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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018 | 3

World
Legal maze adds to pain of Italy’s abused women
ROME
Law enforcement failures
keep victims silent, with
toll among Europe’s worst
BY GAIA PIANIGIANI
Married for 16 years, Antonietta
Gargiulo had tried desperately to keep
her abusive husband, a police officer, at
a distance. She detailed his violence to
family, friends, her parish priest and col-
leagues, who had seen him physically
attack her in front of the factory where
she worked.
She filed a lawsuit and got psycholo-
gists and social workers to assist her
two young daughters. She even re-
ported her husband’s abuse to the com-
mander of his Carabinieri station, ask-
ing for help and to take away his service
revolver, to no avail.
On a winter morning this year, her
husband, Luigi Capasso, shot her along
with their children before killing him-
self. Ms. Gargiulo, 39, survived three
gunshot wounds; the children, 8 and 13,
were killed.
The murders in Cisterna di Latina, an
ancient, rural town about 40 miles south
of Rome, briefly called national atten-
tion to a chronic, often neglected prob-
lem in Italy — the lack of an efficient,
comprehensive response to abuses
against women, starting with law en-
forcement agencies themselves.
Roughly 150 women a year are killed
in Italy by abusive partners, according
to Eures, an independent social and eco-
nomic research institute. It is one of the
highest tolls in Europe, ranking with
those in Germany and the United King-
dom although Italy’s population of about
60 million is smaller.
That toll has held steady despite the
work of women’s advocates to provide a
stronger safety net. In more than one-
third of the fatal cases in Italy, according
to Eures, the victims had already com-
plained to the police.
“When a woman tells her story, au-
thorities rarely believe her, so in the end
women stop speaking up,” said Lella
Paladino, president of Di.Re., a nation-
An abused mother of four at her home near Rome. She said she has been to court so many times that some have mistaken her for a lawyer.
wide advocacy group that seeks to end
violence against women.
“Police had taken Mr. Capasso’s gun
away years earlier, when he was under
investigation for fraud, but not because
of the domestic violence against his
wife,” she said. “That’s the gap in values
we are facing.”
Italy has ratified international con-
ventions on curbing violence against
women, but spotty application of the law
as well as cultural barriers lead many
abused women to stay silent.
The women who do raise their voices
are often ground up for years in Italy’s
infamously byzantine legal system and
countless deferments, while their part-
ners often threaten to sue them for defa-
mation, stalk them or continue to abuse
them.
For those reasons, all of the women in-
terviewed by The New York Times who
shared their stories of abuse did so only
on condition that their names not be
published.
One, a 45-year-old cafeteria worker
from a midsize town outside Rome, de-
scribed how she had been to court so of-
ten to deliver or pick up legal documents
that officials greeted her as a regular.
Sometimes she was even mistaken for a
lawyer, she said.
For seven years, she has been fight-
ing to have her husband kept at a dis-
tance from her and their four children,
who say their father has repeatedly sex-
ually abused them.
“Every day is a new fight,” she said,
speaking in the headquarters of the
NADIA SHIRA COHEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
women’s advocacy group in central
Rome that helped her. “I am Italian, but
before I got sucked into this spiral of vio-
lence, disbelief and snail-paced justice
system, I had no idea of what it was like,”
she said.
In a rage, her husband beat her while
their 3-year-old toddler clung to her leg,
she said. When she managed to call the
police, the officer asked her whether she
wasn’t simply arguing with her hus-
band. Women can wait up to two years to
see their cases discussed in court, living
in a limbo that can extend another three
to 10 years as they wait for a definitive
ruling.
In many cases, violence affects chil-
dren as well. The cafeteria worker lived
for seven months with her four children
in a shelter for abused women run by
nuns, protected by window bars and a
high gate, outside of which her husband,
a teacher, waited for them almost every
day. A judge allowed him to see their
children twice a week, although he had a
diagnosis of mental problems.
The children had to see the father on
Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and
also for several years had to attend the
summer camps he organized. But the re-
quired visits were halted last Septem-
ber, when their 13-year-old son physi-
cally attacked the father in front of the
school, screaming that he was a mon-
ster and should leave his sisters alone,
and three of the children said that their
father had groped them repeatedly and
forced the girls to kiss him on the lips.
“The phenomenon is not taken seri-
ously,” said Marcella Pirrone, a lawyer
and a pioneer activist in Italy for wom-
en’s rights. “Data are gathered by wom-
en’s associations and not by the central
government, and Italy has only 100 shel-
ters in a country of over 60 million peo-
ple. There should be six times as many.”
Italy had its last minister for equal op-
portunities in 2013; the ministry was
abolished and its officials have been re-
assigned, and policies to combat gender
violence or grant women’s rights and
equal pay were left with no central co-
ordination.
The current populist government, a
coalition led by two parties, the League
and the Five Star Movement, chose a
man for the downgraded position of un-
der secretary for equal opportunities.
Many women’s advocates lament a
lack of exemplary punishments for the
perpetrators of abuse in a country
where 22,000 women live in shelters.
“Policemen, social workers, judges
who should protect the women are often
unprepared,” Ms. Pirrone said. “Many
are marred by prejudice, but in general
there is a belief that anyone can deal
with these problems without any scien-
tific preparation. And this leads to inad-
equate answers to the women who seek
help.”

Unapologetic whale killer

REYKJAVIK, ICELAND
Icelander says hunting
is fine as long as their
numbers are sustainable
BY TRYGGVI ADALBJORNSSON
It was a whale sighting, but not the kind
the visitors expected. One summer day
off the coast of Iceland, on a calm sea, a
whaling crew towing freshly killed fin
whales chugged past a tourist boat.
Whale cruises are popular in Iceland,
and for good reason. There are plenty of
things to see — fin whales tend to stay
far offshore, but minke whales, hump-
backs, dolphins and porpoises are usu-
ally easier to find.
Commercial whaling, it turns out, is
not so popular among the whale-watch-
ing crowd. While some don’t object to
seeing dead whales on vacation, “most
people clearly despise it,” said Sigurlaug
Sigurdardottir, a whale-watching guide.
With that in mind, Kristjan Loftsson,
the man who runs the whaling operation
that was responsible for the dead
whales, had a suggestion for whale
watchers — like those tourists in 2015 —
who see his boats: “Just tell them to look
somewhere else. They can just turn
around and look the other way.”
Mr. Loftsson, 75, is the world’s last
commercial hunter of fin whales. He has
been denounced by environmental
groups, and his boats have been sunk by
activists, but his business is legal here
because Iceland doesn’t recognize the
international moratorium on commer-
cial whaling.
Though essentially an international
outcast, he is admired by some at home.
And even his most passionate critics
give him a measure of respect.
Robert Read, chief operating officer of
the British branch of Sea Shepherd, a
conservation group that has blocked
and harassed whaling ships at sea,
called Mr. Loftsson “quite a clever man.”
“If you ask him a question, he general-
ly will answer you, but he’ll pause and
think before he speaks,” Mr. Read said.
“That’s something that we don’t often
see.”
Mr. Loftsson likes to say that whale
blood runs in his veins.
He and his sister are the largest
shareholders in Hvalur, the whaling
business once run by their father.
(Hvalur, pronounced KVA-lur, is the Ice-
landic word for whale.)
They spent many of their childhood
summers at the company’s whaling sta-
tion. Mr. Loftsson watched as whales
were brought to shore and carved up by
hand. At age 13, he got a job helping out
on a boat, washing dishes and scrubbing
floors. Later, he worked as a deckhand.
In 1974, when Mr. Loftsson was 31, his fa-
BARA KRISTINSDOTTIR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Kristjan Loftsson, the world’s last com-
mercial hunter of fin whales.
ther died and he became head of the
company.
Today, Iceland and Norway are the
only countries that allow commercial
whaling. Japanese hunters operate un-
der a research permit issued by their
own government, and aboriginal sub-
sistence hunting takes place in a handful
of countries that include Canada, Green-
land, Russia and the United States.
Globally, fin whales are listed as en-
dangered by the International Union for
Conservation of Nature, and commer-
cial hunting of the species was halted in
Iceland for 20 years, though some
whales were taken under scientific per-
mits.
His business is legal because
Iceland doesn’t recognize the
international moratorium on
commercial whaling.
In 2006, the government allowed
hunting to resume. (The next year, an
assessment by the conservation union
found that populations in the North At-
lantic were not threatened. A 2015 sur-
vey estimated there were 40,000 fin
whales in the central North Atlantic.)
Iceland has come under steady inter-
national pressure to end whaling. In
2013, President Barack Obama called
for an end to the hunt. The following
year, the European Union led an inter-
national protest against Iceland’s whal-
ing.
So far, the government has stood its
ground. And the hunt has support in Ice-
land. Only a third of Icelanders sur-
veyed this year expressed some level of
disapproval of whaling.
Fin whales are almost the largest ani-
mals on earth; only blue whales are
longer and heavier. Scientists from Ice-
land’s Marine and Freshwater Research
Institute say as long as quotas are re-
spected, fin whales will remain abun-
dant in Icelandic waters.
For Mr. Loftsson and his supporters,
whaling is no different than agriculture
or fisheries. “If it’s sustainable, you
hunt,” he said.
His boats hunt with explosive-tipped
harpoons. The charge is designed to go
off inside the animal’s body. Sometimes,
a second shot is needed. Mr. Loftsson lik-
ened that to big game hunting, where an
elk doesn’t always die from the first bul-
let.
Ultimately, he said, the whales “give a
few jerks, and then they just sink.”
The dead whale is then secured to the
ship and taken to Iceland’s only whaling
station, in a fjord north of Reykjavik,
where it’s sliced up for meat. Most of it is
destined for Japan.
This summer, Iceland’s Ministry of
Fisheries has given Mr. Loftsson’s com-
pany permission to hunt 238 fin whales.
It’s unclear whether the whaling op-
eration is profitable. Mr. Loftsson said it
was generally doing well, although re-
starting whaling after the long hiatus
had been costly. He also described Japa-
nese food safety procedures as a huge
hurdle. He declined to cite numbers.
Mr. Loftsson said he had also had
problems moving his product because
shipping companies were reluctant to
carry whale meat.
One of his projects is to develop a
freeze-dried whale powder that could be
sprinkled on cereal as an iron supple-
ment. He called the idea “exciting as
hell” but acknowledged that the powder
could be hard to market.
Whether or not the whaling operation
is making money (the company has held
investments in other businesses like
mainstream commercial fishing), Mr.
Loftsson is clearly a successful busi-
nessman.
Public records show that he was as-
sessed the equivalent of roughly $2.8
million in taxes in 2017, pointing to a sub-
stantial level of income for that year.
He also clearly relishes the life.
When he goes to the whaling station,
he stays in a World War II-era hut left by
Allied forces. It’s nice in the pouring
rain, he said, hearing the drops pound-
ing on the corrugated metal roof.
“I’m there a lot,” he said of the station,
though he acknowledged that he doesn’t
do much more than “see what’s going
on, get fresh air in the lungs and that
kind of thing.”
Still, considering the headaches
around his business, is fresh air and the RARE AND MAGNIFICENT JEWELS
sound of rain worth the trouble? Would-
n’t it be easier to do something else? LONDON GENEVA HONG KONG
“Sure, you can do anything, but why
should you stop doing this?” he said. Tel: +44 (0)20 7290 1536 moussaieff-jewellers.com info@moussaieff-jewellers.com
“There’s nothing wrong with this.”
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018 | 9

