newyorker--2020-02-07--How Trump Has Reversed Decades of American Hostage Policy

For the last half century , the U.S. government ’ s official policy for responding to the kidnapping of Americans overseas for political purposes has been to refuse to negotiate .
The policy dates back to 1973 , when eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September overran the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum , Sudan , and took hostage several foreign diplomats , including two Americans .
Asked by reporters for his response , President Richard Nixon declared that “ we will not pay blackmail.
” Within hours , the two American diplomats , along with a Belgian colleague @ @ @ @ @ @ @ wall and shot .
President Ronald Reagan also proclaimed he would never “ make concessions to terrorists ” but did so in secret , most notably when he made a deal to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for help in freeing U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon .
The “ no-concessions ” policy , as it became known , was eventually codified in a classified directive at the beginning of the George W. Bush Administration .
The underlying rationale was that paying ransom would encourage more hostage-taking while providing a source @ @ @ @ @ @ @ no-concessions policy hardened as Al Qaeda used the kidnapping of Americans and Europeans as a way to garner publicity and funds .
While European governments , such as France , Spain , and Italy , quietly paid multimillion-dollar ransoms to free their citizens , the U.S. Patriot Act , passed in 2001 , specifically banned the provision of material support to designated terror groups , including ransom payments made by private parties , like corporations and families .
For the next fifteen years , the United States and the United Kingdom became the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Beginning in 2012 , as ISIS began to acquire territory in Syria , its members kidnapped dozens of Westerners , among them aid workers and journalists .
ISIS exploited the disparity between the European approach of quietly paying ransoms and the American and British policy of declining to do so .
While the Europeans paid millions in ransom to bring their hostages home , British and American hostages , among them the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff , were murdered .
The families of American hostages were angry with the Obama Administration @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at their time of greatest need .
Their complaints compelled President Barack Obama to order a review of U.S. hostage policy , which was completed in the summer of 2015 .
The new hostage policy kept the no-concessions framework in place but created a more robust interagency system to support families and coördinate the government response .
It provided some additional latitude , making clear that the U.S. government could “ communicate ” with hostage-takers even if it couldn ’ t negotiate .
In order to calm fears among families , Obama assured @ @ @ @ @ @ @ would be prosecuted for paying a ransom to a terrorist group despite the fact that such payments were technically illegal .
President Trump has taken a very different approach to the issue .
He has kept in place the expanded effort created by Obama to support families but repeatedly pushed the boundaries of the no-concessions policy upheld by Republican and Democratic Presidents since Nixon .
Trump ’ s style of resolving cases is more personal and more flexible .
Obama was focussed on the strategic challenges around hostage-taking , and tended to avoid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American President showed a personal interest in bringing a hostage home , the theory went , it would raise the value of American hostages and increase the number of kidnappings .
Trump , by contrast , has gone out of his way to highlight his personal engagement in hostage-recovery efforts , welcoming hostages home on national television or inviting them to Oval Office photo opportunities .
Trump seeks to showcase his skill as a deal maker and gain the political benefit of bringing Americans home .
Peter Bergen , a vice-president of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who has written widely on terrorism , called Trump ’ s hostage efforts “ an area of significant foreign-policy success ” and highlighted the role of Robert O ’ Brien , who served as the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs before being named national-security adviser , last September .
Last year , Trump—citing a statement made by O ’ Brien—said his Administration had brought home thirty-eight Americans held captive abroad , ranging from the 2017 rescue of Caitlan Coleman and her family , held for five years by the Taliban in Pakistan @ @ @ @ @ @ @ American pastor Andrew Brunson , unjustly imprisoned by Turkey on charges of collaborating with a coup .
“ The President has had unparalleled success in bringing Americans home without paying concessions , without prisoner exchanges , ” O ’ Brien said , “ but through force of will and the good will that he ’ s generated around the world.
” Some advocates for hostages say the Administration is inflating the number of prisoners brought home and paying de-facto ransoms in cases .
Trump , for example , takes credit for the release @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have considered hostages , including three U.C.L.A .
basketball players arrested by China for shoplifting , and the rapper A $ AP Rocky , who was arrested in Sweden after he got into an altercation on the street .
The Administration is also increasingly engaging in prisoner exchanges with insurgents and terrorist groups .
In November , 2019 , two hostages held by the Taliban for more than three years in Afghanistan , the American Kevin King and the Australian Timothy Weeks , were released as part of a deal that included the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Afghan jails .
Administration officials said the hostage release was part of a broader effort by U.S. diplomats to secure a peace deal with the Taliban .
( In an apparent setback , an American contractor , Mark R. Frerichs , was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan last month , according to Newsweek . )
In Iran , the Trump Administration claims it negotiated the release of the Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in exchange for an Iranian scientist , Masoud Soleimani , who was imprisoned in the U.S. for sanctions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the no-concessions policy , particularly considering that the Trump Administration designated Iran ’ s Revolutionary Guard , which often controls American prisoners in Iran , as a foreign terrorist organization .
Six Americans—most of them dual Iranian nationals—are still imprisoned in Iran .
Diane Foley , the mother of James Foley and president and founder of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation , which advocates for the release of all Americans held hostage overseas ( and on whose board Bergen sits ) , recognized Trump ’ s efforts .
But she called the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” citing the Administration ’ s unwillingness to confront U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt , where an American citizen , Mustafa Kassem , recently died after more than six years in custody .
Trump has earned praise from other hostage families .
He made a personal call to Carl and Marsha Mueller , the parents of the humanitarian-aid worker Kayla Mueller , who was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in Syria , to inform them about the military operation that had killed the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi , which had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ honor .
At the President ’ s invitation , the Muellers attended the State of the Union address on Tuesday and , in one of the few moments of bipartisan unity , received a standing ovation from the entire Congress .
The family of the journalist Austin Tice , who has been missing in Syria for more than seven years , has also publicly praised Trump for his efforts to bring Tice home .
At a January 27th press conference , Austin ’ s mother , Debra Tice , alleged that an unnamed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s desire to win her son ’ s release by refusing to meet with Syrian officials .

