What Reagan Can Teach Trump / Stunning Jazz Discovery

16.06.2017

HOW BIG DATA IS

CORRUPTING DEMOCRACY

BRAINWASHED

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 JUNE 16, 2017 VOL.168 NO.22

+
PIANO MAN: Jazzman
Thelonious Monk
performs in 1960.
A year earlier, he
recorded the
soundtrack to the
film Les Liaisons
Dangereuses.

20 Veterans
Freshman
Disorientation

24 Nigeria
Fantastic Damage

NEW WORLD

46 Mars
My Favorite
Martian Drone

48 Entrepreneurs
Let 1,000 Unicorns
Bloom

50 Waste
Toxic Burn Notice

FEATURES DEPARTMENTS 53 Smartphones

Limiting
Scream Time
BIG SHOTS

DOWNTIME
26 Freedom From Choice 4 London
Night of Terror
Political operatives used fake news, Big Data and 54 The Place to Be
6 Kabul,
Facebook to suppress the vote and rile up racists in Afghanistan Japan Alps
2016. It’s going to be even uglier next time ’round. Diplomatic Danger Arts Festival
by Nina Burleigh 8 Cox’s Bazar,
Bangladesh 56 Interview
One Man’s Architect
38 At Long Last Monk Ceiling David Rockwell
Why did it take 58 years to release the jazz legend’s 10 Apartado, 60 Books
only soundtrack? by Zach Schonfeld Colombia Christine Sciacca;
Killing the Next Arundhati Roy
Pablo
62 Screen
My Cousin Rachel
PAG E O N E 64 Parting Shot
Harry Gruyaert
JOHN BUL MER /GET T Y

12 Politics
COVER CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN HOLCROFT The Great
Miscommunicator
Newsweek (ISSN2052-1081), is published weekly except one week in January, July, August and
October. Newsweek (EMEA) is published by Newsweek Ltd (part of the IBT Media Group Ltd), 25 Canada
Square, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ, UK. Printed by Quad/Graphics Europe Sp z o.o., Wyszkow, Poland 16 Democrats FOR MORE HEADLINES,
For Article Reprints, Permissions and Licensing www.IBTreprints.com/Newsweek The Un-Hillarys GO TO NEWSWEEK.COM

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 BIG
SHOTS

ENGLAND

Night
of Terror
London—Police lead
people to safety in
central London on the
night of June 4, after
three men in a van
plowed into pedestri­
ans on London Bridge.
At least one of the men
then got out of the
vehicle and attacked
patrons with a knife
in nearby Borough
Market, a popular spot
for bars and cafés. All
three men, who were
wearing fake suicide
belts, were shot dead
by police during Satur­
day’s assault, the third
such attack in Britain
in three months. At
least 11 people have
been detained in a
series of raids follow­
ing the incident.

CARL COURT
CARL COURT/G ET T Y
 BIG
SHOTS

AFGHANISTAN

Diplomatic
Danger
Kabul, Afghanistan—
First responders work
near the site of a large
truck bomb that killed
more than 80 people,
wounded more than
460 and damaged
several buildings on
May 31, in the affluent
diplomatic quarter in
central Kabul, home
to embassies and the
presidential palace.
Though the Taliban
has denied responsi­
bility, the Afghan gov­
ernment has blamed
the group’s Haqqani
wing for the attack.
The attack highlights
the lack of security in
Afghanistan, and Pres­
ident Donald Trump
is deciding whether
to deploy an addition­
al 5,000 American
troops there.

ANDREW QUILTY
ANDREW QUILT Y/ VU
 BIG
SHOTS

BANGLADESH

One Man’s
Ceiling
Cox’s Bazar,
Bangladesh—After
killing hundreds
in Sri Lanka and
India, Cyclone Mora
pummeled southeast
Bangladesh on May
30. Rohingya refugee
camps near the border
of Myanmar bore the
brunt of the damage,
as high waves and
heavy winds flattened
huts and left many
scrambling for safety.
At least seven people
died in the storm,
and hundreds remain
missing. But when
the winds abated and
the rain subsided on
June 1, the Rohingya
and others did what
they always do after
a deadly storm: They
started to rebuild their
lives, one makeshift
MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN/REUTE RS

home at a time.

MOHAMMAD PONIR HOSSAIN

 BIG
SHOTS

COLOMBIA

Killing the
Next Pablo
Apartado, Colombia—
Jose Mendoza tosses
pamphlets out of a
helicopter on May 31.
Written on them was
an offer of up to
$5 million for infor­
mation leading to the
capture of one of
Colombia’s most
wanted men. Men­
doza heads the coun­
try’s anti­narco police
and is on the hunt for
Dairo Antonio Usuga
David, leader of the
Gulf Cartel. In recent
years, Colombia has
tried but failed to nab
the elusive drug king­
pin. Now, 1,200 mem­
bers of the country’s
security forces are
after him, more than
double the number
devoted to the hunt
for Pablo Escobar,
another Colombian
drug lord.
FERNANDO VE RGARA /AP

FERNANDO VERGARA
 P A G E
VETERANS POLITICS
THE GREAT MISCOMMUNICATOR
Can Trump pull a Reagan
and beat the rap?
IT ALL sounds so familiar.
A celebrity turned Republican presidential
candidate wins over the white working class
with promises to restore American greatness,
only to become ensnared in a scandal involv-
ing dubious dealings with a hostile regime. As
the press digs in, the White House appears flus-
tered, and the Justice Department appoints an
independent counsel to investigate the presi-
dent, as well as trusted members of his National
Security Council and former campaign staff.
Are you thinking Donald Trump? Well, yes.
But also Ronald Reagan. Three decades ago, the
Gipper was embroiled in a major investigation,
now known as the Iran-Contra affair. The thrust
of the scandal: a bizarre scheme that involved
the U.S. selling weapons to Tehran—a state spon-
sor of terrorism, according to Washington—and
using the proceeds to covertly (and illegally)
fund Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
Since allegations emerged that the Trump
campaign colluded with Russian intelligence
during the 2016 presidential election, many
have likened the affair to Watergate, the most
NEWSWEEK
O N E
NIGERIA DIGITAL SYRIA DEMOCRATS
notorious political scandal in modern Amer-
ican history. And the parallels are clear. Both
involve attempts to steal information from the
Democratic National Committee, followed
by purported cover-ups and efforts to stymie
the investigation. Yet many raise the specter of
Watergate today not only to measure the sordid
nature of Trump’s alleged misdeeds, but also
as a prediction: Nixon resigned under threat of
impeachment, and Trump, the analogy seems to
imply, may also be removed from office.
Yet even if investigators—or reporters—uncover
evidence of wrongdoing, the president’s down-
fall is far from inevitable, and Iran-Contra
should serve as a cautionary tale for those hop-
ing Trump is pushed from office. The crimi-
nal probe took more than six years, outlasting
a congressional investigation and a separate
review by a presidential commission. When it
was over, investigators had charged 14 U.S. offi-
cials with crimes (leading to 11 convictions or
guilty pleas) and uncovered reams of evidence BY
showing Reagan had illegally authorized deals MALCOLM BYRNE
to trade arms for hostages and ordered his staff @Twitter
12 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 +
WHAT, ME WORRY?:
Even though the Iran-
Contra investigation
uncovered major
misconduct by senior
Reagan White House
RO N EDMO NDS/AP

officials and a cover-

up, there were few
consequences for the
bad actors.

NEWSWEEK 13 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
to keep the Contras together, “body and soul,” relevant personal notes for years.
despite a congressional ban against doing so. As investigators move forward with the
The probe never proved that the president knew Trump-Russia scandal, what’s perhaps most crit-
that funds had been diverted from the Iranian ical is how they—and the press—define it. The
weapons sales to the rebels. But it did find a raft classic Watergate formulation, courtesy of Sen-
of misconduct by senior administration offi- ator Howard Baker, was “What did the president
cials, including a major cover-up. know, and when did he know it?” In Iran-Contra,
And yet most of those top aides escaped with- it was whether Reagan had been aware of, or
out formal sanction, often due to restrictions on approved, the diversion of Iranian arms proceeds
classified information or because the statute of to the Contras. The attorney general, Edwin
limitations had run out by the time prosecutors Meese, set these parameters at the onset of the
could uncover the evidence. Several mid-level scandal. Before Meese did so publicly, however,
operatives who were convicted in court had he had already surveyed everyone in the admin-
their cases reversed on technicalities. Reagan istration who might have been able—or willing—
and his vice president, George H.W. Bush, who to give up the Gipper. (Meese later testified that,
knew much more about the affair than he ini- in the days before the scandal broke, he was act-
tially admitted, suffered temporary drops in the ing as the president’s “legal adviser,” not in his
polls. But Bush was elected president just two official capacity as the country’s top law enforce-
years after the scandal erupted, and Reagan ment officer.) Once he knew the president was
went on to become a conservative luminary, safe on that count, his formulation became a
revered for helping bring down what he called convenient way of focusing the spotlight away
the Evil Empire, the Soviet Union. from other legally and politically sensitive areas.
ORANGE AURA:
The first lesson we can draw from the Iran- Journalists and investigators took the bait, and Trump, like Reagan,
Contra affair is that the Trump White House Reagan ultimately escaped. seems to have a
could be in a stronger position than it may seem. To avoid a similar result in the current situa- Teflon-shield to
deflect criticism,
Presidents (of both parties) can control the flow tion, investigators should remember this will be but Reagan had
of information, even in the face of formal inves- a long fight—especially if public pressure mounts one big advantage
over the current
tigations. Sometimes it works better than others. and the GOP-controlled Congress is forced to president when
In Trump’s case, it’s hard to tell what will happen create a select committee. In that case, Mueller facing a scandal:
He was well-liked
in this regard. Reagan’s staff was highly on a personal level.
loyal; no one at a senior level broke ranks +
the way White House counsel John Dean
did during Watergate. The Trump White
House is already a sieve of leaks. Fidelity,
outside the president’s innermost circle,
seems to be fleeting, and fired FBI Direc-
tor James Comey was scheduled to testify
on Capitol Hill on June 8. What will happen
now that subpoenas have started to fly?
A second lesson is that special counsel
Robert Mueller will need more than just sub-
poenas. Congressional investigators tended
to eschew bare-knuckle tactics during
Iran-Contra, and they regretted it. Even
with subpoena power, and despite Reagan’s
promises of full cooperation, Mueller’s
equivalent back then, independent coun-
sel Lawrence Walsh, was forced to deal
with frustrating delays by the White House
and several federal agencies, notably the
CIA. Even the Justice Department repeat-
edly threw obstacles in Walsh’s way, and
most egregiously, Cabinet-level officials
like Secretary of Defense Caspar Wein-
berger (who lied under oath), White House
Chief of Staff Donald Regan and even
Vice President Bush withheld crucially

NEWSWEEK 14 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 can expect several complications. Congressional
probes are very different from criminal inqui-
ries. Any significant proceeding will involve pub-
lic witnesses, some of whom might be granted
immunity. That move cost Walsh his most
prominent convictions after an appeals court
ruled that the trials of Oliver North and former
National Security Adviser John Poindexter were
tainted because Congress had immunized them
before taking their testimony. If lawmakers seem
inclined to do the same for Michael Flynn or for-
mer (or current) members of the Trump team,
Mueller will need to identify his witnesses and
take depositions as quickly as possible—before
they testify in public.
The longer the Trump inquiry drags on, the
more likely attention fatigue will set in, and the
public will tune out. An irony of all the recent
headlines is that they make an extraordinary
situation feel normal. They can also give a savvy
administration a ready sound bite. Reagan, Bush
and their handlers routinely brushed off allega-
tions as “old news” and refused to address their
OLIVIER DOULIERY/ABACA /SIPA /AP
PAGE ONE/POLI T I C S
Trump’s possible motives for colluding with
Russia also leave him at a disadvantage. Reagan
was universally faulted for his abysmal judg-
ment and execution in the Iran-Contra affair.
But few doubted that his aims were patriotic,
anti-Communist and humanitarian. The gen-
eral assumption by the president’s critics in
today’s saga: Whatever the Trump team was up
to, it was largely about politics—either winning
the race or setting the stage for a softening of
American policy.
What Trump does have on his side is Congress.
Democrats gained control of both houses just as
Iran-Contra hit the headlines. That allowed the

substance. Trump is employing

a similar strategy, labeling the
stories as “fake” and the press as
“the enemy of the people.”
Mueller should expect a bru-
EVEN IF INVESTIGATORS—
tal fight, and his sparkling repu- OR REPORTERS—UNCOVER
tation may not help him. Walsh EVIDENCE OF WRONGDOING,
was a lifelong Republican who
had served as deputy attorney
THE PRESIDENT’S DOWNFALL
general under Eisenhower. IS FAR FROM INEVITABLE.
When he was appointed inde-
pendent counsel in late 1986,
his encomiums sounded just
like Mueller’s. But as Walsh pushed on, and the opposition to begin a televised, public inquiry,
investigation threatened to pull in the vice pres- which embarrassed the White House. Today,
ident, the president’s backers began a vitriolic Trump’s party is in charge on Capitol Hill. Much
assault against him. Walsh wasn’t intimidated, will depend on whether Republicans can hold
but public pressure did affect the congressional both houses next year—and if Trump can keep
investigation. “Ollie’s Army” of enthusiastic his base together. Doing both would help prevent
supporters made committee members fear pos- public hearings or impeachment.
sible political backlash at home and helped per- Either way, the best the American people
suade them to blunt their approach. can hope for is that we find out the truth. After
Will Trump be able to do the same? A White Iran-Contra, both the congressional investi-
House aide recently marveled that the president gating committees and Walsh’s team wrote up
has a “coat of protection that almost seems super- their findings, and those reports remain among
natural.” But Reagan—the Teflon president—had the most important accounts of the affair. Sadly,
something even stronger: He was well-liked. His they also underscored perhaps the main legacy
powerful personal appeal to a majority of vot- of Iran-Contra: how easy it is for our leaders to
ers gave pause to many among the Democratic abuse power—and get away with it.
leadership at a time when few seemed to want
another Watergate. Trump, however, is widely MALCOLM BYRNE is director of research at the
nongovernmental National Security Archive at
loathed by his opponents—and in this hyper-
George Washington University and the author of
partisan political climate, many of them seem Iran-Contra: Reagan’s Scandal and the Unchecked
animated by the prospect of his downfall. Abuse of Presidential Power.

NEWSWEEK 15 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
P A G E O N E / D E M O C RATS
THE UN-HILLARYS
In the shadow of Donald Trump,
thousands of millennials are gunning
to save the Democratic Party
STANDING IN her parents’ pastel-hued living
room, the low hum of a neighbor’s hedge trimmer
buzzing behind her, Hannah Risheq launched
her campaign for the Virginia Legislature with a
slightly rambling speech that was peppered with
“like,” “um” and other youthful tics.
Despite her lack of polish, there was some-
thing compelling about the baby-faced 25-year-
old Democratic candidate. A big part of it is
her personal story: Her Palestinian immigrant
father and Jewish mother were pushed out of
Greensboro, North Carolina, when customers
stopped patronizing their restaurant after the
September 11 attacks. The family of five headed
north and started over in the salad bowl of Vir-
ginia’s Fairfax County.
But there’s another aspect of Risheq’s allure:
her intensity. She captivated the roughly two
dozen people who attended her launch party in
April—from gray-haired neighbors to 20-some-
thing friends and volunteers. “I’m standing up,”
Risheq promised, “and I’m going to take down
[Republican incumbent] Jim LeMunyon.”
The odds are against her. She’s not even the
favorite in her Democratic primary—that would
be 38-year-old community activist Karrie Del-
aney. But even if Risheq loses—in the June 13
primary or come November—Democrats win,
because with their ranks decimated after nearly
a decade of state and local losses, she and thou-
sands of other young first-time politicians like
NEWSWEEK
her represent the party’s best hope of resurrect-
ing itself in the age of Donald Trump. Over the
past decade, only Barack Obama’s name on the
ballot has attracted the broad mix of supporters
Democrats need to win elections. When Obama
wasn’t running (in 2010, 2014 and 2016), the
party got crushed. Since 2008, Democrats have
lost both houses of Congress and nearly 1,000
state legislative seats. The GOP now controls 67
of 98 partisan legislative chambers around the
country. With their 2016 election losses, Demo-
crats were shut out of power at the federal level
and left with few rising local stars.
The dearth of emerging leaders helps explain
the remarkable disconnect last year between
the party establishment, which backed Hillary
Clinton’s presidential campaign, and a younger,
more diverse progressive base, which embraced
Vermont independent Bernie Sanders. The
result was a surprisingly fierce primary that
splintered the party and aroused the deep sus-
picions of the Democratic National Committee
and other party leaders in Washington. Even as
Democrats rally to oppose Trump, the wounds
from the 2016 contest haven’t healed. And none
of the party elders—from its septuagenarian
leaders in Congress to its dwindling number
of governors—seem to have a plausible plan to
HAN NAH RISHEQ
regain power. BY
Since Trump’s election, what Democrats do EMILY CADEI
have, however, is a young bloc of angry voters. @emilycadei
16 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 +
NEW BLOOD: Its
ranks decimated
after nearly a
decade of state and
local losses, the
Democratic Party
is now attracting
fledgling candidates
such as Risheq.

