A photographic journey by artist Leslie Starobin that explores Holocaust memory and family history is on view in a public exhibition on the Brown University campus through May 30 [Brown University] — In a new exhibition at Brown University artist Leslie Starobin intertwines past and present with family and political history through a fusion of photography and text that recounts the experiences of two sisters who survived the Holocaust The exhibition — which represents the sisters’ struggles after being liberated from Auschwitz-Birkenau and the transmission of their memories to younger generations of their family — is on view at Brown’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs through May 30. Titled “Looming in the Shadows of Lodz,” the exhibition is part of the Art at Watson initiative A professor emerita of art at Framingham State University Starobin describes the images in the exhibition as “photo narratives” that combine contemporary photographs of Lodz with captions derived from the recollections of the two sisters “‘Looming in the Shadows of Lodz’ underscores how artists interpret history through a personal lens encouraging viewers to respond based on their lived experiences,” Starobin said “Inviting meaningful dialogue and reflection the artworks speak to those familiar and unfamiliar with this chapter in world history.” Starobin’s journey to creating the exhibition began in 2019 when she traveled to Poland with her husband and children “We traveled on the 75th anniversary of our relatives’ deportation to Auschwitz from the Lodz Ghetto the last ghetto to be liquidated by the Nazis,” Starobin said I photographed the Altman family residences the cemetery where they hid from the Nazis and the Radegast train station where they boarded cattle cars to the death camp.” Starobin gathered the sisters’ recollections through decades of conversations with Starobin’s mother-in-law “The conversations were scattered over the years,” Starobin recalled “We might be sitting around the kitchen table and my mother-in-law would suddenly recall something from the middle of the war.” Starobin carried a small digital recording device with her Starobin said the exhibition examines how storytelling bridges generations and preserves familial narratives across time and space this exhibition aspires to connect with contemporary viewers some of whom might be uninformed about the Holocaust,” Starobin said “Unraveling the threads of human memory has long been central to my creative process.” Some of the photographs in the exhibition appear benign at first glance a senior fellow in international and public affairs at the Watson Institute who was one of the organizers of the exhibition said the subject matter is timely and important stark inequalities and the urgent threat of climate change,” Ingham said other moments have similarly tested our shared humanity The atrocities of the Holocaust serve as a stark reminder of the darkness that can emerge when empathy and understanding are lost.” the exhibition helps to preserve personal narratives that are vanishing from collective memory art can serve as an educational catalyst,” Starobin said “Looming in the Shadows of Lodz” is on view  through May 30 in Stephen Robert ’62 Hall at 280 Brook St This story was adapted from an article by Pete Bilderback a communications and outreach specialist at the Watson Institute Starobin emphasized the significance of telling Holocaust survivors’ stories today and stressed that prejudice does not end when a war does In a new installation at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs titled “Looming in the Shadows of Łódź,” artist Leslie Starobin presents a multimedia portrayal of loss family and memory during and after the Holocaust was inspired by Starobin’s 2019 visit to Łódź where her relatives lived in a ghetto until their deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in 1942 In an introductory speech at the installation’s opening on Feb Starobin shared that the photo narrative takes inspiration from Jewish memorial books.  the first memorial to the Holocaust period came not in stone The installation draws from the testimonies of Starobin’s mother-in-law who shared their experiences as Holocaust survivors which she wrote during the Holocaust at the age of 15 titled “A Tree Grows in Bałuty,” appears simple: an open window in a dark room “Dorka had told me that she passed many hours during the war sitting in the window sill” pictured in the photo Dorka was “often reading a book to assuage her hunger.” Despite the significance of the window sill in the photo “there’s nothing within the frame that reveals the horrific events (Tola and Dorka’s) family experienced here in September 1942,” Starobin said “The yard would just be a yard without the sisters’ memories.”  One photograph in the gallery — an image taken in 2016 of Tola looking into the camera with bright blue eyes — is accompanied by a quote from Dorka’s testimony about life after the war: “Tola went at noon to buy fresh bread She was very beautiful and she didn’t look exactly Jewish.” Tola heard one woman say: ‘We are finished with the Jews but they will come again,’” Starobin recalled this idea of rooted prejudice is still pertinent today.  The Art at Watson initiative brought Starobin’s work to the Watson Institute because of the installation’s ability to “convey the profound horror of these events through a deeply personal and familial perspective,” said Veronica Ingham Starobin’s introductory speech was accompanied by a compilation of Tola and Dorka’s video testimonies as well as a clip of a documentary that Starobin’s son filmed during the trip to Poland.  there was a point of silence,” said attendee Natalia Golova Golova has seen multiple video testimonies from Holocaust survivors was taken aback by the installation’s portrayal of “going from a normal life to being dehumanized,” she said The installation will be on display in the Watson Institute through May 30 "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz," a new exhibition by photographer Leslie Starobin the show features Starobin's photographs from a "roots journey" to Poland Coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz" illustrates how traumatic memories are passed down through generations "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz." Photo credit: Azurae Cruz "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz." Photo Credit: Pete Bilderback Art at Watson committee members Sarah Baldwin and Carl Smith hanging the "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz" exhibition in Stephen Robert '62 Hall "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz." Photo Credit: Azurae Cruz In Art at Watson's latest exhibition "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz" by Massachusetts-based artist Leslie Starobin the past and the present collide with family and political history the exhibition tells the story of two sisters who survived the Holocaust their plight after liberation from Auschwitz-Birkenau and how those memories have been passed down through generations.  which Starobin calls "photo narratives," depict scenes from present-day Lodz Poland and the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp paired with captions drawn from the memories of the two sisters art can serve as an educational catalyst," said Starobin "'Looming in the Shadows of Lodz' underscores how artists interpret history through a personal lens encouraging viewers to respond in part based on their lived experiences Inviting meaningful dialogue and reflection the artworks speak to those familiar and unfamiliar with this chapter in world history." Starobin was inspired to create "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz" after a "roots journey" she made to Poland in 2019 with her husband and children "We traveled on the 75th anniversary of our relatives' deportation to Auschwitz from the Lodz Ghetto the last one to be liquidated by the Nazis," she said and the Radegast train station where they boarded cattle cars to the death camp." While the photos and text do not address Starobin's own lived experience she noted the exhibition "examines how storytelling connects the generations in their quest to pass down and preserve familial narratives across time and space some of whom might be uninformed about the Holocaust." Starobin said that "unraveling the threads of human memory" has long been central to her creative process Watson Senior Fellow Veronica Ingham, who co-managed the exhibition with Watson Communications Specialist and Writer Pete Bilderback The atrocities of the Holocaust during World War II serve as a stark reminder of the darkness that can emerge when empathy and understanding are lost."  marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau," said Bilderback "What happened there and the events that preceded and followed it are quickly passing from living memory we must increasingly rely on generational memory of the Holocaust to convey the horror of those events from a personal perspective Leslie's artwork speaks powerfully toward that end." Ingham added "We hope this exhibition will inspire reflection on our past and spark our imagination for a brighter future — a chance to rediscover our shared humanity."  The project emerged from decades of informal conversations Starobin had with her mother-in-law "The conversations were scattered over the years," said Starobin "We might be sitting around the kitchen table And my mother-in-law would think of something that happened in the middle of the war and she would just sort of start talking." Starobin carried a small digital recording device with her for such occasions A perfectly composed view of a tree from a window is framed by text from Dorka Berger: "May 1 Textbook history and personal family history collide violently in an image of the infamous entrance to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp that is accompanied by text drawn from Starobin's mother-in-law's memory While the exhibition examines family history it also preserves a personal narrative of events that are disappearing from living memory: both the Holocaust itself and the exodus of Jews from Europe — the Brihah — that happened in its aftermath From the beginning of July 1945 to the end of September 1946 over 111,000 Jews left Poland for the British Mandate for Palestine with the Brihah haunted by memories of the Holocaust and chastened by continuing discrimination and hatred "Dorka is the only relative alive to contribute further to this project," said Starobin Some of the text is drawn from her recently discovered journal "The Diary of Dwojra Altman," Dorka's long-lost chronicle from July 1945 Starobin noted that "although Dorka did not travel to Poland with us she directed us emotionally from the sidelines," among other things providing addresses and locations the family should visit "Dorka poured over the photographs from Poland while revealing new memories of the past," said Starobin Dorka is the revered elder of the family," said Starobin she aspires to fulfill the Jewish commandment 'L'haggid' ('And you should tell your children')." With "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz," Starobin honors the same commandment "Looming in the Shadows of Lodz" opens with a reception at 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, February 13, on the first floor of Stephen Robert '62 Hall at 280 Brook St. in Providence, RI. All are welcome. After brief comments from the artist, a 20-minute video interview with Dorka Berger will be screened at the opening. From dive bar to food truck and a long-running presence at Manifesto Market, American chef Isaac Starobin of Dirty Dog Barbecue fame, has shaped Prague’s casual dining scene, Now, he’s channeling his smokehouse expertise into a bold new venture in the city center on Jungmannova Street. Slow-smoked brisket pulled pork and ribs take center stage at Isaac's Barbecue. The menu is playful and indulgent—think bone marrow with mustard “caviar,” fried chicken sliders drizzled with guajillo honey, and an over-the-top Elvis Presley bread pudding with bacon-washed bourbon. We visited Starobin in the restaurant’s historic space to talk about Prague’s evolving food scene, how to turn missteps into learning moments as an expat entrepreneur, and his secret for building a loyal following, one perfectly smoked rib at a time. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Honestly, most of it has been people coming to me with ideas and saying, “Hey, let’s do this,” and me saying, “Okay.” This new project actually started through one of our longtime customers—who became a very good friend. He’s an incredibly successful entrepreneur. One day, he said to me, “Isaac, the food is awesome. Why are you still doing this in a stand after so long? Why don’t you have a restaurant?” I told him, “Money, brother.” Opening in Berlin was… an experience. I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. At first, I was really excited. To me, Berlin was like the New York of Europe. Turns out it’s not. It’s an unbelievably frustrating city with insane bureaucracy—worse than the Czech Republic—so much worse. The best thing about operating in Berlin was that it made me fall back in love with the Czech Republic. I’ll give you an example. If you want to import something from outside the EU, you need an EORI number for customs. In Germany, I had to fill out paper forms by hand, sign them, mail them to the customs office, and then wait weeks. I got a letter back—yes, a physical letter—saying my documents were received and I’d get an answer in four to six weeks. In the Czech Republic, I needed the same number. I filled out a form, submitted it online through the data box system, and the next morning—boom—my number was there. Berlin was tough for so many reasons. You don’t realize how important it is to speak the language, to know people, to have connections. We had none of that there. I think we all underestimated just how difficult it is to start from scratch in a new country. I did—I thought we’d be entering a bigger, more sophisticated market. I was dead wrong. Czechs are way more open to trying new things than Germans. Of course, I’m generalizing, but that was our experience. Every day in Berlin felt like a battle. The day before opening, we finally got all our equipment installed after endless delays and unresponsive contractors. It felt impossible. I had wanted to import a proper smoker from the U.S., but the timeline made it seem unrealistic. Looking back, we could have done it, but it didn’t feel feasible at the time. German-made smokers exist, but the best ones are American. Instead, I had one custom-built in some unpronounceable town in northeastern Germany. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Expats.cz (@expatscz) mechanical failures—one thing after another and a group of young kids who had never worked in a restaurant The first person at our stand is the CEO of the company that owns Potsdamer Platz.“I hear you have barbecue,” he says.“Yes we do.”He orders for 26 people.Scotty and I exchange looks explaining as we go.Just as we get the team in place Then I realize—where’s Scotty?I turn and see him on the ground Flames are pouring out the back.He’s calmly shoveling salt over the fire These dumb Americans can’t even run a kitchen You can’t run two businesses in two separate countries without rock-solid management and we didn’t know how to find it in a different country you need to know a little about everything—accounting bartending—just enough to have an intelligent conversation with the experts But you also need to know when to step back and trust them The best decision we made here—the one I’ve never made before—was hiring legitimate managers but there are too many things I’m just not good at the food scene was either garbage or fine dining—no middle ground wouldn’t have survived back then because people didn’t grasp the idea of paying more than CZK 150 for something that wasn’t a Michelin-star meal New York has great barbecue—my mom and I used to love ribs at spots like Virgil’s and Dinosaur and pepper; Kansas City loves tomato-based sauces But I go with what tastes best—what I call “New York-style” barbecue spring rolls—whatever keeps it interesting I once saw someone eat a wing with a fork and knife—it was a Slovakian girl the Norwegians are eating pizza with a fork and knife from the outside I don’t want anyone to feel ripped off just because we’re in the city center I won’t cut corners by using lower-quality meat or cheaper cooking methods and good brisket costs way more than cheap beef chuck I have two young kids and a new restaurant—I don’t even remember the last time I ate a proper meal Plenty. This 300-year-old building belongs to the Josef Hlávka Foundation, the country’s oldest foundation. Hlávka was a philanthropist and architect. When we took over it was a Vietnamese restaurant covered in white plaster—it looked like a dentist’s office and so is this space—we wanted to blend the two We added new tiles and completely redid the electrical work this is finally me cooking the food I want to cook—not just what I think will sell Your morning coffee deserves a great companion. Why not enjoy it with our daily newsletter? News from Czechia, curated insights, and inspiring stories in English. Esther Rosenfeld Starobin’s parents sent their two-year-old daughter to live with strangers in England Jews in Nazi Germany at the time faced increasing persecution and danger And Esther’s parents prayed their young daughter would be safe living in another country with a foster family Watch to learn about the next eight years Esther spent in England with a Christian family And discover if she ever reunited with her parents First Person: Conversations with Holocaust Survivors Watch live at youtube.com/ushmm You don’t need a YouTube account to view our program After the live broadcast, the recording will be available to watch on demand on the Museum's YouTube page hour-long discussion with a Holocaust survivor that is made possible through generous support from the Louis Franklin Smith Foundation WATCH LIVE This guide helps educators integrate this season’s First Person conversations into a classroom setting Nearly 40 Holocaust survivors serve as volunteers at the Museum and their contributions are vital to our mission Echoes of Memory is a guided writing workshop that provides survivors who volunteer at the Museum with a powerful outlet through which to bear witness This website is using a security service to protect itself from online attacks The action you just performed triggered the security solution There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase You can email the site owner to let them know you were blocked Please include what you were doing when this page came up and the Cloudflare Ray ID found at the bottom of this page It is a simplification to say that David Starobin’s long career as a classical guitarist has been defined by his extensive exploration of contemporary music for the instrument Beginning in 1981 and right through to 2019’s Volume 12 his series New Music With Guitar has brought to listeners’ ears exactly that Starobin hasn’t only recorded new works for guitar he has been energetic in commissioning new works He is “the dedicatee of more than 350 new works featuring the guitar Starobin has also served as a faculty member at the Manhattan School of Music and the State University of New York/College at Purchase which has released more than 400 CDs and DVDs and received nominations for 22 Grammy awards (and won three) to fill “the need to create a wide-ranging forum for repertoire and performance — a home for the exceptionally interesting and challenging personality- performer and composer alike.” Bridge is a family affair with son and daughter both involved in the business (Starobin’s Facebook page indicates that he “Studied Beckyology at Peabody Conservatory.”) A second major stream of repertoire that Starobin has focused on is 19th-century works This year Bridge released Starobin’s recording of Six Sonatas Op 31 by Czech composer Wenzel Thomas Matiegka (Czech: Václav Tomáš Matějka) — described as the guitarist’s final recorded work although he was prominent in the Viennese musical world in his day The Sonatas portray both the courtly forms one would expect from a composer whose dedicatees included Count Johann Karl Esterházy but also reach back to the baroque — Starobin describes the “new-Baroque” and contrapuntal quality of the sixth sonata but in 2020 he joined 35 other guitarists from around the world in the Legnani World Project a pandemic lockdown run-through of Luigi Legnani’s 36 Caprices op 27.  