opinion

A halting progress on abortion rights

A.G. SULZBERGER, Publisher
Why had there been no similar progress marriage itself as too establishment. class divides. They canvassed poor
Javier Corrales on abortion rights? But the decision to prioritize same- neighborhoods to make less-affluent
DEAN BAQUET, Executive Editor MARK THOMPSON, Chief Executive Officer Abortion in Argentina remains re- sex marriage ended up unifying the women feel empowered to demand
JOSEPH KAHN, Managing Editor STEPHEN DUNBAR-JOHNSON, President, International stricted to cases of rape or medical movement. L.G.B.T. activists realized change. And they carried out cam-
TOM BODKIN, Creative Director JEAN-CHRISTOPHE DEMARTA, Senior V.P., Global Advertising threats to a woman’s life. The abortion- that it was an issue that would bring paigns to encourage seemingly conser-
SUZANNE DALEY, Associate Editor ACHILLES TSALTAS, V.P., International Conferences Following a monthslong, contentious rights cause in Argentina is up against people together behind a bigger cause: vative middle-class women to recognize
CHARLOTTE GORDON, V.P., International Consumer Marketing debate, the Argentine Senate rejected a the same forces that were blocking equal protection before the law. Once the double standard of publicly appear-
JAMES BENNET, Editorial Page Editor HELEN KONSTANTOPOULOS, V.P., International Circulation bill in the early hours of Thursday morn- L.G.B.T. rights in the 2000s: religion, L.G.B.T. leaders framed the issue as one ing anti-abortion while privately acting
JAMES DAO, Deputy Editorial Page Editor HELENA PHUA, Executive V.P., Asia-Pacific ing to expand abortion rights. It was a conservatism, patriarchy and misogy- of equality, internal divisions within the pro-choice. They encouraged them to
KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Deputy Editorial Page Editor SUZANNE YVERNÈS, International Chief Financial Officer
setback for feminists. ny. movement lessened. More unity gave reveal that they too would have under-
One could marvel at the political Some people argue that the battle for way to more political force. ground abortions if needed; they con-
resilience of Argentina’s conservatives, abortion rights is harder than the one Feminist leaders in the past few years vinced many women that it’s unfair for
but I prefer to admire how close femi- for same-sex marriage. There is some finally started to address divisions them to have that option and deny it to
nists came to achieving success. truth to this. among women. As poor women.
This was the first time, after many Anti-abortion advocates have suc- Let’s admire the political scientist Just as L.G.B.T. groups succeeded in
TOUGHER ON RUSSIA — DESPITE TRUMP tries, that abortion-rights activists
succeeded in getting Congress to con-
ceeded in casting the abortion-rights
side as intent on “killing innocent lives,”
how close Mala Htun has ex-
plained, in Latin
framing same-sex marriage as an issue
of equality before the law, women’s
sider a bill. They even won support for which of course sounds abominable.
feminists in America, women’s movements succeeded in framing abor-
It is difficult to decide whether to welcome or wonder Argentina
The president about the new sanctions imposed on Russia, in this
the bill in the lower chamber. In the They have effectively called abortion views of abortion tion as an issue of equality, but this time
process, they mobilized some of the restrictions necessary to save the life of came to have two compo- across classes. This lessened divisions
holds chummy case a ban on export of anything with a potential mili- largest street demonstrations ever in the fetus and the life of the mother. It is achieving nents: attitudinal and among women.
meetings with tary use, announced by the State Department on the country in favor of a cause that only difficult to fight this framing. success. class. Feminists in Argentina also learned
Vladimir Wednesday. a decade ago was taboo. But the problem for the abortion- The attitudinal from L.G.B.T. groups the importance of
How did Argentine feminists get this rights movement has had to do with component is that outreach to conservative groups. Select-
Putin, while Certainly Vladimir Putin’s Russia is asking for pun- far? In many ways, by incorporating strategy beyond framing the debate. Up there are anti-abortion women on the ing marriage equality as a priority
his administra- ishment when his agents use a chemical weapon lessons from their less-visible partners: until a few years ago, feminists lacked left, which has meant that forming a forced L.G.B.T. groups to make argu-
tion imposes against a double agent, brazenly meddle in Western L.G.B.T. activists. strategies to address divisions within strong abortion-rights coalition has ments that appealed to conservative
When Argentina approved same-sex their constituency and to reach out to been more complicated than simply ears. The desire to have a stable and
new sanctions. elections, cheat in international sports, ruthlessly
marriage in 2010, the country instantly outside groups. corralling the left. monogamous union under the rule of
ravage Ukrainian territory or violate human rights. became a world champion of L.G.B.T. L.G.B.T. activists in Argentina over- The class component is that wealthier law appeals to patriarchs and neoliber-
All these have drawn a dizzying barrage of sanc- rights. Argentina was the first country came similar challenges in the 2000s. women have the option and means to als alike.
tions from the United States, the European Union and in Latin America to adopt such a law. A Back then, initially, the idea of same-sex get safe abortions underground or Feminists also began to talk more
slew of impressive L.G.B.T. laws fol- marriage divided an already frag- abroad. For them, the abortion ban about how criminalization of abortion,
their Western allies, ranging from asset freezes and lowed in parenting, gender parity and mented L.G.B.T. community, with some doesn’t matter. They can publicly ap- rather than suppress demand, only
travel bans to a broad variety of trade embargoes and transgender rights. people preferring to prioritize narrow pear anti-abortion but privately know encourages underground abortions.
diplomatic expulsions. Another set of sanctions, these But with this progress, Argentina also policy-oriented challenges — such as that abortion is available to them. They emphasized that underground
over Russian meddling in United States elections, is became the focus of more attention for labor discrimination, hate crimes and Argentine feminists did impressive abortions increase medical complica-
its regressive laws restricting abortion. health services — while others saw work to bridge these ideological and tions and thus hospitalizations, which is
making its way through Congress. costly for the state. They adopted the
The sanctions have hurt the Russian economy. After slogan “Legal abortion prevents
the latest ones were announced on Wednesday, Rus- deaths,” which cleverly turns the abor-
tion-rights position into a pro-life stand.
sia’s currency and stock markets promptly fell. Yet the Women’s movements did more than
Western actions have not been demonstratively suc- just learn from allies. They have a long
cessful in changing Russia’s behavior. On the contrary, history of innovation. Their highly
Mr. Putin has responded to every new blow with ever original acts of public shaming during
the dictatorship (1976 to 1983) helped
more defiant charges that the West is out to get Russia bring down the junta. Their successful
and undermine its inherent greatness, as his press lobbying under democratic rule yielded
officers did last week. in 1991 the first ever quota law in Latin
America, which forced parties to in-
Mr. Putin is assisted in his claims by the bizarre
crease female representation in Con-
divide between Mr. Trump and his administration on gress. And in 2015, they started a highly
Russia. What is the message to Russia when Mr. effective campaign against gender
Trump holds chummy secret meetings with Mr. Putin violence (#NiUnaMenos), which mobi-
lized young people of all sexual orienta-
and advocates letting Russia back into the Group of 7, tions. These innovations obviously
and three and a half weeks later his government tight- paved the way for their progress today.
ens the screws on Russia? Mr. Putin’s spokesman may It is also true that progress is more
be speaking a rare truth when he complains that the than just the result of strategy. It also
depends on structural factors. Despite
United States “is quite an unpredictable participant in national pride over Pope Francis, who is
international affairs.” Argentine, the Catholic Church in Ar-
In fact, the sanctions announced Wednesday should gentina continues to decline in terms of
members and reputation. And both
not have been unpredictable. They follow a 1991 law
President Trump and the #MeToo
requiring sanctions against any country that uses movement have galvanized feminist
chemical or biological weapons. The administration movements worldwide, including in
should have imposed them months ago. Argentina. Domestic and international
opportunities have never been more
Still, there is a value in demonstrating to Mr. Putin favorable.
and his band that however friendly Mr. Trump may But opportunity alone does not bring
seem, or whatever hold Mr. Putin may have on Mr. about change. Opportunity needs to be
