The_Atlantic_-_09_2018

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS “IT HAS ALL THE ASPECTS OF A REALLY NICE STORY,” KELLER SAYS OF THE ASTEROID THEORY. “IT’S JUST NOT TRUE.” that Alvarez’s “vicious politics” had caused him to develop serious health problems and that, for fear of a relapse, he couldn’t research Deccan vol- canism without “the greatest of diiculty.” “I never recovered physically or psychologically from that ordeal,” he added. Younger scientists avoided the topic, fearing that they might jeopardize their careers. The impact theory solidiied, and volcanism was largely abandoned. But not by everyone. “Normally, when people get attacked and given a hard time, they leave the ield,” Keller told me. “For me, it’s just the opposite. The more people attack me, the more I want to ind out what’s the real story behind it.” THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 49

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS As Keller has steadily accumulated evidence to rectangles) or switchback roads (pale zigzags). Keller and her col- undermine the asteroid hypothesis, the animosity leagues saw the landscape in greater relief than most: When explain- between her and the impacters has only intensiied. Her ing how volcanoes extrude magma from the planet’s inner mantle, critics have no qualms about attacking her in the press: Mike Eddy characterized the surface of the Earth—the foundation Various scientists told me, on the record, that they con- of our homes, cities, civilizations—as “this little tiny scum,” as sider her “fringe,” “unethical,” “particularly dishonest,” puny as the skin of milk that gathered on our tea each morning. and “a gadly.” Keller, not to be outdone, called one impacter a “crybaby,” another a “bully,” and a third For someone accustomed to thinking about time in “the Trump of science.” Put them in a room together, multimillion-year increments, Keller grew surprisingly impatient and “it may be World War III,” Andrew Kerr says. over wasted minutes. “Why so slow?” she muttered next to me in the back seat, craning her neck to see the speedometer as we As the ive-hour drive to our hotel in rural India plowed into oncoming traic and past slower cars. “Should I go turned into 12 after a stop to gather rock samples, and push?” She discouraged us from stopping at roadside stands Keller aired a long list of grievances. She said impact- for tea and, over meals, needled her colleagues about their halt- ers had warned some of her collaborators not to work ing progress on several co-authored manuscripts. with her, even contacting their supervisors in order to pressure them to sever ties. (Thierry Adatte and Keller’s publication list runs to more than 250 articles, about Wolfgang Stinnesbeck, who have worked with Keller half of which attempt to poke holes in the impact theory. After for years, confirmed this.) Keller listed numerous her 1988 paper on forams in Tunisia, she decided to see whether research papers whose early drafts had been rejected, the slow and steady extinction pattern she’d observed at El Kef she felt, because pro-impact peer reviewers “just held true elsewhere, and she analyzed foram populations pre- come out and regurgitate their hatred.” She suspected and post-Chicxulub at nearly 300 sites around the world. Over repeated attempts to deny her access to valuable and over, Keller saw “no evidence of a sudden mass killing.” samples extracted from the Chicxulub crater, such as Instead, she found more proof that the Earth’s fauna grew pro- in 2002, when the journal Nature reported on accusa- gressively more distressed starting 300,000 years before the tions that Jan Smit had seized control of a crucial piece extinction. The forams, for example, gradually shrank, declined of rock—drilled at great expense—and purposefully in number, and showed less diversity, until only a handful of spe- delayed its distribution to other scientists, a claim cies remained—results consistent with what many paleontolo- Smit called “ridiculous.” (Keller told me the sample gists have observed for animals on land during the same time. went missing and was eventually found in Smit’s duf- fel bag; Smit says this is “pure fantasy.”) Several of More problematic still, Chicxulub did not appear to Keller to Keller’s stories—about a past adviser, for example, or have been particularly deadly. Samples she gathered in El Peñón, a former postdoc—ended with variations of the same Mexico, west of the crater, revealed healthy populations of forams punch line: “He became my lifelong enemy.” even after the asteroid struck. Photosynthetic creatures, which should have been doomed by the dust cloud’s shroud of darkness, 3. also managed to survive. KELLER PLANNED TO And then there was the issue of the four previ- ous mass extinctions. None appeared to have been spend a week gathering rocks in two diferent regions of India, triggered by an impact, although numerous other beginning with the area around Basar, a dusty village of 5,800 in the asteroids have pummeled our planet over the mil- center of the country. Our days in the ield settled into a predictable lennia. (Pro-impact scientists counter that not only routine. From about 7:30 every morning until as late as midnight, was the Chicxulub asteroid gigantic, it also landed in we fanned out from the hotel. Our six- or seven-hour drives to dis- the deadliest possible site: in shallow waters, where it tant quarries revealed the rhythms of rural neighborhoods, where kicked up climate-altering vaporized rock.) women still fetched water from communal pumps and shepherds scrolled on smartphones while grazing their locks. Keller found the asteroid’s timing suspect, too. The impacters had long pegged Chicxulub’s age to The geologists were searching for outcrops—areas where ero- the date of the extinction, which is widely agreed to sion, construction, or tectonic activity had exposed the inner lay- have occurred approximately 66 million years ago. ers of rock formations, from which the scientists could decode the They reasoned that the two must be synchronous, history of the landscape. Most mornings, Thierry Adatte set our because the destruction caused by the asteroid would course by studying satellite images for signs of quarries (big beige have been near-instantaneous. This looked like cir- cular logic to Keller, who in 2002 set out to investi- gate whether the two really were concurrent. Analyzing samples drilled from deep within the Chicxulub crater, Keller uncovered 20 inches of limestone and other sediment between the fallout from the asteroid and the forams’ most pronounced die-of. This was evidence that thousands of years had elapsed in between, she argued. (Smit’s indings from the same samples were diametri- cally opposed; he countered that a tsunami, triggered by the aster- oid, had deposited the sediment essentially overnight.) Based on similar results from Haiti, Texas, and elsewhere in Mexico, Keller concluded that the asteroid had hit 200,000 years before the extinction—far too early to have caused it. So what did cause it? Keller began searching for other possible culprits. She was looking for a menace that had become gradually

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS GERTA KELLER more deadly over hundreds of thousands of years, such that it would have the mass dying. Using new dating techniques, Keller caused increasing stress followed by a inal, dramatic obliteration. and her Princeton colleagues further condensed Dec- can’s activity to about 750,000 years. Now, on this She had a promising lead: The Earth’s four prior mass extinctions are each trip, she was drafting a new paper showing that the associated with enormous volcanic eruptions that lasted about 1 million years biggest Deccan eruptions—accounting for nearly apiece. The ifth extinction, the one that doomed the dinosaurs, occurred just half of the volcanoes’ explosive output—had been as one of the largest volcanoes in history seethed in the Deccan Traps. squeezed into the last 60,000 years before the mass extinction. During that time, so much gas, ash, and Yet it is not only a volcano’s absolute size that makes it catastrophic, but lava were pumped into the ecosystem that the Earth also the pace of its eruptions. The Earth can recover from large environmen- hit “the point of no return,” she said. tal disturbances—unless those disruptions come too quickly, compounding the injury until they overwhelm the planet’s ability to equilibrate. On this excursion, Keller hoped to gather samples that would allow her to create a detailed timeline of Until the mid-1980s, geologists believed that Deccan’s network of volca- Deccan activity in the 100,000 years leading up to the noes had erupted over millions of years, simmering so gently as to be mostly extinction. The goal: to see whether its biggest belches harmless. A 1986 paper concluded that the bulk of its eruptions had occurred correlated with environmental stress and mass dying within 1 million years, but scientists still couldn’t connect those explosions around the world. Basar was 300 miles east of some of to the mass dying. Keller’s irst paper on Deccan volcanism, in 2008, pro- the highest points in the Deccan Traps, an area near vided unprecedented evidence that suggested there could be a link: She the epicenter of the eruptions. Keller had chosen Basar documented huge lava lows just preceding the extinction, which was demar- because she suspected that the long, low stretches of cated in the rock record by the fossils of creatures that had evolved only after basalt around us had been formed by some of the largest lava flows—ejected during major eruptions KELLER DOING FIELDWORK immediately preceding the extinction. To prove that, IN ALABAMA IN 1982 however, Keller needed to have the rock dated. We were snaking down a sinewy road one after- noon when Adatte hollered, the van screeched to a stop, and everyone scrambled out to inspect a steep hill in the elbow of a hairpin turn. It didn’t look like much to me. Rising up from the asphalt were several yards of pebbly, khaki-colored rock, then a thin band of seafoam-green rock, followed by a pinkish layer, and then round, brown rocks interspersed with white roots. Adatte sank to his knees and burrowed into the pebbles. Eddy licked a rock, to determine whether it was clay. Keller sprinted up the incline until she was eye level with the greenish layer. “Keep digging!” Keller told Adatte. “This is a real bonanza for us!” She translated the outcrop for me as though it were text in a foreign language. Rocks record the pas- sage of time vertically: The distance between where Adatte sat covered in gravel and where Keller perched at the top of the hill potentially represented the pro- gression of several hundred thousand years. “Think of it as walking up through time,” Keller said. She passed me a chunk of the seafoam-colored rock and pointed to a tiny white fossil protruding like a baby tooth: evidence of tempestites, broken shells carried in by a storm. The area near Keller’s head had evi- dently once been a prehistoric lake or seaway. The pinkish soil above that had been buried under lava— the brown rocks covered with tangled roots. Since the pinkish layer and the shells predated the lows, they could help pinpoint that particular eruption. Geology is a field of delayed gratification, and there was little else the scientists could say deini- tively before getting the samples into a lab. While Syed Khadri ielded questions from puzzled locals who wanted to know why the foreigners were play- ing in the dirt, Keller, Adatte, and Eddy illed clear- plastic bags with istfuls of rock to ship home. Back in the van, Adatte told me about a recent conference where several researchers had debated THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 51