As a classical guitarist put it to me this brief performance is emblematic of Starobin’s ability particularly with 19th century guitar music This gift for interpretation is evident throughout the present recording and illustrates his artistic ability to “serve” the score and indulges the ear in a series of subtle expressive variations along the way This recording encourages close listening as the guitarist’s technique never intrudes while the interpretive quality described offers myriad opportunities for one’s attention to settle more and more deeply into Matiegka’s compositions Jon Ciliberto is an attorney and strives at being a barely functional classical guitarist Jon Ciliberto is an attorney That’s the verdict offered by Paul Starobin a veteran analyst of Russia. Since Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine some 1 million Russians have fled the country and gone into exile by personal hatred for the czar-like Putin and by a vision of a better Russia shorn of autocracy the exiles have mounted an organized resistance to Putin’s rule Starobin says that the resistance includes followers of the imprisoned Putin opponent Alexi Navalny and journalists feeding Russians back home the kind of coverage that is censored by Kremlin-controlled media some exiles are actively aiding the Ukrainian fight against Russia’s armed forces in hopes of hastening Russia’s defeat and Putin’s demise Starobin traveled to places like Armenia and Georgia to meet with exiles and had conversations with prominent figures throughout Europe and America as he took measure of this rebellion—and its potential to fix a nation plagued by revanchist imperial dreams He reported his findings in his new book Putin’s Exiles and he’ll tell you what he found and what might be coming next for Russia Join us for a special online-only program that goes beyond pro-Putin propaganda and the tightly controlled narrative inside the country and looks outside its borders to the diaspora of Russian exiles who are imagining and fighting for the future of their country Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia The leading national forum open to all for the impartial discussion of public issues important to the membership The Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum we bring hundreds of events on topics ranging across politics society and the economy to our members and the public both in-person and via extensive online and on-air listenership and viewership Copyright © 2025 Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California. All rights reserved. | Statement of Values This website uses cookies to enhance your experience. Read our WAMU Privacy Notice This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful Strictly Necessary Cookie should be enabled at all times so that we can save your preferences for cookie settings we will not be able to save your preferences This means that every time you visit this website you will need to enable or disable cookies again The genesis of “The Last Address” is connected to Starobin’s family history Starobin had inherited a box of photographs from her grandmother and in the mix was an envelope with a Kiev It was the address to which her immigrant grandfather was sending money from America to his Ukrainian relatives the correspondence abruptly ended; the last letters returned with the notation that the addressees had moved Starobin’s process includes curating objects and pictures amplifying her subject’s oral histories In a photographic montage Starobin calls “Maguy – Max 21 Janvier,” her still life features Maguy Marek a Tunisian bride who dreamily looks at her groom and seemingly toward the future Starobin has included the photographer’s stamps on the photo and has displayed the bolero Maguy likely wore for a henna ceremony before her wedding The island of Curaçao was home to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the Western Hemisphere For her presentation of that Jewish immigration story Starobin placed a sepia photograph of a mother and her two children on the cover of an old book A piece of ornate silver from a candelabra the family rescued from the synagogue is in the top left side of the photographic montage Starobin conveys other unique immigrations of Jews from Iraq One woman from Turkey carried a letter from her boss recommending her as a seamstress Other photo montages display ketubot—traditional wedding contracts—and passports letters and testimony creates compelling portraits of early Jewish immigration in the 20th century We also found the diary that Dorka left behind She started it in July 1945 and left it with a journalist friend who donated it to a Jewish archive in Poland.” Dorka’s diary was a roadmap for Starobin and her children who bring their third-generation survivor perspective to the family’s Holocaust history Ori is working on a documentary based on the trip and Tamar recreated versions of the entryway to Limanowskiego 48 the address of Tola’s apartment in the Łódź Ghetto Tamar Segev described her series as “cut pieces of painted canvas I then stitch these fragments to a new canvas support applying and scraping paint in an almost frenetic manner Starobin’s photographs startle as viewers learn the stories attached to them she chose to include a picture of the church at the entrance to the ghetto used as a clearinghouse starting in 1942 to sort deportees’ belongings Dorka survived the war when an uncle hid her in a morgue and remembered sorting clothes at the church “I included the picture of the church in this group of photographs to create a memorial to the ghetto,” said Starobin Starobin pointed out that Łódź’s Jewish cemetery is among the largest in Europe it was nominated to be a UNESCO World Heritage Site The cemetery reflects that many Jews in the town “The cemetery was an important stop on our trip,” she said “My husband’s great-grandmother and great-aunt are buried there In addition to her immigration and Holocaust works Starobin has been photographing trees for decades breathing community of trees that reflect new thinking on trees forming alliances nourishing each other and sending signals through fungal networks radiating from their roots “Extinct” is a local tree in Brookline that conjures a dinosaur The aptly named “Ode to Picasso” is in Seville and eerily reminiscent of the painter’s abstract work Starobin never wanders far from thinking about immigration and displacement. Her artist statement for the trees series called “Out on a Limb” notes: “Throughout history people have migrated from one continent to another carrying seeds and saplings with them greening their new terrains with familiar leaves and American footpaths.” Her discerning eye captures blanched wood As Starobin gathers facts and pursues research she also speculates about a family’s history The origin of objects or trees sparks her imagination Word and image make for a history that reveals profound truths Leslie Starobin will appear on JLive with Jewish Arts Collaborative on Friday, Feb. 18, at noon. Register here A notice on the shoe factory’s bulletin board prompted the British couple to volunteer They knew little; a Jewish child fleeing Nazi Germany needed a safe home What began as a good deed blossomed into bonds that lasted a lifetime When Harry and Dot Harrison greeted two-year-old Esther on their doorstep they never imagined that over eight years she would become like a daughter to them Join us as we commemorate Adoption Month with the story of Holocaust survivor Esther Starobin Watch live at facebook.com/holocaustmuseum. You do not need a Facebook account to view our program. After the live broadcast, the recording will be available to watch on demand on the Museum’s Facebook and YouTube pages This episode was made possible in part by the Abe and Ida Cooper Foundation Esther was sent to England on the Kindertransport She arrived in London and was met by a woman from the Quaker society who escorted her from London to Thorpe she met the family who would keep her safe Kindertransport (Children's Transport) was the informal name of a series of rescue efforts between 1938 and 1940 These rescue efforts brought thousands of refugee children Children were especially vulnerable to Nazi persecution Some were targeted on supposed racial grounds Others were targeted for biological reasons such as patients with physical or mental disabilities or because of their alleged resistance or political activities As many as 1.5 million Jewish children alone were murdered or died at the hands of Nazi officials or their collaborators This correspondence consists of letters written to the Harrison family 1939 notifying the Harrisons that Esther arrived in London Sali Rosenfeld and relates the family’s appreciation for their care of Esther and the family’s desire to have the Rosenfeld siblings reunited in the United States In the main square of the ancient cobblestoned city of Lviv in westernmost Ukraine young people are dancing and singing folk tunes performed by an acoustic guitarist and a vocalist It is 19 months since Russia began its brutal 2022 invasion of their country the revelers plead for the Ukrainian national anthem Amid chants of “Glory to Ukraine!” and “Down with Putin!” the crowd disperses It’s at this point that I spy the placard that the assemblage had obscured: Ukraina Ponad Ooseh!—“Ukraine Above All!” who denied the existence of an identity for Ukraine separate from Greater Russia the country is experiencing a national renaissance—one that I saw for eight days traveling from Lviv to the capital city of Kyiv and a Kyiv suburb targeted by the Russian invaders born Lev Bronstein in a village in the southern province of Kherson destined to fade as human beings discovered their higher common interests Ukraine in the third decade of the twenty-first century stands as a testament to the persistent—and volcanic—power of nationalism The Ukrainian aspiration to join the European Union is real Many Ukrainians desire to join a vast cosmopolitan community “where there is order,” as a Lviv native explained to me Over dinner at a fashionable Crimean Tatar restaurant in Kyiv “Why do [the Russians] need to whip up our identity?” The question begs an understanding—perhaps impossible to obtain—of the warped psychology of a tyrant But to note the fact of the Ukrainians’ identity is only to begin our exploration for a societal journey under nationalism’s force can follow various paths An intense nationalism can consist of love and hatred with a fixation on who is and who is not a member of the group It can take the shape of an insistence that people use a single spoken language in public spaces The construction of myths becomes an industrious Popular demand surges for national heroes—no bland technocrats National passions guide aesthetic choices in architecture And though nationalism is meant to bind a people—in today’s Ukraine even the children’s playgrounds are painted in the blue and yellow of the national flag—internal debate over matters of national identity involving politics and culture can be fierce is the nature of Ukrainian nationalism—and what path is it taking One path might be called the ennoblement of martyrdom: the self-presentation of the Ukrainian people as yet another of history’s beaten-down victims 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of an independent Republic of Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko inaugurated the Holodomor Monument on a bluff in Kyiv Ukraine had an iconic memorial to the epochal famine of 1932–33 in which at least 3.5 million Ukrainians died of starvation The memorial displayed a 100-foot-tall Candle of Memory a pair of weeping Angels of Sorrow at the gates and a statue of a young emaciated Ukrainian girl in braids her hands clutching shriveled stalks of wheat But Russia’s 2022 invasion prompted Ukrainians to contest this narrative of victimhood at the hands of an unappeasable oppressor Putin’s tanks bore down on the suburban town of Irpin just over 15 miles northwest of the capital city there would be little to stop the invading force from seizing the capital the Ukrainian military blew up a crucial roadway bridge spanning a narrow portion of the Irpin River Then the men of Irpin strapped on their helmets and spearheaded a resistance that forced the Russians to retreat even as sections of the town lay in smoldering ruins on a visit to Irpin on a sun-kissed Saturday I stared from across the river at the blown-up bridge gruesomely resplendent in its twisted beams and exposed metal-wire undergirding no effort has been made to repair the structure; a new parallel bridge over the river was under construction the destroyed bridge will stand forever in that stark condition as a memorial of Irpin’s response to the invaders He submitted a design in the spirit of “super-minimalism.” The concept was to leave the site largely undisturbed From an austere narrow walkway spanning the river visitors could observe the ruins of the bridge as if to take in the scene in a moment of silence The spare design looked like something that might commemorate the victims of a German concentration camp—and the Irpin community resoundingly rejected it the Russians had killed some 400 people in Irpin in the battle to subdue the town is of a “shield city” that stood up to the invaders: “Irpin is not about victims We did our job.” He pulled out his phone and shared snapshots of civic leaders That is the sort of image that Irpin aims to memorialize translated from the Ukrainian into English: “the first chronology of the defense of the Hero City Irpin written by the boundless desire for liberty and the heroic resistance of civilians who took up arms.” He also gave me a golden-hued metal pen the top half fashioned from shells from World War II the bottom half from shells from the ongoing Russian–Ukrainian War The outside of the wooden box containing the pen was inscribed with the words “Irpin misto-geroi [‘hero town’].” The inside bore the inscription is assuming its proud place in a flourishing national myth of martial defiance need not embrace falsehood—a national myth is better thought of as a kind of emotive rallying tale to which all members of society can subscribe A comparison of the transformation that Ukraine is undergoing on display in the Yad Vashem memorial in Jerusalem in homage to the millions slaughtered by the Nazis But with its seemingly miraculous triumph over the numerically superior Arab aggressors in the Six-Day War of 1967 the nation of Israel acquired a dashing warrior image represented by the likes of Moshe Dayan in his signature black eye-patch including a massacre of innocents at a dance festival the nation recharged its warrior identity as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed to exact a “mighty vengeance.” national myths cry out for heroes to embody the tales—and one day become marble monuments in the town squares of the nation Nation-building is a spirit in need of flesh it is perhaps early to talk about future monuments I asked Ukrainians: Whose likeness is likely to be erected as a statue after the war has become the global face of Ukraine’s armed struggle But popular acclaim appears to be most ardent for the “Iron General,” Valerii Zaluzhnyi commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine messages of congratulations flooded Ukrainian media some inflected with religious fervor: “Valerii Zaluzhnyi May the Most Holy Theotokos [the Virgin Mary] protect you from enemies and bullets.” The Iron General has abstained from politics Eisenhower as he led the Allied armed forces to victory over Hitler’s Germany Zaluzhnyi is not a bad bet as a future president perhaps jealous of the general’s popularity appeared poised to dismiss him from his post at the start of February Or perhaps Ukrainians will turn to a charismatic populist like Serhiy Prytula the former television host now leading an effort to deliver military equipment and medical supplies to troops on the front lines which sported an enormous map of Ukraine on the wall “I want them to know their history,” he said of his countrymen “not history written by Soviet or Russian leaders.” Prytula can be outrageous in his barbed broadsides as in his suggestion on social media to award a medal to a shark that mauled to death a young Russian man in waters off Egypt as the victim cried to his father for help his task will be to rebuild cities like Kherson and Kharkiv that have suffered substantial damage—and virtual obliteration—from Russian assaults this is already an active question: What should a new Ukraine physically look like has suggested that reconstruction costs could exceed $1 trillion The renowned British architect Sir Norman Foster was participating in discussions with Ukrainian federal and local government officials on an ambitious “reconstruction master plan” for the northeastern city of Kharkiv Ukraine’s second-largest metropolis in population praised by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe included a “heritage project” as a landmark for the center of Kharkiv and a “science neighborhood project” to make the city an “international talent magnet” for technology innovation liberated from its longtime British overseers advocated for a cosmopolitan aesthetic—for an India that would be in visual sync with the most advanced countries of the world But Mahatma Gandhi pushed for an inward-seeking aesthetic that drew on distinctive Indian traditions and folk images the exaltation of a recognizably Ukrainian look One can see this aesthetic in the street art in Ukraine—a harbinger on what remains of the front wall of the Russian-attacked House of Culture some talented artist has painted a glowing vision of Ukrainian resurrection The image shows a pair of adult storks—the snow-white leleka—their claws resting on a nest filled with their beak-upturned babies the nest surrounded by sunflowers set on a blue background is the work of the Ukrainian folk painter Maria Prymachenko whose “primitivist” style inspired Picasso Women’s blouses decorated with familiar Prymachenko images—exotic purple flowers in boughs sprigs of evergreen—are a fashion item in Kyiv I saw a golden-locked young man spiffily clad in a blue cotton jersey and knee-length yellow trousers nibbling at his slice of cake with the capital under nightly assault by Russian drones at Maidan Nezalezhnosti—Independence Square—thousands of small Ukrainian flags waved from plastic sticks planted in the earth each representing “an innocent life” taken by Putin a “madman,” in the inscription of the memorial’s plaque is developing a project that he calls “Ukraine Rebirth,” envisioned as a series on how Ukrainians can rebuild their society “we forgot what it is to be Ukrainian.” One answer is already settled: “Our identity is that we are not Russian.” National quests for identity typically feature such negatives as musketeers fought to rid the colonies of intolerable rule by London it was important that one be “not British.” That meant a casual and sometimes rowdy everyman style intended as a repudiation of Britain’s formalized class- and Crown-based regime of social manners For Ukrainians stirred by nationalist passions a tainted Tchaikovsky Street for the Ukrainian composer Myroslav Skoryk or to enshrine the name of an anti-Russian figure like Chechen separatist Dzhokhar Dudayev who was assassinated by the Russians but lives on through a Lviv street now bearing his name The street formerly was named for the Russian poet and prose writer Mikhail Lermontov whose nineteenth-century novel A Hero of Our Time tells of “Chechen bullets” meant for Russian officers Ukrainians know how to troll their tormentor have a long history in Ukraine—may seem trivial; but for natives “I can compare Russia and its narratives to something like cancer—a poison that lasts for centuries,” a Ukrainian woman told me “not Russian” also applies to Russian literature—the poetry of Pushkin and the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky “Fuck their Chekhov,” a Ukrainian financier blurted over coffee in Kyiv in keeping with manifestations of cancel culture that have scrubbed worthy classics like To Kill a Mockingbird from school reading lists my coffee mate apologized for his outburst—but only and that highlights the liveliest wire in the Ukrainian nationalist firmament: language under the decades-long dictatorship of Francisco Franco a touchstone of the post-Franco separatist movement in the Spanish region of Catalonia was language “We are Catalans because we speak Catalan.” Ukraine experienced a similar suppression of the native tongue: czarist Russia which referred to “the Ukraine” as Malorossiya (“Little Russia”) I marked the language question as ripe for exploration My initial thinking was that this was an issue that resonated most with nationalist types among the cultural and political elites—with those actively immersed in the project of a reborn Ukraine These were not VIPs but ordinary Ukrainians lugging frayed suitcases to spend time with their families for the cost of a €23 ($25) ticket Because I could speak conversational Russian and because I knew that many Ukrainians understood Russian I decided to try to converse with the young woman across the aisle from me Her wrist bore a yarn bracelet in the colors of the Ukrainian flag “I prefer not to speak Russian,” she responded a sign in Ukrainian greets customers: My ne rozmovliajemo movoyu okupanta (“We don’t speak the language of the occupier”) Russian-speaking Ukrainians have resettled in the Lviv region This sign is intended for them—as an encouragement from Lviv’s dominant Ukrainian-speaking community to join in the movement to expunge the Russian language from routine everyday encounters outside the home all children are taught Ukrainian as their first language; Russian is not an option in Kyiv is the primacy of the Ukrainian language an asserted aspect of the nationalist cause—and not only in the schools and shops middle-aged Ukrainian woman raised to think of Ukrainian as a “peasant language” informed me that she no longer spoke Russian to a close friend from Russia of 20 years’ standing: they would now converse in Ukrainian A Ukrainian teenager said that on a recent trip to Sicily she became apprehensive on hearing Russian spoken by fellow tourists: How did she know whether these people were Russian speakers from Ukraine or Russian speakers from Russia was to be suspicious of all Russian speakers Only a Ukrainian speaker could assuredly be a fellow Ukrainian Yet how successful are these attempts to implant obstructions to the Russian language likely to be Along the “Alley of Artists,” a leafy stretch of Kyiv below St for the purchase of handicrafts and several small paintings—and got no objections from their sellers probably a recent arrival from eastern Ukraine we spoke in Russian as we tried to find our bearings Russian-speaking soldiers in the Ukrainian army are waging bloody combat against Russian-speaking soldiers in the Russian army are expected to address their officers in Ukrainian but among foot soldiers in regiments raised from cities like Kharkiv a city some 25 miles from the Russian border with a population of more than 1 million Russian is heard everywhere on its streets while Ukrainian predominates in rural areas outside the metropolis Kharkiv is a classic “borderland” city of Ukraine as long reflected in its mixed linguistic culture author of the 2023 book Kharkov/Kharkiv (the first for the Russian pronunciation of the city’s name Kravchenko ventured that “identity and language are not the same.” After all “look at Canada,” with its two official and widely spoken languages A frustrated pursuit for purity in language suggests one limit to a certain conception of the Ukrainian national identity project And any nationalist saga would also come with its inevitable shadows What nation forges its identity without shameful acts that later generations would just as soon forget some twentieth-century nationalists supported Hitler This conduct was embarrassingly brought to light in a ceremony that the Canadian parliament held in honor of a visit from Zelensky this past September The Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons saluted a 98-year-old man in attendance “a Ukrainian hero,” who had fought in World War II to expel the Russians—as in the Soviet Red Army—from the territory of Sovietized Ukraine It turned out that this man had been a member of a division of the paramilitary Waffen-SS composed of fellow Ukrainians played a pivotal role in organizing the mass wartime slaughter of Jews Nor was anti-Semitism in Ukraine a German import left Kyiv for America around the time of World War I in part for fear of one day being the target of a pogrom is how a nation on a path of renewal deals with the messy past—and not only with the past In a rebuke to Ukrainians who cheered the fatal shark attack on the Russian tourist in Egypt posted on social media that “dehumanization” had arrived in his traumatized country The choice confronting Ukraine is between a crude populism born of chauvinistic thinking and a Western-style open and liberal society In a sign of the capacious quality of the quest to forge a Ukrainian identity as minister of defense—this in a nation in which some 80 percent of the population claims an affiliation with an Eastern Orthodox Christian denomination (and an additional 10 percent with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church) But there seems to be no viable alternative to this nationalist passage Lviv has on its outskirts a street named for John Lennon—vulytsia Dzhona Lennona “Imagine there’s no countries / It isn’t hard to do / Nothing to kill or die for,” Lennon sings in “Imagine.” But in the world as it is this would be a spectacular feat of imagination The globe remains split into nations—only sovereign countries raise serious armies primed for combat not supranational bodies like the European Union or the not-so United Nations and not cities in the bygone tradition of ancient Athens or Sparta National resistance to foreign conquest remains a supreme cause for to bow to the invader is to live as a slave On a drizzly morning after my arrival in Lviv as a trumpeter played a mournful tune for a fallen Ukrainian soldier while the funeral procession passed by town hall In a gray light’s requiem for a battlefield death the cause of Ukrainian nationhood found fresh life Paul Starobin is a journalist and the author of several books, including