For the last half century, the U.S. government’s official policy for responding to the kidnapping of Americans overseas for political purposes has been to refuse to negotiate. The policy dates back to 1973, when eight members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September overran the Saudi Embassy in Khartoum, Sudan, and took hostage several foreign diplomats, including two Americans. Asked by reporters for his response, President Richard Nixon declared that “we will not pay blackmail.” Within hours, the two American diplomats, along with a Belgian colleague, were stood up against a basement wall and shot.
President Ronald Reagan also proclaimed he would never “make concessions to terrorists” but did so in secret, most notably when he made a deal to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for help in freeing U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon. The “no-concessions” policy, as it became known, was eventually codified in a classified directive at the beginning of the George W. Bush Administration. The underlying rationale was that paying ransom would encourage more hostage-taking while providing a source of funding to terror groups.
The no-concessions policy hardened as Al Qaeda used the kidnapping of Americans and Europeans as a way to garner publicity and funds. While European governments, such as France, Spain, and Italy, quietly paid multimillion-dollar ransoms to free their citizens, the U.S. Patriot Act, passed in 2001, specifically banned the provision of material support to designated terror groups, including ransom payments made by private parties, like corporations and families. For the next fifteen years, the United States and the United Kingdom became the leading adherents to the no-concessions framework.
Beginning in 2012, as ISIS began to acquire territory in Syria, its members kidnapped dozens of Westerners, among them aid workers and journalists. ISIS exploited the disparity between the European approach of quietly paying ransoms and the American and British policy of declining to do so. While the Europeans paid millions in ransom to bring their hostages home, British and American hostages, among them the journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, were murdered. The families of American hostages were angry with the Obama Administration, which they felt had abandoned them at their time of greatest need. Their complaints compelled President Barack Obama to order a review of U.S. hostage policy, which was completed in the summer of 2015.
The new hostage policy kept the no-concessions framework in place but created a more robust interagency system to support families and coördinate the government response. It provided some additional latitude, making clear that the U.S. government could “communicate” with hostage-takers even if it couldn’t negotiate. In order to calm fears among families, Obama assured them that no Americans had been or would be prosecuted for paying a ransom to a terrorist group despite the fact that such payments were technically illegal.
President Trump has taken a very different approach to the issue. He has kept in place the expanded effort created by Obama to support families but repeatedly pushed the boundaries of the no-concessions policy upheld by Republican and Democratic Presidents since Nixon. Trump’s style of resolving cases is more personal and more flexible. Obama was focussed on the strategic challenges around hostage-taking, and tended to avoid personal interest or involvement. If an American President showed a personal interest in bringing a hostage home, the theory went, it would raise the value of American hostages and increase the number of kidnappings. Trump, by contrast, has gone out of his way to highlight his personal engagement in hostage-recovery efforts, welcoming hostages home on national television or inviting them to Oval Office photo opportunities. Trump seeks to showcase his skill as a deal maker and gain the political benefit of bringing Americans home.
Peter Bergen, a vice-president of the Washington, D.C.-based New America think tank who has written widely on terrorism, called Trump’s hostage efforts “an area of significant foreign-policy success” and highlighted the role of Robert O’Brien, who served as the Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs before being named national-security adviser, last September. Last year, Trump—citing a statement made by O’Brien—said his Administration had brought home thirty-eight Americans held captive abroad, ranging from the 2017 rescue of Caitlan Coleman and her family, held for five years by the Taliban in Pakistan, to the 2018 release of the American pastor Andrew Brunson, unjustly imprisoned by Turkey on charges of collaborating with a coup. “The President has had unparalleled success in bringing Americans home without paying concessions, without prisoner exchanges,” O’Brien said, “but through force of will and the good will that he’s generated around the world.”
Some advocates for hostages say the Administration is inflating the number of prisoners brought home and paying de-facto ransoms in cases. Trump, for example, takes credit for the release of Americans whom past Administrations would not have considered hostages, including three U.C.L.A. basketball players arrested by China for shoplifting, and the rapper A$AP Rocky, who was arrested in Sweden after he got into an altercation on the street. The Administration is also increasingly engaging in prisoner exchanges with insurgents and terrorist groups .
In November, 2019, two hostages held by the Taliban for more than three years in Afghanistan, the American Kevin King and the Australian Timothy Weeks, were released as part of a deal that included the freeing of three senior Taliban leaders held in Afghan jails. Administration officials said the hostage release was part of a broader effort by U.S. diplomats to secure a peace deal with the Taliban. (In an apparent setback, an American contractor, Mark R. Frerichs, was kidnapped by the Taliban in Afghanistan last month, according to Newsweek.)
In Iran, the Trump Administration claims it negotiated the release of the Princeton graduate student Xiyue Wang in exchange for an Iranian scientist, Masoud Soleimani, who was imprisoned in the U.S. for sanctions violations. These deals appear to defy the no-concessions policy, particularly considering that the Trump Administration designated Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which often controls American prisoners in Iran, as a foreign terrorist organization. Six Americans—most of them dual Iranian nationals—are still imprisoned in Iran.
Diane Foley, the mother of James Foley and president and founder of the James W. Foley Legacy Foundation, which advocates for the release of all Americans held hostage overseas (and on whose board Bergen sits), recognized Trump’s efforts. But she called the President’s record “uneven,” citing the Administration’s unwillingness to confront U.S. allies like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where an American citizen, Mustafa Kassem, recently died after more than six years in custody.
Trump has earned praise from other hostage families. He made a personal call to Carl and Marsha Mueller, the parents of the humanitarian-aid worker Kayla Mueller, who was kidnapped and murdered by ISIS in Syria, to inform them about the military operation that had killed the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, which had been named in their daughter’s honor. At the President’s invitation, the Muellers attended the State of the Union address on Tuesday and, in one of the few moments of bipartisan unity, received a standing ovation from the entire Congress. The family of the journalist Austin Tice, who has been missing in Syria for more than seven years, has also publicly praised Trump for his efforts to bring Tice home. At a January 27th press conference, Austin’s mother, Debra Tice, alleged that an unnamed senior U.S. official was defying President Trump’s desire to win her son’s release by refusing to meet with Syrian officials.
The question is whether Trump’s approach will increase the number of Americans taken captive in the long term and have other strategic costs. The Oval Office photo ops are good politics, but also signal to insurgents and hostile governments that American captives are valuable bargaining chips with Trump. Aya Hijazi, an Egyptian-American children’s-rights activist imprisoned for nearly three years in Egypt, was freed after Trump personally raised her case with Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi at a White House meeting. Egypt’s brutal crackdown on its internal opposition was conspicuously absent from the President’s agenda. “As an individual, I’m grateful to be free,” Hijazi later said. “But the larger foreign policy is compromised. It sends a really dark message to the Middle East.”
If Obama was hamstrung by rigid adherence to the no-concessions framework, Trump seems largely indifferent to long-term policy implications of his vastly more flexible approach. Trump’s proclivity for risky and dramatic action could blow up a hostage situation with a military raid or an intemperate remark that derails sensitive negotiations. “Anyone who tells you they can predict what the Trump Administration will do is lying,” Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent and leading expert on counterterrorism, told me. “I don’t think the Trump Administration itself can predict what it will do.”
Many experts worry that the escalating tensions with Iran, including the U.S. drone strike that killed Major General Qassem Suleimani, could lead Iranian proxies to seize American hostages. After all, hostage-taking—either through the imprisonment of Americans on trumped-up charges, as occurred with the Washington Post correspondent Jason Rezaian, or via proxy groups outside the country—has been a feature of every conflict with Iran since the 1979 Revolution. Brett McGurk, a veteran U.S. diplomat with extensive experience in the Middle East, said that the threat of kidnappings and political assassination by Iran or its proxies will remain elevated for the foreseeable future. “Iran is likely not finished,” McGurk told me. “They don’t forget, and they take their time.”


newyorker--2020-02-07--The Prosecution of President Donald Trump

Near the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump , a Democratic staffer working on the House impeachment team received a message from a sibling .
“ It ’ s going really well , ” the text said .
“ Do you think there ’ s a chance ?
” A week earlier , seven House Democrats—known as floor managers , in impeachment argot—had marched across the long axis of the Capitol , past statues of Brigham Young and Barry Goldwater , and delivered two articles of impeachment to the floor of the Senate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from New York , told me later that the experience of passing from one chamber to the other was “ what it must feel like when a home team is playing in a game at someone else ’ s stadium.
” The feeling was well warranted : just about every aspect of the trial—the amount of time the managers would have to present , the kind and quantity of evidence they could use , even the scope of press access—would be controlled by Senate Republicans , which was to say , in large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Majority Leader .
What ’ s more , the official task confronting the managers , to persuade sixty-seven out of a hundred senators to remove the President from office , was , as everyone had recognized from the start , all but impossible .
And yet , the staffer ’ s family back home could be forgiven for thinking that the House Democrats had reason for some modest optimism .
In the hours before the trial proceedings got under way in earnest , on January 21st , McConnell had been forced by moderate @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a proposal that would have provided just two days for the managers to present their case .
On that first day , the managers had also been able to take advantage of a series of procedural amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer , the Minority Leader , to start arguing the substance of their case , in a way that had clearly seemed to catch the White House lawyers , sent to the Senate to defend the President , off guard .
The staffer recognized these minor victories but quickly set his sibling straight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ back .
“ This is the Alamo .
There ’ s only one outcome here.
” This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House ’ s impeachment efforts .
As recently as July—coincidentally , on the same day that Donald Trump had his now infamous call with the President of Ukraine , Volodymyr Zelensky—Adam Schiff , the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House ’ s impeachment inquiry last fall , said that he would “ be delighted ” if there was a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ impeachment .
Unfortunately , he said at the time , “ the only way he ’ s leaving office , at least at this point , is by being voted out.
” For his part , Jerry Nadler , the chair of the House Judiciary Committee , told me more recently that , though he believed that “ on any rational basis , the President should be removed from office , ” he had no illusions about the possibility of such an event occurring .
“ I ’ m cynical , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ believe the Republicans would give a damn.
” The minimal odds of convicting Trump did not stop many House Democrats from seeing the chance to serve as a floor manager as intensely attractive .
But they also understood , like aspiring popes , that grasping too openly for the position would not help their cause .
After Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her selection of the managers , a few hours before the articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate , several of them insisted that they had not lobbied to be chosen @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a former police chief from Florida , told me that , during the meeting in which Pelosi told her that she would be a floor manager , the Speaker had first asked if she was even interested .
“ She had not heard from me , ” Demings said .
By all accounts , Pelosi kept her choice a closely held secret right up to the end .
Schiff—whom she has called her “ general , ” and whom she selected to be the lead floor manager for the trial—was one of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ matter .
Nadler , who had chaired a hearing about the constitutional standards for impeachment last fall—debates about which would loom large over the trial—was another .
The remaining five managers were selected to make up a group that Pelosi hoped would reflect the diversity , in several dimensions , of the House Democratic caucus .
Zoe Lofgren , of California , had seen two previous impeachment inquiries at close hand .
Jeffries was recognized as one of the House ’ s more talented communicators .
Demings was a member of both the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ given her a role in both major phases of the House impeachment inquiry .
Sylvia Garcia , of Texas , was a freshman congresswoman and a former judge .
Staffers working on the inquiry said that the one surprise on Pelosi ’ s list was Jason Crow , of Colorado , a former Army Ranger who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan but had not been on any of the committees conducting the impeachment inquiry .
The Laurel and Hardy–esque physical contrast between Schiff and Nadler , the team ’ s most senior @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for their differing attitudes toward impeachment .
Schiff had resisted calls to begin proceedings against Trump even after the release of the Mueller report , and had urged Pelosi last fall to keep the scope of the articles narrowly focussed on the Ukraine matter .
Nadler , on the other hand , was an early advocate for impeachment .
Last summer , a month before news of the Ukraine scheme had broken in the press , he told CNN that the Judiciary Committee was engaged in “ formal impeachment proceedings , ” a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more cautious colleagues in the House .
And , when we spoke during the trial , he confirmed to me , for the first time on the record , that he had pushed Pelosi , unsuccessfully , to include an article of impeachment dedicated to the obstruction-of-justice allegations in the Mueller report .
“ It was clear to me by the beginning of 2019 that , on the merits , he ought to be impeached , ” Nadler said , of Trump .
By December , when the actual articles were drawn up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have impeached him on a dozen , literally a dozen , different arguments .
But there ’ s a prudential political judgment to be made in terms of which articles and how many , and that ’ s the judgment that Nancy ” —Pelosi— “ ultimately made .
That ’ s not a judgment on values , on the merits .
It was a judgment , ultimately , on which could be most easily explained.
” The House floor managers had three days to present their case against Trump .
They would end @ @ @ @ @ @ @ twenty-four hours , building their case out of a series of scripted modules .
As a lawyer working on the impeachment told me , the aim of the presentation was to put together something like a closing argument in a typical criminal trial , “ where you are weaving the evidence together—the text messages , the documents , the video , the argument—to show how it all meshes together.
” From the start , the managers and the staff had been aware of the need to reach two audiences .
One was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were forced to sit silently through eight hours of lectures each day , without smartphones or laptops to distract them .
Lofgren , who knew many of the Republicans from earlier in their careers , when they had served in the House with her , said that she took special care to make eye contact with her former colleagues .
“ I ’ m looking at them , wondering what they ’ re thinking and how to speak to them , ” she said .
By far the more important audience , however @ @ @ @ @ @ @ managers were concerned , was the public watching at home , who would not have the time or inclination to absorb hours of sometimes tedious presentations at a stretch .
“ In order to appeal to the broader public , you have to have some repetition , ” the lawyer told me .
“ But that annoys the senators , who are sitting there listening to what they perceive , potentially , to be the same thing over and over .
”

