably discharged military veteran,” Robert Dalton, the Clyde police chief, told me. “It doesn’t make sense.”
Politicians lie to get us into wars; generals lie about how well things are going; soldiers lie about what they did during their service. In 1782, when George Washington awarded ribbons and badges to valorous Revolutionary War troops, he was already worrying about pretenders. “Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of them they shall be severely punished,” he wrote. When Walter Washington Williams, thought to be the last surviving veteran of the Confederate Army, died, in 1959, President Eisenhower called for a national day of mourning. It turned out that Williams had fabricated his service, and that the second-longest-surviving Confederate soldier probably had, too. In fact, according to the Civil War historian William Marvel, “every one of the last dozen recognized Confederates was bogus.” But it’s only recently that lying about military service has been considered a particularly heinous form of lying, one with its own name: stolen valor.
The phrase originated with B. G. (Jug) Burkett, a Texas stockbroker and a Vietnam veteran, whose attempts, in the nineteen-eighties, to raise funds for a memorial to Vietnam veterans from Texas were made difficult, he wrote, by the stereotype that soldiers who returned from the war were “losers, bums, drug addicts, drunks, derelicts—societal offal who had come back from the war plagued by nightmares and flashbacks that left them with the potential to go berserk at any moment.” In 1988, Burkett read a story in the Dallas Times Herald about Carl Dudley Williams, a homeless man who had shot and killed a police officer. The Times Herald reported that Williams was a Vietnam veteran; one of the paper’s columnists wondered whether “Vietnam did that to him.” On a whim, Burkett filed a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain Williams’s military records and discovered that he had never served in Vietnam.
Burkett began FOIA-ing with abandon. He requested the records of a Green Beret who signed autographs for kids at parades: faker. He looked into the Navy SEAL and the Green Beret who operated San Antonio’s Vietnam War Museum: both liars, although each thought that the other was legit. He found that the actor Brian Dennehy, famous for playing Rambo’s law-enforcement antagonist in “First Blood,” had lied about suffering combat wounds in Vietnam. (Dennehy served five years in the Marines, but never in Vietnam; he apologized after Burkett went public with his accusation.) Burkett caught so many people distorting or inventing their military service that he wondered whether the dissemblers might be evidence of “a national phenomenon, a weird ripple in the American psyche.” By 1989, Burkett was averaging one FOIA request a day. He wrote that an official at the National Archives told him that he was “probably the Archives’ number one individual FOIA user.”


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Each week , we provide a cartoon in need of a caption .
You , the reader , submit your @ @ @ @ @ three finalists , and you vote for your favorite .
Anyone age thirteen or older @ @ @ @ @ To read the complete rules , click here .

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit your caption here, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To read the complete rules, click here.
Navied Mahdavian Copy link to cartoon Copy link to cartoon Shop Shop


newyorker--2020-10-20--The West Coast Wildfires Are Apocalypse, Again

Few of us noticed the milestone , however , because it turns out that off-the-charts pollution doesn ’ t feel very different from barely-on-the-charts pollution—which we ’ d endured since the previous evening , and would continue to experience through the following week .
Familiar cliffs and ridges disappeared , and clouds of smoke hung just above the pavement .
Even through an N95 mask , the air tasted of ashes .
Inside , opening a window was out of the question ; without air-conditioning , it was sweltering , and without an air purifier , it stank of burning @ @ @ @ @ @ @ clothes and furniture .
Becalmed and doubly quarantined , we waited for relief , checking air-quality forecasts and peering out the windows for signs of change .
Though the skies never turned lurid orange and red , as they did in the Bay Area , they fluctuated between what David Bieloh , of The American Prospect , dubbed Unholy Ochre and Apocalypto Smoke .
This fall , the notion of apocalypse was routinely invoked on the West Coast , both in dark jokes and official comments .
On September 13th , Washington ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Senator Jeff Merkley , of Oregon , separately described the fires as “ apocalyptic.
” “ I drove six hundred miles up and down the state , and I never escaped the smoke , ” Merkley told ABC News .
Two days later , Art Cullen , the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Iowa ’ s Storm Lake Times , characterized the West Coast as an “ orange hellscape.
