newyorker--2020-08-06--When Pete Hamill Was the Editor of the New York Daily News

In September , 1997 , when Pete Hamill , who died on Wednesday , was fired from his job as the editor of the Daily News , the staff took him out to tell him how much his short reign at the newspaper had meant to them .
When he was appointed , just eight months earlier , the paper was still recovering from a long and bitter strike , followed by bankruptcy and a steady slide in readership .
Hamill ’ s arrival was celebrated as something of a rebirth for staff and readers alike .
Here was Hamill @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in tabloid tours of duty at the Daily News , the Post and New York Newsday , whose columns were often prose poems that lifted the city and its people .
Here was a writer who had dropped out of high school , worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard , studied art , and whose steady , rumbling voice helped define what it meant to be a New Yorker .
His many books included “ A Drinking Life , ” a marvellous memoir of his Brooklyn youth and his battle to put down @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , for God ’ s sake , the liner notes for Bob Dylan ’ s greatest album , “ Blood on the Tracks.
” Hamill , the man who had helped persuade Robert F. Kennedy to run for President , and who had been at his side when he was gunned down , in Los Angeles .
Now he was coming back to the Daily News to right the ship and to remind us why we had wanted to get into this business in the first place .
That it didn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ surprise .
He asked his friend , Norman Mailer , to serialize a novel about the life of Christ in the Sunday paper .
The publishers , Mort Zuckerman and Fred Drasner , were not thrilled .
He ordered less about Donald Trump , and as little as possible about the British Royal Family , to appear in the news pages .
This , too , agitated the owners .
But he started talking to reporters about their stories .
He asked , as well , about their lives .
He brought in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Toole , from Ireland , to do something new and creative as the chief drama critic .
He rekindled the paper ’ s original mission to write about the troubles and travails of everyday New Yorkers .
When a reporter asked to travel to Mexico— a previously unheard-of expense—to write about a manufacturing plant that had relocated there after decades in Long Island City , he said yes , and ran the story that resulted on the front page .
He devoted a full eight pages to a photo and story spread about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was desperately trying to kick her heroin habit .
When the newsroom rumors began to circulate that Hamill was on thin ice , the staff put together a petition demanding that he remain .
More than a hundred people signed within a couple of hours .
The publishers were unimpressed .
Hamill took his ouster with the same quiet good grace with which he handled most problems .
At a bar near the paper , the non-drinking , now ex-editor did his best to cheer everyone else up .
Being a tabloid editor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was like being manager of the Mets .
It ’ s only a matter of time before you get fired .
“ Newspapers , ” he said , leaning back against the bar , “ will always break your heart .
”

Hamill took his ouster from the Daily News with the same quiet good grace with which he handled most problems. Photograph by Jim Cooper / AP / Shutterstock
In September, 1997, when Pete Hamill, who died on Wednesday, was fired from his job as the editor of the Daily News, the staff took him out to tell him how much his short reign at the newspaper had meant to them. When he was appointed, just eight months earlier, the paper was still recovering from a long and bitter strike, followed by bankruptcy and a steady slide in readership. Hamill’s arrival was celebrated as something of a rebirth for staff and readers alike. Here was Hamill, the veteran newsman who had put in tabloid tours of duty at the Daily News, the Post and New York Newsday, whose columns were often prose poems that lifted the city and its people. Here was a writer who had dropped out of high school, worked in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, studied art, and whose steady, rumbling voice helped define what it meant to be a New Yorker. His many books included “A Drinking Life,” a marvellous memoir of his Brooklyn youth and his battle to put down the glass. He had even written, for God’s sake, the liner notes for Bob Dylan’s greatest album, “Blood on the Tracks.” Hamill, the man who had helped persuade Robert F. Kennedy to run for President, and who had been at his side when he was gunned down, in Los Angeles. Now he was coming back to the Daily News to right the ship and to remind us why we had wanted to get into this business in the first place.
That it didn’t work out wasn’t entirely a surprise. He asked his friend, Norman Mailer, to serialize a novel about the life of Christ in the Sunday paper. The publishers, Mort Zuckerman and Fred Drasner, were not thrilled. He ordered less about Donald Trump, and as little as possible about the British Royal Family, to appear in the news pages. This, too, agitated the owners. But he started talking to reporters about their stories. He asked, as well, about their lives. He brought in a magnificent writer, Fintan O’Toole, from Ireland, to do something new and creative as the chief drama critic. He rekindled the paper’s original mission to write about the troubles and travails of everyday New Yorkers. When a reporter asked to travel to Mexico— a previously unheard-of expense—to write about a manufacturing plant that had relocated there after decades in Long Island City, he said yes, and ran the story that resulted on the front page. He devoted a full eight pages to a photo and story spread about the life of a Bronx prostitute who was desperately trying to kick her heroin habit.
When the newsroom rumors began to circulate that Hamill was on thin ice, the staff put together a petition demanding that he remain. More than a hundred people signed within a couple of hours. The publishers were unimpressed. Hamill took his ouster with the same quiet good grace with which he handled most problems. At a bar near the paper, the non-drinking, now ex-editor did his best to cheer everyone else up. Being a tabloid editor, he told us that night, was like being manager of the Mets. It’s only a matter of time before you get fired. “Newspapers,” he said, leaning back against the bar, “will always break your heart.”


newyorker--2020-08-06--Donald Trump Declares War on TikTok

Donald Trump Declares War on TikTok

Last week , President Trump declared his intention to “ ban ” TikTok , a social-media platform with eighty million @ @ @ @ @ States .
TikTok is a product of the Chinese tech company ByteDance , and some @ @ @ @ @ that the company may share user data with the Chinese government .
Sheelah Kolhatkar joins @ @ @ @ @ the controversy reveals about U.S.-Chinese relations and the changing politics around Big Tech .

Download a transcript.
Photograph by Jon Kopaloff / Getty
Last week, President Trump declared his intention to “ban” TikTok, a social-media platform with eighty million daily users in the United States. TikTok is a product of the Chinese tech company ByteDance, and some privacy activists have raised concerns that the company may share user data with the Chinese government. Sheelah Kolhatkar joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what the controversy reveals about U.S.-Chinese relations and the changing politics around Big Tech.


newyorker--2020-08-06--North Dakota Oil Workers Are Learning to Tend Wind Turbines—and That’s a Big Deal

“ I enjoy big machinery , and it punched all those buttons , ” Jay Johnson told me .
“ They really are big , and , if you like machinery , then there you go.
” Johnson has one of the jobs that might , with luck , come to define our era .
At Lake Region State College , in Devils Lake , North Dakota , he trains former oil workers for new careers maintaining giant wind turbines .
The skills necessary for operating the derricks that frack for crude in the Bakken shale , he says , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for operating the machines that convert the stiff winds of the high prairies into electricity .
That is good news , not only because it ’ s going to take lots of people to move the world from oil and gas to solar and wind but because people who work in hydrocarbons are going to need new jobs now that the demand for hydrocarbons is dropping .
“ It ’ s impossible to overstate the stillness ” in the oil fields now , Johnson says .
“ Nothing is happening , zero work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But not in the wind industry .
Renewables are now finding capital faster than fossil fuels , which means , for instance , that a single utility , Xcel , adds enough capacity annually across the Upper Midwest to power a million homes each year .
Johnson was originally a newspaper reporter , but he left that foundering industry and became a wind tech .
He ’ s been teaching since 2009 , instructing students on everything from how to climb two-hundred-foot ladders ( the school has a training turbine ) to how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Most of the job is general maintenance , ” Johnson says , “ when you get up to the top of the tower and get into what we call the nacelle—it ’ s basically a large gearbox and the generator and some control equipment .
It weighs eighty thousand to a hundred thousand pounds .
So , there ’ s a lot of changing oil filters , and lots of inspections , and , to everyone ’ s chagrin , there ’ s a lot of cleaning .
You use a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ towels.
” He added , “ There ’ s a lot of bolt torquing , too .
You have to insure everything is nice and tight .
Torquing and lubrication .
And if it stops working , there ’ s troubleshooting to figure out why it ’ s not .
That can be one of the more satisfying parts.
” In May , Neset Consulting , a prominent oil-services company in North Dakota , asked Johnson to train some of its employees , who used to work at jobs as , for example @ @ @ @ @ @ @ coming up from a fracked hole for signs of oil .
The first seven of those employees will graduate from Johnson ’ s course on August 21st .
“ Operation and maintenance is a big piece of the business .
Neset would like to be able to contract those services to the wind industry , ” the company ’ s operations manager told the Minot Daily News last month .
I would have liked to discuss the issue with him , but my phone calls and e-mails to the company went unanswered .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ the company ’ s story seems fascinating .
Its owner , Kathy Neset , got a geology degree at Brown University , “ one of those snobby schools , very ultra-liberal , ” she told an interviewer a few years ago .
“ I survived and I am a testament that if you stay true to yourself , you can maintain your identity.
” A New Jersey native , she went West to work in petroleum—she was a mud logger herself , and a rare woman in the oil fields ; she married @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and in 1980 they founded the company that she has led since his death , in 2005 .
“ The golden era of the hardy pioneer woman has not faded into a shadowy relic of the past , ” she said .
“ Today she may not be breaking virgin sod with a horse and plow , but there remain plenty of challenges on the prairie for a strong and tenacious spirit to test herself against.
” By all accounts , Neset has succeeded : her two sons both work in the industry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a celebration in 2014 to commemorate passing the million-barrel-a-day production milestone , she hosted the event , sharing the stage with the governor .
A donor to the Republican Party , in 2017 she was touted as a possible Senate candidate .
Given all that , perhaps it ’ s not so easy being green for some in North Dakota : on the one hand , it ’ s pretty clear that the state ’ s energy future lies with wind ; on the other , the current head of the Party , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cancer and that “ when the wind doesn ’ t blow , just turn off the television , darling , please .
There ’ s no wind , please turn off the television quickly.
” So , if the technical transition is relatively simple , the cultural transition may take a while .
Yet recalcitrance about the necessary transition to renewables isn ’ t confined to the right .
Labor unions whose workers build pipelines have historically kept the Democratic Party from a more full-throated backing of renewable power .
This time four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out strongly in support of the Dakota Access pipeline , even after indigenous protesters had been attacked by security guards with German shepherds at Standing Rock .
As Richard Trumka , the president of the federation , said at the time , “ Pipeline construction and maintenance provides quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.
” In 2018 , young activists persuaded the Democratic Party to stop taking money from the oil-and-gas industry—but the A.F.L.-C.I.O .
leaned on Party leaders , who quickly reversed course after , as Tom Perez , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , put it , “ hearing concerns from Labor that this was an attack on workers.
” Just last month , North America ’ s Building Trades Unions issued new reports insisting that , in the words of Sean McGarvey , the organization ’ s president , “ Today ’ s oil and natural gas jobs are better for energy construction workers across the country in both the short and long term.
” He added , “ The research confirms what our members tell us : the career opportunities for renewables are nowhere @ @ @ @ @ @ @ oil , and domestic energy workers highly value the safety , reliable duration and compensation of oil and gas construction jobs.
” And , in May , the Los Angeles Times reported that gas-union workers , rattled by proposed legislation in the city of San Luis Obispo that would encourage new buildings to use electricity for heating and cooking , threatened a mass protest “ with no social distancing.
” All of this is understandable , especially since some clean-energy entrepreneurs , such as Elon Musk , have decided to be anti-union .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ outsized effects on the most vulnerable communities—Phoenix set a new record last month , averaging a temperature of ninety-nine degrees for July ; a quarter of Bangladesh is under water ; and Arctic sea ice is , per usual , at record lows for the date—organized labor needs to be a big part of the solution .
That ’ s already beginning to happen : as more wind energy starts to move offshore , massive new projects are increasingly unionized .
Just last month , New York State—in whose waters a lot of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ will need to pay prevailing wages and make good-faith efforts to sign contracts with unions .
A “ focus on labor ” is “ integrated into the DNA of our marquee renewable-energy program , ” Governor Cuomo ’ s climate adviser , Ali Zaidi , said .