Near the end of the first full day of the impeachment trial of Donald Trump, a Democratic staffer working on the House impeachment team received a message from a sibling. “It’s going really well,” the text said. “Do you think there’s a chance?” A week earlier, seven House Democrats—known as floor managers, in impeachment argot—had marched across the long axis of the Capitol, past statues of Brigham Young and Barry Goldwater, and delivered two articles of impeachment to the floor of the Senate. Hakeem Jeffries, a floor manager from New York, told me later that the experience of passing from one chamber to the other was “what it must feel like when a home team is playing in a game at someone else’s stadium.” The feeling was well warranted: just about every aspect of the trial—the amount of time the managers would have to present, the kind and quantity of evidence they could use, even the scope of press access—would be controlled by Senate Republicans, which was to say, in large part, by Mitch McConnell, the Majority Leader. What’s more, the official task confronting the managers, to persuade sixty-seven out of a hundred senators to remove the President from office, was, as everyone had recognized from the start, all but impossible.
And yet, the staffer’s family back home could be forgiven for thinking that the House Democrats had reason for some modest optimism. In the hours before the trial proceedings got under way in earnest, on January 21st, McConnell had been forced by moderate members of his caucus to backtrack from a proposal that would have provided just two days for the managers to present their case. On that first day, the managers had also been able to take advantage of a series of procedural amendments proposed by Chuck Schumer, the Minority Leader, to start arguing the substance of their case, in a way that had clearly seemed to catch the White House lawyers, sent to the Senate to defend the President, off guard. The staffer recognized these minor victories but quickly set his sibling straight. “No,” he wrote back. “This is the Alamo. There’s only one outcome here.”
This feeling of inevitability was shared among those who were most intimately involved with the House’s impeachment efforts. As recently as July—coincidentally, on the same day that Donald Trump had his now infamous call with the President of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelensky—Adam Schiff, the ex-prosecutor who became the de-facto leader of the House’s impeachment inquiry last fall, said that he would “be delighted” if there was a real prospect of removing the President through impeachment. Unfortunately, he said at the time, “the only way he’s leaving office, at least at this point, is by being voted out.” For his part, Jerry Nadler, the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, told me more recently that, though he believed that “on any rational basis, the President should be removed from office,” he had no illusions about the possibility of such an event occurring. “I’m cynical,” he said. “I didn’t believe the Republicans would give a damn.”
The minimal odds of convicting Trump did not stop many House Democrats from seeing the chance to serve as a floor manager as intensely attractive. But they also understood, like aspiring popes, that grasping too openly for the position would not help their cause. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her selection of the managers, a few hours before the articles of impeachment were delivered to the Senate, several of them insisted that they had not lobbied to be chosen. Val Demings, for instance, a former police chief from Florida, told me that, during the meeting in which Pelosi told her that she would be a floor manager, the Speaker had first asked if she was even interested. “She had not heard from me,” Demings said. By all accounts, Pelosi kept her choice a closely held secret right up to the end. Schiff—whom she has called her “general,” and whom she selected to be the lead floor manager for the trial—was one of the few people with whom she discussed the matter. Nadler, who had chaired a hearing about the constitutional standards for impeachment last fall—debates about which would loom large over the trial—was another. The remaining five managers were selected to make up a group that Pelosi hoped would reflect the diversity, in several dimensions, of the House Democratic caucus. Zoe Lofgren, of California, had seen two previous impeachment inquiries at close hand. Jeffries was recognized as one of the House’s more talented communicators. Demings was a member of both the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, which had given her a role in both major phases of the House impeachment inquiry. Sylvia Garcia, of Texas, was a freshman congresswoman and a former judge. Staffers working on the inquiry said that the one surprise on Pelosi’s list was Jason Crow, of Colorado, a former Army Ranger who had served in Iraq and Afghanistan but had not been on any of the committees conducting the impeachment inquiry.
The Laurel and Hardy–esque physical contrast between Schiff and Nadler, the team’s most senior members, could stand as a metaphor for their differing attitudes toward impeachment. Schiff had resisted calls to begin proceedings against Trump even after the release of the Mueller report, and had urged Pelosi last fall to keep the scope of the articles narrowly focussed on the Ukraine matter. Nadler, on the other hand, was an early advocate for impeachment. Last summer, a month before news of the Ukraine scheme had broken in the press, he told CNN that the Judiciary Committee was engaged in “formal impeachment proceedings,” a declaration that caused some consternation among his more cautious colleagues in the House. And, when we spoke during the trial, he confirmed to me, for the first time on the record, that he had pushed Pelosi, unsuccessfully, to include an article of impeachment dedicated to the obstruction-of-justice allegations in the Mueller report. “It was clear to me by the beginning of 2019 that, on the merits, he ought to be impeached,” Nadler said, of Trump. By December, when the actual articles were drawn up, he said, “we could have impeached him on a dozen, literally a dozen, different arguments. But there’s a prudential political judgment to be made in terms of which articles and how many, and that’s the judgment that Nancy”—Pelosi—“ultimately made. That’s not a judgment on values, on the merits. It was a judgment, ultimately, on which could be most easily explained.”
The House floor managers had three days to present their case against Trump. They would end up using nearly all of their allotted twenty-four hours, building their case out of a series of scripted modules. As a lawyer working on the impeachment told me, the aim of the presentation was to put together something like a closing argument in a typical criminal trial, “where you are weaving the evidence together—the text messages, the documents, the video, the argument—to show how it all meshes together.”
From the start, the managers and the staff had been aware of the need to reach two audiences. One was the hundred senators in the chamber, who were forced to sit silently through eight hours of lectures each day, without smartphones or laptops to distract them. Lofgren, who knew many of the Republicans from earlier in their careers, when they had served in the House with her, said that she took special care to make eye contact with her former colleagues. “I’m looking at them, wondering what they’re thinking and how to speak to them,” she said. By far the more important audience, however, at least as far as the managers were concerned, was the public watching at home, who would not have the time or inclination to absorb hours of sometimes tedious presentations at a stretch. “In order to appeal to the broader public, you have to have some repetition,” the lawyer told me. “But that annoys the senators, who are sitting there listening to what they perceive, potentially, to be the same thing over and over.”
Another challenge was the peculiar legal structure of the trial itself. “In this trial, as opposed to every other trial in America, criminal or civil or whatever, the jury gets instructions from the judge,” the lawyer told me. “The jury is told that they have to follow the law, regardless of what they think of it. They need to apply the facts to the law.” In the impeachment trial, by contrast, “there’s no definitive legal standard that the jury of the Senate needs to abide by. And so the message that we’re trying to convey is not that we have proven the facts as much as it is that we have persuaded the jury. That’s a slightly different analysis.” As a result, the lawyer suggested, some of the most contentious aspects of the impeachment trial tended to focus less on the facts of the case than on their ultimate significance. “For our side, the notion that a President would use the powers that only the President has, to benefit himself, is really anathema to everything that our country stands for. That just became the overarching message that we funnelled through everything that we did.”
The scripts for each module were typically drafted by the staff of the impeachment inquiry. “We started with the facts,” the lawyer said. “And then we tried to pull out from the weeds, to focus on some of the broader messages.” The managers themselves were also keen to put their individual stamp on speeches they delivered. “You can’t talk like a lawyer and bore the entire room,” Lofgren told me. The daughter of a beer-truck driver, she said that she wanted to “use regular words that people understand, that don’t put them to sleep.” Crow, who, while deployed in Afghanistan, had studied for the LSAT during rocket attacks, told me that he liked to write his own scripts from outlines while listening to music from a playlist that, to the mortification of his communications director, he had named “Jason’s Chillin’ Playlist,” with songs by Journey, Foreigner, and Billy Joel. For Jeffries, a former corporate litigator who defended CBS against a lawsuit over Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” during Super Bowl XXXVIII, in 2004, the cycles of intense editing reminded him of being a young legal associate. “The staff here has been giving us great drafts, but we’re still marking them up heavily and putting ourselves into it,” he said.
Some of the most memorable moments of the managers’ presentations were not scripted at all. During the arguments over Schumer’s amendments, Jay Sekulow, one of the President’s lawyers, had asked the senators, “Why are we here? Are we here because of a phone call or are we here before this great body because, as the President was sworn into office, there was a desire to see him removed?” At the next break, Jeffries suggested to Schiff that the question gave the managers an opening to explain what their case was about. When Jeffries spoke later in the day, he extemporized a series of answers to Sekulow’s question before ending his speech with an allusion—surely the first on the Senate floor—to a lyric by the Notorious B.I.G. “That is why we’re here, Mr. Sekulow,” he said. “And if you don’t know, now you know.” Later, he told me, “Perhaps this is just my Brooklyn upbringing, but it came to me that I could think of no better way to finish this off.”
In October, one staffer working on the impeachment inquiry had described Schiff to me as “incredibly wonky, a prosecutor devoid of any emotion,” and several of his colleagues noted his imperturbably even keel. Jason Crow told me that he saw in Schiff a quality he saw in himself. “He operates within a tight band,” he said. “The highs are moderated, the lows are moderated.” Since the Intelligence Committee hearings last fall, however, I’d noticed that Schiff was letting himself get increasingly emotional in his speeches. Sometimes he sounded angry, other times elegiac or aspirational, still others almost pleading. When I asked Schiff about this later, he told me that, during those Intelligence Committee hearings, he had felt “very strongly about the seriousness of the undertaking” and began keeping notes on “what was particularly revealing, a new insight into a witness’s testimony or something that one of the Founders said.” At the end of each day, he would weave the notes into an improvised closing argument—a process, continued through the Senate trial, that produced several rousing speeches, which were repeated endlessly on cable news and social media. “I think, when you’re able to get away from the script, it’s more engaging for the senators and those watching,” Schiff said. “There’s always obviously some risk in doing that, too, but that was my practice.”
Throughout the proceedings in the Senate chamber, the floor managers and their staff, and the White House lawyers across the aisle, sat at comma-shaped tables that were custom-built for the Clinton impeachment trial, in 1999. Another two dozen or so Democratic staffers monitored the proceedings from a room near the Senate chamber that was ordinarily the possession of the Senate’s Rules and Administration Committee. Tables, computers, and heavy-duty staplers had been brought in for the duration of the trial, a copy machine had been wheeled into a corner, and a direct line to the House’s computer network had been installed. On the mantle of a marble fireplace, usually home to a stately clock, were arranged heaps of Skittles, boxes of Clif Bars, and a cache of Cheez-Its that were monopolized by Jason Crow. “I’m a huge carboholic,” he told me. “A big Cheez-Its guy.” For all the planning, the trial held several surprises for the managers. One was the close physical quarters of the Senate chamber, which is much smaller than the House. “Mitch McConnell is right there, front and center,” Jeffries said. “You are talking to the opposition, and he’s about ten feet away from you.” Garcia told me that, during the breaks, both the managers and the senators tended to make a beeline for the same set of bathrooms. “We can’t help but see each other,” she said. “There’s only so much room.”
Another surprise was how little many of the senators seemed to know about the alleged Ukraine scheme before the trial started. On the first day of the managers’ presentation, John Kennedy, of Louisiana, told reporters that he had “learned a lot. Everybody has. Senators didn’t know the case. They really didn’t. We didn’t stay glued to the television. We haven’t read the transcripts.” That evening, Lindsey Graham, of South Carolina, went out of his way to shake Schiff’s hand after the presentations were over. According to a House Democratic aide working on impeachment, those two events were “pretty shocking. We just assumed everybody has been living with every level of detail of this, as we have. The Republicans coming and congratulating our members like that meant a lot to us.”