Putin’s Exiles: Their Fight for a Better Russia Top Photo: Ukraine stands as a testament to the persistent—and volcanic—power of nationalism City Journal is a publication of the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research (MI) Are you interested in supporting the magazine donations in support of MI and City Journal are fully tax-deductible as provided by law (EIN #13-2912529) Copyright © 2025 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research the inaugural recipient of the Chancellor’s Medal for Clinical Excellence will welcome incoming School of Medicine students as the keynote speaker at the White Coat ceremony on Friday students will be presented with a white coat embroidered with their names to mark the start of their educational journey at UMass Medical School is director of the Adult Congenital Heart Program and the Cardiac Fellows Clinic at UMMS He is widely regarded as a clinical expert in congenital heart disease in adults Starobin was already an established and well-respected clinician in Worcester He volunteered to teach third-year medicine and was appointed interim chief of cardiology and chief of cardiology at Memorial Hospital he served as chief of cardiology at every major hospital in Worcester In presenting Starobin with the Chancellor’s Award for Clinical Teaching in September 2012 “Had Norman Rockwell had the chance to know you I am certain that you could have served as the model for one of his paintings of doctors Ever attentive to the needs of your patients and mindful of the desire to learn that is embodied in the determination of your students which all of us who admire you can follow.” Starobin has received many other UMMS awards including the Lamar Soutter Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Medical Education Teacher of the Year and numerous Outstanding Medical Educator awards the Massachusetts Medical Society honored him with the Grant V which recognizes physicians who have made significant contributions to medical students both in the hospital and in organized medicine Starobin graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1954 Christian Award as the highest-ranking student He then began a 59-year relationship with Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) first as an intern in medicine and as a resident in the cardiac department Today he holds the position of clinical assistant in medicine at both MGH and Harvard Medical School Starobin is also a renowned wildlife and landscape photographer His photographs have long adorned the halls of the Department of Medicine A relatively new tradition for medical students the White Coat Ceremony was started in 1993 by the Arnold P Gold Foundation at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons The tradition emphasizes the importance of both scientific excellence and compassionate care for the patient Sign up Privacy Statement Russia’s record $50 billion Sochi Olympics spawned a lavish new resort—but will it survive The view from the front porch of the Grand Hotel of the Gazprom Mountain Resort is splendid: towering snowcapped peaks draped in a thin veil of white clouds that shrouds the green grounds of the complex a section of the Caucasus Mountain range belonging to Russia and the breeze brings fresh air scented by pine an outdoor restaurant specializing in the aromatic dishes of the Caucasus and a café whipping up pitchers of mint lemonade BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes share space with Hondas and Hyundais and even the humble Lada the seemingly ageless Russian version of a base-level Fiat sedan at about $100 a night for a standard double-bed occupancy—bathroom with heated towel rack and spa privileges included large numbers of families with small children invading the cavernous dining hall for the all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet of blinis Guests spend their days riding the gondolas to the top of the mountains there to trod (carefully) in the melting snowcaps the animals pasturing nearby; visiting the Skypark at which the daring might attempt a bungee jump from an 1,800-foot-long suspension bridge said to be the world’s longest; or trout fishing with long wooden poles at a well-stocked pond near a meadow with an icy waterfall for bathing afterward visitors can catch a 3-D movie at the Galactica entertainment center Vacationers have arrived from Moscow on three-hour-long charter flights departing several times daily for this bosky retreat; some have driven here from as far away as Novosibirsk was built for the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics Is there anything more wasteful than the massive public-works undertaking known as the Olympic Games The term “white elephant” seems invented for such grandiose displays—the flaunting of a nation’s (and its leader’s) ego with the inevitable ruin to the natural environment for a global television event lasting about two weeks The white elephant of fable is the rare animal presented by the king to a courtier not permitted to be used as a standard working animal impossibly expensive to keep—and forbidden to be returned It’s not something that anyone wants That metaphor doesn’t quite fit the Sochi games With its crowded swimming pools jammed with screeching Russian kids as bikini-clad mamas and furry-chested papas lounge on deck chairs Krasnaya Polyana has defied the familiar model of deserted post-Olympic sites But the astounding cost of the games—$50 billion by far the most expensive Olympics ever—raises the question of whether the economic activity will ever justify the Sochi script appeared to conform to the tale of the white elephant There was a king—the czar-like Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin leader of Russia (even when he nominally was not) since the end of 1999—who fancied the idea of staging a Winter Olympics in this part of his country was first suggested by a rich business crony Or it may have been a personal whim—Putin was known to enjoy skiing in the region its trails of unpacked virgin snow attainable only by helicopter Russian leaders have a history of doing grandiose without much in the way of cost-benefit analysis came to build his namesake czarist capital from scratch meaning “why not”—captures the spirit of such decisions The inhabitants of Krasnaya Polyana could have given a great many answers to the question of why not Just as some Americans are attracted to a rugged but soul-nourishing life spent in primitive skyscraping natural surroundings at grateful remove from the honking and Azerbaijan and reaching the peripheries of Turkey and Iran Krasnaya Polyana consisted of little more than cabins linked by narrow dirt roads skirting the streams It was an ideal setting for the women’s monastery tucked in the woods He went to Guatemala City to make his pitch for the Winter Games to the delegates of the International Olympic Committee when Sochi was announced as the host city for the 2014 event anyone familiar with the town might have thought that this was a joke midsize city shaded by palm trees on the Black Sea coast well known in Soviet times as a summer rest spot for workers and Communist Party functionaries The only skiing likely to take place there is across the warm waves lapping the pebbled shores the city was known for shutting down altogether Yet Sochi won the games because it was the only city of any significance in the region and other facilities would be built in the smaller town of Adler a short distance along the seacoast to the south seemed to be to transform the entire region “The government wants to turn Sochi into its own little Monaco,” a restaurant manager told the New York Times in the fall of 2008 Shopkeepers in Sochi groused about heavy-handed treatment by local government officials—demanding that they paint roofs a uniform color to make a pleasing canvas for visitors The grumblings coalesced into an organized civic complaint “Sochi is simply not capable of hosting the Olympics and continuing with the current approach threatens the well-being of the people of Sochi and the entire region,” Boris Nemtsov a Sochi native and leading political opponent of Putin’s regime wrote in an April 2009 Washington Post op-ed hundreds of residents have been evicted from their homes Thousands more are being forced into ‘lease’ agreements with the regional government The beaches that have long attracted tourists in summer are slated to become loading ramps for the heavy machinery necessary to build Olympic facilities.” Nemtsov recommended spreading the sporting venues “across the country,” as was done for the 1980 Moscow Summer Games branding the entire Olympics endeavor a Putin vanity project “It will be done in slipshod fashion and will begin to fall apart after the Olympics are over,” he told The Atlantic’s CityLab in a 2013 interview Nearly two years later—one year after the games were held—Nemtsov was shot dead while walking across a bridge in Moscow near the Kremlin walls It remains unclear who ordered what bore the hallmarks of a contract killing; Nemtsov had enemies unconnected with the Olympics project his bullet-ridden body was a grim illustration of the fate that can greet the most determined opponents of Putin and his projects “Adler now looks forward to being a venue for the World Cup When Western journalists arrived from places like Washington and London to cover the Sochi games they quickly seized on metaphors for an inept Olympic Games run by a maladroit water running “yellow and cold” from faucets an “extreme shortage” of pillows—these creature discomforts all snagged headlines Such coverage had an unmistakable political undertone egged on by Russian critics of the Kremlin had constructed a counter-fable of the Sochi undertaking as a Potemkin project The problem with this narrative is that it doesn’t hold up—as I saw for myself two years after the games during my one-week stay in the region in 2016 at Sochi International Airport—a $300 million project undertaken by the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska one of a number of business barons enlisted by the Kremlin to build the infrastructure for the games its spacious arrival hall bathed in natural light—a far cry not only from the typically drab and dank airports of Soviet times but also from aging American airports whose best days are long behind them There was a pleasant café for coffee and pastry; travelers could also find fresh produce Virtually everything one comes across in Adler is new A few minutes’ drive from the airport stands an amusement park featuring an ambitiously scaled roller coaster “Nash Disneyland”—our Disneyland—proclaimed Svetlana a large gold cross dangling from a chain around her neck and we walked across a bike path to a Black Sea beach jammed with sun-roasted bathers setting their towels and umbrellas on a thin strip of dark gray sand and rock Adler now looks forward to being a venue for the World Cup another mega-event for which Putin campaigned The idea that development could serve uses beyond the games clearly was on the minds of planners but some $350 million was spent on the Sochi Autodrom “Formula One’s best racing track of the year,” in 2014 The facilities have also been put to use for less obvious purposes My arrival in Adler coincided with the 11-day World Choir Games with participants from countries such as Argentina Closing ceremonies were held in the Bolshoy Ice Dome the venue for the Olympic hockey competition a fantastic-looking gray metallic structure to evoke frozen water droplets and Fabergé eggs and said to cost as much as $300 million Just a few miles away from these sculpted shrines lies the border crossing to the Republic of Abkhazia recognized as such only by Russia and a handful of other nations Not a ruble of Olympic money was invested here still shows the scars of the war fought in the early 1990s between Abkhazians and troops representing the former Soviet Republic of Georgia the journey from Adler to Krasnaya Polyana is smooth and swift toll-free divided highway that runs through a brightly lit well-ventilated two-and-a-half-mile tunnel carved out from mountain This testament to demolition technique and asphalt engineering roughly traces the banks of a fast-flowing mountain river on the other side of which is the narrow dirt road that once was the only route into Krasnaya Polyana Motorists making their way on that track braved mud slides and The vehicle of necessity was the heroic UAZ military jeep the staple for Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces Also parallel to the highway is what may be a genuine white elephant—an electric railway that links Sochi and Adler to the new mountain resort town of Rosa Khutor in Krasnaya Polyana The federal-government-owned Russian Railways one of the world’s largest transport companies to speed passengers from coastal venues to alpine ones and back That’s not how it’s working now: on my numerous trips at all hours of the day along the highway between Adler and Rosa Khutor Rosa Khutor greets the eye as an array of global and Russian brands: a McDonald’s the Russian sportswear chain featuring tracksuits and the like with national logos kids can ride scooters and Hoverboards and adults can puff pipes of fruit-flavored water al fresco at an Italian restaurant This little town might as well be called Potaninville he grumbled to Reuters about being asked to take on what is known in Russia as a social project with “compensation only for expenditures,” as he put it The gift exchange is an essential feature of Russia’s political and business culture A few miles deeper into the mountains from “Potaninville” is Gazprom Mountain Resort Visitors must pass through a gated checkpoint secured by cleanly shaven young men in crisp khaki uniforms Golf carts motor guests around the grounds Gazprom spent an estimated $6.5 billion on projects geared to the games including the resort and its sleek ski lift said by Russia’s leading anticorruption investigator to belong to Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev (A spokesman for Medvedev has dismissed Navalny’s allegation—that such properties represent bribes from oligarchs—as “propaganda insinuations.”) An irony of this distinctively Russian milieu is the omnipresence of foreign products Siemens also supplied the cars for the electric railway Turkish contractor firms and their teams of imported guest workers did much of the construction work in Krasnaya Polyana known for his building exploits in the even more remote province of Chukotka seems to be an indispensable fixture of post-Soviet life It is a bit more than an hour’s drive from Rosa Khutor The city has not been radically changed by projects linked to the games It looks neither prosperous nor downtrodden Russians still come in large numbers for a summer rest; though Gucci and Louis Vuitton have outlets in a large there is no sign that this watery place is on its way toward becoming an international destination like Monaco on the French Riviera Local lore has it that the largest yacht at the docks belongs to Putin; it is said never to leave its berth except when he is in town do the benefits of the varied works built in advance of the Sochi Olympics outweigh the costs Let’s start with the costs broadly defined but also so-called indirect expenditures on road and related “general” infrastructure “The consensus figure is $50 billion would easily qualify Sochi as the most expensive Olympics ever about 25 percent more than the $40 billion spent on the much-larger 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing,” the Washington Post reported in February 2014 The apparent source for that number was a Russian deputy prime minister citing what Russia was “prepared to invest” in the region a Russian state-run company that had supervised preparations put the total tab at $45 billion including $10.5 billion from Russian Railways assessed the cost of the Sochi games at just under $22 billion in 2015 dollars (not counting general infrastructure) with the London 2012 Summer Games finishing in second place Sochi by this gauge indeed took the gold as “the most costly games ever,” the Oxford researchers concluded given the fact that cost for the Winter Games is typically much lower than for the Summer Games.” (London weighed in at $50 million per event.) How much of the Sochi spending was wasteful—the result of padded contracts and the like Here the Oxford study found “sports-related cost overruns” for Sochi of 289 percent—nowhere near the 720 percent for Montreal’s 1976 Summer Games and below the 324 percent for Lake Placid’s 1980 Winter Games The average overrun for Winter Games was 142 percent have cost overrun,” the researchers found What if the Sochi games had never been held A native of Krasnaya Polyana spoke wistfully of the arrival of “civilization” here tourist business has put welcome money in people’s pockets locals believe that additions to the natural landscape necessary to sustain an industrial-tourist economy—such as the power-generating stations and connecting cables; the hot engines that power the procession of cars and trucks; the furnaces that heat the rooms and the air conditioners that cool them; and the sizzling tubs of oil that crisp the potatoes at McDonald’s—are responsible for an appreciable rise in air temperatures and it can never be returned to its pristine state As for benefits that can be attributed to the games and entertainment complexes that were built for the Olympics and that still operate today because the Russian government appears not to have made any systematic effort to calculate a number Putin aimed to reap global prestige for Russia by staging a showcase spectacle But any such boost to his country’s image set back by his abrupt annexation of nearby Crimea just over three weeks after the games concluded with the Kremlin’s covert military support for separatists in eastern Ukraine brought Russia widespread opprobrium in the West though wrong in his prediction that the Sochi projects would “fall apart” soon after the games proved right in his understanding that the stature of a nation has nothing to do with an Olympics extravaganza But the equation also must allow for the benefits for the Russian middle classes of time spent there on excursion It is abundantly evident that they are enjoying this new playground which would not have been built but for the games The child splashing around in the pool at Gazprom Mountain Resort breathing in the fresh air—without doubt he would voice his preference for a week here compared with sweating out the days in his apartment-block home in dirty with his parents stressed out at their jobs really do all seem alike—and happiness surely counts for something A strict utilitarian could argue that the Benthamite injunction to provide for “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” has been met here This sort of squishy balancing of costs and benefits attends to any Olympics Were the 1980 Lake Placid games worth it to that part of upstate New York Complaints about transportation and facilities at the games were rife functions as that most durable of American institutions—a federal prison you have to commit a serious crime—“fraud of “Abandoned Olympics Venues from Around the World or Why It’s the Biggest Waste of Money Ever.” Near the top of the list of 15 entrants was the Bobsled Track of the Sarajevo 1984 Winter Games “left to crumble into oblivion,” with a graveyard now on the grounds of the original sports complex In fourth place was the Athens Olympic Village for the 2004 Summer Games a former athletes’ training pool now partially filled with brown sludge a lone office swivel chair planted murkily on the bottom Olympic projects have a way of deflating the lofty visions of their creators When the torch was lit for the Sarajevo games of the 1980s who knew that the city would become ground zero for a savage war fought in Bosnia in the 1990s Nothing built for the Sochi events made Bored Panda’s gloomy honor roll One reason Adler and Krasnaya Polyana were so heavily booked in summer 2016 was a happenstance of geopolitics: Russian tourists couldn’t travel to their favorite resorts in Egypt because the Kremlin had suspended all Russian flights to that country after a Russian charter plane broke up after taking off from Sharm el-Sheikh Airport in October 2015 And Russians were kept from their usual haunts in the Turkish Mediterranean because the Kremlin had canceled all Russian package tours to Turkey after Ankara shot down a Russian fighter jet near the Syrian border Bad news for Russia outside the motherland seems good news for its domestic tourist industry—not exactly a sturdy foundation for prosperity in Sochi My best guess is that Krasnaya Polyana is likely to endure The resort caters to a genuine appetite for summer and winter recreation in the mountains and Russians have few other domestic choices available Should the now-dormant conflict between Abkhazia and Georgia restart tourist prospects for the entire region could sink should Russia’s nascent middle classes steadily expand—admittedly a tall order given that the national economy has yet to develop strengths outside the natural-resources sector—it’s possible that tourism and recreational ventures will thrive throughout the area with its efficient airport and network of good roads Sochi may have been an unasked-for gift from the king Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief of Businessweek and the author of Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War STOUGHTON – A woman was arrested Friday night after threatening someone she knew with a knife while inside a car Police received a 911 call about 11:30 p.m from an uninvolved person who said her friend was being threatened in a car near the intersection of Canton and School streets they found the women inside a green Ford Escape SUV outside 89 Canton St The suspect was identified as Crystal Starobin “She used a knife and a pair of scissors to threaten a victim in a car,” Bonney said Crystal claimed that the victim had property of hers that she wanted returned.” Starobin reportedly called police and said she was robbed outside the Bank of America ATM on Washington Street Bonney said he couldn’t release information about the victim in the robbery Starobin was not a suspect in the earlier theft was charged with two counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and threats to commit a crime The incident happened outside 89 Canton St. where a 36-year-old man was fatally stabbed in the driveway in early May Neither the victim or suspect in the stabbing murder lived at the home Starobin was previously arrested in April of this year in Braintree when police said she was asleep at the wheel while high on drugs Starobin was slumped over the wheel while stopped at a traffic light and later charged with drugged driving and possession with intent to distribute heroin The status of that case wasn’t available Saturday Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker David Starobin is among the most respected of guitar virtuosos in both solo and chamber repertoire and his teaching studios at the Manhattan School of Music and the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (where he co-founded the guitar program) are go-to places for the up-and-coming generation Talk about a legacy: More than 350 contemporary compositions are dedicated to him The list of composers from whom he has extracted guitar pieces runs the gamut from William Anderson and Theodore Antoniou to Charles Wuorinen and Yehudi Wyner and his solo recital for Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival this week is dedicated entirely to sonatas and stand-alone movements composed in the early 19th century by Wenzel (a.k.a This is a free concert (in honor of Indian Market) Francis Auditorium (New Mexico Museum of Art listeners are invited to come and go as they please — in between pieces Get the highlights from Santa Fe's weekly magazine of arts Pasatiempo's most popular online content from the past seven days Your browser is out of date and potentially vulnerable to security risks.We recommend switching to one of the following browsers: Get up-to-the-minute news sent straight to your device Account processing issue - the email address may already exist Receive a 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reset your password has been sent to the email address listed on your account a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week, is writing a book on Russia several weeks into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine President Vladimir Putin appeared on stage before a crowd gathered at Moscow’s Luzhniki Stadium.  