Renewable-energy projects are now finding capital faster than fossil fuels. Photograph by Ken Cedeno / Getty
“I enjoy big machinery, and it punched all those buttons,” Jay Johnson told me. “They really are big, and, if you like machinery, then there you go.” Johnson has one of the jobs that might, with luck, come to define our era. At Lake Region State College, in Devils Lake, North Dakota, he trains former oil workers for new careers maintaining giant wind turbines. The skills necessary for operating the derricks that frack for crude in the Bakken shale, he says, translate pretty directly into the skills required for operating the machines that convert the stiff winds of the high prairies into electricity. That is good news, not only because it’s going to take lots of people to move the world from oil and gas to solar and wind but because people who work in hydrocarbons are going to need new jobs now that the demand for hydrocarbons is dropping. “It’s impossible to overstate the stillness” in the oil fields now, Johnson says. “Nothing is happening, zero work, and it sure is scary.”
But not in the wind industry. Renewables are now finding capital faster than fossil fuels, which means, for instance, that a single utility, Xcel, adds enough capacity annually across the Upper Midwest to power a million homes each year. Johnson was originally a newspaper reporter, but he left that foundering industry and became a wind tech. He’s been teaching since 2009, instructing students on everything from how to climb two-hundred-foot ladders (the school has a training turbine) to how to use drones for inspections.
“Most of the job is general maintenance,” Johnson says, “when you get up to the top of the tower and get into what we call the nacelle—it’s basically a large gearbox and the generator and some control equipment. It weighs eighty thousand to a hundred thousand pounds. So, there’s a lot of changing oil filters, and lots of inspections, and, to everyone’s chagrin, there’s a lot of cleaning. You use a lot of Simple Green and a lot of paper towels.” He added, “There’s a lot of bolt torquing, too. You have to insure everything is nice and tight. Torquing and lubrication. And if it stops working, there’s troubleshooting to figure out why it’s not. That can be one of the more satisfying parts.”
In May, Neset Consulting, a prominent oil-services company in North Dakota, asked Johnson to train some of its employees, who used to work at jobs as, for example, mud loggers—the people who inspect soil coming up from a fracked hole for signs of oil. The first seven of those employees will graduate from Johnson’s course on August 21st. “Operation and maintenance is a big piece of the business. Neset would like to be able to contract those services to the wind industry,” the company’s operations manager told the Minot Daily News last month. I would have liked to discuss the issue with him, but my phone calls and e-mails to the company went unanswered.
That’s a shame, because the company’s story seems fascinating. Its owner, Kathy Neset, got a geology degree at Brown University, “one of those snobby schools, very ultra-liberal,” she told an interviewer a few years ago. “I survived and I am a testament that if you stay true to yourself, you can maintain your identity.” A New Jersey native, she went West to work in petroleum—she was a mud logger herself, and a rare woman in the oil fields; she married a local man, Roy Neset, and in 1980 they founded the company that she has led since his death, in 2005. “The golden era of the hardy pioneer woman has not faded into a shadowy relic of the past,” she said. “Today she may not be breaking virgin sod with a horse and plow, but there remain plenty of challenges on the prairie for a strong and tenacious spirit to test herself against.” By all accounts, Neset has succeeded: her two sons both work in the industry, and, when the state held a celebration in 2014 to commemorate passing the million-barrel-a-day production milestone, she hosted the event, sharing the stage with the governor. A donor to the Republican Party, in 2017 she was touted as a possible Senate candidate.
Given all that, perhaps it’s not so easy being green for some in North Dakota: on the one hand, it’s pretty clear that the state’s energy future lies with wind; on the other, the current head of the Party, President Trump, believes that windmills cause cancer and that “when the wind doesn’t blow, just turn off the television, darling, please. There’s no wind, please turn off the television quickly.” So, if the technical transition is relatively simple, the cultural transition may take a while.
Yet recalcitrance about the necessary transition to renewables isn’t confined to the right. Labor unions whose workers build pipelines have historically kept the Democratic Party from a more full-throated backing of renewable power. This time four years ago, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. came out strongly in support of the Dakota Access pipeline, even after indigenous protesters had been attacked by security guards with German shepherds at Standing Rock. As Richard Trumka, the president of the federation, said at the time, “Pipeline construction and maintenance provides quality jobs to tens of thousands of skilled workers.” In 2018, young activists persuaded the Democratic Party to stop taking money from the oil-and-gas industry—but the A.F.L.-C.I.O. leaned on Party leaders, who quickly reversed course after, as Tom Perez, the head of the Democratic National Committee, put it, “hearing concerns from Labor that this was an attack on workers.” Just last month, North America’s Building Trades Unions issued new reports insisting that, in the words of Sean McGarvey, the organization’s president, “Today’s oil and natural gas jobs are better for energy construction workers across the country in both the short and long term.” He added, “The research confirms what our members tell us: the career opportunities for renewables are nowhere near what they are in gas and oil, and domestic energy workers highly value the safety, reliable duration and compensation of oil and gas construction jobs.” And, in May, the Los Angeles Times reported that gas-union workers, rattled by proposed legislation in the city of San Luis Obispo that would encourage new buildings to use electricity for heating and cooking, threatened a mass protest “with no social distancing.”
All of this is understandable, especially since some clean-energy entrepreneurs, such as Elon Musk, have decided to be anti-union. But, given climate change and its outsized effects on the most vulnerable communities—Phoenix set a new record last month, averaging a temperature of ninety-nine degrees for July; a quarter of Bangladesh is under water; and Arctic sea ice is, per usual, at record lows for the date—organized labor needs to be a big part of the solution. That’s already beginning to happen: as more wind energy starts to move offshore, massive new projects are increasingly unionized. Just last month, New York State—in whose waters a lot of turbines will be built—told bidders that they will need to pay prevailing wages and make good-faith efforts to sign contracts with unions. A “focus on labor” is “integrated into the DNA of our marquee renewable-energy program,” Governor Cuomo’s climate adviser, Ali Zaidi, said.
Large chunks of Joe Biden’s energy plan are devoted to helping labor make this transition, and one hopes that those trends will continue, because the environmental and economic logic of clean energy is growing steadily more obvious. In many ways, it produces jobs at least as good as those in the oil fields, where boom-and-bust cycles make stability hard. Even climbing ladders may not be an obstacle much longer. “Almost every new turbine has some kind of elevator, some kind of individual personal lift,” Johnson said. “It takes a lot of training to develop wind techs, and you can’t afford to lose someone because they’re long in the tooth. You’ve got to make things a little bit easier for them as they mature. And we’re at a point now where people can retire as a wind tech.”
The new industries, at their core, are much simpler than the old, and as a result they’re going to relentlessly undercut established ways. Every forecast shows rapid growth in the world’s electricity demand, even as we near (or perhaps have already passed) peak oil. Instead of finding a distant pool of petroleum and fracking the subsurface geology to make it flow, instead of shipping the crude to a refinery, and then to a gas station, and instead of pumping it into a car tank whose pistons must then explode it in small bursts to power a ton of sheet metal down a road—instead of all that, you can let the wind turn a blade, take the resulting power down a wire and into a battery, and run a far simpler motor of a car, or a bus or a train.
“Or a Cat or a dozer,” as Johnson points out. Big machinery.


newyorker--2020-08-06--How Vulnerable Is G.P.S.?

How Vulnerable Is G.P.S.?