NEWSWEEK 17 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
The challenge for the party is to turn that anger,
that energy into electoral gains. And fielding
strong candidates at a local level is critical.
Over the past decade, Democrats have seen
Republicans methodically take over state gov-
ernments, shifting the country to the right
on key issues such as taxes, labor rights and
abortion. Those local gains have also helped
the GOP consolidate its power in D.C. In most
states, the party that controls the legislature
gets to draw the voting district lines, which can
help both state and national lawmakers insulate
themselves from competition. That’s exactly
what happened in 2010, when Republicans took
control of legislatures in Colorado, New Hamp-
shire, North Carolina and more than a dozen
NEWSWEEK
other states. The next year, those legislatures
redrew the state maps in their favor, as both
parties have done in the past.
Opponents complain that redistricting has
warped voter representation. Take Virginia,
where the GOP redrew district lines to pack Dem-
ocrats into certain areas and insulate their own
candidates in others. Republicans there control
the state House by a wide margin and the Senate
by a narrower one, even though Democrats now
dominate statewide. Clinton, for instance, won RAGE AGAINST
THE MACHINE: The
Virginia in November by nearly 200,000 votes. key question for
Gerrymandering, however, isn’t the only Democrats will
state-level problem for the Dems. They’ve also be whether they
can harness the
been handicapped by a lack of compelling can- growing number of
didates. The Northern Virginia district where angry young voters
and turn them into
electoral gains.
+
18 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 Risheq is running favors Democrats—the party’s
gubernatorial and presidential candidates have
won comfortably here in recent years. Yet Le-
Munyon, the Republican incumbent, did not
have a Democratic challenger when he was
re-elected in 2015. Kelly Ward, executive director
of the party’s new National Democratic Redis-
tricting Committee, says the Republican wave
of victories early in the decade, combined with
redistricting, created a sense among Democrats
that “Oh, we can’t win”—so why bother running?
Now, thanks to Trump, “the lid is blown
off of that problem,” Ward claims, as a bevy
SPENCER PL AT T/GET T Y
of Democratic candidates are now vying for
office—at least in Virginia, with its off-year 2017
election. Usually, finding credible people to
run is a time-consuming process. But
since November, it’s been “raining
candidates,” says David Toscano, the
Democratic leader in the state’s House
of Delegates. He notes that in 2015,
the party fielded about 20 challeng-
ers to Republican delegates; this year,
they’re up to 66 challengers running
for 53 GOP seats.
This influx is a reflection of the fer-
ment within the #Resistance move-
ment rather than the strength of the
Democratic Party, says Quentin Kidd,
a political science professor at Chris-
topher Newport University in New-
port News, Virginia. Risheq is a prime
example of how the president is mobi-
lizing new recruits for his opposition.
Fresh out of a graduate program at
Columbia University’s School of Social
Work, she always thought she would
run for office someday, but Trump’s
win accelerated that plan. “It’s time for
a woman of color to be in this spot and
a young person,” she reasoned.
Even with the surge of Democrats
running in Virginia, Republicans are
likely to hold on to their majority—
albeit a smaller one—in the state House
this fall. But the swell of Democratic
candidates is good news for the party
as it looks to rebuild. The more people
who run, the more contact there is with
the local community, as these new can-
didates interact with potential voters
and volunteers, explains Amanda Lit-
man, founder of Run for Something, a
new progressive group that is support-
ing Risheq and other millennial candi-
dates. These newcomers, Litman says,
will also provide the party with future
NEWSWEEK
PAGE ONE/DEMOC R A T S
leaders—people more in touch with grassroots
efforts and the increasingly influential under-
40 voters.
Run for Something is one of a growing num-
ber of progressive groups that emerged out of
Clinton’s—and the party’s—devastating losses
in 2016. The organization’s rallying of protest-
ers outside Republican town halls and Trump
properties around the country has attracted
headlines, but it and other fledgling organiza-
tions are trying to channel that protest energy
into gains at the ballot box at the state and
SINCE 2008, DEMOCRATS
HAVE LOST BOTH
HOUSES OF CONGRESS
AND NEARLY 1,000 STATE
LEGISLATIVE SEATS.
local levels. Former Democratic campaign
operatives who have opted to work outside the
formal party structure have created many of
these groups.
In Litman’s case, that’s because she thinks
the traditional party approach doesn’t work.
Democratic committees and donors measure a
candidate’s viability by political experience and
fundraising networks. They’re likely to shun
young first-timers. As Risheq says, “A lot of peo-
ple told me no.” But Litman believes that sup-
porting newcomers like Risheq is how you build
the bench Democrats lack. “Politics,” she says,
“is like everything else: You need to get experi-
ence.” Few newcomers win. But even if Risheq
loses, Litman says, she can run again in two
years or apply the skills she’s acquired to boost
other Democratic candidates and causes.
So while this 25-year-old Jewish-Palestinian
may not look or sound like a traditional politi-
cian, Risheq and others like her may be exactly
what Democrats need to reinvent themselves as
they look toward 2018 and beyond.
19 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 FRESHMAN DISORIENTATION
Veterans of the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan are struggling to adjust
to life in college. But a Vassar program
is trying to change that
WHEN FERNANDO BRAGA arrived at Vassar
College for freshmen orientation, he imme-
diately had second thoughts. Most of his new
classmates were young and living on their own
for the first time. But Braga, 34, had a wife and
daughter and lived in a house off-campus.
He had also been to war.
Braga had served with the Army in Operation
Iraqi Freedom. After returning from overseas, he
worked in rail maintenance for the Metropolitan
Transportation Authority in New York City. His
life experience and age set him apart from his new
classmates. He felt like Adam Sandler’s character
in Billy Madison, who at 27 must repeat grades one
through 12. “It was like, ‘Did I do the right thing?’”
NEWSWEEK
Students who saw him dropping off his daughter
at day care thought he was a faculty member.
His struggles weren’t unique. Veterans at other
schools have spoken about how difficult it can be
to fit in at college, and a study published in March
in the Journal of Postsecondary Education and Dis-
ability found that because of the mental health
problems veterans might face after returning
from combat, they are at higher risk for dropping
out of college and are more likely to show lower
academic achievement.
Fortunately for Braga, he had people with
similar backgrounds for support. He is one of 11 BY
U.S. military veterans who enrolled in a special MAX KUTNER
program at Vassar, a small liberal arts college in @maxkutner
20 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 Poughkeepsie, New York, in fall 2013. Through the
nonprofit Posse Foundation, Braga and his fellow
veterans received scholarships that supplemented
federal education funding. The hope was that the
+
veterans would find attending college together
A PROUD FEW:
more manageable than going on their own.
Members of the “If you’re a 27-year-old and you’ve been
2014 Veterans deployed to Afghanistan twice or three times, or
Posse Program at
Vassar College. [to] Iraq, you come home, you’re not necessarily
Experts tracking thinking it’s the best idea to go to Poughkeep-
student veterans
worry that not sie to Vassar’s campus with a bunch of 19-year-
many are attend- olds,” says Deborah Bial, president and founder
ing the country’s
top institutions. of the Posse Foundation. “But if you have nine
other veterans that you’re going with, that
changes the equation.”
Braga and the first group of veterans at Vassar
graduated in late May, marking the completion
of the program’s first round. So far, the results
are promising. Seven of the 11 students from the
group graduated, and one more is expected to
finish. Three dropped out. National figures on
veteran graduate rates are elusive, but a February
report by Student Veterans of America,
a coalition of student-veteran groups at
colleges, found that 53.6 percent of vet-
erans on the GI Bill who started college “THE NUMBER OF VETERANS
in fall 2009 graduated within six years.
For the first Vassar group, the rate is AT ELITE INSTITUTIONS IS,
63.6 percent, and that could rise if that FRANKLY, APPALLING.”
final person graduates by 2019. Those
behind the program believe the rate
for subsequent groups could reach 90
percent, which would be a massive improvement
over the national rate. As Vassar Dean of Studies
Ben Lotto puts it, “The men and women [in the
program] are smart, and they are tough, and they
are determined.”
AN ARMY OF 800,000
President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the
GI Bill into law in 1944. It provided benefits to
veterans returning from World War II, including
tuition and living expenses so they could attend
school. “This bill,” Roosevelt said at the time,
“gives emphatic notice to the men and women
in our armed forces that the American people do
not intend to let them down.” Between 1944 and
1956, 7.8 million veterans used those benefits for
education or job training.
The GI Bill didn’t receive a major overhaul
SAMUE L STUART/ VASSAR CO LLEG E
until nine years ago, when President George W.
Bush signed into law a version that expanded
the education benefits. The new GI Bill, for peo-
ple who have served since September 11, 2001,
covers up to 36 months of tuition and fees (full
for in-state students, up to $18,000 per year for
those at private institutions), a living expenses
NEWSWEEK
PAGE ONE/VETE R A N S
stipend and cash for textbooks. Veterans can also
transfer the benefits to family members (about
8 percent of them do).
As of fiscal year 2015, nearly 800,000 veter-
ans and their families had used these benefits,
according to the U.S. Department of Veterans
Affairs (VA). The program has critics, but the Stu-
dent Veterans of America report found that “with
the help of the Post-9/11 GI Bill, student veterans
are earning marketable, college degrees that will
prepare them for the civilian workforce.”
A clear picture of typical GI Bill students
emerges from VA reports. A little more than
half are under 25, just as many pursue bache-
lor’s degrees as they do associate degrees, and
besides general studies, the top fields of study
are business administration, criminal justice,
science and nursing.
But experts tracking student veterans worry
that too few are attending the country’s top
institutions. Four of the five schools that attract
the most GI Bill veterans offer primarily or only
online classes (the University of Phoenix, Ash-
ford University, University of Maryland Univer-
sity College and the American Public University
System), and the other school, Liberty Univer-
sity, has such a low U.S. News & World Report
ranking that the outlet doesn’t publish the figure.
Those five schools have a combined 65,771 stu-
dents using the benefits.
Far fewer veterans are attending upper-tier
schools. “The number of veterans at elite insti-
tutions is, frankly, appalling,” says Lotto, the
Vassar dean, who also mentors Posse students.
In the 2016-17 school year, Yale had 11 under-
graduate veterans, Harvard had three, Williams
had three, Wellesley had two and Princeton had
one. Last fall, according to an analysis by Inside
21 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
Higher Ed’s Wick Sloane, Swarthmore and Ober-
lin had none. Sloane found that at the colleges he
surveyed, just 645 of the roughly 160,000 under-
graduate students were veterans, or 0.4 percent.
By comparison, a single community college,
where Sloane works, had more than 400.
Some schools have more impressive numbers.
Columbia University, which is opening a Cen-
ter for Veteran Transition and Integration next
school year to help its student veterans shift from
active duty to college and beyond, had 466 veter-
ans in its School of General Studies, Georgetown
had 72 (plus nine active service members), and
Stanford had 21.
Having even a few dozen veterans on campus
is “definitely not enough,” says Peter Kiernan, a
recent Columbia graduate who served with the
Marine Corps and started the Ivy League Veter-
ans Council, an organization that wants to boost
those numbers of veterans at top schools. “These
schools do recruiting for all sorts of athletics pro-
grams. Surely they meet a certain profile when
it comes to diversity of racial background and
economic background,” he says. “There’s really
no reason why a school can’t put the same sort
of resources and commit them to recruiting tal-
ented veterans who are more than qualified to go
to their school.”

‘I JUST NEEDED TO VENT’

Since 1989, the Posse Foundation has sent
groups of “nontraditional” students to college
“so they can back each other up,” says Bial, who
delivered the commencement address at Vas-
sar’s graduation ceremony in May. The founda-
tion has since sent more than 7,700 students to
college on more than $1 billion in scholarships.
But it wasn’t until around 2012 that the foun-
dation began thinking about veterans as “non-
traditional” students. Catharine Bond Hill, then an international studies major, felt different from
Vassar’s president, called Bial and made the sug- other students because of his academic back-
gestion. “We normally turn ideas down,” Bial ground. He says he struggled to get good grades
says, “but this seemed to me to be smart and to in high school, which was likely not the case for
be a good application of the model.” most students at Vassar, where the acceptance
Having such a program made sense at Vassar, rate for his class was 24.1 percent, and almost
according to Lotto. A brewer named Matthew half of those admitted were in the top 5 percent
Vassar founded the school for women in 1861, of their high school classes.
at a time when they made up just around 21 per- His regrets didn’t stop until halfway through
cent of college students in the U.S. “Vassar is a his sophomore year, when he began making
place that was founded on the idea of opening up friends outside of his veterans group. But he
SAMUE L STUART/ VASSAR CO LLEG E

education to groups that were not traditionally
afforded an education,” Lotto says. “That spirit
remains today.”
The first round of vets started at Vassar in fall
2013. The transition to campus life was not easy
for all of them, even those who had been out of
active duty for years. Besides the age gap, Braga,
relied on his time with other Posse students,
which often involved sipping bourbon, to get
through the challenges. “The moments that I
shared with Posse members prevented culture
shock,” he says. “It would become overwhelm-
ing, and I just needed to vent.”
Martha Pita, 25, was only eight or so months

NEWSWEEK 22 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 GROWING POSSE: removed from her last overseas deployment with
Vassar President
Emerita Catharine the Navy when she arrived at Vassar in 2016 in
Hill, left, with Posse a subsequent group of veterans. She soon found
Foundation president PAGE ONE/VETE R A N S
Deborah Bial. The the slower pace of campus life challenging. “In
foundation is hoping the military,” she says, “I was always extremely
to bring veterans busy…. You kind of become addicted to the rush,
to 10 to 12 additional
colleges over the the running around.” She’s also found it sur-
next few years. prising how lenient faculty members are when
+
it comes to handing in assignments late. In the
military, her deadlines involved briefing com- politically conservative. She recalls someone in
manders, she says. “Here, it’s like, ‘Well we have class once saying, “I just don’t know how these
a grace [period].’” people can go and kill these other innocent peo-
Not all the Vassar veterans faced those sorts ple” using drones. “It was a huge argument,” Pita
of challenges. Patrick Hood, 29, who joined the says. “People here complain about other people
first Posse group with Braga, had left the Army putting others in a box and assuming things.
in 2010 after participating in Operation Endur- They have to stop doing it themselves.”
ing Freedom, in Afghanistan. He says the fact The veterans don’t always want to stand out.
that he lived in the Vassar dorms and joined the Pita says she is sometimes reluctant to speak in
lacrosse team helped him make friends. “I’m class about her time in the Navy, especially when
definitely generally a pretty outgoing person, so it comes to her experience as a woman. “Some-
I had no problem talking to people and getting to times it is kind of painful remembering some of
know people,” he says. He refused to think of his the stuff that was said to me or the things that
nonveteran classmates as immature, even if they happened out there,” she says. She also doesn’t
were younger and had fewer life expe-
riences. “I think the Vassar population
does have a lot to offer intellectually
and in terms of friendship,” he says, “so
I never really looked at it like they were
“[STUDENTS] COMPLAIN
so different from me.” ABOUT PEOPLE PUTTING
American college campuses are facing
sharp political divides, with some stu-
OTHERS IN A BOX AND
dents on the left shutting down lectures ASSUMING THINGS. THEY
by conservative speakers and some on
the right criticizing leftist students as
HAVE TO STOP DOING
“snowflakes.” But veterans at Vassar, IT THEMSELVES.”
which The Princeton Review ranked the
third most politically active school in the
nation, and whose students are typically
liberal, say they faced little to no opposition about want her presence in the classroom to be a con-
their military pasts. “I definitely have friends stant teaching moment for nonvets. When she’s
who are anti-war, but no one has come up to me around other veterans, she says, “we vent about
who was anti my having participated in the war,” how hard it is sometimes to blend in.”
Braga says, adding that he would speak up about Since those first veterans arrived at Vassar
his experience in class before anyone could “pull in 2013, the school has established three more
things out of their ass.” “posses” of veterans, with a fourth on the way,
Hood, a science, technology and society and the foundation has introduced similar pro-
major, made a similar effort to confront biases, grams at Wesleyan and Dartmouth. It hopes to
especially in a class he took called The American bring veterans to 10 to 12 additional colleges over
Military at Home and Abroad. “People just start the next few years.
assuming things,” he says. “You have to chal- The veterans in that first Vassar group have
lenge those narratives, just like you would chal- left the idyllic campus and are entering or re-
lenge any other harmful narratives about any entering the workforce. In late May, when Braga
other minority groups on campus.” accepted his diploma before hundreds of class-
Pita, who plans to double-major in political mates and thousands of guests, he was probably
science and Latin American studies, says she thinking about the veterans who helped him get
supported Bernie Sanders for president and there, almost a decade after leaving the Army. If
has challenged classmates who assume she is not for them, he says, “I would have quit.”