” The Four Horsemen might not be en route yet , he wrote in the Guardian , but they “ are mounted.
” If by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ catastrophic , ” then yes , the wave of wildfires that began in Southern California in early September has been apocalyptic .
By October 16th , the fires had burned more than eight million acres across twelve states , nearly double the acreage burned by the same time last year .
While western North America is accustomed to wildfires , the combination of climate change and more than a century of fire suppression is creating larger , more destructive conflagrations , and this fire season is on track to be the most destructive @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , are now regional : friends from Los Angeles to Vancouver can compare dire air-quality data .
The August Complex Fire in Northern California grew to more than a million acres in early October , leading state fire officials to upgrade it from a “ megafire ” to the state ’ s first “ gigafire.
” ( While the label is distinctive , the scale of the August Complex is not : four of the state ’ s five largest-ever fires started in 2020 . )
So far , the fires have killed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than nine thousand structures .
In Oregon , more than four thousand homes have burned ; in September , one massive fire levelled hundreds of homes and businesses in the small towns of Talent and Phoenix , near the California line , while another threatened the outer suburbs of Portland .
Tens of thousands of Oregonians were forced to evacuate , and almost two thousand are still displaced , facing not only personal upheaval but also increased risk of transmitting or contracting the coronavirus .
In north-central Washington State over Labor Day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ their one-year-old son , Uriel , were trapped by the fast-moving Cold Springs Fire .
Forced to abandon their vehicle and run overland for nearly a mile , the Hylands were severely burned .
Uriel did not survive .
For the rest of us , fortunate in our comparative safety , the fires are a catastrophe of a quieter kind .
In a year of lost normality , the fires ’ outlandish size and reach are another sign that normal is gone for good .
Yet these fires are not the end of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most of us , the end of our world .
In the face of complicated threats like climate change , it ’ s tempting to talk of the apocalypse : Game Over might not be pleasant , but it can seem easier to contend with than seemingly insoluble realities .
The religion scholar Timothy Beal , in a history of the Book of Revelation , observes that the apocalypse offers the additional temptation of a clean break with the past .
“ It is an ending that is also a beginning , ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ new beginning in which death and suffering will be no more.
” But for those of us lucky enough to survive the fires , the pandemic , or any of the other threats we so readily describe as “ apocalyptic , ” there will be no fresh start .
When this fire season ends , the climate will still be changing , the forests will still be suffering from shortsighted management , and millions of people will still be living in harm ’ s way .
In order to reduce the human and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ must consider the past and the present .
What the feminist theologian Catherine Keller calls our “ apocalypse habit ” blinds us to both .
With time , and sustained attention , the apparently apocalyptic can evolve into something else .
Three years ago , a fifteen-year-old boy tossed a lit firework into a canyon some thirty miles downriver from my town , setting off a blaze that spread to close to fifty thousand acres and burned for three months .
Then as now , heavy smoke trapped us inside for days , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ talk was of apocalypse : while only four homes were destroyed by what became known as the Eagle Creek Fire , the canyon where it started was a beloved recreation area , and social media was filled with angry obituaries for it .
As the Eagle Creek Fire died down , though , it turned out that the viral photographs of its hungry orange flames had told only part of the story .
Like many wildfires , it burned hot in some places and skipped over others .
The canyon was changed forever @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
The nonprofit group Friends of the Columbia Gorge , which had been flooded with donations and offers of help , organized hundreds of volunteers to uproot exotic , fast-growing plant species such as Himalayan blackberry , English ivy , and an odiferous European geranium known as Stinky Bob .
Other groups led the rebuilding of trails .
Three years later , a dedicated corps of about seventy volunteers is still tending to the canyon , after reorganizing into small groups in order to continue work through the pandemic .
Instead of trying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was , they ’ re fostering diversity in the future forest , protecting it as best they can against catastrophes to come .
Pulling weeds can ’ t rebuild a home , much less bring back a loved one lost to fire .