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS the validity of Deccan volcanism versus the impact theory in chores, and fumed that girls had to cook and clean while boys got front of an audience of their peers, who had then voted, by a to study science and math. show of hands, on which they thought had caused the extinc- tion. Adatte said the result was 70–30 in favor of volcanism. I At age 12, Keller wanted to become a doctor. Her teacher, con- heard later from the paleontologist Paul Wignall, who’d argued cerned by these delusions of grandeur, called in a Jungian psy- for the impact side, that Chicxulub had won 60–40, though he chologist to administer a Rorschach test and remind Keller that conceded that the scientists were essentially split—clearly, the the daughter of such a poor family should aspire to less. Shortly question was far from resolved. When I asked Wignall who had afterward, Keller received a visit from a priest: Keller’s mother rescued Deccan volcanism and helped popularize it, he said, “If wanted him to take her to a nunnery, but Keller refused to go. you were to name one person, you would name Gerta.” Two years later, Keller—given the choice of becoming a maid, a salesgirl, or a seamstress—apprenticed with a dressmaker. Her 4. mother hoped that she would help clothe her siblings. OUR LONG STRETCHES Keller eventually worked for Christian Dior’s fashion house, sewing gowns for 25 cents an hour. in the car provided Keller ample time to con- BIANCA BOSKER; DENISE NESTOR tinue inventorying her own numerous brushes In her teens, Keller resolved to die before she with extinction. turned 23. She was suicidal for reasons she declined to explain to me in detail, but attributed generally Her childhood could pass for the opening of to frustration with Swiss society—her sense that a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. Keller’s mother was “options were limited for a kid from a poor family,” the eldest of 12 children in a wealthy Lichten- plus “the sexual harassment” and “the way women stein family. According to stories Keller heard as were treated.” “You were just a piece of meat at any a kid, their fortune from hotels and real estate time,” she told me. She tried to kill herself by taking kept the children wearing Parisian couture and sleeping pills, failed, then igured she would live as dangerously summering in Austria. But the old-money clan as possible and die in the process. “I just never got killed,” she grew distant from Keller’s mother after she mar- said. “Not completely, anyway.” ried Keller’s father, one of 18 children born to In 1964, at age 19, Keller quit her job in Zurich and hitchhiked Swiss woodworkers, whose dreams of becom- through Spain and North Africa for six months. She was detained ing a farmer clashed with the bride’s privileged at the Algeria–Tunisia border amid a coup that deposed Algeria’s upbringing. The young couple took out loans to president, but says she eventually charmed an army commander buy a farm, where they raised cows, sheep, ducks, into letting her pass and even providing her with an escort—a rabbits, vegetables, and their 12 children, the drug traicker who happened to be heading the same way. She sixth of whom was Keller. continued her trek around the globe: Greece, Israel, Czecho- slovakia, and Austria, where her plan to continue on to Russia Keller grew up among rocks, in the alpine crevices of a Swiss village where the neighbors INDIA’S DECCAN TRAPS WERE still believed in witches. Although Keller’s father FORMED BY THE RELEASE OF AN enlisted his brood to tend the land—working them so hard that a neighbor once reported ESTIMATED 720,000 CUBIC him—the family constantly teetered on the brink MILES OF LAVA, OVER AN AREA of bankruptcy. To put meat on the table, Keller’s THREE TIMES THE SIZE OF FRANCE. mother once stewed up one of the cats the fam- ily kept on the farm. Another time, she gave an Deccan Traps INDIA older daughter some fresh “mutton” as a gift—in actuality, Keller’s butchered pet dog. Basar Bay Mahabaleshwar of Keller attended a local public school where Bengal one teacher oversaw four grades, an arrange- Arabian ment Keller enjoyed because it allowed her to Sea tackle the older students’ more diicult assign- ments. Then, much as now, she considered her- self in a league apart from her peers. “I didn’t socialize much with the other kids, because I thought they were too dumb,” Keller told me. (“In school, well, how should I put this? I was very good at whatever I did,” she said another time.) She devoured books, completed her sib- lings’ homework in exchange for them doing her 52 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS was interrupted when her health failed. It was hepatitis, which Keller adores her work. Never before have I encountered someone so gleeful about catastrophe. When we discussed the she had contracted at the Algerian border. “At the hospital, they risk that the Yellowstone supervolcano might blow at any time, Keller’s eyes twinkled. “It’s a fun idea,” she said. To her, mass didn’t think that I would live,” she said. extinctions are not depressing. Rather, they illuminate life’s fundamental questions. “Ask yourself, ‘Where did you come After a year of recovery, Keller set sail from Genoa to Aus- from?’ ‘Why are we here?’ ” Keller told me. “If you extract all the religious bullshit away from it, you have to go to nature. And the tralia, which she planned to use as a jumping-of point for travel only way to ind out is really to study the history.” throughout Asia. Keller recalls that during the three-week journey, Though Keller’s critics accuse her of being ego-driven and publicity-hungry, in the time I spent with her she showed little her ship collided with its sister vessel, hit a typhoon in the Indian concern for her legacy. Instead, she expressed a dim view of what 44,000 years of human civilization will leave behind, Ocean, and was found to be infested with maiosi smuggling much less her own few decades on the planet. “Just think, if we wipe ourselves out in the next couple of thousand years, there weapons. When Keller disembarked, an Australian oicial tried will be no record left,” she said, studying the eroded remains of 66-million-year-old basalt as we drove back to the Hyderabad to steer her to a sweatshop crammed with immigrants at sewing airport, from which we would travel to the heart of the Deccan Traps. “I mean, it’s a second. A nanosecond in history. Who will machines, attempting to negotiate a cut of Keller’s pay, in perpe- ind our remains?” tuity. But Keller spoke better English than the oicial ON JUNE 8, 1783, realized. She discovered the plan, threatened to report Iceland’s Laki volcano began to smoke. The ground wrenched open “like an animal tearing apart its prey” and out spilled the official, and worked instead as a nurse’s aide, a “flood of fire,” according to an eyewitness’s diary. Laki let loose clouds of sulfur, luorine, and hydroluoric acid, blanket- then a waitress. ing Europe with the stench of rotten eggs. The sun disappeared behind a haze so thick that at noon it was too dark to read. (Unlike She was returning from a picnic near Sydney’s the cone-shaped stratovolcanoes from third-grade science class, both Deccan and Laki were issure eruptions, which fracture the Suicide Clifs one day when a bank robber, leeing Earth’s crust, spewing lava as the ground pulls apart.) the scene of the crime, shot her, puncturing her lungs, Destruction was immediate. Acid rain burned through leaves, blistered unprotected skin, and poisoned plants. People and ani- shattering her ribs, and landing her in intensive care. mals developed deformed joints, softened bones, cracked gums, and strange growths on their bodies—all symptoms of luorine “Woman Shot ‘for No Reason,’ ” announced a head- poisoning. Mass death began eight days after the eruption. More than 60 percent of Iceland’s livestock died within a year, along line in The Sydney Morning Herald. (“She looked with more than 20 percent of its human population. And the mis- ery spread. Benjamin Franklin reported a “constant fog” over “a dead,” a witness told the paper.) A priest came to great part of North America.” Severe droughts plagued India, China, and Egypt. Cold temperatures in Japan ushered in what administer last rites and, as Keller hovered in and is remembered as the “year without a summer,” and the nation suffered the worst famine in its history. Throughout Europe, out of consciousness, commanded her to confess crops turned white and withered, and in June, desiccated leaves covered the ground as though it were October. Europe’s famine her sins. Twice, she refused. “I credit that priest 5. lasted three years; historians have blamed Laki for the start of with my survival, because he made me so mad,” the French Revolution. Keller told me. The experience also cured her of her “But that’s just a short-term event from a relatively minor erup- tion, compared with Deccan,” Keller told me. A single Deccan death wish. eruption was “thousands of times larger” than Laki, she said. “And then you repeat that over and over again. For basically 350,000 Keller eventually made her way to Asia, then years before the massive die-of.” arrived in California with plans to continue to South America. Instead, she settled in San Francisco and, at age 24, returned to school. She enrolled in commu- nity college, telling the registrar that her academic records had been destroyed in a ire, and later transferred to San Francisco State University, where she majored in anthropology, the most scientiic ield she could enter without a background in math or science. Her passion for mass extinction began with a geology class she took during her junior year. The professor told her that if she liked rocks and enjoyed travel, she should become a geol- ogist—“because there are rocks everywhere, and you can always dream up some project to do and someone will fund it for you,” Keller recalled him saying. She became the irst member of her family to graduate from college, and then one of the irst women to receive a doctoral degree in earth sciences from Stanford. In 1984, she joined the faculty at Princeton, where she is currently one of two tenured women in the geosciences department. (According to a 2017 survey by the American Geosciences Institute, 85 percent of the country’s tenured geosciences professors are male.) Although Keller is alert to situations in which women are treated diferently from men, she hesitates to blame sexism for the hostility she has faced. “There is clearly sexism going on at some level, but there is no way I would be able to prove it, nor would I want to,” she told me. “Because to me, it is critically important that I, as a woman, can make it in science without even referring to sexism.” But Vincent Courtillot, an early proponent of Deccan volca- nism who has closely followed Keller’s work, thinks that preju- dice has tainted other scientists’ treatment of her. “She is a force- ful woman and she is a courageous woman in a world where, I don’t have to tell you, for someone to rise to the top of geology as a female is much harder than for a male,” he says.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Laki released 3.3 cubic miles of lava; Deccan unleashed an estimated 720,000 cubic miles, eventually covering an area three times the size of France. It took us ive hours of driv- ing, an hour-and-a-half light from Hyderabad to Pune, and 6. another three hours in the car to trace the lava lows from some of their farthest, lattest reaches back to some of their highest “HER CONCLUSIONS ARE points, in Mahabaleshwar, a vertiginous town crowded with honeymooners. Mountains of basalt 2.1 miles high—nearly twice as tall as the Grand Canyon is deep—extended as far as I could see. Even the geologists, who had visited the Deccan Traps multiple times before, gaped at the landscape. “It’s mind-blowing,” Eddy said. “Every time.” Keller, whose food poisoning had gone from bad to worse, made the way o ,” Jan Smit, the Dutch scientist, told me. After van pull over so we could revisit an outcrop she’d sampled twice before, on nearly 40 years of arguing, the two sides still cannot previous trips. At the base of an undulating wall of black basalt, Keller ran agree on fundamental facts. Smit and other impacters her hand over a blood-colored layer of rock, bumpy and inlamed as a scab. counter Keller’s scenario with a long list of rebuttals: Where we now stood was virtually within a blink of an eye of the mass extinc- The planet’s species went extinct “almost overnight,” tion, she explained: Keller’s collaborators had dated this red layer and found Smit insists, too quickly to be caused by Deccan vol- that it was deposited tens of thousands of years before the extinction, just canism. India’s volcanoes hiccuped for hundreds of before Deccan’s largest and most lethal eruptions began. thousands of years, too weakly and for too long to “Shit hits the fan for the last 40,000 years,” Keller said. “The eruptions be deadly, Keller’s critics contend. They argue that really took of. Huge. Absolutely huge. That’s when we have the longest lava there is no evidence that species sufered while Dec- lows on Earth, into the Bay of Bengal”—more than 600 miles away, practi- can simmered, and that the biggest volcanic eruptions cally the length of California. occurred after the extinction, too late to have been A drawing that hangs over Keller’s desk at Princeton depicts her vision the catalyst. Besides, they add, new dating places the of this apocalypse, which was heavily informed by accounts of how Laki asteroid’s impact within 32,000 years of the annihila- poisoned Iceland’s livestock. “I told [the artist], ‘Yellow foaming at the tion—as close as a “gnat’s eyebrow,” says the geochro- mouth!’ ” Keller recounted, delighted. In the illustration, dinosaurs, gur- nologist Paul Renne, who led the study. gling lime-green vomit, writhe on a hill spotted with lames and charred tree Some scientists have attempted to ind a middle stumps; just behind them, a diagonal gash in the ground blazes with lava ground between the two camps. A team at UC Berkeley, and spews dark, swirling clouds. According to Keller’s research, while Dec- headed by Renne, has recently incorporated volcanism can’s lava lows would have devastated the Indian subcontinent, its release into the asteroid theory, proposing that Chicxulub’s of ash, toxic elements (mercury, lead), and gases (sulfur, methane, luorine, collision unleashed earthquakes that in turn triggered chlorine, carbon dioxide) would also have blown around the world, wreaking Deccan’s most destructive pulses. But Keller rejects havoc globally. this hypothesis. “It’s impossible,” she told me. “They As she sees it, the ash, mercury, and lead would have settled over habi- are trying to save the impact theory by modifying it.” tats, poisoning creatures and their food supply. The belches of sulfur would The greatest area of consensus between the volca- have initially cooled the climate, then they would have drenched the Earth nists and the impacters seems to be on what insults in acid rain, ravaging the oceans and destroying vegetation that land ani- to sling. Both sides accuse the other of ignoring data. mals needed to survive. The combination of carbon dioxide and methane Keller says that her pro-impact colleagues “will not would have eventually raised temperatures on land by as much as 46 degrees listen or discuss evidence that is contrary to what they Fahrenheit, further acidifying oceans and making them inhospitable to believe”; Alan Hildebrand, a prominent impacter, plankton and other forams. Once these microscopic creatures disappear says Keller “doesn’t look at all the evidence.” Each from the base of the food chain, larger marine animals follow. “At that point, side dismisses the other as unscientific: “It’s not extinction is inevitable,” Keller said. science. It sometimes seems to border on religious Rocks elsewhere in the world support the sequence of events Keller fervor, basically,” says Keller, whose work Smit calls has discerned in the Deccan Traps. She and her collaborators have found “barely scientiic.” Both sides contend that the other evidence of climate change and skyrocketing mercury levels following is so stubborn, the debate will be resolved only when the largest eruptions, and other researchers have documented elevated the opposition croaks. “You don’t convince the old concentrations of sulfur and chlorine consistent with severe pollution by people about a new idea. You wait for them to die,” volcanic gases. Keller posits that even the iridium layers could be linked to jokes Courtillot, the volcanism advocate, paraphras- Deccan’s eruptions, given that volcanic dust can carry high concentrations of ing Max Planck. Smit agrees: “You just have to let the element. them get extinct.” She also sees Deccan’s ingerprints in the fossil record. The gradual All the squabbling raises a question: How will the decline of the forams—followed by their sudden, dramatic downfall— public know when scientists have determined which aligns with Deccan’s pattern of eruptions: Over several hundred thou- scenario is right? It is tempting, but unreliable, to sand years, its volcanic activity stressed the environment, until its largest trust what appears to be the majority opinion. Forty- emissions dealt a inal, devastating blow. The Earth’s lora and fauna did one co-authors signed on to a 2010 Science paper COLE WILSON not show signs of recovery for more than 500,000 years afterward—a asserting that Chicxulub was, after all the evidence time period that coincides with Deccan’s ongoing belches. The volcano had been evaluated, conclusively to blame for the simmered long after most species had vanished, keeping the planet dinosaurs’ death. Case closed, again. Although some nearly uninhabitable. might consider this proof of consensus, dozens of 54 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS geologists, paleontologists, and biologists wrote in to the journal contesting rapid, downfall of the forams. Whether or not Deccan the paper’s methods and conclusions. Science is not done by vote. ultimately caused the mass extinction, its eruptions Ultimately, consensus may be the wrong goal. Adrian Currie, a philoso- illuminate how our current environment may react pher of science at Cambridge University, worries that the feverish competition to man-made pollutants. If Deccan was responsible, in academia coupled with the need to curry favor with colleagues—in order however, Keller’s theory casts our current actions in a to get published, get tenure, or get grant money—rewards timid research at terrifying light. (Not to be outdone, impacters recently the expense of maverick undertakings. He and others argue that controversy highlighted the Chicxulub asteroid’s relevance to the produces progress, pushing experts to take on more sophisticated questions. present day in a paper for Science, arguing that the Some of Keller’s most outspoken critics told me that her naysaying has moti- asteroid injected enough carbon dioxide into the atmo- vated their research. “She keeps us sharp, deinitely,” Smit said. Though sphere to cause 100,000 years of global warming.) trading insults is not the mark of dispassionate scientiic research, perhaps The asteroid theory has ingrained in the pub- detached investigation is not ideal, either. It is passion, after all, that drives lic’s imagination the idea that mass extinction will scientists to dig deeper, defy the majority, and hunt rocks in rural India for 12 be quick and sensational—that we will go out in a hours at a stretch while sufering acute gastrointestinal distress. great, momentous ball of ire. Big rock from sky hits the humans, and boom they go. But Keller’s vision of the sixth extinction, given what she sees as its parallels with Deccan volcanism, suggests that the end will be drawn out and diicult KELLER FEARS THAT WE ARE to recognize as such within humans’ FILLING OUR ENVIRONMENT WITH brief conception of time. “We are liv- THE SAME INGREDIENTS ing in the middle of a mass extinction today,” Keller told me. “But none of us THAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS. feel that urgency, or that it really is so.” Death felt especially present the afternoon we visited a quarry that stretched 15 miles through the country- side. The landscape was eviscerated. A mountain in the distance had been cut away, leaving a rectangular, unnatural pit. Hills streaked with orange, purple, red, and yellow dirt rose around us, their peaks active with trucks dumping more rainbows of dirt. It was spoil, Eddy explained, the unwanted earth that the strip min- ers had to dig through to reach the Jurassic seam—the coal that, 145 million years ago, was a swamp. The scene got Keller thinking about mass extinc- tions still to come and the geologists of the future (“They’ll probably be cockroaches”), who, while studying this landscape, will be hopelessly confused by all these rock layers jostled on top of one another, out of order. 7. “There’ll be someone going around the Earth try- KELLER’S ATTENTIVENESS TO ing to igure out what happened to us,” Eddy said. “There’ll be big debates about it.” “Well, we were stupid and killed ourselves. On a grand scale,” Keller said. “You rule the world, and then you die.” We all chuckled at this prediction—mass extinc- the stories that rocks tell enables her to live concurrently in the past, present, tion, by this point, having become something of a and future. She was here, driving through Pune’s smog-illed mountains. The macabre inside joke. Just past the spoil, we reached sight of their jagged outlines simultaneously transported her back in time the end of the road, which was lined with piles of 66 million years, to when the Indian subcontinent split apart, spewing gas, white dirt too tall to see over. Clambering over them ash, and ire. That, in turn, evoked the eventual demise of the human species, in search of outcrops, we were confronted by a strange which Keller argues will be triggered by forces similar to Deccan volcanism. view on the other side: an enormous field of coal, Keller fears that we are filling our environment with the same pockmarked with holes. The black earth had been ingredients—sulfur, carbon dioxide, mercury, and more—that killed the dug at regular intervals to create thousands of pits, all dinosaurs and that, left unchecked, will catalyze another mass extinction, the size and depth of shallow graves. Each one had its this one of our own devising. “You just replace Deccan volcanism’s efect own mound of white earth beside it, as if waiting to be with today’s fossil-fuel burning,” she told me. “It’s exactly the same.” illed. No one could explain what they were. Keller sees a bleak future when she looks at our present. Oceans are acidi- fying. The climate is warming. Mercury levels are rising. Countless species Bianca Bosker is the author of Cork Dork and Original are endangered and staring down extinction—much like the gradual, then Copies. She is a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS HOW ICE WENT ROGUE BY FRANKLIN FOER PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN MOORE/GETTY

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS A LONG-RUNNING INFERIORITY COMPLEX, VAST STATUTORY POWER, A CHILLING NEW DIRECTIVE FROM THE TOP INSIDE AMERICA’S UNFOLDING IMMIGRATION TRAGEDY THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 57

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS SETTLING The country forcibly displaced more influx of strangers, providing tracts of INTO than 70,000 of them and rescinded their land to Canadians who had expressed A citizenship. Those who remained behind sympathy for the American Revolution. SENSE fared no better. Approximately 43,000 OF black Mauritanians are now enslaved— Refugee Road wasn’t paved with gold, SAFETY by percentage, one of the largest enslaved but in the early years of this century, it ful- IS populations in the world. illed the promise of its name. The Mau- HARD ritanians converted an old grocery store After years of rootless wandering— into a cavernous, blue-carpeted mosque. when your life’s catalog of memories through makeshift camps, through the They opened restaurants that served teaches you the opposite lesson. Imag- villages and cities of Senegal—some of familiar ish and rice dishes, and stores ine: You led from a government militia the Mauritanian emigrants slowly began that sold CDs and sodas imported from intent on murdering you; swam across a arriving in the United States in the late across Africa. river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary 1990s. They were not yet adept in Eng- on the far bank; had the dawning realiza- lish, and were unworldly in almost every Over time, as the new arrivals gave tion that you could never return to your respect. But serendipity—and the pros- birth to American citizens and became village, because it had been torched; and pect of jobs—soon transplanted their fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes and the heard pervasive rumors of former neigh- community of roughly 3,000 to Colum- Cleveland Cavaliers, they mentally bur- bors being raped and enslaved. Imagine bus, Ohio, where they clustered mostly ied the fact that their presence in America that, following all this, you then found in neighborhoods near a long boule- had never been fully sanctioned. When yourself in New York City, with travel doc- vard that bore a fateful name: Refugee they had arrived in New York, many uments that were unreliable at best. Road. It commemorated a moment at of them had paid an English-speaking the start of the 19th century, when Ohio compatriot to fill out their application This is the shared narrative of thou- had extended its arms to accept another for asylum. But instead of recording sands of emigrants from the West Afri- their individual stories in speciic detail, can nation of Mauritania. The country is the man simply cut and pasted together ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were generic narratives. (It is not uncommon members of a black subpopulation that for new arrivals to the United States, speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a it desperate and naive, to fall prey to such of nationalism, the Mauritanian govern- scams.) A year or two after the refugees ment came to consider these diferences arrived in the country, judges reviewed capital ofenses. It arrested, tortured, and their cases and, noticing the suspicious violently expelled many black citizens. repetitions, accused a number of them of fraud and ordered them deported. But those deportation orders never amounted to more than paper pronounce- ments. Where would Immigration and Customs Enforcement even send them? The Mauritanian government had erased the refugees from its databases and refused to issue them travel documents. It had no interest in taking back the vil- lagers it had so violently removed. So ICE let their cases slide. They were required to regularly report to the agency’s local oice and to maintain a record of letter- perfect compliance with the law. But as the years passed, the threat of deporta- tion seemed ever less ominous. Then came the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly, in the warehouses where many of the Mauritanians worked, white colleagues took them aside and warned them that their lives were likely to get worse. The early days of the admin- istration gave substance to these cautions. The first thing to change was the fre- quency of their summonses to ICE. Dur- ing the Obama administration, many of the Mauritanians had been required to “check in” about once a year. Abruptly, ICE instructed them to appear more often, some of them every month. ICE oicers began visiting their homes on occasion.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Like the cable company, they would pro- David Leopold, a former president of the vide a six-hour window during which to American Immigration Lawyers Associ- expect a visit—a requirement that meant ation. Leopold has kept in touch with an days of from work and disrupted life rou- old client who attends the Mauritanian tines. The Mauritanians say that when mosque. When he mentioned the com- they met with ICE, they were told the U.S. munity’s plight to me, he called it “eth- had inally persuaded their government nic cleansing”—which initially sounded to readmit them—a small part of a global like wild hyperbole. But on each of my push by the State Department to remove trips back to Columbus, I heard new sto- any diplomatic obstacles to deportation. ries of departures to Canada—and about others who had left for New York, where Fear is a contagion that spreads quickly. hiding from ICE is easier in the shadows One ICE oicer warned some Mauritani- of the big city. The refugees were leeing ans sympathetically, “It’s not a matter of Refugee Road. if you’ll be deported, but when.” Another latly said, “My job is to get you to leave this S country.” At meetings, oicers would insist that the immigrants go to the Mauritanian SINCE ITS 2003 Since taking oice, Donald Trump has consulate and apply for passports to return CREATION, ICE regularly thundered against the “deep to the very country whose government had HAS GROWN state.” With the term, he means to evoke a attempted to murder them. AT A REMARKABLE cabal of bureaucrats burrowed within law CLIP FOR enforcement, the intelligence commu- One afternoon this spring, I sat in A PEACETIME nity, and regulatory agencies, a nebulous the bare conference room of the Colum- BUREAUCRACY. elite that will stop at nothing to counter- bus mosque after Friday prayer, an occa- mand his will—and, by extension, that of sion for which men dress in traditional the people. garb: brightly colored robes and scarves wrapped around their heads. The imam But one segment of the deep state asked those who were comfortable to stepped forward early and openly to pro- share their stories with me. Congregants fess its enthusiasm for Trump. Through lined up outside the door. their union, employees of ICE endorsed Trump’s candidacy in September 2016, One by one, the Mauritanians described the irst time the organization had ever to me the preparations they had made lent its support to a presidential contender. for a quick exit. Some said that they had When Trump prevailed in the election, already sold their homes; others had liq- the soon-to-be-named head of ICE trium- uidated their 401(k)s. Everyone I spoke phantly declared that it would inally have with could name at least one friend who the backing of a president who would let had taken a bus to the Canadian border the agency do its job. He’s “taking the and applied for asylum there, rather than handcuffs off,” said Thomas Homan, risk further appointments with ICE. who served as ICE’s acting director under Trump until his retirement in June, using A lithe, haggard man named Thierno a phrase that has become a common trope told me that his brother had been within the agency. “When Trump won, detained by ICE, awaiting deportation, for [some oicers] thumped their chest as if several months now. The Mauritanians they had just won the Super Bowl,” a for- considered it a terrible portent that the mer ICE oicial told me. agency had chosen to focus its attention on Thierno’s brother—a businessman and Whatever else Trump has accom- philanthropically minded benefactor of plished for ICE, he has ended its relative the mosque. If he was vulnerable, then anonymity. His administration’s “zero tol- nobody was safe. Eyes watering, Thierno erance” immigration regime has triggered showed me a video on his iPhone of the a noisy debate about the organizations he fate he feared for his brother: a tight shot has deployed to enforce his policies. For of a black Mauritanian left behind in the weeks this spring, the nation watched as old country. His face was swollen from a oicers took children from their parents beating, and he was begging for mercy. “I’m going to sleep with your wife!” a voice shouts at him, before a hand appears on- screen and slaps him over and over. In 21st-century America, it is diicult to conjure the possibility of the federal gov- ernment taking an eraser to the map and scrubbing away an entire ethnic group. I had arrived in Columbus at the suggestion of a Cleveland-based lawyer named THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 59

