newyorker--2020-11-20--Rudy Giuliani Is a Hot Mess

Rudy Giuliani Is a Hot Mess

Nearly two weeks ago , Rudy Giuliani , Donald Trump ’ s legal point man in his effort to reverse the result of the 2020 election , virtually broke the Internet when he held a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping , a yard-care business situated next to a sex shop , in a North Philadelphia mini-mall .
For his latest public outing , which came on Thursday , he chose a different location : the headquarters of the Republican National Committee , on Capitol Hill .
But if the setting for this Giuliani event was more salubrious than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even more bizarre .
As the former New York mayor stood under the television lights for about forty minutes and accused the Biden campaign of orchestrating an elaborate nationwide voter-fraud scheme , he sweated like a sumo wrestler in a sauna .
At one point , he was forced to dab away with a handkerchief two streams of what appeared to be hair dye that were running down each of his cheeks .
When he finally ceded the lectern to Sidney Powell , another member of Trump ’ s legal dream team , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and gulped down its contents like a camel happening upon an oasis .
By that stage , Giuliani had earned the twenty thousand dollars a day he had reportedly requested for representing Trump in a crusade that even many of the lame-duck President ’ s Republican defenders privately regard as a lost cause .
( Did he not see Lindsey Graham giving Kamala Harris a fist bump on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday ? )
Barely stopping to draw a breath , Giuliani claimed that Biden operatives , working in cahoots @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and a voting-software company tied to Communist governments abroad ( I kid you not ) , contrived to reverse the early leads that Trump held on Election Night in states such as Georgia , Michigan , and Pennsylvania .
“ What I am describing to you is a massive fraud , ” Giuliani insisted at one point .
At another , he said that the evidence he and his colleagues had gathered was “ enough to overturn any election.
” And what is that evidence ?
Giuliani claimed that Trump ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from poll watchers and election officials alleging perfidious acts .
But when reporters asked him to release these documents , he replied , “ I can ’ t do it .
I can ’ t put a witness ’ s life in jeopardy.
” Much of the evidence Giuliani did point to has already been discredited , including claims from Republican poll watchers of malfeasance in Wayne County , Michigan , which includes the city of Detroit .
Last week , a Wayne County judge dismissed the case to which these witnesses ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the witnesses did not attend a session on the ballot-counting process hosted by election officials and their statements were “ rife ” with speculation .
Giuliani also claimed that in Pennsylvania more than six hundred thousand mail-in ballots weren ’ t inspected—which rendered them “ null and void.
” This claim was based on another dubious allegation from the Trump camp : that Republican poll watchers weren ’ t allowed to get close enough to the vote counters .
To back it up , Giuliani invoked Joe Pesci ’ s performance in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Aping a scene in which Vinny , a Brooklyn lawyer , gets a key witness to acknowledge that she might not have seen what she thought she did , the former mayor held up two fingers and said , “ How many fingers do I got up ?
” He went on , “ These people ” —the poll watchers— “ were further away than my cousin Vinny was from the witness .
They couldn ’ t see a thing.
” Giuliani didn ’ t mention that Pennsylvania ’ s Supreme Court has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
In an important ruling handed down last week , it said that poll watchers don ’ t have the right to inspect individual signatures .
Having failed in state court , Giuliani is now fronting a case in federal court , but that isn ’ t going well , either .
Turning to Georgia , he claimed that thousands of ballot signatures weren ’ t properly matched with voter-registration records and that , as a result , such votes should not be counted .
Election officials , including Brad Raffensperger , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ explained that Georgia has an electoral law that was specifically designed to separate signature matching from vote counting in order to insure that votes are kept secret .
“ Give us an opportunity to prove it in court , and we will , ” Giuliani declared at one point .
The truth is that Trump ’ s legal team has suffered a long series of legal setbacks , including three on Thursday alone : in Arizona , Georgia , and Pennsylvania .
Virtually none of their claims have been substantiated .
Despite all @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of a grand conspiracy against Trump , even claiming that Joe Biden himself was involved in putting it together .
“ The logical conclusion is this is a common plan , a common scheme—it comes right directly from the Democratic Party , and it comes from the candidate , ” he said .
“ That ’ s the reason why he probably didn ’ t have to go out and campaign .
He had to have known what they were going to do.
” What ’ s really going on here ?
Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ allegations have no basis .
Their game is to delay the vote certifications and rile up the MAGA base , which can then be mobilized to put pressure on Republican state legislatures to usurp the voters and appoint slates of Trump loyalists to the Electoral College .
As part of this strategy , Trump has invited Republican lawmakers from Michigan to the White House on Friday , reports on Thursday afternoon said .
This outlandish , anti-democratic venture has no antecedent in modern American history , but Trump and Giuliani gave up caring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with Ukraine , they will push their foul scheme as far as they can , secure in the knowledge that every day it lasts is another day of fund-raising for the Trump election-defense fund ; another day of legal fees for Giuliani ; and another day in which Trump doesn ’ t have to acknowledge that he ’ s a loser .
And so , the circus will go on—until the courts , or the calendar , or the American people bring it to a conclusion .
( The Republican Party ?
As @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conference demonstrated , it is part of the scheme . )
Toward the end of his clammy peroration , Giuliani declared , “ We can not allow these crooks—because that is what they are—to steal an election from the American people.
” He was right about that , anyway .
He is one of the ringleaders .
Read More About the 2020 Election • William Barr is the one Administration official with the power to stop Donald Trump and his attempted coup .
• Trump has survived impeachment , twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ may well end now that Joe Biden has been elected the next President .
• With litigation unlikely to change the outcome of the election , Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court .
• We have to talk about what happened under the Trump Presidency and how we can prevent it from happening again .
• If 2020 has demonstrated anything , it is the need to rebalance the economy to benefit the working class—and there are many ways a Biden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for our daily newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

Nearly two weeks ago, Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s legal point man in his effort to reverse the result of the 2020 election, virtually broke the Internet when he held a press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping, a yard-care business situated next to a sex shop, in a North Philadelphia mini-mall. For his latest public outing, which came on Thursday, he chose a different location: the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, on Capitol Hill. But if the setting for this Giuliani event was more salubrious than the last one, its content was even more bizarre. As the former New York mayor stood under the television lights for about forty minutes and accused the Biden campaign of orchestrating an elaborate nationwide voter-fraud scheme, he sweated like a sumo wrestler in a sauna. At one point, he was forced to dab away with a handkerchief two streams of what appeared to be hair dye that were running down each of his cheeks. When he finally ceded the lectern to Sidney Powell, another member of Trump’s legal dream team, he immediately cracked open a water bottle and gulped down its contents like a camel happening upon an oasis.
By that stage, Giuliani had earned the twenty thousand dollars a day he had reportedly requested for representing Trump in a crusade that even many of the lame-duck President’s Republican defenders privately regard as a lost cause. (Did he not see Lindsey Graham giving Kamala Harris a fist bump on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday?) Barely stopping to draw a breath, Giuliani claimed that Biden operatives, working in cahoots with big-city Democratic machines, corrupt judges, and a voting-software company tied to Communist governments abroad (I kid you not), contrived to reverse the early leads that Trump held on Election Night in states such as Georgia, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. “What I am describing to you is a massive fraud,” Giuliani insisted at one point. At another, he said that the evidence he and his colleagues had gathered was “enough to overturn any election.”
And what is that evidence? Giuliani claimed that Trump’s legal team had gathered hundreds of affidavits from poll watchers and election officials alleging perfidious acts. But when reporters asked him to release these documents, he replied, “I can’t do it. I can’t put a witness’s life in jeopardy.” Much of the evidence Giuliani did point to has already been discredited, including claims from Republican poll watchers of malfeasance in Wayne County, Michigan, which includes the city of Detroit. Last week, a Wayne County judge dismissed the case to which these witnesses’ affidavits were attached. He said that the witnesses did not attend a session on the ballot-counting process hosted by election officials and their statements were “rife” with speculation.
Giuliani also claimed that in Pennsylvania more than six hundred thousand mail-in ballots weren’t inspected—which rendered them “null and void.” This claim was based on another dubious allegation from the Trump camp: that Republican poll watchers weren’t allowed to get close enough to the vote counters. To back it up, Giuliani invoked Joe Pesci’s performance in the 1992 film “My Cousin Vinny.” Aping a scene in which Vinny, a Brooklyn lawyer, gets a key witness to acknowledge that she might not have seen what she thought she did, the former mayor held up two fingers and said, “How many fingers do I got up?” He went on, “These people”—the poll watchers—“were further away than my cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing.”
Giuliani didn’t mention that Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court has already dismissed this argument out of hand. In an important ruling handed down last week, it said that poll watchers don’t have the right to inspect individual signatures. Having failed in state court, Giuliani is now fronting a case in federal court, but that isn’t going well, either. Turning to Georgia, he claimed that thousands of ballot signatures weren’t properly matched with voter-registration records and that, as a result, such votes should not be counted. Election officials, including Brad Raffensperger, the Republican secretary of state, have already explained that Georgia has an electoral law that was specifically designed to separate signature matching from vote counting in order to insure that votes are kept secret.
“Give us an opportunity to prove it in court, and we will,” Giuliani declared at one point. The truth is that Trump’s legal team has suffered a long series of legal setbacks, including three on Thursday alone: in Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Virtually none of their claims have been substantiated. Despite all this, Giuliani persisted with his tale of a grand conspiracy against Trump, even claiming that Joe Biden himself was involved in putting it together. “The logical conclusion is this is a common plan, a common scheme—it comes right directly from the Democratic Party, and it comes from the candidate,” he said. “That’s the reason why he probably didn’t have to go out and campaign. He had to have known what they were going to do.”
What’s really going on here? Trump and Giuliani are surely aware that their allegations have no basis. Their game is to delay the vote certifications and rile up the MAGA base, which can then be mobilized to put pressure on Republican state legislatures to usurp the voters and appoint slates of Trump loyalists to the Electoral College. As part of this strategy, Trump has invited Republican lawmakers from Michigan to the White House on Friday, reports on Thursday afternoon said.
This outlandish, anti-democratic venture has no antecedent in modern American history, but Trump and Giuliani gave up caring about precedent long ago. Just as with Ukraine, they will push their foul scheme as far as they can, secure in the knowledge that every day it lasts is another day of fund-raising for the Trump election-defense fund; another day of legal fees for Giuliani; and another day in which Trump doesn’t have to acknowledge that he’s a loser. And so the circus will go on—until the courts, or the calendar, or the American people bring it to a conclusion. (The Republican Party? As the location of Giuliani’s press conference demonstrated, it is part of the scheme.)
Toward the end of his clammy peroration, Giuliani declared, “We cannot allow these crooks—because that is what they are—to steal an election from the American people.” He was right about that, anyway. He is one of the ringleaders.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-11-19--How You Can Help Restore American Democracy