newyorker--2020-02-09--Every Best Picture Winner as Remembered by Our Grandmother, Who Has a Hard Time Remembering the Name

Every Best Picture Winner as Remembered by Our Grandmother, Who Has a Hard Time Remembering the Names of Things

2004 : “ Little Men Without Shoes Doing Big Things , Part Three ” ( “ Lord of the Rings : Return of the King ” ) 1989 : “ The Man Says He Can Drive and Is Excellent at It ” ( “ Rain Man ” ) 1988 : “ Baby King and His Poop Sniffers ” ( “ The Last Emperor ” ) 1976 : “ One Fountain Flew Out the Window ” ( “ One Flew Over the Cuckoo ’ s Nest ” ) 1974 : “ Salad Dressing and the Sundance Kid Go to Chicago ” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : “ Nothing Like ‘ Annie ’ ” ( “ In the Heat of the Night ” ) 1967 : “ Gim me My Divorce !
Gim me Gim me Gim me My Divorce !
” ( “ A Man for All Seasons ” ) 1966 : “ Mary Poppins vs. the Nazis ” ( “ The Sound of Music ” ) 1947 : “ The Second World War Was So Much Fun ” ( “ The Best Years of Our Lives ” ) 1944 : “ ‘ Cheers ’ but in Morocco @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) 1940 : “ Lady and the Mustache ” ( “ Gone with the Wind ” ) 1939 : “ You Can Probably Put It In Your Carry-On ” ( “ You Can ’ t Take It with You ” ) 1938 : “ That Guy with the Fun Name ” ( “ The Life of Emile Zola ” ) 1936 : “ No More Boat for You !
” ( “ Mutiny on the Bounty ” )

2019: “Driving Dr. Piano” (“Green Book”)
2018: “Fuck Frog” (“The Shape of Water”)
2017: “Not ‘La La Land’ ” (“Moonlight”)
2016: “Bad Catholics in the Paper” (“Spotlight”)
2015: “Washed Up” (“Birdman”)
2014: “Oh, Look, It’s Sherlock Holmes” (“12 Years a Slave”)
2013: “Armageddon Outta Here” (“Argo”)
2012: “Couldn’t Hear a Thing" (“The Artist”)
2011: “Funny Mouth” (“The King’s Speech”)
2010: “Lieutenant Explody Face” (“The Hurt Locker”)
2009: “Poor-Kid Trivia” (“Slumdog Millionaire”)
2008: “Dorothy Hamill Goes-a-Murderin’ ” (“No Country for Old Men”)
2007: “Rats Rats RATS” (“The Departed”)
2006: “Everyone’s a Racist” (“Crash”)
2005: “The Loose-Stool Killer” (“Million Dollar Baby”)
2004: “Little Men Without Shoes Doing Big Things, Part Three” (“Lord of the Rings: Return of the King”)
2003: “Jazzy Sparkle Murders” (“Chicago”)
2002: “I See Math Ghosts” (“A Beautiful Mind”)
2001: “AHHHHH!!!” (“Gladiator”)
2000: “Pervert and the Plastic-Bag Kid” (“American Beauty”)
1999: “Juliet in Drag” (“Shakespeare in Love”)
1998: “Drawing Boobies on a Sinking Boat” (“Titanic”)
1997: “Never Seen It” (“The English Patient”)
1996: “ ‘Mad Max’: Scottish Skirt” (“Braveheart”)
1995: “That Runnin’ Fool” (“Forrest Gump”)
1994: “Schindler’s List” (“Schindler’s List”)
1993: “Too Old to Cowboy” (“Unforgiven”)
1992: “Quiet Sheepies” (“Silence of the Lambs”)
1991: “White Men Can’t Dance” (“Dances with Wolves”)
1990: “Bigot Gets a Ride” (“Driving Miss Daisy”)
1989: “The Man Says He Can Drive and Is Excellent at It” (“Rain Man”)
1988: “Baby King and His Poop Sniffers” (“The Last Emperor”)
1987: “Getting Shot a Lot” (“Platoon”)
1986: “Syphilis Lady Loves the Sundance Kid” (“Out of Africa”)
1985: “ ‘Animal House’: The Opera” (“Amadeus”)
1984: “Hunny Bunny Pookie Bear” (“Terms of Endearment”)
1983: “Long” (“Gandhi”)
1982: “Slow-Motion Piano Run” (“Chariots of Fire”)
1981: “The Sundance Kid Tells White People How to Act” (“Ordinary People”)
1980: “ ‘Seinfeld’ Guy vs. Himself” (“Kramer vs. Kramer”)
1979: “The Pittsburgh Russians” (“The Deer Hunter”)
1978: “Neurotic Man and Hat Lady” (“Annie Hall”)
1977: “Punchy the Italian Idiot” (“Rocky”)
1976: “One Fountain Flew Out the Window” (“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”)
1975: “Don’t Forget the Cannoli, the Movie! Part II” (“The Godfather: Part II”)
1974: “Salad Dressing and the Sundance Kid Go to Chicago” (“The Sting”)
1973: “Don’t Forget the Cannoli, the Movie!” (“The Godfather”)
1972: “Electric Pierres” (“The French Connection”)
1971: “Grumpy, Old War Whore” (“Patton”)
1970: “Limpy and the Gigolo” (“Midnight Cowboy”)
1969: “Kinda Like ‘Annie’ ” (“Oliver!”)
1968: “Nothing Like ‘Annie’ ” (“In the Heat of the Night”)
1967: “Gimme My Divorce! Gimme Gimme Gimme My Divorce!” (“A Man for All Seasons”)
1966: “Mary Poppins vs. the Nazis” (“The Sound of Music”)
1965: “Cockney Poufy Hat” (“My Fair Lady”)
1964: “What’s New, Pussycat?” (“Tom Jones”)
1963: “Larry the Camel Guy” (“Lawrence of Arabia”)
1962: “I'll Dance You to Death!” (“West Side Story”)
1961: “Reminds Me of Grandpa” (“The Apartment”)
1960: “Charlton Heston Pony Time” (“Ben-Hur”)
1959: “Gigli” (“Gigi”)
1958: “Obi-Wan’s Choo-Choo Channel” (“The Bridge on the River Kwai”)
1957: “Balloony Takes a Trip” (“Around the World in 80 Days”)
1956: “The First Incel” (“Marty”)
1955: “Pigeon-Boxing” (“On the Waterfront”)
1954: “Sandy Sex Organs” (“From Here to Eternity”)
1953: “Circus Bastard” (“The Greatest Show on Earth”)
1952: “Dance, Frenchy, Dance” (“An American in Paris”)
1951: “Nothing About Adam” (“All About Eve”)
1950: “That Southern Bozo” (“All the King’s Men”)
1949: “Hard Time Letting Go” (“Hamlet”)
1948: “Jewish Pretend-Time” (“Gentleman’s Agreement”)
1947: “The Second World War Was So Much Fun” (“The Best Years of Our Lives”)
1946: “Two Days Between the Couch Cushions” (“The Lost Weekend”)
1945: “Father Mama’s Boy” (“Going My Way”)
1944: “ ‘Cheers’ but in Morocco with Nazis” (“Casablanca”)
1943: “Mrs. Minivan” (“Mrs. Miniver”)
1942: “Coal-Mine Kerflooey” (“How Green Was My Valley”)
1941: “My Cousin with the Bad Knee” (“Rebecca”)
1940: “Lady and the Mustache” (“Gone with the Wind”)
1939: “You Can Probably Put It In Your Carry-On” (“You Can’t Take It with You”)
1938: “That Guy with the Fun Name” (“The Life of Emile Zola”)
1937: “Cake-Dancing” (“The Great Ziegfeld”)
1936: “No More Boat for You!” (“Mutiny on the Bounty”)
1935: “Leggy Hitchhiker” (“It Happened One Night”)
1933/1934: “Sad British Fancy-Pants” (“Cavalcade”)
1932/1933: “Drew Barrymore’s Grandpas” (“Grand Hotel”)
1931/1932: “Forty Years in Oklahoma? No Thanks” (“Cimarron”)
1930/1931: “Shhhh! Germans” (“All Quiet on the Western Front”)
1929/1930: “Jazzy Sparkle No Murders” (“The Broadway Melody”)
1928/1929: “ ‘Pearl Harbor’ But Good” (“Wings”)