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS after they had crossed the U.S.–Mexico and CoreCivic—spent at least $3 million allowed for a measure of compassion, per- border in search of asylum. Although on lobbying and inluence peddling. To mitting prosecutors and judges to stay the ICE played only a supporting role in the take one small example: Owners of ICE’s removals of some defendants in immi- family-separation debacle—the task was private detention facilities were generous gration court, and encouraging a rigor- performed principally by U.S. Customs donors to Trump’s inauguration, contrib- ous focus on serious criminals. Congress, and Border Protection—the agency has uting $500,000 for the occasion. for its part, has for nearly two decades emerged as a shorthand for what critics ofered broad, bipartisan support for the say is wrong with Trump’s immigration An organization devoted to enforcing grand bargain known as comprehensive agenda. Virtually every Democratic politi- immigration laws will always be reflex- immigration reform. The point of such cian hoping to lash his or her progressive ively and perhaps unfairly cast as a villain. legislation is to balance tough enforce- bona ides has called for ICE’s abolition. But borders are a fundamental prerogative ment of the law with a path to amnesty for of the nation-state: The policing of them is undocumented immigrants and the ulti- The history of the agency is still a brief a matter of national security, and a func- mate possibility of citizenship. one. When terrorists struck the World tioning polity maintains orderly processes Trade Center on September 11, 2001, ICE for admitting some immigrants and turn- Yet no politician has ever quite didn’t exist. In the Justice Department, ing others away. By deinition, elements summoned the will to overcome the there was the old Immigration and Natu- of this mission are exclusionary and hard- systematic obstacles that block reform. ralization Service. But while the mission hearted. The liberal immigration poli- Democrats didn’t make it a top priority of INS had always included the deporta- cies practiced within the European Union when they briefly controlled Congress tion of undocumented immigrants—and it have shown how what seems like a sim- during Obama’s irst term, and Republi- occasionally staged signiicant workplace ple generosity of spirit can also be deeply can reformers have again and again been raids—it never had a large force that would destabilizing. A balance needs to be found. stymied by anti-immigration hard-liners enable their systematic removal from the in the House. A comprehensive reform bill nation’s interior. Still, ICE, as currently conceived, rep- passed the Senate in 2013 by a resound- resents a profound deviation in the long ing 68–32 margin, but then-Speaker John But following the shock of 9/11, ICE history of American immigration. On Boehner refused to allow it a vote in the was created as part of the Department of many occasions, America has closed its House. The 2016 GOP presidential hope- Homeland Security, into which Congress doors to both desperate refugees and ful Marco Rubio went from staking his awkwardly stuffed a slew of previously eager strivers. But once immigrants have political identity on immigration reform unrelated executive-branch agencies: the reached our shores, settled in, raised fam- to suggesting that he’d never truly sup- Secret Service, the Transportation Secu- ilies, and started businesses, all without ported the reforms in the irst place. rity Administration, the Coast Guard. breaking any laws, the government has Upon its creation, DHS became the third- almost never chased them away in mean- Under the current administration, largest of all Cabinet departments, and its ingful numbers. In 1954, Dwight Eisen- many of the formal restraints on ICE have assembly could be generously described hower’s Operation Wetback—this was been removed. In the irst eight months as higgledy-piggledy. ICE is perhaps the its official designation—removed more of the Trump presidency, ICE increased clearest example of where such muddied, than 1 million Mexican immigrants. It is arrests by 42 percent. Immigration heavily politicized policy making can lead. remembered precisely because it was so enforcement has been handed over to a dissonant with America’s self-styled iden- small clique of militant anti-immigration Since its oicial designation, in 2003, tity as a nation of immigrants. wonks. This group has carefully studied as a successor to INS, ICE has grown at a the apparatus it now controls. It knows remarkable clip for a peacetime bureau- ICE, however, is assigned the task that the best strategy for accomplishing cracy. By the beginning of Barack Obama’s of removing undocumented immi- its goal of driving out undocumented second term, immigration had become grants from the country’s interior, and it immigrants is quite simply the cultivation one of the highest priorities of federal law has approached this mission with cold, of fear. And it knows that the latent power enforcement: Half of all federal prosecu- bureaucratic efficiency. Until recently, of ICE, amassed with the tacit assent of tions were for immigration-related crimes. the agency had a congressional mandate both parties, has yet to be fully realized. In 2012, Congress appropriated $18 bil- to maintain up to 34,000 beds in deten- lion for immigration enforcement. It spent tion centers on any given day with which O $14 billion for all the other major crimi- to detain undocumented immigrants. nal law-enforcement agencies combined: Once an immigrant enters the system, On a last-minute trip to Columbus, I the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Adminis- she is known by her case number. Her booked a room in a boutique hotel on the tration; the Secret Service; the Bureau of ill intentions are frequently presumed, upper loors of a newly refurbished Art Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explo- and she will ind it exceedingly diicult Deco skyscraper. I had arranged to meet a sives; and the U.S. Marshals Service. to plead her case, or even to know what 20-something African immigrant, whom rights she has. I will call Ismael, and his lawyer at the ICE quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising deten- Approximately 11 million undocu- tion facilities, an international-transit arm, mented immigrants currently live in this and monitoring technology. This appa- country, a number larger than the popula- ratus relies heavily on private contrac- tion of Sweden. Two-thirds of them have tors. Created at the height of the federal resided in the U.S. for a decade or longer. government’s outsourcing mania, DHS The laws on the books endow ICE with the employs more outside contractors than technical authority to deport almost every actual federal employees. Last year, these single one of them. Trump’s predeces- companies—which include the Geo Group sors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, 60 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS WHEN DONALD TRUMP WAS ELECTED, THOMAS HOMAN, THE ACTING DIRECTOR OF ICE UNTIL HIS RETIREMENT IN JUNE, SAID THAT THE NEW PRESIDENT WAS “TAKING THE HANDCUFFS OFF” THE AGENCY. SANDY HUFFAKER GETTY Starbucks in the lobby the next morning; Unsurprisingly, the waiting room at ICE at Ismael. “Why have you been working?” I would accompany them to Ismael’s reg- was not part of the skyscraper’s upscale he asked. “We know you’ve been working.” ularly scheduled appointment with ICE. refurbishment. It was like a dentist’s oice It appeared to be an annoyed response to stripped of magazines, posters that impor- the lawyer’s resistance, hurled without evi- Short, gaunt, and taciturn, Ismael tune lossing, and pretty much any other dence, perhaps in the hopes of provoking came from Africa last year by way of a splash of color. A small, older woman from a self-incriminating response. It seemed smuggling route through Mexico—a cir- Central America wandered through the of a piece with the fraught atmosphere in cuitous trek that culminated in his cap- perfectly quiet room with a piece of paper the waiting room. Earlier, there had been ture while crossing into California and stapled to a manila envelope: “I don’t an announcement that a car was parked several months in ICE detention. When I speak English. Please help me.” illegally outside and needed to be moved. met Ismael, he rolled up a snug-itting leg Ismael’s lawyer had leaned over to tell me of his black jeans to show me the moni- A heavy, locked door separates the that this would be widely presumed to be toring bracelet strapped around his bony waiting room from ICE’s main office, another trick: Many immigrants under ICE ankle—a condition of his release. He had where oicers interview immigrants and scrutiny are not allowed to drive. also received permission to relocate to his sometimes detain them. When a func- cousin’s apartment in Columbus. Because tionary in a lannel shirt opened the door When immigration lawyers in Colum- ICE prohibited him from working while he and summoned Ismael, his lawyer rose to bus deal with ICE, they are tentative, fretful awaited authorization papers, Ismael had accompany him. But the oicer waived a that anything that might reek of complaint improved his English by watching copi- forefinger in her direction. “Sorry, law- could provoke ICE into seeking retribu- ous television. It was good enough for him yers aren’t allowed back,” he told her. A tion against their clients. So Ismael’s law- to tell me, “I came to America to be free. look of confusion compressed her face. yer struck a stance of studied conciliation. This is not freedom.” As we made our way “But I’ve been allowed back in the past. As she gently explained herself, Ismael dis- to ICE, I was startled to discover that we I think I’m allowed back,” she told him. appeared behind the door for his appoint- would not be leaving the premises. ICE had “Can I talk to a supervisor?” ment and another manager emerged. oice space on the third loor of the build- He said that the man handling Ismael’s ing my hotel occupied. It was a small but Two minutes later, an officer with “intensive supervision” worked for a pri- jolting illustration of the ubiquity of the rel- a shaved head, a black Under Armour vate contractor hired by ICE, and that the atively new agency. hoodie, and a gun on his belt leaned his company’s contract with the federal body through the door to stare intently

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS government prohibited lawyers from and perhaps the hope of someday storm- from the Treasury Department. This was attending its sessions with immigrants. ing buildings or standing in the backdrop a shotgun marriage, illed with bickering “Just out of curiosity,” the lawyer asked, of press conferences, beside tables brim- and enmity from the start. The customs “can I see a copy of the rules?” The super- ming with seized contraband. Such rev- investigators had adored their old insti- visor returned with a sheet of paper. He eries are easy enough to entertain, until tutional home and the built-in respect it pointed to the crucial passage in a sec- the irst day on the job. accorded them. They were given little tion enumerating “participant rights.” It warning before being moved to a new described “the right to conidentiality with ICE consistently ranks among the headquarters, with new supervisors, a the exception of information requested by worst workplaces in the federal govern- nebulous mission, and colleagues they ICE.” The lawyer lashed me a furtive smirk ment. In 2016, the organization ranked considered their professional inferiors. as she refrained from commenting on the 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in When I interviewed one of the customs bravura display of doublespeak: Ismael a survey of employee satisfaction. Even investigators, who later had a top job at had been denied his right to an attorney in as Trump smothered the organization ICE, he still referred to the “unfortunate order to protect his conidentiality. But the with praise and endowed it with broader events of March 1, 2003”—the day ICE manager, a Latino man with an untucked responsibilities, ICE still placed 288th came into oicial existence. shirt and glasses, earnestly attempted to last year. explain himself. He said that he wanted to After several false starts, the customs help, and he mentioned the possibility of The culture of ICE is defined by a investigators were eventually restyled Ismael getting a work permit soon. “Look,” bureaucratic caste system—the sort into a unit called Homeland Security he said, “I’m very sympathetic to him.” of hierarchical distinctions that seem Investigations. HSI managed to consis- arcane and petty from the outside, but tently ind its way to glamorous cases that When Ismael returned to the waiting are essential to those on the inside. When involved transnational crime—software room, he supplied one-word answers to ICE was created, 15 years ago, two distinct piracy, child pornography, the bust of the lawyer’s questions about the meeting. and disparate workforces merged into the Mexican kingpin Joaquín “El Chapo” It had ultimately amounted to little more one. The Immigration part of the agen- Guzmán Loera, the investigation of ter- than a rote brush with the system. Still, cy’s name refers mostly to deportation rorist bombings in Paris. But for all their it left the lingering sense that a terrible oicers who came over from the freshly eforts, HSI agents still found themselves outcome had merely been postponed— dismantled Immigration and Natural- dogged by their ties to ERO and the emo- which was perhaps the whole point. ization Service. The Customs part of the tionally charged issue of immigration. name refers to investigators imported N WHEN ICE WAS CREATED, TWO WORKFORCES MERGED, ONE INVOLVED WITH IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND THE OTHER, A HIGHER STATUS GROUP, INVESTIGATING TRANSNATIONAL CRIME. MEMBERS OF THE LATTER HAVE SINCE REQUESTED TO BE RELEASED FROM ICE. No one, as a child, dreams about grow- ing up to deport undocumented immi- grants. Some 6,000 oicers work in the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) wing of ICE, but this is not always a first-choice career option. “Many in ICE applied to other agencies that rank higher in law-enforcement prestige,” says David Martin, a scholar of immigra- tion law who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The ranks of ICE are drawn in large part from retired members of the military and from for- mer Border Patrol agents, who prefer the metropolitan locations of ICE oices to the remote outposts dotting the nation’s southern border. The job is a solid option for high-school graduates, who are not eligible to apply to federal agencies that require a college education. It makes for an accessible entry point into fed- eral law enforcement, a trajectory that comes with job security and decent pay,

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS They were shunned by police in big cit- An ERO officer’s day-to-day exis- ICE CONSISTENTLY ies that refused to cooperate with ICE, tence is at a distant remove from the RANKS AMONG not allowing for the fact that HSI func- televised image of federal law enforce- THE WORST tioned as its own distinct entity. Indeed, ment. It often consists of paper-pushing WORKPLACES this summer 19 HSI agents signed a letter and processing immigrants through IN THE FEDERAL to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen the various stations of deportation. In GOVERNMENT. Nielsen, asking her to officially sepa- many instances, when ERO oicers are IN 2016, THE rate their division from ICE. The agents assigned to detain criminals who are at ORGANIZATION wrote: “HSI’s investigations have been large, they brush up against bureaucratic RANKED 299TH perceived as targeting undocumented limitations. “You go bang on a door and ON A LIST aliens, instead of the transnational crim- they’re not there,” John Sandweg, a for- OF 305 AGENCIES. inal organizations.” They explained that mer acting director of ICE, told me. Even JOHN MOORE GETTY they felt HSI was paying a reputational if the person is home, he has the right to price for its connection to ERO. refrain from letting oicers inside. If that happens, oicers have no recourse other There is arguably a certain institu- than to sit outside and wait. tional hauteur to HSI. “They think of themselves as aristocrats,” one for- “Regular cops get frustrated when a mer homeland-security official told plea agreement is too soft,” says Sand- me. Among other beneits, working for weg. “With ERO, about 50 percent of the HSI brings the rank of “special agent”— people you arrest will still be in the coun- what’s known in federal guidelines as 1811 try a year later.” This is one of the many status—which sets oicers on the same consequences of a system that—whatever level as FBI agents. Meanwhile, ERO one’s political views on immigration—has oicers carry an 1801 classiication. This obvious elements of dysfunction. ICE’s position typically comes with a less favor- capacity to detain immigrants long ago able pay scale and limited powers. For outstripped the capacity of courts to pro- instance, these oicers are not allowed cess them. Immigration courts currently to execute search warrants. have a backlog of 700,000 cases, which means that someone might wait several years before ever seeing a judge. A sense of futility, therefore, has become a pre- vailing ethos for much of the ICE rank and ile. One former agent recalls learning a maxim on his irst day on the job: “It’s not over until the alien wins.” Even as some ICE oicers sufer from a sense of their own impotence, the out- side world often depicts them as heartless jackboots. Thomas Homan has described how, as acting director of the agency, he would wake up every morning and read the latest complaints and negative cov- erage from the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media. And those aren’t the only sources of criticism. Most ICE agents work in cities. Many of them are themselves Latino or have married an immigrant. As John Amaya, a former dep- uty chief of staf of ICE, told me, “Their kids go to school and hear things; they go to the grocery store and hear shit. They are not immune.” When I asked how ICE responds to complaints and criticism, I was repeat- edly told that oicers can have genuine qualms about their work. Like any large organization, ICE has its share of bad apples. But officials from the Obama administration vociferously countered any notion that ICE is teeming with rac- ists. Carlos Guevara, who served as an adviser to the homeland-security THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 63

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS leadership, told me, “There are a lot checklists and paperwork—to ensure that establishing its own airline. ICE Air has of good officers … And I don’t think a the organization hewed closely to the access to 10 planes, most of them Boe- lot of them feel great about picking up new goals. ing 737s, each capable of carrying 135 abuelita”—someone’s grandmother—“or deportees, dispatched from airports in somebody who’s been here for 20 years, In the parlance of certain factions of ive hub cities: Mesa, Arizona; San Anto- much less being part of a policy separat- ICE, these Obama-era priorities were nio and Brownsville, Texas; Alexandria, ing kids from parents.” the “handcufs” that prevented oicers Louisiana; and Miami. Maps like the from doing their job. At various moments ones found in seat-back pockets show To navigate this moral thicket, ICE during these years, a broad swath of ICE the arcing trajectories of ICE Air’s most officers tell themselves comforting sto- oicers behaved as a rogue unit within common routes, extending out across ries. The agency was founded, after all, the federal government. In 2012, after the hemisphere. (In 2016, ICE Air flew in the aftermath of 9/11, when the gov- Obama proposed his enforcement pri- 317 trips to Guatemala, its top destina- ernment had failed to prevent evildoers orities, the union representing ICE oi- tion.) Like most airlines, ICE Air has a from iniltrating the homeland and kill- cers initially didn’t allow its members to baggage limit: no more than 40 pounds. ing thousands. As one former ICE oicial attend training sessions that inculcated Unlike most airlines, ICE Air forbids pas- told me, “You numb yourself by saying the new approach. When Obama issued sengers from wearing belts and shoelaces, everything we do has a national-security his plans for Deferred Action for Child- for fear they might use them to commit focus. By God, if we let this one slip by, it’s hood Arrivals (DACA) that same year, the suicide. If nothing goes amiss, stewards the tip of the iceberg. We never know when head of the union, Chris Crane, sued serve granola bars and water, or on longer we’re confronted with the real threat.” top administration oicials to block the lights a full meal. Sometimes they unlock The likelihood of that genuine threat, of move. Crane became a favorite witness the handcufs of the deportees who have course, is very much open to debate. Sta- of then-Senator Jef Sessions, who called been shackled. tistically speaking, an immigrant who Crane “an American hero.” has lived in the United States for decades, Yet provisions on ICE Air have been a has an immaculate criminal record, and Upon entering the political scene, source of controversy. Last winter, a light comes from Central America (like many Donald Trump promoted himself as carrying 92 Somalians made a pit stop in ICE targets) poses so negligible a national- ICE’s salvation. By laying Obama’s immi- Dakar, Senegal. During the layover, the security threat that it is virtually non- gration policy with uncharacteristic con- plane waited for a fresh crew, which was existent. No immigrant from the region sistency and speciicity, he spoke to the delayed due to issues at its hotel. So the has ever committed a terrorist attack on deep resentments of many ERO offi- plane reportedly sat on the runway for U.S. soil, which is something that cannot cers. Lavishing them with praise—“We almost 24 hours, the passengers never be said of native-born Americans. respect and cherish our ICE officers”— disembarking. ICE has disputed accounts he constantly asserted their importance of the long delay, but some of the Soma- This fragile institutional psyche was to public safety. When the ICE union lians say that the agency failed to supply on full display in ICE’s obstreperous assembled to endorse a presidential can- them with suicient food and drink, and response to Obama. During the first didate, Trump received 95 percent of the that because of faulty air-conditioning, term of his presidency, Obama pursued vote. And he returned the favor: During they found breathing difficult. Accord- an aggressive policy of immigration a speech exactly ive days after his inau- ing to one account, they weren’t allowed enforcement. As late as 2013, he expelled guration, the president pointed to Crane to walk the aisles to the lavatory, so 438,000 undocumented immigrants, a and declared, “You guys are about to be they relied on empty water bottles— far higher number than any other recent very, very busy doing your jobs.” and when their urine outpaced the sup- administration did. This extreme crack- ply of water bottles, they were forced to down was intended as a down payment W wet themselves. on comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans had clamored for proof of We know all the common knocks To coordinate ICE Air requires a cer- Obama’s sincere commitment to enforce- against government: how it over- tain logistical genius, especially given the ment, and he supplied it. Alas, that down complicates tasks, how it resists change, organization’s aim—familiar to anyone payment would never be recouped. how it has a remarkable capacity for who relies on commercial air travel—of Immigration reform collapsed thanks inventing inefficiencies. But ICE has illing as many seats as possible on each to the guerrilla tactics of the GOP hard- quickly created a system of incredible of its lights. (To execute such deporta- liners in the House. And so, in the face of scale, an industrialized process for remov- tions, ICE Air prefers to charter its own congressional inaction, Obama set about ing human beings from the United States. lights; the agency tries to avoid placing steering ICE toward a more compassion- deportees on commercial lights, because ate strategy. He wanted to give the agency Take the example of ICE Air. Twelve airlines won’t board a passenger who a set of explicit and rigid priorities for years ago, ICE set about creating an actively refuses to ly.) One former ICE whom it would detain and deport. Previ- internal mechanism for transporting oicial recalls a conversation in which a ously, almost any undocumented immi- deportees back to their native lands by colleague boasted of an especially com- grant had been fair game. Now Obama plex deportation to Gaza, which required set about focusing ICE’s eforts on seri- traversing the Sinai Peninsula. He said ous criminals and recent arrivals. By the the agency has felt intense congres- middle of his second term, the admin- sional pressure to demonstrate that no istration had igured out how to translate nationality, no matter how small its pres- its priorities into bureaucratic reality. It ence in the United States, is beyond its supplied ICE with clear procedures—with deportation capacity.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS ICE has numeric goals, and it goes to THE GOVERNMENT Both CoreCivic and the Geo Group great lengths to achieve them. Among DOESN’T HAVE maintain that they do not lobby for or pro- the most important of these goals is the THE RESOURCES mote specific legislation shaping immi- drive to constantly run its detention facil- TO REMOVE gration policy. But according to NPR, the ities at maximum capacity. In 2004, Con- THE NATION’S detention industry donated money to 30 gress directed ICE to add 8,000 new beds 11 MILLION of the 36 co-sponsors of the infamous a year. (In 1994, the government main- UNDOCUMENTED S.B. 1070, a broad and harsh crackdown tained a daily average of 6,785 detainees; IMMIGRANTS. on undocumented immigrants, which this year, the expected average is 40,520.) BUT IT CAN then–Arizona Governor Jan Brewer This required a massive investment in CREATE signed into law in 2010. Additionally, detention, which Congress wanted to CIRCUMSTANCES two of Brewer’s top advisers were former ensure didn’t go to waste. In 2009, Rob- UNPLEASANT lobbyists for CoreCivic. (The bill was ert Byrd, the late Democratic senator ENOUGH TO eventually shredded by the courts on con- from West Virginia, quietly added a pro- ENCOURAGE stitutional grounds.) vision to an appropriations bill mandat- THEM TO LEAVE ing that ICE “maintain a level of not less ON THEIR OWN. There are, of course, genuine public- than 33,400 detention beds.” The provi- policy rationales for ICE’s contracting sion was never debated and left room for with private companies for detention competing interpretations. But for large facilities. The principal alternative is to stretches of the Obama years, Byrd’s rely on county jails, where ICE reportedly amendment was regarded as an obliga- rents beds for $130 a night. The deten- tory quota. (Last year Congress finally tion system is supposedly encoded in removed the Byrd quota, but Trump’s civil law, but jails are inherently rooted in goals for detention far outstrip anything the criminal system. Many of the immi- Congress has ever mandated.) grants detained in jails wear brightly col- ored jumpsuits and live surrounded by It’s one thing for a city to require cops bars and wires. Many of these jails, unlike to issue a minimum number of parking the private facilities, have no capacity for tickets; it’s another for the federal gov- handling non-English speakers. ernment to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of Still, the private facilities are run with liberty. But the system that Byrd helped the explicit goal of proit—a motive that enshrine encourages precisely that. Jer- can come at the cost of the well-being of emy Jong, an attorney with the Southern detainees. Several are in remote, rural Poverty Law Center, described to me a areas, where land and labor come espe- conversation he had with an ICE oicial cially cheap. One of the primary private at a Louisiana detention facility. The oi- facilities in the South is in Lumpkin, Geor- cial bragged that “he always did his best gia, on the Alabama border, 140 miles to fulill his contractual obligation to keep from Atlanta. Civil detention is explic- the center’s beds full of inventory.” itly not meant to be punitive—merely a necessary step in the administrative pro- The description of immigrants as cess of deportation—but the distance to “inventory” is a logical extension of how some facilities makes regular visits from ICE has outsourced detention to private relatives extremely diicult. Immigration irms, for which each coninement rep- lawyers told me that they tend not to take resents additional proit. Detention is a cases in such facilities, because access boom industry, backed by such mega- would be so diicult. Marty Rosenbluth, funds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and a lawyer from North Carolina, relocated it has experienced a decade of steroidal to Lumpkin. “I’m currently the only attor- growth. In the months following Trump’s ney doing defense against removal cases, election, the stock prices of the biggest that I know of, between Lumpkin and detention companies, the Geo Group and Atlanta,” he told me. “I actually opened CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 per- up a one-room B&B in my house to try cent. (Those prices have leveled out since and lure attorneys down here, since part then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of of their excuse for not taking cases here is lobbyists employed by the Geo Group that the nearest hotels are an hour drive.” and its primary competitors included Even with his presence, a 2015 University power firms Akin Gump and the Gep- of Pennsylvania Law Review study found hardt Group, founded by former House that only 6 percent of detainees in the Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That facility have a lawyer. Nationwide, the fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good igure isn’t much better: 14 percent. And fortune by holding its annual leadership without a lawyer, their chances of victory conference at the Trump National Doral in immigration court slump from slim resort, in Miami. (21 percent) to nearly hopeless (2 percent). THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 65

