What a fabulous conversation this is, between two giants we’ve lost. You see here, in this quiet, quietly intense, intensely curious conversation — in which (a true rarity) the act of listening is every bit as concentrated as the wonderful talk — why these two have long been touchstones for so many people who came of intellectual age in ‘70s or ‘80s. This is just delicious. Drop in anywhere and you find yummy.
I’d never seen this before, didn’t know it existed, and am so grateful to @muhus, who curates one of my favorite Tumblrs, for pointing it out.
Donald Trump, photo by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons
Masha Gessen shows again why she’s invaluable right now.
Lying is the message. It’s not just that both Putin and Trump lie, it is that they lie in the same way and for the same purpose: blatantly, to assert power over truth itself. Take, for example, Putin’s statements on Ukraine. In March 2014 he claimed that there were no Russian troops in newly annexed Crimea; a month later he affirmed that Russians troops had been on the ground. Throughout 2014 and 2015, he repeatedly denied that Russian troops were fighting in eastern Ukraine; in 2016 he easily acknowledged that they were there. In each case, Putin insisted on lying in the face of clear and convincing evidence to the contrary, and in each case his subsequent shift to truthful statements were not admissions given under duress: they were proud, even boastful affirmatives made at his convenience. Together, they communicated a single message: Putin’s power lies in being able to say what he wants, when he wants, regardless of the facts. He is president of his country and king of reality
Trump has exhibited similar behavior, apparently for the same reason: when he claims that he didn’t make statements that he is on record as making, or when he claims that millions of people voting illegally cost him the popular vote, he is not making easily disprovable factual claims: he is claiming control over reality itself. Those puzzled by Trump’s election-fraud tweets, because they seem like sore-loser behavior on the part of the winner, or by his dismissing out of hand the CIA’s findings about Russian interference—against the views of many leading Republicans—are missing the point: Trump was demonstrating his ability to say whatever he wanted about the election, precisely because he had won it
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After the election, the media’s ability to do its job has been undermined even further. The standard model of reporting requires journalists to give the president-elect say in any news story about him. Thus we now have a series of stories in which reported facts are juxtaposed with a quoted Tweet that dismisses or contradicts the facts themselves. Even a factual narrative can no longer be aired without an immediate challenge contained within the news story itself—and without demonstrating that Trump has once again asserted his power to say what he wants, facts be damned, when he wants, convention be damned, and how he wants, logic and the English language be damned.
It is time to raise the stakes from fact to truth. With a president who lies in order to demonstrate power, fact-checking is indeed useless if it’s the entire story. The media have to find a way to tell the bigger story—the story about the lies rather than the story of the lies; and the story about power that the lies obscure. For mainstream media with long institutional histories, this is even harder than it sounds. The objective style in American journalism often means that nothing can be asserted unless someone in a position of authority utters it. Take Ukraine again: American newspapers have been reluctant to call a war a war because the US administration was not calling it a war. Words like “military adventurism” and “insurgency” had to stand in for the truth. But unless we are willing to live in a world that is not only post-fact but also post-truth, journalists will have to stand up to the soon-to-be president by exposing not only his lies but also other people’s truths.
Get the rest at The Putin Paradigm, @NYRB, by Masha Gessen.
How was Trump able to harness so much anger, even though he had proposed no solutions and offered no way to build anything new? Martha Nussbaum offers that he could do this because anger, and the desire to damage the object of your anger, gives a false feeling of strength and agency. The anger feels like strength; the destruction like a plan. But in the end it can get you nothing, or worse.
From Emma Green‘s Q&A with Martha Nussbaum at The Atlantic, where they’re just killing it lately:
Green: When you look at this year’s campaign—something like a Trump rally, for example—do you see a kind of collective anger?
Nussbaum: Oh, absolutely. Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness. People—and I think this is particularly true of Americans—don’t like to be passive. They like to seize control. I think what Trump has found, and very cleverly so, is that there’s a lot of helplessness out there in the middle of America: People who feel they’re not doing as well as they want; people who aren’t doing as well as their parents did. Jobs are going to China; jobs are going to other countries. He makes them feel that if they turn their helplessness into rage, they will accomplish something.
Christian Guardino, sighted and singing. Photo by Brent Stirton, National Geographic, all rights reserved.
I spent much of last winter working on a story about what it might take to end global blindness. I’m tickled to see the result now on and inside the cover of September’s National Geographic. The four-section story is about determination in the face of tough odds. Here’s a snip from the first section, about gene therapy fashioned by a group led by Penn’s Jean Bennett, and one from the last section, about the extraordinary Namibian cataract surgeon Helena Ndume, who is possibly the most amazing person I’ve ever met.
Christian, the doctor told Elizabeth, had a retinal disease called Leber congenital amaurosis (LCA). His vision, already bad, would never significantly improve. Nothing could be done. The boy would see little of the world and would always walk, once he learned how, with a cane.
Christian did need a cane, and his mother’s guiding hand, when in 2012, at age 12, he first visited a clinic run by the University of Pennsylvania’s Scheie Eye Institute. Yet this January he walked through the institute’s main building cane free and seemingly fearless. Joking and chatting, the teen led a klatch of Ph.D.’s, M.D.’s, lab techs, and me through the airy lobby. He marveled at the towering atrium, the shiny balconies where people sat having coffee.