newyorker--2020-02-09--Judith Butler Wants Us to Reshape Our Rage

Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture .
Like very few men and perhaps no other woman , Butler is an international celebrity academic .
This means that many more people know her name than have read her work—and most of them have an opinion about Butler and her ideas .
One might argue that Butler ’ s influence is immense because some key phrases of hers have become linguistic staples ; take , for example , “ gender performativity.
” On their way into the mainstream , however , these ideas have been simplified and transformed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who is sixty-three , is best known for her work in gender theory , especially her book “ Gender Trouble , ” published thirty years ago .
Butler has written extensively on other questions of culture , politics , and the psyche , such as hate speech ( “ Excitable Speech : A Politics of the Performative , ” 1997 ) , the fundamental unknowability of the self ( “ Giving an Account of Oneself , ” 2005 ) , and Jewish ethics and Palestine ( “ Parting Ways : Jewishness and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California , Berkeley , where she has taught since 1993 .
She lives in the Bay Area with her partner , the political theorist Wendy Brown .
This month , Verso is publishing Butler ’ s latest book , “ The Force of Nonviolence.
” It is a slim volume that makes an outsized argument : that our times , or perhaps all times , call for imagining an entirely new way for humans to live together in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ radical equality.
” Butler sat down for a conversation with me during a recent visit to New York .
The interview has been edited and condensed .
In this new book , you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are .
We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence .
I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group , deciding , “ Nonviolence is the best @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world , which is probably more practical .
I ’ m not a completely crazy idealist who would say , “ There ’ s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.
” I ’ m trying to shift the question to “ What kind of world is it that we seek to build together ?
” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want .
They think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ results they want are realized .
But they ’ ve just issued more violence into the world .
You begin with a critique of individualism “ as the basis of ethics and politics alike.
” Why is that the starting point ?
In my experience , the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that , when I do violence to another human being , I also do violence to myself , because my life is bound up with this other life .
Most people who are formed within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives .
There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure , and ecological perspectives as well .
And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking , the individual is always an adult male in his prime , who , just at this particular moment when we encounter him , happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others .
That model of the individual is comic , in a way , but also @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge , separate , and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual .
That ’ s a translation from German .
They say selbstständig , implying that you stand on your own .
But who actually stands on their own ?
We are all , if we stand , supported by any number of things .
Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move , and so did my shoes , my orthotics , and the long hours spent by my physical @ @ @ @ @ @ @ walk , as it were .
I wouldn ’ t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations .
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough .
But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence , which is regularly misrecognized as well .
If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there ’ s no shame , no humiliation , no “ feminization ” in that—I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ differently , because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest .
You have written before about the concept of grievability , and it is an important idea in this book .
Can you talk about it ?
You know when I think it started for me ?
Here in the United States , during the AIDS crisis , when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss .
In many cases , people would go home to their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss .
The loss was not recognized , and it was not marked , which means that it was treated as if it were no loss .
Of course , that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love .
That puts you into what Freud called melancholia .
In contemporary terms , it is a version of depression , even as it admits of manic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ melancholia .
It enraged me then , as it does now , that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others , depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations .
And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11 , when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not .
Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ married and had a dog and some children .
The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning .
You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times , right ?
Yes .
It was rather amazing the way that the undocumented were not really openly and publicly mourned through those obituaries , and a lot of gay and lesbian people were mourned in a shadowy way or not at all .
They fell into the dustbin of the unmournable or the ungrievable .
We can also see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away , and others who remain without coverage , who can not afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all .
Certain lives are considered more grievable .
We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives , in order to arrive at a different , more radical idea of social equality .

Judith Butler holds a peculiar place in contemporary Western culture. Like very few men and perhaps no other woman, Butler is an international celebrity academic. This means that many more people know her name than have read her work—and most of them have an opinion about Butler and her ideas. One might argue that Butler’s influence is immense because some key phrases of hers have become linguistic staples; take, for example, “gender performativity.” On their way into the mainstream, however, these ideas have been simplified and transformed, often beyond recognition.
Butler, who is sixty-three, is best known for her work in gender theory, especially her book “Gender Trouble,” published thirty years ago. Butler has written extensively on other questions of culture, politics, and the psyche, such as hate speech (“Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative,” 1997), the fundamental unknowability of the self (“Giving an Account of Oneself,” 2005), and Jewish ethics and Palestine (“Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism,” 2012). Butler is the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where she has taught since 1993. She lives in the Bay Area with her partner, the political theorist Wendy Brown.
This month, Verso is publishing Butler’s latest book, “The Force of Nonviolence.” It is a slim volume that makes an outsized argument: that our times, or perhaps all times, call for imagining an entirely new way for humans to live together in the world—a world of what Butler calls “radical equality.” Butler sat down for a conversation with me during a recent visit to New York. The interview has been edited and condensed.
In this new book, you propose not just an argument for nonviolence as a tactic but as an entirely different way of thinking about who we are.
We are used to thinking strategically and instrumentally about questions of violence and nonviolence. I think there is a difference between acting as an individual or a group, deciding, “Nonviolence is the best way to achieve our goal,” and seeking to make a nonviolent world—or a less violent world, which is probably more practical.
I’m not a completely crazy idealist who would say, “There’s no situation in which I would commit an act of violence.” I’m trying to shift the question to “What kind of world is it that we seek to build together?” Some of my friends on the left believe that violent tactics are the way to produce the world they want. They think that the violence falls away when the results they want are realized. But they’ve just issued more violence into the world.
You begin with a critique of individualism “as the basis of ethics and politics alike.” Why is that the starting point?
In my experience, the most powerful argument against violence has been grounded in the notion that, when I do violence to another human being, I also do violence to myself, because my life is bound up with this other life. Most people who are formed within the liberal individualist tradition really understand themselves as bounded creatures who are radically separate from other lives. There are relational perspectives that would challenge that point of departure, and ecological perspectives as well.
And you point out that in the liberal individualist way of thinking, the individual is always an adult male in his prime, who, just at this particular moment when we encounter him, happens to have no needs and dependencies that would bind him to others.
That model of the individual is comic, in a way, but also lethal. The goal is to overcome the formative and dependent stages of life to emerge, separate, and individuate—and then you become this self-standing individual. That’s a translation from German. They say selbstständig, implying that you stand on your own. But who actually stands on their own? We are all, if we stand, supported by any number of things. Even coming to see you today—the pavement allowed me to move, and so did my shoes, my orthotics, and the long hours spent by my physical therapist. His labor is in my walk, as it were. I wouldn’t have been able to get here without any of those wonderful technologies and supporting relations.
Acknowledging dependency as a condition of who any of us happens to be is difficult enough. But the larger task is to affirm social and ecological interdependence, which is regularly misrecognized as well. If we were to rethink ourselves as social creatures who are fundamentally dependent upon one another—and there’s no shame, no humiliation, no “feminization” in that—I think that we would treat each other differently, because our very conception of self would not be defined by individual self-interest.
You have written before about the concept of grievability, and it is an important idea in this book. Can you talk about it?
You know when I think it started for me? Here in the United States, during the AIDS crisis, when it became clear that many people were losing their lovers and not receiving adequate recognition for that loss. In many cases, people would go home to their families and try to explain their loss, or be unable to go home to their families or workplaces and try to explain their loss. The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love. That puts you into what Freud called melancholia. In contemporary terms, it is a version of depression, even as it admits of manic forms—but not just individual depression but shared melancholia.
It enraged me then, as it does now, that some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations. And that came home to me in a different way in the aftermath of 9/11, when it was very clear that certain lives could be highly memorialized in the newspapers and others could not. Those who were openly mourned tended to lead lives whose value was measured by whether they had property, education, whether they were married and had a dog and some children. The traditional heterosexual frame became the condition of possibility for public mourning.
You are referring to the twenty-five hundred mini-obituaries in the Times, right?
Yes. It was rather amazing the way that the undocumented were not really openly and publicly mourned through those obituaries, and a lot of gay and lesbian people were mourned in a shadowy way or not at all. They fell into the dustbin of the unmournable or the ungrievable.
We can also see this in broader public policies. There are those for whom health insurance is so precious that it is publicly assumed that it can never be taken away, and others who remain without coverage, who cannot afford the premiums that would increase their chances of living—their lives are of no consequence to those who oppose health care for all. Certain lives are considered more grievable. We have to get beyond the idea of calculating the value of lives, in order to arrive at a different, more radical idea of social equality.