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Private detention companies’ contracts racial diversity. Demographers say the with ICE stipulate that they uphold a set county’s white majority is on track to of rigorous standards, but they of course be displaced by 2040. When Trump seek to tamp down costs, which means signed an executive order allowing ICE that they may skimp on basic care for to detain essentially any undocumented detainees. Take the CoreCivic facility in immigrants it encounters, the Gwin- Elizabeth, New Jersey, which a group of nett County police responded enthusi- lawyers and health professionals assem- astically. The number of undocumented bled by Human Rights First toured last immigrants transferred to ICE from year. What they discovered on their vis- local jails jumped by 248 percent during its were reports of maggots in the show- the first four months of Trump’s presi- ers and raw food served in the cafeteria, dency, relative to the prior year. Gwin- not to mention drinking water described nett police weren’t rounding up danger- as “pure bleach.” Several detainees said ous gang members: When the Migration they avoid asking for dental care because Policy Institute studied the new pat- the dentist at the facility only performs tern of enforcement, it found that police extractions, even when a filling would were primarily arresting immigrants for do. Mental-health treatment commonly traffic violations before handing them includes “bibliotherapy”—the assignment over to ICE. of self-help books—despite the obvious fact that prolonged detention can bring T stress and depression. CoreCivic main- tains that Human Rights First’s report The early Trump era has witnessed savant; even his ideological opponents EDMUND D. FOUNTAIN REDUX contained “numerous false and mislead- wave after wave of seismic policy mak- confess that he is more luent in the immi- ing allegations.” But these aren’t merely ing related to immigration—the Muslim gration system’s intricacies than they are. the stray observations of an activist group. ban initially undertaken in his very irst In December, John V. Kelly, the acting week in office, the rescission of DACA, From his perch in the Trump admin- inspector general of the Department of the separation of families at the border. istration, Cissna has repeatedly broad- Homeland Security, issued a comprehen- Amid the frantic attention these shifts cast the agency’s new attitude toward sive report based on a series of surprise vis- have generated, it’s easy to lose track of immigration. In February, he rewrote its its to detention facilities. His indings read: the smaller changes that have been tak- mission statement, erasing a phrase that “We identiied problems that undermine ing place. But with them, the administra- described the United States as a “nation of the protection of detainees’ rights, their tion has devised a scheme intended to immigrants.” He explained the change by humane treatment, and the provision of a unnerve undocumented immigrants by stating that he wanted to emphasize the safe and healthy environment.” creating an overall tone of inhospitality “commitment we have to the American and menace. people”—as if there were intellectual ten- Like many bureaucracies, ICE strains sion between the two sentiments. Then, for growth. When the agency was Where immigration is concerned, in June, he announced the opening of an created, it employed just over 2,700 Trump has installed a group of commit- oice that would review the iles of natu- deportation officers, roughly the same ted ideologues with a deep understand- ralized citizens, reexamining ingerprints number of employees as the San Diego ing of the extensive law-enforcement and hunting for hints of fraud that might police department. That workforce has machinery they now control. One espe- enable the revocation of citizenship. since doubled, and the organization’s cially skilled participant is L. Francis ambitions have ballooned. Beyond its Cissna, the head of the Office of U.S. Cissna is part of a close-knit coterie of own budget and its network of private Citizenship and Immigration Services. former Capitol Hill stafers whom Trump contractors, ICE has availed itself of a pro- Cissna is a longtime bureaucrat at the has placed in charge of the immigration vision in an immigration law signed by Bill Department of Homeland Security who Clinton in 1996. That provision empow- styled himself a dissident during the ered the federal government to partner Obama years. In 2015, he temporarily left with state and local police. In efect, this the department to work “on detail” for means ICE can deputize police to enforce Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. An federal immigration laws. Not every juris- MIT graduate and the son of a Peruvian diction has wanted to align itself with immigrant, Cissna began his career as a ICE—indeed, most major cities have stren- Foreign Service oicer in Haiti and then uously resisted, especially in the Trump Sweden. Over time, he became a policy era. But plenty of local police forces, many of them in suburban counties, have gladly taken up ICE’s ofer to collaborate. Gwinnett County, in northern Geor- gia, once epitomized the old rural South, sparsely populated and largely white. But over the past few decades, its pop- ulation has exploded in both size and 66 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS IN 2006, ICE ESTABLISHED ITS OWN AIRLINE, ICE AIR, TO TRANSPORT Last year, he left DHS to serve as a top DEPORTEES BACK TO THEIR NATIVE COUNTRIES. IN 2016, ICE AIR FLEW adviser to Attorney General Jef Sessions. The logic of the job switch was made 317 TRIPS TO GUATEMALA, ITS TOP DESTINATION. apparent to me by one former ICE oicial, who described Sessions as the “de facto system. Before Trump took office, the letter signed by Grassley, Sessions, and secretary of homeland security,” given group clustered in the oices of the con- their Senate colleague Michael Lee asked his comprehensive inluence over immi- servative politicians most committed to DHS to respond “in precise detail” to que- gration policy. Together, Sessions and restrictive immigration policy, especially ries about 250,000 immigrants. Hamilton have instituted a highly insular, Senators Grassley and Sessions. Even in fast-moving enforcement operation. a time when GOP policy on immigration Aside from Miller, perhaps the most had swung far to the right, these stafers— important architect of Trump’s immi- The work undertaken by Sessions, Stephen Miller, now a White House senior gration policy is another young Ses- Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based adviser, is the most famous of the bunch— sions acolyte, Gene Hamilton. In 2008, to some degree on a theory first devel- existed far outside the party’s mainstream. while he was a law student at Washing- oped by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secre- According to former colleagues, the ton and Lee University, Hamilton took tary of state. Over the past year, Kobach oices of senators such as John McCain an internship at an ICE detention facil- has emerged as a prime bête noire of the and Marco Rubio would lose patience ity in Miami. In 2012, he scored a job as left because of his ferocious, ultimately with them because of their eagerness to an ICE lawyer in the Atlanta ield oice. doomed attempts to stamp out a phan- detonate any viable version of immigra- (Back then, Atlanta was known as one of tom epidemic of voter fraud. But for tion reform. “They are a little cabal,” one the most aggressive cities when it came many years, he served as a lawyer for an Republican stafer who dealt closely with to immigration enforcement: The court ofshoot of the Federation for American them told me. They specialized in churn- there granted asylum to just 2 percent Immigration Reform—the loudest and ing out missives to DHS that requested of the seekers whose cases it heard. The most efective of the groups pressing for information about individual immigrants national average is about 50 percent.) restrictive immigration laws. In that posi- so detailed, they sometimes seemed intent tion, he helped write many of the most purely on overwhelming the system. One At the beginning of the Trump presi- draconian pieces of state-level immigra- dency, Hamilton joined DHS as a senior tion legislation to wend their way into law, counselor to then-Secretary John Kelly. including Arizona’s S.B. 1070. Kobach set out to remake immigra- tion law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attri- tion through enforcement—a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briely claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn’t have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can cre- ate circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, “Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational deci- sion is to return home.” Through depriva- tion and fear, the government can essen- tially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country. Once you understand that self- deportation is the administration’s guid- ing theory, you can see why immigration hawks might take satisfaction in sup- posed policy defeats. Even if putative iascoes such as the initial Muslim ban and family separations at the border fail in court or are ultimately reversed, they succeed in fomenting an atmosphere of fear and worry among immigrants. The theatrics are, in efect, the policy.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS The Trump administration made WHERE would apparently rather tolerate battery KADIR VAN LOHUIZEN NOOR REDUX explicit its policy that every undocumented IMMIGRATION than expose their partner to the risk of immigrant is unsafe with the executive IS CONCERNED, deportation—or risk deportation them- order that Trump signed during his irst TRUMP HAS selves. According to the Houston Chronicle, month as president, repealing Obama’s INSTALLED waiting rooms at many health clinics serv- policy of prioritizing the deportation of IDEOLOGUES ing undocumented immigrants in South immigrants who had committed seri- WITH A DEEP Texas are half as full now as they were ous crimes. As Thomas Homan testiied UNDERSTANDING before Trump took oice. And schools in before Congress last year, “If you’re in OF THE suburban Atlanta report that immigrant this country illegally and you committed a LAW ENFORCEMENT parents are reluctant to sign their kids up crime by entering this country, you should MACHINERY for reduced-price lunch programs. be uncomfortable … You should look over THEY NOW your shoulder, and you need to be worried.” CONTROL. Researchers from UCLA interviewed teachers and counselors at schools across The administration has attempted to 12 states to gauge the impact of zero- encode the spirit of that warning across tolerance immigration policies in the the spectrum of immigration enforce- classroom. They found that children of ment. For years, such enforcement undocumented immigrants consistently has abided by a policy intended to give expressed fear at the prospect of return- undocumented immigrants a sense of ing home from school only to ind their safety in “sensitive locations.” ICE has, for parents and siblings gone. An art teacher instance, refrained from apprehending reported that “many students drew and immigrants at schools, places of worship, colored images of their parents and them- and hospitals. The theory is that even if selves being separated, or about people an immigrant might be at risk for depor- stalking/hunting their family.” tation, she shouldn’t think twice about, say, visiting a doctor. But anecdotal evi- Fears of ICE can be exaggerated by word dence suggests that ICE has been operat- of mouth or compounded by hyperbolic ing more often in the vicinity of sensitive news reports, especially in the Spanish- locations: Agents arrested a father after language media. But the activists who he dropped of his daughter at school, and detained a group soon after it left a church shelter. ICE has also attempted to under- mine so-called sanctuary cities, which decline to hand over undocumented immigrants whom their police happen to arrest. ICE has loudly trumpeted its esca- lation of raids in those cities, sending the message that any notion of sanctuary is pure illusion. To date, there is little evidence that self-deportation is occurring in any meaningful numbers. Ample data, how- ever, show that increased fear has caused immigrant families to alter their life rou- tines. One study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that undocumented immigrants tried to limit their driv- ing in order to lower the chance of an inadvertent interaction with the police. Many immigrant parents now keep their kids indoors as much as they can. One woman told Kaiser she noticed that once- vibrant playgrounds in her neighborhood were suddenly vacant. Likewise, police departments around the country have noted a sharp decrease among Latinos reporting domestic vio- lence and abuse. (In Los Angeles, for instance, reports by Latinos of sex- ual assault dropped by 25 percent in the irst four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.) Women 68 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS interact most frequently with ICE, who life, she was actively attempting to deter migration, he argued, Mexico would pay daily visits to detention centers and people from seeking refuge in the United attempt to erode American sovereignty immigration courts, share immigrants’ States. This is the terrible irony of Trump’s and exert influence over the United sense of trepidation. This spring, an policy: It turns even devoted activists into States. Yet just as he promulgated that immigration lawyer from Santa Fe named unwitting servants of its goals. argument, the problem he diagnosed Allegra Love went to Mexico to visit a cara- was disappearing. The nation’s rigid secu- van of Central Americans headed to the D rity has made casually traversing the bor- California border. By the time she arrived, der much harder. In recent years, there the procession, organized by the activist Donald Trump talks a lot about the cri- has often been more migration to Mex- group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, or “People sis at the border. But over the past genera- ico than from Mexico. The Pew Research Without Borders,” had swollen to hun- tion, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of Center has estimated that there were dreds of asylum seekers and attracted dollars sealing the frontier with Mexico. 1.3 million fewer undocumented Mexican the attention of the media, especially Fox It has invested vast sums in surveillance, immigrants in the United States in 2016 News. President Trump described the car- fencing, drones, agents. A generation ago, than in 2007. Even with the recent surge avan as a “disgrace.” Although Love has politicians bemoaned the inlux of Mexi- of Central Americans leeing violence in made a career of advocating on behalf cans into the country. Ten years ago, Mark Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, of immigrants, she had come to Mexico Krikorian, one of the most prominent con- illegal border crossings are a fraction of with an explicit message of discourage- servative theorists on the subject, wrote a what they were in the 1980s and ’90s. In ment. “I wanted to keep these people safe highly touted book warning about Mexi- 2000, the U.S. apprehended 1.7 million and needed to explain to them how willing can plans for a reconquista: Through mass people crossing the southwest border; our government is to make them sufer,” last year, it nabbed just over 300,000. she told me. She conducted a workshop Contrary to widespread belief—and the in a makeshift refugee camp in the city of president’s frequent complaints—very Puebla. As hundreds of migrants gathered, few borders have the dense, protective she addressed them with a microphone: security layers present on America’s bor- “The system has become so appalling. You der with Mexico. need to be afraid. You need to take that into account.” For the first time in her But even as the nation solves one prob- lem, politicians and bureaucracies con- IN 1994, THE GOVERNMENT DETAINED AN AVERAGE OF coct new ones. Border Patrol has started 6,785 UNDOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS ON ANY GIVEN DAY. aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an THIS YEAR, THE EXPECTED DAILY AVERAGE IS 40,520. expansive deinition of border, encompass- ing all terrain within 100 miles of the phys- ical frontier. It has leveraged this lexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regu- lar presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio—and its oicers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio. A similar mission creep alicts ICE. It’s hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native- born population. ICE simply doesn’t have enough criminal targets to justify its enor- mous budget. That’s why, when Obama provided ICE with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted. “Abolish ICE” is a slogan, now fashion- able among Democrats, that has a radical edge. Prudent policy, however, requires not smashing the system, but return- ing it to a not-so-distant past. Only ive years ago, the political center deemed the legalization of the country’s 11 mil- lion undocumented immigrants a sen- sible element of a broad compromise.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Only 15 years ago, before the birth of State University football coach Jim Tres- ICE, America had a bureaucracy that sel, whom Jack once met at a parade. I fol- didn’t treat them as a policing problem. lowed him to his basement, which he is Immigration enforcement was housed in the early phases of transforming into in an agency devoted to both deporta- a shrine to the team. The walls will be tion and naturalization. There’s no rea- painted in the school’s colors, scarlet and son to wax nostalgic for INS, which had gray. “It will be my man cave,” he told me. plenty of problems of its own. But the U.S. can now borrow from its positive exam- Jack then led me up to his oice, which ple and design an institutional structure has his favorite view in the house. It looks that restores a sense of proportion to the down on his deck and grill, across a grassy limited dangers posed by the immigrants expanse of yard. Jack, who is in his mid- embedded in American communities. 40s but looks older, is a professional mover. He works for a big company that L specializes in long-distance relocations. At the beginning of the Trump adminis- Lacking a large number of worthy tar- EVEN WITH tration, Jack even packed up the home of gets, ICE will train more of its attention on THE RECENT a soon-to-be senior Cabinet member and the likes of Jack, an undocumented immi- SURGE OF hauled his belongings to Washington. On grant from Mauritania whom I met this CENTRAL the shelf opposite his desk, he keeps the spring. (Jack is not his real name, but he AMERICANS, awards he’s collected from his company does go by an Americanized nickname.) ILLEGAL BORDER for the excellence of his work. As Jack drove me around Columbus in his CROSSINGS aging but meticulously maintained sedan, ARE A FRACTION “I refuse to give all this up,” he said. An I came to think of him as an evange- OF WHAT oicer at ICE, whom he considers espe- list. With his round face, shaved pate, THEY WERE cially kind, has told him that it’s only a and impressive mustache, he exuded an IN THE 1980S matter of time before he is detained and optimism so cheery that it can only be AND ’90S. deported. But Jack, ever the American described as faithful. I found myself dis- optimist, believes there’s no problem appearing into his homilies, as he set out that can’t be solved. “I will tell them that to convert me to his version of the Amer- I know I did the wrong thing. I came here ican dream. without papers. But look at me. I’ve never broken a law. Fine, deport the guys who As we meandered past Refugee Road have committed a crime. I will say, ‘Look. toward his neighborhood, he wanted me It’s me, Jack.’ I will joke with them and let to know that he had had the vision to them know I’m not a threat. When I talk buy a model home at a good price long to them reasonably, they will relax.” Even before the developer had filled out his with the threat of deportation hanging street. When we arrived at his place, he over him, he has disciplined himself to asked me to gaze out upon his little vil- keep on believing. A few days earlier, he lage of cookie-cutter houses and wind- had bought a truck to start his own haul- ing asphalt. The morning’s drizzle had ing company. “I want to employ people, to turned to mist, and Jack closed his eyes give them opportunities like I had.” and theatrically inhaled, an expression of self-satisfaction like one might see in a As we went through his office, he TV commercial. became wistful. He opened his closet and showed me the suit he had worn on his He took me inside through his garage, light to America as a young man, almost past a shelving unit illed with four tiers of 20 years ago. He had me run my hands sneakers. Jack, a farmer’s son, takes huge— along its frayed lapel. Then he grabbed and very American—pleasure in abun- a leather-bound notebook sitting on his dance. Nearly every room in his house printer and opened it. “Here are things seemed to have a television set tuned to that my girlfriend will need to know.” He CNN. I saw pictures of his young son— had written instructions on how to access born in Columbus, and a U.S. citizen— his bank accounts, open his safe, sell his as well as an image of the former Ohio house, reach his son. As he showed this to me, he inally broke from his customar- ily cheery character and said nothing. He closed the book and traced the cover with his inger one last time. Then he looked at me and said, “When the day comes.” Franklin Foer is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and the author, most recently, of World Without Mind. 70 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 1 8 THE ATLANTIC

