The_Atlantic_-_07_2018

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

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

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

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS OF NO PARTY OR CLIQUE CONTENTS | JULY/AUGUST 2018 VOL. 322–NO. 1 Features 44 The Raid BY WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE Inside a stealth-bomber mission against an ISIS outpost in Libya 52 Finding the Formula for Team Chemistry BY BEN ROWEN The search for an elixir that turns good teams into great ones. Does it exist? THE HEALTH REPORT 74 Being Black in America Can Be Hazardous to Your Health BY OLGA KHAZAN Across the United States, African Americans have a lower life expectancy than whites. In Baltimore and other segregated cities, this gap is as much as 20 years. One young woman’s struggle to get healthy shows why. COVER STORY 88 Your Child Says She’s Trans. She Wants Hormones and Surgery. She’s 13. BY JESSE SINGAL For some teens who experience persistent gender dysphoria, a new protocol ofers profound relief. For other kids, gender dysphoria is temporary— and the efects of transitioning can be permanent. 58 When the Next Plague Hits BY ED YONG The epidemics of the early 21st century revealed a world unprepared, even as the risk of pandemics continues to multiply. Much worse is coming. Is Donald Trump prepared? There’s nothing obviously special about the University of Nebraska Medical Center’s biocontainment unit. But every detail has been carefully designed to give patients access to maximal care, and infectious diseases minimal access to anything. Photograph by JONNO RATTMAN THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 3

CONTENTS РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS 07/08 . 18 VOL. 322–NO. 1 Dispatches Departments 11 FA M I LY 8 The Conversation The Dangers of Distracted Parenting 120 The Big Question BY ERIKA CHRISTAKIS What book or article would you make required reading When it comes to children’s development, we should worry for everyone on Earth? less about their screen time—and more about our own. STUDY OF STUDIES TECHNOLOGY BUSINESS On the Cover 16 Gossip Is Good 20 These Are the 22 You Buy It, Photograph by People in Your You Break It Maciek Jasik BY BEN HEALY Neighborhood BY BRYCE COVERT The surprising virtues of BY IAN BOGOST talking behind people’s backs Private equity is killing retail. Nextdoor, a hyperlocal SKETCH social-media platform, BIG IN ... JAPAN highlights petty grievances— 17 The Trustbuster and proves that Americans 24 Dad Classes for have more in common than the Single Guy BY ROBINSON MEYER they think. BY STEPHEN MARCHE Lina Khan has a novel theory for how monopolies work. Making men more Her sights are set squarely marriageable, one pregnancy on Amazon. suit at a time 4 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

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CONTENTS РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS 07/08 . 18 VOL. 322–NO. 1 The Culture File Poetry THE OMNIVORE BOOKS BOOKS 32 The Unveiling 26 The Wisdom 34 The Wrong 40 Your DNA Is BY EDWARD HIRSCH of Russell Brand Way to Scout for Weirder Than Soccer Talent You Think BY JAMES PARKER BY LAURENT DUBOIS BY NATHANIEL COMFORT The recovering addict, comedian, movie star, and An intense winnowing Genetic research constantly former spouse of Katy Perry process, starting when upends our understanding has entered a new phase: as players are very young, may of heredity—though not our the host of a brainy, fail to spot the gifts that are zeal to control it. philosophical podcast. crucial to the game. 30 M U S I C The Sound of Rage and Sadness BY SPENCER KORNHABER The still-unfolding history of male angst in pop music Essay 108 Searching for Jean-Michel Basquiat BY STEPHEN METCALF Was he an artist, an art star, or just a celebrity? 6 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

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

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS RESPONSES & REVERBERATIONS • THE CONVERSATION solution to this is a constitu- tional amendment to replace The Hardest Job in the World Section 1 of the Twentieth Amendment, which set the In May, John Dickerson laid out the challenges inherent to the presidency—and inauguration date as January 20. proposed a series of solutions, from presidential onboarding to vacation time. At the founding of the I thoroughly enjoyed John in favor of professional career whim; and the entire bureau- republic, travel was diicult. Dickerson’s disquisition on the positions. For example, we cracy would be more eicient Particularly in winter, with mismatch between the Oice of could make all sub-Cabinet and better trained. atrocious roads, getting from the President and the president positions part of the civil the hinterlands to the capital himself. He is certainly correct service. This would mean the David So could take a month or more. in arguing that the profes- president would appoint only Because the votes of the sional demands far outstrip the Cabinet secretaries. EAST ORANGE, N.J. presidential electors were not the capabilities of any human formally certiied by Congress being. Could I suggest an The president would be John Dickerson identiies the until well after the election, an idea? I would like to reduce the relieved of much responsi- near-impossibility of organiz- inauguration date of March 4 number of political appointees bility; policies would not be ing an administration in the was speciied. Meanwhile, the subject to so much partisan time between the election and formation of an administration the inauguration. A possible was relatively trivial. George Washington had ive Cabinet oicers (including the vice president), each of whom had a handful of clerks, secretaries, translators, etc. Washington himself had a few private secretaries. That was the extent of the executive branch. The situation is now reversed. Washington, D.C., can be reached from any point in the country within a day’s travel, but forming an administration of complexity takes months. Thus, a return to the original March 4 inaugura- tion date makes sense. The amendment efecting such a change should also include the provision that the president- elect could submit Cabinet- and sub-Cabinet-level appoint- ments to the incoming Senate for conirmation prior to the inauguration. This way, the new administration could start with much of its infrastructure in place on day one. Steven K. Brierley WESTFORD, MASS. John Dickerson’s very detailed article conirms a suspicion that I have had for a long time: The presidency is an impossible job, and should be divided in half. The president would be responsible for foreign afairs and the military. The vice president would 8 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS be responsible for domestic pronouns throughout the Why Are There So Many Men Here? afairs and economic policy. article. I tried to brush it of, but Each person would be an decided that I’ll take a hit for In May, Caroline Kitchener published an article on expert in his or her respective the team and be “that person.” TheAtlantic.com asking, “Why Do So Few Women Write area. The vice president would The presidency, while seem- Letters to the Editor?” The so-called confidence gap, experts no longer be selected merely ingly a male position because told her, is one major factor behind the gender disparity in to “appeal to the base” or only men have illed it thus far, The Atlantic’s inbox and that of other publications. Read- “balance the ticket.” is actually a gender-neutral job. ers wrote back with their own theories (and prescriptions): “Women don’t need more platforms to speak more often, John Nance Garner, Frank- The world is changing louder, in greater numbers, etc. How exhausting. They just lin D. Roosevelt’s irst vice and growing, and our lan- need men to shut up for a while,” one said. Jen deRose of president, once commented guage needs to relect that. Irvine, California, ofered: “Women are busy.” Jeanne Lamb- that “the Vice Presidency is Words matter. Feeling like a kin of Marblehead, Massachusetts, thought that women may not worth a pitcher of warm welcome part of the conversa- simply have “an extra helping of humility.” Find Kitchener’s spit.” Perhaps it is time to tion is important. full article—and the subsequent letters—at TheAtlantic.com. totally overhaul the job description, and in doing so Summer Whitesell understanding, we should not disconnected realities. The save the presidency. cede the word reality to irony response to Elon Musk’s SEATTLE, WASH. or subjectivism. notion that we’re all in a John Bickford computer simulation, and not Reality’s End Daniel Story in the “base reality,” shouldn’t WALHALLA, S.C. be an ofended cry of anguish; In May, Franklin Foer described GOLETA, CALIF. it should be a dismissive shrug. Okay. It ain’t easy. But compe- how video manipulation is erod- Who cares? It’s what we’ve tent people have accomplished ing society’s ability to agree on Underlying Foer’s prose is got. That doesn’t get us of the the seemingly impossible with what’s true—or what’s even real. a misguided assumption hook for what we do with it. dignity for all but our most that “reality” is something recent history. John Dicker- Franklin Foer compellingly we have access to or we don’t, Elias L. Quinn son, don’t try to make excuses foretells the coming “collapse something we can squander or for a failed president. He is a of reality” that will result from salvage—in short, a commodity. WASHINGTON, D.C. complete loser, and we are all the degeneration of those This framing misses the lessons the worse for it. technological mechanisms we of philosophers from the last Is the “collapse of reality” that now rely on for the unadul- century, and does damage to Mr. Foer talks about a culmina- Linda Umstead terated truth. Yet his choice Foer’s own evident hope that a tion of sorts of the American of words contributes to the reality can be maintained that idea? If “I’m as good as you MILILANI, HAWAII coming of the postmodern hell is inclusive, responsive, and be,” as Emerson described this of which he warns. Foer consis- shared among a national or idea, it’s just a short jump to the I’m incensed that Dickerson tently equivocates on the term even global community. notion that my reality’s as good didn’t include Hillary Clinton reality, sometimes meaning the as yours. Maybe we’ve been in any of his analyses. Like Mitt objectively true state of things Instead of treating reality collapsing reality these past Romney (whom Dickerson and sometimes meaning our as a commodity, we should several centuries. holds up as an example of how shared understanding of the talk about it as a community to “hit the ground running”), objectively true state of things. undertaking, an endeavor. It Stephen Sikora Clinton spent her campaign is collaborative, constantly trying to prepare for the oice, Reality in the former sense renegotiated and contested. BORREGO SPRINGS, CALIF. which she was familiar with is not under any threat of If it is conceived of as a because of her husband. She collapse, no matter what the commodity, the politics of Correction: won the votes of more people internet trolls and dema- power will divvy it out to haves “Will Disney Kill Of the Movie than Trump did, and yet you gogues would have us believe; or have-nots, spark malevo- Theater?” (May) identiied dismiss her as if she didn’t exist. it is only reality in the latter lence, and drive do-gooders HBO Go as a subscription sense that is threatened. By to start reality-preservation streaming service. In fact, HBO Janet Smith equivocating in this way, Foer NGOs. But if reality building Now is the network’s streaming undermines the idea that there is more like gardening than service for cord cutters. HERNDON, VA. is anything beyond our own mining, we can work to make idiosyncratic experiences of it expansive rather than rush to To contribute to The I am trying to read “The the world. If we are to resist turn it into an “ours or theirs” Conversation, please email Hardest Job in the World,” the collapse of our shared choice of facts with isolating, [email protected]. Include and ind myself continually your full name, city, and state. distracted and irritated by the overwhelming use of male E D I T O R I A L O F F I C E S & C O R R E S P ON D E NC E The Atlantic considers unsolicited manuscripts, fiction or nonfiction, and mail for the Letters column. Correspondence should be sent to: Editorial Department, The Atlantic, 600 New Hampshire Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20037. Receipt of unsolicited manuscripts will be acknowledged if accompanied by a self-addressed stamped envelope. Manuscripts will not be returned. CUSTOMER SERVICE & REPRINTS Please direct all subscription queries and orders to: 800-234-2411. International callers: 515- 237-3670. For expedited customer service, please call between 3:30 and 11:30 p.m. ET, Tuesday through Friday. 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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Take a big, deep breath clear your head forget you’re here reading words on paper keep reading though Think back to the last time you were in bed on that perfect mattress supporting every bone in your body. Wait, you don’t have a Casper? Oh. FIND YOUR DREAM MATTRESS AT CASPER.COM

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS The fatherhood class in Tokyo is sort of like the prenatal ones I attended when my wife was pregnant—except that none of my classmates is actually a father or father-to-be. Many of them will list their attendance at this class on their dating profiles with the aim of attracting a partner. — Stephen Marche, p. 24 D I S PAT C H E S IDEAS & PROVOCATIONS J U LY/AUG U S T 2018 • FA M I LY THE DANGERS OF DISTRACTED PARENTING When it comes to children’s development, we should worry less about their screen time—and more about our own. BY ERIKA CHRISTAKIS S M A RT P H ON E S H AV E by now been implicated in so many crummy outcomes—car fatalities, sleep dis- turbances, empathy loss, relationship problems, failure to notice a clown on a unicycle—that it almost seems easier to list the things they don’t mess up than the things they do. Our society may be reach- ing peak criticism of digital devices. Illustration by EDMON DE HARO THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 11