Johnny Cash’s Gospel

Johnny Cash became the Man in Black by accident .
It was the only color shirt that he and his two bandmates had in common when they were asked to sing gospel songs at an evening service in Memphis , Tennessee .
“ Black is better for church , ” Cash said at the time , although later he ’ d go further , singing , “ I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down , ” including those “ who ’ ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.
” Gospel music @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life .
He grew up in the church , going to worship every Sunday morning , Sunday night , and Wednesday evening , in Dyess , Arkansas , a New Deal town near the Mississippi River , where , throughout the week , he ’ d sing hymns in the cotton fields .
His paternal grandfather was a circuit preacher , but it was Cash ’ s mother , Carrie , who taught her seven children to love the Lord .
Cash later recorded an acoustic @ @ @ @ @ @ @ My Mother ’ s Hymn Book , ” filled with the spirituals of his childhood , such as “ Softly and Tenderly ” and “ Where We ’ ll Never Grow Old , ” and he swore it was his favorite record .
For decades , his mother begged him to record himself reading the Bible , and when he finally did , he read the whole of the New Testament—nearly nineteen hours of the King James Version , released in 2004 , by the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson .
I was listening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ copy of Richard Beck ’ s new book , “ Trains , Jesus , and Murder : The Gospel According to Johnny Cash ” ( Fortress Press ) .
Beck is a psychology professor who teaches a weekly Bible study at the French Robertson Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice , a maximum-security facility in Abilene , Texas .
He ’ s written an odd little book , a hodgepodge of music criticism , theodicy , biography , exegesis , meditations on fatherhood , and musings on his own prison ministry @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Beck ’ s son , who jokes that Johnny Cash ’ s songs are all about murder , trains , and Jesus .
But it also nods to Cash ’ s liner notes for one of his later albums , “ Unchained , ” from 1996 , which include a stranger , more thorough , and more beautiful list : A lot of country musicians make their careers off of nouns , but Cash did without the pickup trucks and Mason jars , homing in instead on the harder stuff of that jumbled @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s book is that it doesn ’ t pretend to find a systematic theology in the results .
“ Trains , Jesus , and Murder ” just makes its way through the central ideas that animated Cash ’ s life and gave meaning to his music , pausing along the way to tell stories from his career , including both some I ’ d heard and some I hadn ’ t .
Each of the book ’ s fifteen chapters takes its title , and much of its content , from a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ira Hayes ” describes how he put together “ Bitter Tears , ” his record of protest songs about the plight of Native Americans , and “ Folsom Prison Blues ” begins with Cash ’ s first prison concert , in 1959 , and ends with him recording the live album “ At Folsom Prison , ” in 1968 .
The best of these chapters is “ Greystone Chapel , ” which starts with a pastor passing Cash a copy of a song by a Folsom prisoner named Glen Sherley .
It was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ about a prison chapel and the bars that can imprison anyone ’ s soul , and Cash surprised Sherley by performing the song live , during one of his prison concerts .
I ’ d known that , and anyone who has listened to “ At Folsom Prison ” probably does , too , since Cash introduces the track by saying , “ This next song was written by a man right here in Folsom .
.
.
.
This song was written by our friend Glen Sherley .
Hope we do your @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re going to do our best.
” But I ’ d never known what happened after that performance .
Cash spent three years lobbying to get Sherley paroled , not only through direct appeals but by enlisting the Reverend Billy Graham in the cause and having Ronald Reagan , then the governor of California , make a call , too .
Sherley was finally paroled in 1971 .
Cash moved him to Nashville and got him set up writing songs and performing with his band ; a year later , the pair testified @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for prison reform .
But then Cash fired Sherley for threatening a member of the band , and the two men drifted apart .
Thereafter , Sherley struggled both personally and professionally , and he committed suicide , in 1978 .
“ You can ’ t hasten someone else ’ s recovery or enlightenment , ” Beck quotes Cash ’ s daughter , the musician Rosanne Cash , saying .
“ I think my dad had a sense of maybe he could and it didn ’ t turn out well all the time.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ messy , moving chapter , partly because you see Beck , while thinking about fear and forgiveness in the life of Johnny Cash , struggle with the same challenges in his own prison ministry .
Here and elsewhere , Beck also wrestles with questions about solidarity and patriotism , and with the complexities of Cash ’ s simultaneously conservative and countercultural appeal .
That ’ s a familiar bind for country-music artists , as the recent Taylor Swift documentary “ Miss Americana , ” the career of the Dixie Chicks , and a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before them testify .
In Cash ’ s case , it came to a head when he was invited to perform for President Richard Nixon at the White House , in 1970 .
The Administration announced that Cash would perform “ Okie from Muskogee , ” the famous anti-antiwar anthem by Merle Haggard , and “ Welfare Cadillac , ” a racist dog whistle by Guy Drake—but he refused and instead performed his prison set , including “ What Is Truth , ” a protest song of sorts that he likened to Bob @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Are A-Changin ’ .
” ( The standoff is given even more attention in the documentary film “ ReMastered : Tricky Dick and the Man in Black.
” ) Elsewhere , the book goes a little slack .
Near the end , for instance , Beck offers a very , very , very close reading of the song “ The Man Comes Around , ” in which he gathers up verses of the Gospels and bits of Revelation , like a bird over-anxiously lining its nest .
Scripture was Cash ’ s currency @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try to find every reference and identify every echo in his lyrics .
It is true that his phrase “ takin ’ names ” was inspired by scenes from Revelation , and that Jesus says “ kick against the pricks ” to Paul on the road to Damascus , in Acts .
But it seems like a stretch to suggest , as Beck does , that the song ’ s lyric “ measured hundred weight and penny pound ” is either an allusion to John the Divine ’ s “ Two pounds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” or God ’ s judgment of King Belshazzar , as having “ been weighed in the balance , and found wanting.
” More to the point , the cumulative effect of all of this parsing reads more like a concordance than an exegesis of the song .