In the cool , dark hours after midnight on June 20 , 2012 , Todd Humphreys made the final preparations for his attack on the Global Positioning System .
He stood alone in the middle of White Sands Missile Range , in southern New Mexico , sixty miles north of Juárez .
All around him were the glowing gypsum dunes of the Chihuahuan Desert .
In the distance , the snow-capped San Andres Mountains loomed .
On a hill about a kilometre away , his team was gathered around a flat metal box the size of a carry-on suitcase .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ called a spoofer—a weapon by another name .
Soon , a Hornet Mini , a drone-operated helicopter popular with law-enforcement and rescue agencies , was scheduled to appear forty feet above them .
Then the spoofer would be put to the test .
Humphreys , an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin , had been working on this spoofing technology for years , but he was nervous .
Witnessing the test that morning was a group of about fifteen officials from the Federal Aviation Administration , the Department of Homeland @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s 746th Test Squadron .
They were Humphreys ’ s hosts , but they very much wanted him to fail .
His success would mean a major reckoning for the entire G.P.S .
system—and , in turn , for the effectiveness of some of the country ’ s principal military and defense systems .
Drones , which rely on G.P.S .
to navigate , are an increasingly indispensable part of our security apparatus .
Demand for them is growing elsewhere , too .
There are now over a million more recreational drones in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years ago .
Sales of high-precision commercial-grade drones—for everything from pipeline inspections to 3-D mapping—increased more than five hundred per cent during the same period .
When D.H.S .
had first contacted Humphreys a few months earlier , the department was worried about one kind of G.P.S .
vulnerability in particular—a disruption to the system called jamming .
By transmitting interference , jammers are able to overwhelm a G.P.S .
signal and render a drone ’ s receiver inoperable .
There ’ s no great mystery about how jamming works , but D.H.S @ @ @ @ @ @ @ test the technology in action : Would he be interested in helping with a demonstration ?
Humphreys accepted the invitation right away , then told the officials that he wanted to focus on a different , more sophisticated threat .
In 2011 , Iran had made headlines by successfully capturing a C.I.A .
drone about a hundred miles from the border with Afghanistan .
No one had been sure how the seizure happened : jamming could disorient a drone but not take it over .
Humphreys suggested that Iran had succeeded by spoofing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ actually replacing it with a phantom G.P.S .
signal .
Tricked into trusting the false system , aircraft could then be commandeered and captured .
“ Let ’ s try something more ambitious , ” Humphreys told D.H.S .
He would see whether he could down a drone .
Humphreys , now forty-five , has a gee-whiz fascination with the scientific world that can make him seem younger than he is .
He ’ s earnest and telegenic ; you can imagine him hosting a PBS kids ’ show that launches a million @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Humphreys had planned to be a patent attorney .
But , as an intern at NASA ’ s Jet Propulsion Laboratory , he listened to a NASA lawyer discussing an upcoming patent and realized that he wanted to be the one inventing things , not approving the inventions .
“ I thought , Why would I want to be on his side of the table ?
He ’ s just taking notes , ” Humphreys told me .
Humphreys got interested in G.P.S .
while he was an engineering grad student at Cornell @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radio—the processing of radio waves by computer software , rather than traditional hardware—and began to wonder whether his research could be used to build a brand-new kind of G.P.S .
receiver .
G.P.S .
is owned by the Department of Defense , operated by the Air Force from a heavily secured room at a base in Colorado , and available for free to anyone in the world .
There are twenty-four active G.P.S .
satellites , orbiting at twenty thousand kilometres , each one emitting a radio signal that contains a timecode and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ exact position .
By measuring the transmission time of the signal , a G.P.S .
receiver determines its distance from the satellite .
If the receiver does this simultaneously with the signals of at least four satellites in its line of sight , it can extrapolate its position in three dimensions .
During the roughly sixty-seven milliseconds the signal takes to reach us , it grows exceedingly faint .
The task of receiving the signal and extracting its informational component is often compared to trying to read using a light bulb in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this system has remained the same since the first G.P.S .
satellite was launched , in 1977 , but its uses have proliferated at an astonishing speed .
Although the Air Force oversees satellites that transmit signals , once those signals are broadcast into the world , they belong to everyone .
Because G.P.S .
is a “ passive ” system—meaning it merely requires a user to receive a signal , not transmit one—it can handle infinite growth .
The number of G.P.S .
receivers could double tomorrow without affecting the underlying infrastructure @ @ @ @ @ @ @ measuring the minute movement of tectonic plates , people have devised more ingenious uses for the G.P.S .
signal than the system ’ s original architects could ever have imagined .
Humphreys is one such innovator .
Test day at White Sands was the first time Humphreys ’ s team had used the spoofer outside the lab : because transmitting a fake G.P.S .
signal is illegal , they had never even done a full dress rehearsal .
For Humphreys , who made money in college as a magician at children ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ difficult trick without any practice .
Around two A.M. , the Hornet appeared , hovering forty feet above the missile range .
Humphreys spoke a code word into his handheld radio : “ Lightning.
” Up on the hill , his students switched on the spoofer .
Gradually increasing its power , they directed the bogus signal toward the Hornet , which appeared to hesitate in midair , as if encountering an invisible obstacle .
The spoofer was , in essence , whispering lies in the drone ’ s ear , feeding it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that it had drifted upward , the drone tried to correct , beginning a steep dive toward the desert floor .
Just as it was about to crash into the ground , a manual operator grabbed the controls , pulling the Hornet out of its nosedive .
Humphreys ’ s team let out a celebratory whoop over the radio .
“ We were the only ones clapping , ” he told me recently .
His hosts looked grim .
When Humphreys wasted no time spreading the word about the spoofer ’ s achievement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I ’ m told I ’ ll never be invited back , ” he said .
“ They probably thought I ’ d do a sleepy presentation in an academic journal .
But I was looking to communicate to the world what I thought was an alarming situation.
” Since the G.P.S .
program began , in 1973 , its satellite signals have been a source of controversy .
It was the brainchild of an Air Force colonel named Bradford Parkinson , who , disillusioned by the indiscriminate air campaigns of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a way to improve the accuracy of precision bombing .
Parkinson ’ s research team designed two versions of the G.P.S .
signal , one for civilian use and another , with tighter security protocols and more precise readings , for the military .
But when the first G.P.S .
satellites were launched , it quickly became clear that the civilian signal was more accurate than its architects had intended .
And shrewd scientists discovered that although the military signal ’ s informational content was heavily encrypted , picking up the radio signal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was like gleaning information about a sealed letter by looking at the envelope ’ s postmark .

In the cool, dark hours after midnight on June 20, 2012, Todd Humphreys made the final preparations for his attack on the Global Positioning System. He stood alone in the middle of White Sands Missile Range, in southern New Mexico, sixty miles north of Juárez. All around him were the glowing gypsum dunes of the Chihuahuan Desert. In the distance, the snow-capped San Andres Mountains loomed.
On a hill about a kilometre away, his team was gathered around a flat metal box the size of a carry-on suitcase. The electronic machinery inside the box was called a spoofer—a weapon by another name. Soon, a Hornet Mini, a drone-operated helicopter popular with law-enforcement and rescue agencies, was scheduled to appear forty feet above them. Then the spoofer would be put to the test.
Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, had been working on this spoofing technology for years, but he was nervous. Witnessing the test that morning was a group of about fifteen officials from the Federal Aviation Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Air Force’s 746th Test Squadron. They were Humphreys’s hosts, but they very much wanted him to fail. His success would mean a major reckoning for the entire G.P.S. system—and, in turn, for the effectiveness of some of the country’s principal military and defense systems. Drones, which rely on G.P.S. to navigate, are an increasingly indispensable part of our security apparatus. Demand for them is growing elsewhere, too. There are now over a million more recreational drones in the sky than there were just four years ago. Sales of high-precision commercial-grade drones—for everything from pipeline inspections to 3-D mapping—increased more than five hundred per cent during the same period.
When D.H.S. had first contacted Humphreys a few months earlier, the department was worried about one kind of G.P.S. vulnerability in particular—a disruption to the system called jamming. By transmitting interference, jammers are able to overwhelm a G.P.S. signal and render a drone’s receiver inoperable. There’s no great mystery about how jamming works, but D.H.S. approached Humphreys because it wanted to test the technology in action: Would he be interested in helping with a demonstration?
Humphreys accepted the invitation right away, then told the officials that he wanted to focus on a different, more sophisticated threat. In 2011, Iran had made headlines by successfully capturing a C.I.A. drone about a hundred miles from the border with Afghanistan. No one had been sure how the seizure happened: jamming could disorient a drone but not take it over. Humphreys suggested that Iran had succeeded by spoofing the signal—not just interfering with it but actually replacing it with a phantom G.P.S. signal. Tricked into trusting the false system, aircraft could then be commandeered and captured. “Let’s try something more ambitious,” Humphreys told D.H.S. He would see whether he could down a drone.
Humphreys, now forty-five, has a gee-whiz fascination with the scientific world that can make him seem younger than he is. He’s earnest and telegenic; you can imagine him hosting a PBS kids’ show that launches a million STEM majors. A Utah native, Humphreys had planned to be a patent attorney. But, as an intern at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, he listened to a NASA lawyer discussing an upcoming patent and realized that he wanted to be the one inventing things, not approving the inventions. “I thought, Why would I want to be on his side of the table? He’s just taking notes,” Humphreys told me. Humphreys got interested in G.P.S. while he was an engineering grad student at Cornell. He’d been studying software-defined radio—the processing of radio waves by computer software, rather than traditional hardware—and began to wonder whether his research could be used to build a brand-new kind of G.P.S. receiver.
G.P.S. is owned by the Department of Defense, operated by the Air Force from a heavily secured room at a base in Colorado, and available for free to anyone in the world. There are twenty-four active G.P.S. satellites, orbiting at twenty thousand kilometres, each one emitting a radio signal that contains a timecode and a description of the satellite’s exact position. By measuring the transmission time of the signal, a G.P.S. receiver determines its distance from the satellite. If the receiver does this simultaneously with the signals of at least four satellites in its line of sight, it can extrapolate its position in three dimensions. During the roughly sixty-seven milliseconds the signal takes to reach us, it grows exceedingly faint. The task of receiving the signal and extracting its informational component is often compared to trying to read using a light bulb in a different city.
The core technology of this system has remained the same since the first G.P.S. satellite was launched, in 1977, but its uses have proliferated at an astonishing speed. Although the Air Force oversees satellites that transmit signals, once those signals are broadcast into the world, they belong to everyone. Because G.P.S. is a “passive” system—meaning it merely requires a user to receive a signal, not transmit one—it can handle infinite growth. The number of G.P.S. receivers could double tomorrow without affecting the underlying infrastructure at all. From improving maps to measuring the minute movement of tectonic plates, people have devised more ingenious uses for the G.P.S. signal than the system’s original architects could ever have imagined. Humphreys is one such innovator.
Test day at White Sands was the first time Humphreys’s team had used the spoofer outside the lab: because transmitting a fake G.P.S. signal is illegal, they had never even done a full dress rehearsal. For Humphreys, who made money in college as a magician at children’s parties, it felt like premièring a difficult trick without any practice. Around two A.M., the Hornet appeared, hovering forty feet above the missile range. Humphreys spoke a code word into his handheld radio: “Lightning.” Up on the hill, his students switched on the spoofer. Gradually increasing its power, they directed the bogus signal toward the Hornet, which appeared to hesitate in midair, as if encountering an invisible obstacle. The spoofer was, in essence, whispering lies in the drone’s ear, feeding it inaccurate information about its location. Convinced that it had drifted upward, the drone tried to correct, beginning a steep dive toward the desert floor. Just as it was about to crash into the ground, a manual operator grabbed the controls, pulling the Hornet out of its nosedive. Humphreys’s team let out a celebratory whoop over the radio.
“We were the only ones clapping,” he told me recently. His hosts looked grim. When Humphreys wasted no time spreading the word about the spoofer’s achievement, they were even more displeased. “I’m told I’ll never be invited back,” he said. “They probably thought I’d do a sleepy presentation in an academic journal. But I was looking to communicate to the world what I thought was an alarming situation.”
Since the G.P.S. program began, in 1973, its satellite signals have been a source of controversy. It was the brainchild of an Air Force colonel named Bradford Parkinson, who, disillusioned by the indiscriminate air campaigns of the Vietnam War, imagined G.P.S. as a way to improve the accuracy of precision bombing. Parkinson’s research team designed two versions of the G.P.S. signal, one for civilian use and another, with tighter security protocols and more precise readings, for the military. But when the first G.P.S. satellites were launched, it quickly became clear that the civilian signal was more accurate than its architects had intended. And shrewd scientists discovered that although the military signal’s informational content was heavily encrypted, picking up the radio signal itself wasn’t difficult. It was like gleaning information about a sealed letter by looking at the envelope’s postmark.
In the nineties, the Pentagon intentionally corrupted the civilian signal—a practice known as “selective availability”—hoping to thwart terrorists or other bad actors who might otherwise use the signal to launch precision attacks on U.S. assets. But here, too, users found workarounds, and an order from President Bill Clinton, which took effect in 2000, halted the Pentagon’s program. G.P.S. could now be used to its full potential.
Soon, the civilian G.P.S. industry was flourishing. By the middle of the decade, Garmin, a leading consumer-G.P.S. company, posted more than $1.6 billion in sales. Car units were proliferating at an annual rate of more than a hundred and forty per cent. The in-car G.P.S. boom gave way, of course, to the smartphone boom: G.P.S. was now something you carried with you always. But the explosive growth of the civilian G.P.S. market also incentivized attempts to corrupt the signal. These days, pocket-sized G.P.S. jammers go for a few hundred dollars each on the Internet and offer an easy out for anyone worried about, say, a surveilling employer. A few years ago, so many truck drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike were using jammers to thwart their bosses’ tracking programs that spillover interference eventually disrupted the G.P.S.-based landing system at Newark Liberty International Airport.
G.P.S. is now crucially important for reasons that are unrelated to providing geolocation. Because the G.P.S. clocks are synchronized to within nanoseconds, the network’s signals are used to unify time-dependent systems spread over large areas. G.P.S. time helps bounce calls between cellular towers, regulate power flows in electrical grids, and time-stamp financial trades on the major exchanges. If a spoofer were to feed erroneous information that confused the clocks in even a few nodes of these systems, the damage could be widespread: as time errors multiply, communications systems could fail, wrongly apportioned power flows could result in blackouts, and automated trading programs could yank themselves out of the markets, causing crashes. And those are just a few scenarios. We still have not figured out exactly how to safeguard a technology that is so crucial yet so porous.