Trump, the United States is not prepared to condone seized. Despite the outcome in the
Senate, the women’s movement in
Russia’s aggression or meddling. That Washington is Argentina has made great progress.
continuing to punish Russia, despite anything Mr. This is a testament to its own efforts —
Trump says or does, may also deter European leaders which includes the open exchange of
ideas between the movement and its
leaning toward lifting sanctions, like those in Hungary
L.G.B.T. allies.
and Italy, from rushing to do so.
Yet sanctions are a potent weapon whose effective- JAVIER CORRALES is the author, most
ness is diminished when they are not backed by united EITAN ABRAMOVICH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
recently, of “Fixing Democracy: Why
Constitutional Change Often Fails to
resolve. The discord in the United States, or in Europe, Protesters outside the National Congress in Buenos Aires on Thursday after senators rejected a bill to legalize abortion. Enhance Democracy in Latin America.”
allows Mr. Putin to claim that Western penalties are
the result not of anything Russia did, but of an internal
dispute between Western hawks and doves, between
those who would do anything to prevent Russia from
being great and those who seek friendly relations with
an important nation.
Mr. Putin may even believe this, following the cyni-
cal Soviet view of international politics instilled in him
Are we all ‘harmless torturers’ now?
are on — probably are one, too. after all. There is abundant evidence sions — makes this condemnation that
in his K.G.B. years as a vicious game of thrones in Paul Bloom Parfit’s scenario unfolds all the time from laboratory studies and from real much easier. As our Yale colleague
which the West’s concern for human rights or rules Matthew Jordan on social media. Someone writes some- life that we wish to see immoral agents Molly Crockett put it in an article re-
thing ugly about you on Facebook; get their comeuppance. And this is cently, “If moral outrage is a fire, is the
are just cynical weapons to be deployed when needed.
depending on your relationship with grounded in sound evolutionary logic: If internet like gasoline?”
Meddling in American and European politics is a di- that person, it may or may not be per- we weren’t disposed to punish or ex- There is also a system of reward built
rect product of that worldview. There is a dial in front of you, and if you sonally hurtful, but nobody notices it, clude bad actors, there would be no cost into online shaming. In an essay at
Sanctions may not persuade Mr. Putin or his follow- turn it, a stranger who is in mild pain and so it’s not a big deal. But if a day to being a bad actor, and cooperative Quilette, “I Was the Mob Until the Mob
from being shocked will experience a later it has a thousand likes and several societies couldn’t get off the ground. Came for Me,” a self-described former
ers that the world, or at least the West, really does get tiny increase in the amount of the shock, hundred mocking comments, you might There is also a sort of social credit that social justice warrior writing under the
angry when he violates elemental rules of interna- so slight that he doesn’t even notice it. well be crushed. Even though any par- comes with being seen as a moralistic pseudonym Barrett Wilson described
tional behavior, as when Russia uses lethal chemical You turn it and leave. And then hun- ticular comment on its own may have punisher; we want to show off our good- the thrill he felt in his mobbing days:
weapons abroad, incites violence in an independent dreds of people go up to the dial and caused you little or no pain, the aggre- ness to others, to signal our virtue. We “Every time I would call someone racist
each also turns it, so that eventually the gate effect is far more severe. are more likely to punish when others or sexist, I would get a rush. That rush
neighbor, seizes foreign territory, cheats in the victim is screaming in agony. In his 2015 book, “So You’ve Been are watching, and there is evidence that would then be reaffirmed and sustained
Olympic Games, murders opponents or uses cyber- Did you do anything wrong? Derek Publicly Shamed,” Jon Ronson explored third parties think by the stars, hearts and thumbs-up that
weapons to interfere in foreign elections. He is even Parfit, the influential British philoso- the effects of internet mobbing, includ- In the age more highly of — and constitute the nickels and dimes of
pher who died in January 2017, called ing the story of a woman whose ironic of online are more likely to social media validation.”
less likely to be persuaded when he believes he has a
this the case of the Harmless Torturer. tweet about white privilege went terri- later trust — those But isn’t this death by a thousand cuts
kindred, or at least malleable, spirit in the White Parfit first considered a simpler sce- bly wrong, generating tens of thousands
shaming, we who punish bad a good thing? If it were Hitler, wouldn’t
House, and hopes he can manipulate Americans to nario in which a thousand torturers of angry tweets, leading her to lose her should push actors versus those you be right to let him have it? Yes — but
each turn the dial a thousand times on job and go into hiding. Since then, the ourselves to who sit back and do the problem is that when we are infused
elect more of the same.
their own victim. This is plainly terrible. mob has been busy: its focus has turned consider its nothing. with moral outrage, acting as part of a
What could persuade Mr. Putin is the certainty that But then he explores a contrasting case to a dentist who killed a lion, a series of collective Moral and social crowd and operating in a virtual world
some behaviors carry an inevitable and heavy cost. where each of the torturers turns a dial a white women who without apparent consequences. motivations are hard with no fixed system of evaluation, law
The Russians must see that any respite from sanctions thousand times — each turn shocking a cause called the police on black people, a to disentangle in the or justice, all our enemies are Hitler.
depends on them, and not on the unpredictable resi- different one of the thousand victims. left-wing professor who asked her real world. When a There can easily be, as Ronson puts it, a
The end result is the same; a thousand friends to expel a journalist from a philosopher — Bryan “disconnect between the severity of the
dent of the White House or a few populist leaders in people in agony. And yet morally it feels protest, and many many others. W. Van Norden, writing for The Stone — crime and the gleeful savagery of the
Europe. different, since nobody, individually, When we think of the savagery of says, “Like most Americans, I sponta- punishment.”
The first of the new sanctions, which were imposed caused any real harm to any single social media, we often think of awful neously cheered when I saw the white Certainly, public shaming can have
individual. individual behavior — death threats and nationalist Richard Spencer punched in positive effects; sometimes the angry
under the Chemical and Biological Weapons Control This seems like the sort of clever rape threats; the release of personal the face during an interview,” it is hard mob gets it right — punching up and
and Warfare Elimination Act, goes into effect on Aug. technical example that philosophers information, including home addresses to tell how much of this is a report of hitting the right target. But Harmless
22; after that, Russia has three months to prove that it love — among other things, it’s a chal- and the locations of the victim’s chil- genuine pleasure at a racist getting his Torturers can just as easily swarm the
is no longer using chemical weapons. If it fails, far lenge to a utilitarian view in which the dren; vicious lies; and the like. Harm- just deserts and how much of it is the weak; the mobbing can be based on lies
wrongness of an act is reduced to its less Torturers never go that far; we just desire to be seen as anti-racist to an and confusions or ignorantly encour-
tougher measures are called for. consequences — but one with no actual like, retweet and add the occasional approving audience. If the conscious aged by powerful celebrities and poli-
This would be a good time for Mr. Trump to declare real-world relevance. But the world has clever remark. But there are millions of motivation for our condemnation is ticians, including, notably, the current
that he is fully behind his State Department and Na- changed since Parfit published his us, and we’re all turning the dial. mostly signaling, the idea of making our president.
scenario in 1986. Today, in 2018, the two Parfit never tells us what motivates victims suffer might never even occur to The Harmless Torturer effect isn’t
tional Security Council in demanding an accounting
authors of this article are Harmless the torturers in his thought experiment, us. And the ease with which we can limited to social media; we can also see
from Russia. An administration divided against itself Torturers, and you — regardless of but there are a lot of considerations in express moral outrage online — in most the effects of aggregation when it comes
only makes a mockery of sanctions. which side of any particular issue you everyday life. We are moral animals, cases without any real world repercus- BLOOM, PAGE 10