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S Even so, emerging research sug- technology expert Linda Stone more system so essential to early learning is gests that a key problem remains under- than 20 years ago called “continuous interrupted—by a text, for example, or appreciated. It involves kids’ development, partial attention.” This condition is a quick check-in on Instagram. Any- but it’s probably not what you think. harming not just us, as Stone has argued; one who’s been mowed down by a More than screen-obsessed young chil- it is harming our children. The new smartphone-impaired stroller operator dren, we should be concerned about parental-interaction style can interrupt an can attest to the ubiquity of the phenom- tuned-out parents. ancient emotional cueing system, whose enon. One consequence of such scenar- hallmark is responsive communication, ios has been noted by an economist who Yes, parents now have more face time the basis of most human learning. We’re tracked a rise in children’s injuries as with their children than did almost any in uncharted territory. parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in C HILD - development This is the worst possible the workforce, mothers today astound- experts have differ- ingly spend more time caring for their ent names for the dyadic children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and signaling system between model of parenting—we are child is increasingly low-quality, even adult and child, which always present physically, ersatz. Parents are constantly present in builds the basic archi- thereby blocking kids’ their children’s lives physically, but they tecture of the brain. Jack are less emotionally attuned. To be clear, I’m not unsympathetic to parents in this P. Shonkoff, a pediatri- autonomy, yet only itfully predicament. My own adult children like to joke that they wouldn’t have survived cian and the director of present emotionally. infancy if I’d had a smartphone in my Harvard’s Center on the clutches 25 years ago. Developing Child, calls To argue that parents’ use of screens is an underappreciated problem isn’t to it the “serve and return” discount the direct risks screens pose to children: Substantial evidence sug- style of communication; gests that many types of screen time (especially those involving fast-paced or the psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and smartphones became prevalent. (AT&T violent imagery) are damaging to young brains. Today’s preschoolers spend more Roberta Michnick Golinkoff describe a rolled out smartphone service at diferent than four hours a day facing a screen. And, since 1970, the average age of onset “conversational duet.” The vocal patterns times in diferent places, thereby creating of “regular” screen use has gone from 4 years to just four months. parents everywhere tend to adopt during an intriguing natural experiment. Area Some of the newer interactive games exchanges with infants and toddlers are by area, as smartphone adoption rose, kids play on phones or tablets may be more benign than watching TV (or You- marked by a higher-pitched tone, simpli- childhood ER visits increased.) These Tube), in that they better mimic children’s natural play behaviors. And, of course, ied grammar, and engaged, exaggerated indings attracted a decent bit of media many well-functioning adults survived a mind-numbing childhood spent watching enthusiasm. Though this talk is cloying to attention to the physical dangers posed a lot of cognitive garbage. (My mother— unusually for her time—prohibited adult observers, babies can’t get enough by distracted parenting, but we have been Speed Racer and Gilligan’s Island on the grounds of insipidness. That I somehow of it. Not only that: One study showed slower to reckon with its impact on chil- managed to watch every single episode of each show scores of times has never that infants exposed to this interactive, dren’s cognitive development. “Toddlers been explained.) Still, no one really dis- putes the tremendous opportunity costs emotionally responsive speech style at cannot learn when we break the low of to young children who are plugged in to a screen: Time spent on devices is time not 11 months and 14 months knew twice as conversations by picking up our cell- spent actively exploring the world and relating to other human beings. many words at age 2 as ones who weren’t phones or looking at the text that whizzes Yet for all the talk about children’s exposed to it. by our screens,” Hirsh-Pasek said. screen time, surprisingly little attention is paid to screen use by parents them- Child development is relational, which In the early 2010s, researchers in selves, who now suffer from what the is why, in one experiment, nine-month- Boston surreptitiously observed 55 care- old babies who received a few hours of givers eating with one or more children Mandarin instruction from a live human in fast-food restaurants. Forty of the could isolate speciic phonetic elements adults were absorbed with their phones in the language while another group to varying degrees, some almost entirely of babies who received the exact same ignoring the children (the research- instruction via video could not. Accord- ers found that typing and swiping were ing to Hirsh-Pasek, a professor at Tem- bigger culprits in this regard than tak- ple University and a senior fellow at the ing a call). Unsurprisingly, many of the Brookings Institution, more and more children began to make bids for atten- studies are conirming the importance of tion, which were frequently ignored. A conversation. “Language is the single best follow-up study brought 225 mothers and predictor of school achievement,” she their approximately 6-year-old children told me, “and the key to strong language into a familiar setting and videotaped skills are those back-and-forth fluent their interactions as each parent and conversations between young children child were given foods to try. During and adults.” the observation period, a quarter of the A problem therefore arises when the mothers spontaneously used their phone, emotionally resonant adult–child cueing and those who did initiated substantially 12 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS • FA M I LY fewer verbal and nonverbal interactions Distracted adults grow irritable when model of parenting imaginable—always with their child. their phone use is interrupted; they not present physically, thereby blocking only miss emotional cues but actually children’s autonomy, yet only fitfully Yet another rigorously designed exper- misread them. A tuned-out parent may present emotionally. iment, this one conducted in the Philadel- be quicker to anger than an engaged phia area by Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkof, and one, assuming that a child is trying to Fixing the problem won’t be easy, Temple’s Jessa Reed, tested the impact be manipulative when, in reality, she especially given that it is compounded of parental cellphone use on children’s just wants attention. Short, deliber- by dramatic changes in education. More language learning. Thirty-eight mothers ate separations can of course be harm- young children than ever (about two- and their 2-year-olds were brought into a less, even healthy, for parent and child thirds of 4-year-olds) are in some form room. The mothers were then told that alike (especially as children get older of institutional care, and recent trends they would need to teach their children and require more independence). But in early-childhood education have illed two new words (blicking, which was to that sort of separation is diferent from many of their classrooms with highly mean “bouncing,” and frepping, which the inattention that occurs when a par- scripted lessons and dull, one-sided was to mean “shaking”) and were given ent is with a child but communicating “teacher talk.” In such environments, chil- a phone so that investigators could con- through his or her nonengagement that dren have few opportunities for sponta- tact them from another room. When the child is less valuable than an email. neous conversation. the mothers were interrupted by a call, A mother telling kids to go out and play, the children did not learn the word, but a father saying he needs to concentrate One piece of good news is that young otherwise they did. In an ironic coda to on a chore for the next half hour—these children are prewired to get what they this study, the researchers had to exclude are entirely reasonable responses to the need from adults, as most of us discover seven mothers from the analysis, because competing demands of adult life. What’s the irst time our diverted gaze is jerked they didn’t answer the phone, “failing to going on today, however, is the rise of back by a pair of pudgy, reproaching follow protocol.” Good for them! unpredictable care, governed by the hands. Young children will do a lot to beeps and enticements of smartphones. get a distracted adult’s attention, and if I T HA S NEVER been easy to bal- We seem to have stumbled into the worst we don’t change our behavior, they will ance adults’ and children’s needs, attempt to do it for us; we can expect much less their desires, and it’s naive to to see a lot more tantrums as today’s imagine that children could ever be the unwavering center of parental attention. • VERY SHORT BOOK EXCERPT Parents have always left kids to entertain themselves at times—“messing about Castro’s Ice-Cream Headache in boats,” in a memorable phrase from The Wind in the Willows, or just lounging L I K E WA S H I N G T O N A N D J E F F E R S O N , the found- aimlessly in playpens. In some respects, ing father of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, 21st-century children’s screen time is not loved ice cream. His friend Gabriel García Márquez, very diferent from the mother’s helpers the Colombian novelist, recalled in “A Personal every generation of adults has relied on Portrait of Fidel” that the leader once concluded to keep children occupied. When parents a large lunch by eating 18 scoops of ice cream. lack playpens, real or proverbial, may- According to CIA documents declassi ied in 2007, hem is rarely far behind. Caroline Fra- the CIA noticed Castro’s ice-cream fetish and tried, ser’s recent biography of Laura Ingalls unsuccessfully, to plant a poison pill in his favorite Wilder, the author of Little House on chocolate milkshake. Apparently the assassin the Prairie, describes the exceptionally stored the pill in an ice-cream freezer, and it got ad hoc parenting style of 19th-century stuck and fell apart when he tried to take it out. frontier parents, who stashed babies on the open doors of ovens for warmth and Adapted from Milk! A 10,000-Year Food Fracas, by otherwise left them vulnerable to “all Mark Kurlansky, published by Bloomsbury in May manner of accidents as their mothers tried to cope with competing responsibili- ties.” Wilder herself recounted a variety of near-calamities with her young daugh- ter, Rose; at one point she looked up from her chores to see a pair of riding ponies leaping over the toddler’s head. Occasional parental inattention is not catastrophic (and may even build resil- ience), but chronic distraction is another story. Smartphone use has been associ- ated with a familiar sign of addiction: Illustration by JOE MCKENDRY THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 13

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S • STUDY OF STUDIES hearing a piece of nega- tive gossip, the more likely toddlers age into school. But eventually, Gossip Is Good they were to say they children may give up. It takes two to tango, had learned a lesson and studies from Romanian orphanages The surprising virtues of from it. [7] Negative showed the world that there are limits to talking behind people’s backs gossip can also have a what a baby brain can do without a will- prosocial efect on those ing dance partner. The truth is, we don’t BY BEN HEALY who are gossiped about. really know how much our kids will sufer Researchers at Stanford when we fail to engage. W ORD ON the timeliness (T) times its and UC Berkeley found street is that interest (I) to the power of that once people were Of course, adults are also suffering gossip is the its unverifiability (v) minus ostracized from a group from the current arrangement. Many worst. An Ann Landers the reluctance someone due to reputed selfishness, have built their daily life around the mis- advice column once char- might feel about repeating they reformed their ways erable premise that they can always be acterized it as “the face- it out of taste (t). [3] in an attempt to regain on—always working, always parenting, less demon that breaks the approval of the people always available to their spouse and their hearts and ruins careers.” Despite gossip’s dodgy they had alienated. [8] own parents and anyone else who might The Talmud describes it as reputation, a surpris- need them, while also staying on top of a “three-pronged tongue” ingly small share of it—as By far the most positive the news, while also remembering, on the that kills three people: the little as 3 to 4 percent—is assessment of gossip, walk to the car, to order more toilet paper teller, the listener, and the actually malicious. [4] though, comes courtesy from Amazon. They are stuck in the digi- person being gossiped And even that portion can of the anthropologist and tal equivalent of the spin cycle. about. And Blaise bring people together. evolutionary psycholo- Pascal observed, not gist Robin Dunbar. Once Under the circumstances, it’s easier unreasonably, that “if Researchers at the Univer- upon a time, in Dunbar’s to focus our anxieties on our children’s people really knew what sity of Texas and the Uni- account, our primate screen time than to pack up our own others said about them, versity of Oklahoma found ancestors bonded through devices. I understand this tendency there would not be four that if two people share grooming, their mutual all too well. In addition to my roles as friends left in the world.” negative feelings about back-scratching ensur- a mother and a foster parent, I am the Convincing as a third person, they are ing mutual self-defense maternal guardian of a middle-aged, these indictments likely to feel closer to each in the event of attack by overweight dachshund. Being middle- seem, however, other than they would if predators. But as hominids aged and overweight myself, I’d much a significant body of re- they both felt positively grew more intelligent and rather obsess over my dog’s caloric search suggests that gos- about him or her. [5] more social, their groups intake, restricting him to a grim diet of sip may in fact be healthy. became too large to unite ibrous kibble, than address my own food Gossip may even by grooming alone. That’s regimen and relinquish (heaven forbid) It’s a good thing, too, make us better people. A where language—and my morning cinnamon bun. Psycho- since gossip is pretty per- team of Dutch research- gossip, broadly defined— logically speaking, this is a classic case vasive. Children tend to be ers reported that hearing stepped in. [9] Dunbar of projection—the defensive displace- seasoned gossips by the gossip about others made argues that idle chatter ment of one’s failings onto relatively age of 5, [1] and gossip as research subjects more with and about others blameless others. Where screen time is most researchers under- reflective; positive gossip gave early humans a sense concerned, most of us need to do a lot stand it—talk between at inspired self-improvement of shared identity and less projecting. least two people about eforts, and negative gos- helped them grow more absent others—accounts sip made people prouder aware of their environment, If we can get a grip on our “techno- for about two-thirds of themselves. [6] In thus incubating the com- ference,” as some psychologists have of conversation. [2] In another study, the worse plex higher functioning called it, we are likely to ind that we can the 1980s, the journalist participants felt upon that would ultimately yield do much more for our children simply Blythe Holbrooke took a such glories of civilization by doing less—regardless of the qual- stab at bringing rigor to as the Talmud, Pascal, and ity of their schooling and quite apart the subject, tongue firmly Ann Landers. from the number of hours we devote to in cheek, by positing the them. Parents should give themselves Law of Inverse Accuracy: So the next time you’re permission to back of from the sufocat- C = (TI)v – t, in which the tempted to dish the dirt, ing pressure to be all things to all people. likelihood of gossip being fear not—you may actually Put your kid in a playpen, already! Ditch circulated (C) equals its be promoting cooperation, that soccer-game appearance if you feel boosting others’ self- like it. Your kid will be fine. But when esteem, and performing you are with your child, put down your the essential task of the damned phone. human family. That’s what I heard, anyway. Erika Christakis is the author of The Importance of Being Little: What Young THE STUDIES: and Social Adaptation” in Good Gossip Chemistry Through Negativity” (Personal Psychology, June 2004) Children Really Need From Grownups. (University Press of Kansas, 1994) Relationships, June 2006) [8] Feinberg et al., “Gossip and Ostra- [1] Engelmann et al., “Preschoolers [3] Blythe Holbrooke, Gossip (St. Mar- [6] Martinescu et al., “Tell Me the Gos- cism Promote Cooperation in Groups” Afect Others’ Reputations Through tin’s, 1983) sip” (Personality and Social Psychology (Psychological Science, March 2014) Prosocial Gossip” (British Journal of De- [4] Dunbar et al., “Human Conversational Bulletin, Dec. 2014) [9] Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, velopmental Psychology, Sept. 2016) Behavior” (Human Nature, Sept. 1997) [7] Baumeister et al., “Gossip as and the Evolution of Language (Harvard [2] Nicholas Emler, “Gossip, Reputation, [5] Bosson et al., “Interpersonal Cultural Learning” (Review of General University Press, 1998) 16 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by CHRISTOPHER DELORENZO

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S • SKETCH S HORTLY AFTER I MET THE TRUSTBUSTER Lina Khan, her cellphone rang. The call was from a representative of a national Lina Khan has a novel theory for how organization, regarding a speech it had monopolies work—and her sights are asked her to give. Khan was courteous on the phone, but she winced momentarily set squarely on Amazon. after hanging up. “That was the Ameri- can Bar Association,” she confessed. “I BY ROBINSON MEYER don’t know if I’ve passed the bar yet.” Illustration by TIM TOMKINSON This feeling—that Khan’s ideas are in high demand slightly before her time— has characterized much of her life lately. In the past year, the 29-year-old legal scholar’s work has been cited approvingly by the lefty, rabble-rousing congressman Keith Ellison and by a Trump-appointed assistant attorney general, Makan Delra- him. She has been interviewed by NPR and written op-eds for The New York Times. She has done it neither by focusing on a hot-button issue nor by cultivating a tele- genic demeanor. She is just a young adult— one of many, I would learn—interested in an old topic: antitrust law, that musty cor- ner of American jurisprudence aimed at curtailing monopoly power. For the past few decades of American life, the specter of monopoly was gener- ally raised only regarding companies that seemed custom-designed to rip of consumers—airlines, cable providers, Big Pharma. These were businesses that pulled from the long-standing monopo- list’s bag of tricks: They seemed to keep prices artiicially high, or they formed an unspoken cartel with other industry titans. Typically, consumers worried most about how monopolies would pinch their wallet. For Khan and her colleagues at the Open Markets Institute, an anti- monopoly think tank based in Wash- ington, D.C., monopoly power includes all of that. But it goes further. Even when monopolies appear to beneit con- sumers by ofering free services or low THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 17