newyorker--2020-08-06--Trump Considering Replacing Pence with Confederate Statue

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —Alarmed by his plunging poll numbers , Donald J. Trump is actively considering replacing Mike Pence on the G.O.P .
ticket with a Confederate statue , White House sources have revealed .
According to the sources , Trump is currently considering a short list of Confederate monuments to swap for Pence , including statues of Robert E. Lee , Stonewall Jackson , and Jefferson Davis .
Reportedly , Trump believes that replacing Pence with a Confederate statue is just what his campaign needs to energize his base .
“ Plus , he ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who won ’ t write a book , ” one source said .
According to the same source , choosing among the Confederate statues is shaping up to be the toughest decision of Trump ’ s Presidency .
“ He thinks they ’ re all very fine people , ” the source said .
But another White House insider was less sanguine about the strengths a Confederate statue would bring to Trump ’ s reëlection effort .
“ Replacing Pence with an inanimate object seems like a wash to me , ” the @ @ @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Alarmed by his plunging poll numbers, Donald J. Trump is actively considering replacing Mike Pence on the G.O.P. ticket with a Confederate statue, White House sources have revealed.
According to the sources, Trump is currently considering a short list of Confederate monuments to swap for Pence, including statues of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis.
Reportedly, Trump believes that replacing Pence with a Confederate statue is just what his campaign needs to energize his base.
“Plus, he’ll finally have someone in his inner circle who won’t write a book,” one source said.
According to the same source, choosing among the Confederate statues is shaping up to be the toughest decision of Trump’s Presidency. “He thinks they’re all very fine people,” the source said.
But another White House insider was less sanguine about the strengths a Confederate statue would bring to Trump’s reëlection effort.
“Replacing Pence with an inanimate object seems like a wash to me,” the insider said.


newyorker--2020-08-06--Pete Hamill, Egalitarian Hero

Pete Hamill, Egalitarian Hero

These days , anyone who remembers the era of the three television networks is called a survivor , but the columnist and novelist Pete Hamill , who died on Wednesday morning , was truly the last of a kind .
He was one of the few living inheritors of a time when literary ambition and seriousness routinely intersected with tabloid energy and grit , when it was taken for granted that writing everywhere , reading everything , and drinking hard while you did it could be—hell , oughta be—aspects of a single life .
A storyteller and man of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Brooklyn-bred but Manhattan-bound ( as the Brooklyn-bred were for so long ) , Pete was the kind of figure who could be called , on the morning of his death , and in the Daily News , no less , “ the Bard of the five boroughs ” —called that straight up , no chaser , without the least trace of an ironic wink .
If , reading those words , one smiled , it was ( as he might have written ) a fine and solid smile , fondly recalling his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ city than the one we lesser generations have made .
His C.V. speaks to his range and energy : briefly but beautifully the editor of the Daily News ( and , before that , the Post ) , he was as much at home with Manhattan society people as with street guys , and in his day he squired ( to use a lost tab word ! )
a series of remarkable women , including Jackie Onassis herself .
Certainly , to spend time with him was to enter an era in many @ @ @ @ @ @ @ when Fifty-second Street was filled with good jazz and the Yankees had not yet encountered George Steinbrenner .
He once said sorrowfully , and entirely seriously , of someone who had passed away in the early fifties , “ And he died before he could hear the great Sinatra ” —meaning before Sinatra began to make his concept albums , a true marker of time and value .
A legend , quite possibly true , has Pete , along with his fellow-journalist Jack Newfield , sharing a presumably largely liquid dinner one night @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the history of the world were Hitler , Stalin , and Walter O ’ Malley .
( O ’ Malley , for millennials and Gen X-ers , was the bad man who moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn—and though recent , Bloomberg-era revisionism has tried to make him more of an ordinary businessman , he was a bad man . )
With Jimmy Breslin , Murray Kempton , and a handful of others , Pete upheld the truth that you could do as much real , and deep , writing in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ club .
But Pete was a real writer , not merely a tabloid ornament .
His best book was “ A Drinking Life , ” from 1995 , one of the sweetest memoirs ever written about a Brooklyn boyhood , with all the sometimes potable , sometimes explosive ethnic and racial chemistry laid unsentimentally bare .
( Irish himself , he once explained that it was the Italians , in the person of those like the excitable shortstop Phil Rizzuto and the heartbroken singer Sinatra , who taught the Irish that emotions were @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the book spends little time on drinking and less time celebrating it—he understood the corner bar as a citadel of social trust more than as a place of pleasure .
In relishing his stoop-ball smarts , you could easily miss the range and depth of his literary acumen—and his capacity for parsing the complicated frictions of the city .
( Even situating him too narrowly in the city missed a lot : Mexico , where he had a second home , was his second home , and he spoke about its culture with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ago , during a panel discussion of Albert Camus at the New School , where he taught , it was evident to everyone listening that Pete knew Camus ’ s work far better than the academics and standard-issue highbrows on the panel—and , more important , that he had a far more immediate sense of the political pressures and possibilities felt by a daily-newspaper columnist , which is what Camus had been , too .
( Of Camus ’ s “ Algerian Chronicles , ” Pete noted on that occasion , “ There @ @ @ @ @ @ @ author , as if he knows there will be no good ending to the story of the F.L.N .
[ the Algerian guerrilla resistance ] and the prolonged , sometimes savage ejection of the French , who had been there since 1830.
” What he valued most about Camus , he said , was that “ he had come to mistrust certainty , rejecting ideology , secular and religious.
” ) It is somewhat heartbreaking to think of Pete passing away at this , one of the lowest moments in his beloved city @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his greatest value , and the one thing that he would never do was give up , on the city or himself .
He had some rough later years , physically , but just last year he wrote to a friend that “ my wife Fukiko and I are now back living in my Old Country , the Democratic Republic of Brooklyn , after 30-odd years in Manhattan .
Obviously , I ’ m writing about it , if slowly .
I have a three-hour dialysis session three times a week , to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two broken hips , diabetes 2 , and a rigorous , ascetic diet .
But what the hell , I ’ m alive !
And I ain ’ t done yet.
” No , he wasn ’ t done and , both as a good writer to admire and an egalitarian hero to emulate , will not be soon .