Donning the role of a pastoral leader heading his national flock, Russia’s head of state solemnly moved to consecrate his country’s fallen soldiers, paraphrasing from “our Christian Bible.” “There’s no more love than if somebody gives their soul for his friends,” he rhapsodized.  Welcome to a military conflict cast by Moscow in fervent religious terms.   recently declared on Russian television that “This is truly a holy war we’re waging and we must win.” Nikonov is the grandson of Vyacheslav Molotov but his stark declaration of a “metaphysical clash between the forces of good and evil” is indicative of the decidedly “White,” not “Red,” thinking that prevails in the Kremlin today — a notable return to czarist-era justifications for Russian wars of pre-Soviet times.  Russia began gravitating back toward Orthodoxy as a heavenly destination after the collapse of the officially atheistic Soviet Union in 1991, and this pilgrimage has proceeded more rapidly since Putin assumed power. Today, some 70 percent of Russians identify as Orthodox Christians, according to a Pew survey.  in its own mind to be fighting a sanctified “holy war” in Ukraine — and how should the West understand this messianic mission?  In the first instance, the prospect of a nuclear war, now openly talked about by top Russian government officials, cannot be dismissed as mere bluster. “The danger is serious, real” and “cannot be underestimated,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said in a recent television interview.   Nuclear armaments are seen as God’s way of ensuring Mother Russia’s survival As detailed in a bracing 2019 book, “Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy,” by the analyst Dmitry Adamsky land and sea-based — has a patron saint of the Russian Orthodox Church Holy water is sprinkled on nuclear weapons; nuclear-armed submarines come with chapels; and priests minister to military personnel responsible for the nation’s nuclear weapons system.   Putin himself has said that Orthodox faith and nuclear weapons are “closely interlinked” components of “Russian statehood.” And he recently announced on television the successful test launch of Russia’s most powerful intercontinental ballistic missile ever Russian dedication to holy war also suggests that the “Battle for Kyiv” may not yet be over Though Ukrainian forces thwarted Russia’s initial advance forcing a Russian redeployment of its firepower to eastern and southern Ukraine if these campaigns are concluded to Russia’s satisfaction Moscow may well turn its attention back to Kyiv.  the prized place of Kyiv in the Russian Orthodox firmament cannot be overstated history essentially begins in 988 with a mass baptism of pagan souls in the waters of the Dnieper by Kyiv but the city recovered its Orthodox identity the clergy of Kyiv came under the jurisdiction of the Moscow Patriarchate.   In the first “textbook” of the history of “Rus,” its teachings deeply rooted among Russians and often cited by Putin in his insistence on the indissoluble bond between Russians and Ukrainians Kyiv is depicted as the cradle of Muscovy.   with Russia’s post-Soviet Orthodox revival possibly no image would resonate more triumphantly with the Russian people than those of their soldiers taking triumphant possession of the Saint Sophia Cathedral the hallowed shrine built in the first “Rus” to proclaim Kyiv as a new Constantinople.  even as an elected president — traditionally have gone to battle to protect The twist in the current battle is that the Russians are fighting their Orthodox brethren.  Nearly 80 percent of Ukrainians identify as Orthodox — a higher share than in Russia as many have largely split from the Moscow Patriarchate and their apostate government is seeking to join the decadent West through membership in the European Union and NATO So “Little Russia,” as Ukraine was officially known in imperial czarist times delivered a sermon in Moscow that set the stakes as an epochal struggle over a godless hundreds of Orthodox clergy in Ukraine accused Kirill of heresy for preaching that Ukraine eternally belongs to the unified spiritual and territorial space that Russian Orthodox leaders call Russkiy Mir — Russian World.  Kirill himself has called Putin’s reign “a miracle from God.”  What’s clear is that Putin has publicly embraced the invasion of Ukraine as a religious quest Holy war tends to be the most savage war of all — and Russia’s may be just beginning she contributed to a shift in the Russian perception of the role that a determined The Mueller Report won’t soothe a paranoid frenzy to undo the 2016 election The idea of irascible Donald Trump as a compliant tool of the Kremlin in Moscow—some sort of clandestine agent or asset in spy parlance—has always seemed off-center Does Trump seem capable of keeping secrets or maintaining the strict discipline required of a double agent it should come as no surprise that the final report of Special Counsel Robert S as summarized by Attorney General William P Barr in a letter to congressional leaders on Sunday found no conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia to fix the 2016 election in Trump’s favor And that’s exactly what Trump has been saying in his mantra of “no collusion,” from the start of this nearly two-year-old investigation Surely, then, it’s time for a reckoning—starting with, say, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. In “Donald Trump, the Siberian Candidate,” in July 2016 he suggested that “there’s something very strange and disturbing going on here and it should not be ignored.” On Twitter Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum chimed in that Trump was “the real-life Manchurian candidate.” The Krugman-Applebaum references were to Richard Condon’s classic Cold War novel about an American prisoner of war brainwashed into becoming a Communist sleeper agent The Intercept found that in a six-week period starting in late February of 2017 MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow homed in on “The Russia Connection,” as she called it with Russia-related fare accounting for more than half of her broadcasts “If the American presidency right now is the product of collusion between the Russian intelligence services and an American campaign I mean that is so profoundly big,” Maddow declared Time rendered the thought balloon as a cover illustration showing the red walls of the Kremlin and the candy-striped domes of St Basil’s Cathedral sprouting from the White House on Pennsylvania Avenue The apex of such coverage was attained by Jonathan Chait, in his July 2018 New York opus on the eve of a meeting between “Prump” and “Tutin” in Helsinki The headline: “Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart—Or His Handler A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.” The mind-boggling part was Chait’s hypothesis that Trump possibly became a Kremlin asset back in 1987 when the real-estate mogul had visited Moscow These are just samples of the Trump-as-Putin’s-tool theory The idea was advanced not only by liberal media types but also by anti-Trump conservatives and it became a talking point in Democratic Party and U.S not all Trump opponents swallowed this improbable if seductive line—but many did Partisan politics are one factor at work in efforts to show Trump as being in cahoots with the Russians But mere partisanship seems insufficient to explain an abiding belief in Trump as Moscow’s pawn Trump met with German chancellor Angela Merkel in the White House according to a story that later ran on the front page of the Wall Street Journal about her backing of a pipeline to ship natural gas from Russia to Germany “you’ve got to stop buying gas from Putin.” Do those sound like the words of a Kremlin agent The root explanation for the belief in a compromised Trump lies elsewhere than partisan politics, and a good place to look is the classic essay by historian Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” published in the November 1964 issue of Harper’s of the “Radical Right” of his day and its cherished conviction that Communists had infiltrated the highest echelons of the U.S But the main point of his essay was to identify a recurrent pattern in our political life going back to the republic’s early days “I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing,” he wrote in his opening paragraph “I call it the paranoid style,” he explained “simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind.” In using this expression he was not speaking in a clinical sense of “men with profoundly disturbed minds.” Rather it was “the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.” Red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s was one example; another was leaders of the Populist Party in the 1890s believing in “secret cabals” of “gold gamblers” to ruin America “Trump as Kremlin man” now can be added to these dubious annals Though he did not see the “paranoid style” as the sole province of the Right he tended to view most exhibitors of this style as figures and movements closer to the margins of American politics than to its center Yet his insight into the “modern right wing” as feeling “dispossessed,” as living in an America that “has been largely taken away from them and their kind,” and therefore liable to the paranoid style Trump’s election was so perplexing and disorienting that it was as if they were living in a foreign country How could this be happening in “their” America which can include an inability to live with complexity and ambiguity and an intolerance for adverse outcomes the decorated former Marine and former FBI director as a sellout: What isn’t he telling us Even the publication of his full report—as many Americans are demanding—will not satisfy critics who will insist that the absence of evidence of collusion is simply an element of the vast conspiracy to cover it up can be expected only to heighten the conspiratorial mood of our times is the sort of person apt to believe in intrigues the dark plot is a scheme by the “Deep State” to keep him from getting elected and He may well be loathed by more than a few Washington bureaucrats but that idea looks like another rabbit hole Democrats in Congress are apt to pursue ongoing investigations into the “Russia connection” with even more intensity in hopes of uncovering some nugget that eluded Mueller is to repossess the country—and that can’t be achieved until Donald Trump leaves the White House Paul Starobin a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week is working on a book on the Alaska gold rush of 1900 (Photos: Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images(left) and Win McNamee/Getty Images (right)) BROCKTON – Police arrested a woman twice in the same day when the woman began acting unruly and refused to leave not one is facing multiple charges including trespassing and assault and battery of a police officer after police arrested her in two separate incidents Brockton Police responded to the McDonald’s restaurant at 908 N Montello St Saturday where Starobin had begun yelling and causing a scene “She had started to cause a scene,” said Brockton Police Sergeant William Schlieman “She was acting loud and belligerent and there were children and families present.” Starobin accused the cashier of stealing her money and refused to leave and so police took her into custody for trespassing and disturbing the peace When Starobin was released on bail later in the day at 9 p.m. she again staged a screaming match inside the police station lobby “She was bailed out by the clerk and then came right back in,” Sgt “I want to know the name of the f---ing cop who arrested me.” Starobin kicked and spat in the face of the officer She accumulated additional charges for disorderly conduct and assault and battery to a police officer Police are unsure whether the woman was again released or if she remains in jail She is expected to be arraigned Monday in Brockton District Court Set in the city where Georges Seurat (who inspired the musical) was born and died, the production, with new orchestrations by Michael Starobin is presented in English with French subtitles Members of the cast and creative team recently shared their experiences about working on the Parisian production Michael Starobin (Original and new orchestrations) Two-time Tony Award winner Michael Starobin (Assassins, Next To Normal) was the orchestrator of the original Broadway production of Sunday in the Park With George in 1984 he wrote new orchestrations for a 46-piece orchestra (instead of 11 originally) About the original Broadway production: "Sunday in the Park was my very first Broadway show I had done work Off-Broadway with James Lapine I was only 27 at the time; it was quite a rare opportunity to work for Steve but if I had really understood how important a project it was I had no idea what I was actually involved with and that ignorance was very helpful to let me be creative and to make brave choices." which gives Steve the freedom to do such inventive things." About finding the right balance in the orchestrations: "There are numbers like 'We Do Not Belong Together' where Steve's writing approach is very operatic in the emotions the two characters are expressing Having a large orchestra allows me to respond to that emotion but hopefully not taking it over the top so it's too emotional You have have to keep the right balance for sound then it's not coming from the characters but from the orchestra That's the challenge for me with a large band." About Sunday in the Park With George and the challenges of playing the role of George: "This is one of my favorite pieces Beside the fact that it's an absolutely brilliant composition it has an emotional core to it that's very effective and affecting The characters are very interesting and there are many levels to play: You don't often get that complexity in musicals This role is a great challenge in lots of different ways: physically You have to find links between Act I and Act II and lead the audience through that There are also a lot of different types of singing in it and the more Broadway kind of sound of Act II." About performing this musical in Paris: "When Seurat was painting his work I think it's a little bit the same with Sunday Parisians don't know about this musical and it should be seen Paris has become more educated about musicals - especially Sondheim's - over the last few years If there's any piece in his work that belongs in France Parisian audiences are very happy to use their minds About Sunday in the Park With George: "I saw it on Broadway in 1984 when it first opened I was living in New York at the time and some friends said I went back a second time and found it interesting Then I got the cast album and watched the video It's because anyone who works in the arts deals with the same issues George is dealing with You have to be obsessed with your work and you have to work very hard if you want to be good and succeed because you think of what you have to give up But I also think that I'm luckier than George because I have someone who understands me and who is an artist as well." About rediscovering the score with new orchestrations: "I have done three of the songs [from Sunday] in big orchestrations It doesn't surprise me at all that that music can take a bigger treatment that is appropriate for some of the songs because the emotions in the songs are very big The Act I and Act II finales are perfect for a big theatre We played them for the first time yesterday it is a rediscovery but we're very fortunate to have the original orchestrator returning to his work to do a large version maybe he had five colors and now he has 30." About Sunday in the Park With George and how an artist relates to it: "It's such a smart piece but it also has a great deal of heart to it: The fact that it's about the nature of creation So I think we understand it from that point of view but what makes the piece really work is that it looks at artists and comments on them: 'Yes but it's equally joyous to be in the human world as well In your life?' The show asks very smart questions I think it's impossible not to relate to it when you spend days and weeks People who are very passionate about their work can become so absorbed by it that they lose track of everything else that's going on That's [the song] 'Finishing The Hat.' I do understand that and in my own life and I try to keep a balance between work and life." About French audiences and Sondheim's musicals: "The response has been absolutely phenomenal and it always makes me laugh because I get told all over the world: 'You do musicals in France French don't like musicals!' That's not my experience it seems like there is a huge appetite for it The French audiences seem to love coming to the Châtelet and that's what Mr Choplin [director of Théâtre du Châtelet] has done: He's created a place where these things can happen." Gail Kriegel's new play follows a family affected by mental illness The Tony-winning Best Musical continues at the Walter Kerr Theatre Noah Himmelstein will direct Matthew Puckett's original musical Neumann is the Tony nominated choreographer behind Hadestown and Swept Away one Tony winner is playing the trumpet while the other is channeling Madame Rose Due to the expansive nature of Off-Broadway Thank You!You have now been added to the list Blocking belongson the stage,not on websites Our website is made possible bydisplaying online advertisements to our visitors Please consider supporting us bywhitelisting playbill.com with your ad blocker.Thank you Link IconCopy linkFacebook LogoShare on FacebookXShare on XEmailShare via EmailLink copied to clipboardFacing a difficult future Pa.'s Trump-supporting mining communities are defiant and resilient | OpinionEven amid conflict there may be enough hope to overcome Schuylkill County's chronic pessimism and the story of its decline that always gets told So reads the slogan — call it an industry advertisement — stamped in black letters on a steel-gray coal chute that traverses Pennsylvania Route 54 in the northeastern part of the state in the center of the world’s most extensive deposits of anthracite coal worth tens of billions of dollars at current market prices remain in the ground even after a century and a half of mining here Near the dirt road leading to the electricity plant stands a sign placed by the Pennsylvania Anthracite Council on behalf of its mission: “reclaiming the past — fueling the future.” “coal keeps the lights on” might sound like an embattled region’s middle-finger rejoinder to this uncompromising message one voiced by many Democrats vowing to enact a Green New Deal to phase out fossil fuels a battleground state: The attitudes here remain contested there may be enough hope to overcome the region’s chronic pessimism to drive along the winding roads of Schuylkill County can be to experience a pristine country scene — cornfields just behind a grove of trees along the highway — a gaping black gash in the earth Paces from the Mahanoy Area public school grounds a shallow creek has an odd-looking orange hue — the result of iron runoff from coal mines Many waters emit the rotten-egg odor of sulfur What stands out to first-time visitors to Schuylkill County is the ravage to the man-made settlements that remain The motorist exiting I-81 for Mahanoy City is greeted by small with boxed trash set on rotting wooden porches shaded by tattered awnings “Our biggest problem is blight,” Thom Maziekas not simply to the steep decline in the coal industry but also to the closure of several local shirt- and dressmaking factories an unwavering Trump Democrat (he voted for Barack Obama but felt let down by the president) blames the demise of these businesses on the North American Free Trade Agreement As much as 30% of the family housing in Mahanoy City is classified Section 8 — the provision of federal housing law that provides qualifying low-income families with substantial taxpayer subsidies for private rental housing Numerous residents in Mahanoy City and other towns in the region told me about how Section 8 works in their communities an “investor” buyer — a speculator from outside the area — steps in with an offer The investor puts a few thousand dollars of work into the unit for basic repairs enough to win the prized Section 8 classification the stream of rent payments is generating a profit for the investor on the sunk cost of acquiring and upgrading the place Resentment of the Latino presence—especially among older white voters—probably contributed to Trump’s support in 2016 The lure of cheap housing is partly behind demographic change Families with roots in such places as the Dominican Republic and Mexico are moving into a region long dominated by people tracing their ethnic heritages to Ireland nearly half the 1,000 or so students in the K–12 public school system are not white Resentment of the Latino presence — especially among older white voters — probably contributed to Trump’s support in 2016 with his vow to build a wall to keep illegal immigrants from crossing America’s southern border a 25-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico was beaten to death in Shenandoah by white high school football players with the town’s police chief later convicted by federal prosecutors for falsifying a report related to the attack rendering Shenandoah a bubbling cauldron of antagonisms This one-dimensional portrait omitted a long history of sectarian strife in time largely overcome in the region Maziekas retains an abiding belief that Schuylkill County can be revived I thought it sounded like a last choked gasp of support for a dying industry did not uniformly agree with their borough president “I don’t want my kids to suffer from global warming,” one resident A middle-aged woman told me that she had voted for Trump but now notwithstanding continued support for the president from her husband and voting-age children including “a monkey,” because she is so fed up with his “bad policies,” not least his refusal to acknowledge global warming I came across a similar sentiment in Ashland Trump “sold people a bill of goods here,” a retired police officer told me over Subway sandwiches died of black lung disease from working in the coal mines; so did his neighbor students in an environmental science class participated in September’s Global Climate Strike — a week of actions to “end the age of fossil fuels” — by creating posters such as one depicting the planet as an electric lightbulb