But the practical work of restoration and protection—not only in the woods but also in town halls and state legislatures—can help shield us all from disasters to come , and is all the more urgent in the face of the Trump Administration ’ s indifference to scientific evidence and blue-state @ @ @ @ @ @ @ update building codes and planning policies , as some California legislators are now struggling to do , so that fewer homes are built in fire-prone areas and those that are can better resist the flames .
Public agencies and individual homeowners can reduce the risks to existing structures through prescribed burns and other fuel-reduction efforts .
Measures at every level can address the inequalities exacerbated by wildfire : in the southern Oregon town of Talent , where the fires decimated the mobile-home parks that make up much of the area ’ s scarce @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an emergency ordinance preventing the parks from being converted into single-family subdivisions , and many of the region ’ s local officials and community activists emphasize that rebuilding plans must include affordable housing .
Meanwhile , emissions reductions—at local , state , and regional scales—will give future generations a far better shot at survival .
This year , after particulate concentrations peaked on September 11th , the smoke shrouded our streets for another six days .
When it rained , we wandered into the downpour , masks off , to wave at one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ tendrils of the August Complex Fire were already on their way , though , and before the end of the month our sunsets were once again florid with smoke .
For now , the sky is blue , but fire season is not yet over : fifty-eight large fires are still burning across the Western states .

On September 11th, at about four o’clock in the afternoon, the concentration of fine particulates in the air above my small town in southern Washington State peaked at eight hundred and ninety-five micrograms per cubic metre. Owing to an unlucky combination of nearby wildfires, wind currents, and topography, our air pollution was off the charts of any standard index, and at the time ranked among the worst in the world.
Few of us noticed the milestone, however, because it turns out that off-the-charts pollution doesn’t feel very different from barely-on-the-charts pollution—which we’d endured since the previous evening, and would continue to experience through the following week. Familiar cliffs and ridges disappeared, and clouds of smoke hung just above the pavement. Even through an N95 mask, the air tasted of ashes. Inside, opening a window was out of the question; without air-conditioning, it was sweltering, and without an air purifier, it stank of burning trash, a smell that quickly permeated clothes and furniture. Becalmed and doubly quarantined, we waited for relief, checking air-quality forecasts and peering out the windows for signs of change. Though the skies never turned lurid orange and red, as they did in the Bay Area, they fluctuated between what David Bieloh, of The American Prospect, dubbed Unholy Ochre and Apocalypto Smoke.
This fall, the notion of apocalypse was routinely invoked on the West Coast, both in dark jokes and official comments. On September 13th, Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, and Senator Jeff Merkley, of Oregon, separately described the fires as “apocalyptic.” “I drove six hundred miles up and down the state, and I never escaped the smoke,” Merkley told ABC News. Two days later, Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of Iowa’s Storm Lake Times, characterized the West Coast as an “orange hellscape.” The Four Horsemen might not be en route yet, he wrote in the Guardian, but they “are mounted.”
If by “apocalyptic” we mean simply “catastrophic,” then yes, the wave of wildfires that began in Southern California in early September has been apocalyptic. By October 16th, the fires had burned more than eight million acres across twelve states, nearly double the acreage burned by the same time last year. While western North America is accustomed to wildfires, the combination of climate change and more than a century of fire suppression is creating larger, more destructive conflagrations, and this fire season is on track to be the most destructive yet. The consequences, once local, are now regional: friends from Los Angeles to Vancouver can compare dire air-quality data.
The August Complex Fire in Northern California grew to more than a million acres in early October, leading state fire officials to upgrade it from a “megafire” to the state’s first “gigafire.” (While the label is distinctive, the scale of the August Complex is not: four of the state’s five largest-ever fires started in 2020.) So far, the fires have killed thirty-one people in California, and destroyed more than nine thousand structures. In Oregon, more than four thousand homes have burned; in September, one massive fire levelled hundreds of homes and businesses in the small towns of Talent and Phoenix, near the California line, while another threatened the outer suburbs of Portland. Tens of thousands of Oregonians were forced to evacuate, and almost two thousand are still displaced, facing not only personal upheaval but also increased risk of transmitting or contracting the coronavirus. In north-central Washington State over Labor Day weekend, Jake and Jamie Hyland and their one-year-old son, Uriel, were trapped by the fast-moving Cold Springs Fire. Forced to abandon their vehicle and run overland for nearly a mile, the Hylands were severely burned. Uriel did not survive.
