Trump’s Big Dump/ Fleming Is Forever

THETHE NUTS

AND BOLTSOF HOW WE

WILL FEEDTHE WORLD

30.10.2015—06.11.2015

HELPSAVETHE‘WOW’

These giants of the animal kingdom need help. Despite their strength and cunning they’re no match for a poacher’s rifle. For 50 years WWF has been securing protected areas worldwide, but these aren’t enough to stop the killing. To disrupt the sophisticated criminal gangs supplying animal parts to lucrative illegal markets, we are working with governments to toughen law enforcement. We’re also working with consumers to reduce the demand for unlawful wildlife products. Help us look after the world where you live at panda.org/50

FEATURES DEPARTMENTS

FOR MORE HEADLINES,GO TO NEWSWEEK.COM

1NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Newsweek (ISSN2052-1081), is published weekly except one week in January, July, August andOctober. Newsweek (EMEA) is published by Newsweek Ltd (part of the IBT Media Group Ltd), 25 CanadaSquare, Canary Wharf, London E14 5LQ, UK. Printed by Quad/Graphics Europe Sp z o.o., Wyszkow, Poland

For Article Reprints, Permissions and Licensing www.IBTreprints.com/Newsweek

30 Sow What?The future of farming is already here; the planet

just needs to embrace it. by Betsy Isaacson

40 Trump’s Big DumpThe mogul made his name in Atlantic City but

left ruins behind. by Nina Burleigh

19 EnvironmentBe Nice to Ice

20 MyanmarThe Generals’ Election

22 PoliticsA Dicey Proposition

26 ChileMurder, He Wrote

29 ConventionalWisdom Watch

N EW WOR L D

46 ScienceFrom Breakfast inStyrofoam to Styro-foam for Breakfast

48 StartupsThe Billion-Dollar Mistake

50 MedicineClinical Racism

54 HealthHe’s Got Brainon the Brain

DOWN T I M E

58 MusicJoanna Newsom’s High Dive

62 AlcoholBurden of Proof

65 MoviesTwo QuestionsWith HelenaBonham Carter

66 BooksFleming Is Forever

68 Rewind25 Years

B I G S HOT S

4 Bethlehem,West BankTears of Rage

6 Aleppo, SyriaRubble-Rouser

8 Gilze-Rijen,NetherlandsCSI: Ukraine

10 San AntonioTwo-faced

PAG E ON E

12 IsraelThe Way ofthe Knife

16 RussiaPutin’s OtherMuslim FrontM

AR

K M

AK

ELA

/RE

UT

ER

S

NOVEMBER 6, 2015 VOL.165 NO.16

+CASINO COMEDOWN:

Whatever DonaldTrump says about

Atlantic City now, hislegacy as a businessman

is inextricably linkedto its rise and fall.

COVER CREDIT: ILLUSTRATION BY BILL MAYER

DEPUTY EDITOR

Bob RoeCONTRIBUTING DESIGN DIRECTOR

Priest + GraceMANAGING EDITOR

Kira BindrimEUROPEAN EDITOR

Matt McAllesterINTERNATIONAL EDITOR

Claudia Parsons

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Jim Impoco

EUROPEAN EDITIONEDITORIAL

NEWS EDITOR Barney GuitonDEPUTY NEWS EDITOR Lucy Draper

REPORTERS Felicity CaponConor GaffeyMirren GiddaJack MooreDamien Sharkov

SPECIAL CORRESPONDENTS Robert ChalmersHarry EyresNick FoulkesAdam LeBor

Owen Matthews

ART + PHOTO

ART DIRECTOR Michael FrielDESIGNER Jessica Fitzgerald

PHOTO DIRECTOR Shaminder DulaiPHOTO EDITOR Jared T. Miller

CONTRIBUTING PHOTO EDITOR Chris AllbrittonCONTRIBUTING DIGITAL DESIGNER Tuomas Korpijaakko

PRODUCTION MANAGER Helen J. Russell CONTRIBUTING DIGITAL IMAGING SPECIALIST Katy Lyness

CO-FOUNDER, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Etienne UzacCO-FOUNDER, CHIEF CONTENT OFFICER

Johnathan DavisMANAGING DIRECTOR, EMEA

Dev Pragad

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS

Victoria Bekiempis, Ryan Bort, Jonathan Broder, Nina Burleigh, Janine Di Giovanni,Kurt Eichenwald, Jessica Firger, Abigail Jones, Max Kutner, Seung Lee, Gogo Lidz, Douglas Main,

Leah McGrath Goodman, Jack Martinez, Paula Mejia, Polly Mosendz, Alexander Nazaryan,Bill Powell, Michele Richinick, Winston Ross, Zoë Schlanger, Zach Schonfeld, Jeff Stein,

Lauren Walker, John Walters, Lucy Westcott, Taylor Wofford, Stav Ziv

GENERAL MANAGER

Dave Martin

PUBLISHED BY

Newsweek LTD, a division of IBT Media Group LTD

Elijah Wolfson, R.M. Schneiderman, Matt Cooper, Cady Drell,Grant Burningham, Jackie Bischof, John Seeley, Kevin Dolak, Teri Wagner Flynn

CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

ADVERTISING

SENIOR SALES DIRECTOR Chantal MambouryGROUP ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Una Reynolds

COMMERCIAL DIRECTOR Jeremy MakinSALES DIRECTOR Gemma Bell

SENIOR COMMERCIAL MANAGER Pierce Cook-Anderson

MARKETING AND CIRCULATION

SUBSCRIPTION MARKETING MANAGER Tom NicholsSUBSCRIPTION FULFILMENT MANAGER Samantha Rhodes

NEWSSTAND MANAGER Kim Sermon BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT MANAGER Tom Rendell

WITH A TRIAL SUBSCRIPTION OFFER

WEEKLY MAGAZINE INCLUDES DELIVERY DAILY NEWSLETTER UNLIMITED WEB ACCESS

IPAD / IPHONE APP ACCESS

SAVE UP TO 75%

Visit Newsweek.com/subscribe

BIGSHOTS

ISRAEL

MUSA AL-SHAER

Tearsof Rage

Bethlehem,West Bank—

A member of theIsraeli security forces

watches as Palestin-ian stone throwers

run away from teargas during clashes on

October 13 in Beth-lehem. A Palestinian

was killed in theclashes, Palestinian

medical sources said.At least eight Israelis

and dozens of Pal-estinians have been

killed in a series ofstabbings and otherattacks and protests

by Palestinians,and the Israeli re-

sponse to them.

MU

SA

AL-

SH

AE

R/A

FP/G

ET

TY

MA

MU

N E

BU

OM

ER

/AN

AD

OLU

AG

EN

CY/

GE

TT

Y

BIGSHOTS

SYRIA

Rubble-RouserAleppo, Syria—Rescuers use a carjack to free a manpinned under rubblefollowing Russianairstrikes on Octo-ber 13. Russia beganbombing in late Sep-tember after a requestfrom Syrian PresidentBashar al-Assad formilitary support.Within days of thefirst strikes, the Krem-lin boasted it took outnearly a dozen ISISand Al-Qaeda targets,but the U.S. and othercritics accused Presi-dent Vladimir Putin’smilitary of also target-ing other rebel groupsopposed to Assad.U.S. Secretary of StateJohn Kerry warnedthat “propping upAssad will ultimatelyfail and also unfortu-nately lead to morebloodshed, more refu-gees, more extremism and more jihadis.”

MAMUN EBU OMER

BIGSHOTS

NETHERLANDS

PE

TE

R D

EJO

NG

/AP

CSI:UkraineGilze-Rijen,Netherlands—Journalists photo-graph part of the re-constructed fuselageof downed MalaysiaAirlines Flight 17,after the October 13presentation of theDutch Safety Board’sfinal report on thecrash. The aircraftwas shot down overUkrainian airspacelast year, killing all298 people on board.The report foundthat a Russian-builtBuk missile, firedfrom the ground interritory held by Rus-sian-backed separat-ists, had torn off theforward section of theplane. Russia deniedany involvement andhas vetoed a U.N.resolution to createan independentinternational tribunalto investigate the in-cident and prosecutethose responsible.

PETER DEJONG

BIGSHOTS

U.S.A.

DA

RR

EN

AB

ATE

/RE

UT

ER

S

Two FacedSan Antonio—Democratic presiden-tial candidate HillaryClinton poses for apicture with supporterMaria Anita Monsiv-aiz, who has her hairstyled with Clinton’simage, at the end of a“Latinos for Hillary”rally in Texas on Oc-tober 15. The formersecretary of state wasdue to testify beforethe House committeeexamining the 2012attack on the U.S. dip-lomatic compound inBenghazi, Libya, amidgrowing criticismfrom Democrats thatRepublicans’ primarygoal in setting up thecommittee wasto discredit Clintonas a presidential candidate.

DARREN ABATE

RUSSIA ENVIRONMENT ISRAEL MYANMAR POLITICS CHILE

P A G E O N E

12NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

ALMOST 20 years ago, a Jewish extremist namedYigal Amir fired two hollow-point bullets into theback of Yitzhak Rabin as he left a peace rally in TelAviv, leaving him fatally wounded. Political assas-sinations don’t always alter the future of a coun-try, but the murder of the Israeli prime ministerdelivered exactly what his assassin had prayedfor: a fatal blow to a fragile peace process, whichmany hoped might end a century of communalwarfare between Jews and Palestinians.

Since Rabin’s death, the two peoples—livingas neighbors and enemies on a land they bothclaim—have been caught in a seemingly endlesscycle of deepening hatred, failed negotiationsand growing violence. The most troubling legacyof Rabin’s assassination is how easily animositycan burst into bloodletting. The latest paroxysmoccurred in October, as more than three dozenJews and Arabs died in a series of Palestinian stab-bings and Israeli gunfire across the country, in theWest Bank and along the border fence with Gaza.

This conflict’s front lines are now anywhere

Jews and Palestinians routinely encounter oneanother—riding a bus, shopping in a market orwalking down the street. Rattled Israeli officialsare urging Jews to carry licensed firearms wher-ever they go. Other Israelis are stocking up onpepper spray and stun guns, suspicious of everyArab who lives or works among them. “How canI trust the Arab guy who is working in the super-market?” retired Major General Amnon Reshef,leader of a group of former senior officers callingfor stronger security measures, tells Newsweek. “Iconsider him my friend, but who knows what willbe in a couple of minutes?”

Palestinians are calling the current round ofviolence the third intifada, the Arabic word for“shaking off ” or rising up against Israel’s mili-tary occupation, now in its 48th year. But the firstinsurrection, which began in December 1987,never really ended. That initial round of Pales-tinian stone-throwing and mass demonstrationssubsided in 1993, after Rabin signed the Oslopeace accords, which supposedly ended the

THE WAY OF THE KNIFETwo decades after the murder of Yitzhak Rabin, the olive branch of peace has been replaced by a dagger

Additional reporting byJoshua Mitnick in Jerusalem.

BYJONATHAN BRODER

@JonathanBroder1 ANDJACK MOORE

@JFXM

13NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

AB

ED

ZA

GO

UT/

PAC

IFIC

PR

ESS

/LIG

HT

RO

CK

ET/

GE

TT

Y

+SHARP

DIFFERENCES:A Palestinianboy holds up

knives during ananti-Israel pro-test in Jabalia,

in the northernGaza Strip, on

October 16.

PAGE ONE/ISRAEL

14NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

conflict and raised hopes for a final settlement.But since Rabin’s murder, Oslo has steadilyunraveled, and the conflict has continued.

In this chronic struggle between neighbors,only the weapons have changed. With the failureof peace talks at Camp David in 2000, the samePalestinian security forces that had begun to workwith their Israeli counterparts under Oslo turnedtheir guns against them, and Hamas militantscarried out their signature suicidebombings, killing nearly 1,000 Jews.In response, Israel deployed blastwalls and barbed wire for a securitybarrier that largely sealed off the WestBank and Gaza Strip from the mainJewish population centers. Today, overfive months after Secretary of StateJohn Kerry aborted the most recentU.S. diplomatic effort, young, frus-trated Palestinians are using whateverweapons are handy—kitchen knives,screwdrivers and, in one case, a potatopeeler—in what appear to be lone wolfattacks that almost always end withthe assailant dying in a hail of Israeli gunfire.Some Palestinians have even used their cars asweapons, plowing into crowds of pedestrians.

Israeli officials blame Palestinian PresidentMahmoud Abbas for inciting the violence withhis calls to defend a sacred compound in Jeru-salem’s walled Old City—known to Muslims asHaram al-Sharif, the noble sanctuary, and to Jewsas the Temple Mount. Abbas was reacting to noisydemonstrations by Jewish extremists and right-wing Israeli lawmakers demanding a change tothe nearly 50-year-old arrangement that forbidsJews from praying at the site. The violence hascontinued despite Israeli denials of any plannedchange. “The claim that Israel is trying to changethe status quo on the Temple Mount is just a bunchof lies,” Jerusalem’s Israeli mayor, Nir Barkat, tellsNewsweek. “Unfortunately, some of the teenagersbelieve it. The wave of violence is based on that.”

Kerry is headed back to the region in a freshbid to quell the unrest. Diplomatic sources tellNewsweek the effort may involve assurances fromKing Abdullah II of Jordan, which still main-tains authority over the holy site, and possibly

“HOW CAN I TRUST THE ARABGUY WHO IS WORKING IN THESUPERMARKET? I CONSIDERHIM MY FRIEND, BUT WHOKNOWS WHAT WILL BE IN A COUPLE OF MINUTES?”

a high-profile declaration from Israel that it willnot upend the status quo.

But many believe the violence is primarily theresult of a deepening Palestinian despair over aseemingly endless occupation and the absenceof any active peace process. Mustafa Barghouti, aveteran Palestinian politician and activist, pointsto the two decades since Rabin’s assassinationas a period when the late prime minister’s suc-cessors slowed the implementation of the Osloaccords and expanded the colonization of theWest Bank, establishing unequal sets of laws forJewish settlers and Palestinians, among otherthings. Barghouti says the violence is also a revoltagainst Abbas, who has appeared powerless tostop Jewish settlements and end the occupation.“They are challenging the political leadership,which has failed to produce what they’re asking

for, which is independence and freedom,” Bar-ghouti told the BBC. “They’ve been promisedthat negotiations would lead to a solution for 20years now, and all they see is more oppressionand a system of apartheid.”

Such pessimism is in sharp contrast to thehopes that buoyed both Israelis and Palestinianson September 13, 1993, when Rabin and Palestin-ian leader Yasir Arafat shook hands on the WhiteHouse lawn after signing the Oslo accords. Thehistoric agreement was the first between Jewsand Palestinians to end their conflict. It includedmutual recognition and a schedule for Israeli troopwithdrawals from the Gaza Strip and parts of theWest Bank and opened a path to a broader peacebetween Israel and the Arab world. President BillClinton, who presided over the ceremony, praisedthe two leaders for their “brave gamble that thefuture can be better than the past.”

Just how much of a gamble Rabin and Arafatwere taking quickly became clear. Extremists onboth sides tried repeatedly to scuttle the accords.Hamas bombers killed scores of Israelis onbuses and in cafés, rejecting any deal that didn’t

15NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

ALI

HA

SS

AN

/AN

AD

OLU

AG

EN

CY/

GE

TT

Y

CANNON FODDER:Palestinians carry

an injured protest-er after clashes

with Israeli secu-rity forces duringa demonstration

near Bureij in theGaza Strip.

+

replace Israel with an Islamic state. On the Israeliside, right-wing settlers and religious extremistsopposed any deal that ceded any Palestinian ter-ritories, which they believed God had promisedto the Jews. In increasingly vitriolic demonstra-tions, they portrayed Rabin as a terrorist, a Naziand a traitor. Some, like Amir, believed they hada religious duty to kill Rabin to save Israel. And tothis day, the assassin, now serving a life sentencefor his crime, remains unrepentant.

At the forefront of the anti-Rabin demon-strations was Benjamin Netanyahu, then thenew leader of the right-wing Likud opposition.Instead of speaking out against the demoniza-tion of the Israeli prime minister, Netanyahufed the country’s anxiety over security in hopesof deposing him.

Today, Netanyahu is in his fourth term as theleader of Israel, the clear beneficary (and agent)of the country’s steady drift to the right. Ana-lysts believe this is largely because of securityfears and a growing Israeli conviction that thePalestinians are too politically fractured to signand execute a peace deal. Many analysts believethese divisions are one of the reasons why Ara-fat turned down what the Israelis called a gen-erous offer to withdraw from much of the West

Bank during the Camp David negotiations.But Israeli leaders since Rabin haven’t made

the peace process any easier. After Netanyahuwas elected for his second term in 2009, herefused to endorse an offer by his predecessor,Ehud Olmert, to withdraw from 93 percent of theterritory. Abbas also complains that Netanyahuhas continued to expand existing Jewish settle-ments during peace talks, which some analystshave compared to two people negotiating overa pizza while one of them eats it. More recently,the Israeli leader made a new demand: that thePalestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state.Abbas says that would disenfranchise Israel’snon-Jewish Palestinian citizens, who make up 25percent of the country’s population. Besides, Pal-estinian officials point out, they formally recog-nized Israel in 1988 and again in the Oslo accords.

During Netanyahu’s most recent nationalcampaign in March, he disavowed the two-statesolution, a move that angered President BarackObama but that analysts say helped him winthe election. The prime minister now leads themost right-wing government in the country’shistory, with key coalition partners demandingthe annexation of the West Bank. Meanwhile,Rabin’s Labor Party has been unable to win

over a majority of Israelis, wholargely blame the recent violenceon what they see as a blind Pales-tinian hatred of Jews and give littleimportance, as Rabin did, to thecorrosive effects of the occupation.

Reflecting on the 20th anniver-sary of Rabin’s death, Roberta FahnSchoffman, an American-bornpolitical consultant living in Jeru-salem, offers a grim assessment ofits impact. “Yigal Amir murderedboth the man and the vision for apeaceful resolution to this tragicconflict,” she wrote in an onlinecommentary for the Israel PolicyForum, a think tank that advocatesfor a two-state solution. “Withoutanother leader like Rabin, willing tostand up even in these horrendousdays and state loudly the need for apolitical process...we will see moreacts of terror, we will build cementobstacles to block off Palestinianvillages, we will call upon moreIsraeli civilians to arm themselveswhenever they leave their homesand we will watch more childrenon both sides become both victims and martyrs.”

PAGE ONE/RUSSIA

16NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Syria, but by backing Assad’s mainly Alawitearmy, as well as its Shiite allies, who includeHezbollah and elite Iranian troops, he risksinflaming Sunni passions at home.