“Trains, Jesus, and Murder” makes its way through Johnny Cash’s core religious ideas. Photograph from Michael Ochs Archives / Getty
Johnny Cash became the Man in Black by accident. It was the only color shirt that he and his two bandmates had in common when they were asked to sing gospel songs at an evening service in Memphis, Tennessee. “Black is better for church,” Cash said at the time, although later he’d go further, singing, “I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down,” including those “who’ve never read / Or listened to the words that Jesus said.”
Gospel music changed Cash’s career, and the gospel of Jesus Christ changed his life. He grew up in the church, going to worship every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday evening, in Dyess, Arkansas, a New Deal town near the Mississippi River, where, throughout the week, he’d sing hymns in the cotton fields. His paternal grandfather was a circuit preacher, but it was Cash’s mother, Carrie, who taught her seven children to love the Lord. Cash later recorded an acoustic album in her honor, called “My Mother’s Hymn Book,” filled with the spirituals of his childhood, such as “Softly and Tenderly” and “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” and he swore it was his favorite record. For decades, his mother begged him to record himself reading the Bible, and when he finally did, he read the whole of the New Testament—nearly nineteen hours of the King James Version, released in 2004, by the Christian publisher Thomas Nelson.
I was listening to that recording when I got a copy of Richard Beck’s new book, “Trains, Jesus, and Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash” (Fortress Press). Beck is a psychology professor who teaches a weekly Bible study at the French Robertson Unit of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, a maximum-security facility in Abilene, Texas. He’s written an odd little book, a hodgepodge of music criticism, theodicy, biography, exegesis, meditations on fatherhood, and musings on his own prison ministry. The title was inspired partly by Beck’s son, who jokes that Johnny Cash’s songs are all about murder, trains, and Jesus. But it also nods to Cash’s liner notes for one of his later albums, “Unchained,” from 1996, which include a stranger, more thorough, and more beautiful list:
I love songs about horses, railroads, land, Judgment Day, family, hard times, whiskey, courtship, marriage, adultery, separation, murder, war, prison, rambling, damnation, home, salvation, death, pride, humor, piety, rebellion, patriotism, larceny, determination, tragedy, rowdiness, heartbreak, and love. And Mother. And God.
A lot of country musicians make their careers off of nouns, but Cash did without the pickup trucks and Mason jars, homing in instead on the harder stuff of that jumbled list. What I love about Beck’s book is that it doesn’t pretend to find a systematic theology in the results. “Trains, Jesus, and Murder” just makes its way through the central ideas that animated Cash’s life and gave meaning to his music, pausing along the way to tell stories from his career, including both some I’d heard and some I hadn’t. Each of the book’s fifteen chapters takes its title, and much of its content, from a Cash song: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” describes how he put together “Bitter Tears,” his record of protest songs about the plight of Native Americans, and “Folsom Prison Blues” begins with Cash’s first prison concert, in 1959, and ends with him recording the live album “At Folsom Prison,” in 1968.
The best of these chapters is “Greystone Chapel,” which starts with a pastor passing Cash a copy of a song by a Folsom prisoner named Glen Sherley. It was a simple melody with plaintive words, about a prison chapel and the bars that can imprison anyone’s soul, and Cash surprised Sherley by performing the song live, during one of his prison concerts. I’d known that, and anyone who has listened to “At Folsom Prison” probably does, too, since Cash introduces the track by saying, “This next song was written by a man right here in Folsom. . . . This song was written by our friend Glen Sherley. Hope we do your song justice, Glen, we’re going to do our best.” But I’d never known what happened after that performance. Cash spent three years lobbying to get Sherley paroled, not only through direct appeals but by enlisting the Reverend Billy Graham in the cause and having Ronald Reagan, then the governor of California, make a call, too.
Sherley was finally paroled in 1971. Cash moved him to Nashville and got him set up writing songs and performing with his band; a year later, the pair testified together before a Senate subcommittee to advocate for prison reform. But then Cash fired Sherley for threatening a member of the band, and the two men drifted apart. Thereafter, Sherley struggled both personally and professionally, and he committed suicide, in 1978. “You can’t hasten someone else’s recovery or enlightenment,” Beck quotes Cash’s daughter, the musician Rosanne Cash, saying. “I think my dad had a sense of maybe he could and it didn’t turn out well all the time.”
“Greystone Chapel” is a messy, moving chapter, partly because you see Beck, while thinking about fear and forgiveness in the life of Johnny Cash, struggle with the same challenges in his own prison ministry. Here and elsewhere, Beck also wrestles with questions about solidarity and patriotism, and with the complexities of Cash’s simultaneously conservative and countercultural appeal. That’s a familiar bind for country-music artists, as the recent Taylor Swift documentary “Miss Americana,” the career of the Dixie Chicks, and a long litany of actions and notable inactions before them testify. In Cash’s case, it came to a head when he was invited to perform for President Richard Nixon at the White House, in 1970. The Administration announced that Cash would perform “Okie from Muskogee,” the famous anti-antiwar anthem by Merle Haggard, and “Welfare Cadillac,” a racist dog whistle by Guy Drake—but he refused and instead performed his prison set, including “What Is Truth,” a protest song of sorts that he likened to Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’.” (The standoff is given even more attention in the documentary film “ReMastered: Tricky Dick and the Man in Black.”)
Elsewhere, the book goes a little slack. Near the end, for instance, Beck offers a very, very, very close reading of the song “The Man Comes Around,” in which he gathers up verses of the Gospels and bits of Revelation, like a bird over-anxiously lining its nest. Scripture was Cash’s currency, so I understand the temptation to try to find every reference and identify every echo in his lyrics. It is true that his phrase “takin’ names” was inspired by scenes from Revelation, and that Jesus says “kick against the pricks” to Paul on the road to Damascus, in Acts. But it seems like a stretch to suggest, as Beck does, that the song’s lyric “measured hundred weight and penny pound” is either an allusion to John the Divine’s “Two pounds of wheat for a day’s wages” or God’s judgment of King Belshazzar, as having “been weighed in the balance, and found wanting.” More to the point, the cumulative effect of all of this parsing reads more like a concordance than an exegesis of the song.


newyorker--2020-02-09--Sunday Reading: At the Movies, 2020 Oscars Edition

In 2000 , Mark Singer profiled the legendary director Martin Scorsese for The New Yorker .
In “ The Man Who Forgets Nothing , ” Singer notes that one of the filmmaker ’ s great talents is his ability to devise cinematic solutions “ to the paradox that truth and beauty and depravity must share the same frame.
” For this year ’ s Oscars , the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated an intriguing mix of films—including Scorsese ’ s “ The Irishman ” —that contain many of these same elements , often within the same @ @ @ @ @ @ @ re bringing you a selection of pieces on cinema and some of the directors and films nominated for the ninety-second Academy Awards .
In “ The Movie Lover , ” from 2003 , Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Quentin Tarantino , whose film “ Once Upon a Time .
.
.
in Hollywood ” is nominated in multiple categories , and recounts the director ’ s formative experiences as a young film buff .
Anthony Lane reviews Greta Gerwig ’ s raw , surprising adaptation of “ Little Women , ” and considers the remarkable @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s “ Parasite , ” which won the Palme d ’ Or at Cannes , en route to its Oscar nominations .
In “ Sam Mendes ’ s Directorial Discoveries , ” John Lahr explores the “ 1917 ” director ’ s role as an instinctual filmmaker , and examines his background as a master showman in the British theatre .
In “ Happiness , ” from 2013 , Ian Parker describes the successful writing partnership between Gerwig and her fellow-director Noah Baumbach .
Finally , in “ What ’ s Missing from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Richard Brody dissects the Baumbach-directed film ’ s meditation on an unravelling relationship .
We hope that these pieces bring a little magic to your pre-Oscars Sunday afternoon .
In Quentin Tarantino ’ s mind , the projector never stops running .
What emerges from Gerwig ’ s adaptation is a strong sense that indignation is not just the natural lot of women but their rousing right .
For screen and stage , Mendes works like a sculptor—continually molding and remolding space , speech , and gesture .
Canny and intricate , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most developed and original film .
But the director doesn ’ t risk breaking his own frames to acknowledge the offscreen dramas , the lives behind the characters , and what his movie implies for them .
The unequal world envisioned by Bong Joon-ho could be heading for class war or a brokered peace—for savagery or stillness , or both .

In 2000, Mark Singer profiled the legendary director Martin Scorsese for The New Yorker. In “The Man Who Forgets Nothing,” Singer notes that one of the filmmaker’s great talents is his ability to devise cinematic solutions “to the paradox that truth and beauty and depravity must share the same frame.” For this year’s Oscars, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated an intriguing mix of films—including Scorsese’s “The Irishman”—that contain many of these same elements, often within the same frame. This weekend, we’re bringing you a selection of pieces on cinema and some of the directors and films nominated for the ninety-second Academy Awards. In “The Movie Lover,” from 2003, Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Quentin Tarantino, whose film “Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood” is nominated in multiple categories, and recounts the director’s formative experiences as a young film buff. Anthony Lane reviews Greta Gerwig’s raw, surprising adaptation of “Little Women,” and considers the remarkable and unsettling world of Bong Joon-ho’s “Parasite,” which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes, en route to its Oscar nominations. In “Sam Mendes’s Directorial Discoveries,” John Lahr explores the “1917” director’s role as an instinctual filmmaker, and examines his background as a master showman in the British theatre. In “Happiness,” from 2013, Ian Parker describes the successful writing partnership between Gerwig and her fellow-director Noah Baumbach. Finally, in “What’s Missing from the Brilliant ‘Marriage Story,’ ” Richard Brody dissects the Baumbach-directed film’s meditation on an unravelling relationship. We hope that these pieces bring a little magic to your pre-Oscars Sunday afternoon.
—David Remnick
Photograph by Helmut Newton
The minestrone of Martin Scorsese’s mind.
Photograph By Ruven Afanador
In Quentin Tarantino’s mind, the projector never stops running.
Illustration by Bianca Bagnarelli
What emerges from Gerwig’s adaptation is a strong sense that indignation is not just the natural lot of women but their rousing right.
For screen and stage, Mendes works like a sculptor—continually molding and remolding space, speech, and gesture.
Photograph Courtesy Netflix
Canny and intricate, it’s Noah Baumbach’s most developed and original film. But the director doesn’t risk breaking his own frames to acknowledge the offscreen dramas, the lives behind the characters, and what his movie implies for them.
The unequal world envisioned by Bong Joon-ho could be heading for class war or a brokered peace—for savagery or stillness, or both.
Noah Baumbach’s New Wave.


newyorker--2020-02-08--The Woman Shaking Up the Diamond Industry Finds Yet Another Huge Gem