For the rest of us, fortunate in our comparative safety, the fires are a catastrophe of a quieter kind. In a year of lost normality, the fires’ outlandish size and reach are another sign that normal is gone for good. Yet these fires are not the end of the world, or even, for most of us, the end of our world. In the face of complicated threats like climate change, it’s tempting to talk of the apocalypse: Game Over might not be pleasant, but it can seem easier to contend with than seemingly insoluble realities. The religion scholar Timothy Beal, in a history of the Book of Revelation, observes that the apocalypse offers the additional temptation of a clean break with the past. “It is an ending that is also a beginning,” he writes, “an overwhelmingly extravagant new beginning in which death and suffering will be no more.”
But for those of us lucky enough to survive the fires, the pandemic, or any of the other threats we so readily describe as “apocalyptic,” there will be no fresh start. When this fire season ends, the climate will still be changing, the forests will still be suffering from shortsighted management, and millions of people will still be living in harm’s way. In order to reduce the human and environmental toll of future fires, we must consider the past and the present. What the feminist theologian Catherine Keller calls our “apocalypse habit” blinds us to both.
With time, and sustained attention, the apparently apocalyptic can evolve into something else. Three years ago, a fifteen-year-old boy tossed a lit firework into a canyon some thirty miles downriver from my town, setting off a blaze that spread to close to fifty thousand acres and burned for three months. Then as now, heavy smoke trapped us inside for days, and, then as now, the talk was of apocalypse: while only four homes were destroyed by what became known as the Eagle Creek Fire, the canyon where it started was a beloved recreation area, and social media was filled with angry obituaries for it.
As the Eagle Creek Fire died down, though, it turned out that the viral photographs of its hungry orange flames had told only part of the story. Like many wildfires, it burned hot in some places and skipped over others. The canyon was changed forever, but it was far from lifeless. The nonprofit group Friends of the Columbia Gorge, which had been flooded with donations and offers of help, organized hundreds of volunteers to uproot exotic, fast-growing plant species such as Himalayan blackberry, English ivy, and an odiferous European geranium known as Stinky Bob. Other groups led the rebuilding of trails. Three years later, a dedicated corps of about seventy volunteers is still tending to the canyon, after reorganizing into small groups in order to continue work through the pandemic. Instead of trying to return the forest to what it was, they’re fostering diversity in the future forest, protecting it as best they can against catastrophes to come.


newyorker--2020-10-19--The Wunderkind Iranian Director Who Stopped Making Films

The Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf is one of the best modern directors , and one of the most precocious of all time , but , even when the repertory houses were in high gear prior to the lockdown , her films were rarely shown .
Makhmalbaf made her first feature , “ The Apple , ” in 1997 , at the age of seventeen ; her second , “ Blackboards , ” came out in 2000 , and her third , “ At Five in the Afternoon , ” three years after that .
All three display an artistry that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the leading edge , and that is of its place yet reflects an international sensibility—and I ’ ve recently discovered that all are available to stream .
Makhmalbaf expanded , intensified , and refined her artistry from film to film , becoming , by the age of twenty-three , one of the most original directors in the world .
( I haven ’ t seen her fourth film , “ Two-Legged Horse , ” from 2008 , which isn ’ t streaming anywhere . )
She should have joined other rising filmmakers of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a modern master .
Instead , for reasons unknown to me , she hasn ’ t made a film in more than a decade ( nor left any trace of activity online at all ) .
Makhmalbaf is the scion of a cinematic dynasty .
Her father , Mohsen Makhmalbaf ( who co-wrote the script for “ The Apple ” ) , has been a leading Iranian director since the nineteen-eighties ; her stepmother , Marziyeh Meshkini , has directed three features , including “ The Day I Became a Woman , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Hana , has directed two .
In effect , the Makhmalbaf family is the Iranian counterpart to the Coppolas—and , remarkably , like Sofia Coppola ’ s first feature , “ The Virgin Suicides , ” from 1999 , Samira Makhmalbaf ’ s first feature , “ The Apple , ” is a story of daughters imprisoned at home .