and asking: How many people does it take to change the globe The political crosscurrents in Schuylkill County undermine the notion that geography sorts America into pure red and blue sections a neat division between the heartland interior and the coasts the camps isolated in “information bubbles.” The division Our nation’s culture wars are waged not only between sections but also within communities The Pennsylvania anthracite industry’s annual output has risen to between two million and three million tons Asked whether he credited Trump for the boost in industry fortunes he’s a Trump supporter: Asked if he could support Joe Biden I joined Driscoll the next morning at an active Blaschak coal-mining project the site of a surface mine where work had ceased under a previous operator We donned hard hats and bright yellow safety vests and stood at the lip of an enormous open pit worked by a team operating heavy machinery Blaschak aims to produce as much as 300,000 tons of anthracite annually A $1 million grant from Pennsylvania’s Redevelopment Assistance Capital Program is helping to fund the work a member of the United Mine Workers of America told me he has been mining coal since the age of 20 providing enough for a worker to own a home and support a family his rule of thumb is that hard-coal miners have steady work when Republicans control the executive branch in Washington He voted for Trump in 2016 and plans to do so again — and as far as he knows Their political mind-set is not solely determined by coal Democrats are perceived as hostile to gun rights Pessimism is plentiful in Schuylkill County its veins as deeply etched as the coal seams “These communities are done,” the retired Ashland police officer told me The county’s population has declined by 4% since 2010 and by 12% since 1980 The region’s “work ethic is unbelievable,” he said and “it comes from the coal industry.” The county’s unemployment rate signs of revitalization suggest a future for the region beyond coal with land purchased and Pennsylvania State University a committed tenant The goal is to advance careers in the trades — to assist those aiming to start businesses as electricians and other vocations not requiring a college degree The region’s “work ethic is unbelievable,” Stanley Sobel said that tensions between Latinos and other/white residents are diminishing A declining share of Latino children in Shenandoah’s schools need to take English as a second language and Latino-owned businesses are gaining a foothold Health care is already creating jobs here: In 2018 120,000-square-foot acute-care hospital — to be “built with American steel,” the project’s commissioners noted — southeast of Pottsville greater potential exists for agriculture and related industries like food processing Norsk Hydro (the Norwegian-headquartered and partly state-owned global conglomerate) operates one of the world’s largest aluminum fabrication plants of a growing industry built around renewable energy: atop Shenandoah heights their giant white blades rotated by the wind could change political dispositions in Schuylkill County and it is not threatened in the same way that the region’s textile business was by foreign competition the region’s fate lies in the hands of the young — whether they’re defending fossil fuels or protesting them Will this land of hard times and hard luck prove economically capable of keeping them here The defining vote in these parts will be with the feet — whether staying put or moving on Paul Starobin is the author of A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age. This was adapted from the winter issue of the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal has invested more than $1 million in the camp's rebirth have been repaired and improved by Amish craftsmen Some have been decorated with period furniture and Ali memorabilia."},{"_id":"DBQZX7TWSFECJBTNNARVH2GSAM","type":"text","content":"\"We're trying to replicate everything,\" said Matta."},{"_id":"73JOSDJZNZCBTP3VPDW3TQYM2E","type":"text","content":"As a guide for the project who was best man at one of the fighter's weddings and a pallbearer at his parents' funerals The crusty manager supplied both stories and photos from the Deer Lake years."},{"_id":"IODELRWJDJCXTE5ARQVLNK5F2I","type":"text","content":"\"When I saw those photos I knew we had to put them on display,\" said Madden."},{"_id":"GKRTOBBDF5E6JH2MPAMG43QL6E","type":"text","content":"Now dozens of them — along with Ali quotations magazine covers — adorn the walls of the spacious gym with its regulation ring and punching bag."},{"_id":"J46BXENE2FEBRIQMGSMQGLHMHA","type":"text","content":"Up a hill from there is the cozy white mosque where Ali prayed five times daily adjacent to a large stone grill the boxer built A short walk away are the bunkhouses and the kitchen prepared meals."},{"_id":"BUNHZHRD5NDSVPGDWWRLNOB3KE","type":"text","content":"Those bunkhouses might be suitable for corporate meetings or as theaters where tourists could view some of Ali's 61 professional fights."},{"_id":"WEDI26BFLNGZFENMKUZB2NI4MQ","type":"text","content":"\"Mike's not sure how it's all going to work or how many people are going to come to see this place,\" said Matta they'll come.\""},{"_id":"D65VAIMYPNHMXEXONJP3VLUEEM","type":"reference","referent":{"id":"Z2FLDJYIQRDFPFCMZAGEX7NTJY","type":"image","referent_properties":{"caption":"Sam Matta “People were always popping in and out,” he said “Can you imagine Tom Brady or LeBron James working out someplace where people could come and see them But even when he was the most famous person on earth Muhammad welcomed everyone.”","credits":{"by":[{"type":"author","name":"(Bradley C Bower/For the Philadelphia Inquirer)"}]}}},"additional_properties":{"_do_not_inflate":true}},{"_id":"OHUYYAAJJJHM5H4MCDD5MI4JTU","type":"text","content":"When the camp's doors officially open visitors can view Ali videos on numerous TV monitors — a Howard Cosell-narrated biography in the gym a 1974 Dick Cavett Show tour of Deer Lake in Ali's cabin."},{"_id":"K5OXR5SWURBXDK6NZXSTO5UPYA","type":"text","content":"\"I'm more at home here than I am in my Cherry Hill house,\" Ali told Cavett like Jack Johnson did.\""},{"_id":"EXGEG5IEBVEFJGPMJELHHHJBP4","type":"text","content":"The mosque's TV features an excerpt from a 1977 appearance in England Ali riffed on his spiritual beliefs."},{"_id":"YUFPHZ4U7ZBSXDFOYRNFHUAYCA","type":"text","content":"\"We're hoping to bring school kids here so we had some principals and school superintendents come in and watch that clip,\" said Matta \"We asked them if it raised any separation-of-church-and-state issues and they said no but we have some small-minded people in this area and we're afraid that if we start bringing in kids 'You're taking them to a mosque?' \""},{"_id":"PNKZEULUO5BTVDIIHZEY4BIA5Q","type":"reference","referent":{"id":"5KXVS67SDJDLHOLH6J4BZ6PPME","type":"image","referent_properties":{"caption":"Ali built a mosque at his camp and he prayed there five times daily.","credits":{"by":[{"type":"author","name":"Bradley C Bower / For the Inquirer"}]}}},"additional_properties":{"_do_not_inflate":true}},{"_id":"MXXHZE7FGVFBNAY2KK2XY4U4OI","type":"text","content":"The revived camp whose owner hopes will one day be listed on the National Historic Register Documentarians from HBO filmed here last August for a project partially financed by LeBron James a boxing-mad Saudi prince visited with his sons and offered to buy the place."},{"_id":"EN3MS55JW5FBJN7YBCXFRHIJR4","type":"text","content":"\"People used to come and talk about fixing this place up,\" Kilroy said \"This kid came and he put his money where his heart is.\""},{"_id":"NESWYXZ6YFE53OPELWSFJHU6LQ","type":"text","content":"There's no timetable yet for when the public will be admitted select groups of schoolchildren  – \"focus groups,\" he called them – will tour."},{"_id":"TMKBVGWTHJHC7KZTZTEEZXSHAU","type":"text","content":"\"We'll sit them down afterward and ask what they liked what they didn't What was boring and what wasn't,\" he said."},{"_id":"WXX2R34TXRGZPNTIOC5NDX4DDQ","type":"text","content":"In the meantime Madden has hosted dinners here for business executives and civic leaders He thinks hosting a few corporate retreats a year could finance educational programs."},{"_id":"5BNXIIBLERFRFBAGYDIQGHNJFQ","type":"text","content":"Deer Lake's most striking feature may be the 18 huge boulders scattered around the property Ali's father painted the names of great boxers Ali seemed enamored of the one that honored Sonny Liston the fighter he beat in 1964 to take the heavyweight title."},{"_id":"7GUA5PFPFVBZRLXAGTKF2ZUXFE","type":"text","content":"In one photo from the 1970s Ali is standing proudly atop the Liston boulder gazing out at a spectacular vista of the Appalachian range this time re-creating his famous \"Get up and fight!\" gesture from the second Liston fight."},{"_id":"WEILJ5VHINBXXGGB2F6GSG5CPQ","type":"text","content":"When Madden's son he climbed the rock and took a selfie in the same pose It's a transformation Mike Madden hopes repeats itself often."},{"_id":"R7SNVS5LBZB2NMBOHYAOLBN34E","type":"text","content":"\"My challenge now,\" said Madden \"is figuring out a way to get people up there and through the place It tells a great story about an important historical figure I just wonder if these kids who walk around with their noses in their phones all day will get it.\""},{"_id":"2PORDVDV2FGAZN7RUAIG43U4XE","type":"reference","referent":{"id":"ASEL465EYRCSXKWXUXUEVM6HOE","type":"image","referent_properties":{"caption":"Muhammad Ali’s father painted the names of famous boxers on huge boulders scattered around the Deer Lake property led by John Madden’s son"},"owner":{"id":"pmn","name":"The Philadelphia Inquirer Daily News and Philly.com"},"workflow":{"status_code":6},"subheadlines":{"basic":""},"description":{"basic":"For eight years ALI01P.","scheduling":{"planned_publish_date":"2018-07-03T15:00:00.000Z","will_have_image":true,"will_have_gallery":false,"will_have_video":false}},"display_date":"2018-07-03T15:12:00Z","credits":{"by":[{"type":"reference","referent":{"id":"fitzpatrick_frank","type":"author"},"additional_properties":{"_do_not_inflate":true}}]},"subtype":"post","first_publish_date":"2018-07-03T15:12:00Z","additional_properties":{"original_article_title":"Muhammad Ali’s secluded Pa led by John Madden’s son","character_count":11308,"update_count":40,"clickability_id":"485843772","has_published_copy":true},"publish_date":"2018-07-03T15:12:00Z","slug":"ALICAMP06"},{"_id":"57W6U2LXANHEVKLS6JLIBOLAXE","type":"story","version":"0.6.2","content_elements":[{"_id":"K7YPR7TPERANFBF265SIGFT3IU","type":"raw_html","content":"Coal miners didn’t see the sun all that much back when Joe Brennan went looking with his father and grandfather for anthracite Federal action is key to effectively addressing climate change “Something is better than nothing.” “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.” We are thus grateful to Craig Segall and David Hults for responding to an earlier essay of ours by extolling the virtues of various state and local climate initiatives Yet as much as we personally share Segall and Hults’s hopefulness that “real progress” on climate policy can be made over the next several years as scholars we have a duty to do more than just traffic in hope Optimism can blind decisionmakers and the public to real policy challenges at the state and local level More troubling still is the possibility of lulling the public into thinking the United States can adequately address climate change without federal action “We’re going to do everything America would have done if it had stayed committed.” In the absence of any meaningful federal action such bottom-up strategies would appear irrefutably to be better than nothing It is certainly undeniable that any effective policy to reduce carbon emissions depends on behavioral change at the ground level energy system depends heavily on carbon-based fuels then each person contributes in some way to greenhouse gas emissions And if they do not cover the entire country or planet subnational efforts will inherently be restricted in their impact due to their limited geographic scope the pledges from states to date only cover “up to 35 percent of America’s total greenhouse gas emissions according to the report’s appendix data,” which “means this group represents roughly less than 5 percent of the world’s emissions despite comprising an economy that’s the world’s third-largest.” mandatory national regulation in countries like the United States States and localities need to move forward with their eyes wide open to the legal risks they face But legal risks need to be confronted and managed—or at the very least understood and then accepted Although it is hard to see the federal government taking action for at least the next few years maintaining pressure for a federal climate policy will be necessary for when the policy window does open Paying attention now to the structural limitations and legal risks of state and local climate action helps combat complacency and reinforces the need for meaningful national action Just as it is a truism that “something is better than nothing,” President Theodore Roosevelt had it right too when he said but remember to keep your feet on the ground.” Cary Coglianese is the Edward B Shils Professor of Law and Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania where he is also the Director of the Penn Program on Regulation and the faculty advisor to The Regulatory Review Shana Starobin is Assistant Professor of Government and Environmental Studies at Bowdoin College and a former Fellow of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania Law School This essay is part of a five-part series, entitled State and Local Regulation of Climate Change The Court stayed the “good neighbor” provision of the Clean Air Act in Ohio v Scholar argues that environmental law and policy should expand its scope to inside areas Scholars analyze decreasing environmental prosecutions and propose enforcement improvements The first Kindertransport arrives in Harwich Image by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Courtesy of Instytut Pamieci Narodowej In the following months over 10,000 mostly Jewish children were saved from Nazi-occupied territories because their parents were willing to separate from them In England they were placed in foster families British authorities agreed to grant visas; private citizens and organizations found guarantors for the children up to the age of 17 many of these children emigrated to the United States “My sister Bertl doesn’t call herself a Holocaust survivor,” Starobin I was resettled without having a say in it That seems to me as pretty much being a survivor.” Starobin was only 26 months old when she came to England on a Kindertransport A picture that was taken shortly before her departure shows a wide-eyed 2-year-old with curls holding a stuffed dog with a Christian family: Dorothy and Harry Harrison whom she called “Auntie Dot” and “Uncle Harry,” and their 9-year-old son Alan “I was very much a part of their family,” Starobin recalled smiling every time she mentioned their names Her memories of her time in England are very much that of a small child “They were big on vegetables,” Starobin said referencing her foster parents while rolling her eyes Norwich was out in the countryside and Esther grew up very sheltered she and her foster brother Alan spent a lot of time riding up and down the escalators in stores “We didn’t have those things in Norwich,” she recalled Esther Starobin poses with a guard outside the Tower of London Starobin’s three sisters and her brother survived the Holocaust “I really don’t remember anything from Germany,” she said her sisters followed the directions of their late mother and arranged for all of them to live together in the United States “When you talk to people who were on the Kindertransport their experience in England was God-awful,” Starobin said For her it was leaving her British family that was unbearable “I probably somehow knew I had to leave at some point the shock felt at the time still obvious in the way she talked about it decades later Starobin is a very active retired schoolteacher For twenty years she has also been a volunteer at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington Helga Shepard’s story also began in Germany and ended in the United States she was saved on a Kindertransport to England – but that is where the similarities of their biographies end Shepard was born as Helga Uszerowicz in 1932 in Berlin The well-protected little girl didn’t notice the seizure of power by the National Socialists or the attacks on her family The Uszerowicz family poses with glasses of mineral water along with other patrons of a spa in Karlsbad Image by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Courtesy of Helga Shepard she stops being an 84-year-old American perched on a sofa in her Manhattan apartment and transforms into a young German girl I didn’t know about Hitler,” she said with an innocent look changing her voice and pitch like an actress on a stage when she recalled her childhood Even the Kindertransport itself was nothing but a big adventure for the six-year-old “I was gonna go on a train trip with my brother an odyssey began for the young refugee girl She was separated from her brother and sent to relatives who abused her as a maid and even hit her with a whip She didn’t have any contact with her parents she learned when she was 10 that her brother had died in an accident while wrapping her arms around her body as if to hug herself The feelings are as strong as they ever were Why do the other people talk?’” asked the mother of three Helga Uszerowicz plays outside with a dog in Nottingham where she came on a Kindertransport Shepard’s emotional memories were in stark contrast to her colorful cozy apartment in which we conducted our conversation Numerous posters from the Beatles were on the walls of her living room – the pensioner had recently celebrated a 1960s-themed party Shepard belongs to the small and lucky group of Kindertransport children whose parents both survived the Holocaust But after the eight-year-long forced separation Shepard’s mother didn’t recognize her 15 year old daughter and her Orthodox father soon started hitting her sometimes I think I want to go to an artist and commission three marble columns no communication between them,” Shepard said about the broken relationship with her parents where the family lived in the “Pletzl” quarter or “Little Place” — Yiddish speakers’s name for the Marais the three of them immigrated to the United States together Shepard lived all by herself and from them on her life improved drastically married an American and had three children the Berliner faced her Kindertransport past and met hundreds of members of the Kindertransport Association “It was wonderful,” Shepard recalled her first meeting with some of them with a big smile on her face “It was amazing to know that I wasn’t alone.” To honor and remember the unique rescue operation, December 2 is celebrated as “World Kindertransport Day.” You can find a list of events on the website of the “Kindertransport Association.” Lilly Maier is a news intern at the Forward She has been researching the history of the Kindertransport for many years and in doing so met many inspiring Holocaust survivors On December 12, 2016, she will give a lecture on the “The History of the Kindertransport and Its Long-Term Effects” at Deutsches Haus at NYU in New York. If you are interested to attend, you can rsvp here Reach her at [email protected] or on Twitter at @lillymmaier __Jewish history is one long story of seeking refuge from fundamentalist Teheran to chaos-ridden Addis-Ababa — read more of Jewish refugees’ stories here._ I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward American Jews need independent news they can trust At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S rising antisemitism and polarized discourse This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up Copyright © 2025 The Forward Association Hickey and Watt broke down their bigger query into four smaller questions and two students from the audience also asked a couple of practical questions. Below are edited snippets of some of the panelists' responses to these six questions Drouin: What environmentalism means to me is...I want it to be mainstream and I think we need to elect the right people to office and then hold them accountable once they are in there Tarpinian: My family has built a highly sustainable business around protecting what we have here it was finding the place I thought I could best express my voice and my particular talents and abilities [which is] doing research and being an educator and thinking about policy strategies and what the best policy options there are to have on the table Nelson: Environmentalism is looking for practical ways to use markets and to use people's desire to produce things that are highly valued to nudge them toward different allocations of landscapes we need to identify the policy levers that make a difference and...[also] shine a light on the policy levers that don't make a difference or are perversely worsening the environment we could look at how different companies approach their production processes and support those that do a better job....One other thing Starobin: States — countries — are in a great position to do something about climate change We need coordinated actions and effective policies and that has to go far beyond what any individual can do....Not that a corporation or individual can't do their part everybody does need to have all hands on deck but we always have to go back to the locus of power How can we change or create rules and regulations and at what level of government are they going to be effective Drouin: I would say it is our elected officials who are not holding corporations accountable I firmly believe it is up to all of us to elect pro-conservation people who will enact [environmental] policy levers in 2018 put our head on our pillow and feel good about ourselves We want to align our practices with our values If we don't do that we experience cognitive dissonance — we feel uncomfortable."—Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies and Government Shana Starobin It's all about money and what people are buying....If American people stopped buying foods that weren't labeled [as genetically modified] it would be a quick transition to labeling them or genetically modified stuff going away and that dictates a lot how the country will move forward Starobin: [After giving an example of the dilemma with consuming chocolate much of which is produced in Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire where child laborers are used.] You can choose to buy a product that is more likely not to have been made by child labor but what about the rest of the supply chain Do you relocate production outside of Africa to somewhere where there is no problem We have to remember that going back all the way to developing countries there might be producers that as a result of standards might be pushed aside They can't be a part of [the industry] any more because they can't pay to play they can't pay to get the certifications so we can all feel good about ourselves here....I don't want you to walk away thinking there isn't hope there isn't a pathway — there is — but it requires thoughtful consideration and also thinking about the right policies that can create shifts If your higher goal is to make the world a better place environmentally than you left it than I think it is important to act consistently with that Even if recycling doesn't do much on the margin still do it because it makes you feel like you are part of a larger project.