In the weeks since Election Day , Donald Trump has refused to concede defeat , fired his Secretary of Defense @ @ @ @ @ to investigate specious claims of voter fraud , and stoked conspiracy theories that the election @ @ @ @ @ his actions the flailing response of a sore loser or an attempt at an authoritarian @ @ @ @ @ activists believe that , in either case , ordinary citizens have more power than they @ @ @ @ @ Marantz joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what has been learned in recent years about successful @ @ @ @ @ how to take action to perpetuate a stable democracy .

Download a transcript.|||
Photograph by Brent Combs / NurPhoto / Getty
In the weeks since Election Day, Donald Trump has refused to concede defeat, fired his Secretary of Defense, ordered his Attorney General to investigate specious claims of voter fraud, and stoked conspiracy theories that the election was somehow fraudulent. Are his actions the flailing response of a sore loser or an attempt at an authoritarian power grab? Academics and activists believe that, in either case, ordinary citizens have more power than they think they do. Andrew Marantz joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss what has been learned in recent years about successful nonviolent resistance movements, and how to take action to perpetuate a stable democracy.
Read More About the 2020 Election


newyorker--2020-11-19--What Will a Vengeful President Do to the World in His Final Weeks?

Over the past half century , American Presidents have often scrambled on the global stage in their final weeks in office to salvage troubled legacies at home .
They usually fail .
Several have created messes or additional unfinished business for their successors .
In his final weeks , Richard Nixon went to Israel , Egypt , Syria , Saudi Arabia , and Jordan to jump-start Middle East peace , then to the Soviet Union to talk arms control—both trips meant to divert attention from the exploding Watergate scandal back home .
He made no progress and was soon forced @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Jimmy Carter dispatched diplomats to Algeria to negotiate the release of fifty-two American hostages in Iran .
On a cold , drizzly night , I waited on the Algiers airport tarmac for their flight to freedom , but Tehran refused to let them leave until minutes after Carter left the White House—his final disgrace .
After losing his bid for reëlection , George H. W. Bush deployed twenty-eight thousand troops to conflict-ravaged Somalia in his final weeks , to do “ God ’ s work ” after local warlords blocked humanitarian aid @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The limited mission dragged on more for than a year after Bush left office and produced the “ Black Hawk Down ” debacle that killed eighteen soldiers .
At the end of his Administration , Bill Clinton sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to North Korea to discuss a deal on missiles , then hosted Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the last leg of a peace conference ; he sought to boost his legacy after his impeachment over a sex scandal .
I travelled with Albright to Pyongyang and covered the Camp David @ @ @ @ @ @ @ offset the taint of impeachment .
In his final weeks , George W. Bush made a swan-song trip to his war in Baghdad , where an Iraqi threw his shoes at him , shouting , “ This is the farewell kiss , you dog !
This is from the widows , the orphans , and those who were killed in Iraq !
” More than a decade later , Iraq is still not stable .
Every one of those foreign-policy issues—from Iran , Iraq , and Middle East peace to Russia ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ point .
And Donald Trump , whose mood in his final weeks varies from sulking to spiteful , seems to be plotting to rescue his own image by derailing the Presidency of the man who defeated him .
Joe Biden was already going to inherit a world far more dangerous than it was four years ago , but Trump ’ s final acts on foreign policy threaten to slow , complicate , or stymie Biden ’ s attempts to stabilize the country and the world .
Since his election loss , Trump has @ @ @ @ @ @ @ dealing with his unfulfilled domestic promises or the pandemic .
For twelve days , he had nothing on his public schedule and uncharacteristically avoided the press ; he spent four days playing golf .
But he has reportedly carved out time to consult with the Pentagon brass and senior staff about launching military strikes on Iran or its proxies in Iraq .
The focus on deadly force represented a potentially stunning reversal by a President who promised to end American interventions in the Middle East .
In August , Trump pledged , during @ @ @ @ @ @ @ win .
.
.
we will have a deal with Iran within four weeks.
” He lost and soon began considering lethal action , both overt and covert .
There are legitimate reasons for concern about Iran ’ s behavior .
The world ’ s nuclear watchdog , the International Atomic Energy Agency , reported last week that Tehran has stockpiled twelve times the amount of enriched uranium—the fuel for a nuclear weapon as well as for peaceful nuclear energy—allowed in the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by the Obama Administration and five other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to be a master dealmaker , walked away from the historic accord in 2018 , even as the Europeans , Russia , and China stuck with it .
Trump blustered that he ’ d squeeze Iran , through the most sweeping economic sanctions ever imposed on any nation , into a bigger and better deal .
Only he didn ’ t .
Iran stuck with the original deal , too , and obeyed all the limits for more than a year .
As Washington imposed more sanctions , Tehran gradually breached the accord @ @ @ @ @ @ @ me that none of Iran ’ s moves posed an immediate threat , and each could be quickly reversed .
But the time required for the Islamic Republic to build a bomb has now diminished from more than a year , when Obama left office , to about three months , under Trump .
Iran has outmaneuvered Trump .
The President must be seething—at Iran , for failing to come crawling , and at Biden , for pledging to return to the deal , albeit with updates .
A military strike now could @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump ’ s generals and the Vice-President warned him last week , a limited mission could easily spin out of control and become a full-fledged conflict that ripples across the Middle East , South Asia , and the global economy .
For more than four decades , the United States ( the world ’ s mightiest military ) and Iran ( which ranks fourteenth , between Germany and Pakistan ) have employed vastly different strategies .
Iran ’ s unconventional and low-cost tactics—using proxies and suicide bombs , drones , limpet mines , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , despite the odds against far mightier powers .
Iran and its proxies ousted U.S. troops from Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties , forced Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000 , and helped defeat rebel groups in Syria over the past decade .
Iran and its proxies have killed hundreds of Americans in the region , yet the two countries never went to war .
They have also killed hundreds of Israelis , yet , again , the two countries have not gone to war .
The broad consensus in America ’ s foreign-policy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Iran now would be a historic mistake .
“ It ’ s just foolhardy , ” Doug Lute , a retired lieutenant general who served on the National Security Council in both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations , told me .
“ Once the first shot is fired , there ’ s no time limit on military campaigns that might have looked clean and circumscribed and confined at the outset.
” Lute cautioned against any major offensive anywhere unless the U.S. comes under attack .
“ I don ’ t think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ precipitous action before Inauguration Day .
A lame-duck President shouldn ’ t venture into unpredictable areas.
” Ryan Crocker , a former U.S .
Ambassador to Iraq , Syria , Afghanistan , Pakistan , Lebanon , and Kuwait , called the prospect of a Trump military offensive in his final two months “ somewhere between insanity and criminality .
It ’ s hard to find the words.
” The danger is that Trump may be itching to have the last word on Iran—and his own foreign-policy legacy .
The options for him to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ until January 20th .
So will the pretexts .
On Tuesday , three rockets—reportedly fired by a pro-Iranian militia—landed in the U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad .
The Administration is also concerned about an act of Iranian revenge on or around January 3rd , the first anniversary of the U.S. air strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani , the leader of Iran ’ s expeditionary Quds Force .
What goes around comes around .
This week , the Trump Administration also abruptly announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops in America ’ s two @ @ @ @ @ @ @ by five hundred in Iraq .
Both drawdowns are scheduled to be completed by January 15th , five days before Trump leaves the White House .
The President ’ s decision reportedly went against the advice of senior commanders and , at the time , his own Defense Secretary , Mark Esper .
Six days after the election , Esper was “ terminated ” —as the President called it on Twitter—partly because of a classified memo that he wrote in November , on behalf of the entire chain of command , warning that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from Afghanistan .
Trump ’ s timing is somewhere between awkward and awful .
American officials have long wanted to end the endless war , which has killed more than twenty-two hundred Americans , injured more than twenty thousand , and cost almost a trillion dollars .
( The local cost in death and destruction , by comparison , is staggering .
Nearly fifty thousand Afghans are estimated to have been killed since 2001 , primarily in Taliban attacks . )
But Crocker argues that , after nineteen years in Afghanistan , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ conclude between the beleaguered Afghan government and the Taliban .
A pullout this year could embolden the Taliban , whose latest offensive—which involves thousands of attacks nationwide—has made significant territorial headway .
Crocker , who helped to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after the ouster of the Taliban , scolded the Trump Administration .
“ It ’ s been clear that this Administration is headed for the exit , ” he told me .
“ Politically , the signal that we ’ re done here couldn ’ t be stronger .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the collateral damage ?
Good luck if you ’ re an Afghan female.
” Lute , who served as the so-called war czar during the George W. Bush Administration , was more sanguine .
“ We do counterterrorism operations in the Philippines , Somalia , the Sahel , Yemen , and Syria with fewer , and some places far fewer , than twenty-five hundred troops , ” he told me .
Trump ’ s troop withdrawals have been roundly criticized by some of his most loyal Republican allies .
Senate Majority Leader Mitch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ premature ” U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan “ would likely be even worse than President Obama ’ s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011 , which fueled the rise of ISIS and a new round of global terrorism.
” He compared it to the American retreat from Vietnam .
Mac Thornberry , of Texas , the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee , was tougher .
Military pressure by U.S. and NATO forces had forced the Taliban to the negotiating table .
“ Pretty much everybody agreed that further reductions would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reporters on Tuesday .
“ In other words , they give and we give .
And I don ’ t know of any condition which justifies reducing further the troops that we have in Afghanistan.
” Democrats charged that Trump is trying to sabotage Biden ’ s foreign policy .
Dick Durbin , of Illinois , the Senate Democratic Whip , said Trump was having a policy “ tantrum ” after losing the election .
“ Somebody in his family or close friends have got to sit down with him and say , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , on CNN .
Adam Schiff , the California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee , said that the President was “ potentially trying to put a box around ” Biden in Afghanistan and Iraq “ with decisions that they can ’ t fully implement.
” Biden would have a hard time politically if he felt the need to redeploy troops to Afghanistan after Trump reduces the number of Americans from forty-five hundred to twenty-five hundred .
Trump ’ s plan to withdraw five hundred U.S. forces from Iraq—also leaving twenty-five @ @ @ @ @ @ @ still has an estimated ten thousand fighters regularly carrying out bombings and assassinations .
“ We ’ re not out of the danger zone with either ISIS in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan or the next extremist group in the region , ” Brett Bruen , a former White House director for global engagement and now the president of the Global Situation Room , told me .
The appearance that these historic strategic decisions are motivated by Trump ’ s personal calendar adds to the impression , among allies and adversaries , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ determined more by American politics than the existential military realities in war zones .
Washington is rife with rumors about other U.S. military withdrawals—from Germany , South Korea , and Somalia—before Trump leaves office .
Trump ’ s last gasps are striking because he otherwise leaves office with an abysmal legacy in diplomacy .
Besides a new nuclear deal with Iran , his other big gamble was a nuclear deal with North Korea .
After three bromance summits and several love letters with Kim Jong Un , the North Korean leader ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump took office .
In October , Kim unveiled one of the world ’ s largest ballistic missiles ; North Korea already had missiles capable of hitting the United States .
Now it has even more .
Bruen described Trump ’ s final days as Machiavellian .
The President , he said , is trying to boost his legacy in preparation for another run in 2024 while also setting up Biden for failure .
“ He ’ s basically saying , ‘ How can I set up conditions that are going to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I can point to later and say what a mess they have made.
’ ” The tragedy is that the stakes are America ’ s future , not just Trump ’ s .
Bruen said , “ It ’ s alarming and astonishing to think an American President could use our national security in such a callous way for personal and political gain.
” A previous version of this article misspelled Brett Bruen ’ s name .
Read More About the 2020 Election • William Barr is the one Administration official with the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempted coup .
• Trump has survived impeachment , twenty-six sexual-misconduct accusations , and thousands of lawsuits .
His luck may well end now that Joe Biden has been elected the next President .
• With litigation unlikely to change the outcome of the election , Republicans are looking to strategies that might remain even after rebuffs both at the polls and in court .
• We have to talk about what happened under the Trump Presidency and how we can prevent it from happening again .
• If 2020 has demonstrated anything @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the economy to benefit the working class—and there are many ways a Biden Administration can start .
• Sign up for our daily newsletter for insight and analysis from our reporters and columnists .