The Kremlin is deeply suspicious of indepen-dent Muslim organizations, and security ser-vices carried out a sweeping crackdown aheadof last year’s Winter Olympics in southern Rus-sia. “They consider everything and everyonethat they do not control to be an extremist,” saysHarun Sidorov, head of the National Organiza-tion of Russian Muslims, an independent Islamicmovement whose members have faced policepressure, including raids and arrests.

As many as 500,000 Muslims in Russia mayindeed sympathize with ISIS, according to a cau-tious estimate by Alexei Malashenko, an experton Islam at the Carnegie Moscow Center thinktank. “These are people who want to build a statefounded on the principles of Islam,” he says.“Many of them say ISIS is fighting for social jus-tice and for fair government. Others like the factthat it is fighting against the West.”

ISIS has mounted a slick Russian-languagerecruitment campaign that includes a maga-zine, Istok, and a dedicated propaganda chan-nel, Furat Media. According to Putin, 5,000to 7,000 people from Russia and other for-mer Soviet states, many of them Chechens,are fighting for ISIS in Syria. Earlier this year,Islamist militants in the mainly Muslim NorthCaucasus pledged their allegiance to ISIS’sleader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In response,

“ASSAD IS A heartless killer!” rages Ruslan, amiddle-aged worshipper at Moscow’s biggestmosque, just days after Russia’s dramatic entryinto Syria’s civil war in support of Syrian PresidentBashar al-Assad. “It’s a disgrace that the Kremlinis supporting his bloody regime,” he adds, as anunseasonal snowstorm obscures the mosque’sgolden domes. Another man arriving for eveningprayers, a bearded 20-something named Arslan,thinks the opposite. “Russia is doing the rightthing in backing the Syrian authorities againstISIS and other terrorists,” he says, adding thathe has heard “nothing at all” about human rightsabuses committed by Syrian government forces.

It’s hard to say what most of Russia’s esti-mated 20 million Muslims—around 14 percentof the country’s population—think about Pres-ident Vladimir Putin’s decision to take militaryaction against Islamic State militants (ISIS) andother opposition groups in Syria, but the moveis fraught with dangers. The history of Islam inRussia is one of frequent confrontation, fromthe 19th-century uprising by Muslim rebels inthe country’s North Caucasus region to the sep-aratist and then Islamist wars that devastatedChechnya in the mid-1990s and early 2000s.

Unlike Assad, who hails from the minorityAlawite sect, Russia’s Muslims overwhelminglybelong to Islam’s dominant Sunni branch. Thisis something they have in common with themyriad opposition forces battling for controlof Syria’s war-torn cities. Putin may have beenapplauded by some for seizing the initiative in

PUTIN’S WAR AT HOMERussia’s 20 million Muslims may includehundreds of thousands of ISIS supporters

BYMARC BENNETTS

@marcbennetts1

17NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Chechnya’s pro-Kremlin leader,Ramzan Kadyrov, appealed toPutin to send Chechen fightersto Syria to “destroy” what hecalled ISIS “devils.”

Muslim criticism in Russiaof Putin’s Syria adventure hasbeen largely restricted to furioussocial media posts and onlinearticles. So far, there has beenlittle sign that Russia’s Muslimsare about to take to the streetsagainst the military campaign.Both experts and government critics say thisreluctance to speak out is partly due to a fearof the possible consequences of dissent, ratherthan an indication of tacit approval. “Muslimsin Russia have been frightened into silence bythe repressive policies that have been method-ically carried out throughout Putin’s rule,” saysAirat Vakhitov, a former imam from Russia’sTatarstan region, who was arrested in 2005on what he says were trumped-up terrorism

charges in Russia. He was later released for lackof evidence and now lives abroad.

Kremlin-loyal Muslim leaders have offeredtheir unwavering support for Russia’s airstrikesin Syria. On October 2, the long-serving headof Russia’s Council of Muftis, Ravil Gainutdin,issued an urgent appeal for calm, calling on hisfellow Muslims to not “politicize” the Kremlin’sinvolvement in the conflict. Sprinkling his state-ment with verses from the Islamic holy book, A

LEX

EI

DR

UZ

HIN

IN/R

IA N

OV

OS

TI/

KR

EM

LIN

/RE

UT

ER

S

“MUSLIMS IN RUSSIA HAVEBEEN FRIGHTENED INTOSILENCE BY THE REPRESSIVEPOLICIES THAT HAVE BEENMETHODICALLY CARRIED OUTTHROUGHOUT PUTIN’S RULE.”

+HOUSE OF GOD:

Gainutdin, left, andPresident Putin

presided over theopening ceremony

of a new mosquethat can house

10,000 worship-pers in September.

PAGE ONE/RUSSIA

18NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

the Koran, Gainutdin also expressed the hopethat Russia’s military action would not lead tointerfaith strife among the global Islamic com-munity, or ummah. Gainutdin’s comments wereechoed by subordinate muftis across Russia.

The sole dissenting voice was that of NafigullaAshirov, a co-chairman of the Council of Muf-tis, who in early October told the BBC’s Rus-sian-language service that there should be noforeign “interference” in Syria’s civil war. ButAshirov, a radical figure who in 2001 expressedhis enthusiastic support for the Taliban, quicklybacked down. In subsequent interviews, herefused to comment on Russia’s airstrikes, andhe tells Newsweek he has “no opinion whatso-ever” on the subject.

While the United States says the vast majorityof Russia’s airstrikes in Syria have mainly targetedthe “moderate” opposition to Assad, on October6 the independent Syrian Observatory for HumanRights said Russian jets hit ISIS fighters near theancient city of Palmyra, where the jihadi move-ment destroyed a 2,000-year-old Roman archof triumph earlier this month. Both ISIS and theNusra Front, an Al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria thathas also been targeted by Russian missiles, havesince urged Muslims to wage jihad against Russia.

“It is likely there will be a response fromNorth Caucasus–based militants with links toISIS,” says Gregory Shvedov, editor of Cauca-sian Knot, an independent online news service.“They certainly have the capacity to set upattacks in Moscow and other big cities.”

On October 11, shortly after Newsweek spokewith Shvedov, counterterrorism agents in Mos-cow detained 12 people they said were planninga bomb attack on the city’s public transport sys-tem. Security officials said at least one of thesuspects, a Chechen, had received training at anISIS camp in Syria. But the details of the allegedbomb plot were hazy and often contradictory.The timing of the arrests—they came shortlyafter Putin had spoken on national TV aboutthe need to eliminate Russian ISIS fighters inSyria before they returned home—also sparkedspeculation that they may have been part of apropaganda operation to bolster public support for the Kremlin’s military campaign.

Whatever the truth, news of the arrests frayednerves. Although Moscow has not had an attacksince 2011, when over 30 people were killed inan Islamist suicide bombing, more than 3,000Russians have lost their lives in attacks Russiaconsiders terrorism since Putin came to powerin 2000. But if a new wave of violence is comingto Russia, there is little that counterterrorismofficials can do to prevent it, says Andrei Solda-tov, a journalist and author who is an expert onthe Russian security services. “Russia’s coun-terterrorism system was designed in the mid-2000s, and its main goal is to prevent groupsof militants from getting control over regionsor important facilities, not to prevent terroristattacks,” he tells Newsweek. He also described

security measures in place in Moscow and otherRussian cities as “largely dysfunctional.”

Back at the mosque in Moscow, a middle-agedwoman in a headscarf frowns when I ask heropinion of the Russian missiles raining downdestruction on Assad’s Sunni opponents. “Ihave very strong views on that,” she says, “but Iwouldn’t like to state them out loud.” Then shepauses. “But this is very dangerous,” she whis-pers. “Very dangerous, indeed.”

BURNED OUT: Abomb on a trolley-bus in the southerncity of Volgogradkilled 16 people inDecember 2013,before the Sochi Olympics.+

REUTERS

“THEY CERTAINLY HAVETHE CAPACITY TO SETUP ATTACKS IN MOSCOWAND OTHER BIG CITIES.”

19NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

TWO

NUMBERS

THE ANTARCTIC ICE SHELVES COULD COLLAPSE BY 2100, UNLESS A LOT CHANGES

SOURCE: NATURE GEOSCIENCE, WOODS HOLE OCEANOGRAPHIC INSTITUTE

Be Nice to Ice

ILLU

ST

RAT

ION

BY

SIN

ELA

B

BYZOË SCHLANGER

@zoeschlanger

Later this year, worldleaders will come to-gether for a U.N. meetingin Paris to discuss howto save the planet fromcatastrophic climatechange. New researchout of the Woods HoleOceanographic Institutegives them anothermetric to see exactly howmuch is at stake. A paperpublished in Octoberpredicts that the surfacemelting of ice shelves inAntarctica will doubleby 2050—whether or notemissions change. Butby 2100, our climate poli-cies will be the differencebetween the Antarcticice shelves disappearing into the sea or not.

Ice shelves are mas-sive, floating plateaus offrozen seawater that jutout from the continentand function as block-ades, holding back thegiant continental icesheets. In their absence,the glaciers on the con-tinent would acceleratetheir march into thesea. Under a business-as-usual emissionsscenario, the next 85years of warming couldbring a melt rate highenough to trigger the lossof ice shelves across thecontinent. “Imagine youhave a sink full of water,and you remove the drainplug. The ice shelves arethe drain plug,” explains

Luke Trusel, lead author on the recent study.

Trusel and his col-leagues found that ifemissions continue at thecurrent pace, Antarc-tica’s ice shelves wouldbe losing around 600gigatons of melt waterper year by 2100. “That’sthe equivalent of eightyears of Niagara Fallsrunning continuously,”he says. The melt ratewould be at or above thepoint where ice shelves(like the Larsen A andLarsen B shelves) havehistorically destabilizedand collapsed.

But, Trusel says, ifworld powers commit topeaking global emissions

around mid-century andreducing them steadilythereafter, this cataclys-mic scenario could beavoided. In that case,Antarctica’s ice shelveswould lose just over 200gigatons per year, stavingoff total collapse.

It’s a highly feasiblegoal—Trusel calls this a“middle-of-the-road sce-nario” for climate policy,since some experts andgovernments have advo-cated for much faster andsteeper peak-and-declineemissions scenarios. Inother words, this apoca-lyptic ice melt story has a silver lining. Sort of.

Gigatonsof water melting

if greenhousegas emissionspeak by 2050and DECLINE

thereafter

Gigatons ofwater melting off

Antarctic ice shelvesper year by 2100,with greenhousegas emissions at

CURRENTRATE

PAGE ONE/MYANMAR

20NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

KYAW WANNA SOE, a 40-something newspaperdistributor in downtown Yangon, Myanmar, wastwitching anxiously. While speaking, he wipedhis brow and shifted in his chair. It was summerin Yangon, and that unholy union of heat andmoisture was reaching a suffocating climax.

It was unclear whether his discomfort was aresult of the soaring temperatures or provoked bycontemplation of his country’s future. Asked whatambitions he harbored for Myanmar’s upcominggeneral elections, he meekly responded, “I justhope they happen without any problems.

“There are a lot of tensions right now,” he con-tinued, pointing to front-page images of protest-ing students. “So if something goes wrong…” Hisvoice trailed off while he surveyed the maze ofnewspapers littering his shop floor. “I’m worriedfor my business.”

While many are optimistic about the November8 election, others worry that if there are problemswith the vote, it could undermine progress madeby Myanmar thus far. People like Kyaw WannaSoe have not forgotten the ruling elite’s capriciouspast, particularly the 1990 general election. It wasconsidered the country’s last relatively free andfair one, when the newly formed National Leaguefor Democracy (NLD) party, led by Aung San SuuKyi, won 80 percent of the seats in the parliament.The military regime annulled the results, and SuuKyi was placed under house arrest.

For half a century after the military coup in1962, Myanmar, formerly known as Burma, stag-nated under a dictatorial policy called “the Bur-

mese Way to Socialism.” It has been only fiveyears since the country began making seriouschanges, easing up on the seal that kept it isolated.

President Barack Obama hailed the gradualopening as a diplomatic coup, the result of a “car-rot and stick” U.S. policy of dropping or impos-ing sanctions as Myanmar’s internal situation

THE GENERALS’ ELECTIONNovember voting will show ifMyanmar’s march to democracy is real

BYADAM RAMSEY

@aporamsey

21NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

SO

E Z

EYA

TU

N/R

EU

TE

RS

“I WOULD CALL THISA 75 PERCENT ELECTION,BECAUSE 25 PERCENT OFTHE SEATS ARE GUARAN-TEED TO THE MILITARY.”

NOT SO PEACEFUL:Buddhist monksjoined a protest inFebruary demand-ing that holdersof temporary IDsknown as “whitecards,” who aremostly RohingyaMuslims, be deniedthe right to vote.+

evolved. In November 2012, Obama became thefirst U.S. president to visit the country.

Now the government promises a free and fairelection. It will be a test of whether the countrymoves closer to democracy or remains a militarykleptocracy characterized by cronyism.

There are several parties running for the parlia-ment’s upper and lower houses, but most of theattention is focused on the two major ones: theNLD, headed by Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, and theincumbent Union Solidarity and DevelopmentParty (USDP), led by President Thein Sein.

“It’s certainly important, and it’s shaping up tobe the fairest and most inclusive [general elec-tion] since 1990,” says David Mathie-son, the senior researcher with HumanRights Watch in Yangon. “But,” headds, “there are still major caveatsthat need to be factored in.” The lackof reform of the constitution of 2008is one such failure. It was drafted bythe old military junta and passed in theaftermath of the deadly Cyclone Nar-gis. One of the most contentious pointsis Article 436, which requires a super-majority of more than 75 percent toamend the constitution. “I would callthis a 75 percent election, because 25 percent ofthe seats are guaranteed to the military,” Mathie-son says. “They have stated they are the guardianof the constitution.... They have made it very clearthey won’t countenance any changes.”

A sign of that came in August, when the USDPousted party chairman and presidential hopefulShwe Mann in a surprise overnight move. He haddisagreed with party members over constitutionalchange, among other things.

Another controversial article of the constitutionbars anyone with a foreign spouse or child fromholding the highest office. Suu Kyi’s late husbandwas a British citizen, as are her children, and crit-ics interpreted that article as tailored to excludeher. Suu Kyi still sounds confident. At a campaignrally just north of Yangon, she told the crowd,“Make no mistake: Whoever the president is, Iwill be the leader of the NLD government.”

There is another big factor weighing againsta free and fair election: the many citizens whocannot vote. There are bureaucratic problems,and the Union Election Commission—whichoversees registration, campaigning and polling—is badly stretched, says Myat Thu, director of theYangon School of Political Science. “I’ve beentold by people that names are being repeated [onvoting rosters], while others are missing. Some-times a single name appears five times,” he says.

Several areas along Myanmar’s border regions

are still subject to violence, part of a conflictinvolving a plethora of ethnic armed groups, nowin its 67th year. A two-year-long attempt to reacha nationwide cease-fire has just ended in disap-pointment, with only eight of the 15 invited groupswilling to sign. Nearly 600 village districts nation-wide will have their voting canceled.

Meanwhile, in western Myanmar, the persecu-tion of the Rohingya, a Muslim minority group,has raised doubts over the sincerity of the govern-ment’s transition. Myanmar does not consider theRohingya citizens, referring to them as Bangla-deshis and revoking many of their rights. This hasleft some 140,000 people displaced and wholly

disenfranchised. Obama, while praising the coun-try’s “courageous process” of political reform, haswarned that “Myanmar won’t succeed if the Mus-lim population is oppressed.”

Myanmar’s political elites, including Suu Kyi,were noticeably silent during a Rohingya refu-gee crisis earlier this year. Now the Rohingya facemore discrimination than ever, fueled by the riseof Buddhist nationalist groups like the Associationfor the Protection of Race and Religion, knownlocally by the Burmese acronym Ma Ba Tha.

The Ma Ba Tha, led by hard-line monks, hasstoked sectarian tensions in this overwhelminglyBuddhist country. Last year, it proposed fourso-called “protection of race and religion” lawscondemning Muslims that were swiftly pushedthrough the parliament. “My view is that [the gov-ernment has] simply just stood back, allowed [theMa Ba Tha’s rise] to happen and are now utilizingthat sentiment for themselves,” says Mathieson.

In recent months, state media have carriednumerous reports of senior government officialsmaking offerings to senior monks, and Ma BaTha figures have urged the movement’s support-ers not to vote for the NLD.

Suu Kyi, who spent 15 years under house arrest,told supporters she is focused on reconciliation.“The past should be something from which totake lessons,” she said, “not something that ties us to anger and grudges.”

PAGE ONE/POLITICS

22NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

THE EAST Las Vegas neighborhood of South-ridge is less than a 10-minute drive from the Stripbut has none of its glitz. Blocks of modest ranch-style homes are fronted with scruffy patches ofshrubbery and the white pebble lawns that are astand-in for grass all across the arid Southwest.Caucasians are a plurality, but not a majority, inthis Latino-heavy working-class neighborhood.This is not the Vegas that draws 40 million tour-ists a year. But for Hillary Clinton, Southridgeand similar Vegas neighborhoods are central toher 2016 presidential ambitions.

Despite her good performance in the firstDemocratic debate, the latest polling showsBernie Sanders, Vermont’s liberal curmud-geon, closing in on Clinton in Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses and surpassing her in NewHampshire, which holds the first primary. That’sheightened the focus on the next state on the2016 primary calendar, which becomes a must-win firewall if Clinton stumbles in one or both ofthose places. Thanks to the dogged advocacy oflongtime Democratic Senate leader (and nativeNevadan) Harry Reid, that state is Nevada. Howshe does here could not only determine thenomination but also offer some sense of howshe might do in a general election. This is a statethat went for Bill Clinton twice, George W. Bushtwice and Barack Obama twice—always by thinmargins. Nevada isn’t the nation’s only swingstate, but it’s an important one.

Hillary’s Nevada assault has already begun,based out of places like the single-level flophouseon Bonita Street in East Las Vegas used by Clin-ton staffers. It looks like any other home in South-ridge, aside from the bright blue signs plasteredalong the exterior with the familiar “H” logo. Onthe Sunday before the Democratic candidates’first debate, Clinton’s legion of volunteers gath-ered here to go canvass the neighborhood.

The candidate herself wasn’t flying in until thenext day, but a capable surrogate was there to revup the mostly young, mostly Latino volunteers.“This is where you hear the real stories of Amer-ica,” Joaquin Castro, an up-and-coming con-gressman from Texas, told the group. (His twinbrother, Julian, Obama’s secretary of housing andurban development, has been buzzed about as apotential Clinton vice presidential pick; he for-mally endorsed Clinton on October 15.) “And thisis where you’re going to make a difference today.”Standard political pep rally stuff. But in this case,it also happened to be true.