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS ARE WE HARDWIRED TO DELUDE OURSELVES? THOSE WHO STUDY COGNITIVE BIAS SEEM TO THINK SO.THEY DISAGREE ON WHETHER WE CAN DO MUCH ABOUT IT. BY BEN YAGODA THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 73

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS giving it to a stranger years from now.” The paper described an attempt by Hershield and several colleagues to modify that state of mind in their students. They had the students observe, for a minute or so, virtual-reality avatars showing what they would look like at age 70. Then they asked the students what they would do if they unexpectedly came into $1,000. The students who had looked their older self in the eye said they would put an average of $172 into a retirement account. That’s more than double the amount that would have been invested by members of the control group, who were willing to sock away an average of only $80. I am already old—in my early 60s, if you must know—so Hersh- ield furnished me not only with an image of myself in my 80s (complete with age spots, an exorbitantly asymmetrical face, and wrinkles as deep as a Manhattan pothole) but also with an image of my daughter as she’ll look decades from now. What this did, he explained, was make me ask myself, How will I feel toward the end of my life if my ofspring are not taken care of? I am staring at a photograph of myself that shows me 20 years When people hear the word bias, many if not most will think older than I am now. I have not stepped into the twilight zone. of either racial prejudice or news organizations that slant their cov- Rather, I am trying to rid myself of some measure of my pres- erage to favor one political position over another. Present bias, by ent bias, which is the tendency people have, when considering a contrast, is an example of cognitive bias—the collection of faulty trade-of between two future moments, to more heavily weight ways of thinking that is apparently hardwired into the human the one closer to the present. A great many academic studies brain. The collection is large. Wikipedia’s “List of cognitive biases” have shown this bias—also known as hyperbolic discounting— contains 185 entries, from actor-observer bias (“the tendency for to be robust and persistent. explanations of other individuals’ behaviors to overemphasize the inluence of their personality and underemphasize the inluence Most of them have focused on money. When asked whether of their situation … and for explanations of one’s own behaviors to they would prefer to have, say, $150 today or $180 in one month, do the opposite”) to the Zeigarnik efect (“uncompleted or inter- people tend to choose the $150. Giving up a 20 percent return on rupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones”). investment is a bad move—which is easy to recognize when the question is thrust away from the present. Asked whether they Some of the 185 are dubious or trivial. The IKEA efect, for would take $150 a year from now or $180 in 13 months, people are instance, is deined as “the tendency for people to place a dis- overwhelmingly willing to wait an extra month for the extra $30. proportionately high value on objects that they partially assem- bled themselves.” And others closely resemble one another to Present bias shows up not just in experiments, of course, but in the point of redundancy. But a solid group of 100 or so biases has the real world. Especially in the United States, people egregiously been repeatedly shown to exist, and can make a hash of our lives. undersave for retirement—even when they make enough money to not spend their whole paycheck on expenses, and even when The gambler’s fallacy makes us absolutely certain that, if a they work for a company that will kick in additional funds to retire- coin has landed heads up ive times in a row, it’s more likely ment plans when they contribute. to land tails up the sixth time. In fact, the odds are still 50-50. Optimism bias leads us to consistently underestimate the costs That state of affairs led a scholar named Hal Hershfield to and the duration of basically every project we undertake. Avail- play around with photographs. Hershield is a marketing profes- ability bias makes us think that, say, traveling by plane is more sor at UCLA whose research starts from the idea that people are dangerous than traveling by car. (Images of plane crashes are “estranged” from their future self. As a result, he explained in a 2011 more vivid and dramatic in our memory and imagination, and paper, “saving is like a choice between spending money today or hence more available to our consciousness.) The anchoring efect is our tendency to rely too heavily on the irst piece of information ofered, particularly if that information is presented in numeric form, when making decisions, estimates, or predictions. This is the reason negotiators start with a number that is deliberately too low or too high: They know that number will “anchor” the subsequent dealings. A striking illustration of anchoring is an experiment in which participants observed a CONCEPTS BY DELCAN & CO. • PHOTOGRAPHS BY THE VOORHES

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS roulette-style wheel that stopped on either 10 or 65, then were sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman. Lewis’s earlier book Moneyball was really about asked to guess what percentage of United Nations countries is how his hero, the baseball executive Billy Beane, countered the cognitive biases of old-school scouts—notably fundamental African. The ones who saw the wheel stop on 10 guessed 25 per- attribution error, whereby, when assessing someone’s behavior, we put too much weight on his or her personal attributes and cent, on average; the ones who saw the wheel stop on 65 guessed too little on external factors, many of which can be measured with statistics. 45 percent. (The correct percentage at the time of the experiment Another key igure in the ield is the University of Chicago econ- was about 28 percent.) omist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment efect, which leads us to place an irrationally high The efects of biases do not play out just on an individual value on our possessions. In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a level. Last year, President Donald Trump decided to send more mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on troops to Afghanistan, and thereby walked right into the sunk- average, $2.21 for the same mug. This lew in the face of classic eco- cost fallacy. He said, “Our nation must seek an honorable and nomic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does enduring outcome worthy of the tremendous sacriices that have not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics. been made, especially the sacriices of lives.” Sunk-cost thinking Most books and articles about cognitive bias contain a tells us to stick with a bad investment because of the money we brief passage, typically toward the end, similar to this one in Thinking, Fast and Slow: “The question that is most often have already lost on it; to inish an unappetizing restaurant meal asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be over- come. The message … is not encouraging.” because, after all, we’re paying for it; to prosecute an unwinnable Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an war because of the investment of blood and treasure. In all cases, understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; this way of thinking is rubbish. the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the for- If I had to single out a particular bias as the mer, but in fact the two lines are the same length. Here’s the key: Even after we have measured the lines and found “WE WOULDmost pervasive and damaging, it would prob- them to be equal, and have had the neurological basis of ALL LIKEably be conirmation bias. That’s the efect the illusion explained to us, we still perceive one line to be TO HAVE Athat leads us to look for evidence conirming shorter than the other. WARNINGwhat we already think or suspect, to view facts A. and ideas we encounter as further conirma- tion, and to discount or ignore any piece of BELL THAT evidence that seems to support an alternate RINGS view. Conirmation bias shows up most bla- LOUDLY tantly in our current political divide, where WHENEVER WE AREeach side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything. Conirmation bias plays out in lots of other ABOUT TO MAKE A circumstances, sometimes with terrible conse- SERIOUS quences. To quote the 2005 report to the presi- ERROR,” dent on the lead-up to the Iraq War: “When KAHNEMAN confronted with evidence that indicated Iraq WRITES,did not have [weapons of mass destruction], analysts tended to discount such information. Rather than weighing the evidence indepen- “BUT NO dently, analysts accepted information that it SUCH the prevailing theory and rejected information BELL IS that contradicted it.” AVAILABLE.” Segment A = Segment B B. The whole idea of cognitive biases and faulty heuristics—the At least with the optical illusion, our slow-thinking, analytic shortcuts and rules of thumb by which we make judgments and mind—what Kahneman calls System 2—will recognize a Müller- predictions—was more or less invented in the 1970s by Amos Lyer situation and convince itself not to trust the fast-twitch Tversky and Daniel Kahneman, social scientists who started System 1’s perception. But that’s not so easy in the real world, their careers in Israel and eventually moved to the United when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. States. They were the researchers who conducted the African- “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied countries-in-the-UN experiment. Tversky died in 1996. Kahne- when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to man won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best make a serious error, but no such bell is available.” seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 75