—Associate Professor of Economics Erik Nelson Nelson: One place where there is a nexus [is that] the poor and disenfranchised get the brunt of bad environmental consequences in this country you don't want [polluting industry] in your back yard Drouin: Maine Conservation Voters is working with the Immigrant Welcome Center of Greater Portland We're working with them on a civic engagement project in our democracy....It's not specifically around the environment but...if you look at the polling that is true for all races....It's important for mainstream environmental organizations to stand up and speak out at critical times when there are issues that affect not just environmental justice but racial justice write an email to your mom and dad and say the next car you buy is going to be electric Badger your parents until they buy an electric car Another thing is think about a career in the environment Study in a way that will make you marketable to the firms and nonprofits that work in the environment Drouin: One of the things I learned as an organizer is to take big problems and to really think about your goal and to define it And once you decide what you would like to achieve Nelson: A year ago I bought an electric car a Nissan leaf....And I do recycle with a passion Starobin: I signed up for We Compost It I hope that in the future there will be mandatory composting and it will be the norm We should not all be thinking about what to do with our food waste that ought not go to the landfill there should be a good system there for all of us to do it Tarpinian: What we do at the store is we compost everything and it goes back to five of the organic farmers we buy produce from in the summer I think it is important to do stuff that is routine — recycling and composting And civic engagement…You also have a voice when it comes to our democracy and you should never give that up Watt: The most important thing I do is lead Bowdoin Climate Action....I think the most important thing I've done is engage with students and community members and have greater discussions about what it means to fight for environmental and climate justice — why we do this what we're fighting for — and sharing our stories in that way I educate myself and take pride in being informed and also helping to inform others....Another thing I do is...even if I know the utility of taking a shorter shower isn't as great as policy changes it's a reminder of what I care about and things that give me hope Reflections on Walt Whitman’s bicentennial Walt Whitman Speaks: His Final Thoughts on Life, Writing, Spirituality, and the Promise of America edited by Brenda Wineapple (Library of America Walt Whitman stands as its most exuberant exponent He was steadfast in his embrace of America In “Song of Myself,” published in Whitman’s first volume of Leaves of Grass in 1855 (and appearing in all subsequent editions) he presents himself as the flesh-and-blood representative of a sprawling and rising nation: The essential Whitman qualities can be appreciated anew with the publication of Walt Whitman Speaks and the Promise of America.” Throughout his life Whitman had many such thoughts—in his last years alone transcribed by his young friend and amanuensis the writer and social reformer Horace Traubel Traubel began nearly daily visits to Whitman at his Mickle Street row house in Camden The mostly one-way conversations halted only with Whitman’s death Walt Whitman Speaks is a “best of” from his bulky and repetitious material ruthlessly pared and elegantly sorted by the editor into categories like “Nature,” “Egotism,” “Sex,” “Friendship,” and “Democracy.” Whitman It’s tempting to think of Whitman merely as a reflection of his times—an age of boundless confidence as a young nation sprouted into a global titan America did not enjoy an untroubled passage through these years—the Civil War intervened midway in Whitman’s life—and second Whitman’s literary contemporaries did not all share his buoyant and expansive temperament born a few months apart in 1819 (Whitman in West Hills But their contrasting dispositions came to the fore when fighting began between the North and the South In his poem “The Swamp Angel,” Melville offers an ode to the Union gun—the angel—that rained death and destruction on Charleston in the siege of the city that Northerners blamed for giving birth to the Southern rebellion The poem seems to suggest Charleston’s deserved comeuppance in a tone of cold anger: “Is this the proud City the scorner/Which never would yield the ground?” “Some of my best friends in the hospitals were probably Southern boys,” he tells Traubel I found myself loving him like a son: he used to kiss me good night—kiss me I could tell you a hundred such tales.” This recollection is mirrored in Whitman’s poem “Reconciliation,” written at war’s end: The Union victory strengthened Whitman’s bright spirits his contrast with contemporaries remained striking the endemic corruption that defined this chapter of American life was a wellspring for sardonic sayings along the lines of “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Ambrose Bierce began work on The Devil’s Dictionary where he defined a cynic as “a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are not as they ought to be.” Brooks Adams great-grandson of John Adams and 29 years Whitman’s junior He wrote a mawkish treatise that he considered calling “The Path to Hell,” but ultimately titled The Law of Civilization and Decay His was not a foolish optimism—he saw the Gilded Age for what it was a sense of how “genuine belief seems to have left us” and “the lowering darkness falls,” as he wrote in “Democratic Vistas,” a prose pamphlet published in 1871 “I believe our institutions can digest for “it is impossible for America to fail to turn the worst luck into best—curses into blessings.” He was proven right: the Gilded Age was not America’s undoing with the country and its institutions finding was the root source of Whitman’s irrepressible hopefulness The answer can be found nearly everywhere in the pages of Walt Whitman Speaks especially in the short section titled “Spirituality.” By the time Whitman started pouring out his thoughts to Traubel America had established itself as an economic giant Whitman was not opposed to the country’s gaudy material achievements; after all “the body must precede the soul,” he instructs his friend True meaning was not to be found in “railroads no: these are but fleeting ephemera—these alone are nothing absolutely nothing; only the absorbent spirit enveloping all—only this is something.” In this dogma in nature as in the beating heart of every man and woman: “America—her clouds ideals; let it be reflected in the majesty of each individual.” This democratic spirit This high-voltage positivity was not an unalloyed good Whitman’s faith anticipated what came to be called the American Century built around the dubious idea that an exceptional America had a missionary role to rescue and remake the world “I wonder,” he suggests to Traubel “if the American people are not the most enterprising on the globe They seem to be in readiness at all times for all emergencies; places of peril they transform instantly to safeties.” This was bunk America would be embroiled in the Philippines—first ridding the Filipinos of their Spanish colonial overseers but thereafter waging a war of conquest against natives demanding full independence for their country not to excuse America’s conduct in the war in the country’s unfinished tapestry As unapologetically signaled in “Song of Myself,” he made no vow of consistency in his assorted soapbox pronouncements and he proved resolutely faithful to that promise is to read “Song of Myself,” usually also dipping back into “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” his lovely ode wisest soul of all my days and lands.” Whitman is invariably a tonic on what he might make of today’s America and its multitudes “Washington is corrupt,” he tells Traubel “but the evil is mostly with the upper crust.” (Then again he had “no doubt” that “by and by the capital will go west—somewhere along the Mississippi—the Missouri.”) Donald Trump Perhaps Whitman would be charitable in judging Trump’s personal character; in “Democratic Vistas,” he inveighed against “refinement and delicatesse” as “a cancer” on the body politic and pleaded “for a little healthy rudeness.” Whitman gave wide berth to outrageousness and had intimate and agreeable acquaintances with outsize egos—including his own While projecting such judgments is inevitably an exercise of imagination it’s clear enough that Trump is the opposite of the type that tended to provoke Whitman’s ire “I often get mad at the ministers—they are almost the only people I do get mad at,” he confesses to Traubel where the young Walt attended public schools and in later years edited a newspaper Whitman also might detect something familiar—the “barbaric yawp” that he sounded “over the roofs of the world,” as proclaimed in the final stanza of “Song of Myself.” with its “robber barons” and Newport palaces was notable for its colossal disparities in wealth; yet Whitman with his overriding belief in the spiritual character of all things sins” might have an origin in the structure of the economy stemmed from heartlessness and an absence of faith in the American experiment he undoubtedly would detest the restrictive immigration approach favored by Trump and the president’s supporters It was much the same in Whitman’s day “We ought to invite the world through an open door—all men—yes even the criminals—giving to everyone a chance—a new outlook,” he says but for the great mass of people—the vast Pete Buttigieg struck one in his launch speech in South Bend “You and I now stand in a city that formally incorporated in 1865 the last year of a war that nearly destroyed this whole country What an act of hope that must have been,” he told the crowd “We stand on the shoulders of optimistic women and men Women and men who knew that optimism is not a lack of knowledge but a source of courage.” That’s it Whitman’s optimism was rooted in spirit but of a type as hard and as unbending as metal Paul Starobin, a former Moscow bureau chief of Business Week, is the author of Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War and is working on a book on the Alaska gold rush of 1900 Photo: William Creswell/Flickr millions of Americans are eyeing the exits my wife and I closed on a deal for an apartment in a hilltop town in Umbria I posted a question for my fellow participants in a Facebook group called Expats in Italy: "Is it just my imagination looking to purchase property in Italy?" As the responses poured in many of them sounded a distinct thematic note From a woman in Montana who was planning to move to Tuscany: "Yes I bought a hilltop village home … for a song compared to US prices It's expensive and sick of all the political crap and shootings."  From a woman in Texas: "An insurrection by a narcissist who couldn't accept election loss combined with his gun and abortion policies made moving more of a necessity than just a dream."  From a man in Tennessee: "I'm an American ready to flee America for Italy as Americans gird themselves to choose a president I'm off for Canada if unacceptable candidate X wins It's mostly just therapeutic venting.  That's some 40 million Americans who wanted to leave their country behind Young people are even more likely to be hopeful expats 24% wanted to leave America at the close of Bush's tenure there was a sharp gender divide: Only 20% of young men wanted to flee America Americans already living overseas are bracing for a wave of new expats "There will be more people moving abroad after the election if it is Trump," said Doris Speer the president of the Association of Americans Resident Overseas Stressing that she was expressing her own views Speer emphasized that Trump is far from the only reason Americans are eyeing the exits That's true: Housing prices in America are high remote work is allowing for unprecedented mobility and global respect for the United States has been eroding for decades believe "the American Dream — that if you work hard you'll get ahead — still holds true." In 2012 A second Trump presidency could serve as a "catalyst" that further fuels the growing diaspora of Americans living in exile Europe could well become what Canada was for draft dodgers during the Vietnam War: a political asylum for Americans fed up with their own country When I was looking to buy an apartment in Umbria I found that prices for turnkey places were about a third of the price of condos in Sedona Property taxes and homeowners insurance are also relatively modest in Italy but the mouthwatering fare at local restaurants — wild-boar ragù the dollars-and-cents pull to leave America is strong Wade — one of Trump's signature accomplishments — has aroused widespread anger and discontent But while America is cracking down on reproductive rights Abortion is now permitted in nearly all European countries including Catholic countries such as Portugal France just enshrined the right to abortion in its constitution — the first country ever to take that landmark step Americans are also sickened by the never-ending rash of horrific school shootings gun-ownership laws are much stricter than in the United States which is home to nearly half of the world's civilian-owned guns All of which makes it no surprise that Democrats are far more likely to flee America than Republicans the foreign-based arm of the Democratic National Committee which now numbers in the hundreds of thousands we register everybody," Martha McDevitt-Pugh the international chair of Democrats Abroad told me on a Zoom call from her base in the Netherlands "And we come overwhelmingly across Democrats who want to vote."  Hollywood is further stoking a seductive image of expat life Netflix's smash hit "Emily in Paris" — an inspiration for a new generation of American Francophiles heirs to the likes of Ernest Hemingway and James Baldwin — is now shooting its fourth season hosts webinars targeting prospective US buyers who comprise the largest share of its foreign clientele In "Expats," the new Amazon Prime series set in Hong Kong in the throes of a bedroom frolic with her husband home?" He energetically replies: "I like my life here."  those who flee America to escape MAGA may find themselves confronted by a host of unpleasant surprises my Expats in Italy Facebook group teems with the sort of questions that can drive a novice foreign-property owner batty Why won't my Italian utility company let me pay my bill with a US credit card (Answer: Because it won't.) Property bidders must have their offers officially registered with the local municipality and verified by the godlike person known as the "notaio," an official of ancient standing who drafts and authenticates the raft of documents for a fair-size fee.  a taxpayer with aggregate financial assets of just over $50,000 can be subject to reporting requirements American expats can also face a political backlash which has attracted a sizable contingent of Californians local activists have taken to the streets to protest increases in rent that they blame on the influx of foreigners the new expat haven," read a headline in The Los Angeles Times on the invasion of Golden Staters a semiretired management consultant in California he has visited the country more than a dozen times and he has long considered owning property there he told me that his "planning and research would accelerate if Trump wins in November." Even as a self-described "political centrist," he believes that "the consequences of a 'retribution presidency' (plus the ensuing chaos) could be dire for the country." although we didn't begin our Italy property search to find a refuge from MAGA-infused America we see it as something of a respite from Trumpland A journey to Moscow to discover what Russians really think of America even the monuments can summon a shudder from an American visitor Consider a fresh addition to the Moscow landscape—a 30-foot-high statue the world’s most widely used assault weapon a favorite of terrorists and insurrectionists There he stands astride the Garden Ring Road a Russian Orthodox priest sprinkled holy water on the figure “He created this weapon to defend his motherland,” the priest explained Russia the Terrible: to live in America nowadays to read newspapers and magazines and watch cable news is to be bombarded with unrelievedly negative images of Russia—pictures of a malicious society that has spawned a murderous spymaster-autocrat in the Kremlin a corrupt class of money-laundering business barons bent on meddling in our politics and messing with our minds Time caught the spirit of the moment with a cover illustration of the White House morphing into a monstrous composite of the Kremlin and Saint Basil’s Cathedral candy-colored onion domes sprouting from the roof What do they—the Russians—think of us I was no innocent abroad—I lived and worked in Moscow as a journalist and have visited Russia many times since—but still and to distill from the experience what lessons I might Attire for my determinedly unofficial trek was not business suit and tie but a down jacket and what might be the response—a grimace with the antipathy turned upside-down and devilishly transmuted into theater Boozer Shop & Bar is a locals’ sort of place at remove from the tourist destinations of the city center It offers a good selection of draft beers; but for food not much more than an assortment of flavored potato chips I strolled in on a Monday night to see if I might tap some opinions about my native country and its citizens “There are no more bears—don’t worry about us,” he told me among them a flag pin of Syria featuring Bashar al-Assad in sunglasses Moscow’s military intervention on behalf of Assad helped turn the tide in his favor in Syria’s brutal civil war seated at a bar stool and clad in black leather pants an iron cross dangling from a chain around his neck offered an opening statement: “America will be part of a new Soviet Union and you will be very happy in it.” This retort produced laughs all around produced from under the bar counter a baseball bat—a real one the treatment meted out to unwelcome guests Surely there is no finer sport in the world than America’s national pastime Andrei donned a Roman gladiator–style helmet signifying his allegiance to the Spartak football club in Moscow which ended with the American—me—escorted out of the bar as a mock prisoner Dmitri slipped me a piece of paper with his phone number scrawled on it—“Moscow friend,” he wrote—and the owner of the bar offered to give me 300 rubles (about $5) for a taxi back to my hotel The evening suggested a first lesson: while Russians these days are told by their own media that America Perhaps they’re being saved by cynicism about their own government “The media and politicians want us to hate America but we know that America does not really want to destroy us,” a first-year student at Moscow State University many Russians also see propaganda in the American media’s presentation of their country It is generally conceded that the Kremlin probably did interfere in some fashion with the 2016 U.S can somehow dictate events in mighty America is widely seen as preposterous “When someone says that Russian hackers made Trump president it is like hearing that Martians rule the world,” the same student told me One reason for such skepticism is that Russians tend to see their own culture as under the sway of the American way of life It may be too soon to predict the winner of a second Cold War but there can be no doubt of the winner in the ideological competition that defined the first go-round His monument still stands at Revolutionary Square in central Moscow he might be able to see Tiffany’s and the five-star Marriott just down the street “While Russians are told by their media that America is the enemy they are not reflexively accepting of it.” Russia isn’t simply a window display of boutique capitalism for the tiny few who can afford a diamond-encrusted bauble The democratic instinct may be lacking in a society that rallies around a strongman to keep chaos at bay represents wealth-generating capitalism at its most robust in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse bridled at the Washington policymaker and the Ivy League economist preaching the gospel of Adam Smith they are far from disliking the manner in which America has organized its economy city that they admire and want to visit above all others is New York—a shopper’s paradise another city that never sleeps (though with a less efficient metro system) architectural features of contemporary Moscow seem to have been constructed in imitation of the Manhattan or Chicago style as in the real-estate developers’ paradise known as Moscow City a dense cluster of steel-and-glass skyscrapers by the river On the 85th floor of one of these towers is a restaurant that conjures the bygone Windows on the World from 1 World Trade Center “Europe’s new highest restaurant,” as a promoter billed the place I bundled myself in a shaggy llama coat selected from a closet kept by the proprietor and joined my dining-mates in the ice bar—a small room the temperature set at minus 15 degrees Celsius The idea is for patrons to nibble caviar and knock down shots of vodka The room was a promotion for a vodka brand sprays of colorful flowers exquisitely set into the side and back panels Russia’s national habits persist but are accommodated that Washington and Brussels have imposed as punishment for Moscow’s aggressive behavior—its annexation of Crimea and backing of separatist rebels in eastern Ukraine No longer are Western delicacies—fromage from France for instance—so easy to obtain (though there are ways to get them an enterprising Russian company is breeding Alpine goats imported from France to produce the white mold cheese for which this animal’s milk is renowned) I stumbled across a line of perhaps 1,000 Muscovites snaking out of the aisles of L’Etoile into the foyer of a gleaming American-style shopping mall near the Kievskaya railway station They were there to meet Sarah Jessica Parker in Moscow to market her new brand of fragrance treasured for her Carrie Bradshaw character in Sex and the City Parker is popular here—as are American rappers as I found on an after-hours visit to Garazh (Garage) frequented by bohemian sorts in hipster-ish garbs It was loud with the electronic thump of grime a London-originated music with hip-hop among the influences making conversation difficult but not impossible in the booths off the dance floor and the area around her eyes smeared in black makeup in a catlike pattern Others at the club also volunteered Eminem as a favorite of the “white boy” accepted into the black hip-hop culture of Detroit his drug addiction a prominent theme of his music and understood by his Russian fans as such but the attraction transcends cultural boundaries At my mention of a recent Eminem contribution a freestyle rap video ripping into President Trump as a racist and hypocrite and concluding with the artist raising a middle finger to “any fan of mine/who’s a supporter of his,” Garazh’s patrons responded with knowing chuckles Try as I did to elicit raw expressions of animosity toward America and Americans in random encounters with Muscovites “I don’t