Nevada has one of the highest proportions ofLatino residents in the United States, 27 percent.And that’s just one of the significant minoritypopulations there—large numbers of blacks andAsian-Americans also call it home. Comparedwith snowy-white Iowa and New Hampshire,Nevada’s ethnic potpourri is striking. And that’sgood news for Clinton, who has long-standingties to the Latino and black communities, while

DICEY PROPOSITIONHillary Clinton had a great debate in Las Vegas, but she needs to winNevada if she’s going to be the nominee

JO

HN

LO

CH

ER

/AP

BYEMILY CADEI

@emilycadei

23NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

+DESERT STORM:

Sanders is pollingwell for the first

few primaries, soClinton hopes to

slap him back witha strong showing

in Nevada.

24NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Sanders has spent the last half-century in Ver-mont, where Latinos make up just 1 percent ofthe population, tied for last in the nation.

Clinton’s Nevada team knows those minori-ties are essential to its goal. State director EmmyRuiz and organizing director Jorge Neri, bothLatino, held the same positions for Obama in2012. They are at the top of an operation ofmore than a dozen paid staffers and have beenon the ground since May. Sanders, by contrast,just hired his first paid staffer in Nevada in earlyOctober. “It puts him at a huge disadvantage,”says Las Vegas–based Democratic political con-sultant Andres Ramirez.

Of the four states voting next February,Nevada is inarguably the toughest to campaignin, and not just because of the heat and the scor-pions. It holds caucuses, not regular primaryelections, which require a great deal more timeand motivation on voters’ part. And many of thevoters Democrats rely on—shift workers, minori-ties, single women—are low-turnout voters. Get-ting them to show up requires a huge effort.

Then there’s the fact that Nevada has no tra-dition of caucusing. The first time the SilverState held a politically relevant caucus was in

2008, and the process wasn’t smooth. Squabblesbroke out over holding caucuses amidst the slotmachines and 24-hour buffets of Las Vegas casi-nos. Vote counting was slow and delegate allo-cation contested. It may not be easier in 2014,given how “Nevada is such a transient popula-tion,” says David Damore, a political scientistat the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “You’realways having to relearn [the caucus process].You’re always having to teach.”

Clinton is building the organization to over-come those challenges. Not only are staffers andvolunteers already conducting outreach in ClarkCounty, which encompasses Las Vegas and ishome to nearly three-quarters of the state’s pop-ulation, but they’re also present in the state’smore far-flung corners. That’s a lesson the Clin-ton campaign learned in 2008, when RobbyMook, now the secretary’s campaign manager,was her Nevada state director. Clinton won thepopular vote among Nevada Democrats thatyear, but the Obama campaign proved savvierat playing the caucus game, turning out sup-porters in the less-populated precincts of northand central Nevada and, under allocation rules,earning more delegates. The same problem

SCOOP DU JOUR:Clinton is bettingher strong ties toLatino and blackvoters will put herover in Nevada.+

PAGE ONE/POLITICS

25NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

IS

AA

C B

RE

KK

EN

/TH

E N

EW Y

OR

K T

IMES

/RE

DU

X

dogged her in several states that followed, andClinton’s lack of preparation for a delegate fightultimately doomed her campaign.

This time around, the Clinton campaign isfocused on winning over the entire state, notjust the population centers in the south. In July,for example, senior staffers drove to Schurz, atiny desert town of less than a thousand on theedge of the Walker River Reservation, to wooNative American leaders. “I can guaranteeyou that we have been there more in the lastthree months than any campaign, Democrator Republican, has been there in the last fiveyears,” one Clinton aide boasts.

Organized labor is a more powerful force herethan in many Western states. Nevada unions,however, are a different animal than most. Withthe state’s large number of Hispanic workers,immigration reform is more import-ant to Nevada labor than free-tradeagreements like the Trans-PacificPartnership. That’s a blow to Sand-ers, who has tended to do well withold guard labor.

Labor’sheaviesthitterisLasVegas’sCulinary Workers Union Local 226,which has more than 55,000 mem-bers—mostly in casinos, more thanhalf Latino. Clinton failed to get theirendorsement in 2008, which led tofierce infighting. Teacher unionsallied with Clinton sued over holding caucuses incasinos, which they argued unfairly advantagedworkers who were backing Obama. Unite Here,the union umbrella group that includes the culi-nary union, responded with a Spanish-languageradio ad, claiming, in part, that “Hillary Clintondoes not respect our people.”

Clinton stands a better chance of getting theculinary union’s blessing this time. It doesn’thurt that she recently came out in support ofthe union’s top issue: repealing the so-called“Cadillac tax” on high-spending health insur-ance plans, a cost-containing measure includedin the Affordable Care Act that will hit manyunion health benefits.

However, Annette Wright-DeCampos, a culi-nary union shop steward who works at Harrah’s,said at a recent Las Vegas roundtable that shehears lingering concern from fellow membersabout Clinton’s emails and Benghazi. And withhis focus on inequality and taking on billion-aires, Sanders may get some traction in a statewhere the contrast between glittering casinosand nearby poverty is stark.

University of Nevada, Reno, professor EricHerzik suggests that because it puts a premium

on enthusiasm, the caucus system “actuallymakes up for some of the organization gaps[Sanders] might have.” Sanders drew thousandsto a rally in Reno in August, much as he’s filledarenas elsewhere. Those who back him areintense about it, and “that’s the type of personwho shows up in a caucus,” Herzik points out.

Still, Sanders will have to invest a lot moretime and money in the state to be competitive,

and it’s not clear he’s making that a priority. It’stelling that the Vermont senator didn’t hold anypublic events while he was in Las Vegas for thefirst debate—he met privately with postal unionmembers—then jetted off to Los Angeles forfundraising the next day. Clinton, by contrast,made a shrewd appearance the day before thedebate at the culinary union’s protest in frontof Donald Trump’s Las Vegas hotel (allowingher to side with labor and chide the mogul). Sheclosed the trip with an evening rally at a naturepreserve in West Las Vegas.

With the setting sun painting the Spring Moun-tains pink behind her, Clinton bounded onstageat the outdoor amphitheater to appeal to theblend of Asian, Latino, white, young and oldpeople in the crowd to support her in February.Nevada, she emphasized, was critical to Demo-crats’ hopes of keeping the White House. Earlierin the day, she accepted the endorsement of thelocal International Union of Painters and AlliedTrades. With union members lined up behind herwaving yellow “IUPAT for Hillary” shirts, Clintonseemed in her element, her confidence returningafter an underwhelming summer. “I’m feelingreally lucky in Las Vegas,” she said, beaming.

IN 2008, ONE UNION RANA SPANISH-LANGUAGERADIO AD, CLAIMING THAT

“HILLARY CLINTON DOESNOT RESPECT OUR PEOPLE.”

26NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

THERE IS AN old saying: If you’re going to attackthe king, make sure you kill him.

In the case of Chilean dictator General AugustoPinochet, five U.S. presidents—from Jimmy Car-ter to George W. Bush—had a potentially lethalweapon to use against him but never unleashedit. That is, until the State Department releaseddocuments in October containing compellingevidence from as early as 1978 that Pinochet gavethe order to murder Orlando Letelier in Washing-ton, D.C. By then, however, the king was dead;Pinochet died in his bed in 2006. At the time, hewas under judicial investigation for human rightscrimes, but he was never convicted.

On September 21, 1976, a Chilean agentplanted a car bomb that killed Letelier and RonniMoffitt, an American woman who was with him,as they drove down Massachusetts Avenue. Mof-fitt’s husband, Michael, who worked for Letelier,was also in the car and survived. Letelier, a for-mer ambassador to the United States, had servedas a high-ranking official in the leftist govern-ment of President Salvador Allende, who wasoverthrown in a Pinochet-led coup in 1973. Exiledto Washington after spending a year in a prisoncamp, Letelier had extraordinary access to D.C.power circles and was the most influential voicein the U.S. opposing Pinochet’s dictatorship.

MURDER, HE WROTEFor decades, the CIA knew Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet gavethe order to kill Orlando Letelier inWashington, D.C. Now the secret is out

BYJOHN DINGES

@jdinges FRO

M L

EFT

: FE

LIP

E T

RU

EB

A/E

PA;

AP

27NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

PAGE ONE/CHILE

An FBI investigation led to the 1978 indict-ment of several Chilean officers, including thehead of Chile’s Directorate of National Intelli-gence, General Manuel Contreras, and a groupof anti-Castro Cubans who carried out thebombing. But Pinochet emerged from the inves-tigation unscathed, and he agreed to hand overthe directorate agent who built and planted thebomb, an American named Michael Townley.

As the FBI arranged to take Townley back tothe U.S. to face charges, the CIA was mining itsabundant sources among the military and right-wing civilians in Chile about the bombing. Theagency had close relations with them becauseduring the Allende regime it had worked withChile’s most rabidly anti-Communist organi-zations to undermine the socialist governmentand encourage its overthrow.

A CIA report dated April 28, 1978, and sent toWashington showed that the agency already hadproof of Pinochet’s involvement in the killing.“Contreras told a confidant he authorized theassassination of Letelier on orders from Pino-chet,” the report said, accordingto a newly declassified document.

A State Department docu-ment refers to eight separateCIA reports from around thesame date, each sourced to“extremely sensitive infor-mants” who provided evidenceof Pinochet’s direct involvementin ordering the assassinationand in directing the subsequentcover-up. Newsweek showed thereports to special agent CarterCornick, who was working for the FBI in Santi-ago, Chile, in April 1978. “As you may suspect,none of this was new to us at the time,” he says.

Cornick and his partner Robert Scherrer arecredited with solving the Letelier murder. Cor-nick is now retired and lives in Virginia, just out-side of Washington. He says the informationagainst Pinochet was “hearsay”—gleaned from

people who might talk to the CIA but would neverappear in court. Formal charges against Pinochetwere not possible, but there was another factor inthe U.S. government’s decision not to reveal whatit knew. “The interests of the U.S., according to[the Department of] State,” Cornick says, “werethat Chile was a non-Communist country in LatinAmerica and therefore no further punitive actionagainst them was warranted.”

In 1980, with the election of President Ron-ald Reagan, a Cold War conservative, there wasa new ambassador to Chile, James Theberge,who thought along similar lines. According to anew document, Theberge criticized the damage

caused by “punitive” measures against Chileduring the previous administration of JimmyCarter—a reference to the investigations, tri-als and pressure to obtain extradition of thoseindicted in the Letelier case. He instructed hisstaff to direct their efforts elsewhere, saying,“In my judgment and that of senior staff, theLetelier case offers no chance of success.”

In the early 1980s, Chile was experiencingthe first popular protest movement againstPinochet, and opposition groups on the left andin the center had united to push for a return todemocracy. Public disclosure that the UnitedStates considered Pinochet guilty of a terroristassassination would have had enormous impactin favor of the pro-democracy movement,according to Sergio Bitar, a former governmentminister and an exiled leader at the time.

Juan Gabriel Valdés, the Chilean ambassadorto the United States, agrees. “It would have had acatastrophic impact on Pinochet,” he says. “The

“THE UNITED STATES COULDHAVE CHANGED HISTORYBY SIMPLY ACCUSING THEMAN GUILTY OF A CRIMECOMMITTED IN ITS CAPITAL.”

+BOMBSHELL:Letelier, who hadserved in Allende’sgovernment, waskilled by a carbomb as he drovethrough Washing-ton with AmericansRonni and MichaelMoffitt. Ronni was also killed.

PAGE ONE/CHILE

28NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

indicting Pinochet, assuming “more publicsources of evidence” could be obtained. Thehearsay nature of the information made legalaction difficult, but the U.S. could have revealedit as a political statement. “This,” Shultz con-tinued, “is a blatant example of a chief of state’sdirect involvement in an act of state terrorism,one that is particularly disturbing both because itoccurred in our capital and since his governmentis generally considered to be friendly.” However,for whatever reason, the White House demurred.

The opposition ultimately prevailed in theplebiscite with a “no” campaign against Pino-chet. Chile held elections in 1990, and a newpresident, backed by the center-left Concert-ación alliance of political parties, restored lim-ited democracy. But the generalissimo remainedinfluential as head of the armed forces until 1998.

In October that year, there was another historicopportunity for the U.S. to announce what it knewabout the Chilean general. Pinochet was detainedin London on human rights charges associ-ated with the Operation Condor assassinations,

including that of Letelier. President Bill Clintonordered the declassification of 23,000 documentson Chile and human rights, but kept the Shultzmemo and the CIA reports on Pinochet hidden.

While lamenting the long secrecy, Valdés, theChilean ambassador, says he is deeply grateful tothe Obama administration for quickly releasingthe documents after he made a formal requeston behalf of his government.

Reading them today, you can still see themarkings on the documents from the 1998review: “SECRET” and “DENY.” Now thewords are crossed out. Decades after the CIAdiscovered the evidence of Pinochet’s guilt,it finally bears a simple, unambiguous stamp: “RELEASE IN FULL.”

United States could have changed history bysimply accusing the man guilty of a crime com-mitted in its capital, which it had the completeright to do and the power to do it.”

The Republican-led State Department raisedthe issue again in the final years of the Reaganadministration. The department was payingnew attention to human rights, especially as away to keep diplomatic pressure on the SovietUnion. Chile was still a dictatorship, but in 1987Pinochet announced he would hold a plebi-scite, with himself as the sole candidate, a moveintended to prolong his rule for another decade.

The newly released documents show that Rea-gan’s secretary of state, George Shultz,was trying to convince the presidentthat it was time for the United States“to work toward complete democra-tization of Chile.” Not surprisingly,Shultz’s main argument to Reaganwas that another decade of Pinochetdictatorship “would be highly dan-gerous for Chile and the region as awhole; inevitably it would lead to seri-ous polarization of the Chilean popu-lation and a significant strengtheningof the large (and growing, thanks to Pinochet)Moscow-dependent communist party.”

The real surprise in Shultz’s memo, datedOctober 6, 1987, is what it said about Pino-chet’s role in the Letelier-Moffitt killings. Shultzquoted from a report containing “what we [theCIA] regard as convincing evidence that Pres-ident Pinochet personally ordered his intelli-gence chief to carry out the murders.” Pinochetalso led the cover-up to hide his involvementfrom the U.S. investigation, the report contin-ues, adding a new and chilling detail: Pinochetwas considering “even the elimination of hisformer intelligence chief [Contreras].”

The CIA information given to Shultz is similarin scope and content to the reports the agencygenerated in 1978. But Shultz said that the newreport was stronger. “The CIA has never beforedrawn and presented its conclusion that suchstrong evidence exists of [Pinochet’s] leadershiprole in this act of terrorism,” he told Reagan.

Shultz raised the possibility of formally

“THIS IS A BLATANT EXAMPLEOF A CHIEF OF STATE’S DIRECTINVOLVEMENT IN AN ACT OF STATE TERRORISM…IN OUR CAPITAL.”

JOHN DINGES is the author of two books on theLetelier assassination and other human rights crimesin the Southern Cone: Assassination on Embassy Row

(Open Road) with Saul Landau and The Condor Years:

How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to

Three Continents (The New Press).

29NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

@WisdomWatchUP, DOWN AND SIDEWAYS

Names inthe News

CONVENTIONAL WISDOM WATCH

RICK PERRYNow free fromhis futile run

for president, formerTexas governor hopsin old Chevy forthree-city road tripthrough Los Angeles,San Francisco and...wait, what was thethird one? I can’t re-member now. Oops.

FOX NEWSGuest terror-ism expert

arrested for sayinghe once workedfor CIA, facingcharges of fraud andfaking documents.Related: Bill O’Reilly facing arrestfor faking being a newsman.

FAMILYAunt sues her5-year-old

nephew for hug-ging her too hard;claims she sufferedbroken wrist fromexuberant embraceat child’s birthdayparty. Remember,kids: lawsuits, not drugs.

REVENGE PORNWebsite Porn-hub trying to

curb proliferationof “revenge porn”—porn put up withoutconsent of bothparties. Victim pro-tests at headquartersmet with franticcries of “We’ll be out in five minutes!”

TWITTERLayoff victimdiscovers he

lost his job by way ofsmartphone alertsafter discoveringthat he can’t accesshis company email.They were going totell him in person,but they ran outof character. C

LOC

KW

ISE

FRO

MLE

FT:

BR

IAN

SN

YD

ER

/RE

UT

ER

S;

LAR

RY

DO

WN

ING

/RE

UT

ER

S;

E

RIC

GA

ILLA

RD

/RE

UT

ER

S;

BR

IAN

SN

YD

ER

/RE

UT

ER

S;

AN

NE

RIP

PY/

ALA

MY

RAND PAULCandidate, followed bycameras for full day oncampaign trail toprove he’s

not dropping out of race for Republi-can presidential nomination, callspublicity stunt at one point, oncamera, a “dumbass live stream.”Don’t look for him to do much betterin the poopy-head debates or at that stupid-face convention.

SOW WHAT

By Betsy Isaacson I l lustration by Bi l l Mayer

FU UR FF AARMMMMIIINIIIS A R A HHHHEERRRREEE;;;

HE AN T EEDR CE IITT

32NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

RIGHT NOW—at this very moment—there are over 7 billion humans crawl-ing on the Earth. That’s a lot of mouths to feed. To sustain them all, we’ve taken 40 percent of the planet’s total landmass and turned it into cornfields and almond orchards, cattle ranches and orange groves, all to churn out the cereals, produce and meat that feed humanity.

Unfortunately, that’s left us in a bit of a bind. The world population is expected to grow to 9.6 billion by 2050, and according to the Food and Agri-culture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), if we want to avoid mass malnutrition, we’re going to have to up our food production by 70 percent by 2050. The problem is most of the land we can work for food is already being cultivated. The rest is atop mountains, covered by desert sands or in Antarctica. The only potential farmland left would require slashing and burning the world’s remaining rain forests. That means we’re going to have to make some large-scale changes to how we farm.

It’s not impossible. In fact, it’s been done once before in living memory. Few people have heard of Norman Borlaug, but if you’re seeking a revo-lution in farming, he’s probably the first person you’ll want to look up. In the mid-1940s, wanting to increase wheat yields in the highlands of south

central Mexico, Borlaug bred several high-yield, disease-resistant strains of semi-dwarf wheat well-suited to Mex-ico’s mountains. Farmers who planted Borlaug’s wheat saw yields increase immediately; these gains were espe-cially evident when the crops were planted in soil treated with nitrogen fertilizer. The method caught on quick-ly, and by 1963 95 percent of Mexico’s wheat crop was Borlaug’s dwarf wheat. Between 1944 (the year Borlaug ar-rived in Mexico) and 1963, Mexico’s wheat yields sextupled. Then Borlaug went to South Asia.