NEWSWEEK 23 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 P A G E O N E / N I G E RIA
FANTASTIC DAMAGE
How corruption in Nigeria is making
it hard to defeat Boko Haram
EARLIER this year, Nigerian Lieutenant Colonel
T.J. Abdallah found himself under investigation
by senior military officials. His offense: He crit-
icized them on a WhatsApp messaging group.
Describing them as “Nollywood actors” (Nige-
ria’s version of Hollywood), Abdallah said they
had failed to provide his men with the weap-
ons and equipment they needed to fight Boko
Haram, the militant group that has waged an
armed insurgency in Nigeria since 2009.
But if the colonel’s criticisms are right, his
men’s scarce resources are not for lack of mil-
itary spending. The Nigerian government has
been increasing defense spending for years in
its effort to stamp out Boko Haram. In May, the
country’s Senate passed a record $24.45 billion
federal budget that, once the executive approves
it, will allocate $440 million for the Ministry
of Defense. Yet for Nigerians in the country’s
troubled northeast, where Boko Haram is most
active, the planned cash injection may not bring
the resources they need. A culture of corrup-
tion in Nigeria, says anti-corruption organiza-
tion Transparency International, has prevented
much of that money from reaching the troops.
In a report published May 18, Transparency
International found that “corrupt elites” have
stolen billions of dollars over the past seven
years through inflated or fake military contracts.
The embezzlers, the organization says, launder
the money out of the country and “often [hide
it] in property in the U.K., United States, South
Africa and Dubai.”
NEWSWEEK
As that money pours out of Nigeria, some mil-
itary personnel say the lack of arms is putting
the country’s soldiers in danger. Although Boko
Haram fights on a small annual budget of around
$10 million, according to a 2015 estimate from
Hassan Baage, deputy director of the U.N. Secu-
rity Council’s Counter-Terrorism Committee, it
is reportedly better armed than the Nigerian mil-
itary. Nigerian soldiers have told journalists they
have faced Boko Haram militants when armed
only with AK-47s, while Boko Haram’s arse-
nal has “rocket-propelled grenades, machine
guns with anti-aircraft visors, automatic rifles,
grenades and explosives,” according to a 2012
U.N. report.
Though Boko Haram has lost strength, it is far
from defeated. On May 15, three of the group’s
female suicide bombers blew themselves up in
the northeast state of Borno, killing two people
in addition to the attackers. Those deaths add to
the group’s increasing toll, now around 20,000
victims. The militants’ actions have displaced a
further 2 million people throughout Nigeria and
across neighboring countries.
Corruption in defense spending is not new
in Nigeria. In 2015, when the country’s current
president, Muhammadu Buhari, took office, he
launched an anti-corruption campaign through-
out the government. As part of this, Vice Pres-
ident Yemi Osinbajo found that $15 billion had
been embezzled from the state through fraud- BY
ulent arms deals under former President Good- MIRREN GIDDA
luck Jonathan. His comments came five months @MirrenGidda
24 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 after police arrested Sambo Dasuki, Nigeria’s for- about how the government spends it.
mer national security adviser, who is accused of In February, a U.K. parliamentary briefing
stealing $2 billion through fraudulent arms deals. paper on Nigeria offered a scathing assessment:
(Dasuki remains in detention.) “In May 2016, not long after the former Prime
Despite Buhari’s efforts, criticism from peo- Minister David Cameron had described the
ple like Abdallah suggests that corrupt officials country as ‘fantastically corrupt,’ the British gov-
are still siphoning money from the Nigerian ernment said it was giving Nigeria £40 million
military. One factor driving this, according to
Transparency International, is the secrecy sur-
rounding Nigeria’s defense budget relative to
other countries. “In any country, a proportion
of spending must remain confidential for secu-
BOKO HARAM’S
rity reasons; typically 15 percent, including ARSENAL HAS “ROCKET-
among states in conflict,” the organization’s
report says. “Yet Nigeria classifies nearly all
PROPELLED GRENADES,
defense contracts and budgets and considers MACHINE GUNS WITH
any broadly defined security-related matter
‘secret’ by definition.”
ANTI-AIRCRAFT VISORS,
This secrecy, which prevents journalists and AUTOMATIC RIFLES,
civil society organizations from scrutinizing mil- GRENADES AND
itary spending, is a hangover from when Nigeria
was under military rule. From 1983 to 1999, a EXPLOSIVES.”
powerful regime prevented civilian oversight of
the armed forces. Though Buhari has set up two
committees to investigate past defense deals, the
MORE MONEY,
military remains secretive about its spending. [$52 million] over the next four years to help in
MORE PROBLEMS: According to Transparency International, offi- the fight against Boko Haram.”
Nigeria doesn’t cials have given members of Buhari’s party the It is not clear whether that money was mis-
have the weapons
or equipment it option to pay fines to avoid fraud charges in rela- appropriated, but despite Buhari’s efforts, it
needs to fight tion to defense spending. Nigeria’s international appears defense spending is still slipping out of
Boko Haram
because corrupt allies, the organization notes, continue to give his military’s control—and into the pockets of
elites are stealing money to Nigeria, despite a lack of transparency corrupt elites.
money through
military contracts.
+
AFOL ABI SOTUNDE /REUTERS

NEWSWEEK 25 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
FREE
Political operatives used fake news, Big Data and Facebook
to suppress the vote and rile up racists in 2016. It’s going
to be even uglier next time around

NEWSWEEK 26 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
ED M


 




FROM CHOICE BY NINA BURLEIGH

NEWSWEEK 27 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 HE OPENING CHORDS OF CREEDENCE
CLEARWATER REVIVAL’S “BAD MOON
RISING” ROCKED A HOTEL BALLROOM
IN NEW YORK CITY AS A NATTILY
DRESSED BRITISH MAN STRODE
ONSTAGE SEVERAL WEEKS BEFORE
LAST FALL’S U.S. ELECTION.
I see the bad moon rising,
I see trouble on the way
The speaker, Alexander Nix, an Eton man, was very
much among his own kind—global elites with names like
Buffett, Soros, Brokaw, Pickens, Petraeus and Blair. Trou-
ble was indeed on the way for some of the attendees at
the annual summit of policymakers and philanthropists
whose world order was about to be wrecked by the Amer-
ican election. But for Nix, chief executive officer of a com-
pany working for the Trump campaign, that mayhem was
a very good thing.
He didn’t mention it that day, but his company, Cam-
bridge Analytica, had been selling its services to the
Trump campaign, which was building a massive database
of information on Americans. The
company’s capabilities included,
among other things, “psycho-
graphic profiling” of the electorate. The KGB and the
And while Trump’s win was in no
way assured on that afternoon, Nix
Stasi could only have
was there to give a cocky sales pitch dreamed of having
for his cool new product.
“It’s my privilege to speak to you
Cambridge Analytica’s
today about the power of Big Data snooping superpowers.
and psychographics in the electoral
process,” he began. As he clicked
through slides, he explained how Cambridge Analyt-
ica can appeal directly to people’s emotions, bypassing
cognitive roadblocks, thanks to the oceans of data it can
access on every man and woman in the country.
After describing Big Data, Nix talked about how Cam-
bridge was mining it for political purposes, to identify
“mean personality” and then segment personality types
into yet more specific subgroups, using other variables,
to create ever smaller groups susceptible to precisely tar-
geted messages.
To illustrate, he walked the audience through what
he called “a real-life example” taken from the compa-
ny’s data on the American electorate, starting with a
large anonymous group with a general set of personality
types and moving down to the most specific—one man, it
NEWSWEEK 28
turned out, who was easily identifiable.
Nix started with a group of 45,000 likely Republican
Iowa caucusgoers who needed a little push—what he
calls a “persuasion message”—to get out and vote for Ted
Cruz (who used Cambridge Analytica early in the 2016
primaries). That group’s specifics had been fished out of
the data stream by an algorithm sifting the thousands of
digital data points of their lives. Nix was focusing on a
personality subset the company’s algorithms determined
to be “very low in neuroticism, quite low in openness and
slightly conscientious.”
Click. A screen of graphs and pie charts.
“But we can segment further. We can look at what issue
they care about. Gun rights I’ve selected. That narrows
the field slightly more.”
 Click. Another screen of graphs
and pie charts, but with some cir-
cled specifics.
“And now we know we need a
message on gun rights. It needs
to be a persuasion message, and it
needs to be nuanced according to
the certain personality type we are
interested in.”
Click. Another screen, the state

of Iowa dotted with tiny reds and
BRYAN BE DDER /G ET T Y; PREVIOUS SPRE AD: JONATHAN ERNST/ REUTERS
blues—individual voters.
“If we wanted to drill down further, we could resolve
the data to an individual level, where we have somewhere
close to 4- or 5,000 data points on every adult in the
United States.”
Click. Another screenshot with a single circled name—
Jeffrey Jay Ruest, gender: male, and his GPS coordinates.
The American voter whose psychological tendencies
Nix had just paraded before global elites like a zoo ani-
mal was easy to find. Cambridge researchers would have
known much more about him than his address. They
probably had access to his Facebook likes—heavy metal
band Iron Maiden, a news site called eHot Rods and
Guns, and membership in Facebook groups called My
Daily Carry Gun and Mopar Drag Racing.
J U N E 1 6 , 2017
+
HIS BAG OF NIX: Before the election, Cambridge Ana-
lytica CEO Nix was boasting that his company could
appeal directly to voters’ emotions, bypassing “cogni-
tive roadblocks,” which is a fancy term for facts.
“Likes” like those are sine qua non of the psycho-
graphic profile.
And like every other one of the hundreds of millions
of Americans now caught in Cambridge Analytica’s
slicing and dicing machine, Ruest was never asked if he
wanted a large swath of his most personal data scruti-
nized so that he might receive a message tailored just for
him from Trump.
Big Data, artificial intelligence and algorithms designed
and manipulated by strategists like the folks at Cambridge
have turned our world into a Panopticon, the 19th-cen-
tury circular prison designed so that guards, without
moving, could observe every inmate every minute of
every day. Our 21st-century watchers are not just trying to
sell us vacations in Tuscany because they know we have
Googled Italy or bought books about Florence on Ama-
zon. They exploit decades of behavioral science research
into the flawed, often irrational ways human beings make
decisions to subtly “nudge” us—without our noticing it—
toward one candidate. Of all the horror-movie twists and
NEWSWEEK
scary-monster turns in real life these days, from murder-
ous religious warriors to the Antarctic melting to the rise
of little Hitlers all over the world, one of the creepiest is
the certainty that machines know more about us than we
do and that they could, in the near future, deliver the first
AI president—if they haven’t already.
UNKNOW THYSELF
WHEN CIA OFFICER Frank Wisner created Operation
Mockingbird in 1948—the CIA’s first media manipula-
tion effort—he boasted that his network was “a mighty
Wurlitzer” capable of manipulating facts and public
opinion at home and around the world. The power and
stress of managing that virtual machine soon drove
Wisner bug-eyed mad, and he killed himself.
But far mightier versions of that propaganda Wur-
litzer exist today, powered by a gusher of raw, online
personal information that is fed into machines and
then analyzed by algorithms that personalize political
messages for ever-smaller groups of like-minded peo-
ple. Vast and growing databases compiled for com-
merce and policing are also for sale to politicians and
29 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
their strategists, who can now know more about
you than your spouse or parents. The KGB and
the Stasi, limited to informants, phone tapping
and peepholes, could only have dreamed of such
snooping superpowers.
Anyone can try it out: Cambridge University,
where the Cambridge Analytica research method
was conceived, is not commercially connected to
the company, but the school’s website allows you
to see how Facebook-powered online psychogra-
phy works. At ApplyMagicSauce.com, the algo-
rithm (after obtaining Facebook user consent)
does what Cambridge Analytica did before the
last U.S. election cycle when it made tens of mil-
lions of “friends” by first employing low-wage
tech-workers to hand over their Facebook pro-
files: It spiders through Facebook posts, friends
and likes, and, within a matter of seconds, spits
out a personality profile, including the so-called
OCEAN psychological tendencies test score
(openness, conscientiousness, extraversion,
agreeableness and neuroticism). (This reporter’s
profile was eerily accurate: It knew I was slightly
more “liberal and artistic” than “conservative
and traditional,” that I have “healthy skepti-
cism,” and am “calm and emotionally stable.” It
got my age wrong by a decade or so, and while I’d
like to think that’s because I’m preternaturally
youthful, it could also be because I didn’t put my
birth year in Facebook.)
Cambridge Analytica, with its mass psycho-
graphic profiling, is in the same cartoonishly dark
arts–y genre with several other Trump campaign
operators, including state-smashing nationalist +
WHAT’S TO LIKE? Some call the recent contest the
Steve Bannon, now a top White House adviser, Facebook election because its ad tools were vital for
and political strategist Roger Stone, a longtime Republi- microtargeting, but Zuckerberg actively disputes the
can black-ops guy. Bannon sat on the board of Cambridge, claim that his company turned the vote for Trump.
and his patron, conservative billionaire Robert Mercer,
whose name is rarely published without the adjective something like that: The Democratic National Commit-
“shadowy” nearby, reportedly owns 90 percent of it. tee has used Catalist, a 240 million–strong storehouse of
But Cambridge was just one cog in the Trump cam- voter data, containing hundreds of points of data per per-
paign’s large data mining machine. Facebook was even son, pulled from commercial and public records.
more useful for Trump, with its online behavioral data on But that was back in ancient times, before Facebook
nearly 2 billion people around the world, each of whom had Lookalike audiences, and AI and algorithms were
is precisely accessible to strategists and marketers who able to parse the electorate into 25-person interest groups.
can afford to pay for the peek. Team Trump created a And by 2020, you can bet the digital advances of 2016 will
220 million–person database, nicknamed Project Alamo, look like the horse and buggy of political strategy.
using voter registration records, gun ownership records,
credit card purchase histories and the monolithic data
vaults Experian PLC, Datalogix, Epsilon and Acxiom Cor- DR. SPECTRE’S ECHO CHAMBERS
poration. First son-in-law Jared Kushner saw the power of AMONG THE MANY services Facebook offers advertisers
Facebook long before Trump was named the Republican is its Lookalike Audiences program. An advertiser (or a
candidate for president. By the end of the 2016 campaign, political campaign manager) can come to Facebook with
the social media giant was so key to Trump’s efforts that a small group of known customers or supporters, and
its data team designated a Facebook employee named ask Facebook to expand it. Using its access to billions of
James Barnes the digital campaign’s MVP. posts and pictures, likes and contacts, Facebook can cre-
They were hardly the first national campaign to do ate groups of people who are “like” that initial group and