Over the past half century, American Presidents have often scrambled on the global stage in their final weeks in office to salvage troubled legacies at home. They usually fail. Several have created messes or additional unfinished business for their successors. In his final weeks, Richard Nixon went to Israel, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan to jump-start Middle East peace, then to the Soviet Union to talk arms control—both trips meant to divert attention from the exploding Watergate scandal back home. He made no progress and was soon forced to resign. In his final weeks, Jimmy Carter dispatched diplomats to Algeria to negotiate the release of fifty-two American hostages in Iran. On a cold, drizzly night, I waited on the Algiers airport tarmac for their flight to freedom, but Tehran refused to let them leave until minutes after Carter left the White House—his final disgrace. After losing his bid for reëlection, George H. W. Bush deployed twenty-eight thousand troops to conflict-ravaged Somalia in his final weeks, to do “God’s work” after local warlords blocked humanitarian aid from reaching millions of drought victims. The limited mission dragged on more for than a year after Bush left office and produced the “Black Hawk Down” debacle that killed eighteen soldiers. At the end of his Administration, Bill Clinton sent Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to North Korea to discuss a deal on missiles, then hosted Israeli and Palestinian leaders in the last leg of a peace conference; he sought to boost his legacy after his impeachment over a sex scandal. I travelled with Albright to Pyongyang and covered the Camp David talks; neither succeeded, and neither offset the taint of impeachment. In his final weeks, George W. Bush made a swan-song trip to his war in Baghdad, where an Iraqi threw his shoes at him, shouting, “This is the farewell kiss, you dog! This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” More than a decade later, Iraq is still not stable.
Every one of those foreign-policy issues—from Iran, Iraq, and Middle East peace to Russia’s nuclear arsenal and Somali warlords—remains a flash point. And Donald Trump, whose mood in his final weeks varies from sulking to spiteful, seems to be plotting to rescue his own image by derailing the Presidency of the man who defeated him. Joe Biden was already going to inherit a world far more dangerous than it was four years ago, but Trump’s final acts on foreign policy threaten to slow, complicate, or stymie Biden’s attempts to stabilize the country and the world.
Since his election loss, Trump has seemingly prioritized pondering military actions abroad over dealing with his unfulfilled domestic promises or the pandemic. For twelve days, he had nothing on his public schedule and uncharacteristically avoided the press; he spent four days playing golf. But he has reportedly carved out time to consult with the Pentagon brass and senior staff about launching military strikes on Iran or its proxies in Iraq. The focus on deadly force represented a potentially stunning reversal by a President who promised to end American interventions in the Middle East. In August, Trump pledged, during a campaign fund-raiser, “If we win . . . we will have a deal with Iran within four weeks.” He lost and soon began considering lethal action, both overt and covert.
There are legitimate reasons for concern about Iran’s behavior. The world’s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, reported last week that Tehran has stockpiled twelve times the amount of enriched uranium—the fuel for a nuclear weapon as well as for peaceful nuclear energy—allowed in the 2015 nuclear deal brokered by the Obama Administration and five other major powers. Trump, who claims to be a master dealmaker, walked away from the historic accord in 2018, even as the Europeans, Russia, and China stuck with it. Trump blustered that he’d squeeze Iran, through the most sweeping economic sanctions ever imposed on any nation, into a bigger and better deal. Only he didn’t. Iran stuck with the original deal, too, and obeyed all the limits for more than a year. As Washington imposed more sanctions, Tehran gradually breached the accord’s terms. Experts have told me that none of Iran’s moves posed an immediate threat, and each could be quickly reversed. But the time required for the Islamic Republic to build a bomb has now diminished from more than a year, when Obama left office, to about three months, under Trump. Iran has outmaneuvered Trump. The President must be seething—at Iran, for failing to come crawling, and at Biden, for pledging to return to the deal, albeit with updates.
A military strike now could derail Biden’s plans. As Trump’s generals and the Vice-President warned him last week, a limited mission could easily spin out of control and become a full-fledged conflict that ripples across the Middle East, South Asia, and the global economy. For more than four decades, the United States (the world’s mightiest military) and Iran (which ranks fourteenth, between Germany and Pakistan) have employed vastly different strategies. Iran’s unconventional and low-cost tactics—using proxies and suicide bombs, drones, limpet mines, and short- or medium-range missiles—have often prevailed, despite the odds, against far mightier powers. Iran and its proxies ousted U.S. troops from Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties, forced Israeli troops from Lebanon in 2000, and helped defeat rebel groups in Syria over the past decade. Iran and its proxies have killed hundreds of Americans in the region, yet the two countries never went to war. They have also killed hundreds of Israelis, yet, again, the two countries have not gone to war.
The broad consensus in America’s foreign-policy community is that taking military action against Iran now would be a historic mistake. “It’s just foolhardy,” Doug Lute, a retired lieutenant general who served on the National Security Council in both the George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, told me. “Once the first shot is fired, there’s no time limit on military campaigns that might have looked clean and circumscribed and confined at the outset.” Lute cautioned against any major offensive anywhere unless the U.S. comes under attack. “I don’t think it’s wise to take any precipitous action before Inauguration Day. A lame-duck President shouldn’t venture into unpredictable areas.” Ryan Crocker, a former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Kuwait, called the prospect of a Trump military offensive in his final two months “somewhere between insanity and criminality. It’s hard to find the words.”
The danger is that Trump may be itching to have the last word on Iran—and his own foreign-policy legacy. The options for him to act militarily will remain on the table until January 20th. So will the pretexts. On Tuesday, three rockets—reportedly fired by a pro-Iranian militia—landed in the U.S. Embassy complex in Baghdad. The Administration is also concerned about an act of Iranian revenge on or around January 3rd, the first anniversary of the U.S. air strike that killed General Qassem Soleimani, the leader of Iran’s expeditionary Quds Force. What goes around comes around.
This week, the Trump Administration also abruptly announced the withdrawal of U.S. troops in America’s two hottest wars—by almost half in Afghanistan and by five hundred in Iraq. Both drawdowns are scheduled to be completed by January 15th, five days before Trump leaves the White House. The President’s decision reportedly went against the advice of senior commanders and, at the time, his own Defense Secretary, Mark Esper. Six days after the election, Esper was “terminated”—as the President called it on Twitter—partly because of a classified memo that he wrote in November, on behalf of the entire chain of command, warning that conditions were not right for any pullout from Afghanistan. Trump’s timing is somewhere between awkward and awful. American officials have long wanted to end the endless war, which has killed more than twenty-two hundred Americans, injured more than twenty thousand, and cost almost a trillion dollars. (The local cost in death and destruction, by comparison, is staggering. Nearly fifty thousand Afghans are estimated to have been killed since 2001, primarily in Taliban attacks.)
But Crocker argues that, after nineteen years in Afghanistan, the United States is walking away before talks conclude between the beleaguered Afghan government and the Taliban. A pullout this year could embolden the Taliban, whose latest offensive—which involves thousands of attacks nationwide—has made significant territorial headway. Crocker, who helped to reopen the U.S. Embassy in Kabul after the ouster of the Taliban, scolded the Trump Administration. “It’s been clear that this Administration is headed for the exit,” he told me. “Politically, the signal that we’re done here couldn’t be stronger. I’m just sick. What about the collateral damage? Good luck if you’re an Afghan female.” Lute, who served as the so-called war czar during the George W. Bush Administration, was more sanguine. “We do counterterrorism operations in the Philippines, Somalia, the Sahel, Yemen, and Syria with fewer, and some places far fewer, than twenty-five hundred troops,” he told me.
Trump’s troop withdrawals have been roundly criticized by some of his most loyal Republican allies. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell warned that the consequences of a “premature” U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan “would likely be even worse than President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, which fueled the rise of ISIS and a new round of global terrorism.” He compared it to the American retreat from Vietnam. Mac Thornberry, of Texas, the top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, was tougher. Military pressure by U.S. and NATO forces had forced the Taliban to the negotiating table. “Pretty much everybody agreed that further reductions would be conditions based,” Thornberry told reporters on Tuesday. “In other words, they give and we give. And I don’t know of any condition which justifies reducing further the troops that we have in Afghanistan.”
Democrats charged that Trump is trying to sabotage Biden’s foreign policy. Dick Durbin, of Illinois, the Senate Democratic Whip, said Trump was having a policy “tantrum” after losing the election. “Somebody in his family or close friends have got to sit down with him and say, ‘Stop,’ ” he said, on CNN. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, said that the President was “potentially trying to put a box around” Biden in Afghanistan and Iraq “with decisions that they can’t fully implement.” Biden would have a hard time politically if he felt the need to redeploy troops to Afghanistan after Trump reduces the number of Americans from forty-five hundred to twenty-five hundred.
Trump’s plan to withdraw five hundred U.S. forces from Iraq—also leaving twenty-five hundred—is less controversial, even though ISIS still has an estimated ten thousand fighters regularly carrying out bombings and assassinations. “We’re not out of the danger zone with either ISIS in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan or the next extremist group in the region,” Brett Bruen, a former White House director for global engagement and now the president of the Global Situation Room, told me. The appearance that these historic strategic decisions are motivated by Trump’s personal calendar adds to the impression, among allies and adversaries, that future U.S. commitments may also be determined more by American politics than the existential military realities in war zones. Washington is rife with rumors about other U.S. military withdrawals—from Germany, South Korea, and Somalia—before Trump leaves office.