In the mid-1960s, South Asia was starving, mostly because the region’s food production couldn’t keep up with its population growth. Believing he could help, Borlaug began exporting his high-yield wheat to the subcontinent. He even-tually moved there, spending 16 years supervising the first few plantings and harvests. The results were tremendous: After just five years, the wheat yields in India and Pakistan had nearly doubled. By 1974, both countries were self-suffi-cient in cereal production, and Borlaug’s methods were spreading rapidly to the rest of South Asia and Southeast Asia. Famine had been averted.

But humanity can’t keep coasting on Borlaug’s green revolution—land is now at a premium in a way it wasn’t during Borlaug’s era. Time has also shown that the revolution was far from perfect; in his quest to feed the world, Borlaug encouraged monocropping (growing a single crop year after year on the same land, without diversifi-cation or rotation) and heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer made from petro-leum, both of which can produce mas-sive short-term gains in crop yields but in the long run make the land less fertile. In addition, Borlaug’s focus on rice, corn and wheat as tools to prevent famine led him to ignore several crops that we now know are even more nutri-tious and produce even more calories per acre than those three: potatoes and sweet potatoes, for instance.

+TEAM GREEN: Borlaug won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for his contributions to improved farming and increased food production across the world. FR

OM

LE

FT:

MIC

HE

LIN

E P

ELL

ET

IER

/SYG

MA

/CO

RB

IS;

JOH

N P

RIO

R/A

LAM

Y

33NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

For better or worse, we eat the world Borlaug built. But now we need tomake some changes to that world, so it can produce 70 percent more calorieson the same amount of land. And we need to start with fruits and vegetables.

The Fruit Skyscraper

THE TABERNAS DESERT, in southern Spain, is the driest place in Europe.In the 1960s, it was known primarily as a place filmmakers went when theywanted to film spaghetti Westerns; The Good, the Bad& the Ugly and OnceUpon a Time in the West were both shot there. But then the land began toblossom, and today, the arid desert is where more than half of Europe’s fresh vegetables and fruits are grown.

The credit goes to greenhouses. The first few were built there in 1963,courtesy of a land distribution project spearheaded by Spain’s InstitutoNacional de Colonización. Fruits and vegetables from those greenhouses,where the environment could be controlled and beautiful produce could begrown, consistently soon outsold comparable crops grown in open fields,bringing in a windfall for the previously impoverished citizens of Almeria,the Spanish province that contains the Tabernas. That money was reinvest-ed, the greenhouses were expanded—with inexpensive plastic sheeting

replacing glass as the material of choicefor the majority of the controlled envi-ronments—and today greenhouses cov-er 50,000 acres in the Tabernas desert,adding $1.5 billion annually to the econ-omy of Almeria.

Tabernas’s massive greenhouse clus-ters—visible to the naked eye in low-Earth orbit—have been touted as an eco-

nomic miracle, but they are more thanthat: They are proof of concept. Rightnow, only wealthy-but-land-strappedEurope uses greenhouses to grow a sig-nificant fraction of its fresh produce. Butwith the rest of the world quickly gettingwealthier and more land-strapped, the Tabernas model may take off.

+DESERT TO TABLE: Spain built green-houses throughout much of the coun-try’s arid landscape and is now one ofEurope’s major exporters of produce.

TA B E R N A S ’ S M A S S I V E G R E E N H O U S E C L U S T E R S A R E V I S I B L E T O T H E N A K E D E Y E I N L O W- E A R T H O R B I T.

34NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

That’s because from an environmental and land-use perspective,controlled-environment farming is a great idea. Fruits and vegetablesgrown indoors tend to have far greater yields per area than comparableproduce grown outside. Put a roof and walls around produce, and mostproblems caused by weeds, pests and inclement weather vanish. Addtechnology like hydroponics—growing plants so the roots sit in a custom-ized nutrient slurry instead of in plain old dirt—to the equation, and yieldsincrease even more. Better yet, build a hydroponic rig that is modular,rotates and stacks—which means you can have several “stories” of pro-duce growing atop the same ground (assuming the stacks all get sufficientlight), where an outdoor farmer would be stuck with only one.

This “stacking” of plants can be taken to extremes. In 2005, DicksonDespommier, professor emeritus of public health at Columbia University,put up a website plugging “vertical farms,” a concept he’d invented withhis students four years prior. In some ways, it’s as simple as it sounds: “Avertical farm is a multiple-story high-tech greenhouse,” says Despommi-er. But there are a lot of challenges involved, from getting sufficient lightto all the plants to keeping pests and diseases out of the crops to makesure they grow properly. “There’s a lot of technical stuff and engineeringthat needs to be overcome, and that’s why it wasn’t done until it becamenecessary to do it.”

In 2011, a calamity in Japan made it necessary. The tidal wave that causedthe Fukushima disaster wiped out most of the farmland near Sendai, acoastal area in the northern half of Honshu, the largest island of Japan. TheJapanese government decided to jump-start a vertical farm building boom

there in an effort to replace the lost land.Four years later, Japan boasts hundredsof vertical farms, greenhouses stackedhigh into multistory skyscrapers, whereplants rotate daily to catch sunlight.Instead of porting dirt into the build-ings, the plants grow with their rootsexposed, soaking in nutrients from en-riched water or mist.

Aeroponics, a companion technologyto hydroponics, has taken off in Japanand is helping high-tech greenhousesproduce remarkable yields remarkablyquickly: Unlike hydroponic systems,where plants dip their roots in nutri-ent slurry, aeroponic systems spray theplants’ deliberately exposed roots with anutrient-laden mist. “The root systemsgrow much longer because they haveto increase their surface area to absorbthe same amount of nutrients,” explains

+THINK PINK: Cress, an edible herb, isgrown using just LED lights tuned to apink sectrum. Despite having no sun-light exposure and no direct exchangeof air with the outside, the plant stillgrows effectively in “pinkhouses.”

FRE

YA N

AJA

DE

/AN

ZE

NB

ER

GE

R/R

ED

UX

35NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Despommier. That, in turn, makes the plants grow much faster. Singapore, Sweden, South Korea, Canada, China and the Netherlands all

now boast skyscraper farms similar in concept to Japan’s. In the U.S., such farms have risen in Chicago, while Newark, New Jersey, and Jackson, Wyo-ming, both have contracts with private controlled-environment vendors to build their own.

But with vertical farms, at least as they’re currently conceived, light re-mains a problem; the towers need to be narrow enough to let sunlight pen-etrate all the way through, or else builders must figure out a way to rotate the growing plants to make sure they all catch a healthy complement of sunlight. Or, perhaps, there’s a simpler solution: Replace that sunlight with artificial sources of light energy, like light-emitting diodes.

In the U.K. and the Netherlands, in Boston and in Bryan, Texas, it’s been done. “Pinkhouses,” as they’re sometimes called, are lit blue and red: Those are the spectrums of visible light best absorbed by plants. By using these colors alone, pinkhouses generate serious efficiency: In the wild, plants use at most 8 percent of the light they absorb, while in pinkhouses, the plants can use as much as 15 percent. In addition, because everything happens entirely indoors, the lights, temperature and humidity can be con-trolled to an extent not possible even in the most high-tech, sun-dependent vertical farms and greenhouses.

As a result, the plants grown in these pinkhouses grow 20 percent faster than their outdoor cousins, and need 91 percent less water, negligible fer-tilizer and no treatment with herbicides or pesticides. Currently, the LEDs keep the upfront costs of constructing pinkhouse very high, but LED prices are projected to drop by half in the next five years. Given that, perhaps we ought to be preparing for a future where the majority of our produce is grown industrially in LED-lined skyscrapers made of steel and poured concrete.

Sweet Potato Relief

CHEW ON THIS STAT: In the U.S., as much as 40 percent of produce grown is never sold or eaten. The reason? It’s too ugly.

Consumers won’t buy imperfect fruit and vegetables, and grocery stores refuse to stock them. The demand for “pretty” produce means fruit and vegetable farmers need to make up for the cost of all that food they can’t sell. As a result, the produce currently sold in groceries is just what can make for fat profit margins.

That’s also why controlled environments, from pinkhouses in Boston to plastic-sheeted greenhouses in Almeria, are used overwhelmingly to grow

fresh produce: Farmers who work in controlled environments can put out consistently pretty pieces of produce. They have a huge advantage in the current fruit and vegetable market, which values the look of the crop as much as anything. Moreover, with produce, freshness fetches a premium; the shorter a distance a piece of produce has to travel before it reaches your plate, the tastier it’ll be and the more you’ll pay for it. And controlled envi-ronments allow farmers to grow their produce right next door to where it’s sold. That’s why, even in the land-rich U.S., says Chieri Kubota, a professor at the University of Arizona’s School of Plant Sciences, 40 percent of toma-

toes today sold fresh in stores are grown in greenhouses.

But controlled-environment farm-ing is far less profitable for growers of staples. Rice, corn and wheat—the cereal grains that provide the world with about 50 percent of its calories—are all dirt-cheap, more or less regardless of appearance. The margins on those crops are thin, so any additional investment in innovation and production methods comes at an impossibly steep price. Staple farmers can see their profits by growing huge amounts of their crops on enormous swaths of land; econom-ically, it doesn’t make sense for them to try to replicate that profit model in greenhouses, so controlled-environ-ment farming is unlikely to supplant the open field when it comes to our most important crops.

Increasing the yield of staple crops to the point where we can feed 9.6 billion people likely won’t involve anything as glamorous as greenhouse clusters seen from space; it might be as simple as making the whole farming world more modern. “A lot of poor farmers in un-derdeveloped countries are still farming as though it’s 10,000 B.C.,” says Dan Glickman, former U.S. secretary of ag-riculture, now consulting with several nonprofits that hope to solve world hun-ger. “There’s no crop rotation, no irriga-tion; people are still using animals for plows. Just exporting modern farming practices globally will do a lot to feed a lot more people.”

Universal adoption of crop rotation in particular could be a game-chang-er. Without any intervention, fields

planted with staple crops over and over again eventually grow “exhausted”: the plants eat up all the nitrogen in the soil, rendering it sterile. The most common solutions are to either introduce more nitrogen via fertilizer or to lay the field fallow until the soil recovers and crops can be grown again. Both options have significant costs, either monetarily

I N T H E U. S . , A S M U C H A S 4 0 P E R C E N T O F P R O D U C E G R O W N I S N E V E R S O L D O R E AT E N B E C A U S E I T ’ S T O O U G LY.

36NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

(fertilizer is costly, particularly for small farmers in rural areas) or in cal-ories produced (fallow fields are aren’t producing). But there’s also a fair-ly straightforward alternative: Instead of leaving fields fallow while they recover, it’s possible to plant certain crops—largely legumes—that will re-introduce nitrogen into the soil. In other words, by alternating every corn harvest with a harvest of peas or beans, a field need never lie fallow.

Moreover, diversifying crops can add much-needed nutrients to most local diets. In 2008, Joel Bourne, agronomist, journalist and author of The End of Plenty, went to Malawi to assist aid workers in introducing crop

rotation to local farmers. “People there now are so dependent on maize,” Bourne says. “They eat this white corn porridge that gives them the bulk of their calories, but it’s very low in other types of nutrients, so getting farmers to plant legumes, pigeon peas and ground nuts helps us boost nu-trition in the area.”

Another, more blue-sky option is an overhaul of our global dietary make-up. Compared with other potential staples, wheat, rice and corn don’t pro-duce very many calories per acre; corn yields 7.5 million calories, rice 7.4 million and wheat a mere 3 million. Sweet potatoes, meanwhile, can pro-duce 10.3 million calories per acre, grow in poor soil and tolerate irregular rainfall. Potatoes (which, despite the name, aren’t related to sweet pota-toes) produce 9.2 million calories per acre, grow in any well-drained soil and can tolerate frost. Both have bona fides as staple crops—the humble potato, for example, got Europe through the Industrial Revolution’s popu-lation boom, while for a long time the sweet potato served as the primary staple for both native Hawaiians and the Maori people of what is now New Zealand—but they were sidelined by Borlaug and his disciples during the green revolution in favor of wheat, rice and corn.

Given the calories-to-acres ratio we’re going to have to get to if we want to feed future generations, potatoes and sweet potatoes are due for a re-naissance. Indeed, in places where arable land is scarce, it’s already begun: The Kenyan government, working with the agricultural nongovernmental organization One Acre Fund, is encouraging farmers to plant sweet pota-toes instead of maize, while the Chinese government has asked its citizens to make potatoes part of the national diet. Even the United Nations has be-gun putting its weight behind tubers; in 2008, the potato was declared the “food of the future,” and today the U.N. runs a fund specifically to support potato farmers around the world.

Techie Tractors

UNTIL THAT TUBER REVIVAL goes global, efficiency will be the main game. Almost half of the world’s supply of cereals (wheat, rice and corn, as well as less popular grains like sorghum and barley) is grown in the U.S., India and China. In all three nations, data-driven farming is on the rise, along with new fields of study and new careers for those willing to crunch a lot of numbers.

K.C. Ting, head of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s De-partment of Agricultural and Biological Engineering, works with open-field farmers (those who plant out under the big blue sky) to increase yield while

keeping the costs of things like water and fertilizer flat—and even sometimes decreasing expenses. Ting and his fel-lows map fields, figuring out which lo-cations produce the highest yields and then gathering key data about those spots: everything from soil pH and water levels to mineral content in the ground. With this information, Ting and other

“AB engineers” can help farmers plan where to till and where to spray water, herbicides, pesticides and fertilizer. On larger farms, they can automate some or all of these processes (tilling, spraying, fertilizing) so they’re done far more ef-ficiently than they could be with human hands. Automating farm equipment also helps the engineers collect more data—and year after year, as the data’s collect-ed, the farm gets more efficient.

Brian Scott, a farmer and occasional farm-life blogger residing in Indiana, grows “a little over 2,000 acres” of corn, popcorn, wheat and soybeans. (That’s fairly large; the midpoint acreage of farms in the U.S. is 1,105.) He ticks off the high-tech tools he uses on his farm: tractors equipped with GPS and autos-teer that till straight every time (because “in a 10-to-12-hour day, it’s hard for a human hand or brain to continually till a perfectly straight line”), a planter that “knows where it is and knows where it’s been” so it never replants the same patch of ground, a fertilizer tube that does the same, pH tests for his fields, yield maps and yield histories of his soy-beans and corn. He doesn’t even have some of the hottest stuff out there (crop sensors, irrigation via smartphone), but Scott says the tech toys he does use have helped him increase yield while saving substantial sums of money.

But when asked if the yields of techno-phile American farmers will help allevi-ate global hunger in a world of 9 billion plus, Scott goes quiet. His answer, when it comes, is thoughtful. “People sometimes forget that if we grow 300 bushels of corn per acre”—almost twice last year’s

“A L O T O F P O O R FA R M E R S I N U N D E R D E V E L O P E D C O U N T R I E S A R E S T I L L FA R M I N G A S T H O U G H I T ’ S 1 0, 0 0 0 B . C .”

37NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

LUC

Y N

ICH

OLS

ON

/RE

UT

ER

S

record-breaking average—“that’s great, but what’s the price going to be?”Scott fears that if overproduction of corn drops the price of corn too far,

fewer farmers will find it worth their while to produce corn in bulk—whichwill lead to less corn being grown worldwide. As a result, he says, “thosecrops [won’t] necessarily get to the people in poor countries.” Financial in-centives are key; “a lot of farmers have told me recently that the concept offeeding the world doesn’t resonate with them so much anymore,” says Scott.

Meet Lab Meat

THE COMPLEX INTERPLAY between consumer demand, crop yields andgrower incentives plays out prominently in what is probably today’s hot-test Big Ag topic: genetically modified organisms. A lot of Scott’s crops areactually GMOs; much of his corn is Bt corn (poisonous to certain insects),and all of his soybeans are Roundup Ready (herbicide resistant)—it helpshim keep his yields high. But recent changes in consumer demand for non-GMO products has pushed him to keep some of his crops unmodified. “Lastyear, I think almost all our yellow waxy corn was GMO, and this year it’s not,because the place that we take our waxy corn wants all non-GMO corn.”

But for those concerned primarily with preventing impending world

famine, the debate around GMO safe-ty is overshadowed by an even morefundamental question: Will geneticmodification help feed 9 billion people?Bourne says that though herbicide-resis-tant and pesticide-resistant GMOs havemade farmers’ lives easier, “We haven’tseen significant increases in corn, rice orwheat in the major breadbaskets of theworld since around the year 2000, andthat’s of great concern.”

One potential exception is C4 rice, be-ing developed by the International RiceResearch Institute in the Philippines.Normal rice has what is known as a C3photosynthetic pathway, which turnssunlight into energy in a far less efficient

+SMART WATER: Today, flood irrigation iscommon, but it is increasingly recog-nized as inefficient. Intelligent wateringpractices—drip irrigation, irrigationvia smartphone—will help to maximize resources and raise output.

T H E S W E E T P O TAT O F O R A L O N G T I M E S E R V E DA S T H E P R I M A R Y S TA P L E F O R B O T H N AT I V E H AWA I I A N S

A N D T H E M A O R I P E O P L E .

38NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

way than the C4 pathway used by, for example, maize. The idea, Bourne explains, is to develop a modified form of rice that uses the C4 pathway; compared with an other-wise-identical paddy of unmodified rice, a paddy of C4 rice would yield 50 percent more crop. All the components neces-sary for C4 photosynthe-sis already exist in normal rice, but they are distrib-uted differently and not as active. And the genetic pathway that could turn C3 rice into C4 rice still isn’t entirely understood. “I’ve interviewwed the head of the department at Oxford University who is working on this, and she said we’re still 20 to 25 years out from seeing this in the field,” Bourne says. “So it’s still beyond the horizon we need if we want to head off all food problems.” (That said, the rice institute has recently started experimenting on the process using CRIS-PR, a newly developed gene-editing tool of unprecedented precision—many hope the technology will speed the process of understanding C4 pathways in plants and designing and implementing a C4 pathway for rice.)

According to Bourne, the most efficient way to head off our food problems is actually far less glamorous: We can stop eating meat. Right now, the FAO estimates a full third of available cropland is used for producing feed for ani-mals; much more (about 26 percent of the Earth’s ice-free surface) is used for grazing the animals themselves. Worse, meat’s incredibly inefficient to pro-duce: On average, animal protein production in the U.S. requires 28 calories of feed for every calorie of meat produced for human consumption.

Unfortunately, meat is a luxury item, and as more and more people are pulled from poverty in places like India and China, the demand for meat is increasing enormously; the FAO predicts that the global demand for meat will increase by more than two-thirds in the next 40 years.