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves. Instead, it has been devoted to changing behavior, in the form of incentives or “nudges.” For example, while present bias has so far proved intractable, employers have been able to nudge employees into contributing to retirement plans by making sav- ing the default option; you have to actively take steps in order to not participate. That is, laziness or inertia can be more powerful than bias. Procedures can also be organized in a way that dis- suades or prevents people from acting on biased thoughts. A well-known example: the checklists for doctors and nurses put forward by Atul Gawande in his book The Checklist Manifesto. Is it really impossible, however, to shed or signiicantly miti- gate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the airmative. These experiments are based on the reactions and responses of randomly chosen subjects, many of them college undergraduates: people, that is, who care about the $20 they are being paid to participate, not about modifying or even learning about their behavior and thinking. But what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly moti- vated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me? Naturally, I wrote to Daniel Kahneman, who at 84 still holds an appointment at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Afairs, at Princeton, but spends most of his time in Manhattan. He answered swiftly and agreed to meet. “I should,” he said, “at least try to talk you out of your project.” I met with Kahneman at a Le Pain Quotidien in Lower Man- hattan. He is tall, soft-spoken, and afable, with a pronounced accent and a wry smile. Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t ind anyone more pessimistic than I am.” In this context, his pessimism relates, irst, to the impossi- bility of efecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion. “I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely diicult As it happened, right around the same time I was commu- with real-world cognitive biases. nicating and meeting with Kahneman, he was exchanging emails The most efective check against them, as Kahneman says, is with Richard E. Nisbett, a social psychologist at the University of from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than Michigan. The two men had been professionally connected for we can. And “slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can insti- decades. Nisbett was instrumental in disseminating Kahneman tutepoliciesthatincludethemonitoringofindividualdecisionsand and Tversky’s work, in a 1980 book called Human Inference: Strat- predictions. They can also require procedures egies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment. And in Thinking, such as checklists and “premortems,” an idea CONFIRMATION Fast and Slow, Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett and term thought up by Gary Klein, a cognitive BIAS article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe sta- psychologist. A premortem attempts to coun- PROBABLY tistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments ter optimism bias by requiring team members THE MOST instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This to imagine that a project has gone very, very PERVASIVE bias is known as base-rate neglect.) badly and write a sentence or two describing But over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in ANDhow that happened. Conducting this exercise, his research and thinking the possibility of training people it turns out, helps people think ahead. DAMAGING to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base- “My position is that none of these things BIAS OF rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk- THEM ALL cost fallacy. He had emailed Kahneman in part because he have any efect on System 1,” Kahneman said. LEADS US had been working on a memoir, and wanted to discuss a “You can’t improve intuition. Perhaps, with very TO LOOK FOR conversation he’d had with Kahneman and Tversky at a long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure long-ago conference. Nisbett had the distinct impression to behavioral economics, what you can do is EVIDENCEcue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to that Kahneman and Tversky had been angry—that they’d follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t THAT CONFIRMS thought what he had been saying and doing was an implicit provide cues. And for most people, in the heat WHAT criticism of them. Kahneman recalled the interaction, of argument the rules go out the window. WE ALREADY emailing back: “Yes, I remember we were (somewhat) THINK. annoyed by your work on the ease of training statistical “That’s my story. I really hope I don’t have intuitions (angry is much too strong).” to stick to it.” 76 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Gradu- usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved ate students in psychology also show a huge gain.” telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are Nisbett writes in his 2015 book, Mindware: Tools for Smart always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages Thinking, “I know from my own research on teaching people how early in a season, yet no player has ever inished a season with to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three an average that high. When he talks with students who haven’t domains are suicient to improve people’s reasoning for an indei- taken Introduction to Statistics, roughly half give erroneous nitely large number of events.” reasons such as “the pitchers get used to the batters,” “the bat- ters get tired as the season wears on,” and so on. And about half In one of his emails to Nisbett, Kahneman had suggested give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that that the diference between them was to a signiicant extent a outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at result of temperament: pessimist versus optimist. In a response, bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the Nisbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevita- hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I ble. When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the at the efects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe out to be huge.” into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues. An example of an easy problem is the .450 hitter early in a Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who baseball season. An example of a hard one is “the Linda problem,” have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk which was the basis of one of Kahneman and Tversky’s early out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten. articles. Simpliied, the experiment presented subjects with the characteristics of a ictional woman, “Linda,” including her com- I spoke with Nisbett by phone and asked him about his disagree- mitment to social justice, college major in philosophy, participa- ment with Kahneman. He still sounded a bit uncertain. “Danny tion in antinuclear demonstrations, and so on. Then the subjects seemed to be convinced that what I was showing was trivial,” he were asked which was more likely: (a) that Linda was a bank teller, said. “To him it was clear: Training was hopeless for all kinds of or (b) that she was a bank teller and active in the feminist move- judgments. But we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, ment. The correct answer is (a), because it is always more likely that one condition will be satisied in a situation than that the con- dition plus a second one will be satisied. But because of the conjunction fallacy (the assumption that multi- ple speciic conditions are more probable than a single general one) and the representativeness heuristic (our strong desire to apply stereotypes), more than 80 per- cent of undergraduates surveyed answered (b). Nisbett justiiably asks how often in real life we need to make a judgment like the one called for in the Linda problem. I cannot think of any applicable scenarios in my life. It is a bit of a logical parlor trick. Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most efective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan under- graduates. So I did. The course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett— who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availabil- ity heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings out- number deaths by ire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS He addresses the logical fallacy of conirmation bias, explain- Nisbett’s Coursera course and Hal Hershield’s close ing that people’s tendency, when testing a hypothesis they’re encounters with one’s older self are hardly the only de-biasing inclined to believe, is to seek examples conirming it. But Nisbett methods out there. The New York–based NeuroLeadership Insti- points out that no matter how many such examples we gather, we tute ofers organizations and individuals a variety of training can never prove the proposition. The right thing to do is to look sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other for cases that would disprove it. things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; And he approaches base-rate neglect by means of his own for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so strategy for choosing which movies to see. His decision is never bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?” dependent on ads, or a particular review, or whether a film sounds like something he would enjoy. Instead, he says, “I live Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylva- by base rates. I don’t read a book or see a movie unless it’s highly nia’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara recommended by people I trust. Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecast- ers”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict “Most people think they’re not like other people. But they are.” future events with far more accuracy than the pundits and so-called When I inished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and experts who show up on TV. In Tetlock’s book Superforecasting: The colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads. It contains a few Art and Science of Prediction (co-written with Dan Gardner), and in dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to the commercial venture he and Mellers co-founded, Good Judg- cognitive biases. For example: ment, they share the superforecasters’ secret sauce. Below are four cards. They are randomly chosen from a deck of One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls cards in which every card has a letter on one side and a number “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental on the other side. Your task is to say which of the cards you need attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are con- to turn over in order to ind out whether the following rule is true stantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on or false. The rule is: “If a card has an ‘A’ on one side, then it has good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics. Tetlock a ‘4’ on the other side.” Turn over only those cards that you need explains, “At a wedding, someone sidles up to you and says, to check the rule. ‘How long do you give them?’ If you’re shocked because you’ve seen the devotion they show each other, you’ve been sucked into Box 1 Box 2 Box 3 Box 4 the inside view.” Something like 40 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that statistic is far more predictive of the fate of any 4BA7 particular marriage than a mutually adoring gaze. Not that you want to share that insight at the reception. (a) Box 3 only (b) Boxes 1, 2, 3 and 4 The recent de-biasing interventions that scholars in the ield (c) Boxes 3 and 4 have deemed the most promising are a handful of video games. (d) Boxes 1, 3 and 4 Their genesis was in the Iraq War and the catastrophic weapons- (e) Boxes 1 and 3 of-mass-destruction blunder that led to it, which left the intel- ligence community reeling. In 2006, seeking to prevent another Because of conirmation bias, many people who haven’t been mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the trained answer (e). But the correct answer is (c). The only thing you Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), an can hope to do in this situation is disprove the rule, and the only way agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to do that is to turn over the cards displaying the letter A (the rule to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, IARPA is disproved if a number other than 4 is on the other side) and the initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” number 7 (the rule is disproved if an A is on the other side). video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: conirmation bias, fundamental I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nis- attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less bett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as biased than the average person), the anchoring efect, the repre- well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after sentativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own). to a perfect score.” Six teams set out to develop such games, and two of them Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and tak- completed the process. The team that has gotten the most atten- ing the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases. For tion was led by Carey K. Morewedge, now a professor at Boston one thing, I hadn’t been tested beforehand, so I might just be a University. Together with collaborators who included staf from comparatively unbiased guy. For another, many of the test ques- Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and tions, including the one above, seemed somewhat remote from other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health scenarios one might encounter in day-to-day life. They seemed research company that does a lot of government work, More- to be “hard” problems, not unlike the one about Linda the bank wedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which teller. Further, I had been, as Kahneman would say, “cued.” In contrast to the Michigan seniors, I knew exactly why I was being asked these questions, and approached them accordingly. For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.” 78 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS takes about three hours to complete, while I am neither as much of a pessimist as Daniel others watched a video about cognitive bias. Kahneman nor as much of an optimist as Richard Nis- All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before bett. Since immersing myself in the ield, I have noticed the training, immediately afterward, and then a few changes in my behavior. For example, one hot day inally after eight to 12 weeks had passed. recently, I decided to buy a bottle of water in a vend- ing machine for $2. The bottle didn’t come out; upon After taking the test, I played the game, inspection, I realized that the mechanism holding the which has the production value of a late- bottle in place was broken. However, right next to it was 2000s PlayStation 3 irst-person ofering, with another row of water bottles, and clearly the mechanism large-chested women and men, all of whom in that row was in order. My instinct was to not buy a bot- wear form-fitting clothes and navigate the tle from the “good” row, because $4 for a bottle of water landscape a bit tentatively. The player adopts is too much. But all of my training in cognitive biases the persona of a neighbor of a woman named told me that was faulty thinking. I would be spending Terry Hughes, who, in the irst part of the game, $2 for the water—a price I was willing to pay, as had has mysteriously gone missing. In the second, already been established. So I put the money in and got she has reemerged and needs your help to look the water, which I happily drank. into some skulduggery at her company. Along the way, you’re asked to make judgments and In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reac- predictions—some having to do with the story tions as best I can. Let’s say I’m looking to hire a research and some about unrelated issues—which are assistant. Candidate A has sterling references and expe- designed to call your biases into play. You’re rience but appears tongue-tied and can’t look me in the given immediate feedback on your answers. eye; Candidate B loves to talk NBA basketball—my favorite topic!—but his recommendations are mediocre For example, as you’re searching Terry’s at best. Will I have what it takes to overcome fundamen- apartment, the building superintendent knocks tal attribution error and hire Candidate A? on the door and asks you, apropos of nothing, Or let’s say there is an oiceholder I despise for reasons of tem- about Mary, another tenant, whom he describes perament, behavior, and ideology. And let’s further say that under as “not a jock.” He says 70 percent of the tenants this person’s administration, the national economy is performing go to Rocky’s Gym, 10 percent go to Entropy Fit- well. Will I be able to dislodge my powerful conirmation bias and ness, and 20 percent just stay at home and watch allow the possibility that the person deserves some credit? Netlix. Which gym, he asks, do you think Mary As for the matter that Hal Hershield brought up in the irst probably goes to? A wrong answer, reached place—estate planning—I have always been the proverbial ant, thanks to base-rate neglect (a form of the rep- storing up my food for winter while the grasshoppers sing and resentativeness heuristic) is “None. Mary is a play. In other words, I have always maxed out contributions couch potato.” The right answer—based on the data the super has to 401(k)s, Roth IRAs, Simpliied Employee Pensions, 403(b)s, helpfully provided—is Rocky’s Gym. When the participants in the 457(b)s, and pretty much every alphabet-soup savings choice pre- study were tested immediately after playing the game or watching sented to me. But as good a saver as I am, I am that bad a procras- the video and then a couple of months later, everybody improved, tinator. Months ago, my inancial adviser ofered to evaluate, for but the game players improved more than the video watchers. free, my will, which was put together a couple of decades ago and surely needs revising. There’s something about drawing up a will When I spoke with Morewedge, he said he saw the results as that creates a perfect storm of biases, from the ambiguity efect supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s (“the tendency to avoid options for which missing information work was largely written of by the ield, the assumption being that makes the probability seem ‘unknown,’ ” as Wikipedia deines training can’t reduce bias,” he told me. “The literature on training it) to normalcy bias (“the refusal to plan for, or react to, a disaster suggests books and classes are ine entertainment but largely inef- which has never happened before”), all of them culminating in fectual. But the game has very large efects. It surprised everyone.” the ostrich efect (do I really need to explain?). My adviser sent me a prepaid FedEx envelope, which has been lying on the loor I took the test again soon after playing the game, with mixed of my oice gathering dust. It is still there. As hindsight bias tells results. I showed notable improvement in confirmation bias, me, I knew that would happen. fundamental attribution error, and the representativeness heu- ristic, and improved slightly in bias blind spot and anchoring bias. Ben Yagoda’s books include The B-Side: The Death of Tin Pan My lowest initial score—44.8 percent—was in projection bias. It Alley and the Rebirth of the Great American Song and About actually dropped a bit after I played the game. (I really need to Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made. He writes for the stop assuming that everybody thinks like me.) But even the posi- blog MoviesinOtherMovies.com. tive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.” I had taken Nisbett’s and Morewedge’s tests on a computer screen, not on paper, but the point remains. It’s one thing for the efects of training to show up in the form of improved results on a test—when you’re on your guard, maybe even looking for tricks—and quite another for the efects to show up in the form of real-life behavior. Morewedge told me that some tentative real- world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promis- ing results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them. 80 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS May It Please the Court By Lara Bazelon In more than a decade as a trial law- yer, I’ve watched in frustration as male attorneys rely on a range of courtroom tactics that are off-limits to women. Judges and juries reward men for being domineering—and expect women to be deferential. This cultural bias runs deep and won’t be easily overcome. I have the trial transcripts to prove it. L AST YEAR, ELIZABETH FAIELLA took a case representing a man who alleged that a doctor had perforated his esophagus during a routine medi- cal procedure. Before the trial began, she and the defense attorney, David O. Doyle Jr., were summoned to a courtroom in Brevard County, Florida, for a hearing. Doyle had iled a motion seeking to “preclude emo- tional displays” during the trial—not by the patient, but by Faiella. “Counsel for the Plaintif, Elizabeth Faiella, has a proclivity for displays of anguish in the presence of 82 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS the jury, including crying,” Doyle wrote in his motion. described as a “double standard and a double bind.” Women, she Faiella’s predicted lood of tears, he continued, could wrote, must avoid being seen as “too ‘soft’ or too ‘strident,’ too be nothing more than “a shrewdly calculated attempt ‘aggressive’ or ‘not aggressive enough.’ ” to elicit a sympathetic response.” The glass ceiling remains a reality in a host of white-collar Faiella told the trial judge, a man, that Doyle’s alle- industries, from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. If the courtroom gations were sexist and untrue. The judge asked Doyle were merely another place where the advancement of women whether he had a basis for the motion. has been checked, that would Faiella says that he replied that he did, but be troubling, if not entirely the information was privileged because it surprising. But the stakes in came from his client. (Doyle told me the Reading over my old the courtroom aren’t just a information had in fact come from other woman’s career development defense attorneys.) Faiella called his reply trial transcripts, I am and her earning potential. The “ridiculous.” She told me: “I have never taken aback by how interests—and, in the criminal cried in a trial. Not once.” context, the liberty—of her As Faiella listened to Doyle press many times I said client are also on the line. forward with his argument, her outrage “Thank you”—and how What makes the issue mounted. But she had to take care not to especially vexing are the let her anger show, fearing it would only often I apologized. sources of the bias—judges, confirm what Doyle had insinuated— senior attorneys, juries, and that she would use emotional displays even the clients themselves. to gain an advantage in the courtroom. Sexism infects every kind of The judge denied Doyle’s request, courtroom encounter, from saying, in essence, “I expect both parties to behave pretrial motions to closing arguments—a glum ubiquity that themselves.” Afterward, Faiella confronted Doyle in makes clear how diicult it will be to eradicate gender bias not the hallway. “Why would you ile such a thing?” she just from the practice of law, but from society as a whole. demanded, noting that it was unprofessional, sexist, I began my career as a trial lawyer in 2001, the same year and humiliating. that Rhode published her report. I worked in the Federal Pub- “I don’t understand why you are getting so upset,” lic Defender’s Oice in Los Angeles. When I took the job, I had she says Doyle replied. (Doyle denied that gender braced myself for the stress; almost immediately, my caseload was the motivating factor behind iling the motion; included clients facing lengthy prison sentences for serious felo- he said he had iled such motions against male attor- nies. I did not expect to be told in explicit terms that my gender neys as well.) would play a signiicant role in how I could defend my clients, When I asked Faiella for a copy of Doyle’s motion, and that learning this lesson was crucial to my success and by she said that she could send me examples from more extension to my clients’ lives. “There are things I can do that you than two dozen cases across her 30-year career. She can’t, and things you can do that I can’t” was the way one of the said that at least 90 percent of her courtroom oppo- male supervising attorneys in my oice put it. nents are male, and that they ile a “no-crying motion” Let’s start with the clothes. In my oice, and in the U.S. Attor- as a matter of course. Judges always deny them, but ney’s Oice, where the federal prosecutors worked, the men the damage is done: The idea that she will unfairly stuck to a basic uniform: a dark suit, a crisp button-down shirt, an deploy her feminine wiles to get what she wants has inofensive tie, and a close shave or neatly trimmed beard. If they been planted in the judge’s mind. Though Faiella has adhered to that model, their physicality was unremarkable— long since learned to expect the motions, every time essentially invisible. one crosses her desk she feels sick to her stomach. “I Women’s clothing choices, by contrast, were the subject of cannot tell you how much it demeans me,” she said. intense scrutiny from judges, clerks, marshals, jurors, other law- “Because I am a woman, I have to act like it doesn’t yers, witnesses, and clients. I had to be attractive, but not in a pro- bother me, but I tell you that it does. The arrow lands vocative way. At one trial, I took of my suit jacket at the counsel every time.” table as I reviewed my notes before the jury was seated. It was a sweltering day in Los Angeles, and the air-conditioning had yet to kick in. The judge, an older man with a mane of white hair, F OR THE PAST TWO DECADES, law schools jabbed a inger in my direction and bellowed, “Are you stripping have enrolled roughly the same number of in my courtroom, Ms. Bazelon?” Heads swiveled, and I looked men and women. In 2016, for the irst time, down at my sleeveless blouse, turning scarlet. Observing my female colleagues and opposing counsel as I more women were admitted to law school than settled into the job, I took mental notes. Medium-length or long men. In the courtroom, however, women remain a hair was best—but not too long. Heels and skirts were preferred minority, particularly in the high-proile role of irst at trial—but not too high and deinitely not too short. And panty- chair at trial. hose. I hated pantyhose, both the cringe-inducing word and the In a landmark 2001 report on sexism in the court- sufocating reality. They itched miserably and ripped. But show- room, Deborah Rhode, a Stanford Law professor, ing up in federal court with bare legs was as unthinkable as show- wrote that women in the courtroom face what she ing up drunk. 84 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Clothing may seem trivial, but what a woman wears at trial is I N 18 8, CLARA SHORTRIDGE FOLTZ, who directly related to her ability to do her job. When impeaching a was living in San Jose, California, was left to witness to expose a lie, the men in my oice would march up to raise ive children on her own when her husband the witness box, incriminating document in hand, and shove it in abandoned her. To support her family, Foltz decided the witness’s face. I had to approach witnesses gingerly—because to become a lawyer. California law prevented it: “Any I was balancing on heels. white male” was eligible to practice law, but women It wasn’t just men who taught me what to wear and how to and minorities were excluded. Undeterred, Foltz act. Later in my career, I had a female supervisor who told me drafted the Woman Lawyer’s Bill, successfully lob- in no uncertain terms that I should wear makeup and color my bied the state legislature to pass it, took the bar exam, graying hair. In fact, she told me I needed a complete makeover, and, on September 5, 1878, became the irst female and ofered to pay for it. I didn’t take her money, but I did take her attorney admitted to the California bar. advice, and I’ve borne the signiicant cost of these expectations Today, Foltz is seen in feminist legal circles as a since. My supervisors also reminded me to smile as often as pos- pioneering hero. As a lawyer, she was an advocate for sible in order to counteract the impression that my resting facial the poor and disadvantaged, who formed the bulk of expression was too severe. I even had to police my tone of voice. her client base, since few people would voluntarily When challenging a hostile witness, I learned to take a “more in agree to female representation. In court, the men who sorrow than in anger” approach. opposed Foltz routinely used her gender to discredit This isn’t just dated wisdom passed down from a more conser- her. In her memoirs, she recalled a prosecutor who had vative era. Social-science research has demonstrated that when told the jury to reject Foltz’s arguments on these sim- female attorneys show emotions like indignation, impatience, or ple grounds: “She is a woman, she cannot be expected anger, jurors may see them as shrill, irrational, and unpleasant. to reason. God Almighty declared her limitations.” The same emotions, when expressed by men, are interpreted In 2002, Los Angeles renamed its downtown as appropriate to the circumstances of a case. So when I criminal courthouse after Foltz. It’s inspiring to see entered the courtroom, I took on the persona of a woman who a woman’s name on the building; women lawyers dressed, spoke, and behaved in a traditionally feminine and continue to struggle to get inside, however. National unthreatening manner. data are hard to come by, but state-level studies paint In some ways, this was easy. I had been raised to be polite a bleak picture. The New York State Bar Association, and to show respect for authority. In other ways, this was dif- for example, found in a 2017 report that female attor- icult. When I got angry, I had to stile that feeling. When my neys accounted for just 25 percent of all attorneys eforts failed, I feared having appearing in commercial and criminal come across as strident—or, cases in courtrooms across the state. The worse, as a bitch. When I more complex the civil litigation, the less succeeded, I felt as if I was “I want a Jew lawyer,” a likely a woman was to appear as lead betraying my feminist prin- client once said to me. counsel, with the percentage shrinking ciples. But if there was a sliver from 31.6 percent in one-party cases to of a chance that the girl-next- I told him I was Jewish. less than 20 percent in cases involving door approach would deliver “No, a man Jew lawyer,” five or more parties. The report con- a more favorable outcome, cluded: “The low percentage of women not taking it would be wrong. he responded. attorneys appearing in a speaking role I told myself that my duty was in courts was found at every level and in to my client, not my gender. every type of court: upstate and down- In the seven years I worked state, federal and state, trial and appellate, as a deputy federal public criminal and civil, ex parte applications defender, I fought hard for and multi-party matters.” my clients, and I had my share of victories. But I was practicing Over the past year, I’ve interviewed more than two law diferently from many of my male colleagues and adversar- dozen female trial lawyers from across the United ies. They could resort to a bare-knuckle style. Most of what I did States. Their experiences bear out these grim ind- in the courtroom looked more like fencing. Reading over my ings. Beth Wilkinson, a lawyer based in Washington, old trial transcripts, I am taken aback by how many times I said D.C., told me that the number of women who litigate “Thank you”—to the judge, to opposing counsel, to hostile wit- “bet-the-company cases”—in which millions or even nesses. And by how many times I apologized. billions of dollars are at stake and a corporation’s In 2017, after nearly a decade of holding jobs that ofered ability to survive absent a win at trial is in doubt—is limited opportunities to go to court, I took a position as a clini- “abysmally low.” cal professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law. Wilkinson enjoyed a formidable reputation at I’m now training students to become trial lawyers by supervis- Paul, Weiss, Rikind, Wharton & Garrison, a white- ing their representation of criminal defendants in San Fran- shoe irm where she was a partner, winning cases, cisco Superior Court. During my irst semester, all ive of my bringing in new clients, and earning a high salary. students were women. Four were women of color. Eighteen But she told me she was “never in the inner circle. years earlier, I had been sitting where they were. I wondered Big Law is a male-dominated place, and it is very what had changed. hard for women to thrive in an institution built that THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 85

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS way.” In 2016, she co-founded her own irm, Wilkin- take a few minutes and walk out and try to calm your associate son, Walsh & Eskovitz, which represents a roster of down,” he said. major clients, including the NCAA, Pfizer, Duke Energy, and Georgia-Paciic. As Phelps’s experience suggests, it can be diicult to separate the various forms of discrimination women face. “I want a Jew The situation is worse for female litigators who are lawyer,” a male client once said to me. I told him I was Jewish. not white. According to a 2006 report by the Ameri- “No, a man Jew lawyer,” he responded. can Bar Association, nearly two-thirds of women of color said they had been shut out of networking oppor- T HE PROBLEM IS N’ T merely that women are out- tunities; 44 percent said they had been passed over numbered in the courtroom. It’s that men occupy the for plum work assignments; and 43 percent said they positions of power in staggering proportions. Women had little opportunity to develop client relationships. make up only 33 percent of federal trial-court judges. As of In a survey and in focus groups, many described feel- June, Donald Trump had made 73 U.S.-attorney nominations. ing lonely and perpetually on edge, anxious to avoid Sixty-six of them are men. The state-level statistics are just as race- and gender-based stereotypes. One respondent said she was treated like an “exotic animal,” trotted out for photo ops at diversity and recruitment events but otherwise sidelined. An Asian American woman recounted being asked to translate a document written in Korean and having to explain that she was Chinese. Kadisha Phelps is a 37-year-old associate at a Miami-based firm. She worked her way up to first chair in part by bringing in her own business: She’s built a cottage industry repre- senting former NFL players who claim that they were scammed out of their earn- ings by unscrupulous finan- cial advisers. Phelps, who is African American, describes herself as “a pit bull in a skirt.” But she told me that when she goes to court, she often has to bring one of her male partners along—even if he knows little about the case. “That older white man at the table carries some kind of credibility,” she explained. “It gives judges the assurance that it’s not just some little black girl out there on her own.” In July 2017, Phelps got into a heated debate with a male trial judge about how many depositions she would be allowed in a case her firm valued at $2 million. Phelps had asked Douglas Broeker to join her in court to play the role of the silent white part- ner. When Phelps pressed her point, the judge turned to Broeker. “Maybe you should 86 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS dismal: 30 percent of trial-court judges are women. In 2015, formal complaint. This “wasn’t just any judge,” she according to the Women’s Donor Network, an advocacy group, said. “He was a kingmaker. He brokered deals.” She 17 percent of elected prosecutors were women; women of color feared the repercussions of calling him out. “I thought made up 1 percent. In the criminal context, the odds are that a he could ruin my career.” female lawyer will face of against a male prosecutor in a contest overseen by a male judge. Years passed, but McNamara remained angry and disgusted. In 2016, she iled a complaint against the Not all male prosecutors and judges harbor sexist views of judge with California’s Commission on Judicial Per- women, though many do. Male lawyers referred to their female formance, describing the 2011 incident and accusing peers as “honey” and “sweetheart” in court frequently enough him of having physically assaulted her. The com- that, in 2016, the American Bar Association felt compelled to plaint has yet to be resolved. pass a rule designed to curtail the use of such demeaning terms. Judges, for their part, can reinforce gender stereotypes, implicitly Most judges, of course, don’t strike female attor- normalizing them and even explicitly enforcing them. Female neys in their courtroom. But at various points during trial attorneys routinely report that male judges critique their the irst semester of the clinic, my all-female class of voices as too loud or too shrill. aspiring trial lawyers experienced lower-wattage ver- sions of such treatment. Romany McNamara is a public defender in Alameda County’s In November, one of my students was slated to Oakland oice. In 2011, she had argue a motion before a judge who I knew could be just started litigating felony tri- nasty to female lawyers. Playing the judge’s role in a als. One morning, a trial judge mock argument to prepare her, I went out of my way called two of McNamara’s cases to be sneering and combative, my best imitation of before she’d had a chance to intro- his behavior. And indeed, in court, when my student duce herself to her new clients or objected to opposing counsel’s request for a continu- explain the legal process to them. ance so that a police oicer could testify, the judge When she asked for a brief delay laid into her for lacking professional courtesy. She in the proceedings, she says, the tried to explain her reasoning, but he interrupted, not judge berated her in front of the allowing her to demonstrate that the matter could be packed courtroom. “He likes to resolved without the oicer having to testify. (Two humiliate young female trial law- months later, a diferent judge agreed: The oicer yers,” she told me. didn’t testify, and we won the motion.) McNamara had a third case In class later, I asked my students whether they that day. The judge waited until thought the judge would have treated a male attorney the end of the calendar to call it. the same way. There was a long pause. “That’s a joke, When the courtroom emptied and right?” one of them said. McNamara started to walk out, she says, the judge beckoned her to E VEN WHEN ARG ING before the most approach the bench. As she stood enlightened judge and against fair-minded before him, he offered a luke- opposing counsel, women enter the court- warm apology, emphasizing the room at a disadvantage. In America’s adversarial importance he placed on running system, the ability to compel useful testimony from his courtroom eiciently. Then he a hostile witness is often essential to winning at trial. leaned in and said softly, “Don’t When you invade a witness’s personal space, the do it again.” McNamara says the witness may feel stress, anxiety, and anger. These judge then struck her on the back emotions may lead the witness to blurt out helpful of her hand, hard enough to leave information. In general, jurors tend to be impressed a mark. by lawyers who demonstrate power and control in the courtroom. But for female lawyers, projecting power “I could see the outline of where and control is a tricky proposition. When male attor- he hit me in white before it turned neys show lashes of anger—a raised voice, a pointed bright pink,” she told me. “There inger—juries tend to view them favorably, as “tough was nothing overtly sexual about zealous advocates,” according to research cited in a it,” she said. “But that was abso- 2004 Law & Psycholog Review article. When women lutely the undertone, like: You’ve betray anger, they may be seen as overly emotional. been a bad girl.” Trial lawyers routinely talk with members of the McNamara told a colleague jury when a case is over in order to get their feedback, about the incident; I spoke with that and jurors can be quite candid in their assessments. colleague, and he conirmed that Kila Baldwin, a partner at the personal-injury irm she had told him what happened, Kline & Specter, tries about ive cases a year and has and that they had debated how won a string of multimillion-dollar verdicts. “I always she should respond. McNamara initially decided against filing a THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 87