newyorker--2020-11-19--A French Answer to American Apple Pie

A French Answer to American Apple Pie

The first tarte aux pommes that I came upon in Lyon , and on only our third day in the city , was inside the doorway of a bouchon and was so large that , having just been removed from the oven , it was put on its own dining table to cool .
A typical French tart consists of three concentric circles of fruit slices .
The showcase tart , by virtue of its exceptional diameter ( it put me in mind of a giant pizza for a tailgate party ) , had seven , and each ring of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ placed that the cook could have used a ruler .
It looked like , what , an expression of infinity ?
It was an over-the-top aesthetic act and an early lesson in French pastry—make it beautiful and you will make it scrumptious , because the eater ’ s sense of anticipation will insure that it is .
I badly wanted to eat some .
I also wanted to learn how to make one .
Six months later , I did , when I went to a cooking school in Lyon and signed up @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a stage ( something like an apprenticeship ) in the school ’ s upmarket restaurant .
( Me ?
Pretending to be a pastry chef ?
Ha ! )
The tarte aux pommes , I learned , has three components : the apples , which are sliced in beautiful uniformity ; homemade applesauce , the base that the apple slices are arranged on ; and a pastry half made of butter .
The apples—they ’ re everything , obviously .
But , so , too , is that pastry .
American pies often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like Crisco—which is reasonably easy to work with and doesn ’ t fail at warmer temperatures .
The result is wonderfully flaky .
Less wonderful , it has no flavor .
A proper French pastry has the flake and the flavors of butter , a surprising sweet tartness that goes with just about anything , especially fruit .
The butter , however , makes the pastry temperamental : work it too hard—knead it with flour as you might bread dough , roll it out as you might pasta—and the result will be glue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ butter pastry in French tradition , pâte this and pâte that , but not much difference among them ; they all have roughly the same amount of butter—a lot .
There ’ s one for a savory filling ( like quiche ) , a slightly different one for meat ( like pâté en croûte ) , etc .
Fruit tarts are often made with pâte brisée , an inauspicious name .
It comes from the verb briser , which means to shatter or break—like a vase that ’ s dropped—and it is true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and so little liquid that it easily falls apart .
In one recent effort , I made what I thought was a textbook example—the dough wrapped tightly around a rolling pin—so beautiful that I was compelled to photograph it , when , while holding the rolling-pin handle in my right hand and trying to find the phone in my pocket with my left , I don ’ t know what happened , the pastry suddenly crumbled and fell , broken ( brisée ! )
into more than a dozen irregular pieces .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I learned how to live with the fragility of the pâte and to recognize its beauty .
The philosophy : Flour and butter will never get along .
They don ’ t like each other .
You want for them to coexist just long enough to make it into a hot oven .
The flour : Pastry flour , never bread flour .
Look for one that has a low protein content .
In the United States , the information is often posted on the back of the bag .
Ten or twelve @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , five to six per cent ( if you can find it ) for pastries .
The flour I use , called Frederick , which I buy at Union Square Greenmarket , has eight per cent .
Heat : The enemy .
You want cold .
I keep my pie molds in the freezer .
If I am mixing in a bowl , I store it there , too .
The dough ’ s water element : iced .
The yolk : from an egg retrieved at the last minute from the fridge @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a small dice , then refrigerate on a plate .
For good measure , I wear latex gloves .
Kneading : Never .
After gathering up the dough into a ball , you are allowed a smoosh .
One .
Not two .
Imperfection : Ugly , in this case , is lovely .
There can be streaks and buttery spots in your dough .
If you carry on working it , hoping to get a beautifully golden globe , you will ruin it .
And , besides , fat under heat @ @ @ @ @ @ @ disappear .
My rolling-pin pastry that shattered into more than a dozen pieces ?
I reassembled them in the tart pan .
I didn ’ t press the pieces .
I placed them .
The pastry went into the oven misshapen ; it came out looking just fine .
For me , a French apple tart is among our autumnal harmonies—falling leaves , logs in a fireplace , cold-weather smells of cinnamon—and is a favorite go-to dessert for the season .
My sons , however , don ’ t like it .
They @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the point , ” George said when I asked .
“ Who makes a dessert with apples ?
” Frederick added .
“ It ’ s so lazy .
Why would I ever eat apples if I can have chocolate cake instead ?
” I pondered the distinction .
It reminded me of the Saturday mornings the boys and I spent together in Lyon .
I used to take them to a public pool for swimming lessons .
Afterward , on our way home , we would stop by les Halles Paul Bocuse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , for a French pastry .
For a few euros , we were rewarded with beautiful mini-dessert classics : tarte au chocolat , Paris–Brest , Saint Honoré , macarons , éclairs , never-pass-them-up pains au chocolat , and much else .
In such company , I now see , an apple tart has a hard time competing .
Perhaps we can define what an apple tart is by what it isn ’ t .
It isn ’ t particularly sweet .
American apple pie has much more sugar—and often flour or another starch @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ( apples caramelized on a puff pastry bottom , one of the most famous French desserts ) has even more sugar .
By comparison , the flavors of apple tart are quite restrained : the fruit cooked and not so cooked , a pastry with the texture of buttered air , and in its presentation a gift , like a painting .
It is simple , and , like most French desserts , not so simple .
I prefer metric measurements for this recipe , because there is a mathematical harmony to the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the flour ( and makes them easy to remember ) : flour ( 250 g ) , butter ( 125 g ) , sugar ( 25 g ) , salt ( 5 g ) .
• 125 g ( 4 ½ oz . )
unsalted butter , plus another 25 g ( 1 oz . )
for buttering pan • 250 g ( 9 oz . )
pastry flour , plus more for dusting • A splash of milk or a lightly beaten egg , to brush onto the pastry • Pince @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a big gap between the tines , or a pair of fish-boning tweezers , for fashioning pastry crust • Rouleau de pique-vite , or a fork , to prick holes in the pastry 2 .
Butter the bottom and sides of the tart pan comprehensively .
( I tear off a piece of the waxed paper from a butter stick and use that as a buttering tool . )
Using a sieve , dust the pan with a small amount of flour .
Rotate pan in a shallow circle to insure that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , then tip out excess .
Put pan in freezer for 2 minutes , then remove and dust again with flour .
Keep pan in freezer until needed .
3 .
Via a sieve or a sifter , create a mound of the flour in a bowl or on a work surface .
Make a well in the center , then add salt , sugar , and ice water .
Wearing the latex gloves , mix salt , sugar , and water in the well .
Add egg yolk and mix to combine @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the well , and , working quickly , mix it in with the other ingredients , breaking it up into smaller bits with your fingers , and then gradually pull in the flour .
Continue mixing with your fingers until the dough is crumbly and starting to cohere .
Compress the mixture gently with your hands to create a ball of dough .
Press one more time , with force , flattening the dough lengthwise with the blade of the pastry scraper or your palm to help further amalgamate the butter in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Do not knead .
Loosely shape the dough into an approximation of a circle , an inch or so thick , being careful not to work it .
( I use the pastry scraper to push the dough into shape ) .
Place dough in a plastic bag , using the pastry scraper to transfer it .
Refrigerate for 30 minutes or overnight .

The first tarte aux pommes that I came upon in Lyon, and on only our third day in the city, was inside the doorway of a bouchon and was so large that, having just been removed from the oven, it was put on its own dining table to cool. A typical French tart consists of three concentric circles of fruit slices. The showcase tart, by virtue of its exceptional diameter (it put me in mind of a giant pizza for a tailgate party), had seven, and each ring of fruit was so exactingly carved and symmetrically placed that the cook could have used a ruler. It looked like, what, an expression of infinity? It was an over-the-top aesthetic act and an early lesson in French pastry—make it beautiful and you will make it scrumptious, because the eater’s sense of anticipation will insure that it is. I badly wanted to eat some. I also wanted to learn how to make one.
Six months later, I did, when I went to a cooking school in Lyon and signed up for all the pastry classes, including a stage (something like an apprenticeship) in the school’s upmarket restaurant. (Me? Pretending to be a pastry chef? Ha!) The tarte aux pommes, I learned, has three components: the apples, which are sliced in beautiful uniformity; homemade applesauce, the base that the apple slices are arranged on; and a pastry half made of butter.
The apples—they’re everything, obviously. But so, too, is that pastry. American pies often include vegetable fat—i.e., hydrogenated shortening, like Crisco—which is reasonably easy to work with and doesn’t fail at warmer temperatures. The result is wonderfully flaky. Less wonderful, it has no flavor. A proper French pastry has the flake and the flavors of butter, a surprising sweet tartness that goes with just about anything, especially fruit. The butter, however, makes the pastry temperamental: work it too hard—knead it with flour as you might bread dough, roll it out as you might pasta—and the result will be glue.
There are several types of temperamental butter pastry in French tradition, pâte this and pâte that, but not much difference among them; they all have roughly the same amount of butter—a lot. There’s one for a savory filling (like quiche), a slightly different one for meat (like pâté en croûte), etc. Fruit tarts are often made with pâte brisée, an inauspicious name. It comes from the verb briser, which means to shatter or break—like a vase that’s dropped—and it is true that the pastry has so much fat and so little liquid that it easily falls apart. In one recent effort, I made what I thought was a textbook example—the dough wrapped tightly around a rolling pin—so beautiful that I was compelled to photograph it, when, while holding the rolling-pin handle in my right hand and trying to find the phone in my pocket with my left, I don’t know what happened, the pastry suddenly crumbled and fell, broken (brisée! ) into more than a dozen irregular pieces. It wasn’t until cooking school that I learned how to live with the fragility of the pâte and to recognize its beauty.
The philosophy: Flour and butter will never get along. They don’t like each other. You want for them to coexist just long enough to make it into a hot oven.
The flour: Pastry flour, never bread flour. Look for one that has a low protein content. In the United States, the information is often posted on the back of the bag. Ten or twelve per cent protein is good for bread, five to six per cent (if you can find it) for pastries. The flour I use, called Frederick, which I buy at Union Square Greenmarket, has eight per cent.
Heat: The enemy. You want cold. I keep my pie molds in the freezer. If I am mixing in a bowl, I store it there, too. The dough’s water element: iced. The yolk: from an egg retrieved at the last minute from the fridge. Even the butter, I cut into a small dice, then refrigerate on a plate. For good measure, I wear latex gloves.
Kneading: Never. After gathering up the dough into a ball, you are allowed a smoosh. One. Not two.
Imperfection: Ugly, in this case, is lovely. There can be streaks and buttery spots in your dough. If you carry on working it, hoping to get a beautifully golden globe, you will ruin it. And, besides, fat under heat recomposes itself: the lumps and streaks disappear. My rolling-pin pastry that shattered into more than a dozen pieces? I reassembled them in the tart pan. I didn’t press the pieces. I placed them. The pastry went into the oven misshapen; it came out looking just fine.
For me, a French apple tart is among our autumnal harmonies—falling leaves, logs in a fireplace, cold-weather smells of cinnamon—and is a favorite go-to dessert for the season. My sons, however, don’t like it. They never have.
“I never saw the point,” George said when I asked.
“Who makes a dessert with apples?” Frederick added. “It’s so lazy. Why would I ever eat apples if I can have chocolate cake instead?”
I pondered the distinction. It reminded me of the Saturday mornings the boys and I spent together in Lyon. I used to take them to a public pool for swimming lessons. Afterward, on our way home, we would stop by les Halles Paul Bocuse, the city’s food hall, for a French pastry. For a few euros, we were rewarded with beautiful mini-dessert classics: tarte au chocolat, Paris–Brest, Saint Honoré, macarons, éclairs, never-pass-them-up pains au chocolat, and much else. In such company, I now see, an apple tart has a hard time competing.
Perhaps we can define what an apple tart is by what it isn’t. It isn’t particularly sweet. American apple pie has much more sugar—and often flour or another starch in the filling. A tarte tatin (apples caramelized on a puff pastry bottom, one of the most famous French desserts) has even more sugar. By comparison, the flavors of apple tart are quite restrained: the fruit cooked and not so cooked, a pastry with the texture of buttered air, and in its presentation a gift, like a painting. It is simple, and, like most French desserts, not so simple.
Tarte aux Pommes
I prefer metric measurements for this recipe, because there is a mathematical harmony to the ingredients that illustrates quite clearly their relationship to the flour (and makes them easy to remember): flour (250 g), butter (125 g), sugar (25 g), salt (5 g).
Serves 6
Pâte Brisée
Ingredients