That growing demand might just be the death knell of the Amazon rain for-est: China already owns half the pigs in the world, and as rural peasants there have begun to have more disposable income, the demand for pork has risen. However, growing feed for all those millions of pigs is land-intensive, and China’s agricultural land is in bad shape: According to China’s official news agency Xinhua, more than 40 percent of farmland in the country has already degraded due to over-intensive farming. So China has decided that instead of growing the pig feed it needs, it is just going to import it from places like Brazil. The demand for soybeans to feed China’s hogs is driving a soy revo-lution in Brazil, which, in turn, is incentivizing farmers there to chop down

the rain forest to plant more soy. And, of course, cutting down the rain forest releases carbon into the atmosphere which speeds up global warming which gives us less arable land which makes our upcoming land versus food problem all the worse.

One possible solution is to replace meat that comes from land with meat that comes from labs. At the Nether-lands’s Maastricht University, vascular physiology expert Mark J. Post is working on it. In 2013, Post produced the world’s first lab-grown hamburger and fed it to food researcher Hanni Ruetzler and food

writer Josh Schonwald. Ruetzler praised the burger’s flavor and consistency, but at $330,000 per pop, it wasn’t consid-ered competition for cattlemen. This year, though, Post, bankrolled by Goo-gle co-founder Sergey Brin, brought the price down to $80 per kilogram of meat, or a little over $11 per patty—much closer to commercial viability.

But before it becomes a regular of-

+A MAN-MADE PLANET: The thousands of greenhouses in Spain’s Campo de Dalías are visable from space, as evi-denced by this photo taken by the crew of the International Space Station.

I F W E WA N T T O F E E D F U T U R E G E N E R AT I O N S , P O TAT O E S A N D S W E E T P O TAT O E S A R E D U E F O R A R E N A I S S A N C E .

39NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

FRO

M L

EFT

: N

AS

A;

ED

GA

R S

U/R

EU

TE

RS

fering at McDonald’s, Post’s meat still needs to clear some hurdles. Theburger is dry, says Ruetzler; Post’s meat lacks fat, which on a cow-grownburger adds flavor and keeps the meat “juicy.” The growth medium forthe ground beef is also a problem: Post’s stem cells have thus far grownsuccessfully into meat only when soaked in a serum made from fetal calfblood—an expensive (and definitely nonvegetarian) option. Post and hiscolleagues at Maastricht are currently working on solving those problems.Post estimates it’ll be 20 to 30 years before lab-grown beef goes commer-cial in a big way. In the meantime, though, Amit Gefen, a bioengineer atTel Aviv University, has already begun experiments in lab-growing chick-en. In other words, it’s not totally insane to imagine a near-future in whichfarmlands become, at least in part, home to high-tech food laboratories.

Gators in the Swimming Pool

IF HUMANS can summon the will to bring the full brunt of all this tech-nology and infrastructure to bear on feeding everyone, there will be aninteresting side-effect. Up to 20 billion square miles of land previously de-voted to food production willbe freed up. Where once weate 40 percent of the Earth’ssurface, in the future, ideal-ly, we will eat a bit less than5 percent. So what do we dowith all that extra land?

Despommier tells the sto-ry of a Florida farmer whose30 acres of strawberry fieldswere destroyed in 1992 byHurricane Andrew. The farm-er got money to rebuild hisfarm, but instead of replant-ing strawberries, he usedthe money to build a green-house: “He did this becausehe thought if he built thegreenhouse strong enough itmight survive the next hur-ricane, and he was right,”says Despommier. Moreover,tricked out with hydroponicsequipment, the greenhousewas so efficient that 1 acreof indoor space could growmore strawberries than thefarmer had previously beenable to produce on 30 outdooracres. This left the farmerwith 29 acres of unused land.

The farmer decided to let nature reclaim the former strawberry fields.Soon the crop lands were wetland, “rewilded,” says Despommier. “I talk-ed to him, and he said the only problem he had now was to worry about

alligators in his swimming pool.”Despommier says he wants to be re-

sponsible for “rewilding” as much landas possible. The aesthetic and environ-mental benefits, he says, are desirableenough in and of themselves, but thereal kicker is helping stymie or even re-verse climate change. If every city couldmanufacture even 10 percent of what itate, says Despommier, the subsequentrewilding “would mean a huge additionto hardwood forests that would suckup enough carbon to set the clock backto about 1980 in terms of atmospher-ic carbon.” And that’s with only about340,000 square miles of land reclaimed;imagine the climate gains brought byseveral billion miles of land rewilded—and all with food to spare.

+GROWING UP: A worker harvests freshproduce from a tower at Sky Greens, avertical farm in Singapore that growsleafy vegetables in three-story-highframes stacked inside greenhouses.

“ T H E O N LY P R O B L E M H E H A D N O W WA S T O W O R R Y A B O U T A L L I G AT O R S I N H I S S W I M M I N G P O O L .”

40NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

TRUMP’SBIGDUMPTHE MOGUL MADE HIS NAME IN

ATLANTIC CITY BUT LEFT RUINS BEHIND

BY NINA BURLEIGH

IN

42NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

CH

AR

LES

RE

X A

RB

OG

AS

T/A

P;

PR

EVIO

US

SP

RE

AD

: M

AR

K M

AK

ELA

/RE

UT

ER

S

THIS CITY built on lucky streaks and last chances,Donald Trump is gone but not forgotten. He remainsa totemic presence high above the Atlantic Cityboardwalk even though he no longer owns the hotelsbearing his name, having lost the last one six yearsago. Between the onion domes of the Taj Mahal hotel,the word Trump is still visible, even to ships at sea.

Inside the Taj, one of three casinos he once owned,shoppers can still browse the Trump Exchange store,which sells all Donald Style, from branded apparelto a dinner table set with gold charger plates andcrystal glassware. A black-and-white blowup of theDonald, circa 1980, with windblown hair and firmerjaw, holds pride of place behind the cash register,beneath a bit of his CEO wisdom embossed on thewall: I like thinking Big. You have to think anyway sowhy not think big? D. Trump.

Atlantic City hasn’t forgotten Trump, and theRepublican front-runner for president can’t forgetAtlantic City, where his casinos employed thou-sands and where his companies filed for four bank-ruptcies between 1991 and 2009. By then, the realestate mogul’s share in Trump Hotels and CasinoResorts had already dwindled. He resigned fromthe board, retaining just a 10 percent stake. Histhree casinos were his in name only. Today, onlyone of them, the Taj, still bears the Trump brand.

When asked about Atlantic City, Trump says theiconic resort town is “a disaster” that collapsed justbefore his timely exit, which is surely true. In the townon which the Monopoly game was based, riches didnot trickle down. Many inhabitants are not passingGo: 39,000 people live in a city where unemploymentis 13.8 percent, the 10th highest in the nation, and themortgage foreclosure rate is America’s highest.

Trump has been vigorously spinning his compa-nies’ bankruptcies as evidence of his business acu-men. “I had the good sense, and I’ve gotten a lot of

credit in the financial pages—seven years ago, I leftAtlantic City before it totally cratered,” he boastedin the first GOP primary debate. “And I made a lotof money in Atlantic City, and I’m very proud of it.”

Today, Trump is running for president, he says,to make people rich. How he fared in Atlantic Citysuggests a businessman savvy enough to build atemporary empire but one whose bankruptcies andeventual exit caused considerable pain for many peo-ple. While America knows Trump through his realityshows and golf courses, the residents here know himas a boss and civic figure, and their perspective maybe the best available assessment of Trump’s claimsthat he can, as he says, “make America great again.”

Atlantic City attracted Trump and more estab-lished casino operators—Caesars, Harrah’s, Bally’sand Mirage Resorts—because New Jersey vot-ers passed a constitutional amendment in 1976

43NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

+TAJ MAUL:

Trump says hisspectacular

failure in Atlan-tic City wasn’this fault, that

the collapse ofthe New Jersey

casinos couldn’tbe stopped and

that he wassmart to get out

when he did.

legalizing casino gambling. Politicians promisedgambling would pay for schools and roads, not justin the ailing seaside city but across the state. At thetime, only faraway Nevada offered casino gambling,and Atlantic City was a short drive from many citiesin the densely populated Northeast.

When Trump snagged his first Atlantic City casinolicense in 1982, there were questions about the sizeof his fortune, just as there are now. According

to a biography by financial journalist Timothy L.O’Brien, TrumpNation: The Art of Being Donald, thethen-36-year-old’s wealth was propped up by loansfrom his developer father. (Trump sued O’Brien,and the long litigation ended with the case beingdismissed.) Today, Trump claims a net worth of $10billion, while Forbes says it is more like $4 billion.Whatever his true worth was, in the ’80s and ’90sTrump’s New York flash gave Atlantic City a big PRboost. He brought glitzy high rollers, big-time box-ing and celebrities to town. When Trump walkedthe boardwalk, people applauded. Police cruisersaccompanied his limo, fore and aft.

In 1991, the Trump Taj Mahal Casino, which hadopened just a year before, filed for bankruptcy.Trump had financed it with $900 million in junkbonds. Although the company—and not Trumppersonally—filed for bankruptcy, he unloaded his

WHEN TRUMPWALKED THE BOARDWALK,

PEOPLE APPLAUDED.POLICE CRUISERS

ACCOMPANIED HIS LIMO, FORE AND AFT.

44NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

FRO

M L

EFT

: W

AYN

E P

AR

RY/

AP

; M

AR

K M

AK

ELA

/RE

UT

ER

S

Trump Princess yacht, his Trump Shuttle airline andstakes in other businesses.

The Taj bankruptcy hit Atlantic City’s small busi-nesses much harder. Trump already had a reputationfor being a very tough negotiator with suppliers—anecho of his campaign promise to negotiate the besttrade deals for America. Contractors were so accus-tomed to getting paid cents on the dollar that theyhabitually built in an extra percentage, according toone Atlantic City bankruptcy lawyer.

J. Michael Diehl, who owns Freehold Music Cen-ter, sold Trump eight Yamaha grand pianos foraround $100,000. “He put out a bid for pianosabout a year before the Taj opened. I won the bid. Idelivered the pianos, and I waited and I waited to getpaid. And finally I heard from them that I had threechoices: to accept 70 percent of the bid or to waituntil the casino could afford to pay the bill in full. OrI could force them into bankruptcy with everybodyelse and maybe get 10 cents on the dollar. I took the70 percent, and I lost 30 percent.”

Talking to Philly.com earlier this summer, Diehlsaid, “I’m not going to vote for him, that’s for sure.That’s a crude way of doing business.” Representa-tives at Trump’s company declined to comment onDiehl’s account and did not return calls for this story.

New Jersey state Senator Jim Whelan, AtlanticCity’s mayor back then, and other sources who askednot to be named say Trump had a bad reputationamong vendors even before the bankruptcies. “Thefact is, there were a lot of small contractors and ven-dors who got hurt, who went out of business becauseTrump did not pay contracts on time,” he says.

Small vendors who grappled with delayed or lowerpayments as a business practice then became theunsecured creditors in the bankruptcies. In any bank-ruptcy, small creditors are forced to accept court-ordered percentages of what they are owed. New Yorkbankruptcy lawyer Stephen Meister, who has repre-sented Trump in other matters, defended Trump’scompanies for seeking the best deals possible afterbankruptcy. “A hallmark of any good reorganizationplan is ‘shared sacrifice’ among all the stakeholders,”Meister says. “That is really what bankruptcy reorga-nization is all about. Everyone swallows their fair doseof the medicine. And Trump certainly swallowed hisfair dose. He paid millions and gave up the yacht hehad bought from the Sultan of Brunei.”

In addition to Trump’s financial problems thatled to the Taj bankruptcy, in the ’90s Atlantic Citybegan to face increasing gambling competitionfrom all over the country—Indian casinos, riverboatgambling, horse tracks that added slots and gamingtables. Most Americans didn’t need to travel far togamble, and Vegas posed new competition by trans-forming its reputation from a mob haven into an adult as well as family-friendly playground.

In the face of all that, Trump’s companies filed forthree more bankruptcies, in 1992, 2004 and 2009.Trump’s serial bankruptcies stood out even in theincreasingly tough Atlantic City casino business. Theflurry of bankruptcies by Trump’s companies wasdifferent from that of other casino owners in AtlanticCity, says gaming industry analyst Christopher Jones,managing director of North American research atUnion Gaming Group, a Las Vegas-based investmentbank focused on the global gaming industry. “Themajority of the other [businesses] did not go bankruptfour times. Relative to his peer group, the proper-ties weren’t as well-maintained as the others, whichhelped his decline.” Jones’s bottom line: “Trumpdidn’t do Atlantic City a lotta good in the later years.”

When business was booming, casino industryemployees in Atlantic City enjoyed personal and fam-ily health insurance and retirement benefits. But thespate of bankruptcies—Trump’s and, more recently,others’—washed away that stability. In 2014, Atlan-tic City lost 6,000 casino jobs in a matter of weeks,adding up to more than 10,000 for that year. The fed-eral government had to pump in nearly $30 millionin emergency employment-assistance funds, and thestate of New Jersey set up special assistance centersto help the unemployed get relief and hunt for new

TRUMP HAD ABAD REPUTATION AMONG

VENDORS EVEN BEFORE THE BANKRUPTCIES.

45NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

jobs. “Frankly, you can’t fault Trump for the lostjobs, as much as I want to,” says Whelan, the formermayor. “He got out before the downturn.”

On the boardwalk and in the union hall, menand women who worked for Trump have a love-hate relationship with the mogul. Since TrumpEntertainment—Trump-ian now in name only, andowned by investor Carl Icahn—filed for bankruptcyagain last year, labor relations at the Trump crownjewel casino have imploded. Icahn is in a bitter fightwith Unite Here Local 54, the union representingmore than 11,000 workers, which has called him “amalignancy” in Atlantic City.

By contrast, Bob McDevitt, the union’s president,recalls a good relationship with Trump. “Trumpnever challenged whether the union was legitimate,”he says. “Icahn is trying to destroy the union.” Icahnhas charged that the union cares more about itsfees than workers’ health care and said union rulescontributed to three recent casino closings. Trumphas said he’d make Icahn his treasury secretary andpoint man for trade negotiations with China.

Like the other owners, Trump built casinos on theVegas model—windowless caverns brimming withslot machines and gaming tables. Escalators at the Tajmake it easy to enter, difficult to leave. Once you’reinside and acclimated to the glow of the pink chande-liers, it takes an effort to find exit doors. One can walkseveral hundred carpeted yards in many directionswithout seeing sunlight. No brochures direct visitorsto attractions outside the casino, not to the aquarium,nor even to a local restaurant. It’s a grim scene.

The idea, of course, is to keep you in the casino,gambling. “They built these boxes,” says EllenMutari, an economics professor at Atlantic City’sStockton University, who with colleague DeborahM. Figart spent seven years researching a book onthe effects of the casino industry on Atlantic City.“The message was, ‘Stay in here, it’s safe. We willtake care of you!’ There were very few positiveeffects for local business.”

Today, Trump the politician can draw visitors offthe casino floor. I watched the second GOP presiden-tial debate in September in a room in the Taj Mahal’s“Chairman Tower.” (The complex is divided intothe casino and towers.) As the forum dragged intoits third hour, I ordered room service. An attendantarrived 45 minutes later, apologizing for the delay,explaining that she was the only staff member serv-ing two towers. “We didn’t staff tonight, because wethought it would be a quiet night,” she explained,then pointed at the debate on the screen. “But every-one’s inside their room, watching this!”

She refused to give her name because the staff isinstructed not to talk to reporters about Trump, butshe said she’d worked at the casino for 20 years andpraised the Donald’s legacy. Thanks to the steady

work and benefits, she bought a house and expectsto retire on a pension. “I remember once the unionwas negotiating with his people, and he called downfrom New York and said, ‘Give them what theywant,’” she says. “I always liked him after that.”

Martin Wood, 80, has been minding his Wood’sLoan Office, a pawnshop on Atlantic Avenue, for fivedecades, and he takes a more skeptical view of Trump.The casinos were good for Wood, though. Each time anew casino opened, his business grew by 10 percent,Wood reckons. Gamblers dropped by every morningto pawn jewelry. If they got lucky, they returned atnight to buy it back with their winnings. If not, after acouple of months Wood placed the keepsake amongthe other diamond engagement rings and pinkierings under his glass counter. “I’m not impressed withTrump’s business acumen,” he says. “But then again,he’s probably not impressed with mine.”

Keith Harris, an administrative assistant at AsburyUnited Methodist Church’s community center, whichfeeds Atlantic City’s poor, says Trump had a goodreputation even among the unemployed. “Every-

body did seem to feel he was a better owner, as far asemployees were concerned. But lots of people do feelhe jumped ship and left a lot of us high and dry. ”

Over at the Absecon Lighthouse, New Jersey’stallest, Milton Glenn is director of education. Hemanned the front desk at Trump Plaza from 1991 to1996 and now scoffs at Trump for running on a jobsplatform. “Yes, he made a lot of money, yes, he gotout at the right time, but he really did contribute tothe economic devastation of this town. And he didn’tget out of here at the right time. He was pushed out by bankruptcy.”

+ICAHN-OGRAPHY: In the union halls, those whoworked for Trump in Atlantic City have a love-haterelationship with the mogul, but all seem to scorn his pal, Carl Icahn, as a union-buster.

N E W W O R L D

STARTUPS SCIENCE MEDICINE HEALTH WILDLIFE SPACE

47NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

YU

YA

NG

GOOD SCIENCE

components. The Styrofoam-eating mealworms completed their life cycles—from larva to pupa and finally adult beetle—just as those subsisting on a normal diet of bran do, though their weight didn’t increase as much as that of a bran-fed control group. The researchers, from Stanford University and Beihang University in Beijing, also looked more closely at the microbial envi-ronment of the mealworm gut and the key role it plays in the plastic degradation process.

After giving their insect subjects antibiotics for 10 days to suppress the activity of gut bacte-ria, the scientists found that the creatures could no longer degrade the plastic. They isolated one bacterial strain and demonstrated its degrading effect on polystyrene even when outside the gut—albeit at a much slower pace. The ultimate goal of the project, says Wei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer at Stanford and an author on the papers, is to turn this into tech that can “accelerate reme-diation of plastic contaminated sites.”

MORE THAN 1 million tons of plastic foam cupsand plates—most made of polystyrene resin—were discarded in the U.S. in 2013, says the Envi-ronmental Protection Agency, and the stuff canlanguish in landfills for many years. But theremay be a simple solution: mealworms.

Two papers published in the journal Environ-mental Science&Technology in September foundthat the larvae form of the beetleTenebriomolitorcan eat and rapidly break down Styrofoam andother forms of polystyrene generally thoughtto be nonbiodegradable. After roughly 10 daysadapting to a new Styrofoam diet, the meal-worms could degrade the plastic in their guts inless than 24 hours, turning 47.7 percent of whatthey ingested into carbon dioxide and most ofthe rest into fecal matter.