These days, anyone who remembers the era of the three television networks is called a survivor, but the columnist and novelist Pete Hamill, who died on Wednesday morning, was truly the last of a kind. He was one of the few living inheritors of a time when literary ambition and seriousness routinely intersected with tabloid energy and grit, when it was taken for granted that writing everywhere, reading everything, and drinking hard while you did it could be—hell, oughta be—aspects of a single life. A storyteller and man of the world, civil-rights activist and music critic, Brooklyn-bred but Manhattan-bound (as the Brooklyn-bred were for so long), Pete was the kind of figure who could be called, on the morning of his death, and in the Daily News, no less, “the Bard of the five boroughs”—called that straight up, no chaser, without the least trace of an ironic wink. If, reading those words, one smiled, it was (as he might have written) a fine and solid smile, fondly recalling his access to a tougher, more egalitarian city than the one we lesser generations have made.
His C.V. speaks to his range and energy: briefly but beautifully the editor of the Daily News (and, before that, the Post), he was as much at home with Manhattan society people as with street guys, and in his day he squired (to use a lost tab word!) a series of remarkable women, including Jackie Onassis herself. Certainly, to spend time with him was to enter an era in many ways more benevolent than our own, when Fifty-second Street was filled with good jazz and the Yankees had not yet encountered George Steinbrenner. He once said sorrowfully, and entirely seriously, of someone who had passed away in the early fifties, “And he died before he could hear the great Sinatra”—meaning before Sinatra began to make his concept albums, a true marker of time and value. A legend, quite possibly true, has Pete, along with his fellow-journalist Jack Newfield, sharing a presumably largely liquid dinner one night and determining that the three worst men in the history of the world were Hitler, Stalin, and Walter O’Malley. (O’Malley, for millennials and Gen X-ers, was the bad man who moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn—and though recent, Bloomberg-era revisionism has tried to make him more of an ordinary businessman, he was a bad man.) With Jimmy Breslin, Murray Kempton, and a handful of others, Pete upheld the truth that you could do as much real, and deep, writing in a tabloid as you could in a faculty club.
But Pete was a real writer, not merely a tabloid ornament. His best book was “A Drinking Life,” from 1995, one of the sweetest memoirs ever written about a Brooklyn boyhood, with all the sometimes potable, sometimes explosive ethnic and racial chemistry laid unsentimentally bare. (Irish himself, he once explained that it was the Italians, in the person of those like the excitable shortstop Phil Rizzuto and the heartbroken singer Sinatra, who taught the Irish that emotions were acceptable.) Despite its title, the book spends little time on drinking and less time celebrating it—he understood the corner bar as a citadel of social trust more than as a place of pleasure.
In relishing his stoop-ball smarts, you could easily miss the range and depth of his literary acumen—and his capacity for parsing the complicated frictions of the city. (Even situating him too narrowly in the city missed a lot: Mexico, where he had a second home, was his second home, and he spoke about its culture with corresponding intelligence.) Scarcely five years ago, during a panel discussion of Albert Camus at New York University, where he taught, it was evident to everyone listening that Pete knew Camus’s work far better than the academics and standard-issue highbrows on the panel—and, more important, that he had a far more immediate sense of the political pressures and possibilities felt by a daily-newspaper columnist, which is what Camus had been, too. (Of Camus’s “Algerian Chronicles,” Pete noted on that occasion, “There is a tone of anguish in the author, as if he knows there will be no good ending to the story of the F.L.N. [the Algerian guerrilla resistance] and the prolonged, sometimes savage ejection of the French, who had been there since 1830.” What he valued most about Camus, he said, was that “he had come to mistrust certainty, rejecting ideology, secular and religious.”)
It is somewhat heartbreaking to think of Pete passing away at this, one of the lowest moments in his beloved city’s history—but then, resilience was his greatest value, and the one thing that he would never do was give up, on the city or himself. He had some rough later years, physically, but just last year he wrote to a friend that “my wife Fukiko and I are now back living in my Old Country, the Democratic Republic of Brooklyn, after 30-odd years in Manhattan. Obviously, I’m writing about it, if slowly. I have a three-hour dialysis session three times a week, to ward off kidney failure. I have two broken hips, diabetes 2, and a rigorous, ascetic diet. But what the hell, I’m alive! And I ain’t done yet.” No, he wasn’t done and, both as a good writer to admire and an egalitarian hero to emulate, will not be soon.
A previous version of this post misstated the location of the Albert Camus panel discussion.


newyorker--2020-08-05--The Personal Side of an East German Spy’s Defection, in “Betrayal”

The Cold War , and the international politics that it established , have been full of high-profile defections : Rudolf Nureyev dashing to French security officers at a Paris airport , in 1961 ; a North Korean military officer racing over the line of demarcation , first by car and then on foot , in 2017 ; a handful of Cuban baseball players flying to the States to sign with the major leagues .
Such moments leave a strong impression in national consciences—and can serve as powerful political capital .
These instances of great personal risk and sacrifice are one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ score .
The short documentary “ Betrayal ” looks at the fallout from one such defection from another angle , telling the story of how the flight of an East German spy affected the family members he left behind .
In January of 1979 , Werner Stiller was working for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit , better known as the Stasi , when he secured fake exit visas ; walked through Checkpoint Charlie , the famous crossing point between East and West Berlin , with a dissident waitress ; and boarded the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a double agent for years , dropping photocopied Stasi documents for the West German intelligence service .
Shortly after Stiller ’ s defection , Bob Schieffer , then an anchor for “ CBS Evening News , ” reported that Western intelligence officials had identified five East German spies working in West Germany—all were arrested , Schieffer reported , based on information that Stiller had provided .
Ultimately , according to a report in the Baltimore Sun , nearly a hundred spies were identified , and seventeen spent time in prison , based on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ services , determining that it wasn ’ t safe for Stiller to remain near the German border , spirited him away to the United States , where he was resettled by the C.I.A .
“ At the time of the Cold War , all you heard in the media was the actual act of defection—and not any of the personal stories of the participants , ” Scott Calonico , the director and producer of “ Betrayal , ” told me .
He sought to tell the story another way .
“ So you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bit of news that was broadcast to viewing audiences in the States , along the lines of ‘ Yeah , we got another one , ’ but , behind that , you have this family that was torn apart.
” When he arrived in the U.S. , Stiller , a former physics student , changed his name and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis , where he earned an M.B.A .
He got a lucrative job with Goldman Sachs , and began a new life .
During Stiller ’ s years in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Berlin Wall falls and Germany is unified .
But the focus of “ Betrayal ” is not on how Stiller ’ s defection intersects with these world-historical events but on what was happening to Stiller ’ s wife and two young children back home .
In a letter that he left for his wife , Stiller offered a feeble comment on his disappearance : “ I don ’ t even understand it myself yet.
” His wife , surprised when two Stasi investigators showed up on her doorstep , pled ignorance of her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” pieces together Stiller ’ s story—through letters , documents , and old photographs—guided by the perspective of Stiller ’ s now-adult son , Andy Hudson .
Hudson was too young when his father left , he says , to have any memories of him , but he notes that his sister was “ quite attached.
” Later , when the children would ask about their father , they were told , simply , “ Your father was a bad man.
” When Hudson was a young teen-ager , Stiller took another finance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and moved to Frankfurt to open a new office .
While he was there , the children met with him , but the abandonment was hard to overcome , and the encounter did not lead to total reconciliation .
Hudson met Calonico when the two worked together at a corporate firm , in 2014 .
“ One day , after a friendly soccer game with work colleagues , we were all discussing what our fathers did , ” Calonico told me .
“ The conversation got around to Andy , and he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ be a spy.
’ ” Calonico was immediately intrigued .
“ I pulled Andy aside into our studio , stood him in front of the camera , gave him a couple of beers , and he told me his story.
” But the filmmaker ’ s desire to unravel a mystery is tempered by a son ’ s ambivalence .
It ’ s not clear how much Hudson really wants to hear about his father ’ s new life .
When he is asked outright , “ Do you want to learn more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ demurs .
It ’ s plainly a painful subject .
“ He wasn ’ t an easy character .
Never .
By all means.
” “ Betrayal ” is full of espionage and intrigue .
There is the note that Stiller left for his wife instructing her to “ burn the letter once you read it , ” and which , it turns out , may not have been authored by him alone .
There is the suggestion of an affair in New York .
( Does a relationship in a completely restarted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) And , casting the longest shadow , there is Stiller ’ s fate .
When the filmmakers set out to interview Stiller , who had retired in Budapest , their efforts were cut short .
On December 22 , 2016 , Stiller ’ s body was discovered in the Danube River .
He was sixty-nine .