newyorker--2020-11-19--Fun Ideas for My Next Existential Crisis

Reading : Any sort of book counts , but , in the absence of one , cereal boxes and ads are fine , too .
Thinking about how some people go to the library : If reading proves too big a first step , it ’ s O.K .
to just consider other people doing it .
Yoga-teacher training : Weird that this is two hundred hours and none of those hours are set aside for shopping .
Dating different types of people : It ’ s good to get out of my comfort zone sometimes .
Plus , we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he won ’ t drink my Soylent .
Learning a foreign language : French seems hard , so maybe I ’ ll try Trumpian English ?
Looking at nature : This is made easier by the fact that I ’ m now in a relationship with a beaver .
Dyeing my hair : Nothing says “ I don ’ t constantly think about death ” like having six additional highlights .
Meditating : Wait , am I just supposed to sit here ?
This has been way overhyped .
Changing my diet : @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ kale , ” I ’ d maybe understand what we ’ re meant to be doing on this alleged “ planet.
” But I really don ’ t want to .
Deleting my social media : Then reviving it three days later , just like Christ .
Getting divorced : I ’ ve seen enough movies to know that I can ’ t seek meaning abroad until a big split , so if anyone would like to marry me , that ’ d be a great first step .
Finally watching the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from the beginning , though , right ?
Searching for meaning : Or my keys—they ’ re always missing .
Questioning my assumptions : Maybe the cheese should go on before the mayonnaise .
Calling my mom to tell her I love her : Granted , I should probably be doing this more regularly already , but something about pondering how and why it is that we came to be here makes me think about my mom .
Will unpack this during my next existential crisis .
Asking myself what it is that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on this beautiful earth : This one is hard , so I ’ ll come back to it .

Reading: Any sort of book counts, but, in the absence of one, cereal boxes and ads are fine, too.
Thinking about how some people go to the library: If reading proves too big a first step, it’s O.K. to just consider other people doing it.
Yoga-teacher training: Weird that this is two hundred hours and none of those hours are set aside for shopping.
Dating different types of people: It’s good to get out of my comfort zone sometimes. Plus, we have different tastes in food, so he won’t drink my Soylent.
Learning a foreign language: French seems hard, so maybe I’ll try Trumpian English?
Looking at nature: This is made easier by the fact that I’m now in a relationship with a beaver.
Dyeing my hair: Nothing says “I don’t constantly think about death” like having six additional highlights.
Meditating: Wait, am I just supposed to sit here? This has been way overhyped.
Changing my diet: If I were to try this alleged “kale,” I’d maybe understand what we’re meant to be doing on this alleged “planet.” But I really don’t want to.
Deleting my social media: Then reviving it three days later, just like Christ.
Getting divorced: I’ve seen enough movies to know that I can’t seek meaning abroad until a big split, so if anyone would like to marry me, that’d be a great first step.
Finally watching the news: It makes sense to start from the beginning, though, right?
Searching for meaning: Or my keys—they’re always missing.
Questioning my assumptions: Maybe the cheese should go on before the mayonnaise.
Calling my mom to tell her I love her: Granted, I should probably be doing this more regularly already, but something about pondering how and why it is that we came to be here makes me think about my mom. Will unpack this during my next existential crisis.
Asking myself what it is that I want from my one short life on this beautiful earth: This one is hard, so I’ll come back to it.


newyorker--2020-11-19--The Defacement and Destruction of Black Lives Matter Murals

A half-dozen police officers suddenly arrived , approaching the protesters as they finished the third letter and began peeling away the tarps .
The officers formed a phalanx in a crosswalk , blocking off the street .
Behind them , a group of about ten white men armed with rifles and bulletproof vests appeared , as if summoned .
The men , apparently members of an out-of-town militia , stood by in silence .
Many of them wore bandannas that obscured their faces , and they told demonstrators who questioned their presence that they were on hand to “ keep @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the people armed with paint , not the ones armed with guns .
As a familiar chant from the roiling summer protests— “ Whose streets ?
” “ Our streets !
” —briefly drowned out the officers ’ commands , the protesters completed a mural that spelled out “ BLM ” in bright-yellow letters .
It was Tulsa ’ s second large-scale Black Lives Matter mural but the first to warrant an immediate crackdown by the Tulsa Police Department and an armed militia .
Three people were arrested on the scene , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Mayor G. T. Bynum , who had praised the original street art as a “ beautiful mural ” with an important message , quickly issued a statement : “ Vandalism of public property is not a peaceful protest .
It is a criminal act.
” Since the killing of George Floyd , in May , many cities have embraced Black Lives Matter murals as a symbol of their commitment to racial justice .
Tulsa was informally among them , with an unauthorized but widely celebrated mural painted on its historic Greenwood Avenue @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , galvanized in part by the fractious political climate surrounding the 2020 election , has spread rapidly .
And Tulsa—not entirely on purpose but now with undeniable conviction—has leapt to the forefront of the effort .
“ The police department knows that the city and the political establishment have its back , ” Jess Eddy , one of the people arrested at the City Hall protest , told me .
“ And so they feel emboldened to crack down.
” The day before Trump ’ s arrival , about fifty artists painted a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ Black Lives Matter ” across Tulsa ’ s Greenwood Avenue in the pre-dawn hours of Juneteenth .
The choice of location carried historical resonance .
In 1921 , Greenwood Avenue was the epicenter of Black wealth in Tulsa ; it was also the staging ground for a violent massacre in which white mobs destroyed more than twelve hundred homes and businesses in the neighborhood and killed as many as three hundred people .
In October , an unmarked mass grave that held eleven coffins was found in a local cemetery during a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ single block of Greenwood remains occupied by local Black entrepreneurs , some of whom can trace their heritage back to the massacre .
Seeing a message of solidarity at such a tumultuous moment excited many neighborhood business owners and residents .
“ I was happy to see it , ” Tori Tyson , who has owned Blow Out Hair Studio on Greenwood Avenue for fourteen years , told me .
“ It brought young people , old people , Black kids , white kids , different people together , and they had a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attraction , a site for high-school graduation photos and snapshots with newborn children .
On June 20th , people danced atop the letters during an impromptu block party , shortly after the President left the city .
An aerial shot of the mural appeared on the home page of the Times ’ Web site and on countless social-media feeds .
“ It ’ s kind of like a badge of honor , ” Nehemiah Frank , the editor-in-chief of a local news outlet called the Black Wall Street Times , said .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ we recognize , as a city , that Black lives have not always mattered to the Tulsa government , but today we ’ re gon na change that narrative.
” Even as the murals spread to more and more cities , though , a variety of rhetorical and legal attacks were levelled against them .
On July 1st , President Trump called Black Lives Matter murals “ a symbol of hate , ” after the city of New York placed one in front of Trump Tower .
Later that month , Bob Jack @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republican Party , told the Tulsa World that he wanted to paint a “ Back the Blue ” mural just south of where the President had held his rally .
Jack wrote a letter to city officials asking whether such a mural would be permitted .
Members of a pro-police Facebook group called Back the Blue Tulsa brought similar questions to a local city councillor .
The gambit seemed less focussed on expanding freedom of expression than restricting the expression that was happening in Greenwood .
The conservative outcry was effective .