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S prices, Khan contends that they can still publishing,” she told me. “Publishers used chicken-farming industry. Combing the be deeply harmful. Among the group’s frequent targets are some of the most to be able to take risks with heavier books papers for corporate-consolidation news, popular companies in America: Google, Facebook, and the one to which Khan that might not be as popular, and they used she started seeing monopoly power in has committed much of her published work, Amazon. She tells a comprehen- to be able to subsidize them with best sell- everything. She realized that antitrust pol- sive story about how these companies make Americans less free, a story that ers.” But Amazon’s demand for discounts icy could dominate the decades to come recently received a surprising addendum: Last year, monopoly power cost Khan a has made it harder to cross-subsidize this and that she had to understand it better. month’s pay. way, leading to consolidation among book So Khan took time of to go to law school— I MET KHAN on a Friday morning last fall at the Shops at Columbus Circle, publishers and reduced diversity. and began intensively studying Amazon. a glitzy mall at the southwest corner of Central Park that now contains not one This is a typically Khanian analysis. In Three years later, in January 2017, but two Amazon properties. On the third loor is an Amazon Books, one of more her telling, monopolies don’t just exploit she published the result of that study, than a dozen brick-and-mortar book- stores the company has opened since consumers and workers in 2015. It’s inspired less by libraries than by Apple stores: paperbacks and Kindles their part of the economy. side by side on pale, sparse shelves. And in the basement is a sprawling Whole Even when they ofer low Foods—Amazon acquired the grocery chain for $13.7 billion last year—its prices to consumers, their Amazon has grown so crowded aisles lined with craft beer, for- influence propagates large that it can undercut eign yogurts, and kohlrabi. through the entire system. Khan is unassuming in person, with If one part of an industry other companies just by a narrow face and unruly black hair. She arrived at Amazon Books wearing the consolidates, then all the announcing that it will uniform of the young, urban professional other parts of the industry soon compete with them. class: black jeans, an oversize green lan- will feel pressure to con- nel shirt, a cycling-inspired backpack. (Full disclosure: I was wearing almost solidate too. exactly the same outit.) She arrived very slightly late and immediately apologized. Amazon does not, in She might be a little slow, she said: She was getting married in a week, her entire some respects, look like family was in town, and it had already been a ludicrously busy month. But I a monopoly. According to the National “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” in the Yale couldn’t detect any sluggishness. A min- ute later, she was reeling of paragraph- Retail Federation, it is only the country’s Law Journal. It went viral—or at least as length digressions on the history of Amazon’s business and the nature of its seventh-biggest retailer by total sales. It viral as dense legal scholarship can go. Its monopoly power. sells more than Target, but less than Wal- driving question is simple: How did Ama- “There’s a whole line of critique about Amazon that’s culture-based, about how greens. And Walmart, the nation’s largest zon get so big? they’re wrecking the experience of book- stores,” Khan told me as we surveyed Neil retailer, still generates nearly three times The answers are nearly as straight- deGrasse Tyson’s latest tome. “I person- ally am less focused on that element.” as much revenue as Amazon. forward. First, Khan says, Amazon has Instead, she argues that Amazon Yet these numbers fail to capture Ama- been willing “to sustain losses and invest has denuded America’s book-buying landscape in other ways. “Amazon has zon’s online dominance. About 44 cents aggressively at the expense of profits.” massively—and I’m trying not to use this particular word, but I can’t not use of every dollar that Americans spend This isn’t a controversial assertion: Ama- it here—disrupted the business model in online go to Amazon. (The next-biggest zon has posted an annual proit for only online retailer, Ebay, gets about six cents 13 of the past 21 years, according to The of that dollar.) They also miss Ama- New York Times. Historically, it has plowed zon’s prodigious growth. In 2010, when any proits right back into cheaper prices Khan graduated from college, Amazon and R&D into everything from robotics employed 33,700 people. It now employs to image recognition. Second, Amazon is more than 560,000, and its search for integrated vertically, across business lines. a site for its second headquarters has In addition to selling stuf online, Amazon turned cities and locales across the coun- now publishes books, extends credit, sells try into desperate supplicants. Three online ads, designs clothes, and produces years ago, Amazon was worth less than movies and TV shows. It is also one of the Walmart. As of this year, it is three times world’s largest providers of cloud stor- as valuable as the big-box king. (Accord- age and computing power, renting server ing to an Amazon spokesperson, “In every space to Netlix, Adobe, Airbnb, and NASA. one of our businesses we have incredible These two practices—predatory pric- competition. In worldwide retail, we’re ing and integration across business lines— less than 1 percent. We think our job is to may sound normal. But under old read- keep inventing for customers.”) ings of U.S. antitrust law, they are illegal. Khan didn’t start out interested in Still, it’s unclear whether consum- antitrust. Seeking a job at the New Amer- ers have seen higher prices as a result of ica Foundation, a center-left think tank either strategy. As such, Amazon rejects in Washington, she landed in the group’s the “predatory pricing” label. And antitrust program, whose director, Barry Republican Senator Orrin Hatch last Lynn, gave her an ad hoc graduate edu- August decried the new antitrust move- cation in the anti-monopoly movement. ment as “hipster antitrust” and said it left She studied the book industry, then the him “deeply unimpressed.” 18 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS • SKETCH As Khan and I entered the sprawling profits into price discounts. Partly as a own shopping service above those of Whole Foods three stories below Amazon result, Amazon has grown so large that its rivals in search results. The penalty: Books, we noticed a tower of avocados. A it can undercut other companies just $2.7 billion. sign bragged that, thanks to the Amazon by announcing that it will soon compete merger, a single avocado now cost $1.49, with them. When Amazon purchased Barry Lynn’s team at New America, down from $2.49. Khan cracked up. “This Whole Foods, its market cap rose by which by then was known as Open Mar- is peak myself,” she said. “This is hipster $15.6 billion—some $2 billion more than kets, was delighted. Khan helped edit antitrust, right here.” it paid for the chain. Meanwhile, the rest a short statement from the team, call- of the grocery industry immediately lost ing Google’s market power “one of the F ROM THE PROGRESSIVE ERA $37 billion in market value. (Amazon pro- most critical challenges for competition onward, the U.S. government tests that it has no control over how inves- policymakers in the world today.” They enacted a powerful set of antitrust laws to tors value its competitors.) published it and moved on with their lives. curb “the Curse of Bigness,” as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put it. The When a company has such power, But a few hours later, Lynn excused scope of these laws was remarkable: The Khan believes, it will almost inevitably himself from a conference call that Khan Court once used them to block a shoe wield that power far and wide, distorting was on. Anne-Marie Slaughter, New company from acquiring 2 percent of the not just the market itself, but the whole America’s president, was on the other line. national footwear market. of American life. With suicient power, According to The New York Times, Eric companies can commission studies, Schmidt, Google’s executive chairman at But antitrust laws could be unwieldy. rewrite regulations, bulldoze neighbor- the time, had seen the statement and was Judges sometimes struggled to know hoods, and impoverish education and unhappy about it. Schmidt had previously whether they were enforcing the law or welfare systems by securing billions in been the chairman of New America, and capriciously blocking a merger. And then, sweetheart tax cuts. When a company he and Google had given millions to the in 1978, a Yale Law professor named Rob- comes to monopolize a market—when foundation over the years. A conference ert Bork promoted a clean new theory of it grows so big that it can threaten other room at New America is called the Eric antitrust law, inspired by the libertarian industries just by entering them—it Schmidt Ideas Lab. Chicago school of economics. ceases to be merely a company. It becomes an institution so powerful that A few days later, Slaughter emailed Bork decreed that all antitrust suits it can rule over people like a government. Lynn to inform him that the foundation should be judged by one question: What would be spinning of his group, but with will most lower prices for consumers? “That was the insight of Brandeis,” full funding and staing. “The time has The answer, he said, was almost always Khan told me. “For most people, their come for Open Markets and New Amer- more mergers. When companies merge, everyday interaction with power is not ica to part ways,” she wrote. New Amer- they get rid of redundant business units, with their representative in Congress, ica disputes many of the details of The lower their operating costs, and become but with their boss. And if in your day-to- Times’ account, primarily the notion that more efficient, ultimately passing this day life you’re treated like a serf in your “Google lobbied New America to expel eiciency on to consumers as lower prices. economic relationships, what does that the Open Markets program.” Google also mean for your civic capabilities—for your denied playing any role in New America’s Within a decade, the Reagan admin- experience of democracy?” decision to cut ties or ever threatening istration turned Bork’s theory into oicial to cut of funding. Slaughter described Department of Justice policy. The busi- Khan sees the new antitrust move- problems with the group’s institutional it. ness world noticed. In 1985, there were ment, above all, as a revival. Well before However, after two months, negotiations about 2,300 corporate mergers in the Brandeis’s day, Thomas Jeferson sought on the spin-of failed and the two think United States, according to the Institute to add an anti-monopoly clause to the tanks formally separated. for Mergers, Acquisitions and Alliances. Constitution. Andrew Jackson said In 2017, there were more than 15,300, a Americans should “take a stand against For Khan, the issue was more than new record. all new grants of monopolies.” And academic: It cost her a month of pay. some legal scholars even see an anti- She’d been due to be hired back at New Bork’s views become interesting in monopoly instinct in the Fourteenth America in late July, following her com- light of Amazon. Bork thought vertical Amendment’s equal-protection clause, pletion of the bar exam. But that plan was integration was ine: Since he believed since monopolies can assert claims to put on hold, so Khan worked without pay markets were perfectly efficient, he special protections of the law. “If Amer- until late August, when Open Markets assumed that a lower-cost competitor ican democracy was founded on this established itself as a new and indepen- would always butt in and ight of a would- set of ideas and traditions,” Khan said, dent think tank and rehired her. be monopolist. And predatory pricing? It “then we just took a knife and lopped of is “a phenomenon that probably does not one half of it. It’s just gone.” It was an unexpectedly real example— exist,” he wrote. The Chicago school, he and one that hit close to home—of how said, had proved that companies would Khan knows firsthand what this a single powerful irm can inluence the always pursue short-term profits over can look like. In June 2017, the Euro- many organizations in its orbit. As Khan long-term growth. pean Union slapped Google with the noted, not without irony: “It was a proof largest-ever fine of its kind. Officials of concept of our work.” Amazon’s history seems to belie this alleged that the search giant violated claim. For more than a decade, Wall anticompetition law when it ranked its Robinson Meyer is a staf writer at Street allowed the company to plow any The Atlantic. THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 19

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S • TECHNOLOGY an apparent alternative to Pilates; and, innumerable times, people deposited THESE ARE THE PEOPLE bags of dog poop into lawn-clipping and IN YOUR NEIGHBORHOOD recycling canisters at the curb. All of this news came courtesy of the social-media Nextdoor, a hyperlocal social-media platform, service Nextdoor. On its website and highlights petty grievances—and proves that Americans app, people can post recommendations, updates, and warnings about their build- have more in common than they think. ing, block, or neighborhood. BY IAN BOGOST Anyone who has subscribed to a neighborhood email listserv—or used the E R E A R E S OM E O F T H E T H I NG S I heard about in my internet—can guess what might go wrong. neighborhood over the past year: A thunderstorm downed Social networks connect people, but a tree, blocking a central road; a shadowy agent called “the many of those connections degrade into night clipper” arose, surreptitiously cutting overhanging vitriol. If Twitter is where you ight with bushes while unsuspecting property owners slept; several strangers, and Facebook is where you vie dogs and cats were lost, found, or “on the loose,” whatever with friends, then Nextdoor is where you that means for a cat; a federal-grand-jury-summons tele- get annoyed with neighbors—for send- phone scam struck; someone sought belly-dancing classes, ing “urgent alerts,” pushed late at night to mobile phones, about questionable emergencies; for trying to sell a tattered massage table or used carpet shampooer at near-retail price; for issuing nasty repri- sals on matters large and small. But it can also foster connections among neigh- bors and help counter the social isolation brought about by technology. Nextdoor works a lot like Facebook, but instead of a “Like” button, it ofers a “Thank” button, encouraging a kind of neighborly grace. More important, in order to join, you have to prove that you live where you say you do (by entering a code mailed to your home address, for example). Which means the community you enter is not imagined or diasporic, comprising people from the same school, profession, or interest group—it’s physical. You can “mute” neighbors on Nextdoor to hide their posts, but you can’t make them move away. Like it or not, these are the people in your neighborhood—the people that you meet each day, as the old Sesame Street song goes. Not just the post- man and the barber, but also the aspiring belly dancer, the night clipper, the cat looser, and all the rest. Thanks to its popularity, the service offers a unique window into daily life around the country. Nextdoor’s virtual communities—which cover more than 180,000 U.S. neighborhoods, including more than 90 percent of those in the 25 largest cities—are becoming representa- tive of the country’s actual populations. What do Nextdoor users talk about? On April 18, 2018, to pick a random day, the nation mourned former First Lady Barbara Bush, Japanese Prime Minister 20 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JOSH COCHRAN

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Shinzo Abe visited Donald Trump to dis- (When her Twitter following recently Bowling Alone, about the decline of in- cuss North Korea, and the world reacted to a deadly accident aboard a Southwest surpassed that of Nextdoor’s corporate person social discourse in America and Airlines light. But on Nextdoor, the over- whelming majority of Americans were account, the company’s head of commu- its consequences for civic life. Putnam focused on the impacts of late-season snowstorms: stuck cars, downed power nity congratulated her, while also gen- criticized the technological individualism lines, and especially snowplows. Grout and kittens were on mountain-time tly wondering whether she would blur encouraged by television and the inter- minds, and Oregonians seemed to be enduring a spate of lost wallets and duck the neighborhood names in her posted net, which had already shown a capacity encounters. In Florida and Colorado, problems with telecom services domi- screenshots.) Less than a year after to promote selfishness. Wymer argued nated the conversation. launching the accounts as a loving gag, that Nextdoor cuts against that trend: This is pretty normal. Steve Wymer, Nextdoor’s vice president of policy, told Takahashi has built what might amount to The company boasts dramatic examples me that the same topics arise again and again, modulated by region and the most complete contemporary picture of new collaborations the service helped neighborhood type. Service requests and recommendations constitute 30 percent of day-to-day American behavior, a kind enable—the neighbor who donated an of chatter, and discussions of real estate make up another 20 percent. About of crowdsourced Kinsey report on munici- organ to someone 10 doors down, whom 10 percent of Nextdoor conversations relate to crime and safety, Wymer said. pal perversity. (Suspicious persons come up a lot, often amounting to sightings of people of color Takahashi echoes Wymer in predominantly white areas. Nextdoor has attempted to discourage posts that on noise complaints—talk of use appearance as a proxy for criminality by prompting users to add more detail ireworks or gunshots (they One user donated an and blocking some posts that mention race.) Public agencies such as police and are rarely actual gunshots) organ to someone emergency-management departments is common, she says. Some- 10 doors down, whom she also post updates to their constituencies. times these complaints have Noise complaints are another popular met through Nextdoor. subject, according to Wymer—ireworks dramatic consequences. In seem to raise particular ire—as are clas- siieds, missing pets, and gardening tips. Seattle, a post about a dog’s Judging by the conversations on bad reaction to some kind Nextdoor, it would seem that Americans are concerned irst about the safety and of cannon that was sounded security of their property, family, and pets, and then with their property’s, fam- during Seahawks football games led to she wouldn’t have known were it not for ily’s, and pets’ upkeep and improvement. Though the platform breeds its share an online dispute, and a neighborhood Nextdoor, and the person stranded on a of conlict, it is notable—in contrast to other social networks—for the com- meeting at a library to talk it out erupted roof by Hurricane Harvey who was able to monality it reveals, even in these times of unprecedented political division. No into a brawl. “Seattle is like the Florida summon a rescue boat via the service. one, Democrat or Republican, wants a neighborhood strewed with dog poop. of Nextdoor,” Takahashi told me, refer- But usually life is less dramatic than J ENN TAKAHASHI OPERATES ring to the Sunshine State’s tendency to that. In the most-common Best of Next- a Twitter account and Facebook page called Best of Nextdoor. Because surface all manner of improbable events. door submissions, neighbors worry about Nextdoor posts are private to local com- munities, Takahashi relies on users to Los Angeles is another source of good a weird truck driving by slowly, early in submit funny or weird things they see in neighborhood groups across the country. material: She’s received a handful of sub- the morning. Ever vigilant, other users missions about unrest in parts of the city respond that they have already reported where YouTube stars live, as fans mob the the suspicious vehicle to police, as law- streets trying to catch a glimpse. enforcement representatives on the ser- Best of Nextdoor reveals a charming vice encourage. Typically, the ofending cluelessness that pervades America’s vehicle turns out to be the newspaper- communities. People in cities can’t seem delivery person, plodding through the to tell the diference between a possum suburbs to bring print news to the resi- and a house cat, for example. In Alabama, dents who still read it that way. Eventu- someone tried to sell an unopened box ally, someone explains how newspaper of Hot Pockets. Near St. Louis, one resi- delivery works, and order is restored. dent asked why the neighborhood of I’ve seen a version of this post in my WingHaven is called “Swinghaven.” In own neighborhood. Someone writes: a suburb of San Diego, someone posted “Concerns about white man with turban an image of a found sex toy and—not on bicycle.” Almost instantly, responses comprehending the purpose of the arrive: “Oh, that’s Floyd, he’s harmless,” device—worried that it “looks valuable.” and “Yeah, he’s been around forever.” But most of Takahashi’s collection cata- Some neighbors theorize that he might logs more-mundane patterns, like the be a wizard. It’s a small thing, and maybe poop-in-the-trash-bin crisis that seems not one to be proud of—but the neigh- to plague all Americans. Takahashi has bors’ concerns get assuaged, and Floyd amassed countless specimens, as it were, escapes torment. That’s a post worth from run-of-the-mill lamentations to clicking “Thank” on. complex home-surveillance-camera- facilitated stakeouts conducted to ind Ian Bogost is a contributing editor at and shame the ofending dog walker. The Atlantic and the Ivan Allen College In our conversation, Steve Wymer Distinguished Chair in Media Studies at brought up Robert Putnam’s 2000 book, the Georgia Institute of Technology. THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 21