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS wear heels in front of the jury unless I am in pain,” she to trial in downtown Philadelphia. My sister Jill was picked to be told me. Last June, Baldwin was in pain: The tendons one of the jurors. in her feet were inlamed, so she wore lats to a trial. I could not fathom why Ethicon would let Jill on the jury. I ig- Afterward, a female juror told her that she had not ured that my sister, a mother of two, would naturally be sympa- cared for her shoes. “I never have a casual Friday,” thetic to Adkins. For many women, minor urinary incontinence Baldwin said. “You get less respect.” is a fact of life after childbirth—we cross our legs before sneezing and locate the nearest bathroom immediately upon entering an unfamiliar place. S OM E F E M A L E T R I A L L AW Y E R S have But Jill, who has a doctorate in education policy, also comes succeeded in turning the attributes associ- from a family of lawyers—including our father, her husband, and ated with their gender—compassion, warmth, three sisters. Bueno told me later that she was counting on jurors like her: highly educated individuals who would listen to both accessibility—to their advantage, particularly once sides and apply the law to the facts. they get in front of a jury. Shawn Holley, a prominent I’m conident my sister did exactly that, but she told me she entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles, told me that had been impressed by more than just Bueno’s command of the she makes her gender work for her. She described law. Jill had related to her. She was the only woman lawyer in her courtroom afect as “polite and charming”—but a courtroom packed with attorneys. The men were dour and not so polite or charming that it “gets in the way of dull; Bueno was personable and dynamic. She referred to the the job that needs to get done.” Holley cut her teeth female anatomy with conidence and ease. By contrast, Adkins’s working as an associate for Johnnie Cochran during all-male team struggled when forced to ask personal questions. the O. J. Simpson trial. She said it was this quality—a “If you can’t say the word vagina, you are probably not the best sweet steeliness—that led Cochran to recruit her. He lawyer for the case,” Jill said. By tiptoeing around their client’s encouraged her to be “the person in the courtroom injuries, Adkins’s male lawyers undersold her pain and failed to that everyone loves while being as capable and pre- prove its direct link to Ethicon. pared as possible.” She followed his advice, and today A turning point in the trial, Jill told me, was Bueno’s cross- she represents high-proile clients including Justin examination of Adkins. “She kept her same friendly demeanor Bieber, Lindsay Lohan, and Kim Kardashian. while asking some very tough questions. She had to break [Adkins] Holley has constructed a persona that works for her down and demonstrate that she was not a reliable witness. And in her area of the law. But when I talked with her and she did it without seeming mean or horrible.” In a case involving other women who have enjoyed courtroom success, I complicated issues relating to female genitalia, my sister said, “I saw a pattern emerge. Many of them excelled in areas trusted her more because she was a woman.” where being seen as a woman irst and a lawyer second In a sweeping victory for Ethicon, the jury found that the gave them an advantage over their male adversaries. mesh had been defective but that Adkins had failed to prove that Embracing traits traditionally associated with it had caused her injuries. (In August 2017, the judge overrode the women seems to pay of particularly well in litiga- jury’s verdict; Ethicon has appealed.) When I spoke with Bueno, tion involving so-called women’s issues. she told me that she has In many of these cases, female trial been involved in hundreds of lawyers are favored and even actively mesh cases. “A woman is able recruited. In the civil arena, for exam- Johnnie Cochran told to cross-examine a female ple, women have thrived in high-stakes personal-injury victim with medical-malpractice lawsuits where one female associate: greater sensitivity,” she said. the plaintif claims that the defendant’s Be “the person in the “She can probe a little further product injured her genitalia or repro- without coming across as ductive organs. courtroom that attacking the victim.” For a number of years, Ethicon, a sub- everyone loves.” sidiary of Johnson & Johnson, has been defending itself against tens of thousands L YNNE HERMLE con- of cases alleging defects in mesh devices ducted what was per- it created for surgical implantation in the haps the highest-proile vagina to alleviate incontinence, among other conditions. Some patients who had the devices cross-examination of 2015. Ellen Pao was seeking $16 million in implanted experienced complications such as bleed- damages from her former employer, the Silicon Valley venture- ing and the perforation of internal organs. capital irm Kleiner Perkins Cauield & Byers, claiming that she In 2013, Kimberly Adkins, a 48-year-old Ohio had experienced gender discrimination—and had been fired woman, sued Ethicon, claiming that the mesh sling when she’d spoken up about it. Hermle, a partner at Orrick, implanted to treat her incontinence had caused per- Herrington & Sutclife, was the lead counsel for the all-female manent internal damage, leaving her unable to have defense team. Hermle is the senior partner in Orrick’s Silicon Val- sex. Ethicon retained Kim Bueno, a partner at the ley employment group, where 10 of the 13 attorneys are women. Texas-based law irm Scott Douglass & McConnico, “I think women are better at the conflict aspect in the court- to serve as lead counsel. In May 2017, the case went room,” she told me. “We are able to confront people directly and 88 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS dismantle false stories in a way that men can’t do without com- my ist into my open palm as I argued to the judge— a woman—that the case had been a colossal mis- ing across as a bully.” In the Pao case, “I had a really tight, well- carriage of justice. It was exhilarating to allow myself to feel the full range of emotional responses and to crafted cross-examination that never involved shouting.” The use the full array of tactics available to men. proof, Hermle said, was in the result: The jury ruled for her client. The judge threw out the conviction. Afterward, my client’s 76-year-old mother paid me what I consider Yet Hermle’s success in the Pao case came at the expense the greatest compliment of my career. Gripping my wrists, she looked at me and said, “You are a trial beast.” of a woman ostensibly ighting for gender equity in an industry I T WOULD MAKE FOR a tidy ending notorious for its chauvinism. I asked her whether she saw an to say that I am training my law stu- dents to be trial beasts. But it would irony in this. Hermle said no. Pao, she maintained, was simply not be true. The case I just described, tried before a female judge, and in which the wrong messenger for a righteous cause. I was armed with overwhelming evi- dence of my client’s innocence, comes Hermle’s success has along once or twice in a career in criminal court—if ever. My students will litigate been a boon for her practice murkier cases in courtrooms controlled by men, facing juries who will be more at Orrick. But a nagging ques- willing to listen to and be convinced by a traditionally feminine woman. tion remains: Would women I tell my female law like Bueno and Hermle have In 1820, Henry Brougham, a lawyer tasked with defending Queen Caroline had the same opportunities if students that their before the House of Lords against allegations by they’d pursued a legal career body and demeanor her husband, King George IV, that she had commit- in which they would not have ted adultery and should be stripped of her crown, explained his role this way: “An advocate, in the dis- been perceived as having a will be under charge of his duty, knows but one person in all the gender-based advantage—as, relentless scrutiny world, and that person is his client. To save that client say, a prosecutor in a homi- by all means and expedients, and at all hazards and costs to other persons, and, among them, to himself, cide division? Hermle argued from every corner of is his irst and only duty.” that taking on cases in which the courtroom. I’ve always loved that deinition of a lawyer’s work being a woman offers an and its description of the sacriices we make for our cli- ents. But in the courtroom, whether as an attorney or advantage can provide a lad- as an instructor, I’m constantly reminded that women lawyers don’t have access to the same “means and der up and out. “Women can expedients” that men do. So I tell my female students the truth: that their body and demeanor will be under use these [cases] to get high- relentless scrutiny from every corner of the courtroom. That they will have to pay close attention to what proile trial experience, which they wear and how they speak and move. That they will have to ind a way to metabolize these realities, is hard to get, but ultimately I think that falls away once you because adhering to biased expectations and letting slights roll of their back may be the most efective way achieve a certain stature.” She told me that only about 40 percent to advance the interests of their clients in courtrooms that so faithfully relect the sexism of our society. of her cases involve gender and that some of her biggest wins Sometimes I worry that I am part of the problem, that I am holding my students back by using valuable came when she was defending companies against discrimination class time to pass on the same unfair rules that were passed on to me. And then we go to court. claims based on race, ethnicity, disability, or religion. Since her Lara Bazelon is a professor at the University of San win in the Ellen Pao case, Hermle has defended both Twitter and Francisco School of Law. Her irst book, Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Con- Microsoft in class-action lawsuits brought by employees alleging viction, will be published in October. gender discrimination. E VERY WOMAN I interviewed said she had experienced Deborah Rhode’s double bind: the imperative to excel under stressful courtroom conditions without abandon- ing the traits that judges and juries positively associate with being female. It is a devilishly narrow path to walk, and can severely hin- der the ability to ofer a client the best and most zealous defense. I know this because in the middle of a case in 2013, I consciously stopped trying to walk that path. My client had been convicted in 1979 of a murder he did not commit and had spent 34 years in prison. The case against him was preposterous, and the refusal by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Oice to concede error infuriated me. Just days into the evidentiary hearing that would determine his fate, what was left of the state’s case fell apart. For the irst and only time in my life as a litigator, I knew we were going to win. As the hearing had gone on, I had grown angrier. Now I had nothing to lose by pretending otherwise. When I went after the police, who I believed had lied and covered up evidence, I was by turns angry, sarcastic, and, yes, aggressive. My cheeks were red, not from shame but from righteous indignation. My voice shook as I questioned my client, not because I was being hysterical or manipulative but because the travesty of his stolen life broke my heart. In closing, I raised my voice and slammed THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 89

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS E S S AY Minority poets, queer poets, immigrant poets, refugee poets— DEX R. JONES; JESS CHEN; DIMITRIOS KAMBOURIS a young generation of outsiders in America has found itself on the inside, winning prizes and acclaim with ambitious debuts. Exploring and exploding identity in new ways, these voices are also—of all things—drawing crowds. BY JESSE LICHTENSTEIN Illustration by Eleanor Shakespeare 90 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS COOL BEANS. T HE POETRY WORLD El Salvador, Haiti, Iran, Jamaica, Korea, would hardly seem a likely Vietnam. They are black men and an All New place for a “race row,” the Oglala Sioux woman. They are queer as phrase The Guardian well as straight and choose their personal DR® CHIPPERS applied in 2011 to a blunt pronouns with care. The face of poetry exchange of literary verdicts. The cele- in the United States looks very diferent Larger Capacity, Lower Prices! brated (and white) critic Helen Vendler today than it did even a decade ago, and had disparaged the celebrated (and far more like the demographics of Mil- black) poet Rita Dove’s selections for lennial America. If anything, the current the new Penguin Antholog of Twentieth- crop of emerging poets anticipates the Century American Poetry. Dove, Vendler face of young America 30 years from now. wrote, had favored “multicultural inclusiveness” over quality. She’d tried These outsiders find themselves, at to “shift the balance” by choosing too the very start of their careers, on the many minority poets at the expense of inside—and not just of a hermetic realm better (and better-known) writers. The of poetry whose death knell someone poems were “mostly short” and “of sounds every April, when National Poetry rather restricted vocabulary,” the pre- Month arrives. At literary festivals, many siding keeper of the 20th-century canon judged. Over at the Boston Review, the This generation (also white) critic Marjorie Perlof, the doyenne of American avant-garde poet- of poets respects ics, weighed in too. She lamented what she saw as new poets’ reliance on a the hustle, formulaic kind of lyric already stale by the 1960s and ’70s—a personal mem- convinced that ory dressed up with “poeticity,” build- ing to “a profound thought or small poems, with the epiphany.” Her example: a poem by the acclaimed (also black) poet Natasha right push, can Trethewey about her mother’s painful hair-straightening routine. “enter the jet Dove took strong exception to a pat- stream of the tern she saw in the response of estab- lished white critics. Were they, she demanded, making LOWEST a last stand against the hordes of ongoing national • Chip big branches up to 5.75\" PRICES up-and-coming poets of different thick! skin complexions and different eye discourse.” EVER! slants? Were we—African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans, of these poets are drawing big crowds, as • Self-feeding models available. Starting Asian Americans—only acceptable as I saw in November when what looked like No more force-feeding! long as these critics could stand guard hundreds of people waited in the rain to at just by the door to examine our credentials hear Danez Smith and Morgan Parker and let us in one by one? discuss “New Black Poetry” at the Port- • Powerful engines spin big $69999 land Art Museum, in Oregon. flywheels (up to 62 lbs.), It’s been a long time coming, but the 19216X © 2018 door has since been blown of its hinges. When I spoke this spring with Smith, generating massive chipping PTO Skim the table of contents of the major who uses plural pronouns, they were just literary journals, including white-shoe back from a United Kingdom tour for their force! MODELS TOO! poetry enterprises like Poetry magazine, collection Don’t Call Us Dead, a National and even general-interest weeklies with Book Award inalist. The British press had • Models that shred yard and garden waste vast reach such as The New Yorker and The marveled at poetry that could win criti- as well as CHIP branches. New York Times Magazine. Scan the recip- cal notice in The New Yorker and rack up ients of the prestigious and sometimes 300,000 views on YouTube. There are “a FREE SHIPPING 1 Y E A R T R I A L lucrative fellowships, awards, and lecture- lot of stories that we’ve been telling that ships granted annually to the most prom- are now being told in more public ways,” SOME LIMITATIONS APPLY ising young poets in the country. They Smith said, noting the collective energy are immigrants and refugees from China, of this generation, and of poets of color Call for FREE DVD and Catalog! TOLL-FREE 877-201-5222 DRchipper.com 92 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS and queer poets more broadly. Each new number of them have agents and publi- who edited three of the 10 collections book and accolade spurs a fruitful compe- cists (this is not, historically speaking, that made it onto the long list for the 2017 tition to do and dare more. “I don’t want normal!). Some are genre crossers, buck- National Book Award in poetry, “this is a to be the one to show up wearing the bad ing poetic insularity. Saeed Jones (Pre- renaissance.” And most striking among dress,” Smith went on. “A win for some- lude to Bruise, 2014) is a public presence body is really just a win for poetry, the as an on-camera host of a BuzzFeed News Having come of people that read it, and the people that show. Fatimah Asghar (If They Come for age in the heyday we come from.” Us, 2018) wrote and co-created a popu- of identity politics, lar web series, Brown Girls, now being the diverse poets More than a few of this generation’s adapted for HBO. Eve L. Ewing (Electric now in the bright lights found poetry irst through Arches, 2017) is a sociologist and com- spotlight are performance, or come from communi- menter on race with a massive social- reclaiming “the ties where “spoken word” and “poetry” media presence. democratic ‘I.’ ” are not separate lanes. Other poets have shown a talent for building an audience Poets a little older may grumble at the many forces propelling that renais- in less embodied ways. Before Kaveh the networking and exposure, but their sance is a resurgence of the irst-person Akbar published his strong 2017 debut juniors respect the hustle, convinced that lyric—just what the “language poets” of collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, he had poems, with the right push, can “enter the late 1970s declared obsolete. Too established himself through his interview the jet stream of the ongoing national series on the website Divedapper, which discourse,” as Jones has put it. They offers intimate and engaging introduc- are onto something: A recent survey by tions to new American poets. He also tire- the National Endowment for the Arts lessly shares what he is reading with his revealed that poetry readership doubled 28,000 Twitter followers, posting daily among 18-to-34-year-olds over the past screenshots of pages from books that ive years. have excited him. The energy on display is about more Emerging poets of this digital-native than savvy marketing or niche appeal. generation are ready to work at getting “From what I’m seeing,” says Jef Shotts, their words and their names out there. A the executive editor of Graywolf Press, Call for a free brochure 1.800.363.7566 adventurecanada.com Sail the Northwest Passage CULTURE . WILDLIFE . WILDERNESS August–September, 2019 Aboard the 198-passenger Ocean Endeavour NOW BOOKING AT 10% OFF, OFFER EXPIRES SEPTEMBER 30, 2018 Adventure Canada’s award-winning small-ship expeditions to the Arctic and sub-Arctic engage, educate, and entertain. We connect people to the land and to each other through wildlife, culture, learning, and fun. Explore with us. Adventure Canada, 14 Front St. S., Mississauga, ON L5H 2C4, Canada , TICO Reg# 4001400