Within @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Bynum scheduled the mural removal for August 3rd .
That morning , road crews were greeted by a sea of cardboard boxes installed on the street by protesters .
They represented the tombstones of Black people who had died at the hands of state-sanctioned violence , from 1921 massacre victims to Terence Crutcher , an unarmed man who was killed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016 .
Jess Eddy , a co-founder of Whites Against Racism , a group that tries to engage white allies in the fight for racial justice , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ volunteer watchman .
“ Whenever Black bodies come into an encounter with police , there ’ s an increased chance of violence , ” he told me .
“ Therefore , as a white man , I have a responsibility to be in between that.
” On that day , the mural stayed .
The matter was not settled , though .
After efforts to convert the street to private ownership failed , it ultimately fell on city officials to decide whether to keep the mural .
The most straightforward solution would have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of government speech , explicitly endorsing its message .
Here , there was precedent .
In Washington , D.C. , a conservative legal-advocacy group had argued that the city violated its First Amendment rights when the organization was not allowed to paint a competing mural ( “ Because No One Is Above the Law !
” ) on city streets .
City attorneys argued that the Black Lives Matter mural was a government message , not a public forum .
When activists added “ = Defund the Police ” to the mural in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that this had also been accepted as government speech , comparing it to a donated art installation .
( The case is pending in U.S. District Court . )
Most councillors in Tulsa rejected that idea .
“ It was illegally put on the road by an activist , ” Connie Dodson said at a public-works committee meeting in August .
“ If we adopt that as government speech , we ’ re adopting that criminal offense.
” Two councillors who supported the mural , Vanessa Hall-Harper and Kara Joy McKee , proposed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ repaving of Greenwood Avenue was already planned .
Other councillors insisted that the removal happen immediately .
“ Time is of essence for me and for many of my constituents , ” Phil Lakin , a council member who represents a district on the southernmost edge of Tulsa , more than ten miles from the mural , said .
The council recommended that the repaving of a single block of Greenwood Avenue be moved up by five months , to October .
However , the responsibility for directing crews to start removing the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ You can not tell one group we ’ re not allowing public messages to be displayed on city streets , ” Bynum told me in an interview , “ but I ’ m going to look the other way while this other one was on this street and just allow it to be there.
” When Tori Tyson arrived at her hair salon before dawn on October 5th , wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt imprinted with the American flag , she expected to see the mural one last time .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the pavement at 4:15 A.M. By the time she unlocked the door to her salon , the entire street had already been pulverized , the words Black Lives Matter ground into yellow-specked gravel and poured into a dump truck .
Tyson stood outside her front window and watched as Tulsa became the first major city in the U.S. to remove a Black Lives Matter mural .
“ I was not surprised in Tulsa but hurt , because the world is watching us , ” she told me later .
“ It ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for Black Lives Matter murals not only in Tulsa but across the nation .
In Ithaca , New York , a mural was doused in black paint , on October 4th .
In Pittsburgh , in late September , two men shot paintballs at a downtown Black Lives Matter mural , while one of them wore a Trump hat and a sweatshirt with a Confederate-flag design .
At the University of North Carolina , Asheville , e-mails threatened violence if the college ’ s mural was not removed , prompting a campus lockdown @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Nashville on October 17th was marred by burnout tire tracks the next day .
In some of these communities , police tried to identify and arrest the murals ’ vandals ; in Tulsa , officers portrayed Black Lives Matter , both the message and the movement , as a threat .
On the Saturday when protesters painted the mural in front of City Hall , a separate march in support of law enforcement was held nearby .
Several officers participated , including Wendell Franklin , the Tulsa chief of police , and Chris @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
At the start of that rally , Witt warned pro-police demonstrators that Black Lives Matter protesters might try to approach them in the street .
“ I need you not to panic—don ’ t run , ” he said .
“ These officers are going to come up to form a line in front of you to protect you.
” When the pro-police demonstrators marched near the Black Lives Matter protest , though , the protesters applauded them and their right to peaceably assemble .
Frank , the editor of the Black @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the protest , encouraged the applause .
Later , when some B.L.M .
protesters began an anti-police chant , after the mural was painted , Frank cut them off with his megaphone .
He said that , despite the day ’ s optics , he wanted to avoid a dichotomy between pro-police and anti-police protesters .
“ I don ’ t want people to think that the police are the ones that are the targets , ” he told me .
“ The target is ending systemic racism and eradicating white-supremacist ideas from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the Black Lives Matter mural in front of City Hall , the city ’ s practice of selective enforcement has intensified .
During the City Hall protest , Jess Eddy , the Whites Against Racism founder , was immediately arrested for breach of the peace , after officers said that he refused to leave the street .
When police spotted a woman several blocks away with yellow paint on her clothes , they chased her down and arrested her .
She now faces felony charges for malicious injury to property , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in jail .
The Tulsa Police Department put a photo on Facebook of four masked people painting the street , asking followers to contact Crime Stoppers with information .
The Tulsa County district attorney has declined to pursue state charges , saying that his office ’ s resources are better used targeting violent crime .
Tulsa police , though , continued to search for whoever recently spray-painted “ BLM ” in other parts of downtown Tulsa .
“ They ’ re hiding their racism behind the law , ” Frank said .
Today @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are again blank canvasses .
Two hours after the mural was painted in front of City Hall , a government cleaning crew washed away the paint , the remnants pooling in milky yellow puddles by the sewer grates .
No city officials have provided any information about the white militiamen who stood behind the police during the protest .
The fight over the murals has galvanized the people protecting them as much as it has angered the people so desperate to see them gone .
When the original mural was vandalized with a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it within hours .
“ Time after time , that mural brought the community together , and it was beautiful , ” Briana Shea , who helped organize the painting of the Greenwood Avenue mural on Juneteenth , told me .
Shea has been working with a foundation that honors Terence Crutcher , the 2016 shooting victim , to paint a series of identical murals in church parking lots around the city .
And , since the police enforced their crackdown at City Hall , people have also started painting murals in their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ months , Shea hopes to paint a hundred of the murals on private property around Tulsa .
While the city seeks to punish people for writing the words , the spirit of the phrase “ Black Lives Matter ” can not be erased , even if the words are washed away , paved over , and criminalized .
• The death of George Floyd , in context .
• The civil-rights lawyer Bryan Stevenson examines the frustration and despair behind the protests .
• Who , David Remnick asks , is the true @ @ @ @ @ @ @ A sociologist examines the so-called pillars of whiteness that prevent white Americans from confronting racism .
• The Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi on what it would mean to defund police departments , and what comes next .
• The quest to transform the United States can not be limited to challenging its brutal police .