NEWSWEEK 30 J U N E 1 6 , 2017

then target advertising made specifically to influence it.
The marriage of psychographic microtargeting and
Facebook’s Lookalike program was the next logical
step in a tactic that goes back at least to 2004, when
Karl Rove initiated electoral microtargeting by doing
things like identifying Amish people in Ohio, then
getting them so riled up about gay marriage that they
raced their buggies to the polls to
vote for the first time ever. 
Since then, the ability of machines
and algorithms to analyze and sort the Trump’s data team
American electorate has increased
dramatically. Now, with the help
named a Facebook
of Big Data, strategists can, with a employee the
click of a mouse or keypad, apply for
and get your relative OCEAN score.
campaign’s MVP.
Psychographic analyses don’t even 
JUSTIN SUL LIVAN/G ET T Y
require Facebook; computers can sort
people psychologically using thousands of commercially
available data points and then run their profiles against
people who have actually taken the tests.
When Barack Obama ran for president in 2008, his
NEWSWEEK 31
campaign was credited with mastering social
media and data mining. Four years later, in 2012,
the Obama campaign tested new possibilities
when it ranked the “persuadability” of specific
groups and conducted experiments combining
phone calls and demographic analysis of how well
messages worked on them.
By 2012, there had been huge advances in what
Big Data, social media and AI could do together.
That year, Facebook conducted a happy-sad
emotional manipulation experiment, splitting a
million people into two groups and manipulat-
ing the posts so that one group received happy
updates from friends and another received sad
ones. They then ran the effects through algo-
rithms and proved—surprise—that they were
able to affect people’s moods. (Facebook, which
has the greatest storehouse of personal behavior
data ever amassed, is still conducting behavioral
research, mostly, again, in the service of advertis-
ing and making money. In early May, leaked doc-
uments from Facebook’s Australia office showed
Facebook telling advertisers how it could identify
emotional states, including “insecure teens,” to
better target products.)
By 2013, scientists at Cambridge University
were experimenting with how Facebook could be
used for psychographic profiling—a methodology
that eventually went commercial with Cambridge
Analytica. One of the scientists involved in com-
mercializing the research, American researcher
Aleksandr Kogan, eventually gained access to
30 million Facebook profiles for what became
Cambridge Analytica. No longer affiliated with
the company, he has moved to California, legally
changed his name to Aleksandr Spectre (which had
nothing to do with James Bond, but was about finding a
“non-patriarchal” name to share with his new wife) and
set up a Delaware corporation selling data from his online
questionnaires and surveys—another, slightly more trans-
parent method to Hoover up personal information online.
The 2016 election, sometimes now called the Facebook
election, saw entirely new capabil-
ities applied by Facebook, beyond
Cambridge Analytica’s experiments.
Trump might well have been elected
before social media existed. However,
advances in data collection, as well
as the relative lawlessness regarding
privacy in the United States (more on
that later), enabled the most aggres-
sive microtargeting in political his-
tory—pulling “low-information” new
voters into the body politic and expanding the boundaries
of racist, anti-Semitic and misogynistic political speech.
Christoph Bornschein is a German IT consultant who
advises German Chancellor Angela Merkel on online
J U N E 1 6 , 2017
privacy and other internet issues. He says the difference
between the Obama election strategies and Trump’s are
in the algorithms and today’s advanced AI. The same
tools that enable marketers to identify and create groups
of “statistical twins,” or like-minded people, and then to
target ads to sell them shoes, trips 
and washing machines also enable
political strategists to create “echo
chambers” filled with slogans and
Psychographic
stories that people want to hear, algorithms allow
aka fake news.
The segmentation by Face-
strategists to target
book’s advertising tools of very not just angry racists
small, like-minded groups of
people who might not have been
but also the most
grouped together helped break the intellectually gullible.
so-called Overton window—the
outer limit of acceptable speech in

American public discourse. For example, voters known
privately—on Facebook—to favor racist or anti-Semitic
ideas can also be grouped together and targeted with
so-called dark ads, whose source can remain anon-
ymous. In 2016, racist sentiment, white supremacy,
resentment of refugees, anti-Semitism and virulent
misogyny flooded social media and then leaked out into
campus posters and public rallies.
Psychographic algorithms allow strategists to target
not just angry racists but also the most intellectually
+ that suppression ads and fake news were more effec-
MAKE AMERICA HATE AGAIN: The use of electronic mi-
crotargeting to play on prejudices dates back to 2004,
when Karl Rove got the Amish in Ohio riled up over gay
marriage to boost the campaign of George W. Bush.
gullible individuals, people who make decisions emotion-
ally rather than cognitively. For Trump, such voters were
the equivalent of diamonds in a dark mine. Cambridge
apparently helped with that too. A few weeks before
the election, in a Sky News report on the company, an
employee was actually shown on camera poring over a
paper on “The Need for Cognition Scale,” which, like the
OCEAN test, can be applied to personal data, and which
NEWSWEEK 32
measures the relative importance of thinking versus feel-
ing in an individual’s decision-making.
The Trump campaign used Facebook’s targeted adver-
tising to identify ever smaller audiences—fireplaces in IT
talk—receptive to very precisely targeted messages. This
targeting is increasingly based on
behavioral science that has found
people resist information that con-
tradicts their viewpoints but are
more susceptible when the infor-
mation comes from familiar or like-
minded people.
Finding and provoking people
who hate immigrants, women,
blacks and Jews is not hard to do
with Facebook’s various tools, and
Facebook, while aware of the dan-
ger, has, so far, not created barri-
ers to prevent that. It has, however, acknowledged the
potential. “We have had to expand our security focus
from traditional abusive behavior, such as account hack-
ing, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more
subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts
to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people,” Face-
book stated in an April report.
On any given day, Team Trump was placing up to
70,000 ad variants, and around the third debate with Hil-
lary Clinton, it pumped out 175,000 ad variants. Trump’s
digital advertising chief, Gary Coby, has said the ad vari-
ants were not precisely targeted to speak to, say, “Bob
Smith in Ohio,” but were aimed at increasing donations
from disparate small segments of voters. He compared
the process to “high-frequency trading” and says Trump
used Facebook “like no one else in politics has ever done.”
He denied the Trump camp ever used Cambridge Ana-
lytica’s psychographics—although clearly, based on the
individual Nix outed in his New York City speech, Cam-
bridge had applied the special sauce to Trump voters.
Coby also denied that the campaign was behind the
barrage of anti-Clinton ads and propaganda, made in
Eastern Europe and in the U.S, precisely targeted to the
FROM LE FT: CARLO ALL EG RI/REUTERS; ANDREW HARRER /BLOOMBE RG/G ET T Y
disaffected people identified by Facebook’s tools to be
like known Trump voters, in an attempt to suppress the
vote among minorities and women. Research suggests
tive in determining the outcome of the election than
Trump’s push ads.
Facebook ads targeting by race and gender are not
new and are legal, although there have been scandals.
Last fall, author and journalist Julia Angwin, whose book
Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security, and Freedom
in a World of Relentless Surveillance, revealed that housing
advertisers were using Facebook’s “ethnic affinity” mar-
keting tool to exclude blacks from ads. Facebook prom-
ised to build tools to prevent it, but the social media giant
has said nothing about using the tool on racially targeted
political messages.
J U N E 1 6 , 2017
+
TEXAS TWO-STEP: Cambridge Analytica also did
work for Ted Cruz during the Republican primary,
proving that its methods are not a guaranteed win
for any candidate.
A spokesman for Facebook refused to speak on the
record about the various allegations and said founder and
CEO Mark Zuckerberg would not comment for this arti-
cle. “Misleading people or misusing their information is a
direct violation of our policies and we will take swift action
against companies that do, including banning those com-
panies from Facebook and requiring them to destroy
all improperly collected data,” the spokesman wrote in
an emailed message. Facebook’s definition of misusing
data, the spokesman said, is laid out in its terms, which
are lengthy and broadly divided into issues of safety and
identity. Nothing in the terms appears to explicitly bar the
kind of psychographic analysis Cambridge was doing.
Zuckerberg’s last public pronouncement on the Face-
book election was in March, when he said, at North
Carolina A&T University: “There have been some accu-
sations that say that we actually want this kind of con-
tent on our service because it’s more content and people
click on it, but that’s crap. No one in our community
wants fake information.” He has not spoken publicly
about psychographic microtargeting, but as criticism
mounted after the election, Facebook has hired 3,000
NEWSWEEK
people to monitor reports of hate speech.
Democratic campaign strategists who spoke with
Newsweek acknowledge that Trump’s digital strategy was
effective, but they don’t think it won him the election.
“Ultimately, in my opinion, Trump’s overall strategy was
less sophisticated, not more” than prior years, says Marie
Danzig, deputy director for Obama’s digital operation in
2012, now with Blue State Digital, a political strategy firm
that works for progressive causes. “He focused on large-
scale, mass fear-mongering. Social media has become a
powerful political platform. That didn’t exist two [elec-
tion] cycles ago, and you can’t ignore that. Social media
is a perfect vehicle for outlandish statements to rally the
base or for disseminating fake news. When you use avail-
able psychographic or behavioral data and use it to mis-
lead or make people fear, that is a dangerous game with
dangerous results.”
Danzig and other Democratic strategists say Face-
book’s microtargeting abilities, behavioral science and
the stores of data held by other social media platforms
like Twitter and Snapchat are tools that won’t go back
inside Pandora’s box. They, of course, insist they won’t
be looking for low-cognition voters high in neuroti-
cism who are susceptible to fear-based messages. But
Big Data plus behavioral science plus Facebook plus
33 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
+
BOTCHA! Experts predict that by the 2020 U.S. elec-
tion, there will be many more online tools to create
thousands of tailored ads and even “messenger bots”
that will answer questions from voters.
microtargeting is the political formula to beat. They
will use it, and they won’t talk about how they will
refine and improve it.
Coby predicted that by 2020, more platforms like Goo-
gle and Facebook will likely come online, and the cre-
ation of tens or hundreds of thousands of ad variants will
become more programmatic and mechanized. Finally, he
predicted that “messenger bots” will become more prev-
alent and more targeted, so that voters in, say, Ohio, could
get answers from a Trump bot about questions specific to
them and their communities.
There’s a reason Zuckerberg, Cambridge and even
Democratic consultants don’t want to delve too deeply
into the implications of what they are up to, says Eli
Pariser, author of The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is
Hiding From You. “There are several dangers here,” he
says. “One is that when we stop hearing what political
arguments are being made to whom, we stop being able
to have a dialogue at all—and we’re quite close to that
microtargeted world already. The other is that it’s not
NEWSWEEK
hard to imagine a world where we move past making
specific intentional arguments to specific psychographic
subgroups—where political campaigns just apply a mil-
lion different machine-generated messages to a million
different statistically significant clusters of people and
amplify the ones that measurably increase candidate
support, without an understanding of what is working or
even what is being argued.”
WHACK-A-MOLE PRIVACY
“PEOPLE DON’T understand data,” says Travis Jarae, a
former Google executive who specializes in securing
people’s online identities, mainly to protect large compa-
nies from hackers and thieves. “People don’t understand
what bread crumbs they leave around the internet. And
our representatives in government don’t understand how
analytics work.” Jarae founded a consulting firm that
advises corporations on online identity and security, and
he finds the ignorance extends even to officials at finan-
cial firms, where trillions of dollars are at stake. “If they
don’t understand, do you think governments and regular
citizens do?”
34 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 Big Data technology has so far outpaced legal and regu-
latory frameworks that discussions about the ethics of its
use for political purposes are still rare. No senior member
of Congress or administration official in Washington has
placed a very high priority on asking what psychographic
data mining means for privacy, nor about the ethics of
political messaging based on evading cognition or ratio-
nal thinking, nor about the AI role in mainstreaming rac-
ist and other previously verboten speech.
Activists in Europe are asking those questions. Swiss
mathematician and data protection advocate Paul-
Olivier Dehaye, founder of PersonalData.IO, which helps
people get access to data about them, has initiated arbi-
tration with Facebook 10 times for information it collects
on him and others. He has written extensively on both
Facebook and Cambridge, including instructions on how
to apply for the data they collect. “It’s a whack-a-mole
thing,” he says. “It would be wrong to think these plat-
forms are separate. There are companies whose role is to
link you across all platforms and companies whose prod-
uct is exactly to link those things together.”
Even industry insiders concede that the implications
of data-driven psychographics are creepy. “The possi-
bilities are terrifying,” said Greg Jones, a vice president
at Equifax, one of the biggest data collectors, who par-
ticipated in a recent panel discussion in Washington,
D.C., on regulating Big Data. “When you look at what
[Cambridge] did with the microtargeting, that’s kind of
a marketer’s dream, right? Having the kind of intimacy
with your customer that allows you
to give them the perfect offer at the 
perfect time. But their usage of it?
Legal, yes. Is it ethical? I don’t know. Finding and
Should some regulation be applied
for political purposes, where you
provoking people who
can’t do microsegmentation and hate immigrants,
offer people the best offer based on
that, whether it be a credit card or
women, blacks and
the best political party? I think some Jews is not hard to do
of these things have to mature, and I
think people will decide.”
with Facebook’s
But when? There have been no various tools.
post-election changes in American
privacy law and policy, and very 
little public outrage. On the contrary, Trump moved
decisively in April toward less privacy and even more
commercial data, repealing Obama-era privacy rules that
would have required broadband and wireless companies
to get permission before sharing sensitive information.
LUKE SHARRET T/ BLOOM BERG/GE T T Y
Now, companies like Verizon and AT&T can start to mon-
etize data about online activity inside people’s homes and
on their phones.
After the U.S. election in November, Cambridge Ana-
lytica’s parent company, defense contractor Strategic
Communications Laboratories (SCL), quickly set up an
office just a few blocks from the White House and final-
ized a $500,000 contract from the U.S. State Department
NEWSWEEK 35
to help assess the impact of foreign propaganda, accord-
ing to The Washington Post. But while the money rolls in,
a small but persistent core of outrage has forced the for-
merly self-promoting Nix and company to turn shy and
self-effacing. Publicist Nick Fievet tells Newsweek that
Cambridge Analytica doesn’t use data from Facebook
and that when it mines information from Facebook, it is
via quizzes “with the express consent of each person who
wishes to participate.” He also says Cambridge did not
have the time to apply psychographics to its Trump work.
After months of investigations and increasingly critical
articles in the British press (especially by The Guardian’s
Carole Cadwalladr, who has called Cambridge Analyt-
ica’s work the framework for an authoritarian surveil-
lance state, and whose reporting Cambridge has since
legally challenged), the British Information Commission-
er’s Office (ICO), an independent agency that monitors
privacy rights and adherence to the U.K.’s strict laws,
announced May 17 that it is looking into Cambridge and
SCL regarding their work leading up to the Brexit vote
and other elections.
Other lawyers in London are trying to mount a class-
action suit against Cambridge and SCL. Because of the
scale of the data collection involved here, astronomical
damages could be assessed.
In the U.S., congressional investigations are report-
edly looking into whether Cambridge Analytica had
ties to the right-wing Eastern European web bots that
flooded the internet with negative and sometimes false
Clinton stories whenever Trump’s
poll numbers sagged during the fall
campaign.
American venture capitalists and
entrepreneurs are hustling to build
websites and apps that can stem the
flow of fake news. A Knight Proto-
type Fund on Misinformation and
a small group of venture capital-
ists are putting up seed money for
entrepreneurs with ideas about how
to do that. Hundreds of developers
attended the first Misinfocon at
MIT earlier this year, and more such
conferences are planned. Facebook
and Google have been scrambling since November devis-
ing ways to filter the rivers of fake news.
‘THEY’RE NOT BULLSHITTING’
AFTER THE election, as the scale of the microtargeting
and fake news operation became clear, Cambridge and
Facebook stopped boasting and went on defense. One of
the founders of Cambridge even denies to Newsweek that
its method works, claiming that psychographics have an
accuracy rate of around 1 percent. Nix, the source says, is
selling snake oil.
Before journalists started poking around, before privacy
J U N E 1 6 , 2017
activists in Europe started preparing to file suit, before the
British ICO office launched its investigation and before a
Senate committee started looking into Cambridge Ana-
lytica’s possible connections to Russian activities on
behalf of Trump during the election, Cambridge was
openly boasting about how its psychographic capacities
were being applied to the American presidential race.
SCL still advertises its work influencing elections in
developing nations and even mentions 
on its website its links to U.S. defense
contractors like Sandia National Lab-
oratories, where computer scientists
Industry insiders
found a way to hack into supposedly concede that the
secure Apple products long before any-
one knew that was possible.
implications of
New media professor David Car- data-driven
roll from New York City’s New School
believes Cambridge was telling the truth
psychographics
then, not now. “They are not bullshitting are creepy.
when they say they have thousands of
data points.”