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS tm INCREASE AFFECTION narrowly experiential, too sentimental, That wasn’t easy in a poetry culture too accessible, inadequate to the task that was white in its present and white Created by of engaging with a postmodern, media- in its past, and not exactly eager to con- Winnifred Cutler, saturated culture—this was the verdict of front this fact. In 1988, tired of feeling like Ph.D. in biology a previous avant-garde that abandoned tokens in poetry workshops, two Harvard from U. of Penn, “the speaker” in favor of a recondite poet- undergraduates and a composer friend post-doc Stanford. ics that appealed to an ever more exclu- formed the Dark Room Collective in a Co-discovered sive audience. But the rising generation— yellow Victorian house in Cambridge, human pheromones while embracing avant-garde techniques establishing a space in which to foster (the use of radical disjunction and col- the work of young black poets. Over the in 1986 lage, the potpourri of “high” and “low” next decade, a remarkable array of tal- cultural references)—hasn’t bought the ent found a home there, including Nata- (Time 12/1/86; and message. Having come of age in the hey- sha Trethewey and Tracy K. Smith (both Newsweek 1/12/87) day of identity politics, the diverse poets future U.S. poet laureates), Kevin Young, now in the spotlight are reclaiming “the Carl Phillips, and Major Jackson. Ambi- Author of 8 books democratic ‘I,’ ” in the words of the poet tion ran high, and so did a restless urge not on wellness Edward Hirsch. simply to it in but to call new shots. “Even if we were all published in The New Yorker, PROVEN EFFECTIVE IN 3 DOUBLE BLIND This “I,” reared on multiple lan- STUDIES IN PEER REVIEW JOURNALS guages and dialects, could not be said Chen Chen’s poems to suffer from a restricted vocabulary, INCREASES YOUR as Vendler complained. Lyric, for this boast the frank ATTRACTIVENESS generation, definitely needn’t mean short. Making their debut in the wake ease of a late-night Unscented Athena 10X tm For Men $99.50 of Claudia Rankine’s best-selling Citi- Fragrance Additives 10:13 tm For Women $98.50 zen: An American Lyric (2014), poets dare Gchat with a bright, to tackle project books, with historical Cosmetics Free U.S. Shipping sweep and hybrid form, right out of the emotionally gate. This “I,” aware of the variously n Sara, PhD (CO) “I find 10:13 has major positive marginalized “we”s to which it belongs, available friend. effects in my professional work. It’s like the Red marries the personal to the ambitiously Sea parts. I don’t think it’s all my charm! Thank political. Its ascendancy has raised poeti- would that be the point?” Young, then a you, Dr. Cutler. This product is shocking!” cally energizing questions about identity. Harvard senior, told The Harvard Crimson The young poets who stand out have in 1992. “You’re missing the point if it’s a n Don (CA) 23 orders.“Athena pheromones work helped make race and sexuality and gen- new driver driving the same old truck.” to make women want to be in my company. At der the red-hot centers of current poetry, parties, I’ll end up surrounded by women. I love and they push past as many boundaries Within a few years, new faces were, if the product” as they can. They strain to think anew not at the wheel, more welcome and visi- about selhood and group membership. ble in the poetry world. In 1993, Rita Dove Not in stores tm 610-827-2200 Drawing on eclectic traditions, they mine became the U.S. poet laureate. That same the complexity latent in the lyric “I.” At year, in his introduction to The Open Boat, www.Athenainstitute.com its best, the last thing this “I” aspires to the first anthology of Asian American deliver is tidy epiphanies. poetry to be edited by an Asian American, Athena Institute, 1211 Braefield Rd., Chester Spgs, PA 19425 ATM Garrett Hongo could point to progress in T HE LABOR OF removing the mainstreaming: “These days, some of us Made in USA Since 1982. hinges from the door in fact even serve on foundation and [National began decades ago. While the Endowment for the Arts] panels, sit on tm language poets were upending late- national awards juries, teach in and direct 20th-century American poetry—trying creative writing programs, and edit liter- The Only Traditional Pima Cotton Oxford to subvert the powers that be by flout- ary magazines.” ing expressive conventions—minority Our look is unmistakeable, our comfort unmatched. poets were pushing to integrate the liter- In a landscape of poetry by then dom- Distinctive, unlined 3 7/16 full roll collar, single needle ary world and the canon, as well as cham- inated by M.F.A. programs, a spreading pioning alternatives. The Black Arts network of supportive institutions soon throughout, generous cut, with long sleeves and tail. Movement of the 1960s and ’70s, and offered young poets from marginal- Guaranteed impeccable after 150+ washes. the numerous organizations it spawned, ized groups a supplemental world of 1st Time Buyers- Save 25%. advocated independent outlets for black, free workshops and mentorship. Cave Asian American, and Latino artists. But Canem, founded in 1996 to serve Classic Blue, White, Pink, Yellow, Stripes. by the ’80s, the drive was on to claim a emerging black poets, was followed by seat at the table—which meant demand- Pullovers, 140’s, Sport Shirts, Traditional Boxers, Custom. ing a bigger table. WWW.MERCERANDSONS.COM CATALOG 1-800-705-2828 SWATCHES /,7(5$5<$:$5'6 6(1')25285)5((%52&+85( (DWRQ/LWHUDU\\$JHQF\\ 32%R[ 6DUDVRWD)/ ZZZHDWRQOLWHUDU\\FRP  MODERN MEMOIRS, INC. As-told-to memoirs & self-publishing services since 1994 413-253-2353 94 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Kundiman (for Asian American writ- Tensions have thrummed within outside, questioning and speaking back ers) and CantoMundo (for young Latino and Latina poets). The Lambda Literary even the coziest, most supportive of the to whatever supposed ‘here’ or ‘we’ or Foundation has provided similar back- ing to LGBTQ poets. The traditional various minority enclaves, from the Dark ‘now’ we’ve created.” Her poetic ideal gatekeepers of poetry—big journals, respected publishing houses large and Room onward: Embracing the outsider is “a nomadic presence, or a mind that small, prize-giving committees—now know where to turn to ind a broad spec- “we” and its group narratives comes with is consistently on the run, and prevent- trum of already vetted work. its own pressures. Poets have chafed ing these political moments from cal- But mainstreaming rarely happens without turbulence. The Dark Room at—as well as thrived on—them. Of cifying.” As a stab at summing up the alumni have come in for their share of sharp critiques as they have taken seats course they have: How else does poetic mutable and provocative new lyric “I,” it at a table that has been extended but is still very much within establishment ferment happen? Carl Phillips has writ- would be hard to do better. The quest to walls. With inclusion among the domi- nant “we” comes pressure to produce ten recently of feeling that he was truly contain multitudes—to probe the and promote more broadly accessible or depoliticized work. The Open Boat efectively exiled from the Dark Room protean self and the society that shapes anthology was soon taken to task for pre- senting Asian American poetry through a because he “wasn’t writing the kind of and reshapes it—within a coherent lyric narrow lens of familiar immigration and assimilation narratives. Kevin Young’s poems that were correctly ‘black.’ ” In an is still a radical experiment. recent arrival as The New Yorker’s poetry editor at age 47 raises the inevitable essay called “A Politics of Mere Being,” question of how new and diferent the truck will look and sound. “Ahe wonders about the efects not just of M I A GAY BL ACK MAN when roasting a chicken at home for a call to be politically correct, but of “a friends?” Carl Phillips asks in “A push to be correctly political”—that is, to address a particular set of “issues of Politics of Mere Being,” and he answers, identity, exclusion, injustice.” Shouldn’t “Sure. But that’s not what I’m most con- “poets of outsiderness, of whatever kind,” scious of at the time. Am I necessarily, he suggests, resist the notion that “resis- then, stripped of political resonance at tance” alone deines what is political? that moment?” The 29-year-old Chinese A quarter of a century younger American poet Chen Chen confidently than Phillips, the Iranian American embraces the realm of chicken roasting— poet Solmaz Sharif—whose first col- of quotidian routines and ruminating—as lection, Look (2016), was a finalist for he stakes a poetic claim to the “politics the National Book Award—also sees of mere being” in his 2017 debut, When the value of a voice that is “continually I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 95

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS “I’M NOT Possibilities, which was long-listed for the A RACIST!” National Book Award. –GOOD WHITE As the title suggests, in Chen’s work PEOPLE the new lyric “I” is open-ended, cumu- lative, marked by potential. His poems “Thoughtful, instructive, “A vital, necessary, and boast the frank ease of a late-night and comprehensive.” beautiful book.” Gchat with a bright, emotionally avail- able friend, and the terrain is, at least —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, —MICHAEL ERIC DYSON overtly, more personal than political. At Starred Review the same time, the conversational tone “DiAngelo allows us to under- (in tune with an era in which many of our Available in paperback, ebook, and audio stand racism as a practice not conversations are typed) offers a wel- come into a world that is neither insular restricted to ‘bad people.’” nor stable. —CLAUDIA RANKINE Chen, who left China with his family when he was 3 and grew up in Massachu- WhiteWalls® setts, shows little interest in patrolling the no-man’s-land between the “I” and Steel Whiteboard Wall Panels the author. Several key poems deal with a central event in the speaker’s—the \"You wouldn’t believe how much creativity is sparked when poet’s—life: coming out to his parents you have the entire room as your writing surface\" as a teen and the violent scene that fol- Office Manager, Label Manufacturer, Brea CA lows. The speaker runs away, climbs a tree, scales a wall, falls back to Earth— WhiteWalls.com 800-624-4154 eventually hobbling home to face abiding parental disappointment. Chen joins an array of other talented young poets (among them Ocean Vuong, Hieu Minh Nguyen, and Fatimah Asghar) whose work explores the challenges of being a queer Asian American in an immigrant family. For Chen, poetry is “a way for those diferent experiences to come together, for them to be in the same room,” but without any predetermined expectations of how they may inter- act. In the face of a mother who wants her sons “to gulp up the world, spit out solid degrees, responsible grandchildren ready to gobble,” Chen’s speaker dreams instead “of one day being as fearless as a mango. / As friendly as a tomato. Merci- less to chin & shirtfront.” Like the great mid-century New York poet Frank O’Hara, Chen has an avid eye for everyday details that bridge emotional, domestic, and cultural landscapes. O’Hara once invented a fake movement called “Personism,” in which “the poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages.” Many of Chen’s poems display a similar yearning to connect with the “you” they address, though the speaker knows that the space between never quite vanishes. When the poems do tread close to familiar child- of-immigrant tropes—“forgiving / the Broken English of Our Mothers”—they still manage to be more tender than trite or ironic: 96 SEPTEMBER 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS I don’t know what to tell you. I it didn’t make me feel like I could see book moves through the discomforts and thought I could less of the gun in her holster because complexities of identity and history, the she was blk & short & a woman, too. baseline fear felt by a young black person tell this story, give it a way out of itself. she go, in America, the poet’s unconventional Even here, in my fabulous relationship to her assigned gender. But this your house? the poems rarely land where their open- Tony-winning monologue of a I say yeah. she go, ing salvos suggest they are heading. New York, I’m struggling to get can you prove it? I say it mine. One poem of Barnes’s that I keep re- to the Joy, the Luck. I tell you my she go ID? I say it mine. turning to starts with a minor domestic mother still she go backup on the sly scene: The speaker finds a centipede near her writing desk. In lines that boils the water, though she Despite this trajectory, the poem span the width of the page, broken up knows she doesn’t have to ends not in tragedy, rage, or even rec- by white spaces, the poem proceeds to anymore. onciliation. Instead, it settles in a place cover a vast territory—apartheid, colo- of bone-deep weariness. “I’m bored nialism, a fascination with the bodies Her special kettle boils in no time, is a & headlights quit being interesting,” of saints, bodies in extremis—before feat of engineering. Barnes intoned, “after I called 911 when I was 2 years old because it was the only An Aziza Barnes She could boil my father in it phone number I knew by heart.” Some- & he’d come out a better person, in how, resignation feels more damning poem can scorch than any high dudgeon the poet might beautiful shoes. have brought us to. the earth without It’s a bracingly wry meta-relection Make no mistake: An Aziza Barnes breaking a sweat. on his story of identity—the loving poem can scorch the earth without break- particulars balanced by a dose of ilial ing a sweat. A igure on the poetry-slam arriving at a quiet indictment of the bitterness. Chen is a rarity among this circuit who grew up in L.A. and studied poet herself for killing the creature she new cohort of poets, many of whose at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the can’t be bothered to understand. The debuts deal in justifiable rage, plunge University of Mississippi’s M.F.A. pro- opening poem of the book, it’s a wan- into agony, lash with leeting moments gram, she has won praise for her “swagger dering lament for a basic human failing. of ecstasy. “I’m keenly aware of the and verve”—and her “screaming, precise, Squashing the insect is not equivalent political forces, the layers of artiice, the incisive” language, in one critic’s words, to the acts of cruelty, ignorance, and whifs of strategic essentialism, and the is indeed vital to her poems. “I love injustice—great and small—that bear on bouts of slippery fragmentation that go being able to be mean or curt in my this particular poet’s place in the world, into group identity formation,” he has poetry,” Barnes has said, and her lyric “I” but the impulse prompts a recognition of said. But the “I” that rides the cross- can level invective that rivals the weird their common seed. winds of “queer Asian American,” while speciicity of a Yiddish curse: also telling a personal story, conveys a Many of the poems in i be, but i ain’t daring and unusual suppleness: When I beg to be experienced viva voce, and Grow Up permits itself both to dwell in it’s easy to imagine them bellowed in realms of everyday sadness and to cham- front of the footlights, or slung coolly pion the lesser virtues of amusement, back and forth in front of the camera. curiosity, and delight. Though to praise “performance poets” for their voice and “literary poets” for N OT LONG AG O, at a packed In the next life their prosody is something of a cliché— reading in Los Angeles, Aziza reinforcing a distinction that fits this Barnes introduced a poem I pray you the one plant generation poorly—Barnes has pushed whose title posed a version of Carl a talent for enacted speech further than Phillips’s question, implying a starker Ain’t pollinate. most of her poetry peers. In December, answer: “my dad asks, ‘how come her play, BLKS, about four 20-something black folk can’t just write about flow- But if that makes Barnes—who has de- black women living in Brooklyn and ers?’ ” A few knowing laughs rose from scribed her work as “quite black and looking for love, opened to glowing the audience before Barnes launched quite gay”—sound like an assertive reviews at the Steppenwolf Theatre, in into the poem and everyone grew quiet. preacher, she is not. Solmaz Sharif ’s Chicago, and will move off-Broadway Barnes, too, deals in the quotidian—the “mind … constantly on the run” is more next spring. Poetry readers can only overpolicing of black life, the under- like it. “Poetry is the best medium for the hope that Barnes’s growing stature on investigation of black death, routine self to be subverted / performed / ex- the stage doesn’t pull her too far away harassment—but in a register worlds ploded,” Barnes has said. The title of her from the lyric she’s capable of breathing away from Chen’s. The speaker in the debut collection, i be, but i ain’t, points to such life into. poem is walking with friends near her contradictions within the “I” that need own house. Her “milk neighbors,” as subverting, performing, and exploding. she calls her street’s pale new residents, “collaborate in the happy task of surveil- In the midst of emotionally—and lance”: They call the police, three squad racially and politically—charged terri- cars appear, and an oicer begins inter- tory, Barnes does not hesitate to take rogating. For the poem’s speaker, unexpected paths, create her own forms, and explore them at her own pace. The THE ATLANTIC SEPTEMBER 2018 97

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS W HILE PERFORMANCE In the preceding sentence, I italicize uncertainty and instability. This grasp- seems to suit the strengths “same week” for emphasis. ing at the elusiveness of sense-making of Barnes’s work, Layli Long can be thrilling, but it demands that the Soldier’s poetry is harder to separate The Sioux fought because they were reader weather discomfort, abstraction, from the page—which doesn’t mean that starving: They hadn’t received the pay- it rests there comfortably. Quite the con- ments agreed to in treaties with the U.S. “I climb the backs trary. Midway through WHEREAS (2017), government, they had lost their hunting her debut collection and a National Book grounds, and local traders refused to of languages,” Award inalist, the speaker states, “I will extend them credit to buy food. One of compose each sentence with care, by the traders was supposed to have said, Layli Long Soldier minding what the rules of writing dic- “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.” tate.” The declaration is noteworthy After a raid by Sioux warriors, this writes, “ride them because, up to this point in the book, as an trader’s body was found with his mouth epigraph announces, Long Soldier shows stufed with grass. Some might call this into exhaustion— little inclination to mind the rules: poetic justice. Long Soldier goes further: maybe I pull the Now I am inclined to call this act by the make room in the mouth Dakota warriors a poem. reins when I for grassesgrassesgrasses There’s irony in their poem. mean go.” The language of WHEREAS enacts the struggle of its project: the sheer weight There was no text. and incompleteness—and not linch from of representing an “I” that is both a self asking, with Long Soldier, about the whole and a part of a highly diverse collective— “Real” poems do not “really” require endeavor: Is poetry up to the task? American Indians—whose identity has words. largely been imposed from without. For For Long Soldier, language and the Long Soldier, an enrolled member of the Then she reconsiders: After all, the trad- body are not really separable. Apology Oglala Sioux tribe and a visual artist who er’s words initiate the poem, “click the is at the heart of the book, and physi- has taught at Diné College, in the Navajo gears of the poem into place.” It’s telling cal gesture is at the heart of apology. As Nation, syntax itself strains and cracks that even in the most straightforward por- she tells us, “In many Native languages, under the burden. tion of the book, Long Soldier deploys there is no word for ‘apologize.’ The language to mark its own limits, to probe same goes for ‘sorry,’ ” yet there are ways The vow to compose sentences with its utility, to take its measure against con- to admit error and make amends. The care comes from “38,” a ive-page poem crete and tangible actions. title, WHEREAS, comes from the careful, that acts as a fulcrum between the shorter oicial language of a federal apology to poems in the book’s irst section and the Long Soldier’s itful, yearning relation- American Indians—a series of toothless longer “Whereas Statements” of the ship to the language of her father and older “whereas” clauses in a Senate resolu- book’s second and inal section. “38” is relatives—her palpable “ache of being tion that was later cut to half a page and an account of the largest “legal” execu- language poor” when it comes to Lakota— tucked into a defense appropriations bill, tion in U.S. history: 38 Sioux prisoners embodies that sense of inadequacy, of signed by President Barack Obama one hanged, with President Abraham Lin- constantly reaching and failing to con- December weekend in 2009, with no coln’s approval, following the 1862 Sioux nect or express. “I climb the backs of announcement and no tribal represen- Uprising. The poem builds force with languages,” she writes, “ride them into tatives present. The U.S. government’s stark, declarative sentences, each stand- exhaustion—maybe I pull the reins when apology to American Indians is almost ing as a stanza or paragraph on its own. I mean go.” Because even with Long the deinition of an empty gesture. Soldier’s rich command of it, English is The hanging took place on Decem- a fraught instrument for exploring the Long Soldier sets this in contrast ber 26, 1862—the day after Christmas. dark legacies of the U.S. and the Sioux’s to a quiet moment with her estranged shared history, which Long Soldier, as a father over breakfast in her kitchen. A This was the same week that President dual citizen, is heir to. 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