want to have any enemy—Americans are friendly,” Alexander a lawyer fresh from an obligatory stint in the Russian army We were speaking after the first period of a hockey game at the sparkling new VTB Ice Palace in Moscow Perhaps such conversations illustrated nothing more than a journalistic version of the Heisenberg principle—the object of observation is bound to be influenced by the observer Russians are not gratuitously rude to foreign visitors and in my travels in Russia over the years from frozen Chukotka by the Bering Strait to balmy Sochi on the Black Sea I can recall only one instance of being accosted as an American It was at a café at the airport near Sochi in the summer of 2016; my haranguer was a middle-aged man of Putin-critic Hillary Clinton becoming president coasted to victory for another six years as president extending his undeclared reign as czar for life An affinity for Sarah Jessica Parker and her fragrance for the razzle-dazzle of New York—none of this is sufficient to relax tensions born of politics the return to Cold War–like conditions offers a compelling refutation of what has been dubbed the Golden Arches doctrine after the neoliberal hypothesis of New York Times columnist Thomas L that the global spread of consumer capitalism would restrict a country’s “capacity for troublemaking” and promote “gradual democratization and widening peace” around the world Yet there are more than 600 McDonald’s outlets in Russia and Russians subsist on Google and Facebook They buy their Apple iPhones—and purchase a hard-shell protective casing with an image of Putin on the back given my fondness for the Russians whom I meet at hockey games that the antagonism evident in Russia for the U.S as a political actor is simply the work of the Kremlin and its propagandists The Kremlin is amplifying currents already active in the broader culture heartfelt sentiments that can be found even among people not fond of Putin as was apparent in the conversations that I had with intellectual types over innumerable cups of coffee in the café of Hotel Budapest (my Moscow quarters) and other settings Moscow on the whole has a liberal disposition an attachment to core aspects of the Western pluralist tradition like freedom of expression Moscow embraced with fervor glasnost and perestroika the loosening of political and economic controls that helped undermine the Soviet system and cause its demise Tens of thousands of Muscovites have participated in street demonstrations protesting Putin’s iron rule But not even the liberal Muscovite any longer sees America as the lodestar and the enforcer of a liberal global order Disillusionment has set in among a cadre apt to be fluent in English and readers of the New York Times Older Muscovites are apt to bring up not anything from the recent past but an episode from the time of the late Clinton administration and the last year of Boris Yeltsin’s rule launched a months-long bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia to try to bring down the Serbian nationalist regime of Slobodan Milošević and thereby end the wars ravaging the Balkans NATO acted at the behest of Bill Clinton and without explicit authorization from the United Nations Security Council Orthodox Serbia is Orthodox Russia’s traditional ally Russians speak with indignation over the images seen back then on their television screens—of NATO bombs striking apartment houses and even a passenger train was the global face of the American superpower the victor over Moscow in the Cold War: a bully determined to use its overwhelming military might to shove everyone else around in cementing a new global order after its own liking Bush’s war against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq yet another military action begun against the Kremlin’s objections and without the assent of the Security Council this attitude was sealed by Washington’s infuriating interference in Ukraine—for centuries a possession of imperial Russia—as in the toppling We have our origin story of the second Cold War Consult a Russian—saving for that vacation to New York with a stop at the Grand Canyon—and you’re apt to scrape against the hard rock of a patriot This was the great mistake in the neoliberal belief in global capitalism as an elixir for peace between the nations—an underappreciation of the staying power of nationalism a resonant force in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and now again in the first decades of the twenty-first Putin’s Russia is a stronger global presence than Yeltsin’s Russia and the Russians who now hear unremitting criticism from America of Putin are apt to wonder why such criticism was lacking of Yeltsin “The disillusionment with America is easy to explain,” historian Andrey Isserov told me over lunch at the Russian Academy of Sciences we were good,” in the eyes of America If Washington feels free to tamper with Ukraine The Kremlin peddles this line of propaganda but can do so effectively because the message taps into genuine anxieties The history of Russia is the history of warding off invasions—the Mongols and Swedes As Russians today are apt to remind an American promised that NATO would not extend its domain by even “one inch to the east”—and yet NATO did expand to encompass the Soviet Republics in the Baltics How can Washington be trusted to keep its promises a burgeoning literature declares that the America Century titled After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age.) My Russian interlocutors tend to believe that America is still a colossus and is likely to remain one Mention of an emerging Chinese Century prompts a roll of the eyes I am not watching Chinese movies,” says Georgy Filatov a fourth-generation graduate of Moscow State and an expert on Spain smuggled a clandestine copy of Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago out of the USSR “Maybe America is not as powerful as before We are looking at the world from an American point of view.” Russians may feel more powerful under Putin than under Yeltsin they see their country as well behind the U.S in “hard power”—the most important measure of geopolitical prowess their blood-soaked history has taught them Russia may be at parity in nuclear weapons but America is spending nearly nine times as much as Russia on national defense—a budget of $611 billion in 2016 for the U.S America can afford to lavish funds on the Pentagon with an annual gross domestic product of $18.6 trillion is more than 14 times larger than the Russian economy whereas America can boast not only of New York but also of Houston and Dallas “Russians may feel more powerful under Putin but still The true nature of Russian–American antagonism is as a clash of complexes—an “inferiority complex” on the part of Russians and a “superiority complex” on the part of Americans a specialist in the works of Nikolai Gogol There is something to that; the thought occurs that the Russians will be the last people on earth to acknowledge the end of the American Century Perhaps their national imagination cannot admit of a diminished America this seemingly eternal facet of national self Kalashnikov in bronze stands guard over the Garden Ring and farther to the periphery of Moscow is a monument to the Semyenovsky Regiment formed by Peter the Great in 1683 and stationed in this spot A lone guard in knee-high boots and three-cornered hat bears watch over what is now a bustling part of the metropolis “We trustfully served the Russian czars,” the plaque reads “fighting with honor and giving fright to the enemy at the mere sight of our flag,” to paraphrase the rest Fifteen minutes’ walk brought me to the global headquarters of RT (Russia Today) the “Kremlin’s principal international propaganda outlet,” according to the assessment of the U.S a cluster of satellite dishes on the roof gave away the main building “Question More,” emblazoned in signature green on the white side panels RT calls itself a global news organization My visit was a violation of my resolve to experience Russia from outside the peeping eyes of the state Washington’s intelligence report had focused global attention on RT and especially RT America an English-language channel operated within the U.S. and I was curious as to how my request to visit its Moscow premises might be received I had urged an understanding of Putin “not as a conventional government leader but as CEO of a shadowy and increasingly global financial empire that might be called ‘Kremlin Inc.’ ” and calling on Washington to “publish Putin’s bank account.” Might that be held against me an assistant in the media-relations department agreed to my request for a tour of the broadcast studio on a day and hour of my choosing an RT employee whose principal job these days There I stood in the place visited only days earlier by CBS News journalist Lesley Stahl and her production crew for a report on RT by 60 Minutes The face hands of a trio of clocks were set to New York Flat-screen television panels were affixed to the walls workers tapped away at their desktop computer keyboards It looked and sounded like any broadcast studio and there in the anchor’s seat was BBC veteran Colin Bray preparing to deliver his top-of-the-hour news roundup No one at RT mentioned my New Republic piece or lectured me about anything; dutiful laughter greeted my lame joke about how we were standing on a spot in the target coordinates of America’s arsenal of ICBMs The message was plain enough: RT has nothing to hide This picture of ordinariness was enhanced by the grounds outside patrolled by young mothers pushing baby strollers down the walkways I came across the English (as in U.K.) School of Science & IT posterboard images of a bearded Tolstoy and a frazzled-haired Einstein displayed on the fence by the front gate—an imagined and now-forlorn medley of Anglo–Russo harmony as its content is a distillation of the least attractive features of American government and society—and offers a warped presentation of America’s conduct in the world “the old scapegoat” for the United States as I heard a commentator say while listening to RT programming in my hotel room I found myself wondering about the many Russians involved in RT production Should such people be thought of as the for-hire members of a theater company RT makes use of a familiar type whose sincerity is beyond question—the disaffected American outspoken about our social and economic inequities formerly a star foreign correspondent for the New York Times a weekly interview show on RT America aimed at airing “dissident voices” absent from American mainstream media America’s “ruling elite” today uses Putin’s Russia as a “foil” to deflect criticism of “corporate capitalism the security and surveillance state and imperialism.” Moscow also sought to make use of disaffected Americans—of figures like W he wrote glowingly of a visit to Khrushchev’s Moscow in the fall of 1959 as a VIP participating in the annual commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution Red Square and the Kremlin walls in view from the window Du Bois marveled at the cleanliness of the streets on which the day before “a half-million people marched and danced” but took scrupulous care not to soil with dirt or scraps of paper: “These people feel a vested interest in this nation such as few Americans feel for the United States.” This outlook would have made Du Bois attractive to RT America The platform awarded by Moscow to such figures that Washington does more or less the same with an outlet like Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty broadcasting in languages including Russian and offering a picture of a Russia that “intimidates” its citizens and aims to “dominate” its neighbors and “fight” the world The loop seems closed—the Russian and the American that on occasion the circle is broken—and never more so than when Washington and Moscow joined forces to defeat Hitler in World War II diplomat George Kennan was in Moscow on the morning of May 10 the unconditional surrender of Nazi forces to the Allies Young Russians joyfully marched through the streets and settled down to demonstrate before the embassy building feelings that were obviously ones of almost delirious friendship.” But such moments are interludes; they stand out for being exceptional given the general character of relations between America and Russia an omnipresent thread in Russian life and literature The belief that an unhappy relationship with America is in the cards the red-and-white club scarf tied in a loop around his neck his girlfriend Alexandra by his side as they stand at a table near the concession counters in VTB arena the third period of an exciting game about to commence I wait for him to finish his snack and then ask whether he thinks that an atmosphere of tension always will be the organizing principle in the relations between his country and mine Paul Starobin is a former Moscow bureau chief for Business Week and the author of Madness Rules the Hour: Charleston, 1860 and the Mania for War and After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age. He is writing a book on the Nome Top Photo: Moscow’s modern skyline seems to have been constructed in emulation of Manhattan or Chicago American journalism needs a reawakening of its core values issued a declaration of principles for the paper often reflecting little beyond the prejudices of the loudmouth owners of the presses In words that became famous as a statement for good journalism Ochs said that the Times would instead seek “to give the news impartially without fear or favor.” And he attached that pronouncement to a less-well remembered one: “to make of the columns of The New York Times a forum for the consideration of all questions of public importance and to that end to invite intelligent discussion from all shades of opinion.” It was an awakening to the principle known as the “marketplace of ideas,” the notion that the best thoughts on social and economic progress should compete in an open forum Ochs had the confidence and conviction to put his paper on the side of this standard accepted the resignation of editorial-page editor James Bennet An “Editor’s Note” note atop the online version of the Cotton piece declares that the essay “should not have been published.” hired the conservative writer Kevin Williamson to join the magazine’s staff—only to fire Williamson in the face of objections to the hiring from inside the publication and from readers The Atlantic’s motto is “Of no party or clique,” but in this instance Goldberg ruled in favor of protestors arguing that past statements by Williamson The most intense objection was to his tweets relating to abortion as in his comment that “the law should treat abortion like any other homicide.” convened a meeting of editorial staff and announced that Buruma would be leaving as editor “I have already made that very clear to David Remnick too.” Remnick hastily rescinded the invitation: “If the opportunity presents itself I’ll interview him in a more traditionally journalistic setting.” Each of these episodes prompted defenders of the traditional marketplace of ideas to point to the threat posed by “cancel culture” to our liberal values I echo that lament—but it is not sufficient to lay the blame for this trend on the migration of illiberal ideas from their birthplace in intolerant academia to leading journalistic institutions To leave matters there is to suggest a kind of helpless stasis to this development as if a new weather system has moved in and forced all of us to breathe the same fouled air Every culture is formed by individual choices Journalists believe in personal accountability for choices made by those in positions of responsibility and that includes the choices made by those who publish and edit their work attention must be focused on what presents as a lapse in conviction at the top of these institutions—a disappointing failure to have faith in the very principles in which the institutions profess belief a different call could have and should have been made—by Times publisher Sulzberger on forcing out Bennet by Atlantic editor Goldberg on firing Williamson by New York Review publisher and owner Hederman on forcing out Buruma and by New Yorker editor Remnick on withdrawing his invitation to Bannon “he said its mission was to take part in ‘a severe contest between intelligence timid ignorance obstructing our progress.’ Those words have guided us for 175 years.” In a similar vein, regarding the Buruma incident, John Ryle, the British writer and academic, organized an open letter signed by more than 100 contributors to The New York Review Their statement objected to Buruma’s “forced resignation” as “an abandonment of the central mission of the Review which is the free exploration of ideas.” Signatories included Joyce Carol Oates and Ian McEwan Sharp questioning might lead to strained relations in the workplace A challenge to a claim like the one put forward by some Times staffers—that publishing Cotton’s op-ed put black staff “in danger”—would require a thick skin on the part of the dissident news organizations must take seriously workplace-safety concerns posed by journalists responsible for gathering the news in dangerous situations whether on the streets of Minneapolis or in the mountains of Afghanistan But should such concerns guide what appears on opinion pages To say yes is to jeopardize the autonomy of the opinion section—to collapse the wall that separates newsrooms from opinion departments Yet surveys reliably show that journalists overwhelmingly lean Democratic and liberal in their politics To turn news pages into opinion pages is a formula not for broadening the marketplace of ideas but for narrowing “all shades of opinion” down to a predictable few surely they can profit by reviewing the collective experience of the press in dealing with Twitter mobs by now a common hazard of the social media landscape In the joint interest of not emboldening these throngs they need to recognize that to give way to a mob one time is only to encourage an even more insistent horde the next What happens to your neighbor can happen to you Do news organizations really stand to suffer if they refuse to heed demands to retract a controversial article While several speakers withdrew from The Economist’s Open Future festival in protest of the invitation of Bannon to appear with some 1.6 million print and digital subscribers combined The marketplace of ideas certainly is noisy It’s a truism to say that social media has made it more rambunctious than ever—but that assertion doesn’t stand up to historical scrutiny America was born in an age of furious opinion with pamphlets propounding every conceivable view papering the streets and taverns The marketplace principle remains the bedrock—the possession of “no party of clique,” as in The Atlantic’s founding credo of 1857 in his mission statement for the Times in 1896 wasn’t inventing a principle but reaffirming a timeless one Institutions like the Times need to stay truer to their roots What’s needed is a true reawakening—in short a renaissance of journalism’s core values Paul Starobin got his start in journalism as a reporter for the Lowell (MA) Sun in the mid-1980s and is the author, most recently, of A Most Wicked Conspiracy: The Last Great Swindle of the Gilded Age * Lowery’s age was incorrectly listed as 30 originally Link IconCopy linkFacebook LogoShare on FacebookXShare on XEmailShare via EmailLink copied to clipboardPenn students protest the school’s denial to show a film critical of Israel with plans to screen anywayPenn said “the safety and well-being of the Penn community is our top priority” and that “after discussions with Penn Public Safety and University administration,” it decided to postpone the screening University of Pennsylvania students protested Monday night after the school denied a progressive Jewish group there permission to this week screen a film critical of Israel on campus Students at Penn Chavurah wanted to show Israelism which has drawn significant controversy this year but the school cited “a potential negative response on campus” and used the word “vitriol,” according to one of the film’s producers and a student The university had offered to allow students to screen it in February a board member and student organizer for Penn Chavurah but he said the group planned to show it on Tuesday evening anyway — without the university’s permission » READ MORE: Petitioners nationwide ask Penn to defend those who speak in support of Palestinians a political science and economics major from Olney “One of the most fundamental aspects of a high-quality education is freedom of speech freedom of expression and I feel like that freedom is being really jeopardized by this decision.” Penn said in a statement that “the safety and well-being of the Penn community is our top priority” and that “after discussions with Penn Public Safety and University administration,” the decision was made last week to postpone the screening “We are actively working to find a date in February when the film can be viewed and discussed safely and constructively,” the university said The most recent showdown creates another sticky situation for the Ivy League university Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for its handling of antisemitism on campus and under criticism from others for not supporting its Palestinian and Muslim students and faculty in the wake of Hamas’s Oct which has led to the deaths of more than 13,000 Palestinians inside Gaza » READ MORE: U.S. Department of Education investigates Penn, Lafayette, over antisemitism and Islamophobia allegations The documentary, which debuted at a film festival in February, depicts the stories of “two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel” until they travel to Israel and the West Bank and “witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians,” according to the film’s website The film was made by two Jewish filmmakers who grew up in circumstances similar to the protagonists in their film The film has drawn controversy for its portrayal of Israel, and Abraham H. Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League, who is featured in the film and is a Holocaust survivor, said on X, formerly Twitter calling it “an anti-Israel and anti-American Jewish community film.” The film has won several prizes since its debut including an audience award at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival and best documentary at the Arizona International Film Festival has now agreed to show it following a backlash from faculty and students including Penn Chavurah and “If Not Now Philly,” which describes itself as a group of American Jews working to end its community’s support of occupation Starobin said Penn’s Middle East Center was able to secure a room in Myerson Hall where the film will be shown Tuesday evening » READ MORE: Under pressure from Jewish community, Penn president unveils plan to combat antisemitism In a meeting with a university official Monday Starobin said he was told that if Penn Chavauh obtains a university room for the screening without explicitly stating what the room is for it could lose its funding and status as a student group Penn did not respond to questions about the potential Myerson Hall viewing “We are calling their bluff,” Starobin said Monday evening addressing about 50 people gathered at Penn Commons for the protest They stood before a banner that said: “American Jews say: Stop genocide in Gaza The university does not censor pro-Israel events “Penn only protects speech that its donors approve,” he said The university has been roiled in controversy since the Palestine Writes literature festival was held on campus in late September drawing criticism for allowing some speakers who have a history of making antisemitic comments Meanwhile, a petition signed by more than 500 academics and writers from inside and outside the United States has called on the University of Pennsylvania to defend its students and staff against targeted harassment for speaking in support of Palestinians The Penn chapter of the American Association of University Professors said Penn’s refusal to grant the student group permission to reserve a room to screen the film on campus this semester is “one more expression of our university leadership’s failure to uphold the principles of academic freedom —principles enshrined in Penn’s policies and essential to the mission of a university “Academic freedom entails the freedom of students to learn and to encounter and critically examine multiple interpretations of the world.. the university administration violates its own policies and endangers the principles of academic freedom that are essential to the research and teaching mission of a university.” Starobin said students first sought permission to show the film on campus over the summer and had secured permission for Oct decided to postpone the event given the Oct When they sought approval in late October to screen the film on Nov the university initially did not respond and then ultimately last week said it would not grant approval this semester Axelman said there has been an aggressive and “defamatory” email campaign against the film They have heard from universities hosting the screenings that they have received a large volume of emails encouraging them to ban it is based on his own story — he grew up in rural Maine — and many of his friends who were given a “mythical” or “heroic” narrative about Israel “the cornerstone of our Jewish identities.” more young American Jews are realizing that isn’t the whole story and have decided they must fight antisemitism at the same time they fight against the oppression of Palestinian people The film chronicles the stories of Simone Zimmerman and Eitan (whose last name is not used) who served in the Israeli military and participated in the occupation of the West Bank Screenings of the film were paused for 10 days after the Oct “Our film could play an important role in understanding the root causes of this conflict,” he said 2013 at 1:21 am ET.css-79elbk{position:relative;}A high-speed car chase in Stoughton this past weekend resulted in a drug bust and the arrests of a Norwood man and a Stoughton woman according to a post on the Stoughton Police Department's Facebook page noticed what appeared to be a domestic event in the vehicle in front of him He called in the information and followed the vehicle while waiting for a marked unit," according to the SPD Facebook post "Once the operator realized he was being followed by an officer he took off at a high rate of speed in order to evade Officer Healey Marked units joined the pursuit which reached speeds of 90 MPH and put the officers and the public at risk," the post continues "began to attempt to swallow several pills upon the approach of the officers," according to police police also discovered "several hundred percocets and lorazepams" as well as $7,000 in cash faces more than a dozen charges related to the chase and subsequent drug bust Charges include: assault and battery; operating to endanger; reckless operation; speeding; failure to stop; failure to use care in passing; passing where prohibited; failure to stop for a signal; marked lanes violations; unsafe lane changes; failure to stop for a police officer; possession of Class B substance to distribute; and conspiracy to violate drug law is charged with possession of Class B and C substances with the intent to distribute and with conspiracy to violate drug law Get more local news delivered straight to your inbox. 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Shamil Zhumatov / ReutersDecember 2005 Issue ShareSave Nursultan Nazarbayev is a man of grand projects—and the grandest of them all is Astana Once an obscure fortress town of the Russian Empire in a region where temperatures swing from 100°s in the summer to -40°s in the winter Astana today is a fast-growing metropolis of 600,000—and a showcase for a staggering variety of public works Billions of dollars are being poured into the construction of government buildings aware of Kazakhstan's growing importance as a global oil exporter are courting Nazarbayev with generous contributions to Astana's development To cite just a few examples: the Persian Gulf state of Qatar has funded a national Islamic center with a mosque able to accommodate 7,000 worshippers; a Saudi prince's foundation has funded a center for cardiac surgery; and the Russian-Jewish oligarch Alexander Mashkevich who has large metal holdings in Kazakhstan has funded the Beit Rachel synagogue and Jewish center is aware of the city's immense importance to Nazarbayev "The heart of the nation now beats here," he informed his people in 1999 two years after officially uprooting the government from Almaty Nazarbayev claims to be the planner of Astana's every detail right down to the choice of yellow and white paints for the houses On the ground floor of the presidential palace is an eye-catching scale model of the emerging capital The model highlights the so-called "new city," on the left bank of the Ishim River are working on major commissions (Foster is building a glass-pyramid "Palace of Peace") but Nazarbayev has made his own role in designing Astana clear "I'm the architect," he once told a reporter Considerable speculation attends the reasoning behind the move to Astana Some Nazarbayev watchers say the main idea was to distance the seat of power from China whose vast population inspires fear among the Kazakhs Others say it was to establish the capital in an area populated by many ethnic Russians and close to the Russian border—thus checking any notions those citizens might have about breaking away to unite with Russia born of several days' wandering around the place recently is that Nazarbayev thinks of the city as a blank canvas No small measure of personal vanity attaches to this endeavor an abstract-looking monument in the center of town Designed to represent a tree of life planted in the heart of Eurasia the monument has become the principal symbol of the new capital and the new country A 1,000-ton trunk of white metal shoots up 344 feet from the ground and branches into limbs enmeshing a golden 300-ton glass ball seventy-two feet in diameter Visitors can take an elevator to the top of the monument and into the ball which affords a 360-degree panorama of the city's gleaming new structures (the massive blue-domed presidential palace among them) A plaque there is inscribed with wishes for world peace from the Chinese Taoist Association But the main attraction is a silver mold of Nazarbayev's palm print Placing a hand in it strikes up the Kazakh national anthem I tried but couldn't raise a note—a problem that At night the monument is lit up by pulsating mauve and turquoise lights The Baiterek seems right out of Architecture for Dictators 101—and there's no denying that Nazarbayev is a dictator He has benefited from a regime-manufactured cult of personality since he became president That so many around the world are humoring his grandiosity is owing mainly to the country's impressive deposits of oil which began to be developed intensively after the collapse of the Soviet Union Western analysts are confident that the country will soon become one of the world's top oil exporters "It is the real deal when it comes to oil," a senior U.S with a full head of steel-wool hair and a wardrobe of dark business suits Tuyakbay impressed me as level-headed and resolute when we met for lunch at the Tabard Inn Tuyakbay had come to town to attend a dinner of the International Republican Institute a pro-democracy group chaired by Senator John McCain "Would I be glad if he were gone?" McCain said "Yes." Later he elaborated on that thought "cannot support despotic governments and expect over time not to pay a heavy price." Kazakhstan's oil is no reason Bush has been reluctant to publicly criticize Nazarbayev's authoritarian bent—especially in light of Nazarbayev's commitment to ship oil by a Washington-favored pipeline route that skirts Russia and ends on the Turkish Mediterranean But in a speech at the dinner Tuyakbay attended Bush did sound a note of encouragement for the Kazakh opposition "Across the Caucasus and Central Asia," he declared "hope is stirring at the prospect of change—and change will come." Perhaps it will: a Washington-applauded putsch recently removed the authoritarian leader of Kyrgyzstan a neighbor of Kazakhstan and another former Soviet republic The spark in Kazakhstan could come as soon as December when Nazarbayev may be elected to another seven-year term—in a contest that is unlikely to be "free and fair." What I discovered during my journey to Kazakhstan is that the prospect of change has many ordinary folks there feeling nervous I went in search of a despised dictator and instead found a tolerated one—in some quarters even a popular one Its 15 million people are scattered across an expanse of territory as large as Western Europe stretching from China in the east to the Caspian Sea in the west grouped in kinship clans and larger hordes but except in the less nomadic south it never inspired an especially fervent devotion European culture and the Russian language (now universally spoken) came with the Russian colonial conquest Early in the Soviet period the Kazakhs endured a brutal series of Moscow-dictated transformations including the collectivization of agriculture But they gradually accommodated themselves to Soviet rule and developed their own strong bench of party leaders Nazarbayev accepted and mastered the Soviet system After high school he joined tens of thousands of other rabochiye—manual workers conscripted by the Communist Party's economic planners—at an enormous steelworks in the republic's northern town of Temirtau gulping salt water to retain body fluids in the furnacelike conditions and proved adept at cultivating powerful patrons he was well along the path to the top Party post of first secretary (reporting directly to Moscow) educated at Moscow academies in economics or engineering (or trained by the KGB) look down on Nazarbayev as crude and ignorant They maintain that the public would be scandalized to know of his private antics who told me that Nazarbayev is a binge drinker claims to have seen him put away a quart and a half of vodka in a single day in the 1990s "I never saw him lose control." (Nazarbayev's personal physician told me the president's health is "very good.") Other opposition sources supplied me with snapshots of Nazarbayev at a private party in Turkey in the mid-1990s is tucking a wad of money into the brassiere strap of a belly dancer In another he is handling a golden pistol—a gift To explain Nazarbayev's rise to the top, critics use the Russian word hitryi, which translates roughly as "tricky" or "cunning"—as in a fox. Stalin, too, was said to possess this trait Even nonpartisans admit that Nazarbayev has a helpful a coffee-table book of photographs lovingly compiled by his press office includes a reproduction of a painted Soviet-realist-style portrait that depicts him in a muslin blouse with sleeves rolled up Another reproduced painting suggests a kind of modern Khan: he is shown in a suit and tie astride a black horse but his chosen image for Western consumption is that of an economic modernizer To perfect that image he has sought advice from Michael Porter a famous economic-development guru at the Harvard Business School Porter flew to Kazakhstan last January for a three-hour lunch with Nazarbayev "He really wants his country to be a success in a market economy," Porter told me "and bristles at being compared with other leaders in the region." In the 1990s because of Nazarbayev's unremitting urging that his citizens make their own way on entrepreneurial initiative Kazakhs nicknamed their leader "Bazaar-bayev." foul-smelling exhaust poured from the chimney stacks of the steelworks From the townspeople I learned of Temirtau's rough introduction to capitalist culture which during peak Soviet times employed some 40,000 people had declined with the end of the Soviet practice of sending rabochiye to special state-owned sanatoria for needed rest Pollution from the plant was poisoning the water and spoiling the breast milk of new mothers And because Kazakhstan has difficulty controlling its borders Temirtau had become a transit point for smugglers moving narcotics along a route between the poppy fields of Afghanistan and the drug markets of Europe And yet the people of Temirtau seemed to blame not the Nazarbayev regime but the sudden and chaotic collapse of the Soviet system told me that things were actually at their worst in 1996 and 1997; since then government initiatives to address pollution and other hazards have gradually improved living conditions Outside the gates of the steelworks I chatted with Alex (he declined to give his last name) blue-eyed Russian who grew up in Temirtau and now earns about $150 a month as a mechanic at the works He folded a pair of well-muscled forearms across his bib overalls; his hands were caked with black soot "Maybe Nazarbayev is one of the richest people in the world," Alex said "but he cares about the people and does things for the country." it is said in Kazakhstan that Nazarbayev is the planet's tenth wealthiest man Those sentiments were echoed on a visit to Chimkent the main city in the impoverished rural region of southern Kazakhstan In the old quarter I met with Ziyatulla Madaliyev and Abdugani Baibulotov at a modest private home shaded by an arbor of grapevines Uzbeks have lived in Chimkent for centuries (present-day Uzbekistan is just a short drive away) and make up about 30 percent of the current population They are also pillars of the local business establishment "We would prefer for Nazarbayev to stay for another seven years—in fact for as long as he is living," Madaliyev told me he will not stop stealing until his pockets are full." This was an idea I heard repeatedly: Nazarbayev and his cronies are already so wealthy that their appetite for money has been sated It seemed plain that the opposition's call for Western-style political reforms was not a burning issue for these people If their political liberties were restricted Baibulotov told me that he goes to the neighborhood mosque every Friday and has survived the Bolshevik Revolution and all other onslaughts it is thriving; 80 percent of the people there on Fridays are young men In neighboring Uzbekistan a more repressive ruler enforces tight restrictions on religious activity and consequently faces a grassroots revolt urged by Islamic militants For a decidedly unofficial view of Nazarbayev I made secret arrangements to meet Galymzhan Zhakiyanov Kazakhstan's most famous political prisoner With the help of an opposition activist living outside Kazakhstan A student at the University of Texas in Austin Berik had rented a cottage near the prison gates in order to spend summer time with his father as prison rules permitted My subterfuge was necessary because Zhakiyanov had not asked the authorities for permission to give an interview As we drove out on the highway toward Shiderty in a Toyota Camry the white seedling strands of the kovyl' steppe grass suggested a carpet of snow Cowboys on small chestnut horses tended cattle Eventually the Toyota veered left at a grove of white birch trees and sped past a coal mine and I was hustled through the door into a room decorated in the fashion of a yurt the felt tent traditionally used by Kazakh nomads The floor and walls were covered by carpets Zhakiyanov was an up-and-coming provincial governor in the early years of Kazakhstan's independence but was dismissed after helping found Democratic Choice of Kazakhstan a reform-oriented group that criticized state power as excessively centralized—and demanded an explanation of Nazarbayev's holdings in foreign bank accounts A criminal investigation was conducted of Zhakiyanov's alleged misdeeds as governor and in 2002 a court handed down a seven-year sentence for "abuse of office" and related financial crimes "The real reason for his imprisonment," Amnesty International states in its most recent report on Kazakhstan "appeared to be his peaceful opposition activities." The Shiderty colony is located in prime Soviet-gulag territory: Solzhenitsyn did time at a camp in the area in the 1950s a fermented beverage much enjoyed by Kazakhs A cook set on the table a steaming platter of besbarmak a Kazakh national dish of lamb chunks boiled in broth and ladled over large he has a good survival instinct," Zhakiyanov said Zhakiyanov was poring over the Federalist Papers "The danger in Kazakhstan is instability of the political system," he said He set an empty plate on the table and stacked three apples That's Nazarbayev's "vertikal' vlasti," he said—his top-down hierarchy of power putting a big one in the middle of the plate and ringing it with several smaller ones surrounded by members of a genuine parliament "Our opposition is not one person but one idea," he said "No more vertikal' vlasti." So Zhakiyanov and other opposition leaders pledge to amend the country's constitution to limit the president to a single term in office "There is no question this transformation will happen," Zhakiyanov said "The question is how peacefully it occurs." The week after my interview with Zhakiyanov I encountered President Nazarbayev at a dinner in Almaty that he gave to open a business conference in town sponsored by the New York—based Asia Society The tables were laid with platters of smoked fish and bowls of black caviar; white-gloved waitresses poured vodka into small goblets diplomat and the chairman of the Asia Society was seated directly across from Nazarbayev Holbrooke motioned toward him and suggested I go over and introduce myself Deciding not to mention my unauthorized visit with Zhakiyanov I told Nazarbayev about my lunch with Zharmakhan Tuyakbay in Washington the opposition is saying that you have been in power too long Nazarbayev fastened his large brown eyes on me Tuyakbay was the general prosecutor during Soviet times and he jailed many dissidents?" He shifted his gaze to someone else who wanted to talk to him I chatted briefly with one of the head-table guests who holds the title of president of the Jewish Congress of Kazakhstan Opposition leaders have him in their sights: his holdings in Kazakhstan are sure to be scrutinized avidly if Nazarbayev falls from power But Mashkevich is viewed as a crucial ally by the country's Jewish leaders who are struggling to rebuild their community "We like his good relationship with the government," Yeshaya Cohen he found the businessman stuffing $50 bills into the charity box of a synagogue in Almaty Beit Rachel itself cost Mashkevich about $2.5 million In an interview at the presidential palace in Astana dismissed the opposition leaders' vow to end the system of crony politics in Kazakhstan "Just get them a tasty pie and a good position," he said and they will forget about all their opposition views." The list of Nazarbayev's once trusted associates who are now out of office and openly in opposition includes In Almaty a former counterintelligence official for the regime told me that Nazarbayev could not count on the loyalty of the security services The loyalties of others in the political and business elites are also up for grabs; I know of one prominent businessman who is simultaneously encouraging the opposition and courting the regime The opposition is amply funded by sources that include the former prime minister who made a fortune in the waning days of the Soviet Union by exporting pharmaceutical chemicals to the West at prices of up to twenty times his costs Kazhegeldin lives a moneyed if restless life in Europe "Sometimes at night I dream I am back at the center of things," he told me when I met him recently I had a long talk about the situation with Dariga Nazarbayeva who has founded a national television channel and is herself active in politics she sipped from a cup of green tea into which she deposited spoonfuls of honey She was smartly dressed in an orange-and-turquoise blazer over a turquoise jersey and white slacks A Kazakh newspaper had recently reported that Nazarbayeva believed a putsch against the president "This is possible everywhere now," she said—not because of grassroots discontent with her father but because Western-aided NGOs and small elites with money and the help of modern media technologies can create a kind of false revolutionary situation "We have to be more active to avoid this," she said To that end her father is crafting laws to restrict the activities in Kazakhstan of the International Republican Institute and other Western pro-democracy groups Nazarbayeva portrays herself as a political progressive She conceded that "some people around my father don't want to see power devolved" and that this stance is in the long run an obstacle to "political modernization." As for the criticism that the president's family had in effect hijacked the national economy: "It's a lie." (Nazarbayev himself has dismissed the charges against the consultant James Giffen as "baseless," and denies any personal role in that scandal.) I gained from her a sharp impression of just how personal and intimate elite politics is in Kazakhstan Everyone knows everyone else; her children are close friends with the children of a leading opposition figure She switched from English to Russian to deliver her most emotive points and concluded our talk with a wail against Tuyakbay and his brethren: "Pochemu Dariga Nazarbayeva is probably right about one thing masterminded by Western-oriented activists—some more scrupulous than others—with tight ties to power brokers in Washington Such an upheaval might well turn out to be a step forward for global democracy it is a curious kind of democratic movement that has as its mainspring not "the people" but a selected clique I gave my estimation of the popular mood to one opposition activist "have the people of Kazakhstan decided anything?" At issue in vulnerable places like Kazakhstan—for the first time in centuries the protagonist of its own history—is a question of power Who gets to write the next chapter of the tale In his resolve to remain the story's author Nazarbayev attends to the public in the way he knows best Soon after the coup in Kyrgyzstan he announced a 32 percent wage hike for government workers the most modern of its kind in Central Asia more than 650 people have received open-heart surgery And for the plebeians in his model capital city Nazarbayev is delivering not just bread—and health care—but circuses Early on a Friday evening I crowded into a stadium with thousands of others for a celebration of the capital's eighth birthday astride which young men in crimson costumes performed daredevil stunts Scores of comely young women resplendent in folk garb marched in There were jugglers and elephants—and a small boy who managed to walk upside down on his hands for at least fifty yards Halfway through the ceremonies the performers turned and faced Nazarbayev who was seated in a box in the middle of the grandstand This article appears in the December 2005 print edition with the headline “Sultan of the Steppes.”