Several forms of analysis showed that themealworms’ guts had depolymerized the poly-styrene molecules—in other words, they couldbreak apart the links among the molecule’s

FROM BREAKFAST IN STYROFOAM TO STYROFOAM FOR BREAKFASTTo rid the world of plastic dishware, the worm’s the word

BYSTAV ZIV @stavziv

+ THEY CAN STOMACH IT: After discovering that mealworms can biodegrade Styro-foam, Wu’s team plans to investi-gate the mecha-nism at work by isolating bacterial strains found in the worms’ guts.

NEW WORLD/STARTUPS

DISRUPTIVE

48NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

SITTING ACROSS from me for our interview,Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky demonstrated whyartificial intelligence robots won’t take over thejob of entrepreneur anytime soon.

No robot would ever be as crack-brained andheedless as Chesky was at his company’s begin-ning—actually, as any entrepreneur must betoday. In this warped era of company creation,the only good business ideas are really badideas. Code that into an IBM Watson and watchits circuits melt.

The interview with Chesky took place atNew York University, in front of an audienceof mostly students who someday want to startcompanies. Chesky retold Airbnb’s creationstory. He and Joe Gebbia, recent graduates ofthe Rhode Island School of Design turned job-less roommates in San Francisco, couldn’t affordtheir rent. A major design conference was com-ing to town, and hotels were sold out. The room-mates blew up three airbeds and put up a websiteoffering to rent them out and serve cereal in themorning. Hence AirbedAndBreakfast.com. Theygot three paying customers.

“Does that sound like a big idea?” Cheskyquipped. “I remember someone saying to me,‘Don’t worry about your idea. If it’s any good,everyone will dismiss it.’”

I’ve been hearing a lot of that lately. BryanRoberts, a venture capitalist at Venrock, told mehe has to look for what he calls non-consensus

ideas. These companies have to have “some-thing most people think you can’t surmount, orthat if you do surmount, no one will care.” Snap-chat, for instance, falls into that latter category.Early on, a lot of people wondered why anyoneexcept sexting teenagers would care about a ser-vice that disappears their naked selfies. Today,the company is valued at $16 billion. Go figure.

Why search for non-consensus? In this era ofconstant connectivity and social media, every-one knows what everyone else is doing instantly.Cloud services and open-source software allowanybody with an idea to get it up and run-ning quickly for very little money. Add all thattogether and the second an idea seems sane, 30companies are already doing it and fighting forattention, investment and customers. That’s notthe kind of business that’s going to blow up intoa multibillion-dollar, world-changing enterprise.

A non-consensus company like Airbnb orSnapchat buys time in the shadows to build abusiness that hardly anyone thinks is worthbuilding. Then another phenomenon of ourultra-connected age kicks in. As Roberts says,“Things go from non-consensus to consensusvery quickly, but by then you [the company] havesome competitive advantage that’s hard to sur-mount.” Nobody sees it, and then—boom!—it’severywhere, constantly tweeted, liked, pinnedand shared. Slack, Dropbox, YouTube—you’vewatched it happen a hundred times. For Airbnb,

THE BILLION-DOLLAR MISTAKEThe best ideas in tech thesedays are the ones everyone agrees are stupid...until they’re not

BYKEVIN MANEY

@kmaney

49NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

SNOW THYSELF:To break out today

in Silicon Valley,you need some-thing that may

sound crazy, like abusiness that rentsout a hotel room in

a cable car in theFrench Alps.

+

that takeoff moment came in 2011. Today, Airbnboffers more rooms than Hilton, Marriott andHyatt combined. It’s been valued at $25.5 billion.

The speed is what’s new. Non-consensusideas have always driven the greatest inno-vations. (When King Gillette started sellingdisposable safety razors in 1904, most menwondered why they’d give up their straightrazors.) But in the past, starting a business ofteninvolved manufacturing, and your word hadto be spread by advertising. The conversion toconsensus was more like a journey than a lightswitch. New gadgets could be protected by pat-ents for decades. Today, a fraction of startupseven file for a patent. There’s no time. The bet-ter protection is having potential competitorsthink you’re nuts for just long enough that theycan’t catch up once you prove you’re not.

The challenge of searching for non-consensusideas, then, is separating good non-consensusideas from ideas that just plain suck. In the earlieststages, as when Chesky was renting blow-up beds,the two look the same. In honest moments, everyinvestor or entrepreneur will tell you they can’t tell

the difference. Chesky’s advice: “You just have tobuild a solution for a problem in your own life.”Solve your own small problem, and it might laterscale to solve a lot of people’s bigger problems.

In fact, when you think about it, the legendaryentrepreneurs have understood that their jobsweren’t just to invent something. That may bethe easy part, the part someone like Chesky canstumble into. The real job is changing people’sminds. A non-consensus idea by definition hasno demand. No one thinks he wants or needs it.Inventing Airbnb was one thing. Convincing amass market that it’s wonderful to stay in otherpeople’s homes while traveling has been thecompany’s real victory.

This circles back to worries that AI will get sosmart it will take over all our jobs. Days beforetalking with Chesky, I met with Joseph Sirosh,who’s developing machine learning at Micro-soft. He discussed how machines are gettingamazingly good at predicting what to do nextbased on past data. They can suck up all themedical research and patient data ever cre-ated and diagnose a rare disease most doctors

wouldn’t even know about.But great non-consensus ideas

come from the opposite direc-tion. As Sirosh said, past datawill always show that a non-

consensus idea will fail. Use AIto analyze Airbnb in 2008 and itwould’ve suggested Chesky stickto his other idea, making politi-cally themed breakfast cereal.Chesky and Gebbia actuallyfunded Airbnb by selling boxes ofObama O’s and Cap’n McCain’s.

In this modern age, the greatvalue of humans—our ultimatetriumph—seems to be our will-ingness to do things that make absolutely no sense.

“DON’T WORRYABOUT YOURIDEA. IF IT’SANY GOOD,EVERYONE WILL DISMISS IT.”

WHITEHOTPIX

/ZUMA

NEW WORLD/MEDICINE

50NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

MINUTES SEPARATED Are’Yana Hill from deathas she struggled to breathe in the hallway of herSan Francisco high school. The 18-year-oldhad lived with asthma attacks since before shecould talk, and on that day, in April 2014, shecould not speak. She thrust the rescue inhalershe carried in her backpack between her lipsand inhaled. No relief. It felt, she thought, as if acharley horse had formed in her chest, knottingher lungs—each gasp trammeled by tighteningairways. Her pursed lips turned gray, and all shecould think about was her unborn baby. Hill,eight months pregnant, clutched her inhalerand prayed for paramedics to arrive.

“I take my medicine every day. I do everythingthe doctors tell me. I’ve tried every single thing,and I still have attacks,” Hill said a little morethan a year later, as a nurse at San Francisco Gen-eral Hospital’s Asthma Clinic placed a stetho-scope on her back, between her shoulders. Herwheezing was barely audible. Each expirationsounded like the whistle of a distant tea kettle.

The attack in 2014 put Hill in the hospital.Asthma attack patients in the ER are oftengiven oxygen and albuterol or other medica-tions to relax the airways through a nebulizermask. These treatments typically last a coupleof hours, but Hill’s airways weren’t opening.She breathed through a nebulizer continuouslyfor a week. Eventually she recovered, and, twoweeks after she left the hospital, her son wasborn. Others are not as lucky.

African-Americans, like Hill, are three times

more likely to die of asthma than their whitecounterparts. Albuterol, the most commonly pre-scribed asthma medication in the world, is lesseffective in African-Americans and Puerto Ricansthan in other racial and ethnic groups. Accordingto one study, 47 percent of African-American kidsand 67 percent of Puerto Rican kids with moder-ate to severe asthma didn’t respond to albuterol;only 20 percent of Dutch kids with severe asthmaweren’t helped by the drug in a separate study.Blacks who use long-acting bronchodilators tocontrol asthma are four times more likely to dieor be hospitalized for severe asthma complica-tions than whites.

Genetic differences affect how minority groupsrespond to treatment for other diseases too.About 86 percent of Asian-Americans are esti-mated to have a genetic trait that makes themhypersensitive to warfarin, the most commonlyused anticoagulant drug, putting them at risk ofexcessive bleeding at doses typically prescribedfor white Americans. Only about 16 percent ofwhite Americans have that trait. Up to 75 percentof Pacific Islanders have a genetic trait that makesthem poor responders to the blood thinner clopi-dogrel, putting them at risk of recurrent heartattacks. Last year, in Hawaii, the state attorneygeneral sued the makers of Plavix, claiming false,unfair and deceptive marketing, because the drughas little to no effect in an estimated 30 percent ofthe state’s population.

What part of the world your ancestors camefrom can affect your disease risk and determine

CLINICAL RACISMWhy some of the world’s most important medications don’t work for minorities

BYLINDSEY KONKEL

@LindseyKonkel

51NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

JEA

N-P

IER

RE

JA

NS

/RE

A/R

ED

UX

how your body metabolizes certaindrugs. Yet 96 percent of modernstudies on disease genetics havebeen conducted in Caucasians, peo-ple of European descent. In the U.S.,African-Americans and Hispanicsmake up nearly 30 percent of the pop-ulation, yet account for only about 6percent of all clinical trial partici-pants. The result is a one-size-fits-allapproach to medicine that benefitssome segments of the population more thanothers. And the problem is bound to worsen:As the nation’s interest and investment grow inprecision medicine, the racial health disparitygap may be exacerbated if minority participantsaren’t better represented in future research ini-tiatives, experts warn.

INA SUNNYHALLWAY of Dr. Esteban Burchard’sMission Bay research laboratory hangs a framedprint of Mexican artist Diego Rivera’s “FlowerSeller.” In it, an indigenous Mexican womankneels as she stretches to wrap her arms arounda mighty bundle of calla lilies—Rivera’s homageto the perennially downtrodden. “It reminds me

why I come to work every day,” Burchard says.A pulmonologist at the University of Cali-

fornia, San Francisco (UCSF), Burchard leadsthe nation’s largest pediatric asthma researchcohort composed entirely of blacks and Lati-nos. He has identified a genetic variant forsevere asthma that is 40 percent more com-mon in African-Americans than Caucasians.His research shows that ethnicity is the mostimportant factor in determining whether apatient will respond to asthma therapy—evenmore important than the severity of the diseaseor the patient’s socioeconomic status.

Like many of the participants in his study,Burchard grew up poor, just blocks from San

NINETY-SIX PERCENTOF MODERN STUDIESON DISEASE GENETICSHAVE BEEN CONDUCTED IN CAUCASIANS.

+UNTESTED: In the

Netherlands, aman participatesin Helius, a largestudy examining

the differences inhealth between

various ethnic andcultural groups. Inthe U.S., minoritygroups have long

been left out ofmedical testing.

52NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

Francisco General’s Asthma Clinic, in the MissionDistrict, a hotbed of Latin American politicalactivism in the 1960s and 1970s. Half-Latino,half-Caucasian, Burchard and his four siblingswere raised by their single Mexican-Americanmother, a schoolteacher. Chinese neighborshelped watch and feed him—he still speaks someCantonese. Burchard was fascinated by the racialdiversity he saw around him but frustrated by therigid social structures girding it. “My mom wasdarker than me. Growing up, I could go placeswhere she couldn’t. I was so perplexed by that,”says Burchard, who’s made a career out of study-ing the nexus of genetic and socio-environmentalfactors that influence health and disease.

Historically, within medical research, Afri-can-Americans, Native Americans and otherminorities were often relegated to unscientificexperiments aimed at bolstering eugenics—such as the disfiguring procedures performed inthe antebellum South by white physicians onnon-consenting black slaves. In addition, they’vehistorically been excluded from clinical and ther-apeutic trials that seek to uncover risk factorsfor disease and offer life-saving new treatments.Consider the infamous federally funded Tuskegeesyphilis experiment—shut down in 1972—whichdenied treatment to hundreds of African-Ameri-can men suffering from the disease.

In the U.S. medical community, studyingracial differences in disease susceptibility andresponse to treatments remains controversial.Race and ethnicity are social constructs thathave been used to marginalize and exploit. Sci-entifically, race serves only as a crude proxy forwhat experts call genetic ancestry—the diversesignatures that arose in the genetic code as ourancestors traversed the globe.

Some experts worry that a focus on findinggenetic differences obscures the need to addressthe socioeconomic disparities that lead touneven access to health care in the U.S. “Focus-ing on inclusion in clinical trials is a great way toignore the fact that large numbers of poor andminority people are getting less than optimalhealth care,” says Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medicalofficer for the American Cancer Society.

Yet because of its social baggage, race remainsa powerful tool for studying patterns of diseaseand health, according to Sam Oh, an epidemiolo-gist in Burchard’s laboratory at UCSF. A person’sself-identified race or ethnicity can offer import-ant clues beyond genetic ancestry about import-ant cultural, socioeconomic and environmentalfactors that may influence disease risk.

Nearly 30 percent of Dr. Latha Palaniappan’spatients in the San Francisco Bay Area are of

Asian descent. In the past, Asians were rarelyincluded in clinical trials, says Palaniappan, aninternist and medical researcher at the Stan-ford University School of Medicine. “For 1 outof every 3 patients I see, there is little researchto guide my management. We are flying blind interms of clinical care for Asian-Americans,” shesays. And when Asian-Americans are studied,says Palaniappan, researchers often focus on oneAsian subgroup—forcing clinicians to extrapo-late about disease risk and treatment for otherAsian-Americans. This approach ignores the tre-mendous genetic and cultural diversity betweendifferent groups of Asian Americans. Take heartdisease: “If you lump all Asians together andcompare them to the white population, heart dis-ease risk looks about the same,” says Palaniap-pan. “But if you look closer, you see that Chineseactually have a lower risk, while Asian Indiansand Filipinos have a much higher risk.”

Burchard made a similar discovery when hecompared asthma rates among Latinos. Nearly20 percent of all Puerto Ricans have asthma,while less than 5 percent of Mexican-Americans suffer from the disease.

THEREAREMECHANISMS meant to ensure racialequity in biomedical studies. The National Insti-tutes of Health Revitalization Act, instituted byCongress in 1993, mandated inclusion of minori-ties in federally funded clinical research. But, saysMoon Chen, an expert in cancer health dispari-ties at the University of California, Davis, the acthasn’t done its job. Last year, Chen and colleaguesfound that less than 2 percent of clinical cancer T

HE

NAT

ION

AL

AR

CH

IVES

+UNTREATED: Attimes throughouthistory, minori-ty groups havebeen treated likeguinea pigs. In theinfamous TuskegeeSyphilis Study,black men wereincluded as partof clinical testingbut excluded from treatment.

53NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

NEW WORLD/MEDICINE

trials funded by the National Cancer Institutesince 1993 focused on any racial or ethnic minoritypopulation. “The proportion of minority adultsenrolled in cancer clinical trials is not adequateor representative of the U.S. population,” theyconcluded. Total cancer incidence in minoritiesis expected to increase by 99 percent, comparedwith just 31 percent for whites, in the next 15 years.In addition, less than 5 percent of all lung diseasestudies funded by the National Institutes of Health(NIH) in the past two decades have included astatistically meaningful number of participantsfrom racial or ethnic minorities, Burchard andcolleagues reported earlier this year.

Primary investigators are mandated to submitan inclusion plan when applying for NIH-fundedresearch, but there are few incentives to followthrough. “We have not established any mecha-nisms of accountability or consequences for notdoing it,” says Dr. Eliseo Pérez-Stable, directorof the National Institutes of Minority Health andHealth Disparities, an NIH branch establishedthrough the Affordable Care Act to improveminority health and health disparities.

Studies show that minority researchers aremore likely to focus their research on health dis-parities and addressing questionsrelevant to minority health. Butminority physicians and scientiststhemselves are underrepresentedamong faculty at U.S. medicalschools and research centers.They face additional barriersto getting their studies funded.A 2011 review of grant applica-tions to the NIH found that Afri-can-American and Asian-American researcherswere 13 percent and 4 percent less likely to befunded than their white peers, respectively.

A dearth of minority researchers involvedin grant review committees and other deci-sion-making bodies can lead to subtle bias in theselection process, says John Dovidio, a psycholo-gist at Yale University. “People tend to have moreconfidence in people like them. When you haveto choose one applicant over the other, you’regoing to go with your gut. Racial bias colors thatintuition in subtle ways,” he says. In addition,minorites are more likely to be poor and lackaccess to medical centers that refer patients forclinical factors. Cultural, linguistic and historicaljustice factors also create barriers.

In recent years, the NIH has funded investi-gations to understand how subtle bias occursduring the process and has taken steps to elim-inate it, including launching a pilot program tomake the review process anonymous. It has also

funded initiatives to increase diversity in thebiomedical workforce, including partnering withuniversities to fund training and mentorship pro-grams for minority students and young scientistspursuing careers in biomedical research.

While such steps may have a greater impact onfuture generations of researchers, says Pérez-Sta-ble, more needs to be done right now to incen-tivize the current field of research scientists anddecision-makers to pay attention to the problemin a serious way. “The changing demographicsof the U.S. make this an urgent issue, in my opin-ion,” he says. More than half of all Americans willbelong to a minority group by 2044, accordingto the U.S. Census Bureau. A growing numberof taxpayers stand to be underrepresented in the medical research they help to fund, says Oh.

In January, President Barack Obama announcedhis Precision Medicine Initiative aimed at accel-erating biomedical research on patient-centeredtreatments. The $215 million investment willinclude a research study of 1 million Americans.Kathy Hudson, deputy director for science, out-reach and policy at the NIH, called recruitmentof underrepresented minorities over the next twodecades a “high priority” for the research initia-tive. The NIH has solicited feedback from doctorsand scientists such as Burchard on how to create adiverse research cohort. The effort is an incredibleopportunity to move forward on addressing ques-tions of minority health, says Burchard, a mem-ber of the Precision Medicine Initiative WorkingGroup, which has advised the NIH on how torecruit 1 million volunteers. “Getting it right is a matter of social and scientific justice.”

“WE ARE FLYING BLIND INTERMS OF CLINICAL CARE FOR ASIAN-AMERICANS.”

This reporting project was funded through agrant provided by the Reporting Award at New YorkUniversity’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

54NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

THE BRAIN is a battlefield, says neuroscientistDavid Eagleman. You might think you’re mak-ing single-minded decisions, but you’re reallynot. “Instead, you are made up of multipledrives, all of whom are trying to be in control,”he says. Despite being a bit disconcerting—AmI not who I think I am? What are these voicesin my head?—the “team of rivals” brain model

might, Eagleman believes, pave the way towardthe end of drug addiction in the United States, ifhe can figure out how to teach people to harnessthose myriad drives.