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S • BUSINESS innovate. By 2007, according to Bloom- berg, interest expense consumed 97 per- YOU BUY IT, YOU BREAK IT cent of the company’s operating profit. It had few resources left to upgrade its How private equity is killing retail stores in order to compete with Target, or to spif up its website in order to contend BY BRYCE COVERT with Amazon. “It’s true that they couldn’t respond to Amazon,” Eileen Appelbaum, A N N M A R I E R E I N H A R T was one of placed around the company’s neck. Toys a co-director of the Center for Economic the irst people to learn that Toys “R” Us “R” Us had a debt load of $1.86 billion and Policy Research, told me. “But you was shuttering her store. She was super- before it was bought out. Immediately have to ask yourself why.” vising the closing shift at the Babies “R” after the deal, it shouldered more than Us in Durham, North Carolina, when her $5 billion in debt. And though sales had Shortly after the buyout, the com- manager gave her the news. “I was almost slumped before the deal, they held rela- pany’s CEO implemented a plan to speechless,” she told me recently. Twenty- tively steady after it, even when the Great combine and remodel Toys “R” Us and nine years ago, Reinhart was a new mother Recession hit. The company generated Babies “R” Us locations. Customers liked buying diapers in a Toys “R” Us when she $11.2 billion in sales in the 12 months the changes, but the company was able to saw a NOW HIRING sign. She applied and before the deal; in the 12 months before revamp only 146 of its more than 1,500 was ofered a job on the spot. She eventu- November 2017, it generated $11.1 billion. stores by 2010. By that point, it was facing ally became a human-resources manager the efects of the Great Recession. Most and then a store supervisor. Saddled with its new debt, how- retail operations try to keep their debt ever, Toys “R” Us had less lexibility to burden low to be ready for an inevitable She stayed because the company downturn; when you sell a product as treated her well, accommodating her discretionary as toys, a recession can hit schedule. She got good benefits: health particularly hard. Thomas Paulson, the insurance, a 401(k). But she noticed a founder of the investment irm Inlection diference after the private-equity irms Capital Management, which focuses on Bain Capital and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, companies that serve consumers, told me along with the real-estate irm Vornado that when the retail landscape shifts, a Realty Trust, took over Toys “R” Us in 2005. “It changed the dynamic of how the store ran,” she said. The company eliminated positions, loading responsibilities onto other workers. Schedules became unpre- dictable. Employees had to pay more for fewer beneits, Reinhart recalled. (Bain and KKR declined to comment; Vornado did not respond to requests for comment.) Reinhart’s store closed for good on April3.She was granted no severance—like the more than 30,000 other employees who are losing their job with the company. In March, Toys “R” Us announced that it was liquidating all of its U.S. stores as part of its bankruptcy process, which began last September. Observers pointed to the company’s struggle to ight of new competition. In its court iling, the com- pany laid the blame at the feet of Amazon, Walmart, and Target, saying it “could not compete” when they priced toys so low. Less attention was paid to the alba- tross that Bain, KKR, and Vornado had 22 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by REBEKKA DUNLAP

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS company may need to make investments the company, by either helping it go pub- Private equity can stack the deck in and even adapt its business model to stay aloat. If it’s already carrying signiicant lic or selling it. other ways, too. Firms can direct busi- debt, it’s “really handcuffed,” he said. “That’s what happened with Toys “R” Us.” In some instances, private-equity irms nesses they own to buy other companies Josh Kosman, the author of The Buyout lend know-how that allows a company and then act as broker on the deals, reap- of America, agrees: “All it takes is for earn- ings to stop rising and level of, or even to operate more efficiently or expand ing transaction fees. After its buyout, Toys decline a little bit, and you’re in a whole heap of trouble.” beyond a small niche. “There’s a role for “R” Us acquired a number of companies, Toys “R” Us is hardly the only retail private equity in certain industries that are including FAO Schwarz, eToys.com, and operation to learn this lesson the hard way. The so-called retail apocalypse felled experiencing disruption,” Angela Kapp, assets from KB Toys (itself a failed recla- roughly 7,000 stores and eliminated more than 50,000 jobs in 2017. For the spate of an investor who sits on the boards of mation project of Bain’s). Consolidating brands that have recently declared bank- ruptcy, their demise is as much a story private-equity-owned about private equity’s avarice as it is about Amazon’s acumen. companies, told me. One In April 2017, an analysis by Newsday of the more celebrated found that of the 43 large retail or super- market companies that had iled for bank- retail buyouts was KKR’s Two-thirds of the retailers ruptcy since the start of 2015, more than acquisition of Dollar Gen- that filed for Chapter 11 40 percent were owned by private-equity eral, in 2007. After bring- firms. Since that analysis, a number of in 2016 and 2017 were others have joined the list, including Nine ing in a new management West, Claire’s, and Gymboree. An analy- sis by the irm FTI Consulting found that team that made changes backed by private equity. two-thirds of the retailers that iled for such as upgrading the qual- Chapter 11 in 2016 and 2017 were backed by private equity. ity of the company’s prod- “Had these companies remained pub- ucts and tailoring them to licly owned,” Paulson said, “they would have had a much higher probability of its customer base, the irm being able to adapt, to invest, and to with- stand” the ups and downs of the economy. helped it go public. It now has the most brick-and-mortar and online toy busi- A PRIVATE-EQUITY TAKEOVER stores of any U.S. retail chain. Firms “bring nesses may have been a good-faith strat- is akin to a family’s buying a house: A irm contributes what is essentially a resources and capabilities and [have] seen egy. What’s certain is that the deals helped down payment using its own funds and then inances the rest with debt. But in the movie before,” Kapp said. generate $128 million in transaction fees the case of a buyout, the firm doesn’t have to pay back the mortgage; instead, But that doesn’t mean the movie for the owners. the company it bought assumes the debt. always has a happy ending. “I don’t even Private-equity firms enjoy the mis- perception that they swoop in and save know if there are that many success cases S O FAR , PRIVATE EQUIT Y’S string struggling companies from the verge in retail,” Sucharita Kodali, an analyst at of failures in retail hasn’t caught up of ruin. They’ve long held the promise of beneiting these companies through the market-research company Forrester, with it. Pension funds and institutional close monitoring—and debt, the theory goes, should impose discipline on mana- told me. She allowed that Toys “R” Us was investors keep coming back to the promise gers. That’s the model followed by a few specialty irms, but it is far more common hardly in great shape before its acquisi- of a 12 percent (or greater) return on invest- for private-equity firms to seek moder- ately successful targets where they see tion, but says the buyout only made things ment, well above what’s ofered by bonds an opportunity to increase proit margins. After a few years of slimming costs and worse. “I think it probably hastened their or even public companies. But creditors boosting revenues, the goal is to of-load death,” she said. Even Dollar General’s and vendors left holding the bag when success, she argued, had a lot to do with retailers go out of business don’t have timing and the particular corner of retail it much recourse. occupies—the recession pushed consum- One success story: Private-equity ers toward its discount stores. irms helped buy out the retailer Mervyn’s Given private equity’s poor track record in 2004, loading it up with $800 million in retail, it can be diicult to see what com- in debt and spinning off its real-estate panies like Toys “R” Us hope to get from holdings. The company went bankrupt in a buyout. For private equity, however, the 2008 and liquidated its stores, yet accord- appeal is clear: The deals are virtually all ing to bankruptcy-court ilings, its owners upside, and carry minimal risk. Many pocketed $200 million in fees and divi- private-equity irms chip in only about 1 to dends from 2004 to 2006. Vendors such 2 percent of the equity needed for a lever- as Levi Strauss, which had sold clothes to aged buyout, and skim fees and interest the retailer and wanted to be paid for its throughout the deal. If things go well, the goods, sued the private-equity owners. irms take a huge cut of the proit when They secured a $166 million settlement, they exit. If everything blows up, they usu- arguing that the owners had played a role ally still escape with nary a burn. Toys “R” in driving Mervyn’s into bankruptcy. (The Us was still paying interest on loans it got owners did not admit any wrongdoing.) from KKR and Bain up until 2016, as well In other countries where private equity as millions a year in “advisory fees” for has a meaningful presence in the market, unspecified services rendered. Accord- it operates with more restrictions. Ger- ing to one estimate, the money KKR and many and Denmark guarantee that most Bain partners earned from those fees more workers receive severance, making it far than covered the irms’ losses in the deal. costlier for a private-equity irm to seek THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 23

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS D I S PAT C H E S are part of a burgeoning efort to redefine Japanese layofs to increase proit margins. In the • BIG IN ... JAPAN fatherhood. An organiza- U.S., labor campaigns have successfully tion called Fathering Japan pushed a number of retailers to pay more, Dad Classes for was started in 2006, for offer better benefits, and improve their the Single Guy example, to help fathers be scheduling practices. But the sector’s more involved; it provides instability is throwing these gains into Making men more marriageable, courses, and a sense of question, and some reformers would one cumbersome pregnancy suit at a time community. Yet men who like to see even more radical change. forgo work to care for their A conglomeration of workers’-rights BY STEPHEN MARCHE kids remain outliers. and financial-reform organizations is seeking to outlaw leveraged buyouts T  HE MAN in the Ikumen is a portman- Back at our Ikumen altogether. “They weren’t always legal,” traditional kimono teau of the Japanese word class, the instructor Charles Khan of the Strong Economy for is having dificulty ikuji—meaning “child- lectures about Japan’s All Coalition, which is part of the group, with the breasts. The rearing”—and the English demographic crisis, the points out. Before the 1980s, companies weight of the belly strains word men. Though the social consequences of couldn’t finance deals with such high his back. Simply walking term has been around the declining birth rate, levels of debt. One aim of Khan and his around the room—a party for years, the divide and why men should con- allies is to once again force buyouts to room in a Tokyo condo between work and home sider child care a national rely on a smaller portion of debt. “The building—is more like in Japan remains nearly duty. Everybody nods economy has existed long before pri- lumbering. Lying down absolute. Mothers still along. But besides trying vate equity,” he says. “I think it can exist and getting up again is a tend to shoulder almost all on a pregnancy suit, what without private equity.” struggle. The rest of the domestic responsibilities— can men do to help? men in the Ikumen class an imbalance that can Political solutions, even more-modest laugh as he tries to adjust be miserable, as Masako For starters, the ones, could be a tough sell in Congress. to the new reality. But then Ishii-Kuntz, a sociology teacher recommends, Private-equity firms shower a lot of we all have to try on the professor, hears wherever compliment your wife. money on Republicans and Democrats pregnancy suit ourselves, she goes. “I just gave a Instead of saying things alike. They’ve also made the most of the and one by one, we come talk this morning, and my like “Why did you sleep in revolving door between the public and the to the same conclusion: It’s audience [was] all younger so late?,” men could ofer private sectors: Barack Obama’s Treasury hard to be a woman. mothers,” she told me in words of praise: “This is secretary Tim Geithner is now the presi- her ofice at Ochanomizu delicious.” “Your hair is set dent of the private-equity irm Warburg The class is sort of University. “Many of them nice.” “Your outfit looks Pincus; Donald Trump’s commerce sec- like the prenatal ones I were talking about ‘Oh, cute today!” retary, Wilbur Ross, founded a private- attended when my wife my husband is just simply equity irm in 2000. was pregnant—except that not interested in house- After the lecture, we none of my classmates is work or child care.’ That’s learn how to bathe an While their demands may prove overly actually a father or father- not rare at all.” infant. (I nearly fail the ambitious, reformers are clear-eyed about to-be. Some of them aren’t lesson, even though I’ve what will happen without a change of even dating. Many of them Needless to say, this helped raise two babies some kind. Retail companies face billions will list their attendance in state of afairs has not and kept them both pretty of dollars in debt coming due in the next this class on their dating helped either women’s damn clean.) Though ive years, much of it thanks to leveraged profiles with the aim of success in the workforce the skills being taught buyouts. More bankruptcies are on the way. attracting a partner. The or the country’s critically are basic, I can’t help but young women they’re low birth rate, two major admire the students for Toys “R” Us workers are making the hoping to interest want sources of economic drag. trying to train themselves, case for severance pay directly to law- to see some fatherhood Which is where Ikumen in advance, to take care makers. In early May, Ann Marie Reinhart credentials up front. classes come in. They of a child. Something has and other former employees met with to give in Japan. You can’t Senator Bernie Sanders and Representa- promote gender equality tive Keith Ellison. Next, they’ll take their in the workforce and raise demands to KKR, Bain, and Vornado. the birth rate without “We’ve given blood, sweat, and tears to this doing something just as company,” Reinhart told me. “So to walk revolutionary: transforming away with nothing, it’s just humiliating.” society’s attitudes toward men, specifically fathers. In the meantime, Reinhart is looking for work. She hopes she won’t have to Bringing women into take another job in retail. “I could not go the workplace is one through this again,” she said. thing; bringing men fully into the household will be Bryce Covert is a contributing op-ed quite another. writer at The New York Times and a contributing writer at The Nation. Stephen Marche’s new podcast, How Not to Fuck Up Your Kids Too Bad, is available on Audible. 24 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by RAMI NIEMI

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS THE C U LT U R E FILE BOOKS, ARTS, AND ENTERTAINMENT THE OMNIVORE The Wisdom of Russell Brand The recovering addict, comedian, (Brand, in this scene, is addressing a group of wonder-struck English school- movie star, and former spouse of Katy children.) “To feel adored is a buzz for me, but—what does it matter, really?” Perry has entered a new phase: as the host of a brainy, philosophical podcast. Russell Brand has always been interesting. Excessively interesting, per- haps: There’s an outsize, overheating quality to his charisma, as if it entered BY JAMES PARKER his body superpower-style, via a laboratory accident or lying asteroid chunk. Forty-three years old, he comes from the working-class backwater of Grays, W HEN YOU’VE DONE Essex, in England. His physical presence is slightly dazzling, unnerving, with SHUTTERSTOCK; ADOBE STOCK; WIKIMEDIA; FLICKR it all, what then? When a subversive, greased-by-eroticism efect. The word louche attaches itself to you’ve smoked all the him. Genetically a comedian, he is also an occasional ilm star. As the sleazily crack, eaten all the marvelous rock-god boyfriend Aldous Snow in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, he chocolate, had all the stole so many scenes that he got his own spin-of movie, Get Him to the Greek. He is also some sort of culture-jammer, a serial causer of lutters/disturbances sex, made all the money, in television studios and at awards ceremonies. (“Is this what you all do for a living?” he asked during an infamous 2013 takeover of Morning Joe, a phero- and been on all the talk shows—where do you go monal blitz that deprived the panel of speech and left Mika Brzezinski slurping in panic from her water bottle.) In pre-Brexit Britain he reaped the scorn of next? Because there it is, squatting on the far side of the political classes by appearing on current-afairs programs, long-haired and messianically tinged, and preaching revolution: transformation of conscious- adulation: nothingness. “Celebrities,” the Buddhist ness, down with capitalism … love. He writes, speaks, and performs a lot about his former addictions—to drugs, to sex—and about his need for attention. For scholar Robert Thurman once said, “are in a very less than two years, he was married to the pop diva Katy Perry. interesting position. They’ve already achieved But it is in his latest incarnation—as a podcaster, of all things, clamped in headphones and nuzzling a huge mic—that Brand has become genuinely, great fame, success, and wealth, and they’ve real- slow-growingly, deep-brain interesting. The Brand who presents Under the Skin With Russell Brand, the second season of which began in June, is part seeker and ized that those things alone don’t bring happiness; that, in fact, they can be a real pain in the neck.” Or, as Russell Brand puts it, tunneling toward enlight- enment in the 2015 documentary Brand: A Second Coming, “Fame and power and money is bullshit.” 26 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by RYAN OLBRYSH

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS 2billion people around the world have access to quality medicines, dietary supplements and food as a result of our standards, advocacy and education. The foundation of quality we build helps: • Scientists keep discovering • Manufacturers keep producing • Healthcare teams keep healing Find out how we’re empowering a healthy tomorrow: usp.com/tomorrow