“Whoa!” he said as we neared the building’s exit—for before us an enormous revolving door turned its huge blades. His mother was some distance behind; he was on his own. Christian neither stopped nor paused. He walked calmly through the opening of the spinning wedge of steel and glass and held his pace as one glass wall closed behind him and another smoothly swung out of his way. He stepped into the sunlight.
Christian Guardino could see. Everything that had posed an obstacle before—light and dark, steel and glass, the mobile and the immovable—now brought him pleasure. The world had opened before him.
…
Helena Ndume dancing with one of the 30,000 patients she has given sight to. Photo Brent Stirton, National Geographic, all rights reserved.
Cataracts, a disease of poverty, cause half of all blindness on Earth. In the developed world, people with cataracts routinely get treated as soon as they have trouble seeing the TV. In the developing world, people with cataracts routinely go blind. The treatment everywhere is simple: Get clinician and patient in the same room, prep the latter, spend 15 to 20 minutes replacing the cloudy natural lens with a clear artificial lens, do a post-op checkup. In developing countries, treatment usually costs $15 to $100. Yet it reaches few who need it.
Working with Namibia and other African governments and the nonprofit SEE International, Ndume is trying to fix this by running “cataract camps.” At these gatherings in underserved areas, Ndume and other surgeons operate on up to 500 people a week. The United Nations last year recognized Ndume’s “service to humanity” with its inaugural Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela Prize.
It’s a fitting honor for someone who 41 years ago, as a girl of 15, left a different kind of darkness when she fled the apartheid that the South African government had imposed on Namibia. With three friends she made her way to a camp in Angola run by the Namibian resistance movement SWAPO; survived a machine gun attack soon after she arrived; braved hippo-infested rivers and hostile helicopter patrols to find safety in Zambia; told SWAPO she’d like to go to fashion school but was sent instead to medical school in Leipzig, Germany; and there married a countryman who soon after was killed in Angola. She bore their baby alone, finished her ophthalmology training, rejoiced when Namibia won its independence in 1990, and returned for good in 1996 with her child, her education, and a determination to help those who could not see.
The rest is here:Why There’s New Hope for Ending Blindness
Many thanks to editors Jamie Shreeve and Patty Edmonds and to the enormously talented photographer Brent Stirton, whose gorgeous photos grace the story, and whose partnership on this story was a huge blessing. Most of all, all my heart to the many people who shared their lives and work with me for this story — the researchers, patients, family members, and others, many who do not appear in this brief treatment, who helped me understand it. It’s hard to overstate my admiration for their generosity, courage, determination, humility, and good humor. Meeting such people, and hearing their stories and thoughts in person, is by far the most wonderful part of this splendid but difficult job.
If you like the story, consider subscribing to the Geographic. It’s wonderfully affordable, gorgeous, and your money will support the sort of extended reporting that a story like this requires.
I’m honored to have written this story of a rare, severely debilitating disorder; the researchers trying to crack it; and the uncommon love between a father and his 24-year-old daughter.
You should read it here. For those who like teasers:
The first sign, at least in retrospect, was a reticence, he recalls in the memoir, that Gina hadn’t been displaying as she blossomed through her second and into her third year: “a little less eye contact … a little less chatter, a little more pointing.” In the stroller, rolling around Rome, she sometimes sat quietly upright, not relaxed, her eyes fixed forward.
For a time, these changes seemed explainable by their move to Italy. Her older sister was in school full-time, while Gina went to preschool just two or three days a week. It didn’t seem odd that Gina had few friends over and tended to play quietly alongside them.“She just needs time is the truce I offer the situation,” writes Bernardo about that year, “as if it were mine to offer. Piano, piano, the Italians say: little by little.”
Yet by October 1995, when Gina was 3, both her parents were shocked but not exactly surprised when a teacher said she thought Gina might have autism.
Six months later, after the family moved back to the United States, a specialist in New York agreed — “she was emphatic about it,” says Bernardo — and suggested they see Yale’s Fred Volkmar, a leading expert, then and now, in obscure developmental disorders, including CDD. Gina, now 4, was far behind where she’d been a year before. Volkmar told them she had CDD.
Today, Bernardo recognizes that Gina is lucky, as these things go, and significantly more capable than many people with CDD. Yet getting the diagnosis then “was devastating,” he says, and part of him initially refused to accept it. Much would fall away in the months and years to come, including his marriage to Gina’s mother. At first, though, there was grief. “There were a lot of tears there. There still are sometimes,” he says. “You have this idea of what’s possible in your child’s life. It’s a really hard thing to let go of.”
The most terrifying childhood condition you’ve never heard of, at Spectrum.
Accountability journalism ain’t quite dead yet. Azeen Ghorayshi with another great scoop on horrid behavior.
One of the employees was an administrator whom Katze had hired, at an unusually high salary, on the implicit condition that she submit to his sexual demands. He personally rewarded this woman, known as Mary Roe in some court documents, with “thousands or even tens of thousands” of dollars a year in cash and gifts, the investigation found.