Speaking to a Big Data industry conference in Wash-
ington May 15, fugitive National Security Agency whis-
tleblower Edward Snowden implored his audience to
consider how the mass collection and preservation of
records on every online interaction and activity threatens
our society. “When we have people that can be tracked
and no way to live outside this chain of records,” he said,
“what we have become is a quantified spiderweb. That is
a very negative thing for a free and open society.”
Facebook has announced no plans to dispense with
any of its lucrative slicing, dicing and segmenting ad
tools, even in the face of growing criticism. But in the past
few weeks, the company has been fighting off denun-
ciations about how its advertising tools have turned it
into, as Engadget writer Violet Blue put it, “a hate-group
incubator” and “a clean, well-lit place for fascism.” Blue
campaign aide, Kushner went to Silicon Valley, got a crash
course in Facebook’s ad tools and initiated the campaign’s
Facebook strategy. He and a digital team then oversaw
the building of Trump’s database on the shopping, credit,
driving and thinking habits of 220 million people. Now
in the White House, Kushner heads the administration’s
Office of Technology and Innovation. It will focus on
“technology and data,” the administration stated. Kush-
ner said he plans to use it to help run
government like a business, and to treat
American citizens “like customers.”
The word customers is crass but key.
The White House and political strate-
gists on both sides have access to the
same tools that marketers use to sell
products. By 2020, behavioral science,
advanced algorithms and AI applied to
ever more individualized data will help
politicians sell themselves with ever
more subtle and precise pitches.
German IT consultant Bornschein
says the evolution of using more data points to more
precisely predict human behavior will continue unless
and until society and lawmakers demand restrictions:
“Do we really want to use all capabilities that we have
in order to influence the voter? Or will we make rules at
some point that all of that data-magic needs to be trans-
parent and public? Whether this is playing out as utopia
or a dystopian future is a matter of our discussion on
data and democracy from now on.”

FROM LE FT: OLIVE R CONTRE RAS/ THE WASHINGTON POST/G ET T Y; J ONATHAN ERNST/REUTERS
published an article headlined “The Facebook President
and Zuck’s Racist Rulebook,” accusing the company of
encouraging Holocaust denial, among other offenses,
because of its focus on money over social responsibil-
ity. The Guardian accused it of participating in “a shad-
owy global operation [behind] The Great British Brexit
Robbery” and has just published a massive trove of anti-
Facebook revelations called “The Facebook Files.” Two
recent books are highly critical of how Facebook tools
have been used in recent elections: Prototype Politics:
Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democ-
racy by Daniel Kreiss, and Hacking the Electorate: How
Campaigns Perceive Voters by Eitan Hersh.
When Trump, the first true social media president,
appointed his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, as an unofficial

+
BIG DATA CHECK: Robert Mercer, with his daughter
Rebekah, has funded alt-right beacon Breitbart News,
is a patron of presidential adviser Steve Bannon and
reportedly owns 90 percent of Cambridge Analytica.

NEWSWEEK 36 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
+
LEAD WITH YOUR GUT: First son-in-law Jared Kusher
pushed the Trump campaign to use Facebook ad tools
to precisely target individuals suseptible to emotional
rather than fact-based appeals for their vote.
During and after the past U.S. election, Jeffrey Jay
Ruest—a Trump supporter “very low in neuroticism,
quite low in openness and slightly conscientious,”
according to Cambridge Analytica’s psychographics, and
a man who does indeed care very much about guns—was
going about his business, unaware that Alexander Nix
had flashed his GPS coordinates and political and emo-
tional tendencies on a screen to impress a ballroom filled
with global elites.
Nix displayed Ruest’s full name and coordinates at
that event in September 2016 on his big screen, although
they have been blacked out on YouTube. I found him in
May 2017, with the help of Swiss privacy activist Dehaye,
and through some of his friends on Facebook, and
emailed him a link to the YouTube video of Nix’s talk.
The Navy veteran and grandfather says he only signed
up for Facebook to see pictures of his grandchildren,
and he is disturbed by the amount of information about
him the strategist seem to have. “They had the latitude
and longitude to my house,” says Ruest, who lives in a
NEWSWEEK
Southern state. “And that kind of bothers me. There’s all
sorts of wackos in the world, and I’m out in the middle of
nowhere. When I pulled it up on a GPS locator, it actually
showed the little stream going by my house. You could
walk right up to my house with that data.”
Ruest, who works in operations for a power com-
pany, had never heard of psychographic political
microtargeting until he was contacted by Newsweek. “I
don’t quite know how I feel about that,” he says. “They
could use it in advertising to convince you to buy things
that you don’t need or want. Or they can use it to tar-
get you. I lean conservative, but I’m very diplomatic in
the way I look at things. And I definitely don’t want to
appear otherwise. I believe everyone has a right to their
opinion.” He adds that he is careful about not answer-
ing quizzes or responding to anonymous mailers, but
he says, “I might try to be a little more careful than I am
now. I am really not comfortable with them publishing
that kind of data on me.”
Too late. Ruest, like almost every other American,
has left thousands of data crumbs for machines to
devour and for strategists to analyze. He has no place
to hide. And neither do you.
37 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
At
Long
Last
Monk Why did it take
58 years to release the jazz
legend’s only soundtrack?

By Zach Schonfeld
NEWSWEEK 39 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 +
IN THE CAN: Monk
takes a break from
recording, with
his wife, Nellie
Smith, far left, and
Baroness Nica de
Koenigswarter, a close
friend and patron.

On July 27,

Thelonious Monk entered the penthouse of Nola Recording

Studio on Manhattan’s West 57th Street. He was wearing a
very strange hat. This was often the case—the enigmatic jazz
pianist was known for his bobble hats, trilbies, fur hats, even
skullcaps—but this headpiece, a gift from Ghanaian Afro-jazz
pioneer Guy Warren, was particularly distinctive: large and
round, like “some weird modernistic lampshade,” as trum-
peter Humphrey Lyttelton described it. Monk was still wear-
ing it, photos reveal, when he sat down at the piano that day to
record music for the soundtrack to the French film Les Liaisons
Dangereuses, a racy adaptation of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’s
novel directed by Roger Vadim.
Monk wore many hats in the figurative sense too: composer,
pianist, bandleader, eccentric style icon—and, for that brief
moment, film scorer. Les Liaisons Dangereuses was the only film
Monk would ever soundtrack. His music, off-kilter and disso-
nant, helped set the seductive, scandalous mood of the film.
And it nearly didn’t happen.
Monk had been recording since 1944, without much success:
His idiosyncratic compositions, while highly regarded by his
peers, were considered too “difficult” for the mainstream. But
his prospects had begun to improve in late 1956, thanks largely
to his album Brilliant Corners and a now-legendary six-month
residency at the Five Spot Cafe in New York. His fortune was
short-lived: The momentum came to a violent halt on October
15, 1958, in Wilmington, Delaware, with an arrest for drugs and a
vicious beating by cops. Monk, who had been arrested for drugs
once before, lost his cabaret card for the second time (meaning
he couldn’t play in clubs), pushing him into a depression so deep
he spent a week in a Massachusetts insane asylum.
Monk had been introduced to Vadim by Marcel Romano, the
 ARN AUD BOUB ET PRIVATE CO LLECTION; PREVIOUS SPRE AD : ARNAUD BOUB ET PRIVATE COLLECTION

NEWSWEEK
41
J U N E 1 6 , 2017
music supervisor for the film. Described by The New York Times in
1989 as “a shadowy hipster on the French jazz scene” of the 1950s,
Romano made his reputation booking the Club Saint-Germain in
Paris, and he produced soundtracks for several New Wave films,
including Louis Malle’s Elevator to the Gallows, featuring Miles
Davis. Les Liaisons was set to film in France in the summer of
1959, but Monk’s legal problems had made it impossible for him
to travel, and he never showed up. Romano finally flew to New
York to track down the musician. He had a strict deadline: The
soundtrack had to be completed in just five days, by July 31.
He found a man in bad shape. Monk was exhausted and
anxious—barely able to sign the contract, let alone write new
material for a film. Instead, when he finally made it into the
Nola Studio—supported by a band that included Art Taylor on
drums and Sam Jones on bass—Monk recorded new arrange-
ments of some of his best-known compositions (including the
sly ballad “Crepuscule With Nellie” and the widely covered
“Rhythm-a-Ning”), as well as a gospel hymn: “an ironic choice
to underscore the film’s theme of seduction and innocence,”
according to his biographer, Robin Kelley.
Somehow, the soundtrack was completed in three nights.
(Credit, perhaps, that strange hat; according to Kelley, Monk wore
it nonstop during this period—even in bed.) A relieved Romano
returned to Paris carrying the recordings in his briefcase.
Les Liaisons Dangereuses premiered in the fall, scandalizing
censors (one lawsuit, brought by France’s Société des Gens de
Lettres, claimed to be protecting the reputation of the novel).
As for the soundtrack, it was never released as an album, and
quickly lost to history. Monk carried on with his career, retired
from public life during the 1970s and died of a stroke in 1982.

The Indiana Jones of Jazz

After Les Liaisons Dangereuses was released—and the soundtrack
not released—Romano held on to the reel-to-reel tapes he’d
brought from New York to Paris for more than four decades.
Several years before his death in 2007, he handed them over
to his friend Laurent Guenoun, a jazz fanatic and former pro-

“It was like uncovering

a new Van Gogh
painting or a Leonardo SERIOUS SHADE:
+

da Vinci masterpiece.” During this period, Monk

wore a modernistic,
lampshade-like hat
pretty much night and
day, and even to bed.
fessional diver who specialized in filming underwater, work-
ing at times with Jacques Cousteau. “He decided to entrust
something very special to me,” says Guenoun. “At some point,
he came back with a bunch of reel-to-reel tapes and a pile of
magazines. The tapes were Monk’s session recordings for Les
Liaisons Dangereuses. As for the magazines, it was a complete
collection of old Jazz Hot issues from the 1930s. I preciously
kept these documents as if they were secret treasures.”
Years passed. In 2014, François Le Xuan, the founder of Saga
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP L EFT: ARNAUD BOUB ET
PRIVATE COL LECTIO N (6); ZEV FELD MAN
Jazz (which specializes in reissues), and his friend Fred Thomas,
founder of Sam Records, were searching for unreleased record-
ings by Barney Wilen, the French saxophone whiz who had
played on Les Liaisons Dangereuses and in Miles Davis’s band at
the age of 20. Le Xuan had become acquainted with Guenoun
and Romano 15 years earlier, when Le Xuan worked for Universal
Music Jazz France in Paris. He hoped Romano’s archives might
contain Wilen recordings. Instead, Guenoun dug out a mysteri-
ous tape emblazoned with a single name: “Thelonious Monk.”
“It seems I excited their curiosity,” Guenoun says with under-
statement.
Le Xuan and Thomas listened to the seven reels, assuming
they contained a live performance or a copy of a pre-existing
album. Instead, what they heard was the soundtrack session
from July 1959—recordings never released outside of the film.
It was an emotional experience. “We exchanged hardly a word
while we listened to the tapes,” the pair recounted in a recent
interview with Superfly Records. “We had a jubilant, almost
unsettling feeling that we were in the same room as the session
that had taken place 55 years earlier.”
Le Xuan and Thomas decided they wanted to release this
music, a task that would take nearly three years. The two men
first reached out to Zev Feldman, an L.A.-based jazz producer
who tells me that he’s been called “the Indiana Jones of jazz.”
By this, he seems to mean that he has a flair for tracking down
unheard or historical recordings (“jazz archaeology,” he calls it),
not that he fights Nazis for the Holy Grail—though, for Feldman,
the Monk project basically is a holy grail. “It was like uncovering
a new Van Gogh painting or a Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece,”
he says. “It really was up there at that level.”
Feldman has several jobs, including managing the nonprofit
label Resonance Records, which, thanks to his efforts, has
released critically praised early recordings by Wes Montgom-
ery and Bill Evans. He’s also the co-founder of the Barcelona,
Spain-based Elemental Music and, via that imprint, brought
25 long-out-of-print recordings from the defunct Xanadu label
back to life, rescuing some tapes from an East Coast warehouse

“I’ve never heard another jazz musician

that can play and sound like Thelonious
for more than three goddamn notes.”
flooded by Hurricane Sandy. In addition, he’s a freelance pro-
ducer who routinely works with the families of late jazz icons
to secure the rights of old recordings. He says he gets emails
every day about tapes deserving of release, but one, in Decem-
ber 2014, made “my eyes pop out of my head.” He was in Paris,
and the email, from Thomas—who somehow knew that he was
in the city—mentioned newly discovered Monk recordings
from 1959. “I couldn’t believe the notion that over a half-cen-
tury later we were talking about a studio album. Not just any
recording, but a studio document! From Monk!”
Feldman met up with Le Xuan and Thomas, and the pair
asked him to co-produce the release. What fol-
lowed, Feldman tells Newsweek, was “one of the
most incredible journeys in my career and really
in my life.” In the end, he says, “I was just trying
not to break anything.”
Feldman’s first task was contacting the Monk
estate. The late pianist’s 67-year-old musician
son, T.S. Monk, was aware of the soundtrack but
“had no idea the actual recording might be avail-
able.” He was 100 percent behind putting it out.
The legal tangles were trickier. In the late

NEWSWEEK 44 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 +
LIVE AND LIFE: Monk performing
in 1965; by the early ’70s, he
had stopped playing and was
living in seclusion.

jointly released by Sam Records

and Saga Jazz on CD and other
digital formats. The extravagant
two-LP deluxe boxed set includes
a 56-page booklet with previously
unreleased photographs of the
session and tributes from author-
ities like 82-year-old historian
Alain Tercinet. (The second disc
contains alternate versions of
tracks and some bonus material,
such as a “Making Of ” track.)
The timing is neat: 2017 marks
the centennial of Monk’s birth.
Nobody seems more pleased
than his son, who says that at
the end of his life his father
still didn’t think his music was
understood or appreciated. “It’s
funny, because the day before
he died in 1982, he hadn’t played
in six or seven years,” says T.S.
“I won’t say he was thrown in
the dustbin of history, but he
was out of sight, out of mind.
But the day he died, it was like:
Whoa! In terms of how import-
ant Thelonious was, everything
just exploded. Slowly but surely,
everybody is beginning to accept
that Thelonious is pretty much
the father of modern jazz.”
In recent decades, Monk has
1950s and early ’60s, Monk was signed to River- been honored with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, a Grammy
side Records, which had bought out his prior con- Lifetime Achievement Award and a street in Manhattan
tract for $108.24. But Riverside no longer exists; named for him. The greatest compliment, perhaps, is that his
the company’s masters were acquired in 1972 by improvised style—angular and abrupt—remains inimitable.
a company called Fantasy Records, which in turn “The mother lode of jazz is the ability to play your instrument
was sold and merged with Concord Records. in a fashion that no one can copy,” says T.S. “I’ve never heard
“It has been a trip to figure this out,” says law- another jazz musician that can play and sound like Thelonious
yer Steven Reich (no relation to the minimalist for more than three goddamn notes.”
composer), who administers international music When this recording was made, T.S. was not yet 10. Back
publishing rights for Monk’s estate. After much then, “I had no idea, to put it simply, who the fuck my father
investigation, he determined that a prior lawyer was,” he says. “Daddy just did what Daddy did, but everybody
MIC HAEL O CHS ARC HIV ES/G ET T Y

for the estate had reached a settlement with Con-
cord stating that any recordings not in possession
of Concord Records were free to be released.
‘Everything Just Exploded’
On June 16, nearly 60 years after it was recorded,
the soundtrack for Les Liaisons Dangereuses will be
seemed to think it was outrageous and great.” People fre-
quently told him, “Fifty years from now, your father’s music is
going to be bigger than it is today.” He found this difficult to
believe. “When you’re a kid and somebody says, ‘Fifty years
from now...,’ they might as well have said 500 years from now. I
didn’t even believe it.” Now “it’s 50 years later, and he’s bigger
than ever. They weren’t lying to me!”