It is also an amazing fusion of documentary and fiction , a dramatization of a real-life event reënacted by the actual people it concerned .
( The version that ’ s currently @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The story is centered on a Tehran family , the Naderis , whose elderly patriarch , the father of twelve-year-old twin daughters , is so dogmatically religious that , in order to prevent them from even being glimpsed by males , he refuses to allow them to go out in public at all , ever , from birth onward—not to school , not to play , not to a store .
The girls , Zahra and Massoumeh , remain imprisoned at home , locked behind two sets of gates inside the house .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; their gaits are cramped and awkward .
Their mother , who is blind , accepts the patriarchal dictate .
But when neighbors realize that there are children in the household , they call the authorities , and the father is forced , under pain of punishment , to let them out .
Makhmalbaf lends the story a plainly polyphonic density , blending documentary footage with a true-crime drama , complete with denunciation , investigation , accusation , intervention , and the girls ’ experience of liberation .
Makhmalbaf films children with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of mischievous wonder and surprising autonomy ; she also has a keen eye for spontaneous symbolism , such as mirrors and locks and the titular fruit itself , which is prominently featured and suggests dramas of self-consciousness and unnamed temptations and longings .
Makhmalbaf ’ s second feature , “ Blackboards , ” is also about oppressed children—it ’ s a story of violence , deprivation , and terror , set during the Iran-Iraq War , near the border , and centered on Kurdish people who ’ ve been forced to leave their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ subjected to a chemical-weapons attack .
The title comes from blackboards that a group of itinerant teachers , in search of work , carry on their backs—and that also serve surprising purposes along the way , including as shields from incoming fire .
The teachers can ’ t get students , which is to say that children in the region are getting no education .
One teacher falls in with a group of boys who are “ mules , ” transporting contraband , at high risk , through the dangerous region ; another @ @ @ @ @ @ @ heading toward the border—and , along the journey , marries a widowed young mother .
It ’ s the teachers who get taught along the way—who find , in the struggle for survival amid the crossfire of two hostile powers , lessons that don ’ t come from their books .
Makhmalbaf herself , in her documentary-rooted cinema , collects and preserves these lessons , and , moreover , lends a highly textured , symbolized identity to them by way of her discerning and composing eye .
Her ironic vision doesn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basis for recording and transmitting experience—as a model for her own cinema .
Attention to heroic struggles amid horrors—and to the beauty that survivors embrace nonetheless—is heightened and deepened in “ At Five in the Afternoon , ” one of the great movies of life in wartime ; it ’ s reportedly the first film made in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban .
In it , Makhmalbaf goes further in her depiction of the urgency of education as a crucial springboard for progress .
It ’ s a tale of two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Noqreh , who ’ s about twenty , isn ’ t allowed by her extremely devout father to go to school .
With his horse-drawn cart , he brings her instead to a Koranic school , but she sneaks out : she removes her burqa , replaces her slippers with white high-heeled shoes , and heads to a large , outdoor , secular school for girls , where the teacher , a woman , encourages her students to become engineers , teachers , doctors , and even the President of Afghanistan—an idea that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her sister-in-law , is married to Noqreh ’ s brother Akhtar , a truck driver who has vanished ; they have an infant , who is starving to death because Leylomah , herself malnourished , can no longer produce milk .
“ At Five in the Afternoon ” is an appalled , grief-stricken movie filled with characters who ’ ve endured horrific losses .
The film displays a city in ruins , unearths decades of political trauma , depicts ongoing violence , and reveals deep-rooted religious fanaticism—yet Makhmalbaf ’ s sense of teeming @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her passionate vision of the intellectual life , opens dimensions of inner experience as if forging a desperately sought political , material , and social reconstruction of the country .
The dialectical element in Makhmalbaf ’ s first two films bursts out dominantly and proudly in “ At Five in the Afternoon , ” as in the teacher ’ s interrogations of her students—and the students ’ incisive debate with one another .
Challenged by a classmate on the issue of a Muslim woman becoming a head of state , Noqreh cites the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( The pushback that she gets is fascinating . )
Encountering a French soldier on patrol , Noqreh engages him in a remarkable , unorthodox political discussion .