The university found that Katze also sexually harassed another administrative employee, known as Jane Doe in court documents. According to the investigations, Katze asked her to clean his apartment, purchase marijuana and Percocet for him, email escorts and place personal ads for him, and “schedule his manicures, pedicures, haircuts, and hair lightening appointments.” Meanwhile, he joked about having sex with her, made sexual comments about her appearance, sent her sexually suggestive emails, and, on two occasions, tried while drunk to kiss or touch her.
The university had received at least seven previous complaints about Katze’s behavior, including claims that he was frequently intoxicated in the lab, watched porn on his university computer, belittled his employees, and retaliated against lab members who challenged him. A UW spokesperson said the school dealt with allegations against Katze, over the years, with “letters to him, admonishments, etcetera.” But his employment was never suspended or terminated.
A MoJo reporter gets a job as a prison guard at a private prison. The orientation was a bit disorienting.
The human resources director comes in and scolds Reynolds for napping. He perks up when she tells us that if we recruit a friend to work here, we’ll get 500 bucks. She gives us an assortment of other tips: Don’t eat the food given to inmates; don’t have sex with them or you could be fined $10,000 or get 10 years at hard labor; try not to get sick because we don’t get paid sick time. If we have friends or relatives incarcerated here, we need to report it. She hands out fridge magnets with the number of a hotline to use if we feel suicidal or start fighting with our families. We get three counseling sessions for free.
This is one crazy story. Epic reporting. My Four Months as a Private Prison Guard, by Shane Bauer, at MoJo.
06/13/2016 WOODS HOLE, MA Dr. Andre Fenton (cq) poses for a photo at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe)
Carl Zimmer on memory researcher Andre Fenton, comeback researcher of the year.
In an age when we get a lot of our medical news in click-baity headlines and hasty tweets, it’s easy to believe that scientific research is constantly barreling forward like a jet. The saga of PKMzeta shows just how contorted the true path of science can be. Fenton and Sacktor have worked together with what some of their colleagues consider a near-obsession for 14 years on PKMzeta. And after all that work, and years of setbacks, they feel like only now are they just able to start figuring out what this molecule does to let us form memories.
“Now we know it’s important,” Fenton said in a recent interview. “But what is it actually doing? I can tell you it’s crucial biochemically, but you shouldn’t feel satisfied that you understand memory any better. Because you don’t. We still don’t know what it means for memory.”
Get the rest at Stat: Memory researchers were rebuffed by science, and came roaring back, by Carl Zimmer.
Salmon makes a strong and highly unsettling argument:
The next step, after the Hogan verdict, was for Thiel to go public. After the enormous damages were announced and the long appeals process creaked into action, it started to become obvious that Gawker would need to raise more capital in order to continue to be able to fight the case. (In the worst case scenario, it would need to put up a $50 million bond.) Gawker had already sold some new stock in January; there was talk of doing the same thing again. With cash, Gawker could fight the Hogan verdict, get it reduced or even thrown out entirely, and carry on as a going concern.
But then the Thiel bombshell dropped. The Hogan case, it turned out, wasn’t a war in which Gawker could emerge victorious; instead, it was merely a battle in a much larger fight against an opponent with effectively unlimited resources.
Gawker could continue to fight the Hogan case; it could even win that case outright, on appeal. But even if Hogan went away, Thiel would not. Thiel’s lawsuits would not end, and Thiel’s pockets are deeper than Denton’s. Gawker’s future is indeed grim: it can’t afford to fight an indefinite number of lawsuits, since fighting even frivolous suits is an expensive game.
The result is that investing in Gawker right now is a very unattractive proposition, since any investor knows that they will be fighting a years-long battle with a single-minded billionaire who doesn’t care about how much money he spends on the fight. And if Gawker can’t raise any new money to continue to fight the Hogan case, then its corporate end might be closer than anybody thinks. The company’s money-spinning sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker will live on, somehow: they have value to potential purchasers, and are assets which can be sold in satisfaction of a financial judgment. But Gawker Media, the unique and fearless media organization led by Nick Denton, is truly staring down an existential threat, with no obvious way out.
It gets worse. If Thiel’s strategy works against Gawker, it could be used by any billionaire against any media organization. Sheldon Adelson, Donald Trump, the list goes on and on. Up until now, they’ve mostly been content suing news organizations as plaintiffs, over stories which name them. But Thiel has shown them how to go thermonuclear: bankroll other lawsuits, as many as it takes, and bankrupt the news organization that way. Very few companies have the legal wherewithal to withstand such a barrage.
Thiel, by funding Hulk Hogan, has managed to change the world.
Zika virus has been earning all the headlines, because it is already affecting Americans—including 300 pregnant women, according to a new CDC estimate—and is expected to move into U.S. mosquitoes as the summer bug season starts.
But outside the United States, another mosquito-borne disease is attracting the world’s attention, and it may predict more than Zika does about how epidemics will move around the world in the future. The disease is yellow fever, the epicenter of the outbreak is Angola, and the force that could push it around the globe is Chinese investment in the developing world.