The Cold War, and the international politics that it established, have been full of high-profile defections: Rudolf Nureyev dashing to French security officers at a Paris airport, in 1961; a North Korean military officer racing over the line of demarcation, first by car and then on foot, in 2017; a handful of Cuban baseball players flying to the States to sign with the major leagues. Such moments leave a strong impression in national consciences—and can serve as powerful political capital. These instances of great personal risk and sacrifice are one of the ways that world powers keep score. The short documentary “Betrayal” looks at the fallout from one such defection from another angle, telling the story of how the flight of an East German spy affected the family members he left behind.
In January of 1979, Werner Stiller was working for the East German Ministerium für Staatssicherheit, better known as the Stasi, when he secured fake exit visas, walked through the checkpoint at Friedrichstrasse, and boarded the subway. He had been acting as a double agent, dropping photocopied Stasi documents for the West German intelligence service. Shortly after Stiller’s defection, Bob Schieffer, then an anchor for “CBS Evening News,” reported that Western intelligence officials had identified five East German spies working in West Germany—all were arrested, Schieffer reported, based on information that Stiller had provided. Ultimately, according to a report in the Baltimore Sun, nearly a hundred spies were identified, and seventeen spent time in prison, based on intelligence that Stiller shared. Western intelligence services, determining that it wasn’t safe for Stiller to remain near the German border, spirited him away to the United States, where he was resettled by the C.I.A.
“At the time of the Cold War, all you heard in the media was the actual act of defection—and not any of the personal stories of the participants,” Scott Calonico, the director and producer of “Betrayal,” told me. He sought to tell the story another way. “So you have this little, tiny, brief bit of news that was broadcast to viewing audiences in the States, along the lines of ‘Yeah, we got another one,’ but, behind that, you have this family that was torn apart.”
When he arrived in the U.S., Stiller, a former physics student, changed his name and enrolled at Washington University in St. Louis, where he earned an M.B.A. He got a lucrative job with Goldman Sachs, and began a new life. During Stiller’s years in finance, history takes over: the Berlin Wall falls and Germany is unified. But the focus of “Betrayal” is not on how Stiller’s defection intersects with these world-historical events but on what was happening to Stiller’s wife and two young children back home. In a letter that he left for his wife, Stiller offered a feeble comment on his disappearance: “I don’t even understand it myself yet.” His wife, surprised when two Stasi investigators showed up on her doorstep, pled ignorance of her husband’s plan. “Betrayal” pieces together Stiller’s story—through letters, documents, and old photographs—guided by the perspective of Stiller’s now-adult son, Andy Hudson.
Hudson was too young when his father left, he says, to have any memories of him, but he notes that his sister was “quite attached.” Later, when the children would ask about their father, they were told, simply, “Your father was a bad man.” When Hudson was a young teen-ager, Stiller took another finance job, this time with Lehman Brothers, and moved to Frankfurt to open a new office. While he was there, the children met with him, but the abandonment was hard to overcome, and the encounter did not lead to total reconciliation.
Hudson met Calonico when the two worked together at a corporate firm, in 2014. “One day, after a friendly soccer game with work colleagues, we were all discussing what our fathers did,” Calonico told me. “The conversation got around to Andy, and he said, ‘My dad used to be a spy.’ ” Calonico was immediately intrigued. “I pulled Andy aside into our studio, stood him in front of the camera, gave him a couple of beers, and he told me his story.” But the filmmaker’s desire to unravel a mystery is tempered by a son’s ambivalence. It’s not clear how much Hudson really wants to hear about his father’s new life. When he is asked outright, “Do you want to learn more about your dad?,” Hudson demurs. It’s plainly a painful subject. “He wasn’t an easy character. Never. By all means.”
“Betrayal” is full of espionage and intrigue. There is the note that Stiller left for his wife instructing her to “burn the letter once you read it,” and which, it turns out, may not have been authored by him alone. There is the suggestion of an affair in New York. (Does a relationship in a completely restarted life constitute an “affair”?) And, casting the longest shadow, there is Stiller’s fate. When the filmmakers set out to interview Stiller, who had retired in Budapest, their efforts were cut short. On December 22, 2016, Stiller’s body was discovered in the Danube River. He was sixty-nine.
Note: A previous version of this piece misstated some aspects of Stiller’s border crossing.


newyorker--2020-08-07--Part of the Problem

Part of the Problem

I like to think I ’ m a good guy .
I pay my taxes .
I love my kids .
But after a lot of soul-searching about my place in society , I ’ ve come to realize that I ’ m not nearly as innocent as I would like to believe .
The hard truth is that I ’ m part of the problem .
If we ’ re ever going to heal this nation , we need to start having uncomfortable conversations about why I burn things .
Sure , it ’ s exciting , but I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have unwittingly contributed to all those bridges that caught fire .
Would they have ignited anyway ?
We may never know .
These are the questions that keep me up at night lighting matchbooks in a parking lot .
The status quo in this country has always been me pushing shopping carts full of burning paper toward the mailman .
And , hey , as a guy who appreciates the beauty of fire , it ’ s comfortable for me to say nothing and continue enjoying my privilege .
But it ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a sea of flames .
To fix this , we have to say enough is enough and start giving them big , thick shields .
Have I unconsciously benefitted from a system in which I put cigarettes out on my arm ?
Has my own bias blinded me to the effect of torching abandoned row homes ?
There are no easy answers , but taking the time to ask the questions is a start .
I ’ m tired of being complicit in this messed-up system .
I want to be part @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I ’ ve grown to see that melting stop signs with a flamethrower is , in some ways , not the right thing to do .
From here on out , I pledge to only melt traffic lights .
It ’ s easy to do the right thing when your parole officer is watching .
But what happens when those ankle monitors go away and you no longer have to meet with a counsellor about your spiralling pyromania ?
We ’ ve seen this play out before .
We thought we were in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at the burns on my feet will put that lie to rest .
It ’ s time to wake up and smell the billowing smoke .
I don ’ t want to minimize how far we ’ ve come .
There have been huge strides in reducing the number of hot coals I kneel on to pray to Hephaestus , the god of fire .
We should celebrate that .
But to sustain the momentum of these gains , we have to keep pushing for me to tape jelly jars over my hands @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lighter .
This is how change happens .
It ’ s natural to get defensive when a roommate extinguishes your masterpiece .
But instead of criticizing him for trying to stay alive , it ’ s important to take a step back and listen to him explain where the kerosene is .
Only then can we achieve true sexual excitement .
Everyone has blind spots .
But that ’ s no excuse for not educating yourself about the struggles of people trying in vain to burn water .
Until everything is on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ We can do better .

I like to think I’m a good guy. I pay my taxes. I love my kids. But after a lot of soul-searching about my place in society, I’ve come to realize that I’m not nearly as innocent as I would like to believe. The hard truth is that I’m part of the problem.
If we’re ever going to heal this nation, we need to start having uncomfortable conversations about why I burn things. Sure, it’s exciting, but I can’t help thinking I may have unwittingly contributed to all those bridges that caught fire. Would they have ignited anyway? We may never know. These are the questions that keep me up at night lighting matchbooks in a parking lot.
The status quo in this country has always been me pushing shopping carts full of burning paper toward the mailman. And, hey, as a guy who appreciates the beauty of fire, it’s comfortable for me to say nothing and continue enjoying my privilege. But it’s no longer O.K. to cleanse people in a sea of flames. To fix this, we have to say enough is enough and start giving them big, thick shields.
Have I unconsciously benefitted from a system in which I put cigarettes out on my arm? Has my own bias blinded me to the effect of torching abandoned row homes? There are no easy answers, but taking the time to ask the questions is a start.
I’m tired of being complicit in this messed-up system. I want to be part of the solution. Over time, I’ve grown to see that melting stop signs with a flamethrower is, in some ways, not the right thing to do. From here on out, I pledge to only melt traffic lights.
It’s easy to do the right thing when your parole officer is watching. But what happens when those ankle monitors go away and you no longer have to meet with a counsellor about your spiralling pyromania? We’ve seen this play out before. We thought we were in a post-me-streaking-through-a-forest-fire society, but one look at the burns on my feet will put that lie to rest. It’s time to wake up and smell the billowing smoke.
I don’t want to minimize how far we’ve come. There have been huge strides in reducing the number of hot coals I kneel on to pray to Hephaestus, the god of fire. We should celebrate that. But to sustain the momentum of these gains, we have to keep pushing for me to tape jelly jars over my hands so that I can no longer hold a lighter.
This is how change happens.
It’s natural to get defensive when a roommate extinguishes your masterpiece. But instead of criticizing him for trying to stay alive, it’s important to take a step back and listen to him explain where the kerosene is. Only then can we achieve true sexual excitement.
Everyone has blind spots. But that’s no excuse for not educating yourself about the struggles of people trying in vain to burn water. Until everything is on fire, none of it is.
We can do better.


newyorker--2020-08-07--Escaping the City Heat at Rockaway Beach

Immortalized by the Ramones in their 1977 punk-rock anthem of the same name , Rockaway Beach ( pictured ) remains @ @ @ @ @ Yorkers looking to escape the heat of the city .
( “ Rockaway ” is @ @ @ @ @ , which means “ sandy place ” in the language of the Lenape people , @ @ @ @ @ ) This summer , masks are required on all city beaches—as is social distancing—but swimmers @ @ @ @ @ into the water , when lifeguards are on duty .

Immortalized by the Ramones in their 1977 punk-rock anthem of the same name, Rockaway Beach (pictured) remains a favorite place for New Yorkers looking to escape the heat of the city. (“Rockaway” is the Anglicized version of reckouwacky, which means “sandy place” in the language of the Lenape people, who originally lived there.) This summer, masks are required on all city beaches—as is social distancing—but swimmers can remove them before venturing into the water, when lifeguards are on duty.


newyorker--2020-08-07--Black Entrepreneurs Bring Regional Dishes and Vegan Treats to Maison Yaki