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018 | 11

Business
The prophet of Turkey’s financial crisis
Lira’s crash has surprised
many, except the economist
who foresaw it years ago
BY LANDON THOMAS JR.
For the last seven years, Tim Lee has
been warning that a financial crisis in
Turkey would set off a wider calamity in
global markets.
Just about nobody listened — until
now.
A plunge in the Turkish currency, the
lira, and the prospect that the country
might soon need a bailout has caused an
investor exodus in Turkey, one that
gathered steam on Friday as the cur-
rency dropped as much as 16 percent.
Relative to the dollar, the lira is now
down 70 percent this year; one dollar
buys 6.4 lira, the most ever.
There are signs of the rout spreading
beyond Turkey. The stock prices of Eu-
ropean banks, which have been big lend-
ers to their Turkish counterparts,
dropped sharply on Friday, with invest-
ors worried that a wave of corporate
bankruptcies in Turkey would lead to a
banking bust in the country. The curren-
cies of China, Brazil and Mexico also
weakened. And in the United States, ma-
jor stock market indexes fell more than 1
percent before recovering slightly.
Suddenly, Mr. Lee’s largely ignored
prophecy — that a decade of gorging on
cheap foreign debt by Turkish compa-
nies and real estate developers would
end badly, not just for Turkey but for the
world — does not seem so outlandish.
“Turkey is the canary in the coal
mine,” Mr. Lee said Friday. “We are go-
ing to have another crash that will be
worse than 2008 in certain ways.”
This is not a widely held view. United
States stock markets remain near their
highs. Anxiety about trade wars with
China and Europe has been largely cast
aside. Even financial markets in devel-
oping countries, which tend to swoon in
unison when one of their peers im-
plodes, recently have been doing well.
Mr. Lee, 58, made his initial call — that
Turkey was in deep financial trouble —
in 2011.
A soft-spoken Englishman who es-
chews financial television and social
“Turkey is the canary in the coal mine,” said the economist Tim Lee. “We are going to have another crash that will be worse than 2008 in certain ways.”
media, Mr. Lee started writing an in-
vestment newsletter in 2003 after two
decades working as an economist for
the British mutual fund company GT
Management.
He writes the newsletter, called
piEconomics, from a Greenwich, Conn.,
office where he now works alone. The
publication is simple: 10 pages of dense
text supplemented with the occasional
chart. His subscribers are a small clus-
ter of European investment funds.
Toward the end of 2011, Mr. Lee pub-
lished an installment of the newsletter
in which he predicted that Turkey would
need a $100 billion bailout.
At the time, central banks all over the
world were pumping money into their
economies, which were struggling to re-
cuperate from the financial crisis.
Mr. Lee noticed that Turkish banks
were borrowing in dollars to make loans
to fast-growing Turkish companies. He
also saw that, over all, Turkey’s econ-
omy was growing more reliant on fi-
nancing from foreign investors. It
struck him as similar to what had hap-
pened to Thailand in the years before
the Asian financial crisis in 1997.
In his monthly notes to investors, he
kept returning to the topic of Turkey and
the risks there.
In a 2013 newsletter, he got more spe-
cific: The lira, then trading at 1.9 to the
dollar, would crater to 7.2.
At the time, the Turkish economy was
NICK HAGEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
humming. The odds of a blowup looked
remote. The idea of the lira ever trading
at 7.2 seemed ludicrous. It was easy for
people to ignore Mr. Lee’s fantastical-
sounding warning.
But Mr. Lee was onto something, even
if his prediction was a half-decade pre-
mature. Over the next five years, the
economic situation in Turkey deterio-
rated, as he had anticipated.
One side effect of having trillions of
dollars of new money sloshing around
courtesy of central banks was that it be-
came much easier for governments and
companies in hot economies like Tur-
key’s to borrow money in dollars — as
opposed to their own currencies — to fi-
nance their investments or other
growth plans.
Today, according to the Institute of In-
ternational Finance, a banking trade
group, corporate debt in foreign curren-
cies is $5.5 trillion, the most ever.
And Turkey relies on such foreign-
currency debt more than any other ma-
jor emerging market. Corporate, finan-
cial and other debt denominated in for-
eign currencies, mostly dollars, repre-
sents about 70 percent of Turkey’s econ-
omy, according to the Institute of
International Finance. Turkish compa-
nies and real estate developers used
borrowed dollars to pay for factories,
shopping malls and the skyscrapers
that define the Istanbul skyline.
The threat is that as the lira loses val-
ue, it becomes more expensive for Turk-
ish companies to repay their dollar-de-
nominated loans. Indeed, a growing
number of companies in Turkey already
have said they cannot repay these loans.
“Companies there just ignored all the
risks and kept borrowing in dollars,” Mr.
Lee said.
And that has the potential to spread
far and wide. American investors, for
example, own nearly 25 percent of out-
standing Turkish bonds and more than
half of publicly traded Turkish stocks,
according to the Institute of Interna-
tional Finance.
Mr. Lee these days is far from the only
one warning about the Turkish economy
and financial system.
The thing that really worries him and
other bearish investors is that Turkey
could be a signal for what lies ahead for
assets and economies that were inflated
by cheap debt.
“I think that most people have not
thought through the broader implica-
tions of what is happening in Turkey,”
said Justin Leverenz, who manages the
Oppenheimer Developing Markets
Fund, the largest of its kind in the United
States. “I could see global growth being
much weaker than people think.” Brac-
ing for stressful times ahead, Mr. Lev-
erenz recently reduced the fund’s expo-
sure to Turkey to nearly zero.

Fidelity accelerates price war

Investing giant offers
2 no-fee funds as ‘bait’
to attract new clients
BY TARA SIEGEL BERNARD
Investing just became even cheaper —
free, actually.
Fidelity introduced two new index
mutual funds recently that have no fees
whatsoever, taking the democratization
of investing to a whole new level. Ameri-
can consumers now have access to do-
mestic and international stock markets
without any hurdles, including no re-
quired minimum investment amount.
The move continues an industry trend
toward lower-cost investing, with sev-
eral giant firms — Fidelity, Schwab and
Vanguard among them — all but daring
one another to push their already rock-
bottom fees even lower.
But when companies start to dangle
free offers, one can’t help but ask:
What’s the catch?
that offer fatter profit margins. And giv-
en its size, the company can afford to sell
no-fee funds below cost.
“They’re bait,” Jeffrey Ptak, an ana-
lyst with Morningstar, said of the new
funds.
The good news is that the bait — Fi-
delity Zero Total Market Index Fund and
Fidelity Zero International Index Fund
— is as advertised: There are no hidden
fees, and costs are not simply waived
temporarily. (The funds track indexes
created by Fidelity.)
“It is not a rebate, it is not temporary,
it is not a promotional offer,” Kathy Mur-
phy, president of Fidelity’s personal in-
vesting business, said. “It is perma-
nent.”
Beyond the free funds, Fidelity has in-
troduced other changes that make it
easier and cheaper to invest. It has elim-
inated its minimum investment require-
ments for opening brokerage accounts
(previously $2,500), 529 college savings
plans and the vast majority of its in-
dexed mutual funds when bought
through Fidelity.
invested in these funds, according to Fi-
delity, that translates to a reduction of
roughly 35 percent, with some funds
costing as little as 0.015 percent of as-
sets, or a penny and a half for every $100
invested.
Fidelity’s latest changes come after
another consumer-friendly move: The
company significantly expanded the
number of commission-free exchange-
traded funds available on its platform, to
265 from 95. (Generally speaking,
E.T.F.s are similar to index funds but
trade like stocks on an exchange, mean-
ing investors must pay commissions
whenever they buy or sell shares, which
also carry underlying investment fees).
Vanguard also recently expanded its
stable of commission-free E.T.F.s.
Lowering costs and easing access to
investing is a universal good for con-
sumers. But analysts and others who
work in the industry said they expected
Fidelity would try to sell more of its
other wares — at least one of them prob-
ably in the form of advice. That is, the
company may try to get investors to pay
te in er

It’s simple, analysts said. If Fidelity The company has also cut prices on a separate fee to manage their money or
ar eth ov

can lure investors in with a promise of nearly two dozen existing stock and perhaps try to entice them aboard its
r. g

no fees, it is in a position to sell other bond index funds, so that all investors digital-investing platform, Fidelity Go,
sm m le

products and services — a money-mar- now have access to its lowest-priced which charges 0.35 percent of assets to-
so uzz

ket account, say, or financial advice — class of fund shares. For people already tal, including investment costs.
None of that is necessarily bad, if the
P

advice is needed, the financial adviser is

MINH UONG/THE NEW YORK TIMES
truly acting in the investor’s best inter-
est (not, for example, motivated by a
push to meet sales goals) and any fees
are reasonable. But as some costs come
down, the possibility of a sales pitch in
other areas is something to watch for.
Investors have flocked to lower-cost
index funds, which generally focus on a
selection of investments that track the
stock or bond markets (or segments of
them). Over time, index funds tend to
outperform actively managed mutual
funds that hold investments handpicked
by humans, in part because the active
funds often cost significantly more.
The average index fund costs 0.52
percent of assets, compared with .87
percent of assets for actively managed
mutual funds, according to a Morn-
ingstar analysis, which excluded funds
that carry sales charges in addition to
the underlying cost of the investment.
The easiest part of the world’s greatest
Fidelity introduced its latest price crossword is saving 50%. The challenge
cuts as it grapples with broader chal- is deciding whether to choose today’s
lenges to its mutual fund business. In- puzzle, select from our endless archive
vestors have been fleeing its actively or quickly solve a Mini. So subscribe
today, save half and start solving.
managed funds in favor of cheaper in-
dex funds.
The company says on its website that
its index funds are now cheaper than
Vanguard’s — “There’s no match for Fi-
Crossword
delity in index investing — not even Save 50% when you subscribe now.
Vanguard.” nytimes.com/solvenow
Vanguard, the indexing pioneer, has
long been heralded as the lowest-cost
provider, and Morningstar says that,
over all, it still holds the crown when
comparing its universe of actively man-
aged and index funds with Fidelity’s to-
tal collection of funds.