The Canadian firm that can not stop finding huge diamonds has found another huge diamond .
This week , Lucara , the mining company led by Eira Thomas , whom I profiled recently in the magazine , announced the discovery of a five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat ice-white stone at its Botswanan mine , Karowe .
It ’ s the fourth-heaviest diamond ever recovered at Karowe , and maybe the prettiest .
The find will only add to Lucara ’ s lustre .
Karowe has been in operation for just seven years , but it has already found three of the ten largest rough @ @ @ @ @ @ @ both lucky and ingenious .
The Karowe deposit clearly contains exceptional stones , but the firm has also been innovative in how it recovers diamonds .
Lucara has pioneered the use of X-ray transmission technology , known as XRT , which scans objects for a specific atomic signature rather than for a physical characteristic , such as luminescence or weight .
The engineer who works with Lucara told me that an XRT machine functions much “ like an airport baggage scanner.
” The scanning technology reduces the chance that miners will damage diamonds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ find tiny diamonds among thousands of tons of ore , you need to crush big rocks , and the violence can damage valuable gems .
The XRT machines allow Lucara to recover more large diamonds unbroken , because the ore does not need to be crushed so many times before it is sorted .
The new diamond ’ s discovery has pleased Lucara ’ s leadership team for reasons other than its beauty and potential value .
In 2017 , the firm installed a unit called the Mega Diamond Recovery , which was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ circuit—the string of conveyor belts and mechanisms that leads the ore to the diamond-sorting house .
The M.D.R .
was designed to spy diamonds that had been liberated before the most aggressive section of the circuit—the mill—went to work , and to stop them from being damaged .
Until now , the M.D.R .
had not recovered a single large , valuable diamond , because most of the gems were freed later , in the mill .
This single discovery will repay Lucara ’ s investment in the M.D.R .
The natural question @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
When I spoke to Lucara employees this week , not many people had yet seen the new stone .
Those who had were bowled over .
Lucara ’ s sales manager in Botswana , Stephen Kgobe , a keen distance runner who is by nature taciturn and not prone to hyperbole , texted me to say , “ The stone is marvelous and is the masterpiece of its kind .
.
.
smooth surface and the purity is fantastic.
” Both John Armstrong , Lucara ’ s leading geologist , and Eira @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to me using the same phrase : “ She ’ s a beauty.
” Although the new find is only around a third as large as the enigmatic , black-covered diamond that was discovered in April of last year—which is now known as Sewelô and is partly owned by Louis Vuitton—the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat stone is almost certainly worth much more .
Rough-diamond prices are subjective but are governed by color , clarity , and weight .
Berenberg investment bank estimated that the diamond might sell for between fifteen and twenty million dollars , but @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the sale of previous exceptional large stones .
Armstrong told me that the new diamond ’ s color and quality could certainly be compared to the Queen of Kalahari , a beautiful three-hundred-and-forty-two-carat stone that was recovered in 2015 at Karowe and later sold for $ 20.55 million to an unidentified buyer .
( It was eventually bought by the jeweller Chopard for an undisclosed sum . )
Armstrong also compared the new stone to the Constellation , a pristine eight-hundred-and-thirteen-carat stone also recovered at Karowe in 2015 .
The Constellation sold for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ per carat—the highest price ever paid for a rough diamond .
If the new five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond approached the Constellation ’ s price-per-carat valuation , its price could exceed forty million dollars .
( Lucara did not comment on the stone ’ s potential value . )
There is also the question of how Lucara plans to sell the new diamond .
Traditionally , miners have sold their stones to the diamantaire market at tenders and then have taken no further interest in what happens to the diamond .
Eira Thomas has rethought her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ process .
With Sewelô , the large black diamond now partly owned by Louis Vuitton , Lucara still owns a fifty-per-cent stake , because Thomas wants to participate in the “ story ” of the stone , and also to reap a cut of the profits once the stone is polished .
I asked Armstrong what Lucara planned to do with the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond , but he said that it was too early to tell .
“ We have to wrap our heads around what it is , first , ” he said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and however it reaches its buyer , its discovery is cause for celebration—and not only for Lucara .
As I learned during my recent trip to Botswana , the country has managed revenues from its natural resources admirably .
The government raises hefty taxes and royalties from diamond producers .
Much of that money is spent on schools , scholarships , infrastructure , and health-care projects .
Keith Jefferis , an economist and a former deputy governor of the Bank of Botswana , told me that diamond revenues had lifted hundreds of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the country became independent , in 1966.
“ The contribution of diamonds has been immense , ” Jefferis said .
“ It ’ s really underpinned the transformation of what was a very poor country to an upper-middle-income country.
” The new diamond was recovered on Sunday , February 2nd .
By a strange quirk of fate , Thomas and Armstrong were visiting the Karowe mine at the end of January from their new headquarters in London .
For a while , on January 31st , Thomas and Armstrong stood at the bottom @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and fluorescent vests , watching diggers load ore from a section of the deposit called EM/PK ( S ) —a section from which the majority of the firm ’ s most valuable diamonds have emerged .
( One Lucara geologist described EM/PK ( S ) as the mine ’ s “ G-spot.
” ) Two days later , material from that section was travelling through the M.D.R .
when the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond was discovered .
It struck Armstrong that he might have unwittingly watched as the material carrying the big diamond was mined @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Armstrong told me .
“ That ’ s pretty cool .
”

The Canadian firm that cannot stop finding huge diamonds has found another huge diamond. This week, Lucara, the mining company led by Eira Thomas, whom I profiled recently in the magazine, announced the discovery of a five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat ice-white stone at its Botswanan mine, Karowe. It’s the fourth-heaviest diamond ever recovered at Karowe, and maybe the prettiest. The find will only add to Lucara’s lustre. Karowe has been in operation for just seven years, but it has already found three of the ten largest rough diamonds in history.
Lucara has been both lucky and ingenious. The Karowe deposit clearly contains exceptional stones, but the firm has also been innovative in how it recovers diamonds. Lucara has pioneered the use of X-ray transmission technology, known as XRT, which scans objects for a specific atomic signature rather than for a physical characteristic, such as luminescence or weight. The engineer who works with Lucara told me that an XRT machine functions much “like an airport baggage scanner.” The scanning technology reduces the chance that miners will damage diamonds while trying to discover them. To find tiny diamonds among thousands of tons of ore, you need to crush big rocks, and the violence can damage valuable gems. The XRT machines allow Lucara to recover more large diamonds unbroken, because the ore does not need to be crushed so many times before it is sorted.
The new diamond’s discovery has pleased Lucara’s leadership team for reasons other than its beauty and potential value. In 2017, the firm installed a unit called the Mega Diamond Recovery, which was placed near the beginning of the processing circuit—the string of conveyor belts and mechanisms that leads the ore to the diamond-sorting house. The M.D.R. was designed to spy diamonds that had been liberated before the most aggressive section of the circuit—the mill—went to work, and to stop them from being damaged. Until now, the M.D.R. had not recovered a single large, valuable diamond, because most of the gems were freed later, in the mill. This single discovery will repay Lucara’s investment in the M.D.R.
The natural question is: What is the diamond worth? When I spoke to Lucara employees this week, not many people had yet seen the new stone. Those who had were bowled over. Lucara’s sales manager in Botswana, Stephen Kgobe, a keen distance runner who is by nature taciturn and not prone to hyperbole, texted me to say, “The stone is marvelous and is the masterpiece of its kind . . . smooth surface and the purity is fantastic.” Both John Armstrong, Lucara’s leading geologist, and Eira Thomas, meanwhile, described the stone to me using the same phrase: “She’s a beauty.”
Although the new find is only around a third as large as the enigmatic, black-covered diamond that was discovered in April of last year—which is now known as Sewelô and is partly owned by Louis Vuitton—the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat stone is almost certainly worth much more. Rough-diamond prices are subjective but are governed by color, clarity, and weight. Berenberg investment bank estimated that the diamond might sell for between fifteen and twenty million dollars, but this estimation seemed low, based on the sale of previous exceptional large stones.
Armstrong told me that the new diamond’s color and quality could certainly be compared to the Queen of Kalahari, a beautiful three-hundred-and-forty-two-carat stone that was recovered in 2015 at Karowe and later sold for $20.55 million to an unidentified buyer. (It was eventually bought by the jeweller Chopard for an undisclosed sum.) Armstrong also compared the new stone to the Constellation, a pristine eight-hundred-and-thirteen-carat stone also recovered at Karowe in 2015. The Constellation sold for $63.1 million, or $77,613 per carat—the highest price ever paid for a rough diamond. If the new five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond approached the Constellation’s price-per-carat valuation, its price could exceed forty million dollars. (Lucara did not comment on the stone’s potential value.)
There is also the question of how Lucara plans to sell the new diamond. Traditionally, miners have sold their stones to the diamantaire market at tenders and then have taken no further interest in what happens to the diamond. Eira Thomas has rethought her firm’s role in the sales process. With Sewelô, the large black diamond now partly owned by Louis Vuitton, Lucara still owns a fifty-per-cent stake, because Thomas wants to participate in the “story” of the stone, and also to reap a cut of the profits once the stone is polished. I asked Armstrong what Lucara planned to do with the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond, but he said that it was too early to tell. “We have to wrap our heads around what it is, first,” he said.
Whatever the stone eventually sells for, and however it reaches its buyer, its discovery is cause for celebration—and not only for Lucara. As I learned during my recent trip to Botswana, the country has managed revenues from its natural resources admirably. The government raises hefty taxes and royalties from diamond producers. Much of that money is spent on schools, scholarships, infrastructure, and health-care projects. Keith Jefferis, an economist and a former deputy governor of the Bank of Botswana, told me that diamond revenues had lifted hundreds of thousands of Botswanans out of poverty since the country became independent, in 1966.“The contribution of diamonds has been immense,” Jefferis said. “It’s really underpinned the transformation of what was a very poor country to an upper-middle-income country.”
The new diamond was recovered on Sunday, February 2nd. By a strange quirk of fate, Thomas and Armstrong were visiting the Karowe mine at the end of January from their new headquarters in London. For a while, on January 31st, Thomas and Armstrong stood at the bottom of the vast pit in hard hats and fluorescent vests, watching diggers load ore from a section of the deposit called EM/PK(S)—a section from which the majority of the firm’s most valuable diamonds have emerged. (One Lucara geologist described EM/PK(S) as the mine’s “G-spot.”) Two days later, material from that section was travelling through the M.D.R. when the five-hundred-and-forty-nine-carat diamond was discovered. It struck Armstrong that he might have unwittingly watched as the material carrying the big diamond was mined. “We were there,” Armstrong told me. “That’s pretty cool.”