He’s in the early stages of a project at his labat the Baylor College of Medicine that uses real-time feedback in brain imaging to, essentially,reshape how addicts react to their particular

HE’S GOT BRAIN ON THE BRAINTV’s next science pitchman also wants to cure drug addiction

BYSTACEYANDERSON

@staceykanderson

55NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

NEW WORLD/HEALTH

BLI

NK

FIL

MS

bête noir. “You’ve got these different neural net-works that all have purposes and agendas,” hesays. “Part of your brain really wants something,then there are other networks trying to resistit. We’re trying to help people to see these bat-tles under the hood and tip the scales.” Eagle-man connects his subjects to an MRI machine,then shows them photos of drug parapherna-lia; he instructs them to alternately allow theircravings to overwhelm and then suppress theirurgings for their drug of choice, charting theirneural responses on screen via a gauge similarto a speedometer. His theory is, with practice,the subjects will be able to hone their resistanceimpulse toward these powerful triggers.

“I call this ‘the prefrontal gym’—it’s just likegoing and working out, figuring how to movethe needle. The idea is by strengthening yourcapacity to suppress your craving, when you’reout in the real world, you’ll still want it, butyou’ll have the cognitive tool to resist,” saysEagleman energetically.

Early footage from these trials creates a par-ticularly dramatic interlude of The Brain WithDr. David Eagleman, his new documentaryminiseries for PBS. Written and hosted by thescientist, the program (which premiered onOctober 14) attempts to educate neuroscienceneophytes on the most fundamental processesof our most important organ: how it channelsthought, how it processes reality, how it func-tions in both conscious and unconscious states.

Much like his childhood hero, Carl Sagan (andSagan’s Cosmos heir, Neil deGrasseTyson), Eagleman is a gregariouscommunicator well-honed for TV;he cuts an earnest, convivial fig-ure as he translates dense researchinto lean layman’s terms. The Gug-genheim fellow often brims withyouthful glee as he breaks down hisown career focuses of synesthesia(a condition in which informationbetween the senses is blended),time perception (how one interpretsthe temporal order of events in theworld, from tactile to visual and auditory sensa-tions) and neurolaw (how neuroscience researchfindings should dictate societal constructs, fromcriminal punishment to how juries should weighunconscious actions). He often employs someform of flashy visual metaphor, whether he’s cladin full baseball regalia to hit a fastball (to demon-strate unconscious physical reaction) or goingspelunking in a foreboding cave (to replicate thedark confines of the human cranial cavity).

The scientist’s own résumé is pretty surreal,

including a volunteer stint in the Israeli army, anundergraduate degree in British and Americanliterature from Rice University, and a short forayas a stand-up comedian in Los Angeles. He’salso authored a best-selling fictional work, Sum:Forty Tales From the Afterlives, which whips upingenious alternatives to the usual binary argu-ment of the religious heaven versus the atheisticvoid; in one tale, God is the size of a microbe,with no comprehension of humanity. In another,the undead relive their most common earthlyactivities in time-blocked spans: They spend sixunyielding days clipping their nails, two yearsfeeling bored, 200 days showering, etc. Eagle-man’s most celebrated nonfiction book, Incog-nito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, delves intochewy pontifications of free will, neural contra-dictions and biological interdependence, whilealso allotting space for the odd Mel Gibson burn.

Eagleman’s theatrical flair also extends to hisresearch projects. In a talk he gave this spring ata TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) con-ference to debut a vest of his invention that trans-lates audio information into tactile sensations,

he ripped off his navy button-up shirt mid-stride,unveiling the glowing white garment as proudlyas Superman unfurling his cape. In 2007, to testwhether time actually slows down for someoneduring a life-threatening experience—or whetherthe amygdala’s thorough capturing of detailsmerely feels longer in that panic or whether“you’re seeing time stretched out, like Neo in TheMatrix, or it’s just a retrospective trick,” as Eagle-man translates—he and a grad student, ChessStetson, dropped participants in a 110-foot free

+THE ART OFSCIENCE:Eagleman’s bookof fiction, SUM,explores 40possible afterlives,each of whichoffers a differentinsight into thehuman psyche.

EAGLEMAN DROPPEDSTUDY PARTICIPANTS INA 110-FOOT FREE FALL FROM THE TOWER OF A LOCALAMUSEMENT PARK RIDE.

NEW WORLD/HEALTH

56NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

illegal drugs seek treatment, both note.)“I think what we’re doing is in alignment with

other methods that people do, like meditationand cognitive therapy,” says Eagleman, “butwe’re putting that on turbo boost.” Dr. MarvinSeppala, chief medical officer of the HazeldenBetty Ford Foundation, calls Eagleman’sapproach “remarkable.” “I think it could reallybe helpful, because craving is one of the essen-tial features of addiction and contributes to thelong-lasting potential for relapse,” says Sep-pala, who has not worked with Eagleman. “Thereward center of the brain is subcortical, so it’skind of subconscious. If you can see how muchyour brain is being altered by such things andwork in real time to reduce how that alterationoccurs, I think that could be really powerful.”

However, Seppala had reservations aboutthe method taking off as widely as Eaglemanhopes, if only for the prohibitive costs of neuralscanning. “I’d have doubts, only because of thecontinuing financial pressure from insurancecompanies and other payers to limit the cost ofhealth care,” he says. The average cost of MRI

brain scanning exceeds $1,100 in the U.S.—andinsurance companies have become so reticentto cover MRIs, it’s become a subject of researchpapers. Seppala adds, “Also, craving is only oneaspect of addiction. There is also compulsion tocontinue to use, loss of control and diminishedrecognition of the problem itself, which is partof the issue of frontal lobe damage.”

Eagleman’s addiction approach, with itsfuturistic bend, also seems to appeal to thesame dramatic inclinations of his career. “Hey,science is hard. There’s a lot of work; there’s somuch competition for grant funding and pub-lishing. I feel like there are a million ways peo-ple can go down rabbit holes and do things thatend up being really boring,” he says. “When Ithrive is trying to do the experiments that get me out of bed in the morning.”

fall from the tower of a local amusement parkride into a net. Amid their shrieking, the subjectstried to read numbers flashing on specializedwristwatches at a rate slightly faster than whathumans can normally perceive; if they wereactually seeing the world at a slower pace, they’dbe able to detect the numbers. (Their findings:Neo alone had that ability.)

Though Eagleman has taken on a strongambassadorial role for neuroscience—becom-ing a sort of “public intellectual,” according tohis peer Michael S. Gazzaniga of the Univer-sity of California, Santa Barbara—his addictionresearch may yield a real impact in the field.Eagleman’s work in this field re-examines the potential of neuroscanning andthe use of MRI machines to treataddiction. Though they are mostcommonly used to detect neuro-logical cancers and diseases tothe central nervous system, suchas epilepsy and dementia, MRIsare also well-suited to detectthe slight changes of rewiredassociative patterns. It’s not apurpose that has been exploredat length yet, or channeled intolarger rehabilitative efforts theway Eagleman is attempting, butthe potential is there. Hollywoodrecognized that in 2004: The movie Eternal Sun-shine of the Spotless Mind had a similar premise,with rogue scientists strapping “patients” intobrain scanners and charting their neural reac-tions toward ex-lovers.

Eagleman’s real-world version is a sort ofadvancement of cognitive behavioral therapy,a popular type of psychotherapy; this processidentifies negative thought patterns and worksto curb those triggers gradually. Twelve-stepprograms hinge on this system; it’s a cornerstoneof Narcotics Anonymous and has been endorsedby the National Institute on Drug Abuse andthe American Psychological Association as oneof the most effective methods currently avail-able for preventing drug relapse. (Though onlya small percentage of the estimated 20 millionAmericans age 12 and older who regularly use

“IT’S IN ALIGNMENT WITHOTHER METHODS THATPEOPLE DO, LIKE MEDITATION AND COGNITIVE THERAPY,BUT WE’RE PUTTING THAT ON TURBO BOOST.”

DOWN T I M E

BOOKS TELEVISION MUSIC ALCOHOL ART MOVIES

59NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

of history’s inevitable fade into obscurity. When Newsom released “Sapokanikan” unex-

pectedly one morning in August, accompanied by a music video and the news that she would be releasing her first album in five and a half years, the Internet erupted, as if the folksinger had just climbed out of an unmarked grave. Within hours, fans—and NPR—set to work deciphering the song’s tangle of references. Newsom’s fan base is deep, devoted and (in its own way and on a smaller scale) as obsessive as Radiohead’s or Bob Dylan’s a generation prior. There is even a collection of both personal and scholarly inter-pretations of her music titled Visions of Joanna Newsom and a modestly successful band named after her in Wales (Joanna Gruesome).

An indie icon, one of the most revered song-writers to emerge this side of the millennium, she’s spent five years in varying degrees of seclu-sion, dabbling in film and disappointing the fans who were begging for a new record. Divers, the album she’s finally finished, arrived October 23 to rapt anticipation. It’s lighter in tone and shorter

“WIKIPEDIA is amazing,” exclaims Joanna New-som. The harpist and songwriter likely won’tread the lengthy entry about herself, but shefrequently dives down Wikipedia rabbit holes.“Reading something on Wikipedia will oftensend me off in a new direction,” she says. Whileliving in New York’s Greenwich Village severalyears ago, for instance, Newsom found herselfdigging up historical nuggets on the neighbor-hood around Washington Square Park.

Unlike most of us, Newsom channels theseprocrastinatory-seeming Internet binges intosong. Vivid, stunning songs of melancholy andlonging, written for the harp or piano, with diz-zying and self-referential verses rich with literaryallusion. The song inspired by the WashingtonSquare Park rabbit hole, “Sapokanikan” (whichI am very much afraid of mispronouncing inNewsom’s presence), is named after a NativeAmerican village located in what is now lowerManhattan. Built around a winding piano melody,the song tells of forgotten mayors and TammanyHall, of 19th-century sonnet “Ozymandias” and

+THE LIFE AQUATIC:Newsom, a singer,songwriter andharpist, surprisedthe Internet thissummer by drop-ping a new video,“Sapokanikan,” andannouncing a newrecord, Divers, outOctober 23.

AN

NA

BE

L M

EH

RA

N

JOANNA NEWSOM’S HIGH DIVEHow the cult songwriter tuned out the world to create her new album

BYZACH SCHONFELD

@zzzzaaaacccchhh

60NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

released an album. Have One on Me, a sprawlingtriple-disc set, might have seemed to be anotherextreme gesture to ward off the unbelievers, butthe songs were the most affecting of her career,with uncharacteristically direct meditations onheartbreak and a voice that had deepened, follow-ing a bad case of vocal cord nodules.

On Divers, that voice is back, but it’s what sur-rounds it that’s most immediately striking. Witha vast pool of collaborating composers, includ-ing Dave Longstreth (Dirty Projectors) and clas-sical composer Nico Muhly, and a wide range ofoften archaic instruments ranging from clav-ichords to Marxophones, Divers is Newsom’smost richly produced set yet.

Press materials promised an album of “sci-fisea-shanties and cavalier ballads.” The nauticaltheme is clear—there’s an oceanic album coverand a title track about a pearl-hunting romance.But it’s not the ocean that fascinates the song-writer, “it’s the line separating sea and sky,”she says. Newsom often talks about her work inairy, abstract terms. “I think most of the songsthat take place on the ocean are very concerned with that line.”

than the 2010 epic Have One on Me, and it’s themost instrumentally varied work she’s ever pro-duced, with both keyboards and synths accom-panying her long-favored harp. At 11 tracks in 52minutes, Divers is the first Newsom album sinceher debut not to push the extremes of the albumformat (there are no nine-minute baroque epics ormultiple discs here) and the first music she’s putout since marrying actor Andy Samberg in 2013. Afew numbers even sound...joyful?

For Newsom’s followers, it’s a monumentaloccasion. “I’ve had a Google Alert set up forthis for 4 freaking years,” one fan tweeted when“Sapokanikan” was released, while another saidhe felt “broken from an excess of happiness.”Soon after the song appeared, Newsom’s father,a retired doctor in California, emailed his daugh-ter a link to the lyric annotation site Genius.com, which had posted a full annotation of it.

Did they get it right?“In terms of all the references, they got a lot of

them,” Newsom says. “They didn’t get them all,though!” she adds, cackling a bit mischievously.

It’s a rainy afternoon in September, and New-som and I are chatting in the empty restaurant ofthe Four Seasons Hotel in Manhattan. The artist’sspeaking voice is not much like her singing voice,though it has the same hint of untraceable twang.

Here is the part of the article where you’lleither appreciate some background on New-som or feel outraged by the notion that anyonemight need such a primer. That neatly capturesthe polarized reception Newsom’s music has gar-nered since the start. Raised in the small town ofNevada City, California, and classically trainedon piano and harp, Newsom released her firstalbum, The Milk-Eyed Mender, at the age of 22 in2004. The mesmerizing, story-like songs drewpraise, though her vocals—a high and gloriouslyunrestrained Appalachian wail—made her asdivisive as any singer this side of Björk.

For her second album, Ys (pronounced “ees”),she hired a full orchestra to bring to life denseparables about farm animals and fires, somestretching longer than 10 minutes. That albumcontained lyrics such as “Awful atoll / O, incalcu-lable indiscreetness and sorrow / Bawl, bellow,”and its cover image depicted Newsom as a medi-eval maiden, as if she were warning any listenerwho wasn’t totally committed to keep away.

Accessibility has never been her priority. Today,at the preference of herself and the Drag City label,Newsom’s music is unavailable on Spotify. (She’snot sorry about this. She says of Spotify: “It’s abusiness that’s literally built from the ground up tocircumvent labels having to pay artists.”) Spotify,of course, had barely emerged when Newsom last

+HARP AND SOUL:Newsom, picturedhere in Budapestin 2011, says shedoesn’t listen tomusic when she’srecording a newalbum. “Right now,everything soundslike garbage tome,” she says. “Iget ear fatigue.”

DOWNTIME/MUSIC

61NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

BA

LAZ

S M

OH

AI/

MT

I/A

P

She has long puzzled over borders of bothlove and geography and how they might be tra-versed. “When you come and see me in Califor-nia,” she sang on HaveOne onMe, “you cross theborder of my heart.”

But the final track onDivers, “Time, as a Symp-tom,” brings Newsom back to shore, grapplingwith loss. “The moment of your greatest joy sus-tains,” she promises the listener, and suddenlythe song swerves into a frenzied march of voices,strings and dove calls. The track’s gushing refraincalls out for the “nullifying, defeating, negating,repeating joy of life,” and the grief fades into theswell of interlocking vocal harmonies.

Those five and a half years might have beenworth the wait for this song.Divers is Newsom’s most costly work to date

and, by a matter of seconds, her shortest. Shealso spent nearly half her career working on it.“I’m so glad no one told me when I started ithow long this particular idea was going to take,”she says. “I would have been really discouraged.As it was, I was bright-eyed, idealistic and reallyexcited about this idea and forging ahead.”

Writing took up to two years, she says casu-ally. Recording the basic tracks took only a fewmonths. Then the real laborious process: tryingto convey to her collaborators how the albumsounded in her head. That took a year or two.

There were nonmusical holdups too. In 2013,Newsom married Samberg, her longtime boy-friend, in a celeb-filled wedding in Big Sur,California. Then, in 2014, Newsom made herfilm debut, narrating and appearing briefly onscreen as the mystical Sortilège in Paul ThomasAnderson’s mega-stoned Thomas Pynchonadaptation Inherent Vice.

The album was largely recorded by the timeshe began filming, but it hadn’t been mixed. “Ihad a distinct feeling through the whole processof making this record that the thing that wouldgive it its identity, the thing that would breathelife into the album, was going to be the mixingprocess,” Newsom explains. She doesn’t listento any music while recording an album, until themixing. Then she revisits her favorite albums forinspiration. “Right now, everything under thesun sounds like garbage to me,” Newsom admits.“I get ear fatigue, and it’s really nice to orientyourself to a complete record that sounds great.”For this album, her reference points for mixingwere mostly around the early 1970s. She rattlesoff a list: Mickey Newbury’s Looks Like Rain, RoyHarper’s Stormcock, Joni Mitchell’s Blue.

She pauses at the mention ofBlue. “That recordis astonishing. If you just look at it as a technicaldocument, it’s incredible. The piano sound that

she has on that record—there’s no piano that hassounded like that before or since.”

She sounds just like a Joanna Newsom obses-sive talking about one of her songs.

Newsom knows there’s a feverish cult sur-rounding her, but she’s unconcerned with thedetails. She doesn’t keep a social media pres-ence or much of a public persona outside of themusic. In February, Pitchfork ran a piece titled“The Atypical Fashion Cult of Joanna Newsom.”“I have been made aware of that,” she says. “It’ssweet. It’s awesome. But it’s probably not thebest idea for me to personally read it.”

Though her relationship with Samberg hasgarnered her Emmy appearances and mentionson Us Weekly, she guards her private life. Therecord has much to say about love and loss andplaces in between, but it is not diaristic. New-som refers to her songs as being sung by a “nar-rator,” voiced by something apart from herself.“Every single song is narrated by a slightlydifferent entity on this record,” she explains.“They’re all kind of about the same thing, but

they are approaching that collection of themesfrom different angles.” Divers is the first New-som album not to feature her on the cover insome fantastical garb, but “the cover still is rep-resentative of the narrator.”

I ask her if she would articulate the themes.She refuses, as if I’ve asked a novelist for theCliffsNotes version. That’s a task for the cult, thedevoted followers, who’ll get to the bottom ofDivers like divers for pearls.

“It’s all there,” Newsom says. “It’s all in therecord. I feel like for me to summarize it is taking the fun away.”

“I’VE HAD A GOOGLEALERT SET UP FOR THISFOR 4 FREAKING YEARS,” TWEETED ONE FAN.

62NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

DOWNTIME/ALCOHOL

I’M STANDING outside of a ballroom on the sixthfloor of the Marriott Marquis hotel in midtownManhattan, and I can barely move. Surround-ing me on all sides are anxious men with glassesin their hands. Most of them are middle-aged,with hair in various stages of thinning or graying(or both). They have paid $325 or more for theprivilege of standing here because, in about 15minutes, the ballroom doors will open to reveala paradise of brown liquor—103 different boothsoffering samples of 350 different types of whiskey.

I regret subjecting myself to this mob as early asI did, but there’s no way out of it now. In a fit of des-peration, I decide to check the badge I was givenat check-in. Sure enough, it says what I hoped itwould: New York WhiskyFest—VIP Admission. Ishoulder my way through the gaps in the crowd,past a leather vest, a cowboy hat, a pocket of cigarstench someone dragged in from outside, until Ireach a staff member. “Is there some sort of VIPline I can get in?” I ask, holding my badge up.