On a recent Saturday in downtown Tulsa, beneath the glittering glass windows of City Hall, about a dozen people descended on Second Street with blue tarps, black clothes, and a very familiar shade of yellow paint. The tarps served as stencils, outlining three large block letters on the street as they were unfurled. A woman in the group carried a white bucket toward the first letter and dolloped splashes of yellow across the dark asphalt. Behind her, a team wielding rollers smoothed the paint into a legible font. As the second letter began to take shape, a siren pierced the air, and a large white pickup truck, emblazoned with the logo of the Tulsa Police Department, zoomed toward the group. It was followed by a police cruiser—and then another. “This is an unlawful assembly,” a speaker on the truck boomed. “If you do not clear the street now, you’re going to be arrested.”
A half-dozen police officers suddenly arrived, approaching the protesters as they finished the third letter and began peeling away the tarps. The officers formed a phalanx in a crosswalk, blocking off the street. Behind them, a group of about ten white men armed with rifles and bulletproof vests appeared, as if summoned. The men, apparently members of an out-of-town militia, stood by in silence. Many of them wore bandannas that obscured their faces, and they told demonstrators who questioned their presence that they were on hand to “keep the peace.” The police focussed on the people armed with paint, not the ones armed with guns. As a familiar chant from the roiling summer protests—“Whose streets?” “Our streets!”—briefly drowned out the officers’ commands, the protesters completed a mural that spelled out “BLM” in bright-yellow letters.
It was Tulsa’s second large-scale Black Lives Matter mural but the first to warrant an immediate crackdown by the Tulsa Police Department and an armed militia. Three people were arrested on the scene, and officers quickly began searching for more suspects. Mayor G. T. Bynum, who had praised the original street art as a “beautiful mural” with an important message, quickly issued a statement: “Vandalism of public property is not a peaceful protest. It is a criminal act.”
Since the killing of George Floyd, in May, many cities have embraced Black Lives Matter murals as a symbol of their commitment to racial justice. Tulsa was informally among them, with an unauthorized but widely celebrated mural painted on its historic Greenwood Avenue. But a national backlash this fall, galvanized in part by the fractious political climate surrounding the 2020 election, has spread rapidly. And Tulsa—not entirely on purpose but now with undeniable conviction—has leapt to the forefront of the effort. “The police department knows that the city and the political establishment have its back,” Jess Eddy, one of the people arrested at the City Hall protest, told me. “And so they feel emboldened to crack down.”
The Black Lives Matter murals that now adorn streets in more than seventy U.S. cities emerged not as a form of protest but as a form of government P.R. In Washington, D.C., the first rendition of the famous yellow letters was painted by the District of Columbia Department of Public Works, under the direction of Mayor Muriel Bowser. The mural design quickly spread to cities in deep-blue states, like Sacramento, California, and deep-red ones, like Birmingham, Alabama, where local officials blessed the projects. In Tulsa, the creation of a Black Lives Matter mural took on increased urgency after President Donald Trump announced that he would hold his first campaign rally since the onset of the pandemic here, during the weekend of Juneteenth. The city government, expecting large-scale protests against Trump, seemed unlikely to permit any message that could be construed as political.
The day before Trump’s arrival, about fifty artists painted a street mural without city approval, writing “Black Lives Matter” across Tulsa’s Greenwood Avenue in the pre-dawn hours of Juneteenth. The choice of location carried historical resonance. In 1921, Greenwood Avenue was the epicenter of Black wealth in Tulsa; it was also the staging ground for a violent massacre in which white mobs destroyed more than twelve hundred homes and businesses in the neighborhood and killed as many as three hundred people. In October, an unmarked mass grave that held eleven coffins was found in a local cemetery during a search for victims. Today, a single block of Greenwood remains occupied by local Black entrepreneurs, some of whom can trace their heritage back to the massacre.
Seeing a message of solidarity at such a tumultuous moment excited many neighborhood business owners and residents. “I was happy to see it,” Tori Tyson, who has owned Blow Out Hair Studio on Greenwood Avenue for fourteen years, told me. “It brought young people, old people, Black kids, white kids, different people together, and they had a conversation.” The mural became a community attraction, a site for high-school graduation photos and snapshots with newborn children. On June 20th, people danced atop the letters during an impromptu block party, shortly after the President left the city. An aerial shot of the mural appeared on the home page of the Times’ Web site and on countless social-media feeds. “It’s kind of like a badge of honor,” Nehemiah Frank, the editor-in-chief of a local news outlet called the Black Wall Street Times, said. “To leave the mural there says that we recognize, as a city, that Black lives have not always mattered to the Tulsa government, but today we’re gonna change that narrative.”
Even as the murals spread to more and more cities, though, a variety of rhetorical and legal attacks were levelled against them. On July 1st, President Trump called Black Lives Matter murals “a symbol of hate,” after the city of New York placed one in front of Trump Tower. Later that month, Bob Jack, the chair of the Tulsa County Republican Party, told the Tulsa World that he wanted to paint a “Back the Blue” mural just south of where the President had held his rally. Jack wrote a letter to city officials asking whether such a mural would be permitted. Members of a pro-police Facebook group called Back the Blue Tulsa brought similar questions to a local city councillor. The gambit seemed less focussed on expanding freedom of expression than restricting the expression that was happening in Greenwood.
The conservative outcry was effective. Within weeks of the Republican protests, Mayor Bynum scheduled the mural removal for August 3rd. That morning, road crews were greeted by a sea of cardboard boxes installed on the street by protesters. They represented the tombstones of Black people who had died at the hands of state-sanctioned violence, from 1921 massacre victims to Terence Crutcher, an unarmed man who was killed by a Tulsa police officer in 2016. Jess Eddy, a co-founder of Whites Against Racism, a group that tries to engage white allies in the fight for racial justice, slept beside the mural overnight as a volunteer watchman. “Whenever Black bodies come into an encounter with police, there’s an increased chance of violence,” he told me. “Therefore, as a white man, I have a responsibility to be in between that.” On that day, the mural stayed.
The matter was not settled, though. After efforts to convert the street to private ownership failed, it ultimately fell on city officials to decide whether to keep the mural. The most straightforward solution would have been to adopt it as a form of government speech, explicitly endorsing its message. Here, there was precedent. In Washington, D.C., a conservative legal-advocacy group had argued that the city violated its First Amendment rights when the organization was not allowed to paint a competing mural (“Because No One Is Above the Law!”) on city streets. City attorneys argued that the Black Lives Matter mural was a government message, not a public forum. When activists added “= Defund the Police” to the mural in a similar font, the city argued that this had also been accepted as government speech, comparing it to a donated art installation. (The case is pending in U.S. District Court.)
Most councillors in Tulsa rejected that idea. “It was illegally put on the road by an activist,” Connie Dodson said at a public-works committee meeting in August. “If we adopt that as government speech, we’re adopting that criminal offense.” Two councillors who supported the mural, Vanessa Hall-Harper and Kara Joy McKee, proposed removing it next spring, when a repaving of Greenwood Avenue was already planned. Other councillors insisted that the removal happen immediately. “Time is of essence for me and for many of my constituents,” Phil Lakin, a council member who represents a district on the southernmost edge of Tulsa, more than ten miles from the mural, said. The council recommended that the repaving of a single block of Greenwood Avenue be moved up by five months, to October. However, the responsibility for directing crews to start removing the mural ultimately fell to Mayor Bynum. “You cannot tell one group we’re not allowing public messages to be displayed on city streets,” Bynum told me in an interview, “but I’m going to look the other way while this other one was on this street and just allow it to be there.”
When Tori Tyson arrived at her hair salon before dawn on October 5th, wearing a Black Lives Matter T-shirt imprinted with the American flag, she expected to see the mural one last time. But the work crews had begun grinding up the pavement at 4:15 A.M. By the time she unlocked the door to her salon, the entire street had already been pulverized, the words Black Lives Matter ground into yellow-specked gravel and poured into a dump truck. Tyson stood outside her front window and watched as Tulsa became the first major city in the U.S. to remove a Black Lives Matter mural. “I was not surprised in Tulsa but hurt, because the world is watching us,” she told me later. “It’s embarrassing.”
A ragged stripe of blue paint runs through the center of a Black Lives Matter mural in the Greenwood District of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photograph by Ian Maule / Tulsa World / AP
Despite the mayor’s insistence on objectivity, Tulsa’s handling of murals has hardly been impartial. In August, as the city council deliberated on whether to remove the Greenwood Avenue mural, someone painted a thin blue line clean across its bright yellow letters. Police made no effort to investigate the vandalism. Later, after someone spray-painted “BLM” in yellow paint on the spot where the mural had existed, police officers questioned area business owners and the city parked a security van on the street for round-the-clock surveillance. (A Tulsa Police Department spokeswoman denied that officers investigated the incident, but multiple entrepreneurs on the street said, and video footage from a local news station indicates, that they did.) Bynum told me that the police department regularly investigates attacks on “lawful murals,” and noted that the one on Greenwood was illegal. However, after a legal Black Lives Matter mural painted on a local building was repeatedly vandalized this fall, and the owner of the property filed a police report, the department failed to assign an officer to the case for more than a month.
Vandalism has been a problem for Black Lives Matter murals not only in Tulsa but across the nation. In Ithaca, New York, a mural was doused in black paint, on October 4th. In Pittsburgh, in late September, two men shot paintballs at a downtown Black Lives Matter mural, while one of them wore a Trump hat and a sweatshirt with a Confederate-flag design. At the University of North Carolina, Asheville, e-mails threatened violence if the college’s mural was not removed, prompting a campus lockdown. A street mural painted in East Nashville on October 17th was marred by burnout tire tracks the next day.
In some of these communities, police tried to identify and arrest the murals’ vandals; in Tulsa, officers portrayed Black Lives Matter, both the message and the movement, as a threat. On the Saturday when protesters painted the mural in front of City Hall, a separate march in support of law enforcement was held nearby. Several officers participated, including Wendell Franklin, the Tulsa chief of police, and Chris Witt, a lieutenant on the force. At the start of that rally, Witt warned pro-police demonstrators that Black Lives Matter protesters might try to approach them in the street. “I need you not to panic—don’t run,” he said. “These officers are going to come up to form a line in front of you to protect you.”
When the pro-police demonstrators marched near the Black Lives Matter protest, though, the protesters applauded them and their right to peaceably assemble. Frank, the editor of the Black Wall Street Times, who helped organize the protest, encouraged the applause. Later, when some B.L.M. protesters began an anti-police chant, after the mural was painted, Frank cut them off with his megaphone. He said that, despite the day’s optics, he wanted to avoid a dichotomy between pro-police and anti-police protesters. “I don’t want people to think that the police are the ones that are the targets,” he told me. “The target is ending systemic racism and eradicating white-supremacist ideas from the American culture.”
Since the painting of the Black Lives Matter mural in front of City Hall, the city’s practice of selective enforcement has intensified. During the City Hall protest, Jess Eddy, the Whites Against Racism founder, was immediately arrested for breach of the peace, after officers said that he refused to leave the street. When police spotted a woman several blocks away with yellow paint on her clothes, they chased her down and arrested her. She now faces felony charges for malicious injury to property, a crime punishable by up to thirty days in jail. The Tulsa Police Department put a photo on Facebook of four masked people painting the street, asking followers to contact Crime Stoppers with information. The Tulsa County district attorney has declined to pursue state charges, saying that his office’s resources are better used targeting violent crime. Tulsa police, though, continued to search for whoever recently spray-painted “BLM” in other parts of downtown Tulsa. “They’re hiding their racism behind the law,” Frank said.