When a large group of refugees arrives by truck from Pakistan , she speaks with a young man in the group about Bhutto , which gives rise to a warm and promising friendship .
He ’ s a poet , and his recitation ( in Dari ) of a death-seared poem by Federico García Lorca gives the movie its title , forges their bond @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of “ At Five in the Afternoon ” on location summoned Makhmalbaf ’ s most creative inspirations , a visual sensibility that her first two features only sketched , and which , here , bursts forth ecstatically from her surroundings .
The film is a modern pictorial masterwork , featuring visions of a vigorous visual energy and a revelatory eye for the vestigial beauties , inspiring exertions , and incidental wonders of a ravaged city struggling toward rebirth .
Scenes of the sea of young women ’ s faces ( and , for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of their heads ) in school , of the crowd of survivors from Pakistan alighting from trucks , of a burned-out airplane fuselage that serves as a shelter , and of a vast ruined compound where the central family takes refuge have a pointillistic specificity and a monumental power that matches the passionate intimacy of Makhmalbaf ’ s closeup portraiture .
Her trenchant visual composition while on location ( she and Ebrahim Ghafori did the cinematography ) , her documentary-rooted sense of exquisite style , is both a mark of her art and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with those of Wes Anderson and , again , Sofia Coppola , whose documentary views of Tokyo in “ Lost in Translation , ” made at just about the same time , are similarly distinctive .
Yet Anderson and Coppola have made a batch of major films since then , and I ’ ve long wondered why Makhmalbaf has not .
We served together on a film-festival jury , in 2003 , but haven ’ t been in touch since then ; recent attempts to contact her through her family ’ s film @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Makhmalbaf company ’ s office went unanswered .
A piece in Screen Daily from last November describes the tribulations of the Makhmalbafs , who have been living in London since 2011 .
Her father , who was politically persecuted in Iran , left the country in 2005 ; Makhmalbaf and her stepmother , who are also in exile , have been denied passports by the British government .
And it turns out that , in this year ’ s push by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to expand the ranks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ eight hundred and nineteen newly invited members is Samira Makhmalbaf .
( It ’ s not clear whether she has actually accepted . )
Her voice may count there—but her cinematic voice , one of the most vital of our time , is conspicuous in its absence .

The Iranian director Samira Makhmalbaf last released a feature in 2008. Photograph by Piet Goethals / Reporters / Redux
The Iranian filmmaker Samira Makhmalbaf is one of the best modern directors, and one of the most precocious of all time, but, even when the repertory houses were in high gear prior to the lockdown, her films were rarely shown. Makhmalbaf made her first feature, “The Apple,” in 1997, at the age of seventeen; her second, “Blackboards,” came out in 2000, and her third, “At Five in the Afternoon,” three years after that. All three display an artistry that is intensely of its time yet at the leading edge, and that is of its place yet reflects an international sensibility—and I’ve recently discovered that all are available to stream. Makhmalbaf expanded, intensified, and refined her artistry from film to film, becoming, by the age of twenty-three, one of the most original directors in the world. (I haven’t seen her fourth film, “Two-Legged Horse,” from 2008, which isn’t streaming anywhere.) She should have joined other rising filmmakers of the time in being considered, now, a modern master. Instead, for reasons unknown to me, she hasn’t made a film in more than a decade (nor left any trace of activity online at all).
Makhmalbaf is the scion of a cinematic dynasty. Her father, Mohsen Makhmalbaf (who co-wrote the script for “The Apple”), has been a leading Iranian director since the nineteen-eighties; her stepmother, Marziyeh Meshkini, has directed three features, including “The Day I Became a Woman,” from 2000; her younger sister, Hana, has directed two. In effect, the Makhmalbaf family is the Iranian counterpart to the Coppolas—and, remarkably, like Sofia Coppola’s first feature, “The Virgin Suicides,” from 1999, Samira Makhmalbaf’s first feature, “The Apple,” is a story of daughters imprisoned at home. It is also an amazing fusion of documentary and fiction, a dramatization of a real-life event reënacted by the actual people it concerned. (The version that’s currently streaming only has Spanish subtitles.)