“This is the VIP line,” he says. Since everythinganyone could want to know about the recentAmerican whiskey renaissance is containedbeyond the doors ahead, I figure I can stick it outfor a few more minutes.

Scotch, which is made primarily with barley,is what most people around the world think ofwhen they hear whiskey. American whiskey typ-ically means bourbon or Tennessee whiskey, themost well-known producer of the latter being

Jack Daniels Distillery. Both are made from cornand are smoother and sweeter than scotch. Ryewhiskey, made primarily with rye (obviously),has a spicier taste and is growing in popularity,but it’s still a blip compared with bourbon. LarryKass of Heaven Hill Distilleries once told Imbibemagazine that they “spill more bourbon in oneday than [they] sell rye in a year.”

WhiskyFest New York is one of three similarevents Whisky Advocate magazine will host in2015. The others are held in Chicago and SanFrancisco, and, in 2016, they will add a fourthevent in Washington, D.C., for the first time.WhiskyFest is billed as the longest-running suchgathering in the country, though it’s not the onlyone. Google the name of any metropolitan areain the United States along with whiskey and fes-tival and you will not be disappointed. “Therehave been a lot of new whiskey events thathave cropped up in the last five years,” says LewBryson, an editor at Whisky Advocate and authorof the bookTastingWhiskey. “I think that’s proba-bly indicative of the way things are going.”

How are things going for American whis-key? In 2003, bourbon and Tennessee whiskeygenerated a little over $1.3 billion in revenue,according to the Distilled Spirits Council of theUnited States. By 2014, the number had morethan doubled, to $2.7 billion. Over the past sixyears, from 2009 to 2014, annual revenue hasincreased by 46.7 percent. After the dominance

BURDEN OF PROOFCan distillers convince the restof the world to join the American whiskey renaissance?

BYRYAN BORT

@ryanbort

63NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

SHOOTINGSTRAIGHT: A tramcovered in a JimBeam ad passesthrough Prague.With whiskey’s

revenue increasing,American distill-ers have startedpursuing foreign

markets.+

of clear spirits caused the industry to finally bot-tom out in the late ’90s, an uptick was inevita-ble, but the rise of American whiskey has beenthe result of more than just market correction.“People are looking for organic food, they’relooking at locally made products,” explainsBryson. “They’re looking forfamily businesses and thingsthat have been made the sameway for generations. Whiskeyhas all of that, and it’s real.”

Reid Mitenbuler, author ofBourbon Empire: The Past andFuture of American Whiskey,attributes the turnaround tothe cyclical nature of the spiritsindustry, but also to our nostal-gia for a bygone era, when lifecould be as simple as the glass ofbourbon in your hand. Few pleasures are moreAmerican. “Whiskey, more than other spir-its, has a heavy symbolism that’s rooted in theAmerican Revolution,” says Mitenbuler. “Thatcreates a romantic draw. It has a strong pull

from a storytelling perspective.”Beam Suntory, the world’s leading bourbon

producer and the maker of Jim Beam, might bethe most mythologized of all the American whis-kies. At WhiskyFest, Beam’s booth is in primeposition right in front of the ballroom entrance,

and festivalgoers are treated to samples of itslatest innovations—from the pricey Harvest Col-lection to Jim Beam Devil’s Cut, which is madeby extracting bourbon from the wood of thecharred oak barrels it’s distilled in. Sitting in a

chair next to the booth isFred Noe, great-grandson ofthe brand’s namesake andits current master distiller.He’s a large man, bald andwith a gray goatee that com-plements his thick Kentuckydrawl. As the Jim Beambrand continues to expand,Noe is the living emblemof its down-home-y history.His presence at WhiskyFestassures consumers that thetradition espoused on theside of the bottle isn’t just amarketing gimmick. “Con-sumers now want the story,”he says. “They want to knowwhat they’re drinking.”

In January 2014, JimBeam made a bold move toexpand when the distillerywas sold to Japanese spiritscompany Suntory for $13.6billion. Some consumersworried that one of the lastpurely American institu-tions would be corrupted byforeign influence, but so farSuntory has been hands-off,only serving to open distri-bution channels and expandbourbon’s growing global

“PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FORORGANIC FOOD, LOCALLYMADE PRODUCTS, FAMILYBUSINESSES. WHISKEY HASALL OF THAT, AND IT’S REAL.”

PIE

RR

E B

ESS

AR

D/R

EA

/RE

DU

X

64NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

DOWNTIME/ALCOHOL

they’re consistently amusing. “If you just kindof stand back, you’ll see some shit,” he drawls.“You will see some shit.”

Returning to the main ballroom after stoppingby a high-priced tasting seminar Noe hosted,I realized what he meant. In short, everyonewas drunk. Though each booth came equippedwith a spitting bucket, they were underutilized,to say the least. Founders of craft distilleries—of which there are now more than 500 in theUnited States, compared with only a few dozen15 years ago—excitedly explained to tasters whytheir product was different from the rest. The“peaty-ness” of certain brands is commentedon, and the lengthy line to sample Pappy VanWinkle—the ultra-rare bourbon that can go forthousands of dollars a bottle—is bemoaned.

At one point, I came across a man standing inthe middle of an aisle, open-mouthed, tastingglass in hand, with an enormous streak of redsauce down the front of his half-buttoned shirt.If he even noticed, he certainly didn’t care. Andin a way, this possibly blacked-out guy coveredin food is a huge reason why bourbon has flour-

ished in recent years. He is not someone who isdetecting notes of vanilla; he is the indiscrimi-nate whiskey drinker who will take it as it comes,decorum be damned. While scotch demands acertain attentiveness in the way it is consumed,bourbon—the sweetness of which makes it eas-ier to drink—is far more versatile. Its appeal isbroader than that of European whiskies, a signthat its growth potential is nearly limitless.

No one recognizes this more than Noe, whosees bourbon as something to be savored how-ever one sees fit, whether it be through a high-priced cocktail or a shot thrown back at the endof a dive bar. “The versatility is one of the mainthings,” he says. “The mixology world is keep-ing bourbon alive and well. The folks coming upare enjoying it. We’ve kind of hit the right lick.”

Now it seems that the biggest obstacle forAmerican whiskey makers is convincing the rest of the world to enjoy it as much as they do.

appeal. In 2002, the United States exported $376million in whiskey. In 2014, the number was overa billion for the second year in a row.

But marketing bourbon to foreign consum-ers isn’t the same as marketing it to Ameri-cans. “We’ve learned that what’s popular heredoesn’t necessarily work everywhere else,” saysNoe. “Different flavors do well in different partsof the world, based on what society you’re mar-keting to. That was a learning curve for us.”

Countries such as Belgium, Brazil and, to amuch larger extent, Australia have been primarytargets for U.S. bourbon exports, and Suntoryis continuing to cultivate a taste for Americanwhiskey in Japan, a nation whose native whis-key is experiencing a similar explosion in globalpopularity. While Beam opted for sex appeal inmarketing to U.S. consumers when it hired MilaKunis as its domestic spokeswoman in 2014,for Japan it chose sophisticated cool: A sharplydressed Leonardo DiCaprio has appeared inmultiple commercials for Jim Beam White Label.

Scotch is still the dominant whiskey world-wide, but, as Mitenbuler says, “bourbon’s staris rising.” Jack Daniel’s—technically not bour-bon but Tennessee whiskey because of how itis “mellowed” through charcoal—is gainingground on Johnnie Walker as the world’s mostpopular whiskey brand, and the door is openfor Jim Beam to continue to increase its marketshare as well. “All the bourbon companies areworking on export outreach because, largely,it’s pretty much untouched,” says Bryson. “Thisis why the growth looks really good for the next10 or 20 years.”

The need to educate consumers has turnedNoe from a country-boy bourbon distiller intoa celebrity spokesman. He estimates that hespends 75 percent of his time on the road. Alarge portion of his travel stops, which take himaround the globe, are at events like WhiskyFest,where the growth of the spirit is most evident.He’s well-versed in the dynamics of such fes-tivals, noting the increased diversity of thecrowds, the careful ways in which drinkers plantheir sampling routes and the endless cycle offans asking him for pictures or to have a drink.For Noe, whiskey festivals are often similar, but

“WHISKEY, MORETHAN OTHER SPIRITS,HAS A HEAVY SYMBOLISMTHAT’S ROOTED IN THEAMERICAN REVOLUTION.”

65NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

ST

EFA

N H

ILL/

FOC

US

FE

ATU

RES

BYPAULA MEJIA @tenaciouspm

quite happy to rape andsexually abuse them, youknow. And I thought thatwas so important. Thefunny thing about jiujitsuis that you use the forcefrom the attacker and putit back on them—that’sthe ultimate defense.She really did think thiswas a war to be fought.And there were thingsthe suffragettes did thathad a very militaristictemplate. She had herarmy, and they were allvery organized and had discipline.

I was reading aboutthe feminist activistgroup Sisters Uncuthitting the film’sLondon premiere andusing it as a platform

HELENA BONHAMCarter is a scene-stealing chameleon, asnatural playing manicsex addict Marla Singerin Fight Club as she is thequeen of England in TheKing’s Speech. This month,you’ll find her in early20th-century England forSarah Gavron’s Suffrag-ette, about the womenwho first risked beatingsand prison time whileprotesting for the rightto vote. Bonham Carterplays the lawbreaking,lawmaking Edith Ellyn(based on real-life suf-fragette Edith Garrud), anacid-tongued first-wavefeminist who encouragesher fellow protesters tobomb mailboxes and getin brawls with the policein the fight for suffrage.

The stakes for BonhamCarter with Suffragettewere personal. Hergreat-grandfatherHerbert Asquith was theprime minister of GreatBritain from 1908 to 1916and vehemently opposedwomen’s suffrage. Twowomen were arrested forbreaking his windows andattempting to kidnap hisdaughter, Violet, BonhamCarter’s grandmother.“Sometimes feminism isdepicted as a caricature

to protest reductionsto domestic abuseservices. You werequoted as saying itwas the “perfect” reac-tion to the film. Why?I don’t know that muchabout it, but there werequite a few women thatwere lying down on thered carpet and wereprotesting domesticviolence. Two women inEngland die of domesticviolence a week. It’s ex-traordinary. [The protestswere] a kind of geniusidea and a good use ofa red carpet, I thought.They were lying down—literally lying down—forwhat they believed in,instead of standing up.I think it was a very just thing to do.

of being aggressive andscreechy and hysterical,”Bonham Carter says.“[Suffragette] is insteadvery subtle, nuancedand quiet, and makes itspoint, with bold strokes, very slowly.”

Did you learnanything surprisingfrom playing Edith?I think what was greatabout [writer] Abi [Mor-gan] and Sarah was thatthey were very collabora-tive. Edith was originallycalled Caroline, but Ibased my character onthis real-life womancalled Edith Garrud,who taught the suffrag-ettes jiujitsu to defendthemselves against thepolice who would be

WITH HELENABONHAM CARTER

TWO QUESTIONS

Acting’s gothic good witch goes to Suffragette city

66NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

DOWNTIME/BOOKS

SPECTRE is almost upon us. Trailers havemade it clear that the 26th James Bond film—Daniel Craig’s fourth outing in the role andSam Mendes’s second as director—will featuresome reassuringly familiar Bond-movie tropes:death in the snow, sex on the fly, one-liners bythe dozen. But while Mendes appears at peacewith giving audiences much of what they expectfrom Bond films, the Oscar-winning director isnot in the Bond business just to recycle clichés.Pre-publicity for Spectre suggests that Mendesis continuing the exploration of Bond’s historythat he began in Skyfall, the most recent and, sofar, most financially successful film in the series.In so doing, Mendes is attempting to fill out theoccasionally blank but compelling main char-acter in British author Ian Fleming’s original 12Bond novels, the first of which was published62 years ago. Those novels have sold more than100 million copies, but many of the people whosee Spectre in the coming days and weeks maynot have heard of Fleming. They’re missing out.Two and a half hours of cold martinis, Craig’smerciless gaze and the producers’ even morechilling devotion to product placement can giveyou only a limited sense of Bond. For a fullerpicture, pick up a Fleming novel once you’reback from the multiplex. The author was him-self parsimonious with details about the famousspy’s biography, but he fleshes out 007 withgems of dialogue and description.

FLEMING IS FOREVERAs the new James Bond movie arrivesin theaters, don’t forget the sparkling spy novels that gave us 007

BYEDWARD PLATT

The initial Bond novel, Casino Royale, waspublished in 1953, and it was apparent fromthe very first line—“The scent and smoke andsweat of a casino are nauseating at three in themorning”—that Fleming had a complete senseof his character. By the end of Chapter 1, fivepages later, when Bond, still holding the “buttof the .38 Colt Police Positive with the sawnbarrel,” fell asleep, and “his features relapsedinto a taciturn mask, ironical, brutal, and cold,”we know all we need to know about him. Thebook’s famous last line—“The bitch is deadnow,” Bond says when he calls headquarters torelate that his double-agent lover, Vesper Lynd,has killed herself—reaffirms his heartlessness,his barely concealed misogyny and his reflexivedevotion to the cause.

Subsequent novels add intriguing dabs to hischaracter and history: He gets married in OnHer Majesty’s Secret Service (1963), but—spoileralert, if it’s entirely necessary at this point—villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld kills Bond’s wifeon their wedding day, and Bond once againbecomes a loner. In the penultimate novel, YouOnly Live Twice (1964), Fleming reveals that 007had a Swiss mother and a Scottish father, andhe was orphaned at age 11—a skeletal backstorythat inspired the second half of Skyfall, whichtakes place in the childhood home in Scotlandthat Mendes invented for him.

The lack of information was deliberate: “I

67NEWSWEEK 1 1 / 0 6 / 2 0 1 5

CO

LUM

BIA

PIC

TU

RES

/EV

ER

ET

T C

OLL

ECT

ION

wished him to be unobtrusive. Exotic thingswould happen to and around him, but he wouldbe a neutral figure,” Fleming wrote in April1958 in a letter to The Manchester Guardian, inresponse to an article criticizing the “sex, vio-lence and moral decay” of Bond’s world. Yet inorder to create an “illusion of depth,” he had to“fit Bond out with some theatrical props”—theguns, the cigarettes and the vodka martini cock-tail, shaken “very well until it’s ice-cold” andserved with “a large thin slice of lemon-peel,” asFleming described it in Casino Royale. (Severalmonths later, Fleming tried the drink, which he“found unpalatable.”) Fleming also allowed hisspy “a rather precious though basically simplemeal,” although in fact it wasn’t simple at all:When Bond first has dinner with Vesper, he hascaviar, “a very small tournedos, underdone, withsauce Bearnaise and a coeur d’artichaut”—a steakand artichoke heart, followed, rather oddly tomodern habits, with “half an avocado pear witha little French dressing.” The decadent mealproved popular with readers, who were still suf-fering from wartime food rationing.

It was not just the diet that must have seemedunimaginably rich in postwar Britain: the glam-orous women, the distant locations and theflights that take Bond to those places; the exper-tise in moneyed pursuits such as gambling, ski-ing and scuba diving; and the mix of deferenceand lingering superiority that characterizes

Bond’s relationship withthe CIA agent Felix Leiterand implies that postcolo-nial, postwar Britain is stillan equal partner with itsAmerican cousin. All thatmust have been thrilling tomany readers in the 1950sand ’60s.

Some elements of thebooks have dated badly,most notably Bond’s—orFleming’s—attitude towardwomen. In her introductionto Casino Royale, Scottishnovelist Candia McWilliamrefers to what she calls the“pleasingly retro tropesof sexism,” which gener-ously excuses it as beingof its time. There is racismand snobbery as well. Butthere are compensations.The plots are tightly con-structed and play out invividly realized settings;

Fleming is a master of the deceptively difficult artof creating a sense of place through the accumu-lation of physical details and sensations, withoutlosing narrative momentum. (Kingsley Amis, whowrote the first of the many post-Fleming Bondnovels, which include installments by SebastianFaulks and William Boyd and a subgenre of Young

Bond novels by Charlie Higson, once said that theisland inDr.No was the perfect fictional location.)

The secondary characters, including Bond’scolleagues, his foes and his women, are realenough to have survived countless reinterpreta-tions on film and in the follow-up novels. Yet itis Fleming’s Bond who still holds our attention.If Spectre proves anywhere near as successful asSkyfall, it will be not only because of masterfulmarketing but also because we still hunger toknow more about the enigmatic presence at the heart of Fleming’s novels and stories.

FLEMING TRIEDTHE BOND MARTINI,WHICH HE “FOUND UNPALATABLE.”

+NOT STIRRED:

Daniel Craig as thesuave, unflappable

James Bond inCasino Royale. The

latest Bond flick,Spectre, revealsmore backstory,but all you need

to know aboutBond can be found

in Ian Fleming’s12 novels.

25YEARS

“After 30 delivery-truck drivers walked out in protest, theywere told their jobs were gone. On anhour’s notice in themiddle of the night,

management assembled replacements. Their transport buses were quickly assaulted by workers wieldingbaseball bats. Forty delivery truckswere vandalized and eight burned.Executives condemned the violence, but to them the smell was of victory.”

FORMER NEWSWEEK EDITOR JONATHAN ALTER REPORTS ON THE 1990 UNIONFIGHT AT THE NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

NOVEMBER 5, 1990

Over 400,000 people have crossed the Mediterranean

during 2015, undertaking unthinkable journeys from

countries like Syria, that have been torn apart by war

and persecution.

These families are fleeing for their lives, risking the

treacherous sea and land crossings. Many having

no choice but to board over-crowded, flimsy boats

to give their children a chance of safety. For some,

this desperate journey will be their last. Almost

3,000 people have drowned trying to reach safety

in Europe. The crossing is dangerous but for

many families making this journey is the only

choice they feel they have.

UNHCR is on the ground providing life-saving assistance but we need your help.

You can help provide shelter, food, water and medical

care to vulnerable families arriving in Europe.

With so many in need and as more continue to make

this journey, your donation today is vital and will help

UNHCR to save lives and protect families who have

been forced to fl ee their homes.

$120 can provide emergency rescue kits containing a thermal blanket, towel, water, high nutrient energy bar, dry clothes and shoes, to 4 survivors.

PLEASE GIVE WHAT YOU CAN TODAY. VISIT DONATE.UNHCR.ORG

“It was dangerous to do the crossing but do you know what? Compared to everything we have witnessed, all the things happening at home, nothing could be as bad. We knew we had to try.”

Mahmoud, father and Syrian Refugee

REFUGEE CRISIS IN EUROPEFAMILIES FORCED TO FLEE THEIR HOMES