newyorker--2020-11-19--Man Refuses to Leave Job He Hates

Man Refuses to Leave Job He Hates

WASHINGTON ( The Borowitz Report ) —A Florida man who hates the job he has held for nearly four years is nevertheless refusing to leave it , puzzling psychologists .
While many people are reluctant to leave jobs that they enjoy , the man has shown every sign of despising his job from the day he took it .
Rather than applying himself to the tasks before him , he has gone to great lengths to avoid them , watching television most of the day and frequently leaving the office to play golf .
Sometimes , he has even hidden @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hours , according to reports .
And yet , despite his obvious distaste for his job , he has steadfastly refused to accept the fact that he was fired from it two weeks ago .
Dr. Davis Logsdon , chairman of the psychology department of the University of Minnesota , proposed a possible explanation for the man ’ s bizarre actions .
“ This is the behavior of someone who has failed at many jobs , ” he said .
“ On some level , he is terrified that he is not employable @ @ @ @

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—A Florida man who hates the job he has held for nearly four years is nevertheless refusing to leave it, puzzling psychologists.
While many people are reluctant to leave jobs that they enjoy, the man has shown every sign of despising his job from the day he took it.
Rather than applying himself to the tasks before him, he has gone to great lengths to avoid them, watching television most of the day and frequently leaving the office to play golf.
Sometimes, he has even hidden in the basement of his workplace for hours, according to reports.
And yet, despite his obvious distaste for his job, he has steadfastly refused to accept the fact that he was fired from it two weeks ago.
Dr. Davis Logsdon, chairman of the psychology department of the University of Minnesota, proposed a possible explanation for the man’s bizarre actions.
“This is the behavior of someone who has failed at many jobs,” he said. “On some level, he is terrified that he is not employable anywhere else.”