The story is centered on a Tehran family, the Naderis, whose elderly patriarch, the father of twelve-year-old twin daughters, is so dogmatically religious that, in order to prevent them from even being glimpsed by males, he refuses to allow them to go out in public at all, ever, from birth onward—not to school, not to play, not to a store. The girls, Zahra and Massoumeh, remain imprisoned at home, locked behind two sets of gates inside the house. They have hardly even learned to speak; their gaits are cramped and awkward. Their mother, who is blind, accepts the patriarchal dictate. But when neighbors realize that there are children in the household, they call the authorities, and the father is forced, under pain of punishment, to let them out. Makhmalbaf lends the story a plainly polyphonic density, blending documentary footage with a true-crime drama, complete with denunciation, investigation, accusation, intervention, and the girls’ experience of liberation. Makhmalbaf films children with a vibrantly unsentimental empathy, capturing their sense of mischievous wonder and surprising autonomy; she also has a keen eye for spontaneous symbolism, such as mirrors and locks and the titular fruit itself, which is prominently featured and suggests dramas of self-consciousness and unnamed temptations and longings.
Makhmalbaf’s second feature, “Blackboards,” is also about oppressed children—it’s a story of violence, deprivation, and terror, set during the Iran-Iraq War, near the border, and centered on Kurdish people who’ve been forced to leave their home town of Halabja after it was subjected to a chemical-weapons attack. The title comes from blackboards that a group of itinerant teachers, in search of work, carry on their backs—and that also serve surprising purposes along the way, including as shields from incoming fire. The teachers can’t get students, which is to say that children in the region are getting no education. One teacher falls in with a group of boys who are “mules,” transporting contraband, at high risk, through the dangerous region; another teacher joins a large group of migrants heading toward the border—and, along the journey, marries a widowed young mother. It’s the teachers who get taught along the way—who find, in the struggle for survival amid the crossfire of two hostile powers, lessons that don’t come from their books. Makhmalbaf herself, in her documentary-rooted cinema, collects and preserves these lessons, and, moreover, lends a highly textured, symbolized identity to them by way of her discerning and composing eye. Her ironic vision doesn’t deride education but affirms it as a basis for recording and transmitting experience—as a model for her own cinema.
Agheleh Rezaie appears in Samira Makhmalbaf’s film “At Five in the Afternoon.” Photograph from RGR Collection / Alamy
Attention to heroic struggles amid horrors—and to the beauty that survivors embrace nonetheless—is heightened and deepened in “At Five in the Afternoon,” one of the great movies of life in wartime; it’s reportedly the first film made in Kabul after the fall of the Taliban. In it, Makhmalbaf goes further in her depiction of the urgency of education as a crucial springboard for progress. It’s a tale of two sisters-in-law amid the ruins of Kabul. Noqreh, who’s about twenty, isn’t allowed by her extremely devout father to go to school. With his horse-drawn cart, he brings her instead to a Koranic school, but she sneaks out: she removes her burqa, replaces her slippers with white high-heeled shoes, and heads to a large, outdoor, secular school for girls, where the teacher, a woman, encourages her students to become engineers, teachers, doctors, and even the President of Afghanistan—an idea that Noqreh takes very seriously. Leylomah, her sister-in-law, is married to Noqreh’s brother Akhtar, a truck driver who has vanished; they have an infant, who is starving to death because Leylomah, herself malnourished, can no longer produce milk.
“At Five in the Afternoon” is an appalled, grief-stricken movie filled with characters who’ve endured horrific losses. The film displays a city in ruins, unearths decades of political trauma, depicts ongoing violence, and reveals deep-rooted religious fanaticism—yet Makhmalbaf’s sense of teeming and intimate detail, as well as her passionate vision of the intellectual life, opens dimensions of inner experience as if forging a desperately sought political, material, and social reconstruction of the country. The dialectical element in Makhmalbaf’s first two films bursts out dominantly and proudly in “At Five in the Afternoon,” as in the teacher’s interrogations of her students—and the students’ incisive debate with one another. Challenged by a classmate on the issue of a Muslim woman becoming a head of state, Noqreh cites the example of Benazir Bhutto, in Pakistan. (The pushback that she gets is fascinating.) Encountering a French soldier on patrol, Noqreh engages him in a remarkable, unorthodox political discussion. When a large group of refugees arrives by truck from Pakistan, she speaks with a young man in the group about Bhutto, which gives rise to a warm and promising friendship. He’s a poet, and his recitation (in Dari) of a death-seared poem by Federico García Lorca gives the movie its title, forges their bond, and portends danger.