12 | MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018
business
They love Harley-Davidson but want to leave it
STURGIS, S.D.
Company decision has put
it at odds with its fans,
who are also fans of Trump
BY ALAN RAPPEPORT
Gary Rathbun rumbled into South Da-
kota to attend the United States’ pre-em-
inent gathering of motorcycle enthusi-
asts atop his Harley-Davidson, a 2009
Ultra Classic that brought him 800 miles
from Idaho. It is the 40th Harley he has
owned. It will also likely be his last.
Like many of Harley’s most loyal
customers, Mr. Rathbun was enraged by
the company’s announcement this sum-
mer that, because of the Trump adminis-
tration’s trade fight, it would begin man-
ufacturing the bikes it sells in Europe
outside the United States.
His anger echoed that of President
Trump, whose public denouncement of
Harley’s decision has put one of the
country’s most iconic brands in the un-
comfortable position of clashing with a
president who is immensely popular
with most of its customers.
“I’m riding my last Harley,” said Mr.
Rathbun, 67, a retired truck driver
whose bike rally essentials included a
steel knife nestled in his belt, a saddle
bag stuffed with a Ruger pistol and a
small bottle of Jack Daniel’s cinnamon
whiskey. “It was American made, and
that’s why we stood behind them.”
Harley took a public relations risk to
protect its bottom line when it said it
would skirt European Union tariffs
aimed directly at the industry in retalia-
tion for Mr. Trump’s steel and aluminum
levies. Rather than eat the cost of the
tariffs or raise prices on the bikes it sells
in Europe by $2,200, the company said it
would move some production overseas.
In a warning to other companies that
might follow suit, Mr. Trump described
Harley’s decision as an act of corporate
treason, declaring in a Twitter post in
June: “If they move, watch, it will be the
beginning of the end — they surren-
dered, they quit!”
It was a sentiment shared by many of
the hundreds of thousands of motor-
cycle enthusiasts who converged last
week in the Black Hills of South Dakota,
most of whom developed a relationship
with their Harleys well before Mr.
Trump became president. Still, as
leather-clad baby boomers revved en-
gines, drank beer and swayed to classic
rock ballads, Mr. Trump’s influence was
palpable.
Like Mr. Trump, Gary Panapinto, 63, a
machinist from Illinois, had doubts
about Harley’s true intentions, believing
that the company was planning to move
the bulk of its bike production out of the
United States, and, like Mr. Trump has
intimated, he suggested that Americans
would be forced to buy a product that
was made overseas. While Mr. Trump
has fanned that perception, Harley has
said it would shift production only for
bikes it sells in Europe and that Ameri-
can bikes would still be made in the
United States.
“They need to keep them here in the
United States, especially if they’re going
to sell them here,” Mr. Panapinto said. “I
think Trump is just trying to protect jobs
in the U.S.”
Oliver Lapointe, a retiree from New
Hampshire who rides less-expensive
Japanese bikes, said he used to aspire to
own a Harley but could never afford one.
Now he thinks they are not worth it be-
cause they are filled with foreign-made
parts and, he said, increasingly made
overseas. Like several Trump adminis-
tration officials, he accused the com-
pany of using the tariffs to justify a deci-
sion that it already had in mind.
“They’re always advertising that
they’re made in America, so I don’t think
they should do it,” Mr. Lapointe, 70, said.
“They’re greedy.”
The company declined to comment,
but it pointed to a July interview in
which its chief executive, Matthew Lev-
Inside Twitter’s struggle over what should warrant a ban
SAN FRANCISCO
BY CECILIA KANG
AND KATE CONGER
With his arms folded, Jack Dorsey
paced back and forth in a conference
room at Twitter’s headquarters on Fri-
day afternoon.
Offering a rare look inside one of the
social media company’s policy meet-
ings, the Twitter chief executive gath-
ered with 18 colleagues, including the
safety team, to debate ways to make the
social media service safer for its users.
The discussion quickly turned to how to
rid the site of “dehumanizing” speech,
even if it did not violate Twitter’s rules,
which forbid direct threats of violence
and some forms of hate speech but not
deception or misinformation.
Twitter asked that members of its
safety team not be identified, for fear of
them becoming targeted by internet
trolls. “Please bear with me,” said one
team member at the meeting. “This is
incredibly complex.”
For about an hour, the group tried to
get a handle on what constituted dehu-
manizing speech.
At one point, Mr. Dorsey wondered if
there was a technology solution. There
Clockwise from top: A jacket in the Sturgis Motorcycle Museum in Sturgis, S.D.; signs outside of the Ponderosa Pines Inn and Cabins in Lead, S.D.; an antique motorcycle in the
museum; a stand selling Trump memorabilia; riding in the Buffalo Chip campground near Sturgis; watching a former Army parachutist carrying a giant American flag.
atich, defended the decision. He denied
that he wanted to shift its manufactur-
ing, noting that it would not take up to 18
months to execute the plan if it were in
the cards all along. “We’ve worked very
hard to be apolitical in how we approach
was no agreement on an answer.
The discussion capped a difficult
week for Twitter. For the previous five
days, the company has been embroiled
in internal conversations about how to
evolve and explain its policies for what
can and cannot be posted on its site. The
debates were urgent, fueled by criticism
against Twitter for its lack of action
against the posts from the far-right con-
spiracy site Infowars and its creator,
Alex Jones.
While Apple, Facebook and Google’s
YouTube had earlier in the week purged
videos and podcasts from Mr. Jones and
Infowars — which have regularly
spread falsehoods, including that the
Sandy Hook school shooting was a hoax
— Twitter let the content remain on its
site. In a string of tweets on Tuesday, Mr.
Dorsey said Twitter would not ban Mr.
Jones or Infowars, because they had not
violated the company’s rules.
In the aftermath, many of Twitter’s
users and own employees heaped ire on
Mr. Dorsey and the company. (Sample
comments included “jaw dropping” and
“pathetic.”) Several journalists also
picked apart Twitter’s decision to leave
up the posts from Mr. Jones and In-
fowars, pointing to examples of the con-
tent that appeared to violate the compa-
ny’s policies.
our business and our consumers every-
where in the world,” he said. “We have to
do what we have to do based on the facts
and circumstances before us, and we’re
doing that.”
Some hard-core Trump supporters
On Friday, to provide more transpar-
ency about its decision making, Twitter
invited two New York Times reporters
to attend the policy meeting. During the
one-hour gathering, a picture emerged
of a 12-year-old company still struggling
to keep up with the complicated de-
mands of being an open and neutral
communications platform that brings
together world leaders, celebrities, jour-
nalists, political activists and conspir-
acy theorists.
Even settling on a definition of dehu-
manizing speech was not easy. By the
meeting’s end, Mr. Dorsey and his exec-
utives had agreed to draft a policy about
dehumanizing speech and open it to the
public for their comments.
In an interview after the meeting, Mr.
Dorsey, 41, said he was “O.K. with people
not agreeing” with his decision to keep
Mr. Jones’s account live.
“I don’t see this as an end point,” he
said. “I see this as maintaining integrity
with what we put out there and not doing
random one-off interpretations.”
But Mr. Dorsey also said that while
Twitter’s longtime guiding principle has
been free expression, the company is
now discussing “that safety should
come first.” He added, “That’s a conver-
sation we need to have.” He said he was
thinking deeply about human rights law
said they understood the economic ra-
tionale behind Harley’s decision. Few
complex machines are fully sourced and
assembled in the United States these
days, and even the riders who are de-
voted to the ideal of a fully American-
JESSE GRANT/GETTY IMAGES FOR CASH APP
Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twit-
ter, which has been having an internal
debate over “dehumanizing” speech.
and listening to audiobooks on speech
and expression.
Karen Kornbluh, a senior fellow of
digital policy at the Council on Foreign
Relations, said Mr. Dorsey had mishan-
dled the Infowars situation but added
that dealing with matters of free speech
on social media is highly complex.
“There is no due process, no transpar-
ency, no case law and no expertise on
these very complicated legal and social
questions behind these decisions,” she
said.
Just over a week ago, debates around
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
PHOTOGRAPHS BY BENJAMIN RASMUSSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
made product said they understood that
companies must compete globally.
Bikers have been among the groups
most loyal to Mr. Trump, as motorcy-
clists in the United States tend to be pre-
dominantly working-class men over 50
dehumanizing speech were not the main
topic of conversation at Twitter. At a
staff meeting at the time at the compa-
ny’s headquarters, Twitter employees
were buoyant as they watched a break-
dancing executive on stage, a cameo by
Mr. Dorsey’s mother, and attended an af-
ter-hours dance party.
Then late on Aug. 5, Apple yanked
most of the content from Mr. Jones and
Infowars off its iTunes store, quickly fol-
lowed by deletions at Facebook,
YouTube and Spotify. At Twitter, execu-
tives met on Monday morning to debate
their own response. They ultimately de-
cided that Mr. Jones had not committed
enough infractions to result in a perma-
nent ban from the site.
On Tuesday evening, Mr. Dorsey fi-
nally posted about Twitter’s decision to
keep up the posts of Infowars and Mr.
Jones. In his tweets, he suggested that
other social media companies had caved
to political pressure by removing Mr.
Jones’s content. He also said the task of
fact-checking Mr. Jones’s sensational