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS part clown, capering at the margins of thought in THE OMNIVORE snicker-snack of addiction is inside consumerism, the company of scientists, anarchists, theologians, and inside the version of human relations that is philosophers, psychologists, Marxist scholars, doc- There’s an determined by consumerism. And the ungratiied umentarians, and mad professors. And Al Gore. outsize, celebrity, he for whom the world’s ultimate blow “Thank you so much for doing this interview and overheating job has not suiced, is our paradigm. The sensual for putting so much thought into it, Russell,” the quality to his realm has combusted before his eyes, in demon former vice president says, with hilarious imper- charisma, as twists of chemical vapor. He has squandered his turbability, to the gasping, insatiable person on the if it entered serotonin supply, his natural gladness endowment, other side of the studio table. He will later reward his body via and hungry ghosts are roosting in his blackened Brand with some bass-boosted vice-presidential a laboratory brain-wires. Time for a change of approach. chuckles and, at the end of a frantic exchange about experiment climate change and spiritual renewal, exclaim, or flying aster- “We are diferent men, you and I,” Brand tells “That is entertainment!” oid chunk. Andy Puddicombe, a co-founder and the mesmer- izingly everyday-English voice of the meditation To the author and interrogator of capital- app Headspace. “I am a person that has found THE CULTURE FILE ICONS BY NEIGHBORHOOD STUDIO ism Naomi Klein, Brand reveals that he read flesh very, very appealing and corrupting. I’ve her book No Logo while in Cuba, addicted to found drugs very, very engaging. I like senses, I heroin and making a commercial: “I felt some- like sensuality, I like the body. So I’ve had to come what conlicted … I was making a chewing-gum to meditation, yoga, spirituality with a gun to my commercial—the most vacuous of all products, head.” (Puddicombe gently points out that he too of course, unnecessary mimicking of mastication has a body, of which he is quite fond.) while the world starves.” “Bringing capitalism to Cuba, personally?” an amused Klein replies. On his podcast, Brand is in dialogue with some With the physicist and broadcaster Brian Cox he very expert people, some very large and poised intel- has a lyrical exchange of views on the meaning of lects. And in dialogue, his efervescing synapses and life, Cox contending that meaning is “local and manic facility with language—the tools of his trade temporary”—supplied by us, in other words, and as a comedian—are stabilized and counterbalanced. not by God—and Brand rather grandly demurring. Not always, of course. Brand will prattle, yap, cross- “What does it mean to you,” Cox asks, “what do talk, overuse the word ideolog , and now and you feel like, if I say that there will come a time in again spiral of into monologue, into a heightened, the future when there is no consciousness in the incantatory speech that sounds weirdly lubricious: universe? So all possibility of meaning has gone, New Age dirty talk. “My consciousness has existed but the universe will still be there?” Brand barely before me, and my consciousness will exist after draws breath before responding: “I would say that me,” he says to, or at, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake. within my philosophy, consciousness and matter “My consciousness is part of a vital energy, a contin- have the reverse relationship to in yours. I believe ual pranic low existing through all forms, existing that matter emerges from consciousness, not vice beyond and through time and space, time and space versa. So even where the astrophysical context al- themselves being just referential points from this ters and evolves, as brilliant men such as yourself biological organism …” But by and large his pranic and your predecessors have demonstrated that will low is contained: He listens, he pays attention, and happen, that to me is essentially irrelevant because the conversations prickle brilliantly along. it’s just part of the cosmic ballet continuing within the framework of consciousness.” By way of proof, Your enjoyment of Under the Skin will depend he cites Herman Melville, and then the comedian on your tolerance for Russell Brand—how much Bill Hicks. Not bad. of him you can take before you’re overloaded. But in this medium you might be able to take more I T IS BRAND’S presentation of himself as an of him than you’d previously thought. The new addict, a man in recovery, a 21st-century con- season promises conversations with Gabor Maté, sciousness who has gone through the veil of the physician and addiction expert who wrote, maya and now wants answers—or better questions, “Addiction loods in where self-knowledge—and at least—that provides the theme for what might therefore divine knowledge—are missing,” and otherwise be a scattershot sequence of encounters. Jim Carrey. (Jim Carrey! There’s a guy who’s gone “I used to like nice, numb drugs,” he says wistfully of and come out on the other side of … something.) to the meditation teacher Sharon Salzberg, a nota- And Brand will preen and prance and shake his bly down-to-earth presence from whom, over the bells, proclaiming the void within him, which is the course of the interview, he elicits a lovely selec- void within us all. “That there is information avail- tion of gurgling belly laughs and high, wild titters. able,” he says to Sheldrake, “that can’t be under- Aren’t we all addicts anyway, twitching over our stood within the existing template—it seems to me phone, infatuated by this, attached to that, buzz- bloody obvious.” So ask not whether Russell Brand ing or starving for a little squirt of dopamine? The is for real. Ask yourself, rather: Am I for real? James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic. 28 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Seven Ways of Looking at Pointless Suffering The Ashtray This Radical Land Fishing Lessons Is the Cemetery Dead? Sleep Demons The University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS MUSIC angry men loom large in the genre’s history, it’s not because they have tapped into some elemental well The Sound of Rage of gender-speciic sentiment. Instead, they have and Sadness often made their mark by expanding the boundar- ies of what anger or sadness, or anger and sadness The still-unfolding history of male angst in pop music together, can sound like for guys. BY SPENCER KORNHABER Bono’s comment got me thinking not just about that lineage of sound and sentiment, but about A T THE END OF 2017, U2’s Bono made one of his periodic Chester Bennington, the Linkin Park singer whose pronouncements about the state of rock and roll. “I think suicide a year ago this summer I’ve had very much music has gotten very girly,” he told Rolling Stone. “There are in mind. By some measures the last top dog that rock some good things about that, but hip-hop is the only place for ever bred, the California group is often spoken of as young male anger at the moment—and that’s not good … In an embarrassing artifact of George W. Bush–era the end, what is rock & roll? Rage is at the heart of it.” He was cultural crudeness. But in hindsight, Linkin Park’s airing the sort of conventional wisdom you most commonly hear ranted from trajectory, and Bennington’s, sheds light on an a barstool: Rock and roll is rooted in virility, and the genre’s decline in popu- evolving quest for new ways to express vulnerability. larity represents a worrisome triumph of the feminine. Though such gender The pop landscape that has emerged may bewilder anxieties uncannily mirror the ones driving national politics, rock is of course Bono, but space has opened up for male fury in more bigger than one gender or one emotion—ask Joan Jett or Courtney Barnett. If malleable forms than ever—and such fury seems to be, for better and for worse, in plentiful supply. Linkin Park’s product was male rage in a form the entire family could mosh to. (It’s worth not- ing that sales igures for the band’s 2000 debut album, Hybrid Theory, have been surpassed in the new millennium by no rock album other than The Beatles’ 1.) The guitarist Brad Delson’s cleanly rumbling chords triggered the kind of shiver you might feel while in a dinghy passing an aircraft car- rier. Co–front man Mike Shinoda rapped in blocky syllables, his voice a stentorian simpliication of the voice cultivated by Public Enemy’s Chuck D. A DJ who went by the name Mr. Hahn threaded in nerdy-cool electronic sounds; the drummer, Rob Bourdon, hammered with comforting steadiness; and a bassist who called himself Phoenix shel- lacked on an ominous tint. The most important ingredient was Benning- ton’s wail and whisper, a volatile fuel to be pro- cessed by the others. To revisit the video for the 2001 Linkin Park single “Crawling” is to see his powers at full strength, and his special appeal laid bare. At the outset, a music-box ballerina spins, a woman cries into a bathroom sink, a pretty key- board melody plays, and Bennington screams. The crying woman appears to be in an abusive relation- ship, and the scrawny singer, his hair in peroxide- blond spikes, seems to narrate her emotions. His chorus—“crawling in my skin / these wounds, they will not heal”—is a strained roar, truly volcanic. His verses are soft and mannered. “Against my will, I stand beside my own relection,” Bennington sings, looking into the woman’s face. Her nose is pierced, as is his lip. Professional critics found such works mawk- ish, and heavy-metal purists dissed Linkin Park in crasser terms—gay or, yes, girly. That’s because, for all its testosterone rage, the band violated the notion that to be male is to be steady, unstudied, and tough. Linkin Park’s form of nu metal—the 30 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by CHLOE SCHEFFE

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS rap-rock style in vogue around the turn of the MUSIC Bizkit’s breakout hit, “Nookie,” a lewd kiss-of to millennium—was polished and, for the band’s a girlfriend who treated the singer, as he told MTV, irst few albums, notably devoid of swearing. The “like shit.” musicians were genre benders, stitching patches of hard rock, hip-hop, and new wave to a veil of soft, The emergence of PG-rated Linkin Park in this velvety pop. They had young fans and female fans, context was so exquisitely well timed, it invited and young female fans. And they had Bennington: theories that the band had been focus-grouped capable of lullaby gentleness and perpetually ix- into life. Bennington and Shinoda’s lyrics cannily ated on his own victimhood. rendered rage and alienation in generic terms, staging battles between an “I” and a “you,” who T H I S BL E N D, rather than betraying the Linkin Park’s could be a girlfriend, a parent, or something more history of emotionally aggrieved popular music was nebulous. Yet real feelings roiled. Fans often talked music, fulilled a tradition of complicating male rage about how Linkin Park helped them through their the ideal of strong, silent masculinity. Look back in a form struggles. And interviews with Bennington made at Rolling Stone’s 1969 pan of Led Zeppelin I, which the entire clear where some of his own pain came from, and described the high-pitched wails of the lead singer, family could that it was no pose. Robert Plant, as “foppish.” Punk balked at pre- mosh to. scribed roles and reveled in sexual transgression. When he was about 7, an older friend had begun New wavers like Depeche Mode knit the suppos- molesting him. “I was getting beaten up and being edly frivolous and fey sounds of disco into their forced to do things I didn’t want to do,” Benning- gloom. Rock misogyny remained alive and well, ton told Kerrang magazine in 2008. The sexual but these maneuvers encouraged men to commu- abuse continued for another six years, but he nicate in ways that would previously have gotten remained silent about it. “I didn’t want people to them labeled wimps. think I was gay or that I was lying,” he said, hint- ing at the cost of chasing certain masculine ideals. Grunge, the scrufy rebellion of the early ’90s, Instead of seeking help, Bennington turned to most clearly embraced the political potential of drugs and alcohol. A cycle of addiction, recovery, such an evolution. The scene was no less male and relapse continued through two marriages, the dominated than many rock scenes before it had births of six children, and a multiplatinum music been, but its practitioners’ moans conveyed a career. Not long before the 41-year-old hanged sense of chafing against bodily constraints and himself at home in Southern California last July, cultural expectations. In grunge, the critics he’d told friends he was struggling not to drink. An Simon Reynolds and Joy Press heard “castration autopsy found alcohol in his system. blues, the lailing sound of failed masculinity.” A song like Soundgarden’s “Big Dumb Sex” brut- B Y T H E N, L I N K I N PA R K’S heyday as ishly satirized the previous decades’ hair-metal a hit-making force was long past. It had machismo: “I’m going to fuck fuck fuck fuck you!” ended in the aughts, and for nearly a Nirvana’s roaring disdain for the social hierarchies decade, nu metal was rarely mentioned by main- of Reagan-Bush America was conveyed both in stream critics or forward-thinking musicians. But Kurt Cobain’s sarcastic lyrics and in his onstage whether or not the new forces on the scene—the cross-dressing. Sonically, the songs thrived on likes of Skrillex and Lady Gaga—were Linkin Park dichotomies of loud/soft and pretty/grating; the fans, the band had clearly previewed the new efect was less to gild aggression with sweetness millennium’s pop sensibility: bombastic, melo- than to wring drama and verisimilitude from the dramatic, and self-consciously genre busting, feeling of internal conlict. though always outitted with glimmering synthetic textures. Meanwhile, Drake’s rise to stardom rep- The drama was rowdily amplified by the resented a breakthrough for male sensitivity in nu metallers of the late ’90s and early 2000s, who hip-hop, on display in an aesthetic swerve toward experimented with rhythmic contrast by placing sinuously hybrid songs in which rap bleeds into swampy funk and break-danceable beats amid the singing against purpled and luminous sound- thudding of metal. If the results were ugly, so was scapes. Though they might not admit it, some of the subject matter: pain and trauma, expressed in Drake’s fans were surely reared on Linkin Park. even more personal terms than before. Ditching the fantastical blather of classic metal and the Indeed, in retrospect Linkin Park stands out as poetic abstractions of grunge, Jonathan Davis of a signiicant evangelist for both rock and rap. The Korn addressed his own childhood molestation by band’s merging of hip-hop and guitar music was a babysitter by literally sobbing throughout 1994’s committed and proud in a way that subgenre peers “Daddy.” Grown men confessing experiences of like Deftones or Korn never really matched. Linkin violation, real or ictional, thereafter became a nu- Park had a full-time singer, Bennington, as well as metal trope—though in many cases accompanied a full-time rapper, Shinoda, who genuinely cared by a dose of bellowed machismo. Think of Limp about his craft’s history—even if he mostly made clumsy additions to it. Between them, two forms of THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 31

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS musical (and often male) angst traditions achieved MUSIC 2017-dominating smash. Yet dark emotion is not reconciliation: the pathos and self-loathing of rock, all that distinguishes this scene. Once again in and the aggrieved confidence of hip-hop. The pop-music history, when hard anger meets soft vul- band’s songs read as wounded counterpunches nerability, the commingling almost always comes against abusers, finding victory in the moment with a dose of beauty and a jolt of sonic possibility. when the dams of internal repression broke. “I can- not take this anymore,” Bennington hissed in the It also,onceagain,comeswithtroublingandinex- irst line of the band’s irst single, “One Step Closer,” plicable real-life associations. Bennington’s death which built up to a full-blown screaming tantrum: was the latest in a crescendo of shocks in the rock “Shut up when I’m talking to you!” world, following the 2017 suicide of Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell (a close friend of Bennington’s) and Within a tight pop framework, the underlying the 2015 fatal overdose of Stone Temple Pilots’ Scott music looked for opportunities to hybridize as well. Weiland (whose band Bennington had played in). Songs such as “Crawling” pushed grunge’s dichot- Meanwhile, the morbid preoccupations of Lil Peep omies to new extremes: A synth rif like something and his peers track all too closely with urgent social you might hear at a crystal-healing meditation har- realities like the prescription-drug epidemic and the monizes with guitar feedback that evokes a garbage- rising rate of suicide among young people. It does disposal jam. My own entry point as a teen was not seem coincidental that one of the biggest songs Linkin Park’s hugely popular, Shinoda-produced of 2017, Logic’s “1-800-273-8255,” measurably 2002 remix album, which showcases a surprisingly increased calls to that phone number, the National deep eclecticism. Some tracks intensify the band’s Suicide Prevention Lifeline. metal edge, others turn the dial toward the airy and orchestral, and many enlist well-respected rappers In the face of these dark facts, who can avoid (Black Thought, Pharoahe Monch, Chali 2na). A pondering some sort of grim transference of smash 2004 EP by Linkin Park and Jay-Z, Collision inner torment across generations? But it is safer to Course, converted many black kids to rock fandom, simply recognize that music responds to the real as tributes written since Bennington’s death attest. world in any era because music is created by real people. “These wounds, they will not heal” goes L ATELY, A WAVE of stylishly sullen young Edward Hirsch’s “Crawling,” and the feeling that there is no future artists, many in rap, has excavated the pain- most recent has proved true for too many pop creators. At least fully unhip, angsty subcultures of the 1990s book is Gabriel: their music, inding new boundaries to cross and and 2000s. Bennington’s tragedy further clari- A Poem (2014). break, escapes that fate. ied the lines of inluence. In one fan video from August 2017, the rapper Lil Peep leads a crowd in Spencer Kornhaber is a staf writer at The Atlantic. black T-shirts in a sing-along of Linkin Park’s “In the End” at an event called Emo Nite. The video THE UNVEILING is especially moving given that Lil Peep, the 21-year-old Long Islander born Gustav Åhr, died Instead of a pebble to mark our grief of an overdose a few months after it was ilmed. A bisexual fashion-magazine muse with a tattooed or a coin to ease his passage face, he seemed to present a plausible future for pop, swerving between melodic hard-rock wails you placed a speaker and mumbled hip-hop boasts. And what Lil Peep rapped and sang about, in almost every song, was at the top of his head drugs or suicide. His lyrics sometimes shouted out Cobain, who killed himself at 27 in 1994, and in and suddenly a drumbeat one music video he glowered in front of a portrait of Amy Winehouse, who died at 27 in 2011. came blasting out of the grass, Dystopian though the thought is, Lil Peep startling the mourners on the far side exemplified the arrival of self-annihilation as a trending topic for a new generation of performers of the cemetery, clanging the trees, who borrow from nu metal, grunge, emo, and punk. The anti-anxiety medication Xanax is to many scattering the swifts of today’s rappers what Patrón was to rappers a decade ago, and self-harm is referenced routinely. that had gathered around the stone One breakout duo is named $uicideboy$, and the controversial XXXTentacion, another rising like souls of the dead, star who loves Cobain, pretended to hang him- self on Instagram. “Push me to the edge / all my souls that were now parting friends are dead,” went the chorus to Lil Uzi Vert’s to make way for a noisy spirit 32 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC rising out of the dirt. — Edward Hirsch Illustration by MELINDA JOSIE

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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS BOOKS As Gwendolyn Oxenham writes in Under the Lights and in the Dark: Untold Stories of Women’s The Wrong Way to Scout for Soccer, Nadim played with friends and by her- Soccer Talent self, juggling the ball for hours. Eventually she approached the coach in the town ields, and he An intense winnowing process, starting invited her to join his team. In her irst game, she when players are very young, may fail to spot scored three goals. From there, a string of youth coaches nurtured her talent. She graduated from the gifts that are crucial to the game. high school and college, and eventually attended medical school; she also became a professional BY LAURENT DUBOIS soccer player. Today, she is a star of the Danish national team and, after becoming a member of I N 2001, NADIA NADIM, a 12-year-old Afghan girl living with the Portland Thorns, one of the top women’s pro- her mother and sisters in a Danish refugee center, looked up and fessional teams in the United States, now plays for noticed a soccer ball in the branches of a tree. On the other side Manchester City, in England. of a nearby fence were lush soccer ields where youth teams from the local town practiced. Players sometimes sent balls lying into Bernard Appiah grew up in Teshie, a poor sea- the woods near the center. Spotting more, Nadim and her friends side town near Accra, Ghana. He played soccer shook the trees and threw some of the balls back over the fence. constantly as a young boy, and when he was about They kept a few older ones so they could play, too. 8, a coach recruited him to a local team. The team had 50 players but only two soccer balls, so, as Sebastian Abbot writes in The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer’s Next Superstars, they spent much of their time in practice “simply running around in the dust.” Appiah outplayed everyone, earning the nickname “The Tornado.” Soon after, another local coach recruited him to a better team, one with proper equipment and a good practice ield, hoping to nurture his talent for a professional career in Ghana or abroad in Europe. In 2007, a Spanish coach named Josep Colomer came to Teshie on a irst-of-its-kind tour of Africa 34 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by JONATHAN BARTLETT

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS in search of the best young players he could ind. BOOKS scale. Many promising young players sign con- On ofer were three scholarships to Aspire Acad- tracts with clubs whose inances depend on buy- emy, a lavishly endowed new soccer-training pro- “Game ing and selling those contracts in an international gram in Qatar that boasted a stadium, six ields, intelligence” market. The “transfer fees” exchanged between and speakers that piped in “the sounds of birds can be clubs have risen vertiginously over the past few chirping throughout the day.” Appiah, at that point nurtured, decades. Last summer, Paris Saint-Germain, a a young teen, was chosen as one of the best play- but it is team bankrolled by Qatari investors, set a record ers in Ghana, and was brought to the Aspire Acad- difficult by buying the Brazilian star Neymar from Bar- emy, along with 23 other players from throughout to teach. celona for $263 million. For top players, as well Africa, for the inal tryouts. He was awarded one as the clubs and intermediaries involved in the of the coveted scholarships, and began what was soccer market’s chains of speculation, there are supposed to be a multiyear program of honing his fortunes to be made. For the masses of aspiring talents. His coaches pegged him as the next Lio- players, whose chances of succeeding are inin- nel Messi, whom Appiah met when the Argentine itesimal, the costs are human and in many cases superstar visited Aspire. Today, however, Appiah quite brutal. lives in relative poverty in Ghana, his dreams—and those of the coaches and institutions that invested Abbot and Oxenham offer us riveting por- in him—largely evaporated. traits of players trying to make it, bouncing from team to team and continent to continent, often in Soccer is the most popular sport on the planet, deeply precarious circumstances. Their accounts a universal language like no other. Billions of peo- raise questions about the ethics and efectiveness ple play and watch the game. Many of its great- of the current soccer system. Does the ruthless est players, like those in other sports, have come selection that male athletes face—driven by a top- from the margins of society. Part of what draws down structure, an emphasis on early winnowing, multitudes is that soccer is a place of possibility, and intensive youth training—go against the grain where even those born into the most diicult of of a game based on shifting, unpredictable play? circumstances can become global icons, cele- And might women’s careers, which unfold dif- brated for playing a game that explodes with joy ferently because of the gender inequalities that and creativity. shape a notably underfunded sport, have some lessons to ofer? Yet the men’s side of professional soccer has given rise to a merciless process of talent identii- S TARTING IN THE 19 0S, European cation and development that operates on a global national teams and professional clubs began organizing youth academies aimed at identifying and cultivating male players at a very young age. Those academies have now spread all over the continent, and the competition among the kids there, some brought in as young as 5 years old, is ierce. A recent study of English academies, cited by Abbot, concluded that out of about 10,000 kids in the system, roughly 100 will become profes- sionals. And among those who do get professional contracts as teenagers, two-thirds will no longer be playing by the time they are 21. The net is cast wide at the youth level because it is so diicult to determine which players have the talent, skills, and drive that will allow them to suc- ceed. Soccer doesn’t require a particular body type. Lionel Messi is 5 foot 7 and sufered from growth- hormone deiciency as a child, but was neverthe- less recruited to the Barcelona academy when he was 11. Nicknamed “The Flea” by his teammates, he had amazing technique with the ball and con- sistently outplayed them. As he matured, Messi stood out thanks above all to what coaches call “game intelligence”—“the ability,” as Abbot puts it, “to evaluate a dynamic situation and execute the right decision almost instantly.” Game intelligence can be nurtured, but it is dif- icult to teach. The only sureire way to cultivate it THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 35

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS is to play a lot. And the more structured training In soccer’s Called Football Dreams, the enterprise was, Ab- approach taken by many academies may, iron- global order, bot writes, “the largest soccer scouting project in ically, be a hindrance. Abbot invokes research Africa is history.” The irst year, when Appiah was selected, suggesting that play in informal environments— seen as a nearly 430,000 boys participated in the tryouts. By on a patch of dirt or in the courtyard of a hous- supplier of 2014, more than 3.5 million youths had been scouted ing project, for example, rather than on a well- raw material by the program. At one ield in Ghana, more than manicured pitch under adult supervision—is key to be refined 100 young players showed up two days early, sleep- to the development of game intelligence. In these and then ing on the ground while they waited for Aspire settings, kids also tend to one-up each other with sold on the Academy representatives to arrive. In the irst year, lashy play—dribbling adroitly around someone, international Colomer persuaded Jassim to expand the number kicking the ball over a head or through a thicket market. of scholarships awarded by setting up an academy of legs, juggling the ball in the air for a while, ex- in Senegal, which welcomes 20 students a year, in ecuting a back-heel pass to a teammate—which is addition to the few who get to train in Qatar. Still, as a great way to master technical skills. Such pickup Abbot notes, the winnowing process is “a thousand games demand creativity and improvisation, times more selective than getting into Harvard.” and reward those who are constantly observing their surroundings and recalibrating their moves I F YOUNG PL AYER S thronged to the try- accordingly. Coaching is no doubt useful, but outs, it was because Aspire Academy seemed even players at academies do better when they to point the way to a professional career in spend a lot of time in free-form play. Europe—the dream that drives soccer throughout Africa. At 8, Appiah was already a commodity. His No wonder, then, that Africa, which over the second youth coach, Justice Oteng, paid an infor- past several decades has produced some of Eu- mal transfer fee for him and other players when rope’s greatest soccer stars, has beckoned as a they joined the team. Oteng also paid for the vast and untapped recruiting ground. Structured Ghana Football Association license that qualiied academy training of the kind now prevalent in Appiah to play in the country’s oicial leagues, and Europe is rare there. The next star, the thinking he provided housing for several years. goes, could be anywhere, honing his talents under an overpass in Lagos or oceanside in Dakar. The For Oteng, these were speculative investments prospect appealed to Sheikh Jassim, the founder that he hoped to recoup one day. Like Oteng, how- of Aspire Academy. In line to be the next emir of ever, most local coaches don’t have direct links to Qatar, Jassim had renounced the throne to focus European clubs. So young players end up vulner- on his true passion, soccer. (A doctor once sum- able to unscrupulous agents, many of whom de- moned to his palace to cure his insomnia saw the mand money up front and never follow through on problem immediately: wall-to-wall screens in the promises to introduce players to recruiters. Such bedroom, showing games being played all over the a large number of aspiring African players are left world, around the clock.) Setting out to train a great stranded and homeless in Europe that one retired Qatari team, Sheikh Jassim decided that import- soccer player has created an NGO in France to help ing talented African players would help, and hired them. He describes this trade in young players as a Josep Colomer to search the continent. kind of “modern slavery.” COVER TO COVER battle is learning to builds as Sonja’s inner to the countryside drive. Shifting gears is world unfolds. Stuck where she grew up, Mirror, Shoulder, a challenge for Sonja, in a driving lesson and especially to her Signal a translator of Swedish or on her massage estranged sister. But crime fiction who lives therapist’s table, she gauzy nostalgia isn’t DORTHE NORS, in Copenhagen and is is elsewhere, too, as in her middle-aged TRANSLATED BY prone to bouts of dizzi- if she’d “pressed an repertoire as she nav- MISHA HOEKSTRA ness. Even working up elevator button in her igates the terrifying the nerve to change mind.” An unmoored, on-ramp to the future G R AY W O L F driving instructors is lonely soul in a big alone. “As women,” a struggle. city, she’s grappling she says of herself THE DANISH WRITER in The Paris Review. with “the things and her mother in a For the 40-something Only a writer as she cannot find the rare moment of dia- Dorthe Nors likes to protagonist of her lat- agile and profound as language to say and logue, “we’re not com- subject her characters est novel—the first to Nors would dare to the people she most pletely fine-tuned.” As to “the battle that you appear in English, and proceed from such a wants to say them to.” a novelist, Nors comes experience on the a finalist for the Man heavy-handed (and remarkably close. brink of something Booker International humdrum) premise. Sonja’s thoughts new,” she explained Prize last year—the The novel’s power return again and again — Ann Hulbert in a 2014 interview 36 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Football Dreams was presented by its leaders BOOKS might not have felt the need to leave home to hone as an alternative to this kind of exploitation. Yet his talents, and when the time was right—when he as Appiah discovered, the pressures of the indus- THE AWAY GAME: was old enough, and ready—he could have made a try are inescapable. With the eyes of European THE EPIC SEARCH move to Europe. Recruiters could still travel Africa teams on him as he played exhibition matches FOR SOCCER’S NEXT looking for star players, but they would be looking with Aspire, a conlict developed between Oteng for young men rather than boys, and have a better and the academy over when he should go profes- S U P E R S TA R S chance to truly judge whether they were ready for sional and who would negotiate, and proit from, SEBASTIAN ABBOT European club soccer. Cutting back on intensive the move. The struggle over Appiah’s future even- training in childhood might have downsides, of tually short-circuited it. He left Aspire Academy W. W. Norton course. Yet the gains, especially for the many play- after a year, and his attempts to get a contract in ers who never become stars, could be seen as com- Europe loundered, despite his top-level training UNDER THE LIGHTS pensation enough. and connections to coaches there. He ended up AND IN THE DARK: playing professionally in Ghana, where the pay is UNTOLD STORIES OF T H E W O R L D O F women’s soccer por- low: The going salary is about $50 a month, which WOMEN’S SOCCER trayed by Oxenham provides inspiration sometimes is barely enough for food and shelter. GWENDOLYN OXENHAM here. To be sure, the absence of big money Now in his mid-20s, he remains optimistic that he doesn’t mean freedom from exploitation. Most of will get a break, but time is running out for him to Icon the players we meet in Under the Lights and in the have a professional career in Europe. Dark are barely eking out a living, even in the U.S. league, which is better-funded than most coun- Describing Appiah’s departure from the acad- tries’ leagues. Marta Vieira da Silva, a star of Bra- emy, Abbot writes that he was “headed back to zil’s national team—and considered by many to be the mine where he was found.” The echoes of the world’s greatest female soccer player—earns colonialism are clear. In soccer’s global order, about $40,000 a year playing with the Orlando Africa is seen as a supplier of raw material to be Pride, though she makes more from commercial refined and then sold on the international endorsements. The inancial realities reshape the market—or, far more likely, discarded. Encour- entire process and ethos of women’s soccer. Young aged to stake everything on the game, young players can only ever think of soccer “not as a des- players confront intense expectations and inan- tination but as a route,” writes Oxenham, once an cial pressures. One of Appiah’s classmates at the aspiring professional player herself. “From the academy did ultimately go professional in Europe, beginning of our playing careers, we prepared for playing for a year with Barcelona and then with the end.” a lesser-known team. A few more-recent Aspire graduates have gone professional as well. Still, That means the path for even the most skilled Abbot’s book paints a portrait of institutions so and ambitious girls begins as, and remains, a obsessively geared toward producing the next broader one. Like Nadim, one of the American star that little thought is given to what is con- players in Oxenham’s book attends medical sumed, and lost, in the endeavor. school; a star of the German national team is in the police academy. “I can’t just be a soccer player,” W HAT IF THE SYSTEM were struc- she explains. “I’d be bored.” Gaëlle Enganamouit tured diferently, focused on the expe- of Cameroon uses the money she earns playing riences of the vast majority of aspiring professionally to invest in a taxi business run by players who will fail rather than on the tiny number her family back home. who will succeed? This would be more ethical and less exploitative, and might well produce just as Nadim discovered soccer for herself, and got many great stars, at a much lower personal price. her teenage training thanks to the generous gov- As Abbot’s book highlights, the Aspire Academy ernment support—local and national—for youth quest has yielded strikingly mixed results, espe- sports throughout Denmark. She saw the ball in cially given the massive investment involved. A the tree in part because well-equipped programs blunt truth emerges: Seeking out players when meant that young players didn’t bother to go after they are very young is surely not an ideal formula the balls they kicked into the woods. A dose of that for scouting success. The development of game spirit, spreading soccer’s benefits wider, would intelligence remains fairly mysterious; the asset serve everyone, including stars. Soccer, at its heart, is one whose eventual emergence can be hard to is all about creating openings where there seem to predict early on. be none. Utopian though the dream of a more just and equitable soccer system may sound, that’s only What boys like Appiah may need most of all is more reason to nurse it. more time, and a comparatively modest space up- grade. Instead of six practice ields in Qatar, he and Laurent Dubois teaches at Duke University and is other young players could have used another good the author, most recently, of The Language of the one in Teshie. With better conditions there, he Game: How to Understand Soccer. THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 37

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FUTURE Is HUMAN Enterprising workers are As cities get denser, the modern A number of urban centers are at moving to cities in droves. But as economic forces workforce is being transformed by pow- the forefront of addressing this change, threaten to pull us apart, erful forces like automation and global which is one big reason why cities in the transforming work and life competition. Looked at in one way, these U.S.—and around the world—are now on as we know it, we must are forces that could eventually turn us the rise. And not just cities like New York embrace community and against each other, instilling in people a and London. From Kansas City to Denver, pave the way for a rising sense of alienation and uncertainty that São Paulo to New Delhi, cities are all grow- generation of entrepreneurs. can make urban life lonely and the future ing as young entrepreneurs migrate en of work seem ominous. masse to urban areas, forming a constella- Companies must reimagine tion of enterprise that dots the globe. their work spaces to support That may sound bleak, but there is plenty innovation and encourage of reason for hope. According to experts, Recently, Long Beach, California, lost a connection and creativity. the disruptions to urban work life also giant Boeing manufacturing facility, which have the potential to bring us closer decimated the local economy. Rather than together if harnessed correctly, giving shying away from the consequences of cities—and the companies that operate technological innovation, though, Long therein—the chance to create new hives Beach was determined to embrace them. of meaningful social interaction that can The city set about connecting employers enrich local economies. with freelancers, who make up 30 percent of the population, and brought WeWork, “People tend to work better together,” says the co-working giant, to its downtown Ethan Pollack, an associate director of area last year. research and policy for the Aspen Insti- tute’s Future of Work Initiative. “Humans Since then, Long Beach has seen a hearty are inherently social beings, so as work revival of its business district. WeWork’s becomes more independent, it further introduction to the area acted as a kind of emphasizes the need to create other ways binding agent and economic accelerant, that people can connect with each other.” allowing entrepreneurs and enterprises

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS SPONSOR CONTENT “WeWork is now a critical WeWork’s Economic piece of our economic ɕʝʝɬ
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ʲ development, job creation, and downtown 70%–80% revitalization strategy.” 70%–80% of WeWork members in New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago are new to their neighborhood—bringing economic activity to local restaurants and shops. Robert Garcia 12% Mayor of Long Beach, California New businesses are 12% more likely to survive at WeWork than to seamlessly connect within Long Beach of companies and entrepreneurs allows and in cities around the world.“I think We- members to tap into and realize value are their peers, and 45% of member Work can be a game changer for the future from these economic spillovers within companies credit WeWork with helping of cities,” says Robert Garcia, the mayor of their local communities and across cities.” Long Beach. accelerate their growth. The story of a newly revitalized city like This change begins with one block, one Long Beach can serve as a model for 2x neighborhood, one city—but these are other locales. But thriving economies just the start. If you can connect people in aren’t assured. The future depends, in The WeWork community creates a power- meaningful ways, then neighboring cities large part, on how we respond to loom- ful economic multiplier for cities: like Long Beach and Los Angeles, for in- ing changes. We can fear technological stance, won’t be solely dependent on each advancement. We can fear a world that 10,000 WeWork members can create an other for symbiotic working relationships is becoming more interconnected by additional 10,000 jobs in the local economy and shared intellectual resources. The the day. We can turn inward and against network can go beyond physical location: those around us. Or we can embrace through indirect and induced spending. A growing small business in Long Beach, change with optimism and action. We for example, can easily collaborate with can lasso the forces that threaten to pull Read the full report at designers in Detroit and an engineering us apart and humanize both cities and we.co/weworkimpact team in San Francisco while it negotiates a partnership with a Fortune 500 company For more on how cities can in Chicago and sells to clients from New build a community for the York to Mexico City to Shanghai—creating future, visit: a borderless string of entrepreneurship theatlantic.com/future-is-human and cities around the globe. SOURCE “WeWork has created the physical- E ਬ
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РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS BOOKS in 1700, not yet 40, childless and sterile. Geneti- cists have calculated that he was more inbred than Your DNA Is Weirder he would have been had his parents been siblings. Than You Think After his death, the Spanish Habsburg dynasty collapsed, crushed under the weight of a heredity Genetic research constantly upends our understanding that as yet had no name. of heredity—though not our zeal to control it. Though Renaissance nobles could not have BY NATHANIEL COMFORT missed the unfortunate traits that ran like fractures through the House of Habsburg, not until the 1830s I N 1555, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V announced his plans did the term heredity acquire its modern conno- to abdicate, and his 28-year-old son, Philip II, became the king tation as a biological legacy. Because the term irst of Spain the following year. The throne was Philip’s natural— speciied material inheritance, often from eldest hereditary—right. The Habsburg dynasty, to which Charles and son to eldest son, we tend to think about heredity Philip belonged, had raised strategic matrimony to an art form, in terms of straight lines: bloodlines, patrilines, using marriage bonds among relations distant and close to seize and eventually germ lines. Our word for a dia- control over much of Europe. Power came with a price, however: gram of the lines of descent—pedigree—is probably derived from the French pé de grue, or “crane’s severe, recurring mental and physical problems. Charles’s foot,” evoking an image of a pencil-like leg ending in straight, splayed toes. mother was Joan the Mad; his son Philip was said to be “of weakly frame and Yet linear thinking doesn’t begin to do hered- of a gloomy, severe, obstinate, and superstitious character.” Philip’s descen- ity justice, and in his sprawling, magisterial new book, the science writer Carl Zimmer shows why. dant Charles II was 4 before he could talk and 8 before he could walk. He died She Has Her Mother’s Laugh brims with rich stories and colorful actors—some sinister, some brilliant, some both—and delves into scientiic research, history, and ideas made intimate through the au- thor’s personal experiences. The result explodes any unitary idea of heredity. Zimmer limns por- traits of multiple intersecting heredities, more like the web of a spider than the foot of a bird. Despite this proliferation, dreams of human con- trol over the process continue to soar. 40 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC Illustration by MAYUKO FUJINO

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS The biological concept of heredity came too BOOKS and exhibits masculinized behavior (and is particu- late for the Habsburgs, but not for Francis Galton, larly tasty on the grill). Where does one calf end and a half-cousin of Charles Darwin. When Galton It is all the other begin? looked at distinguished pedigrees in the 1860s, too easy to he saw concentrations of virtues: intelligence, scoff at the Zimmer describes a bizarre twist on the free- good looks, strength of character. This Victorian monstrous martin: a girl with different-colored eyes and gentleman, who gave us the phrase nature versus confidence ambiguous genitals who appeared at a Seattle nurture, convinced himself that talent and charac- that led genetics clinic. Her ovaries proved to have only ter were hereditary, because they ran in families. eugenicists to XX chromosomes—typical female—but her other After abandoning the awkward word viriculture, he believe they tissues were mixtures of XX and XY. Further christened the science of hereditary improvement understood analysis showed that she had started out as oppo- “eugenics,” from the Greek for “wellborn.” heredity well site-sex twins. But early in development, the two enough to embryos had fused, becoming a single, highly un- Galton’s eugenic scheme relied on persuasion engineer it. usual child. Like a verse from the old Ray Stevens and social incentives to discourage those he con- novelty song “I’m My Own Grandpa,” this girl was sidered unit from reproducing, while encourag- her own twin brother. ing procreation among the posh and brilliant. The result, he earnestly believed, would be a “galaxy of But chimeras are not just oddities. You surely genius.” Later editions of eugenics were less opti- know one. In pregnant women, fetal stem cells mistic. If you take Galton’s recipe, add Mendel’s can cross the placenta to enter the mother’s blood- peas and Morgan’s fruit lies, simmer in the politics stream, where they may persist for years. If Mom and culture of the Progressive era, and stir vigor- gets pregnant again, the stem cells of her irstborn, ously, you get the American eugenics movement— still circulating in her blood, can cross the placenta dogmatic, ideological, and coercive. (Sadly, some in the other direction, commingling with those of choice examples of its rhetoric may be found in the the younger sibling. Heredity can thus low “up- archives of this magazine.) Serve warm to German stream,” from child to parent—and then over and fascists, and you get the Final Solution. down to future siblings. It is all too easy to shake our heads at the cruelty The genome, Zimmer goes on to reveal, eludes and naïveté of the eugenic creed, which held that tidy boundaries too. Forget the notion that your society could be “cured” of crime, disease, and genome is just the DNA in your chromosomes. We poverty by eliminating the “unit” from the gene have another genome, small but vital, in our cells’ pool, or to tsk-tsk at the monstrous conidence that mitochondria—the tiny powerhouses that supply led eugenicists to believe they understood heredity energy to the cell. Though the mitochondrial genes well enough to engineer it. Much more diicult is are few, damage to them can lead to disorders of to bear in mind that in 20 years, many of today’s the brain, muscles, internal organs, sensory sys- received truths will also be thought wrong. Playing tems, and more. At fertilization, an embryo re- God is always harder than it looks. ceives both chromosomes and mitochondria from the egg, and only chromosomes from the sperm. S TEP BY MEASURED STEP, Zimmer SHE HAS HER Mitochondrial heredity thus lows strictly through walks us deep into the thickets of genetics MOTHER’S LAUGH: the maternal line; every boy is an evolutionary and genomics, revealing complications and dead end, as far as mitochondria are concerned. exceptions that challenge what we think we know THE POWERS, about heredity. Following his own family tree, Zim- PERVERSIONS, Beyond the genome are more surprises. School- mer shows us that counterintuitive facts lie even in AND POTENTIAL children learn that Darwin’s predecessor, the great the humble pedigree. If you pursue your lineage far OF HEREDITY French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, got enough, the branching forks of a family tree begin heredity wrong when he suggested that traits to rejoin, such that if your ancestry is European CARL ZIMMER acquired through experience—like the giraffe’s back to the time of Charlemagne, you are related Dutton neck, elongated by straining and stretching to to Charlemagne himself! reach higher, perhaps tenderer, leaves—could be passed down. The biologist August Weismann To focus in is to ind chromosomes playing all famously gave the lie to such theories, which col- sorts of tricks. Take, for example, chimeras. To the lectively are known as “soft” heredity. If Lamarck- ancient Greeks, the Chimera was a ire-breathing ism were true, he said, chopping the tail of mice hybrid monster; to a biologist, chimeras are organ- and breeding them, generation after generation, isms that comprise cells from two diferent individ- should eventually produce tailless mice. It didn’t. uals. Ranchers are familiar with one type of chimera, Lamarck wasn’t lurking in the details. the freemartin, which results when a cow carries opposite-sex twins. Connected by a shared placenta, Recent research, however, is giving Lamarck a the fetal calves exchange stem cells. The bull calf measure of redemption. A subtle regulatory sys- grows up into a more or less normal bull, while the tem has been shown to silence or mute the efects heifer—the freemartin—has undeveloped ovaries of genes without changing the DNA itself. Envi- ronmental stresses such as heat, salt, toxins, and infection can trigger so-called epigenetic responses, THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 41

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS turning genes on and of to stimulate or restrict BOOKS The ethics of some reproductive technologies growth, initiate immune reactions, and much become blurrier in light of the newly complex more. These alterations in gene activity, which are Every one of understanding of heredity’s crosscurrents. A reversible, can be passed down to ofspring. They us carries a maternal surrogate, for example, will likely ex- are hitchhikers on the chromosomes, riding along unique flora change stem cells with the fetus she carries, open- for a while, but able to hop on and of. Harnessing of hundreds if ing the door to claims that baby and surrogate are epigenetics, some speculate, could enable us to not thousands related. If the surrogate later carries her own baby, create Lamarckian crops, which would adapt to a of microbes, or that of a diferent woman, are the children re- disease in one or two generations and then pass the each with its lated? Parenthood becomes even stranger with acquired resistance down to their ofspring. If the own genome, so-called mitochondrial-replacement therapy. If disease left the area, so would the resistance. without which a woman with a mitochondrial disorder wants we cannot a biological child, it is now possible to inject the All of these heredities—chromosomal, mito- be “us.” nucleus of one of her eggs into a healthy woman’s chondrial, epigenetic—still don’t add up to your egg (after removing its nucleus), and then perform entire you. Not even close. Every one of us carries in vitro fertilization. The result is a “three-parent a unique lora of hundreds if not thousands of mi- baby,” the irst of which was born in 2016. Zimmer crobes, each with its own genome, without which doesn’t presume to make ethical judgments about we cannot feel healthy—cannot be “us.” These procedures such as this, but warns that “informed too can be passed down from parent to child—but consent” in such cases can be unexpectedly thorny. may also move from child to adult, child to child, stranger to stranger. Always a willing volunteer, And why stop with people? A so-called gene Zimmer allowed a researcher to sample the mi- drive could enable researchers to release into crobes living in his belly-button lint. Zimmer’s nature organisms that would genetically engineer “navelome” included 53 species of bacteria. One one another, spreading a desirable trait through- microbe had been known, until then, only from out a population within a couple of generations. the Mariana Trench. “You, my friend,” the scien- Scientists imagine using this process to create tist said, “are a wonderland.” Indeed, we all are. pest-proof crops, malaria-free mosquitoes, and limitless other innovations in agriculture and pub- W ITH THIS IN MIND, reconsider the lic health. Trials are in progress. ongoing effort to engineer heredity. The motto of the Second International Engineering the global genome could save mil- Eugenics Congress, in 1921, was “Eugenics is the lions of lives—or produce a chimeric hybrid of Gat- self-direction of human evolution.” Since then, taca and Jurassic Park. We could alter the gene pool controlling heredity has become technically much of the future in ways we cannot yet even imagine, easier and philosophically more complicated. When, let alone understand. Zimmer is excited about the in the 1970s, the first genetic engineering made possibilities, but in a world where headlong innova- medical gene therapy feasible, many of its pioneers tion always trumps careful contemplation, he urges urged caution, lest some government try to create scientists and the public to learn from history. “We a genetic Fourth Reich. In particular, two taboos would do well,” he writes, “to look back at how the seemed commonsense: no enhancement, only tools we’ve already invented have altered our eco- therapy (thou shalt not create a master race); and logical inheritance over the past ten thousand years.” no alterations in germ-line tissues, only in somatic cells (thou shalt not make heritable modiications). An old saw of biology runs “Evolution is clev- erer than you are.” And ecology, involving as it To today’s genetic engineers, those parameters does the dovetailed evolution of countless organ- seem quaint. Researchers can now convert mature isms in a constantly changing world, is cleverer somatic tissue taken from, say, a cheek swab into than evolution. In Zimmer’s pages, we discover stem cells able to become any type of cell, even a world minutely threaded with myriad streams sperm and eggs. New technologies such as the of heredity lowing in all directions, in variegated gene-editing technique known as CRISPR have patterns and diferent registers—from a newt’s greatly expanded the repertoire of engineering. truncated, regenerating tail; to the pond in which Ethical quandaries abound. Although injecting the newt paddles; to the meadow where the pond the hormone erythropoietin can be lifesaving for ills and dries, ills and dries, down the centuries. people with severe anemia, it is illegal for athletes. The computing power alone required to play pup- What about gene therapy to raise one’s “natural” pet master for such a scene, tugging and twirling erythropoietin production? Is it better to elimi- the strings of its DNA, is staggering. Whether we nate gene variants for sickle cell anemia and thal- have the wisdom to nurture nature is a question assemia, or to retain the malaria resistance those that Zimmer leaves, held aloft like a dandelion genes confer? What kinds of side effects would puf, for us to contemplate. seem tolerable in order to raise your child’s IQ by a few points? Nathaniel Comfort is a professor of the history of medicine at Johns Hopkins University. 42 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS It’s time to say NO to trying to fit square-peg kids into round holes, and YES to raising them from a place of acceptance and joy. T oday one out of five kids has ADHD, dyslexia, autism, giftedness, anxiety, or other neurodi erences. These are children that Deborah Reber, bestselling author and mother of a twice-exceptional son, calls “di erently wired,” and the challenges of raising them are many. Now, weaving together personal stories with a tool kit of expert advice, she o ers a groundbreaking how-to and manifesto that will help parents help their children fully realize their best selves. “Di erently Wired will help parents of children who think di erently to accept their child for who they are and facilitate their successful development.” —TEMPLE GRANDIN, author of Thinking in Pictures and The Autistic Brain “A wonderfully engaging and much-needed book that I will enthusiastically recommend to so many parents and professionals I meet on a regular basis.” —BARRY M. PRIZANT, PhD, CCC-SLP, author of Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism “A ‘must read’ for all parents raising children with multiple exceptionalities.” —DR. MICHAEL POSTMA, EdD, interim director of SENG (Supporting the Emotional Needs of the Gifted) “Building on the premise that we should celebrate our children’s uniqueness instead of apologizing for it, Deborah Reber provides real tools and practical advice for parents to confidently support their child’s journey.” —AMANDA MORIN, Writer/Expert at Understood and author of The Everything Parent’s Guide to Special Education Available now, wherever books are sold.

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS Here’s one way to ight ISIS: Send one of the most advanced and expensive military aircraft in the U.S. arsenal from a base in Missouri to drop GPS-guided 500-pound bombs on a group of 70 ragtag ighters sleeping in the Libyan desert. (Spoiler alert: They died.) 44 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

TРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS H E BY WILLIAM LANGEWIESCHE ILLUSTRATIONS BY OWEN FREEMAN R A I D

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS I. School, in Nevada. The airplanes had been fawned over for days TARGET by ground crews, but in ine aeronautical tradition the respon- sibility for their condition lay ultimately with the pilots. They The B-2 stealth bomber is the world’s most exotic strategic air- loaded their gear into the cockpits, gaining access by climbing craft, a subsonic lying wing meant to be diicult for air defenses a short ladder and pulling themselves up through a hatch in to detect—whether by radar or other means—yet capable of carry- the loor. They then performed a traditional walk-around, fol- ing nearly the same payload as the massive B-52. It came into ser- lowed by extensive system checks and light-plan entries. This vice in the late 1990s primarily for use in a potential nuclear war took about 90 minutes. No problems were discovered. They with the Soviet Union, and clearly as a irst-strike weapon rather closed the cockpit hatches, strapped into their seats, and while than a retaliatory one. First-strike weapons have destabilizing, still in the hangars started their engines. Each B-2 has four jet not deterrent, efects. It is probably just engines—not clunky cylinders but turbofans embedded sleekly as well that the stealth bomber was not in the wings, like gills in a shark, so as to limit radar, infrared, quite as stealthy as it was meant to be, and was so expensive—at $2.1 billion each— and acoustic signatures. The engine start is automated—a push- that only 21 were built before Congress button afair that requires monitoring but rarely fails. refused to pay for more. Nineteen of them are now stationed close to the geo- Once the engines had started, the B-2s emerged in unison graphic center of the contiguous United from their hangars and pivoted to form a single-file line. A States, in the desolate farmland of central low overcast blackened the sky. The air was cold and moist— Missouri, at Whiteman Air Force Base. conditions conducive to engine-induction icing while the plane is They are part of the 509th Bomb Wing, idling on the ground, one of several weather-related weaknesses and until recently were commanded by from which the B-2 sufers as a result of the uncompromising pur- Brigadier General Paul W. Tibbets IV, pose of its design. Because of the potential for icing, the pilots whose grandfather dropped the atomic were eager to get their ships into the air. Spaced 500 feet apart, bomb on Hiroshima. B-2 bombers are still the B-2s taxied briskly toward the top of the runway—an array primarily regarded as a nuclear-delivery of wings with no fuselages, no tails, and no vertical stabilizers, system, meaning that their crews are by barely recognizable as airplanes except for their hefty landing selection the sort of men and women gear and the whine of their hidden engines. The irst three took capable of deining success as a precisely of 30 seconds apart and were swallowed by the night. The others, lown sortie at the outset of mass annihi- which had been spun up in case the primary aircraft experienced lation. No one should doubt that, if given problems, taxied back to their hangars and shut down. When I the order to launch a nuclear attack, these crews would carry it out. In the meantime, they have occasionally lown missions of a diferent sort—make-work projects such as saber rattling over the Korean penin- sula, and the opening salvos in Serbia, Afghanistan, and Iraq—to tactical advan- tage without American discomfort. Such was the state of affairs in the small hours of the morning at Whiteman on January 17, 2017, during the last days of the Obama administration. Six years had passed since any B-2 had lown in combat. But now, in the privacy of their bespoke, climate-controlled, single-occupancy hangars, several of them had been loaded with 80 GPS-guided bombs for use against enemies who had been spotted on the ground in a faraway country. The preparations had been hushed: Relatively few people on the base, even among those assembling and loading the bombs, knew that this was something other than a training run. In the B-2, the only inhabitable space is the cockpit, and the light crew consists of merely two people. Though they are cross- trained to perform any role in light, the one in the right seat is the mission commander, who handles the weapons and military communications, and the one in the left seat is considered the pilot, who performs the lesser tasks of lying the airplane and dealing with air traic control. On that January morning, all of the crew members were mid-ranking men and graduates of advanced B-2 training at the United States Air Force Weapons 46 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS later expressed surprise at this level of redundancy, one of the minute, doing a relatively sedate 320 miles an hour. Once they pilots explained that it had been necessary to ensure the bombs reached the mid-30,000-foot range, they cruised, maintaining a would be released at the chosen time: within the irst several sec- stacked-in-trail formation: the lead airplane lowest, followed by onds of January 19, 2017. The timing seemed so arbitrary that I the second airplane a little way back and slightly higher, followed asked about the reasoning behind it. My question was amateur- by the tail airplane in the same basic geometry. With the seats ish, and the pilot did not appreciate it. “I was not privy to those raised high, visibility from the cockpits was good. The seats were discussions,” he said. “I just go when they tell me to go.” extremely comfortable, and part of an elaborate ejection system. Crews are required to wear helmets and masks during phases The B-2s were going to Libya. The most expensive and capa- of light when ejection might be required—on takeof, landing, ble tool in the Air Force arsenal had just been deployed against and aerial refueling, and over hostile territory. For now the pilots a group of ighters in the desert, asleep in scattered locations removed the gear and put on Bose headsets. The ride was smooth across two camps. The plan was for the B-2s to ly 6,000 miles and above the weather, under winter stars and a waning moon. and drop a 500-pound bomb on every one of those ighters. Their course passed south of Chicago, north of New York, and across New England. Traic was light. The commander of the THE PREPARATIONS lead airplane was a slightly built captain in his early 30s with a HAD BEEN HUSHED: wife and an infant daughter at home. He probably should have FEW PEOPLE ON THE taken the opportunity to unstrap from his seat and stretch out in BASE, EVEN AMONG the back of the cockpit. The space there is occupied by a toilet, a THOSE ASSEMBLING microwave oven, and typically a couple of Styrofoam coolers con- AND LOADING taining food the pilots pack for themselves. It allows just enough THE BOMBS, KNEW room for an average-size man to lie down. Managing sleep on THAT THIS WAS long-duration lights is a crucial part of the job. Some crews bring SOMETHING OTHER a cot for the purpose, and others roll out a camping pad. For this THAN A TRAINING RUN. light, the commander didn’t even try. II. I’ll call him Scatter. He was lying his irst combat mission. He INTO THE had been preparing for it for 10 years. I can say this much about him: He grew up in Pittsburgh, graduated from high school in 2003, NIGHT and went to college in North Dakota to get a degree in aviation. He wanted to be an airline pilot. He had a cousin who had been an B-2 pilots make ighter pilots look like dandies. Their mission Army tank commander in Kosovo. His cousin said, “Hey, man, you requires them to ly straight and level, and to live the same way. should check out the military. I think you’d be good at it.” Scatter What passes for jauntiness among them is the use of the word jet joined the ROTC, enjoyed it, and received his Air Force commis- for the airplane and gas for the fuel. Sometimes they call them- sion upon graduation, in 2007. By then he had several commercial- selves drivers. They give one another nicknames. But that’s as pilot licenses. The Air Force sent him to pilot training in Texas for cute as it gets. two years and assigned him to ly B-52s out of Louisiana. He lew B-52s for the next three years, accumulating 900 hours of light The three jets that took of last January each weighed 336,500 time. In 2013 he transferred to the B-2, which he called a pretty pounds and carried more than 129,500 pounds of gas—enough, cool airplane, the varsity bomber, and one that, unlike the old- for instance, for them to get from Missouri to Maine and back fashioned, overcrewed B-52, involves its pilots fully in all aspects without aerial refueling. Immediately after takeof, the drivers of the light. There was a negative to the move as well: Because retracted the landing gear and switched on the autopilot; the three Whiteman had more than 100 B-2 pilots, and because 100 hours airplanes turned eastward and climbed at a gentle 3,000 feet a of maintenance were required for every hour of light, time at the controls was extremely limited—no more than 100 hours a year— and it could be a struggle to meet the minimum combat-readiness requirement of two flights a month. So Scatter, who had just emerged from intensive training at the Air Force Weapons School, considered himself lucky to have met the minimum, and then to have been chosen to command the lead ship that night. He was up past his bedtime, but not inclined to doze of. Over Maine, in the darkness, the planes joined up with four KC-135 tankers—one to fuel each of the three B-2s, and a spare to provide redundancy. The KC-135 is a four-engine jet, a derivative of the old Boeing 707. It carries a crew of three or four. These had lown to the intercept from bases as far away as California. Scatter led his light into a modest descent, to altitudes where the heavily laden B-2s would have more thrust available for maneuvering. The formation then split apart as each airplane approached its assigned tanker from behind and below. Aerial refueling is the most challenging piece of lying that B-2 pilots face. It is accom- plished entirely by hand, with the autopilot of, in all weather conditions, sometimes with both airplanes blacked out. It requires the B-2 to be held in an unusually restrictive position in THE ATLANTIC JULY/AUGUST 2018 47

РЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА \"What's News\" VK.COM/WSNWS relation to the tanker, and speciically to the boom that delivers convoy in which he happened to be leeing. Rebels captured and fuel through a door located on the top of the bomber, aft of the killed him. By then, ighting and air strikes had nearly destroyed cockpit and out of sight. Whoever came up with that design did Sirte. The long-sufering residents began rebuilding under the not have pilots’ needs much in mind. When I mentioned this to precarious protection of a militia with Islamist ties, while the rest Scatter, he shrugged it of. He said, “The airplane is very much of Libya descended into a welter of factions aspiring to national built to go into combat and be low-observable. It is not built to power. In 2014, soon after the Islamic State gained ground in make it easy on us. For us to ly in weather or even for us to ly Syria and Iraq, Libyan militants began declaring their allegiance in a national airspace system, I can’t even just tell my airplane to its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and his cause. By early 2015 to go to a ive-letter ix”—the worldwide navigational waypoints they were able to iniltrate Sirte, shift the aspirations of the mili- embedded in the databases of other aircraft—“I have to enter the tia members in place, and declare the town part of the blessed lat./long., because the airplane is designed to go bomb a country. caliphate. Militants from outside Libya joined them, until their It’s not designed to ly into LAX.” numbers in the city swelled to about 2,000. They imposed their FOR THE HANDFUL OF SURVIVORS, RUNNING FRANTIC ALLY, THE ORDEAL WAS NOT YET OVER. WITH THEIR HELLFIRE MISSILES, REAPER DRONES MOVED IN AND BEGAN PICKING OFF ANYONE TRYING TO GET AWAY. The B-2 is designed to fly into the maelstrom when Los version of Islamic law, leveled usurious taxes, and committed Angeles is burning and GPS signals have been jammed. It is various atrocities. They made propaganda videos of their heroics made to defeat the world’s most advanced air-defense sys- and posted them online. tems. In addition to its conventional navigational capabilities, it has autonomous systems that operate independently from In Washington this was seen as America’s problem. Ever any ground- or space-based transmitters. The primary one is since the disintegration of the Qaddafi regime, the Obama an inertial unit that slowly drifts, as inertial units do, but can administration had been struggling to invent a new Libyan be recalibrated in light by using a stellar navigation system state—one not quite to its taste, but complete at least with a that observes stars day and night, or alternatively by using the single capital and government. The solution settled on by the airplane’s synthetic-aperture radar to pick out ground features international community was an assembly that was founded in at thousands of locations worldwide, which are known to an air- late 2015 as the Government of National Accord and declared borne database. It is impressive what you can persuade yourself by foreign diplomats to be the sole legitimate executive author- to think you need once a supplier like Northrop perceives that ity in Libya, even though it could not control the capital and there is no limit to cost. much of Libya violently opposed it. But ighting a nuclear war is getting ahead of things. The In 2016, militia forces from the city of Misrata, apparently intended target now was a fractured country with no air defenses seeking legitimacy, declared their allegiance to the Govern- at a time when GPS satellites were functioning unimpeded, and ment of National Accord and with 6,000 ighters advanced to indeed would be guiding the bombs. The refueling took 15 min- retake Sirte from ISIS. They arrived in May and got bogged down utes. When it was over, the tanker crews went of to land some- in house-to-house ighting against die-hard militants holding where local and get some rest. Dawn was approaching. The B-2s strong positions. Overseeing the battle from afar was the U.S. climbed back to cruising altitude, and their crews ran a inal Africa Command, one of the Pentagon’s 10 joint-combat groups, operational check. It showed that every system and weapon in based in Stuttgart, Germany. Africa Command had a few Special all three airplanes was functioning correctly. Scatter cleared the Forces on the ground to observe and advise, as well as drones third B-2 to return to Missouri, and he led the light, now of two, over the city and a wealth of other resources as needed. The into the irst Atlantic crossing of his bombing career. drones were lown remotely by pilots in the United States. Early in the ight they were given authority to ire on individually speci- III. ied targets. This seems to have had little efect. In July 2016 a SQUIRTERS new commanding oicer arrived in Stuttgart, a Marine Corps general named Thomas D. Waldhauser. In August he ordered The origin of the mission was the NATO intervention in Libya an increase in air strikes, with carrier-based Marine Corps Har- in March 2011, during the Arab Spring—an initiative that Presi- rier jets and helicopter gunships joining in. Over the following dent Barack Obama later admitted was one of the worst of his few months, the U.S. carried out nearly 500 strikes. That may administration. The intervention meant that the United States seem like a lot, but these were pinpoint hits, and actually an exer- would be married to the confusion that followed the downfall of cise in restraint. President Obama had insisted on the need to the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddai. Qaddai came from the avoid civilian casualties. Speaking about Africa Command, an coastal town of Sirte, halfway between Tripoli and Benghazi. In observer at the Pentagon explained to me that it had faced the strongman style, he had spent decades building it into a monu- standard frustration of counterinsurgency campaigns: “They ment to himself. After he was driven from Tripoli, he retreated to didn’t know who was who in the zoo.” Gradually, however, ISIS Sirte, and for a few months made a stand, until rebels overran the was worn down and defeated. place. On October 20, 2011, an American drone strike stopped a Of the original 2,000 ISIS fighters, many had died, but a good number had managed to slip away, even though check- points had been set up around Sirte. Africa Command knew it. In the Air Force, escapees are called “squirters” because, rather than being crushed, they squirt out from the pressure of strikes. 48 JULY/AUGUST 2018 THE ATLANTIC