The filming of “At Five in the Afternoon” on location summoned Makhmalbaf’s most creative inspirations, a visual sensibility that her first two features only sketched, and which, here, bursts forth ecstatically from her surroundings. The film is a modern pictorial masterwork, featuring visions of a vigorous visual energy and a revelatory eye for the vestigial beauties, inspiring exertions, and incidental wonders of a ravaged city struggling toward rebirth. Scenes of the sea of young women’s faces (and, for that matter, of the white-scarved backs of their heads) in school, of the crowd of survivors from Pakistan alighting from trucks, of a burned-out airplane fuselage that serves as a shelter, and of a vast ruined compound where the central family takes refuge have a pointillistic specificity and a monumental power that matches the passionate intimacy of Makhmalbaf’s closeup portraiture. Her trenchant visual composition while on location (she and Ebrahim Ghafori did the cinematography), her documentary-rooted sense of exquisite style, is both a mark of her art and of the times—it connects her cinematic sensibility with those of Wes Anderson and, again, Sofia Coppola, whose documentary views of Tokyo in “Lost in Translation,” made at just about the same time, are similarly distinctive.
Yet Anderson and Coppola have made a batch of major films since then, and I’ve long wondered why Makhmalbaf has not. We served together on a film-festival jury, in 2003, but haven’t been in touch since then; recent attempts to contact her through her family’s film Web site and phone calls to the Makhmalbaf company’s office went unanswered. A piece in Screen Daily from last November describes the tribulations of the Makhmalbafs, who have been living in London since 2011. Her father, who was politically persecuted in Iran, left the country in 2005; Makhmalbaf and her stepmother, who are also in exile, have been denied passports by the British government. And it turns out that, in this year’s push by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to expand the ranks of Oscar voters, one of the eight hundred and nineteen newly invited members is Samira Makhmalbaf. (It’s not clear whether she has actually accepted.) Her voice may count there—but her cinematic voice, one of the most vital of our time, is conspicuous in its absence.


newyorker--2020-10-19--Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Elizabeth Warren on the Limits of Bipartisanship

At the 2020 New Yorker Festival , this month , Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren joined Andrew Marantz @ @ @ @ @ race and how Joe Biden should lead if he wins the election .
Biden often @ @ @ @ @ cherished value that he would restore to Washington , but Ocasio-Cortez is dubious .
“ @ @ @ @ @ , seems like this kind of vintage fantasy .
Like , it seems like people @ @ @ @ @ that I ’ ve never lived through , ” she says .
“ Bipartisanship got @ @ @ @ @ .
.
[ and ] bank bailouts .
And we very rarely see the results @ @ @ @ @ justice , yielding in economic justice for working families , yielding in improvements to health @ @ @ @ @ Just because something is bipartisan doesn ’ t mean it ’ s good , or @ @ @ @ @

Source photographs by Liu Jie / Xinhua / Alamy (Warren); Brian Cahn / ZUMA / Alamy (Ocasio-Cortez)
At the 2020 New Yorker Festival, this month, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Elizabeth Warren joined Andrew Marantz to talk about the Presidential race and how Joe Biden should lead if he wins the election. Biden often speaks about bipartisanship as a cherished value that he would restore to Washington, but Ocasio-Cortez is dubious. “Bipartisanship, to young people, seems like this kind of vintage fantasy. Like, it seems like people are yearning for this time that I’ve never lived through,” she says. “Bipartisanship got us the Iraq War . . . [and] bank bailouts. And we very rarely see the results of bipartisanship yielding in racial justice, yielding in economic justice for working families, yielding in improvements to health care. . . . Just because something is bipartisan doesn’t mean it’s good, or good for you.”