claims should fall to journalists on the
platform rather than Twitter’s own mod-
erators, prompting confusion.
Internally, Mr. Dorsey, aiming for
transparency, encouraged employees to
publicly post their opinions regarding
Mr. Jones.
..
and veterans — demographics that com-
prise the bulk of the president’s base.
Mr. Trump has embraced that alle-
giance, saying recently that “I guaran-
tee you everybody that ever bought a
Harley-Davidson voted for Trump.”
On Saturday, Mr. Trump invited hun-
dreds of bikers from the New Jersey
Bikers for Trump chapter to visit him on
vacation in Bedminster. He praised
them as “people who truly love our
Country.”
Some who are generally pleased with
Mr. Trump said he was wrong to bully
the motorcycle maker merely for trying
to make a profit, but they remained loyal
to him nonetheless. “You’ve got to take it
with a grain of salt. He’s hot one day and
he’s cold the next,” Bill Schaner, an elec-
trical supply salesman from North Da-
kota who has owned seven Harley bikes,
said of the president. “If they’re going to
make bikes in Europe and sell them in
Europe, let them go. We’ll take the bikes
made in America.”
Veterans of the bike rally in Sturgis,
S.D., in its 78th year, said that the hard-
ships facing Harley-Davidson go be-
yond Mr. Trump’s tough words and stem
from years of declining ridership in the
United States.
Leslye Beaver, owner of The Beaver
Bar in Sturgis and several other biker
bars across the country, said that Harley
and other American motorcycle manu-
facturers are at a crossroads because
their products have lacked appeal to
young people in the United States. She
pointed out that the trade disputes have
increased their raw material costs and
hindered their ability to export to Eu-
rope, which is a growth market.
“I think they’re doing what they have
to do to stay in the game,” Ms. Beaver,
who lives in Georgia and supports Mr.
Trump, said while patrolling the parking
lot of her bar. “It’s human for people to
be mad because Harley is so American,
but I think they want to be here.”
For years, Harley-Davidson’s sales in
the United States have been steadily de-
clining as the Milwaukee-based com-
pany grappled with an aging population,
a vibrant secondary market and the
changing tastes of consumers. Recently,
it has focused on marketing its motor-
cycles to women, selling branded cloth-
ing and increasing international sales as
a way to grow profits.
The average cost of a Harley is around
$20,000, and they top out around
$40,000, making the motorcycles a lux-
ury item for people who do not use them
as their primary mode of transportation.
In 2017, the company’s United States re-
tail sales fell for the third consecutive
year to 147,972 motorcycles, while sales
in international markets have been
climbing slowly or holding steady, with
more room to grow. In the past five
years, Harley’s stock price has fallen by
nearly 25 percent, even as the stock
market has been on a tear.
Harley is also under pressure from
more intense competition. In the 1990s
at Sturgis, Harley riders would torch so
called “rice burners” — a pejorative
term for Japanese bikes — or tie them to
the back of their all-American motor-
cycles and drag them down the streets.
Although Harleys continue to be the
most popular ride, foreign brands such
as BMW, Honda, Yamaha and Kawasaki
are increasingly common.
The greater appreciation for foreign-
made bikes was on display at Buffalo
Chip, a sprawling 600-acre campground
three miles east of Sturgis. At the camp-
ground, Michael Lichter, a Colorado-
based photographer and curator, puts
on exhibitions of specialty motorcycles
from around the world as a way to make
the rally less Harley-centric and broad-
en interest and inspiration beyond
American bikes.
“People need to be exposed to more,”
said Mr. Lichter, who hopes to put on a
show of customized motorcycles by only
Japanese builders next year. “If you’re
buying just because it’s American, I
don’t think that’s a good thing.”
He added: “It means there’s no pres-
sure on American manufacturers to
build better.”
In Friday’s meeting, the 18 attendees,
all standing around a wooden confer-
ence room table, debated topics includ-
ing whether tweets that disparaged im-
migrants could be considered dehuman-
izing. One executive insisted that it was
important for Twitter to enable debate
about immigration policy.
“Immigration is a really valid political
debate in many countries around the
world, and I think we want to make sure
we protect the ability of people to say
things like, ‘Immigration has affected
my community. My local factory em-
ploys different people now; I can’t get a
job.’” said Nick Pickles, a policy strat-
egist.
Any new rules also had to allow vic-
tims of rape to openly discuss their ex-
perience online, said Del Harvey, the
head of Twitter’s trust and safety team.
“We don’t want to make people feel less
comfortable,” she said.
Mr. Dorsey stroked his beard and nod-
ded.
In the interview afterward, Mr.
Dorsey said he was contemplating
broader changes, including “systemic”
solutions that aren’t a “one-off.” But
those conversations, he said, have not
been “explicit.” Twitter is early in the
process, he said.
“We’ll talk more,” he said.
..
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Culture
Distant and not-so-distant mirrors
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
LONDON
Familiar political tensions
and populist hostilities find
their way to London stages
BY BEN BRANTLEY
He may have come and gone here in
the twinkling of a faux pas in July, but
Donald J. Trump is still casting a very
visible shadow over this city’s cultural
landscape. American playgoers visiting
London’s theaters in search of escap-
ism may find that there’s an awful lot
on this city’s stages to remind them of
political frictions they only thought
they’d left at home.
Anxieties about the surge of national-
ism on both sides of the Atlantic are
percolating through plays as different
as “Imperium,” the Royal Shakespeare
Company’s absorbing two-part adapta-
tion of Robert Harris’s “Cicero Trilogy”
of novels, set in ancient Rome, and Joe
Murphy and Joe Robertson’s “The
Jungle,” an immersive piece that places
its audience in the midst of an migrant
encampment in Calais, France.
Even the latest comedy by Alan
Bennett, “Allelujah!,” set in a geriatric
ward, simmers with its author’s dismay
about xenophobia in the age of Brexit.
So did David Hare’s “The Moderate
Soprano” (now closed), about the
founding of the Glyndebourne music
festival in the 1930s, and the invaluable
contributions of German artists in
creating what is perceived as a
quintessentially English institution.
(Mr. Hare’s play has acquired enhanced
resonance with newly raised concerns
over the impact of Brexit on the British
classical music culture.)
The National Theater this summer
has offered windows on American
racism (with a rousing production of
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s “An Octo-
roon”) and self-cannibalizing capitalism
(the fabulous “Lehman Trilogy”), as
well as Britain’s culturally invasive
colonialism (in an exquisite revival of
the Brian Friel masterwork “Transla-
tions”).
Some of these productions are more
blatantly topical than others. Consider
that bloated guy with the surreal blond
coif, for instance, who makes his en-
trance to knowing chuckles at the John
Gielgud Theater these days, where
“Imperium” runs through Sept. 8.
His name may be Pompey, and he
may be a denizen of ancient Rome. But
as a walking sight gag, described by
another character as “a petulant child
in the body of an aging man,” he’s as
much an effigy of the sitting American
president as the Angry Baby balloon
that flew over Parliament Square dur-
ing Mr. Trump’s brief recent visit.
“For God’s sake don’t laugh at his
hair,” one Roman senator says to his
secretary, which means the audience
laughs all the louder.
That same senator — the legendary
orator and philosopher Cicero (artfully
played by the Tony and Olivier Award-
winning actor Richard McCabe) —
elicits further laughs, in a more regret-
ful key, when he says of Pompey, “I
doubt he could do much damage.”
Pompey turns out to be little more
than comic relief here. Other charac-
ters, though, embody the more persua-
sive appeal of a populism that sounds
uncomfortably familiar these days.
Take Catiline (Joe Dixon), the Roman
Oscars to add blockbuster category
LOS ANGELES
Aiming to bolster ratings,
academy also vows to keep
telecast to three hours
BY BROOKS BARNES
Alarmed by plunging television ratings
for the Academy Awards, the organiza-
tion behind the Oscars has said it will
add a category for blockbuster films and
shorten the telecast by giving out some
statuettes during commercial breaks.
Yet adding a category for “outstand-
ing achievement in popular film,” as
John Bailey, the president of the Acad-
emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sci-
ences, put it in a letter to members,
could create new problems for the belea-
guered organization.
What if a movie many see as a legiti-
mate best picture contender — the
worldwide smash “Black Panther,” for
instance — receives a nomination for
the populist Oscar but not for best over-
all picture? Does that mean “Black Pan-
ther” and films like it are second-class
citizens?
The letter, co-signed by Dawn Hud-
son, the academy’s chief executive, did
not say what would constitute a “popu-
lar” film or whether movies nominated
in that category could also be nominated
for best picture. (An academy spokes-
woman later clarified that they could.)
The category will make its debut at the
next Oscars ceremony, which will be
senator and fiery demagogue who
knows how to work up a restless mob.
“I share your poverty,” declaims this
wealthy son of aristocracy. “I feel your
anger.” And: “Help me tear down the
corrupt and moribund order of privi-
leged people.”
Cicero, who has been observing this
speechifying from the sidelines, makes
a wry prediction for Catiline’s probable
success. “Stupid people sometimes
vote for stupid people,” he says. And
the audience with which I saw the
show broke into bountiful applause.
“Imperium,” directed by Gregory
Doran, is the Royal Shakespeare Com-