The other day , as I spoke to the chef Michelle Williams by phone , she paused to explain a faint beeping .
“ Oh , sorry , that ’ s a timer , ” she said cheerfully .
“ I ’ ve got a poundcake in the oven.
” As we hung up , she was logging on to a virtual meeting to discuss the new school year ; in addition to running Good IV the Soul , her Brooklyn-based catering company , she teaches culinary arts in New York City public high schools .
After the meeting , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ she was catering that night , setting portions aside for me to try in advance of her next venture : launching the third pop-up ( through Aug. 16 ) in an ongoing series at Maison Yaki , in Prospect Heights , showcasing Black entrepreneurs .
The dinner included strip steak topped with parsley compound butter , salmon stuffed with lump crabmeat , and roasted broccoli , all hearty , comforting , and abundantly seasoned , fragrant with a concentrated , garlicky saltiness .
Williams ’ s mother is her primary culinary inspiration , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ her best friend .
A retired bus matron who used to get up at 4 A.M. to commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx , her mother “ always made sure she had food on the table , ” Williams said .
“ A protein , a starch , and a veggie.
” Good IV the Soul ’ s repertoire is loosely organized around traditions of the American South and the Caribbean and miscellaneous in the manner of someone game to take requests .
The menu for the pop-up includes not one but three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ smothered , atop grits ; and mixed with cheese in an empanada-like “ soul pocket.
” Williams has long dreamed of opening a restaurant , or , better yet , six .
May she follow in the footsteps of Lani Halliday , the first chef to be featured at Maison Yaki , in July , whose five-year-old cake-and-pastry company , Brutus Bakeshop , is going brick and mortar later this year .
I can think of nothing I ’ ve eaten recently that has buoyed my spirits more than Halliday ’ s passion-fruit-glazed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no confection I ’ ve tried , ever , that ’ s more complex than her miso-chocolate-chip cookie , which is as funky as an unfiltered wine .
Both are gluten-free and vegan , designations that , in Halliday ’ s hands , seem less like restrictions than like powerfully wielded creative constraints .
Her dark-chocolate cake , made with aquafaba and a rice-based flour mix , has an exceptionally soft and glossy crumb .
The leaves of raw collard greens that she wrapped , burrito style , around sliced heirloom tomato and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ substitute for something starchier but as the best possible option , sturdy yet supple .
In the U.S. , collards are associated with the South ; Halliday grew up in Hawaii and Portland , Oregon , but much of her family is from Alabama , where her uncle grows vegetables , including collards .
“ Systemic racism has sort of strangled my connection to my lineage , ” she told me .
The wraps were a way to acknowledge her heritage on her own terms .
As Jared Howard developed the menu for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ second pop-up in the series , he considered the optics of “ being an African-American serving fried chicken , ” he told me .
“ I did not want to be a cliché.
” But he did want to highlight the cuisine of his native Maryland , which he began researching years ago .
As expected , there was much to learn about Chesapeake Bay seafood ; what surprised him was the chicken .
Some of his mother ’ s techniques , he realized—like covering her cast-iron pan with a lid mid-fry , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Escoffier ’ s “ Ma Cuisine , ” published in 1934 , Howard found a recipe for Maryland fried chicken finished with béchamel , and another source suggested that a dish of the same name had been served on the Titanic .
At Maison Yaki , he dusted his in Old Bay and sandwiched it—with béchamel—in an herb-flecked , Red Lobster-inspired buttermilk biscuit .
There were no crab cakes , but a clever oyster-mushroom po ’ boy hinted at the sea , and at what more Howard has in store .
( Pop-up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ♦

The other day, as I spoke to the chef Michelle Williams by phone, she paused to explain a faint beeping. “Oh, sorry, that’s a timer,” she said cheerfully. “I’ve got a poundcake in the oven.” As we hung up, she was logging on to a virtual meeting to discuss the new school year; in addition to running Good IV the Soul, her Brooklyn-based catering company, she teaches culinary arts in New York City public high schools. After the meeting, she would finish preparing a dinner that she was catering that night, setting portions aside for me to try in advance of her next venture: launching the third pop-up (through Aug. 16) in an ongoing series at Maison Yaki, in Prospect Heights, showcasing Black entrepreneurs.
At left, a fried-chicken biscuit sandwich, with dill pickles and béchamel. At right, a basket of Old Bay-and-vinegar waffle fries with sriracha aioli. Photograph by Myles Loftin for The New Yorker
The dinner included strip steak topped with parsley compound butter, salmon stuffed with lump crabmeat, and roasted broccoli, all hearty, comforting, and abundantly seasoned, fragrant with a concentrated, garlicky saltiness. Williams’s mother is her primary culinary inspiration, she told me, as well as her best friend. A retired bus matron who used to get up at 4 A.M. to commute from Brooklyn to the Bronx, her mother “always made sure she had food on the table,” Williams said. “A protein, a starch, and a veggie.” Good IV the Soul’s repertoire is loosely organized around traditions of the American South and the Caribbean and miscellaneous in the manner of someone game to take requests. The menu for the pop-up includes not one but three preparations of shrimp: deep fried; smothered, atop grits; and mixed with cheese in an empanada-like “soul pocket.”
Michelle Williams, who runs a catering company called Good IV the Soul and teaches culinary arts in New York City public high schools, is the third chef in the pop-up series. Photograph by Myles Loftin for The New Yorker
Williams has long dreamed of opening a restaurant, or, better yet, six. May she follow in the footsteps of Lani Halliday, the first chef to be featured at Maison Yaki, in July, whose five-year-old cake-and-pastry company, Brutus Bakeshop, is going brick and mortar later this year. I can think of nothing I’ve eaten recently that has buoyed my spirits more than Halliday’s passion-fruit-glazed, guava-filled pop tart, and of no confection I’ve tried, ever, that’s more complex than her miso-chocolate-chip cookie, which is as funky as an unfiltered wine.
Howard’s oyster-mushroom po’boy (upper left) was vegetarian but hinted at seafood. A trio of salads—corn, watermelon, and potato—accompanied the sandwich. Photograph by Myles Loftin for The New Yorker
Both are gluten-free and vegan, designations that, in Halliday’s hands, seem less like restrictions than like powerfully wielded creative constraints. Her dark-chocolate cake, made with aquafaba and a rice-based flour mix, has an exceptionally soft and glossy crumb. The leaves of raw collard greens that she wrapped, burrito style, around sliced heirloom tomato and sautéed mushrooms struck me not as a substitute for something starchier but as the best possible option, sturdy yet supple. In the U.S., collards are associated with the South; Halliday grew up in Hawaii and Portland, Oregon, but much of her family is from Alabama, where her uncle grows vegetables, including collards. “Systemic racism has sort of strangled my connection to my lineage,” she told me. The wraps were a way to acknowledge her heritage on her own terms.
Diners at the pop-ups can take their food to go or seat themselves at socially distanced tables outside. Photograph by Myles Loftin for The New Yorker
As Jared Howard developed the menu for Honey Bunny’s Chicken, the second pop-up in the series, he considered the optics of “being an African-American serving fried chicken,” he told me. “I did not want to be a cliché.” But he did want to highlight the cuisine of his native Maryland, which he began researching years ago. As expected, there was much to learn about Chesapeake Bay seafood; what surprised him was the chicken. Some of his mother’s techniques, he realized—like covering her cast-iron pan with a lid mid-fry, which retains moisture—seemed Maryland specific. In Escoffier’s “Ma Cuisine,” published in 1934, Howard found a recipe for Maryland fried chicken finished with béchamel, and another source suggested that a dish of the same name had been served on the Titanic. At Maison Yaki, he dusted his in Old Bay and sandwiched it—with béchamel—in an herb-flecked, Red Lobster-inspired buttermilk biscuit. There were no crab cakes, but a clever oyster-mushroom po’boy hinted at the sea, and at what more Howard has in store. (Pop-up dishes $7-$30.) ♦
More on the Coronavirus


newyorker--2020-08-07--“Boys State” and “Red Penguins,” Reviewed

Is American democracy in good health , will it remain so in the years ahead , or does it suffer from a painful and permanent case of electile dysfunction ?
If such questions nag at you , I recommend “ Boys State , ” a new documentary that casts a cool eye on the nation ’ s youth .
We meet a braying batch of them , mostly aged sixteen and seventeen , who are drawn together by a common passion for politics—not the blaze of activism , that is , but the hard grind of governance .
How and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling , as John Lennon advised , is a mystery that the film does not address .
The point is that these are the sort of kids who , should their dreams come true , will be running the show in the future .
I used to think that anyone who exhibits an abnormal fascination with politics as a teen-ager ought , on principle , to be banned from public office as an adult ; these days , however , you can ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Boys State ” look as if they used their own toilet training as a filibuster .
All of them come from Texas .
The movie , directed by Amanda McBaine and her husband , Jesse Moss , begins with an explanation : “ Since 1935 the American Legion has sponsored a program for teenagers to learn about democracy and civil discourse through a week-long engagement in self-governance .
There are separate programs for boys and girls.
” And that ’ s the first problem .
How can you prepare , in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of legislation ?
Currently , of the hundred and fifty members of the Texas House of Representatives , thirty-five are women ; one way to redress the balance , surely , would be to have their potential successors mix it up a little .
It may be , of course , that the Legion did contemplate tossing hundreds of boys and girls together for a week , shuddered at the prospect , and decided to cleave them in twain .
Let them self-govern , preferably after dark .
This movie concentrates exclusively on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Moss take a deep breath , return to the fray , and make “ Girls State ” ?
Let ’ s hope so . )
And what choice specimens it finds .
Behold Eddy , an Italian-American lad who , when he ’ s quizzed about his political assets , nominates his own abs .
“ He thinks he is God on Earth , ” someone says , and what ’ s ominous is just how far Eddy , like so many handsome strivers , is propelled by that belief .
At the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico .
Before him , nobody in his family had made it past the first year of high school .
Already , he seems older and steadier—less outspoken , yet more eloquent—than his coevals in the film , his only equal being René , one of the few Black contenders in the frame .
As smart and as slender as a whip , René has so judicious a manner , and such command as an orator , that he might as well skip these childish political games @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
He even has a pair of little spectacles , like half-moons , over which he examines a crowded chamber with a mildly inquiring disdain .
Why wait four decades , until René has put on fifty pounds , moved to Georgetown , used up a couple of marriages , and somehow mislaid his hair , his sense of humor , and his aura of charismatic hope ?
Give the guy a Senate committee to chair , now .
The boys are mustered in Austin , within sight of the capitol .
At @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into two competing camps , Federalists and Nationalists—each six hundred strong , and each with a number of administrative posts to be contested and filled .
Atop the pile are the two gubernatorial candidates , one of whom is duly elected governor as the week concludes .
I won ’ t spoil the fun , or the genuine tremor of suspense , by revealing the outcome , but it ’ s noticeable that all the major players in these battles are kids whose fortunes we have followed from the start .
How so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
Did they track innumerable boys , perhaps , and pluck out the successful ones from a writhing mass of footage ?
( No fewer than eight cinematographers are listed in the end credits . )
The only other possibility is that the filmmakers pulled a Putin and rigged the whole deal in advance .
“ Boys State ” will leave you alternately cheered and alarmed at the shape of things to come .
True , the landscape of the movie is richly littered with jerks , who fill or foul the air @ @ @ @ @ @ @ warns of “ the looming threat of alien invasion , ” while others propose that Texas secede from the Union .
( These two ideas may well be connected . )
Some of the kids sound like budding Nazis , informing us that citizens must be “ disciplined yet dangerous ” or that “ weak men simply create chaos ” —an oddly Nietzschean note to strike , in this allegedly God-fearing state .
Budding , however , is hardly the same as full-bloomed , and the film never lets us forget that these @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out dumb attitudes as if they were hair styles .
It would be great if McBaine and Moss , taking their cue from Michael Apted , whose “ Up ” documentaries have come out every seven years since 1964 , could gather some of the participants from “ Boys State ” at a later date and invite them to review their junior selves .
I see this film as a soothing antidote to our current fevers , in that it prevents us from making up our minds too staunchly or too fast .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ instance , begins by deriding the politics of gender , sexuality , and disability ; yet he is a double amputee , having lost his legs to meningitis at the age of three .
Not once during the week does he request any sympathy for his condition , let alone use it for advantage .
He even jokes about it .
On the other hand , he is the one kid onscreen who , as voting draws near , resorts without mercy ( and with visible success ) to dirty tricks .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gets people talking , ” he says .
“ You have to use personal attacks.
” Ben is a remarkable fellow .
He is also proof that Trumpery will not end with Trump .
And so to Robert , who turns eighteen in the course of the week .
He ’ s a ringer for the freshman hero of Richard Linklater ’ s “ Everybody Wants Some !
!
” ( 2016 ) , and , indeed , “ Boys State ” radiates some of the smiling tolerance that Linklater—a godfather of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dramas .
No one is more dazed and confused than Robert .
Hearty , white , and hellbent on West Point , he longs to project a jockish self-possession , but the surface cracks .
In one extraordinary sequence , he quietly confesses to being pro-choice : “ My stance on abortion would not line up well with the guys out there at all , so I chose to pick a new stance .
That ’ s politics.
” So , what has Robert acquired from his days in Austin ?
“ A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ get into office , ” he says .
Whether you think the less of him for fibbing , or the more of him for being so honest about his dishonesty , he becomes , on the spot , a more interesting figure .
Likewise , as Steven delivers a typically expert pitch to the voters , the camera catches Robert looking on with undisguised admiration .
His face is a concession speech made flesh ; you can see him admitting to himself , and to us , that this modest and stocky Latino @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ounce of Robert ’ s privilege , is in fact his superior , both moral and rhetorical , and therefore deserves to win .
On the strength of that moment alone , the American Legion should consider its job well done .