NEWSWEEK 45 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 U.S. GEOLOGICAL SURVEY

NEWSWEEK 46 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 NEW WORLD
CULTURE MARS ENTREPRENEURS SOCIAL
GOOD SCIENCE
MY FAVORITE MARTIAN DRONE
Astronomers hope drones can
help map the red planet
A TEAM of European astronomers has a proposal
for a better way to explore Mars: a drone. Efforts
to survey the Martian landscape have delivered
some stunning results. In May, the U.S. Geological
Survey published three maps and images show-
+ ing geological formations that, researchers say,
LOW-FLY ZONE: A could only be the result of abundant water. But
drone could survey the Curiosity rover can’t take aerial images, and
large swaths of
Mars; the chal- its drill broke last December, which means it can’t
lenge is to get probe beneath the surface, where living or fossil-
one through the
planet’s upper ized microbes could exist (although it did recently
atmosphere. scoop up a handful of sand for analysis).
The drone plan, published recently in the jour-
nal Acta Astronautica, is to launch a “small Mars
system” that includes a dust analyzer and a drone.
The system would land on Mars and release the
drone, which would fly at a low altitude around
the globe, snapping pictures of the entire surface.
The technology hinges on IRENE, an umbrella-
like heat shield developed by the Italian Space
BY Agency that, scientists hope, will enable the small
JESSICA WAPNER system to pass through the upper atmosphere
@jessicawapner on its way down to the surface. The astronomers
NEWSWEEK
SMARTPHONES WASTE
behind the drone–dust analyzer combo note its
small size and low cost as advantages compared
with other missions in development.
Meanwhile, studies investigating the basic
necessities for a human colony on Mars con-
tinue. Crowdfunders can back research about
what plants can be grown on Mars. That work is
led by Dutch biologist Wieger Wamelink, who
bears a strange resemblance to The Martian
actor Matt Damon, as evident in a video posted
on Wamelink’s Facebook page. Early in May,
SpaceX, Elon Musk’s rocket and spacecraft com-
pany, test-fired one of its Falcon Heavy engines,
the kind Musk intends to use for human missions
to Mars, followed by colonization within the next
50 to 100 years. And Mars One, a company dedi-
cated to establishing a permanent human settle-
ment on Mars, was recently valued at nearly $400
million by an independent Swiss auditor.
For the near future, though, we must be con-
tent with images and samples from the red planet.
This European helicopter drone, while still in the
early stages, could bring the best ones yet.
47 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
NEW WORLD/ENTREPRENEURS
LET 1,000 UNICORNS BLOOM
Entrepreneurs come in all shapes,
sizes and cities. They don’t have to be in
Silicon Valley to disrupt the world
A CRAPPY CUP of airplane tea and the rise of
Donald Trump led to the launch in May of an
outfit with the wacky name of All Turtles, which
might usher in a new way to think about tech
startups around the world.
The All Turtles story began with Phil Libin, who
used to be CEO of the app company Evernote and
lately has worked as a partner at the venture cap-
ital firm General Catalyst in Silicon Valley. Last
fall, Libin boarded a JetBlue flight from Boston to
San Francisco. As the plane leveled off, he ordered
tea. Libin plopped the tea bag in the hot water,
then got distracted for about 10 minutes. By then,
the tea was over-steeped, and he had the classic
problem of what to do with a soaked tea bag while
trapped in an airplane seat. “I got thinking that tea
is kind of a crappy experience,” Libin tells News-
week, using the type of language that usually leads
people like him to think: How can I disrupt tea?
Libin’s mind wandered to how he’d fix the way
the drink has been served since the invention of
the tea bag in 1904. He’d find a mesh material
engineered to seal up after being wet for a cer-
tain amount of time, so the tea would stop steep-
ing, and he’d attach the bag to a swizzle stick that
could be left in the cup. Libin concluded that to
make and market such a thing would involve
about 20 steps, including filing patents, working
with a company on the mesh, building prototypes,
seeking funding from venture capitalists and
creating a whole company to carry out the idea.
NEWSWEEK
Libin wasn’t looking to disrupt the tea business,
but he realized that the many steps to do so would
seem like a 100-foot wall to anyone without his
experience and connections. And that led to his
epiphany. “How many ideas like this exist in the
world?” he says. “There are all these qualified peo-
ple who understand how to fix a problem, but the
world is not structured to help them make these
things. Why not make a structure to do that?”
Around the same time, Trump’s campaign was
making it hard to ignore a deep divide in Amer-
ica. Silicon Valley was churning out billion-dol-
lar companies and developing life-altering stuff,
like self-driving cars and virtual reality. But huge
swaths of the population have felt left behind and
unable to participate. One new study by Good-
Call found that 90 percent of all founders of bil-
lion-dollar tech companies attended just 3 percent
of U.S. colleges—though, really, almost all the
founders went to either Stanford or Harvard.
“If you’re white or South Asian, male, between
the ages of 22 and 27, with a computer science
degree from Stanford, and if you live within 50
miles of Silicon Valley, you have a pretty good
KIYOSHI OTA / BLOOM BERG/GE T T Y
shot of getting into the tech startup ecosystem,”
Libin says. “For each of those things that you
aren’t, your odds decrease by a factor of two—
or maybe 10.” So much for the modern Ameri-
can dream in most of America. BY
Others around the tech industry have been KEVIN MANEY
realizing that opportunity has to spread to more @kmaney
48 J U N E 1 6 , 2017

+ The ultimate big idea is to put these All Turtles
DEFEAT ELITISM:
Libin knows there
are many innova- people in more places. AOL founder Steve Case
tors being ignored launched a “Rise of the Rest” campaign to encour-
because of their
mailing address age startups in cities like Memphis and Buffalo.
or the school on Ro Khanna, the Democratic congressman from
their diploma.
Silicon Valley, has been outspoken about creating
tech ecosystems in places like Appalachia. Still,
it’s been difficult to turn somewhere that’s not
Silicon Valley into a hotbed of tech company cre-
ation—not even when grasping for the aura of Sili-
con Valley by adopting a name like
Silicon Alley, Silicon Roundabout
or Silicon Cow Pasture.
Libin considered this and
thought that maybe the problem
ALMOST ALL THE FOUNDERS
is the very idea of a company— OF BILLION-DOLLAR TECH
forcing an inventor to start a com-
pany is like making a novelist start
COMPANIES WENT TO EITHER
a publishing house. With today’s STANFORD OR HARVARD.
technology platforms, there must
be a better way. Entrepreneurs
can rent cloud computing from
Amazon Web Services (AWS) with a credit card or
rent an instant office from WeWork. Maybe, Libin
thought, someone with a good idea ought to be
able to essentially rent a company to get it going.
Here’s what Libin ended up with. He describes
All Turtles as a studio, modeled somewhat on
the way Netflix operates a studio that can han-
dle all of a show’s production and distribution
so that the talent—writers, directors, actors—can
just focus on creating product. Someone with a
cool idea for a tech product can make a pitch to
All Turtles. If that pitch is accepted, All Turtles
takes care of everything that normally would
come with starting a company. The innovator
just has to focus on bringing the cool idea to life.
NEWSWEEK
All Turtles includes physical work space and
wants to foster interaction and a sense of com-
munity among its members.
As for a payoff, the innovator gets equity in his
or her venture, as well as some equity in the All
Turtles pool of projects. “Call it a fellowship,”
Libin says. He hopes that once a member gets one
product into the market, that person will stay in
All Turtles and start something else. Just because
you invent something, Libin notes, doesn’t mean
you should have to be stuck for years with a com-
pany you started around that invention. This
allows innovators to move on and keep inventing.
In this sense, All Turtles is a meta-company,
and all its members are self-directed, entrepre-
neurial contributors free from having to raise
money, coddle investors, muck around with
legal issues or figure out what kind of kale salad
to include in the catered lunch.
outlets all over the world to capture ideas Silicon
Valley would miss from people who are not white,
male Stanford grads—and to help transform econ-
omies in places like Memphis and Buffalo. OK, so
one of the first three All Turtles has been set up
in San Francisco, which defeats the purpose. The
others are in Tokyo and Paris. But Libin plans to
roll them out to many, many cities, connecting
them all in a global All Turtles cloud network.
Much more than disrupting tea, Libin is after
a bigger prize. “We think we can disrupt the
idea of a company.”
And the name? It comes from the expression
“turtles all the way down”—the ancient idea that
the world is flat and is supported on the back of
a giant turtle. But what supports the giant turtle?
Another turtle. In fact, it’s turtles all the way down.
Similarly, All Turtles is supposed to be a platform
for new ideas, which sits on top of cloud platforms
like AWS, which in turn sits on platforms like the
internet, which in turn rides on routers and fiber
optics…and so on. It’s platforms all the way down.
That might sound a little woo-woo, but at
least the concept for once doesn’t put Silicon
Valley at the center of the universe.
49 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 N E W W O R L D / WASTE

TOXIC BURN NOTICE

Destroying hazardous waste out in
the open is banned in the U.S., with
one glaring exception: the military

TWO YEARS ago, after Erin Card moved within 2

miles of the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in
southwest Virginia, she began noticing threads
of smoke that occasionally rose above the heav-
ily wooded site. She started asking about it and
was stunned by what she learned: Toxic explo-
sives were being burned in the open air. “It just
seems crazy to me,” says Card.
There is no proof the fumes have harmed Card’s
family, which has lived in the area for more than a
decade, yet her husband had cancer (he’s now in
remission), and their eldest boy, 5-year-old Rex,
had a cyst by his thyroid removed. “Sometimes,”
Card says, “I feel sick to my stomach with worry.”
The open burning and detonation of hazard-
ous waste munitions—including small arms
cartridges, rockets, mortars, artillery shells and
tactical missiles—is banned in many countries,
and in the United States, private industry long ago
abandoned the practice, which is blamed for toxic
air, soil and water pollution.
But the U.S. military and Department of
Energy continue the open burning and deto-
nation of explosives—and, in a few cases, even
radioactive waste—under a 1980 exemption
from the Environmental Protection Agency. The
EPA granted the exemption to provide time to and the Puerto Rican island of Vieques.
develop better disposal techniques. Today, the “It’s crazy that in the 21st century they’re still
U.S. allows open burning and detonation in at allowed to do it,” says Marylia Kelley, executive BY
least 39 locations, according to federal data. The director of Tri-Valley CAREs, a watchdog group DAN ROSS
government also continues the practice in Guam monitoring the cleanup of an open burn site at @1danross

NEWSWEEK 50 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in
Northern California. Developers hope to begin
construction soon on thousands of homes within
a mile of the open burn site at Lawrence Liver-
more—which, Kelley argues, will expose resi-
dents to a range of toxic emissions.
The EPA, which didn’t respond to repeated
requests for comment, allows open burning of
waste explosives if it won’t bring “unsafe releases”
into the environment. But burning and detonating
explosives in the open appear to do just that. In a
presentation he gave last year to fellow agency
employees, Ken Shuster, a veteran EPA expert
in hazardous waste disposal, described the “tre-
mendous amount” of air, soil and groundwater
JEREMY HOGAN/BLOOMINGTON H E RA LD-T IMES/A P
contamination caused by open burning. In fact,
the open burning of explosives routinely releases
OPEN WOUND: The
some of the most potent known toxins, including
EPA grants the U.S. the carcinogens cadmium and dioxins, accord-
military an exemp- ing to Brian Salvatore, a Louisiana State Univer-
tion to burn haz-
ardous waste and sity expert on toxic emissions. “There’s a whole
explosives (such assortment of them, and it’s really awful,” he says.
as this propellant)
in the open if it In an email, Army spokesman Wayne Hall
won’t put “unsafe says the Defense Department has reduced open
releases” into the
environment. burning and detonation and is evaluating new
+ technologies to cut back further. He says the
department uses open detonation in emergen-
cies, when its officials determine munitions are
unsafe for storage or transport and when no
other option exists because of the munitions’
“size and explosive content.”
The latest defense spending bill included an
amendment requiring the National Academy of
Sciences to study alternatives to open burning,
but some believe that is mere foot-dragging, since
alternatives such as contained incinerators have
long been available. Pentagon officials argue that
open burning is cheaper than the alternatives, but
the EPA’s Shuster says it is a “myth” when you fac-
tor in the cleanup costs—sometimes hundreds of
millions of dollars—at open burn sites. Ted Pro-
civ, a former deputy assistant to the secretary of
defense for chemical and biological matters, says
the military should be conducting tests using
alternative disposal systems already available. He
is a project coordinator for one such system, the
Davinch detonation chamber, which he says was
used to dispose of chemical weapons in Japan as
far back as 1992. A ban, he says, is “the only thing
that’s going to get these guys to do anything.”
Doing something is imperative, Prociv says,
because the munitions stockpile to be destroyed
is staggering. According to a Government
Accountability Office report, the total as of Feb-
ruary 2015 was 529,373 tons. The Pentagon esti-
mates that from fiscal year 2016 to fiscal year
2020, another 582,789 tons will be added.
NEWSWEEK
Part of that stockpile sits at the Blue Grass Army
Depot near Richmond, Kentucky, which alerts
nearby residents before any open burning or deto-
nation. Many can hear the blasts from miles away.
Among them, Craig Williams, program director
of the Kentucky Environmental Foundation, who
campaigned to force the Defense Department
to dispose of chemical weapons safely. He says a
“monstrous” legislative quagmire awaits anyone
challenging the practice.
The consequences of inaction could be dire,
analysts say. The EPA’s Shuster, in his recent pre-
sentation, described “unbelievable” high levels of
toxic groundwater contamination from the open
burning of explosives, involving chemicals such
as RDX, TNT and perchlorate. He said the con-
taminants, all linked to human health problems,
have penetrated some drinking water systems.
As for the toxic air emissions, LSU’s Salvatore
says they sometimes aren’t properly monitored.
That’s partly because the most sophisticated tech-
nologies to detect fine particulates are rarely used,
and also because the emissions are very widely
dispersed. “You have no stack or chimney to con-
“SOMETIMES, I FEEL
SICK TO MY STOMACH
WITH WORRY.”
centrate the focus of the emissions. They just go
willy-nilly everywhere,” he says.
Inadequate monitoring can extend beyond the
perimeter of bases as well, sometimes making it
difficult to verify the source of contamination.
Perchlorate, for example, is released through
open burning of explosives and propellants at
the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia.
Nearby drinking water supplies are contaminated
with it. Although plant officials say it’s unlikely the
problem comes from open burning, they acknowl-
edge that it hasn’t been “determined definitively.”
A dearth of data makes it hard to prove defin-
itive links between open burning and chronic
health problems among nearby residents. A 1991
Boston University study found that people living
near a former open burn site in Massachusetts
had higher than expected rates of lung cancer and
that a causal link to open burning was possible.
Some suspect chronic health problems suffered
by soldiers who worked at burn pits in Afghani-
stan and Iraq are related to exposure to toxic sub-
stances—an argument made by Joseph Hickman
51 J U N E 1 6 , 2017

NEW WORLD/WASTE
in his 2016 book, The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of
America’s Soldiers. But conventional explosives
burned in the U.S. are merely one form of the
hazardous material—including gasoline, pesti-
cides, medical wastes and, possibly, chemical
weapons—destroyed in those war zones. The
Department of Veterans Affairs is still studying
the long-term health effects.
The lasting environmental impact, however,
is hard to dispute. At Wisconsin’s Badger Army
Ammunition Plant, which stopped open burning
in 1996, hundreds of monitoring wells track miles
of groundwater pollution. Large plumes contam-
inated with chemicals such as DNT and
chlorinated solvents from two former
burn sites there still flow into the Wis-
consin River, according to the Army. A “IT’S CRAZY THAT IN THE
spokesman for Badger, Mike Sitton, con-
firms the groundwater monitoring will 21ST CENTURY THEY’RE STILL
continue for decades to ensure that there ALLOWED TO DO IT.”
will be little risk to public health.
Occasionally, open burning and det-
onation have prompted shutdowns.
That was the case at the Sierra Army Depot in
Northern California, where powerful blasts
rattled the windows of nearby homes. In 1999,
the depot was the second-worst source of toxic
chemicals in all of California, according to EPA
data. Local residents and environmentalists
fought back by suing and reached a settlement
in 2001 that limits the Army to open burn or det-
onate munitions only in an emergency.
Public pushback also shut down open burn-
ing at the former Louisiana Army Ammunition
Plant, now known as Camp Minden. Plans to
open-burn some 15 million pounds of M-6 pro-
pellant—used to fire heavy artillery—provoked
uproar, forcing the plant to instead install a con-
tained burn system two years ago to incinerate
the stockpile. (Now that the incineration of the
waste explosives is nearly complete, the con-
tained burn system also is due to be shut down
and removed, following a campaign by local
activists to prevent Camp Minden from becom-
ing a long-term disposal site.)
But incinerators won’t single-handedly solve
the problem of emitting dangerous chemicals,
experts say, as some still emit dangerous chemi-
NEWSWEEK
cals such as dioxins, furans and nitrogen oxides.
Makers of alternative disposal technologies, like
the Davinch detonation chamber, argue that their
systems are necessary to dispose of munitions
when incinerators can’t do it cleanly. Still, the
technology behind incinerators is advancing fast.
For example, the emissions from the incinerator
at Camp Minden were, according to the system’s
operators, cleaner than the ambient air.
Incinerators are one of the options being
reviewed at the Holston Army Ammunition
Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, where smoke
from open burning has clouded the skies since
the 1940s. A 2012 Army Corps of Engineers
report identified two alternative disposal meth-
ods that can be used to destroy “all present and
future wastes” at Holston, but the Army is still
“pursuing alternative technologies,” says Justine
Barati, a spokeswoman for the Defense Depart-
ment’s Joint Munitions Command.
For Mark Toohey, a 61-year-old juvenile court
judge living in Kingsport, the smoke seemed like
no more than a minor nuisance for decades. In
fact, he didn’t even know whether it was com-
ing from Holston or from one of the region’s
heavy-polluting plants. But five years ago, when
the plumes started getting thicker and darker,
Toohey was horrified when he finally learned that
the source was toxic explosives being burned in
the open air at the military site.
Toohey, who lives a mile and a half from
Holston, blames the smoke for triggering the
chronic asthma and severe sinusitis that his
wife suffers. Their daughter, who lives close by,
has similar health problems.
Now, when the fires burn on the base, the
Tooheys shut themselves inside and close all
of the doors and windows. He can’t believe the
Army allows this environmental hazard to con-
tinue. “What,” he asks, “does this say about
how caring they are about the people around
these sites, including their own employees?”
This story was reported by FairWarning (FairWarning.org),
a nonprofit news organization based in Pasadena,
California, that focuses on public health, consumer
and environmental issues.
52 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 +
SWIPE OUT:
Many parents
wrongly believe
that their
toddlers learn
from screened
devices.
LIMITING SCREAM TIME
SMARTPHONES MIGHT MAKE YOUR TODDLER DUMBER
STARING DUMBLY at a smart-
phone isn’t just for grown-ups
anymore—even toddlers are
in on the game (and games).
But according to a new study,
such screen time could cause
language delays in children. The
research confirms what many of
us already know: Smartphones
don’t always make us so smart.
The study, which will be
presented at the 2017 Pediatric
Academic Societies Meeting,
examined the link between
handheld device screen time
and language development
among 894 children between
the ages of 6 months and 2 years.
The researchers, from the
University of Toronto and the
Hospital for Sick Children, also
based in Toronto, tracked screen
time and communication skills.
For four years, they recorded how
much time the children spent
looking at smartphone screens,
as reported by the parents. They
also assessed language develop-
ment, using a standard measure
called the Infant-Toddler Check-
list, or ITC, which includes
the ages at which children are
expected to reach certain
KIKE CALVO/AP
communication milestones.
BY Most parents said their
JESSICA WAPNER children had no screen time.
@jessicawapner But among those who admitted
NEWSWEEK
that their children did play with
smartphones, the average expo-
sure time was 28 minutes per
day. In total, 20 percent of the
children were spending nearly
half an hour a day staring at a
tiny touch screen by the time
they were 18 months old.
And those children had some
problems. That half-hour of
screen time was associated with
a 49 percent increase in expres-
sive speech delays. In simpler
terms, they started talking later.
The researchers saw no delays
in gestures, body language or
social interactions, but the abil-
ity to form sounds into words
came slower among the phone
holders. Those children were at
or below the 10th percentile for
speech at 18 months.
Catherine Birken, a staff pedi-
atrician at the Hospital for Sick
Children and senior author of
the study, acknowledges several
limitations of the work. First and
foremost, the study describes
only a correlation between
device time and language devel-
opment, and as all web-reading
parents should know, correlation
does not imply causation. “This
study is a first step that requires
replication,” says Birken, “and
other study designs to examine
causation.”
53 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
Kristen Copeland, a pedia-
trician at Cincinnati Children’s
Hospital Medical Center who
was not involved with this
research, says studies like this
one help correct the mistaken
belief many parents hold that
children learn from screens. “In
fact, all evidence points to the
contrary, especially for children
under 30 months,” she says. She
notes that the speech delays
observed in this study could
also be due to parents replacing
more language-enriching activi-
ties with devices.
Also, the researchers did not
observe what the children were
doing with their smartphones,
or whether they were using them
alone or with their parents. So
there is no knowing, based on
this data, if the activity makes a
difference in the risk of language
delays. This information is
crucial for determining whether
the link is causal, says Birken,
who notes that more studies
on handheld screen devices,
including their potential bene-
fits, are needed.
Copeland acknowledges what
we’re up against. “Screens are
compelling,” she says. “So it
takes willpower and intention to
not expose children or ourselves
to them.”
W E E K E N D
CULTURE, TRAVEL AND OTHER GOOD NEWS

NEWSWEEK 54 JUNE 16, 2017

 THE PLACE TO BE
Omachi, Japan
A new festival turns its rural
setting into contemporary art
Y
ou can’t miss the vast yellow circles,
painted across roads, walls and rooftops,
in this tiny hamlet in rural Japan. They
radiate outward, as if pinpointing a
target—but a target for whom? For art lovers, as it
turns out. Rather than the predictable white walls of
a city gallery, this contemporary art festival, opening
June 4, is using a remote corner of Nagano prefecture
as its backdrop.
The inaugural Japan Alps Arts Festival showcases
36 artworks scattered across 565 square kilometers
(218 square miles) of lakeshores, hot spring onsen
resorts, mountain forests and abandoned buildings.
Works include the white curved interior of an old
mountaintop house by the Japanese collective Mé;
a former shop filled with white abstract origami
paper sculptures by Tomoko Fuse; an experiential
forest theater by Finnish artist Maaria Wirkkala;
and, of course, this yellow-painted hamlet. Covering
the façades of two empty buildings with bright
paint, creating a kind of 3-D painting, is Swiss artist
Felice Varini’s way of highlighting the shrinking
demographics of one tiny five-house community.
TSUYOSHI HONGO
NEWSWEEK
A string of other events will take place during
the 57-day festival period, including a performance
by jazz pianist Yosuke Yamashita. Akira Minagawa,
the designer behind the Japanese label Mina
Perhonen, has created nature-inspired motifs for
festival products such as bags and T-shirts. But
the focus is revitalization, as conceived by festival
director Fram Kitagawa of Tokyo’s Art Front
Gallery, the man who created the global template
for supporting declining rural communities with
art—first with the Setouchi International Art Festival
and then with the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale,
the world’s biggest outdoor art festival, held in
Niigata prefecture. “I believe the most remote and
challenging places can be transformed by art,” says
Kitagawa. “A chemical reaction is triggered, and this
helps turn them into the most interesting places.”
Rather like painting a bright yellow target on an old
wooden house. —DANIELLE DEMETRIOU
The Japan Alps Art Festival runs from June 4 to July 30;
accessible from Tokyo by an 80-minute train and one-hour
bus to Shinano-Omachi station; SHINANO-OMACHI.JP
+
COLOR FIELD:
Swiss artist Felice
Varini highlights
the shrinking
demographics
of this remote
community.
55 JUNE 16, 2017
INTERVIEW
A Recipe for Success
How architect David Rockwell and chef
Nobu Matsuhisa built their perfect restaurant
W
ALKING AROUND the newly
opened Nobu restaurant in
New York’s the financial
district after a busy lunch
service, architect David
Rockwell surveys his handiwork: On the ground
floor, marble Doric columns draw the eye up,
30 feet, to the ceiling of the lounge area. A black-
ash wood sculpture hangs above the backlit
onyx bar. In the main restaurant space below,
custom-made fabric hangs over the back of the
banquettes like draped kimonos, and an origa-
mi-inspired wooden canopy spreads across the
ceiling. Rockwell deadpans: “Not bad for a sushi
chef and a guy from Mexico.”
This grand space is the latest product of a cre-
ative relationship between Rockwell, who was
brought up in Guadalajara, Mexico, and the Japa-
nese-born chef Nobu Matsuhisa that has spanned
two decades and produced 22 restaurants in spots
from Doha, Qatar, and Melbourne, Australia, to
Hong Kong and Dallas. “I think secretly Nobu
wanted to be an architect, and I’ve always wanted
to be a chef. It’s a very deep connection,” says
Rockwell of their partnership. Matsuhisa concurs:
“We’ve grown together.”
It’s easy to imagine the two men hitting it
off when they first met in the 1990s at a City-
meals-on-Wheels charity event in New York
that Rockwell had organized. They share a low-
key and affable nature. Rockwell gives me a
tour of the New York space dressed in a simple
BY
TOM MORRIS black T-shirt. Matsuhisa, whom I speak to at his
@thosmorris restaurant on Park Lane in London, is smiley
NEWSWEEK 56 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
and welcoming. Both are already waiting for
me when I arrive early for the respective inter-
views: solicitousness slightly at odds with the
luxury super-brand each has become. Nobu is a
household name, and the Rockwell Group is a
250-strong architecture and design firm known
for its global work with W hotels, the Hyatt’s
Andaz properties and co-working space Neue-
house in Los Angeles and New York. But with its
grand design, Nobu Downtown has the ego that
both figures seem to lack.
The new restaurant borrows a lot from the
one it has replaced: the pair’s original Tribeca
location, which opened in 1994 and closed in
March. Its closure marked a kind of end for a
restaurant that transformed fine dining in the
1990s. Matsuhisa had spent time working in
Peru and blended his experience there with
Japanese culinary traditions, creating—and he
hates the word—a fusion of cultures that was
unheard of on the food scene in those days,
however ubiquitous it has become since. His
first restaurant opened in Beverly Hills in 1987.
Robert De Niro liked it so much, he implored
Matsuhisa to open a site in New York. There,
RYAN CHRISTOPHE R JON ES FOR NEWSWEE K
Matsuhisa’s business partner, restaurateur Drew
Nieporent, introduced him to Rockwell.
The two set about creating something new in
the food world. “When the Tribeca restaurant
opened, it looked unlike any other restaurant.
The food was unlike any other cuisine,” says
Rockwell. Nobu’s design mirrored its smart-
casual, East-meets-West food. “Luxury dining
was all about tablecloths and two and a half
 +
A FINE PAIRING:
Matsuhisa and
Rockwell at
the new Nobu
Downtown.
 +
NOW AND ZEN:
With its grand
design, Nobu
Downtown has
an ego that
Rockwell and
Matsuhisa
seem to lack.

hours. Nobu’s luxury dining was about scorched-

ash tables, an hour-and-a-half dinner, and you
get the other hour back to do what you want.
There was a redefinition of luxury.”
The partnership between the two men, how-
ever, was not without its problems. Both sepa-
rately—and fondly, I should point out—recall one
particular fracas concerning a step in the Tri-
beca restaurant. Rockwell had added a platform
down one side of the restaurant to help visually
break up the space, against Matsuhisa’s wishes.
“You can’t have customers walking up one step
to get to their booth, drinking and having a nice
time, and then leaving and forgetting the step,”
explains Matsuhisa, who visited the site midway
through construction and spotted it. “I had said
‘flat.’ Then, one day, I saw this step, so we had
a fight.” Matsuhisa won the argument, and the
platform was never built. “It was an interesting
moment because we’ve learned to listen to each
other,” adds Rockwell. He gestures around the
new restaurant with an outstretched arm. “You
can see here, there are no levels.”
Collaboration has been a central theme in
Rockwell’s career. His next partnership with
Diller Scofidio + Renfro—the firm behind the

NEWSWEEK 58 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 High Line in New York and the Broad art museum
in Los Angeles—is the Shed, a vast cultural insti-
tution housing spaces for visual art, performance
and music currently under construction in Hud-
son Yards, a 28-acre redevelopment project in
on the West Side of Manhattan. The eight-story
building, which Rockwell first sketched out with
Liz Diller in Venice in 2008 over bellinis, has a
roof that retracts to reveal a “shed” used for exhi-
bitions and performances. Though they meet up
several times a week to discuss everything from
design to content, Rockwell admits that he and
Diller are not an obvious pair: “She comes from
the academic world; her early career was about
theory, and mine was about practice,” he says,
but like the difference in his and Matsuhisa’s
backgrounds, he finds that juxtaposition exciting.
“THE SUSHI BAR IS A STAGE,
RYAN CHRISTOPHER JONES FOR NEWSWEEK (2)
AND NOBU THE LEADING MAN.”
“Collaborating doesn’t work when you have two
people obsessing over the same thing,” he says.
But Rockwell has more than one way of
approaching architecture, and the Shed’s mov-
able elements seem to come out of another part
of Rockwell’s portfolio: his interest in theater,
choreography and performance. In recent years,
he has edged into designing sets for Broadway
shows, including Falsettos, Hairspray, She Loves
Me (for which he won a Tony) and, this sum-
mer, two open-air Shakespeare plays in New
York’s Central Park. Rockwell’s passion for the-
ater design is palpable as he gleefully whips out
his phone to scroll through images of the half-
finished Julius Caesar set. Tellingly, his website’s
bio mentions his Tony before any other award.
Perhaps this is what first attracted him to
working with Matsuhisa, in whose restaurants
the sushi bar is a stage, and Matsuhisa the lead-
ing man. In many ways, Rockwell is a director
of a Nobu play. This was particularly evident in
Rockwell’s design of the first Nobu Hotel in Las
Vegas in 2013. Enter Nobu-san stage left: The
brand he had worked hard to build was present
in his trademark friendly welcome—guests are
greeted with a chorus of the traditional Japanese
“Irasshaimasu” hello—and the relative simplicity
of its Asian design and use of natural materials,
which was at odds with the ostentatious casino
glitz of Las Vegas. Matsuhisa also selected art-
work for the rooms. “Think about every luxury
hotel—there’s no Mr. Four Seasons, there’s no
Mr. Mandarin Oriental. There’s no personality,
NEWSWEEK
so we tried to bring Nobu’s personality forward
as much as possible,” says Rockwell.
Yet, beneficially perhaps, there are no con-
tracts between these two stars. Later this year,
Nobu Hotels will undergo rapid expansion, open-
ing sites in London (see below), the Saudi capital
of Riyadh and the island of Ibiza, off the coast of
Spain, with more to follow in the next 12 months.
Rockwell has not been involved in them. What
does that say about their partnership? “Well, the
good news is that I’m very confident about our
relationship. I understand there are economic
realities, geographic realities and time issues,”
he admits. “It makes Nobu and I appreciate each
other, when we go off and have flings.”
The chef also describes Rockwell in spousal
terms. “In the beginning, it’s all ‘Oh I love you,’
but after a couple of years...” Matsuhisa says, and
then pauses before continuing: “David’s a creator,
and he always brings new influences. That’s why
we have a good relationship.” More than 23 years
later, this is still a fusion that works.
Nobu Downtown is open now at 195 Broadway, New York City;
ROCKWELLGROUP.COM, NOBURESTAURANTS.COM
Meanwhile, in London...
IT’S A BIG YEAR FOR BRAND NOBU.
In early July, the long-awaited Nobu Hotel
Shoreditch will open in London. Architects Ron
Arad and Ben Adams worked on the design of
the 150-bedroom site, which will also include
a 240-seat Nobu restaurant. The outpost is
tucked away near Old Street roundabout, as
close to the City as it is to Shoreditch. Isn’t that
a bit of a leap from Nobu’s two existing spots in
the more exclusive area of Mayfair? Build it, and
they will come, says Matsuhisa: “That’s what
we’re trying to do. We’re in a lucky position
because the Nobu brand is on six continents,
with 2,000 people working for it. My customers
NOBU HOTE L SHORED ITCH
are world travelers. They trust our food, and
they trust our quality.” The hotel is the fifth in
the group and precedes new sites opening in six
different cities over the next 12 months.
NOBUHOTELSHOREDITCH.COM
59 J U N E 1 6 , 2017
 ILLUMINATING
WOMEN IN
THE MEDIEVAL
WORLD
By Christine Sciacca
Getty, out June 20,
$25 (£18)

PERCEPTION of women’s lives

in the medieval period is far
from fully drawn—the stories
passed down through the ages
have frequently cast them in
roles of prettiness and passivity,
rescued from the jaws of
dragons, cloistered in convents
and royal courts, spending their
days quietly as mute wives and
mothers. But this month, a
new book by Christine Sciacca,
published to coincide with an
exhibition at the Getty Center in
Los Angeles, brings a different
perspective, revealing some of
the nuance and variety of their
lives. Illuminating Women in
the Medieval World draws on
text and images from the Getty
Manuscript Collection (where
Sciacca is assistant curator),
as well as private archives, to
depict the lives of women of the
period: from saints to harlots,
damsels to patrons—some of
them powerful enough to have
commissioned illuminated
work themselves. It makes for
a fascinating collection—from
Saint Hedwig of Silesia to
the Cult of the Virgin Mary,
Bathsheba, Judith and Jael,
and this particularly intriguing
depiction from about 1500
of a French noblewoman,
entitled Denise Poncher Before
a Vision of Death, by the
wonderfully named “Master of
the Chronique scandaleuse.”
COFFEE TABLE Here are women from England

No Handmaidens Here
to Ethiopia, rich, poor, laborers,
GE T T Y PUBLICATIONS

lovers, all of them magnificent,

multifaceted and richly drawn.

Secret lives of ancient women Together, they let the light in on

these long-shadowed lives.
—LAURA BARTON

NEWSWEEK 60 JUNE 16, 2017

 IN THEIR WORDS
Magic Carpet Ride Arundhati Roy captures
India’s chaotic beauty in her second novel
ARUNDHATI ROY LIKES
to wander at night in the
old city of Delhi, near her
home, and pay heed to
the street folk who survive
there among palaces,
shrines, temples, mosques
and cemeteries. “People
are just shoved into the
crevices of these crumbling
places,” says Roy. She
started to think that she
had to find a way to make
the unseen visible. “What
I wanted to do,” she says,
“was to write a book in
which I never walked
past anybody.”
Two decades after
her sensational Booker
Prize–winning debut, The
God of Small Things, the
Indian author—better
MAYANK AUSTEN SOOFI
known in recent years as
a controversial essayist
and political campaigner—
has finally come home
to fiction. Her second
novel, The Ministry of
Utmost Happiness, moves
from an informal family
of outsiders clustered in
an Old Delhi graveyard to
the brutal insurgency in
distant Kashmir, weaving
the lives of her characters
into a single narrative. It
is a war story, a love story
and a group portrait of a
divided nation. The novel
starts with the hijra Anjum,
part of India’s transgender
community, unrolling
a Persian rug in the city
graveyard. Meanwhile,
in Kashmir, a triangle of
love and rivalry connects
former college pals: Musa, a
guerrilla; Naga, a journalist;
and Tilo, a South Indian
activist whose mixed
background—with parents
from different classes
and religions—resembles
the author’s.
The novel illustrates the
+ a vast canvas,” she says.
INDIAN SUMMER:
Two decades after
her debut, Roy
finally returns
to fiction.
NEWSWEEK
ways in which a divided
society can constrain
people. If Anjum has to
cross the fault lines of
gender, Tilo’s position as
a hard-to-place outsider
strands her on what
Roy calls “the border of
caste.” “Everyone has
borders running through
them,” the author says of
her characters.
For Roy, it is impossible
to write about India without
addressing its imbalances.
Even today, she says,
“everyone is a walking bar
code,” their social markers
visible. “To write about
India without writing
about caste would be like
ignoring apartheid’s legacy
in South Africa. These
divisions form the fabric
of our lives.” But for all its
rigid social constructions,
the country also contains
a chaos that makes for
beautiful fiction. “India is
“Everything can coexist,
anarchy as well as order.”
Now 55, Roy has made
her admirers wait for this
tumultuous, tragicomic
story that honors those
who stray across the
lines. In the two decades
since publishing her first
novel, she wrote essays
and reportage that flayed
injustices both local and
global, from the negative
ecological impact of big
hydroelectric projects
in India to support for
National Security Agency
whistleblower Edward
Snowden. But she started
to lose faith in the power
61 JUNE 16, 2017
of polemic. “It was about
10 years ago,” she recalls,
“that I started feeling
that all these urgent
interventions weren’t
making a difference.” In
Kashmir, she heard stories
of terror and repression
that she says weren’t
“possible to express...
solely with footnotes and
facts and with evidentiary
backup.” So she decided
to go about her activism
in another way. “Fiction
seemed to be the right
thing to do for me. It
sounds peculiar to say
this, but it isn’t like I make
decisions…. The choice is
made for me somehow.”
Her return to fiction,
however, doesn’t mean
that her reportage and
activism were for nothing.
“I couldn’t write the
kind of fiction I write with
a quick turnover,” she
says. “All the journeys,
and all the writings, and
all the things that I have
done, very much form the
underpinning of the book.”
—BOYD TONKIN
THE MINISTRY
OF UTMOST
HAPPINESS
By Arundhati Roy
Knopf ($29) and
Hamish Hamilton
(£19), out now

DIRECTOR ROGER MICHELL
has been quoted as saying of
the novel My Cousin Rachel
that its creator, Daphne du
Maurier, “lights her scenes
like Caravaggio and writes
them like Hitchcock.” So
how to account for his
film version, one without
menace or shadows or
the voluptuous morbidity
that’s the hallmark of
gothic melodrama? It’s true
that du Maurier’s novel––
which the English author
of Rebecca and The Birds
published in 1951—has its
sluggish patches. But it also
has a cumulative gloomy
undertow, and it’s a fine
example of melodrama, a
much-derided form that has
frequently served to express
what can only be called
feminist concerns.
Essentially, it’s a
novel about the fear
and unworldliness that
underpins traditional
masculinity, as well as
the sexual jealousy that
turns it into a toxic brew.
The story is told by Philip
Ashley, a 24-year-old orphan
who has been brought up
by his cousin Ambrose
on the latter’s estate in
Cornwall. Together, they
live a life utterly without
women, comfortable in
their moldering, masculine
domesticity. When
Ambrose’s weak constitution
NEWSWEEK
+
FAMILY PLOT?
Weisz as the
mysterious
title character in
My Cousin Rachel.
THE SCREENING ROOM
Widow’s Pique Rachel Weisz has
her way with classic melodrama
in My Cousin Rachel
sends him to Italy, in search
of warmer weather, he
meets and marries a half-
Italian, half-English widow
named Rachel.
At first, the letters that
Ambrose sends home to
Philip speak of a newfound
happiness, and the younger
man is filled with jealousy.
But when Ambrose’s letters
turn to pleas for help—and
claim that Rachel is out to
destroy him—Philip sets
out for Italy, only to arrive
after Ambrose has died.
Believing Rachel to be
an evil schemer, Philip is
unprepared for the gentle
woman who eventually
62 JUNE 16, 2017
shows up in Cornwall.
Every suspicion Philip
harbors against Rachel has a
rational explanation that he,
drawn to fantasies about the
duplicitous ways of women,
initially disregards. In the
book, he is a fool but not
incapable of charm, and as
his suspicions give way to
infatuation, Rachel falls for
him too. But the suspicions
don’t go away, and time and
again, Rachel, a woman
with all the worldliness
and maturity Philip lacks,
finds herself wounded.
The women who read du
Maurier’s book no doubt
recognized the type he
represents: the puppy dog
who believes his experience
on his own pitiful turf
amounts to a worldview.
Michell, who had his
first big hit with 1999’s
Notting Hill, is no stranger
to psychological subtext
or adapting novels: He
helmed the film version
of Ian McEwan’s Enduring
Love and Jane Austen’s
Persuasion, for TV. But here,
FOX SE ARCHLIGHT/ NICOL A DOVE
he races through half the
novel in roughly 40 minutes.
Instead of developing the
underlying emotional
themes that would create
the much-needed tension,
Michell resorts to montages

that reduce each incident to
mere pictorialism. There’s
no rhythm or momentum to
the filmmaking, and when
the climax arrives, it is flat
and prosaic, robbed of any
tragic inevitability.
The gothic melodramas
in which du Maurier
specialized exude an
enveloping sense of death;
youth and romance don’t
stand much of a chance.
Reading My Cousin Rachel is
like being in a room slowly
filling with the smell of
rotting orchids. Michell,
who not only directed
THE MOTH
but wrote the screenplay,
establishes a tone in which
fatalism mingles with the
characters’ flaws. Sam
Claflin, who looks like a
peevish Daniel Brühl, is a
charmless Philip. He lays on
the entitled callowness so
thickly that the question of
whether Rachel is the vixen
he thinks she is fails to have
any suspense. In fact, you
begin to hope that she is evil,
if only to give the little prig
what’s coming to him.
The only reason to see
My Cousin Rachel is Rachel
Weisz as Rachel. But what
else is new? She is generally
terrific, as she was in two
very different films last year,
The Light Between Oceans and
the underrated courtroom
drama Denial. Here, she
radiates both pliancy and
a stubborn determination
to live life on her terms,
all judgments be damned.
Weisz, superbly, captures the
frustration of a woman who
shows tenderness to a young
man and then has to live with
the frustrated realization that
she’s fallen for a boy.
Du Maurier’s novel was
melodrama infused with
the poisoned suspicions of
male-female relations.
Weisz does full justice to
the tragic realism inside
the contrivance.
—charles taylor
Released June 9 in the U.S. and U.K.;
worldwide releases until Sept. 7.
NEWSWEEK
ANNIVERSARY
Novelist Meg Wolitzer
on 20 Years of the Moth
WHEN I WAS FIRST asked
to be a storyteller at
the Moth, a U.S.-based
nonprofit that sends
people out in front of
audiences to tell their true
stories, I was a little leery.
The word storyteller made
me uneasy; I pictured
myself sitting somberly
with a group of people
in a circle, wearing a
special storyteller robe
and holding a rain stick.
But, of course, telling
a story at the Moth is
nothing like that.
It wasn’t that I was
afraid of standing before
an audience. I’m a novelist,
so reading aloud to a
roomful of people (or even
a handful of people and a
loud bookstore cappuccino
machine) is something I
know how to do. But at the
Moth, you can’t hold notes.
While the artistic director
had been working with me
on my piece, helping me
turn it from an anecdote
into a fully realized story,
I was still hung up on the
memorization part.
The Moth, which was
founded by writer George
Dawes Green 20 years ago
this month, has become an
international phenomenon,
with an award-winning
radio show, a hugely
popular podcast and a plot
twist on Girls. (Its new
collection of stories, The
Moth Presents: All These
Wonders, was published
in April.)
At a Moth evening,
which is often a lively and
raucous event, you might
find a celebrity, a refugee,
a former convict, a mother.
You never know who or
what will be in the mix.
I chose a story from
my adolescence, which to
me remains a startlingly
vivid time. I tried hard to
memorize it, but in the
days leading up to the big
night, whenever I banished
my husband from the living
room and stood there with
a timer, practicing, I found
that I was leaving out
63 JUNE 16, 2017
entire chunks of the story.
I started to panic.
Then I realized that
instead of focusing on
memorizing, I should
focus on memory. I
simply remembered the
experience of being at
summer camp in the
1970s, feeling young and
excited and open. And
once I really felt it all over
again, I found the words.
They weren’t the exact
same words as during my
last rehearsal, but they
weren’t supposed to be.
A Moth story is like a
living thing: It changes
and moves.
Finally onstage under
a spotlight in front of an
enormous audience,
I was like a better-coiffed,
much older version of
that girl I’d been at camp.
To anyone who is thinking
of getting up and telling
a story, I would say, What
you need to do, most of
all, is feel like yourself.
Once you do that, the
words will come.
And also, as it turns
out, the applause. I left
the stage gratified, hot-
faced, exorcised, thrilled,
thinking, I would do this
again. Hell, I would even
do it wearing a special
storyteller robe.
For information about events, see
THEMOTH.ORG
+
TELLING TALES:
You never know
what to expect
at a Moth event.
 PA RT I N G S H O T
‘Mali, 1988’ Harry Gruyaert
BY HARRY GRUYAERT is a Magnum
MATTHEW SWEET photographer, but he doesn’t do
@DrMatthewSweet that thing for which the agency’s
chosen ones are so often
celebrated: narrative. “There is
no story,” he’s said of his photos.
“It’s just a question of shapes
and light.”
Precisely why this boy is
sprawled on the balustrade or
what is under the gingham sheet
is therefore a mystery. What we
do know about this image is that
we are in Mopti, a town
on the banks of the Niger River
in Mali. People catch fish here
and dry it. For four months of
the year, the area floods,
“THERE IS NO STORY.
IT’S A QUESTION OF
SHAPES AND LIGHT.”
NEWSWEEK 64
turning the town into an
archipelago and obliging the
inhabitants to get around
on stone causeways. It must
be dramatic. There must be
stories here. But Gruyaert has
carefully excluded anything that
threatens to look like an event.
He was born in 1941 in
Antwerp, Belgium, worked as a
fashion photographer in Paris
and took his first important
pictures when he was in London
and obsessing over American
pop art. He fiddled with his
TV dial until the figures on
the screen—film stars, news
broadcasters, winners of the
Crufts dog show, astronauts—
were reduced to fizzing blocks
of color. Then he photographed
“Harry Gruyaert: Western and Eastern Light” is at the Michael Hoppen Gallery, 3 Jubilee Place,
London SW3, until June 27. Archival pigment print, edition of eight, 33.3 x 50 centimeters,
£2,520 ($3,240), including frame and VAT; MICHAELHOPPENGALLERY.COM
JUNE 16, 2017
them. For the following decade,
he lived out of a Volkswagen
van, stowing his equipment in
the back and his prints with
friends—well, girlfriends—in
various parts of the world.
One of the reasons he joined
Magnum in 1981 was to relieve
the duties of this scattered band
of archivists.
He’s often compared to
Edward Hopper—and, true, he
likes Los Angeles gas stations at
the magic hour, as well as lone
figures in departure lounges and
cinema doorways—but I think he
sees the world more as Matisse
saw it in those late years when
he dropped his paintbrush and
picked up the paper and scissors.
Here, in this image, fields of HARRY GRUYAERT/MAGNUM/MICHAEL HOPPEN GALLE RY
color gather before our eyes.
As if sky and ground and river
were flat forms overlapping in
the frame. A band of ashen gray,
a block of toothpaste blue, the
alkaline white of the foreground,
on which two forms, one black,
one red, have settled.
The Longines Master Collection