pany’s second offering in recent years
to evoke the political turmoil of a dis-
tant era as a mirror of our own. It
follows in the stately wake of the
much-lauded “Wolf Hall,” Mr. Poulton’s
held on Feb. 24 and televised in the
United States on ABC.
“Eligibility requirements and other
key details will be forthcoming,” the let-
ter said. The academy did not respond to
a request to interview Ms. Hudson or
Mr. Bailey, who was re-elected to a sec-
ond one-year term as president at a
board meeting last week.
The academy’s board also voted to
keep the telecast to three hours, which it
described as an effort to deliver “a more
accessible Oscars for our viewers world-
wide.” To trim the telecast — the last
show, in March, stretched nearly four
hours — the academy said it would
present “select categories” during com-
mercial breaks, with the winning mo-
ments edited and aired later during the
broadcast.
It did not say which categories could
be edged aside. The most likely are the
three Oscars presented for short films.
Producers hired to shape the annual
telecast have long pressed the academy
to reduce the number of awards
presented on air. (There are now 25.)
But academy traditionalists — some of
whom have left the board in recent years
— always pushed back.
A third change will not take effect until
2020, the academy said. The telecast will
be held earlier in the year in an attempt
to speed up Hollywood’s awards season,
which in recent years has stretched to
four solid months of ceremonies. By the
time the Oscars roll around, there is little
suspense about who will win what, and
the honorees themselves have a cata-
tonic look, having been trotted from one
awards podium to the next.
One ancient Roman is a walking
sight gag, described by another
character as “a petulant child in
the body of an aging man.”
stage adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s
novels set during the reign of Henry
VIII.
Lacking the more intricately shaded
characters of its predecessor, “Imperi-
um” isn’t as fully gratifying as “Wolf
Hall.” But it holds the attention with
the sharp-nailed grip of a governmen-
tal soap opera like “House of Cards.”
And like the maligned Catiline, this
vigorously paced show knows how to
play to the crowd. It has been designed
with eye-filling pageantry by Anthony
Ward, and features some goosebump-
The change in dates may force other
telecasts, including the Grammy
Awards, to recalibrate their own posi-
tions on the calendar.
The addition of a category for block-
busters was immediately assailed by
some prominent film critics. Manohla
Dargis of The New York Times called
the changes “stupid, insulting and pa-
thetically desperate” on Twitter.
While some responses were favor-
able, the academy also drew wide mock-
ery, with the social media universe sug-
gesting other categories that might
draw more viewers, like hottest on-
screen kiss or best stunts.
Whether its remedies are the correct
ones or not, the academy had to take
some kind of action: The Oscars are in-
creasingly out of touch. A record low of
MANUEL HARLAN
raising set pieces, including one in
which the dead Julius Caesar (Peter
De Jersey), bursts through the center
of the floor as a talking, doomsaying
statue.
The dialogue sometimes leans to-
ward the clunk of sword-and-sandals
films of the mid-20th century. Yet
there’s a certain cathartic charm in
seeing the moral squalor of present-
day governments translated into a
juicy melodrama that winds up in an
orgy of destruction.
A different form of catharsis is on
offer in “The Jungle,” which has trans-
ferred from the Young Vic to the Play-
house Theater in the West End. This
intense evocation of the last days of
the migrant encampment in Calais —
directed by Stephen Daldry and Justin
Martin — places theatergoers in the
PATRICK T. FALLON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
26.5 million people watched this year’s
telecast, a nearly 20 percent drop from a
year earlier. As recently as four years
ago, the Academy Awards had an audi-
ence of 43.7 million viewers.
“We have heard from many of you
about improvements needed to keep the
Oscars and our academy relevant in a
changing world,” Mr. Bailey wrote. “The
Board of Governors took this charge se-
riously.”
The Oscar telecast is a big business,
generating 83 percent of the academy’s
$148 million in annual revenue. ABC
controls broadcast rights for the show
until 2028 at a cost of roughly $75 million
a year. ABC was seeking as much as $2.8
million per 30-second commercial for
the most recent telecast.
Nose-diving ratings threaten all of
Left, Richard McCabe, as Cicero, warily watching Julius Caesar (Peter De Jersey) in
“Imperium.” Top, Malcolm Sinclair, left, as General Eisenhower, with David Haig as a
Scottish meteorologist, in “Pressure.” Above, Jonathan Nyati in “The Jungle.”
heaving center of a provisional, teem-
ing city of the dispossessed. (The
convincingly detailed set is by the
brilliant Miriam Buether.)
The show presents the points of view
not only of the immigrants, who are
trying to shape a home out of limbo,
but of the do-gooding Britons who
arrive in hopes of helping out. (It’s
worth noting that the play’s young
authors established a theater in the
Calais encampment.)
The night I saw the show, there was
little doubt that the helplessness and
guilt of the British characters, who find
themselves surrounded by fathomless
and unresolvable suffering, were
shared by many members of the audi-
ence. Theatergoers on all sides of me
were crying in response to harrowing
autobiographical monologues by actors
playing refugees from Somalia and
Afghanistan.
By the end, cast and audience
seemed to have melted into one teary,
sweaty blur, steeped in an oddly inspir-
ing, paradoxical feeling of hopeful
hopelessness. It will be interesting to
see if Americans, who probably feel
less immediately invested in the
events of “The Jungle” than the
British, will respond as emotionally
when the production travels to St.
Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn at the
end of this year.
In the meantime, Americans in
London in search of a more comforting
history lesson might find it in a play
inauspiciously entitled “Pressure,” at
the Ambassadors Theater. Written by
and starring David Haig, this appeal-
DAVID MCNEW/REUTERS
Left, the Academy Awards ceremony in
March ran nearly four hours. Above, the
academy president, John Bailey.
that income, not to mention eroding the
position of the Oscars in comparison to
the more freewheeling Golden Globe
Awards. A few more years of declines
and the Globes will be the higher-rated
show.
Reasons for the Oscars’ decline
abound — the general fragmentation of
the media landscape is one — but the
central complaints have been about the
telecast’s marathon length and increas-
ing tendency to honor niche films that
the majority of American moviegoers
have not seen. Last year’s best picture
winner, “The Shape of Water,” had sold
about $60 million in tickets at the time
after playing in theaters for 14 weeks.
“Black Panther,” by comparison, took
in $202 million over its first three days in
North American theaters alone.
MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018 | 13
ROBERT DAY
MARC-BRENNER
ingly old-fashioned history drama is
set during the 72 hours before the
allied Operation Overlord invasion of
Normandy in 1944.
The action takes place in Southwick
House in Yorkshire, where General
Dwight D. Eisenhower (a fulminating
Malcolm Sinclair) is about to give the
signal for the momentous invasion that
would be known as D-Day. But will the
weather, which has been propitiously
(and unusually) fine, continue to be
so?
James Stagg (an immensely likable
Mr. Haig), the Scottish meteorologist
who has been brought in as an adviser
and is well versed in the caprices of
British weather, thinks not. His cocky
American counterpart, Colonel Irving
Krick (Philip Cairns) disagrees.
And a debate about such seemingly
arcane matters as jet streams and
barometric readings brings the audi-
ence to the edge of its seat, as charac-
ters keep reminding us that the lives of
hundreds of thousands of troops hang
in the balance. The collective sigh of
relief that the audience emits at the
end isn’t inspired only by the (spoiler
alert) final success of the mission and
the vindication of Stagg.
I’ve no doubt that it also comes from
the contentment of having been trans-
ported into a moment in history when
a war seemed truly winnable; when
the special relationship between the
United Kingdom and the United States
was in its honeymoon phase; and
when the line between good guys and
bad guys seemed fixed and unblurred.
Distant times indeed.
In 2009, the academy tried to make
room for more widely seen films by dou-
bling the number of potential nominees
for the best-picture award to 10 from
five. That shift occurred after “The Dark
Knight,” a critically acclaimed super-
hero film, was shut out of the best-pic-
ture category, despite receiving nomina-
tions in eight others and winning in two.
But allowing more best-picture nomi-
nations did little to solve the problem.
For the most part, moviedom’s elite con-
tinued to bypass films with large audi-
ences and simply put forward additional
niche ones.
One rumpus after another has roiled
the academy in recent years. After black
actors and films that focused on black
characters were overlooked for Oscar
nominations in 2015 and 2016, the #Os-
carsSoWhite social media outcry was so
fierce that the academy raced member-
ship changes into effect. There has been
progress, but it’s still mostly white and
male.
The 2017 Oscars added the humilia-
tion of naming the wrong movie, “La La
Land,” as the best picture winner, before
the error was corrected from the stage
and “Moonlight” was given the trophy.
More recently, the academy has been
struggling to contend with the #MeToo
movement. The organization put behav-
ioral guidelines in place for members —
only to have Mr. Bailey become the poli-
cy’s first test. A woman accused him of
inappropriate touching during a van
ride on a movie set. The academy said in
March that it had conducted an investi-
gation and concluded that the claim had
no merit.