Is American democracy in good health, will it remain so in the years ahead, or does it suffer from a painful and permanent case of electile dysfunction? If such questions nag at you, I recommend “Boys State,” a new documentary that casts a cool eye on the nation’s youth. We meet a braying batch of them, mostly aged sixteen and seventeen, who are drawn together by a common passion for politics—not the blaze of activism, that is, but the hard grind of governance. How and why they developed this peculiar habit, rather than lying in bed and staring at the ceiling, as John Lennon advised, is a mystery that the film does not address. The point is that these are the sort of kids who, should their dreams come true, will be running the show in the future. I used to think that anyone who exhibits an abnormal fascination with politics as a teen-ager ought, on principle, to be banned from public office as an adult; these days, however, you can’t start early enough. The inhabitants of “Boys State” look as if they used their own toilet training as a filibuster. All of them come from Texas.
The movie, directed by Amanda McBaine and her husband, Jesse Moss, begins with an explanation: “Since 1935 the American Legion has sponsored a program for teenagers to learn about democracy and civil discourse through a week-long engagement in self-governance. There are separate programs for boys and girls.” And that’s the first problem. How can you prepare, in a single-sex bubble, for the grownup business of legislation? Currently, of the hundred and fifty members of the Texas House of Representatives, thirty-five are women; one way to redress the balance, surely, would be to have their potential successors mix it up a little. It may be, of course, that the Legion did contemplate tossing hundreds of boys and girls together for a week, shuddered at the prospect, and decided to cleave them in twain. Let them self-govern, preferably after dark.
This movie concentrates exclusively on the guys. (Will McBaine and Moss take a deep breath, return to the fray, and make “Girls State”? Let’s hope so.) And what choice specimens it finds. Behold Eddy, an Italian-American lad who, when he’s quizzed about his political assets, nominates his own abs. “He thinks he is God on Earth,” someone says, and what’s ominous is just how far Eddy, like so many handsome strivers, is propelled by that belief.
At the other extreme, we have Steven, whose mother was an immigrant from Mexico. Before him, nobody in his family had made it past the first year of high school. Already, he seems older and steadier—less outspoken, yet more eloquent—than his coevals in the film, his only equal being René, one of the few Black contenders in the frame. As smart and as slender as a whip, René has so judicious a manner, and such command as an orator, that he might as well skip these childish political games and head straight for the real thing. He even has a pair of little spectacles, like half-moons, over which he examines a crowded chamber with a mildly inquiring disdain. Why wait four decades, until René has put on fifty pounds, moved to Georgetown, used up a couple of marriages, and somehow mislaid his hair, his sense of humor, and his aura of charismatic hope? Give the guy a Senate committee to chair, now.
The boys are mustered in Austin, within sight of the capitol. At the outset, they are randomly split into two competing camps, Federalists and Nationalists—each six hundred strong, and each with a number of administrative posts to be contested and filled. Atop the pile are the two gubernatorial candidates, one of whom is duly elected governor as the week concludes. I won’t spoil the fun, or the genuine tremor of suspense, by revealing the outcome, but it’s noticeable that all the major players in these battles are kids whose fortunes we have followed from the start. How so? Did McBaine and Moss get lucky? Did they track innumerable boys, perhaps, and pluck out the successful ones from a writhing mass of footage? (No fewer than eight cinematographers are listed in the end credits.) The only other possibility is that the filmmakers pulled a Putin and rigged the whole deal in advance.
“Boys State” will leave you alternately cheered and alarmed at the shape of things to come. True, the landscape of the movie is richly littered with jerks, who fill or foul the air with their personal policy statements; one warns of “the looming threat of alien invasion,” while others propose that Texas secede from the Union. (These two ideas may well be connected.) Some of the kids sound like budding Nazis, informing us that citizens must be “disciplined yet dangerous” or that “weak men simply create chaos”—an oddly Nietzschean note to strike, in this allegedly God-fearing state. Budding, however, is hardly the same as full-bloomed, and the film never lets us forget that these are big children, who are trying out dumb attitudes as if they were hair styles. It would be great if McBaine and Moss, taking their cue from Michael Apted, whose “Up” documentaries have come out every seven years since 1964, could gather some of the participants from “Boys State” at a later date and invite them to review their junior selves.
I see this film as a soothing antidote to our current fevers, in that it prevents us from making up our minds too staunchly or too fast. A libertarian soul named Ben, for instance, begins by deriding the politics of gender, sexuality, and disability; yet he is a double amputee, having lost his legs to meningitis at the age of three. Not once during the week does he request any sympathy for his condition, let alone use it for advantage. He even jokes about it. On the other hand, he is the one kid onscreen who, as voting draws near, resorts without mercy (and with visible success) to dirty tricks. “We need to do something drastic that gets people talking,” he says. “You have to use personal attacks.” Ben is a remarkable fellow. He is also proof that Trumpery will not end with Trump.
And so to Robert, who turns eighteen in the course of the week. He’s a ringer for the freshman hero of Richard Linklater’s “Everybody Wants Some!!” (2016), and, indeed, “Boys State” radiates some of the smiling tolerance that Linklater—a godfather of the Austin movie scene—has brought to his Texan dramas. No one is more dazed and confused than Robert. Hearty, white, and hellbent on West Point, he longs to project a jockish self-possession, but the surface cracks. In one extraordinary sequence, he quietly confesses to being pro-choice: “My stance on abortion would not line up well with the guys out there at all, so I chose to pick a new stance. That’s politics.”
So, what has Robert acquired from his days in Austin? “A new appreciation for why politicians lie to get into office,” he says. Whether you think the less of him for fibbing, or the more of him for being so honest about his dishonesty, he becomes, on the spot, a more interesting figure. Likewise, as Steven delivers a typically expert pitch to the voters, the camera catches Robert looking on with undisguised admiration. His face is a concession speech made flesh; you can see him admitting to himself, and to us, that this modest and stocky Latino kid, who has had not an ounce of Robert’s privilege, is in fact his superior, both moral and rhetorical, and therefore deserves to win. On the strength of that moment alone, the American Legion should consider its job well done.
For some people, I guess, the celebration of democratic leadership in “Boys State” will be a drag. Why be responsible when you can be gonzo? The good news is that another documentary, “Red Penguins,” is here to serve your bedlam-loving needs. Communism, capitalism, corruption: the gang’s all here. The director is Gabe Polsky, and the title refers to a hockey team—specifically, the former Red Army hockey team, which, as the Soviet Union melted, in the early nineteen-nineties, found itself drained of funds. Even the manager, Valery Gushin, was at a loss. (Interviewed for the film, he unleashes a grin that would scare a Siberian tiger.) Salvation arrived in the shape of the Pittsburgh Penguins, whose owners, sniffing an opportunity, dared to invest in their team’s Russian counterpart. A marketing man, Steven Warshaw, was sent to Moscow with orders to spruce things up.
There was a lot of sprucing to do. The sports arena was a rusty wreck. On the ice, Warshaw recalls, “there were medical doctors driving Zambonis, because they made more money driving a Zamboni than doing surgery.” Undaunted, he launched the basic weapons of his trade, such as advertising boards and a cartoon logo, plus a few bespoke local touches: a Yeltsin and Gorbachev look-alike contest, say, or live bears serving drinks on the rink. (There were also free-beer nights. For Russians. Tough sell.) Sure enough, the fans came flocking, and everything went well until it didn’t—until, that is, the Muscovite mafia demanded a slice of the American pie. Once Warshaw learned that the price on his head was sixty-five hundred bucks, he left town, and rightly so. I mean, they couldn’t even make it seven grand? What an insult. ♦