14 | MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018
culture
Above, La Monte Young playing “The Well-Tuned Piano” in New York in 1981 in the midst of the installation “The Magenta Lights” by his wife, Marian Zazeela. Below, Mr. Young and Ms. Zazeela, right, performing with Jung Hee Choi, their longtime associate, in 2015.
A Minimalist classic (6½ hours) is back
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
‘The Well-Tuned Piano
in the Magenta Lights’
has been reissued on DVD
BY SETH COLTER WALLS
In 1964, the composer La Monte Young
made the first recording of his solo-
piano work “The Well-Tuned Piano.” It
lasted less than an hour. In 1981, he
took another pass. This time, it was
just over five hours long.
Something had changed. Mr. Young
added new thematic material. A lot of
it. He also refined the work’s peculiar
system of “just” intonation tuning into
something even more idiosyncratic,
while exploring new combinations of
favored chords.
The result was widely celebrated.
The critic John Rockwell called it
“throbbingly mystical” in his list of the
best recordings of 1987 in The New
York Times, when the 1981 version was
released on the Gramavision label. But
in the 1990s, it went out of print and
became a kind of holy grail of Min-
imalism, with LP and CD editions
commanding eye-popping prices, often
north of $400, when they weren’t being
bootlegged.
Yet it wasn’t the last word. In the
booklet for that five-hour set, Mr.
Young listed the work’s composition
date as continuing up to the present.
On May 10, 1987, he ventured a six-
Life, death and dinner
BOOK REVIEW
Killing It: An Education
By Camas Davis. 339 pp. Penguin Press.
$27.
BY CREE LEFAVOUR
Nearly 10 years ago, Camas Davis
found herself depressed, heartbroken
and purposeless, “feeling like such a
failure.” Having been fired from her job
as an editor at “a scrappy city maga-
zine” in Portland, Ore., she headed to
the French village of Agen, in Gascony,
“in search of meaning” — and butch-
ery skills. She spent seven weeks in
this “French Shangri-La,” living and
learning alongside her agritourism
hostess, an American named Kate Hill.
Davis’s French education entailed,
among other things, pouring 30-pound
buckets of blood into a mixer to make
boudin noir, stuffing the intestines of
the pig she’d just helped kill with its
own meat for saucissons and learning
how to force-feed geese to enlarge
their livers for foie gras.
Davis is now a butcher (although
hour-and-24-minute version of “The
Well-Tuned Piano” that stretched into
the following day. There were new
themes, and more extensive passages
of droning filigree, quaking with beat-
ing acoustic tremors that emerged
from Mr. Young’s precisely controlled
frequencies.
That performance was captured on
both audio and video. The addition of a
visual component made it possible to
preserve the transfixing mobile sculp-
tures and lighting — purples and dark
blues — of the visual artist Marian
Zazeela, Mr. Young’s wife, whose work
has long enveloped and enhanced
presentations of his music.
The two produced a DVD, “The
she remains uncomfortable with that
title), an educator and “the founder
and owner of a unique meat education
program” known as the Portland Meat
Collective. The story she tells here is
of discovering meaning and purpose
by learning butchering skills and then,
thanks to the classes she develops
back home, teaching others to do the
same. As she concludes before return-
ing from France, “learning to kill an
animal and turn it into dinner had
changed everything.”
What Davis really takes on in
“Killing It” is the tension, as she puts
it, between “life, death and dinner.”
She wants readers to contend more
immediately with the act of killing and
eating an animal, imparting what she
represents as a uniquely French re-
spect for a culinary attitude the
British chef Fergus Henderson has
memorably dubbed “nose to tail eat-
ing.”
There seem to be two books be-
tween these covers. The first takes
place in France and soon after, when
Davis returns to Portland to get her
classes, and herself, off the ground.
This entails locating animals, farms
and experienced butchers who are
TONY CENICOLA/THE NEW YORK TIMES
Well-Tuned Piano in the Magenta
Lights,” and released it on their own
imprint in 2000. Then that edition also
went out of print, sparking another run
of high-price speculation among sec-
ondhand sellers. Earlier this year,
though, Mr. Young and Ms. Zazeela
quietly reissued the DVD version on
their website, melafoundation.org. For
the first time in nearly two decades —
legally, that is — you can purchase a
new copy for less than $100.
In an interview at their apartment in
the TriBeCa neighborhood of New
York, I asked them whether they had
any advice for those approaching the
DVD (which they have resisted provid-
ing any online excerpts from). Other
Meat for sale at a French butcher shop.
able to teach their skills to others. The
second encompasses her tumultuous
romantic entanglements, along with
awkward descriptions of the publicity
that brought her considerable atten-
tion: an award from Martha Stewart
and a photo shoot for her magazine, a
than expressing a desire that people
play it “pretty loud” — citing the con-
trast between passages of “pin-drop
silence” and deep pools of repetitive
density — Mr. Young said he has
“learned that it’s not good to try to be a
policeman. Let people find their way.”
For dedicated fans of Mr. Young and
Ms. Zazeela who have visited one of
their “Dream House” sound and light
environments — in Manhattan or
elsewhere around the world — the
DVD is an automatic purchase. (Who
knows when this run will sell out?) But
more casual listeners might wonder
what’s new here.
To my eyes and ears, plenty. I woke
up at 6 one morning, drew curtains
over the windows, turned up a sub-
woofer, pressed play and sat (fairly)
still for over six hours. I found the
work both more thundering and more
delicate than before. On the 1981 re-
cording, the most forceful explorations
of a given chordal area — Mr. Young
calls these “clouds” — tend to last
between four and nine minutes, no-
where near how long the artists spend
in sustained tone environments in their
personal practice.
“The Well-Tuned Piano in the Ma-
genta Lights” brings us deeper into
how they actually live and work. The
DVD’s first “cloud” section lasts 13
minutes. The second goes on for 37
minutes. (An accompanying booklet
provides time stamps for each chordal
section, as well as a valuable essay by
Jung Hee Choi, their longtime associ-
ate, on the tuning and the work’s gene-
sis.)
PHILIPPE HUGUEN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE — GETTY IMAGES
knife ad that featured Davis’s image on
a billboard in Times Square, a story in
The New York Times Magazine that
had her posing with a pig’s head on a
silver platter.
For anyone who has kept up with the
food world during the last 25 years,
THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION
Ms. Zazeela’s lush designs offer
poetic visual counterpoint. While the
pianist thrashes away at a collection of
pitches, her mobiles and their shadows
twist calmly in front of the lights, creat-
ing a potent contrast with the instru-
mental ferocity.
Some of the gentler additions to the
work are wonderful, like a gorgeous
melody, reminiscent of gamelan, that
Mr. Young has titled “Blues for Euryd-
ice.” (It comes in the fourth hour.)
Chordal relationships from the world of
pop are grafted to Mr. Young’s tuning
in the piano’s lower range, during the
In the liner notes to the new
edition, the composer, La Monte
Young, calls it “probably my best
performance ever.”
“New Böse Brontosaurus Boogie,”
resulting in a thrilling symbiosis of the
familiar and the otherworldly. (That’s
in the fifth hour.)
Mr. Young said that he could have
played longer but that, in the 1980s, a
composer of extended continuous
works had to worry about the amount
of audio or videotape that could fit on a
reel. After the concert was preserved
on the DVD, he stopped presenting the
piece. In the liner notes to the new
edition, he calls it “probably my best
performance ever.”
Asked if he would ever dust it off
again, he said that a revival could take
place only under “extraordinary cir-
cumstances.” Instead, he, Ms. Zazeela
much of this material will feel overly
familiar. Too often Davis’s insights and
questions appear better suited to the
village idiot in Agen than to a reader in
2018. On fertilization: “The manure
gets put back out in the fields, where it
decomposes and renews the soil with
nutrients.” On grass-fed beef: “I knew
it was more expensive than grain-fed,
but I didn’t know why.” On meat: “Did
how these muscles on a pig move have
something to do with the pale color of
the loin and the darker hue of the
coppa, with why we cook a pork chop
in a frying pan and a pork shoulder in
a smoker or a Crock-Pot?”
There are too many of these “golly-
gee” moments in “Killing It,” moments
that leave you wondering if Davis was
really ever that naïve. Perhaps one
should credit her with such innocence,
since without it her earnest mission to
impart what she has learned in France
becomes just plain silly. “What if,” she
writes of the people who will sign up
for her classes, “I not only inspired
them to change their buying and eat-
ing habits, but also to change the way
they saw the entire world?”
That’s an extraordinarily tall order
— and one that sits awkwardly beside
..
JOHN CLIETT/LA MONTE YOUNG AND MARIAN ZAZEELA
and Ms. Choi are conceiving an ambi-
tious slate of potential releases.
Projects under consideration include
some of their work together in the Just
Alap Raga Ensemble, as well as a
collective performance of one of Ms.
Choi’s compositions, heard last fall at
the Church Street Dream House. They
are also considering appending a
series of archival recordings to a
planned book of interviews.
Any of these could be months or
years away. But soon, a major Ameri-
can orchestra will play Mr. Young’s
work for the first time. The Los Ange-
les Philharmonic will play a section of
“The Second Dream of the High-Ten-
sion Line Stepdown Transformer”
(from “The Four Dreams of China,”
1962) in November.
“They do two or three rehearsals,
and they think they’re ready,” Mr.
Young said, describing his reservations
about a typical orchestra’s approach to
works by living composers. “And I
rehearse a lot.”
It’s the participation of two members
of Mr. Young’s ensembles — the trum-
peter Ben Neill and the cellist Charles
Curtis — that has made the idea of a
Los Angeles performance seem palat-
able. “I hope for the best,” Mr. Young
said. “Ben and Charles know it very,
very well. And if they will let them
lead, they can do wonders.”
When I reminded Mr. Young that in a
previous interview, he had said he
wasn’t sanguine about the possibility
of orchestras’ tackling his work, he
chuckled softly. With a slight shrug, he
said, “Something changed.”
the book’s other overarching concern:
Davis’s desire for a personal tran-
scendence that hinges on the “real.” In
the end, she finds that the success of
the Portland Meat Collective interferes
with her desire to live authentically
and she ends up experiencing herself
as “the spectacle of the female
butcher” rather than the genuine
article.
By standing to the side of so much of
her own story — her messy love life,
the evolution of her public persona,
even what must surely be her formida-
ble knowledge of meat and butchering
— Davis leaves her readers on uncer-
tain ground. Her prose skitters along
with her own insecurities, becoming
thin and abstract rather than rich with
the details of her engagement in the
gritty work she clearly loves. Rather
than leading us to grapple with what
she presents as the transformative
power of looking death in the eye,
Davis’s approach seems to suggest
that we not take her book too seriously.
It is, after all, just one more part of the
spectacle she disdains.
Cree LeFavour’s most recent book is a
memoir, “Lights On, Rats Out.”
 ..
16 | MONDAY, AUGUST 13, 2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION