Life takes us in many strange directions and wonderful discoveries. It never turns out the way we thought it would.
Wednesday, January 31, 2024
Tuesday, January 30, 2024
A Mega Tsunami 8,000 Years Ago
DISCOVERIES
Waves of Destruction
More than 8,000 years ago, Storeggaslide, a massive underwater landslide off western Norway, created towering waves of up to 65 feet that destroyed many coastal communities in northern Europe.
The mega-tsunami devastated parts of northern Europe and contributed to a major decline in Stone Age Britain’s population, the Independent reported.
This geological upheaval took place during a period when northern Britain was already experiencing a dip in its population, estimated by previous studies at about only 1,000 people.
During the same period, many sites across northwestern Europe were also being abandoned because of a rapid and sustained drop in temperatures.
But University of York researchers wrote in a new paper that the Storegga event was one of the main causes of that population crash after conducting a series of computer simulations on the mega-tsunami.
Their findings suggested that sediment deposits from the prehistoric site of Howick, north of Newcastle, were likely formed by the tsunami – although only if the waves struck during high tide.
The destruction would have caused a high number of fatalities and damaged key resources that the ancient inhabitants needed to survive.
The authors conclude that it’s unlikely that Stone Age Britons, lacking any experience or awareness of tsunamis, would have been as resilient as fishing societies in tsunami-prone regions like the northern Pacific, who often relocate to higher ground when faced with such threats.
Monday, January 29, 2024
Sunday, January 28, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 01/27/2024
The Economist
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JANUARY 27TH 2024
Cover Story newsletter from The Economist
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How we chose this week’s image
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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
We had two covers this week. One was about America’s failure to impose order on its southern border and the chance that this could cost Joe Biden the White House in November. The other looked at how artificial intelligence (AI) could transform lives in the emerging world.
We started with some images of the physical barriers would-be migrants must overcome. Here is a close-up of some razor wire, with a hand delicately touching its sharp edges. The image has menace, but not enough drama. There was more action in this photo of an athletic young man scaling the fence and preparing to jump down on the American side.
The image on the left was emotive, but slightly dehumanising. We cannot see anyone’s face, and the outstretched hands suggest people asking for handouts, which is misleading—immigrants to the United States tend to find jobs quickly. The picture on the right was better, but still not quite on the mark. The mother looks passive and despondent; we wanted something that suggested more agency.
This one, showing a crowd of migrants wading across a river, had a real sense of purpose and movement: these people are willing to endure discomfort and danger in search of a better life. The next gave an unusual perspective on the crowds of people waiting to be processed: we thought this was a stunning image and ended up using it in our United States section.
This picture was perhaps too dramatic, and too close to the propaganda images that suggest that migrants are arriving in overwhelming numbers, like an invasion. That is not what we are arguing. We think it is both possible and desirable for America to regulate the flow of newcomers better and to decide who enters and who does not. So we opted for this moody desert photo. The towering cacti give a vivid sense of place. The migrants look ordinary, purposeful yet stuck in limbo. The mountains frame the image beautifully. We just needed to make the headline clearer to complete a memorable cover.
Our other cover story was harder to illustrate. It concerned something invisible: artificial intelligence, and the possibility that it might help improve human capital and productivity in the emerging world.
We have used robots before to symbolise AI and our team mocked up some striking images in this vein. Here is a robot hand holding a globe, with the map of Africa emphasised. And here is a hand made of a circuit board, also grasping the poorest continent.
We played around with some of the examples that emerged from our reporting. Chatbots could provide individual instruction to kids in cash-starved education systems, so here is a robot scribbling on a whiteboard. Machine learning is already being used to crunch satellite data and give farmers in developing countries more timely, accurate information about such things as the weather. So here are some healthy crops with buffering symbols instead of flowers.
This one was neat: a robot using a smartphone as a catapult to launch an emerging-world everyman to greater heights. Some of us found this funny and lively; others thought the robot had a creepy, Terminator vibe. So we made the robot friendlier. That was nice, but it suggested a little boost rather than a potential transformation of lives.
Since most people in developing countries who will use AI will do so via their phones, we decided to use a smartphone screen to show a tantalising glimpse of the future. In this early effort, a parched landscape becomes a field of sunflowers. However, AI will be felt in cities first, so we preferred an image of a slum becoming a shining city of parks and skyscrapers. For a final touch, we added more people, climbing through the screen to grasp the opportunities this extraordinary technology may offer.
Cover image
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Backing stories
How the border could cost Biden the election (Leader)
America’s immigration policies are failing (United States)
America’s border crisis in ten charts (United States)
The prospect of a Trump presidency looms over Mexico’s elections (The Americas)
Saturday, January 27, 2024
Friday, January 26, 2024
Thursday, January 25, 2024
Wednesday, January 24, 2024
Canada Reduces Its Intake Of Foreign Students
Doors Wide Shut
CANADA
Canada will impose a two-year cap on the intake of foreign students after explosive growth in recent years has resulted in a worsening housing crisis in the country, Reuters reported.
Minister of Immigration Marc Miller unveiled plans to issue around 364,000 visas this year, which would cut the number of intakes by nearly a third.
Last year, the country issued almost one million study permits – roughly three times more than a decade ago.
The new proposals will also set limits on post-graduate work permits for foreign students, in an effort to encourage them to return home. However, students pursuing masters’ or post-doctorate programs will be eligible for a three-year work permit.
The permits are seen as an easier path to permanent residency.
Meanwhile, the government plans to reassess the acceptance of new study permit applications in 2025, Miller added.
Miller explained that the measures are “not against individual international students,” but are meant to ensure future students receive the “quality of education that they signed up for,” the BBC noted.
However, observers said the caps come as Canada has become a popular destination for international students which has led to a huge shortage of rental apartments and rising rents across the country. The affordability crisis has caused a dent in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s popularity ahead of next year’s general elections.
Even so, others noted that the changes will negatively impact educational institutions and various sectors, causing labor shortages in businesses such as restaurants and retail.
International students contribute $16.4 billion annually to the Canadian economy, mainly benefiting Ontario, the most populous province.
During the pandemic, Canada sharply felt the economic loss of immigrants and foreign students when it shut its borders. When they were reopened, the government stepped up measures to accept foreign workers and students.
A Retired Oakland Judge Has A New Theory About The Lindbergh Baby Kidnapping 91 Years Ago
S & WORLD
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CALIFORNIA
Retired Oakland judge has shocking theory about infamous Lindbergh kidnapping. And it’s catching on
By Kevin Fagan
Jan 2, 2024
Gift Article
True crime author and retired judge Lise Pearlman has recruited supporters in a campaign to exonerate Bruno Hauptmann nearly 90 years after he was convicted of kidnapping the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
True crime author and retired judge Lise Pearlman has recruited supporters in a campaign to exonerate Bruno Hauptmann nearly 90 years after he was convicted of kidnapping the baby of aviator Charles Lindbergh.
Loren Elliott/Special to the Chronicle
It’s been 91 years since celebrity aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby was kidnapped, a crime that plunged the nation into a paroxysm of anguish that ended with the capture of a German immigrant named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Prosecutors at the time said he snatched the child to squeeze a $50,000 ransom from the family, but to the day he was executed in the electric chair, Hauptmann insisted he was innocent.
Questions about Hauptmann’s guilt have swirled ever since his death, and now respected Bay Area historians are proposing a new, macabre theory about the case: that Lindbergh offered up his child as a subject for medical experiments and faked the kidnapping to cover up the child’s death.
That’s what an author and retired judge in Oakland says, and she is joined by a growing chorus of supporters who say her theory is worth investigating, including the former vice mayor of Tiburon, the co-founder of the Innocence Project and Hauptmann’s descendants.
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Back in March 1932, when 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was snatched from his New Jersey home in the dark of night, it was called the “crime of the century,” and his father was one of the most vaunted figures in the world. Dubbed “Lucky Lindy” for flying his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis plane from New York to Paris in the first solo trans-Atlantic flight in 1927, Lindbergh had married socialite and poet Anne Morrow. The birth of their son in 1930 was worldwide front-page news.
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The abduction led to the biggest manhunt in U.S. history at the time, and the subsequent trial that led to Hauptmann’s death sentence was called the “trial of the century.” But retired judge and award-winning true crime author and filmmaker Lise Pearlman now contends it was instead one of the great injustices of the century, and she wants New Jersey authorities to release archived evidence from the killing to prove her theory.
“A lot of leads weren’t followed, about a dozen state witnesses likely committed perjury, and the prosecution had 90,000 pages of investigation they didn’t let Hauptmann or his defense see,” Pearlman told the Chronicle. “The wrong man was executed, and my hope is that Hauptmann will be posthumously exonerated. And I am certainly not the only one who wants that.”
Using information gleaned from medical reports on the kidnapping and the dead baby’s body, New Jersey State Police files and papers written by Lindbergh and Nobel Prize-winning French biologist Alexis Carrel, Pearlman theorizes that Lindbergh may have offered his son to Carrel to see whether they could preserve living organs outside of the body long enough to be transplanted. That type of preservation would have revolutionized surgery in the 1930s, and Pearlman suggests — using medical writings and photos by Carrel and others — that Carrel or his team may have removed a thyroid and part of a carotid artery from young Charles, leading to his death, then concocted a kidnapping hoax to cover up the crime.
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Historians have long noted that Lindbergh and Carrel were both advocates of eugenics, or weeding out human deficiencies so they won’t be inherited, and the Lindbergh baby was known to be sickly and to have an abnormally large head. Pearlman contends that, to Lindbergh, the child may have been disposable. Others, including the authors of 1993’s “Crime of the Century: The Lindbergh Kidnapping Hoax,” previously theorized Lindbergh was involved in the kidnapping.
Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. in 1931, shortly before he was kidnapped on March 1 from his parents’ new home at Hopewell, N.J. On May 12, the body of the 19-month-old was found in a shallow grave 5 miles away. Five years later, Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the crime.
Charles A. Lindbergh Jr. in 1931, shortly before he was kidnapped on March 1 from his parents’ new home at Hopewell, N.J. On May 12, the body of the 19-month-old was found in a shallow grave 5 miles away. Five years later, Bruno Hauptmann was executed for the crime.
Associated Press 1932
“My theory is that the child was operated on,” Pearlman said. “We think at the very least that his carotid and probably his thyroid were taken out and kept viable for 30 days. We think he died on the operating table.
“And I think Carrel conducted the operation with Lindbergh’s permission — and Lindbergh was likely present at the operation.”
Hauptmann was an unfortunate victim of circumstance, Pearlman posits. Police nabbed him after he spent some of the traceable ransom money at a gas station two years after the baby’s disappearance, but he always said he had the money only because a friend gave it to him before traveling to Europe and dying of tuberculosis.
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Pearlman published a 554-page book on her theory in 2020 called “The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1, The Man Who Got Away.” In it she poses the same question she has today: “Was international hero Charles Lindbergh himself Suspect No. 1, the man who got away?”
Since then, a researcher in New Jersey has filed a lawsuit seeking to open evidence still kept by the New Jersey State Police with the goal of clearing Hauptmann. Last February, the American Academy of Forensic Sciences published Pearlman’s contentions after she presented them with research by herself, her daughter Jamie Benvenutti and Dr. Peter Speth at its annual convention.
Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, has consulted with Pearlman and is backing a reopening of the case, writing in support of her book that it “addresses an enduring, troubling question: Was an innocent man convicted of kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh’s baby? Fascinating read with surprising conclusions.”
Kurt Perhach, the attorney handling the New Jersey lawsuit to unlock state evidence in the case, said he has been fascinated by the kidnapping since he was 13 years old.
“I do think Lise Pearlman has a point,” he said, adding that any of a number of theories could also hold water. “I don’t think anybody knows what happened, and we have an opportunity to get some answers, but the state of New Jersey is refusing to let us look at the evidence. I don’t really understand why.”
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A state judge dismissed the suit in 2023, saying the plaintiffs might destroy evidence if they subjected it to forensic testing. Perhach has appealed. The New Jersey Office of Attorney General said it was unable to discuss the matter because it involved pending litigation.
Hauptmann’s 58-year-old great-great niece, Cezanne Love, said she is convinced Pearlman’s theory is on target, and she is ready to participate in legal action to force a reexamination of the evidence.
“It’s amazing, the research Lise has done; phenomenal,” said Love, a flight attendant living in Southern California. “Her medical theory? I totally believe that. Only God and Richard (the name Hauptmann and his family preferred over Bruno) know for sure, but from everything I’ve heard, he sounds innocent. And Lindbergh didn’t sound like a nice person.”
She said that except for Hauptmann’s widow, Anna, the family didn’t talk much about the worst chapter in its history.
“It was … so infamous just about nobody wanted to even mention it, certainly not in public,” Love said. “But privately, my aunt remembered growing up and having my grandmother tell her, ‘Please try to clear his name someday.’ ”
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But until now, the only relative who has vigorously tried to exonerate the man was his widow, Anna Hauptmann. She sued New Jersey — with San Francisco attorney Robert Bryan — in 1981 to get her husband’s name cleared, insisting that she was with him at her Bronx bakery job on the night of the kidnapping, nowhere near the Lindberghs’ New Jersey home.
She lost her case and died in 1994 at age 95, having never remarried and proclaiming Hauptmann’s innocence to the end.
Doubts about Hauptmann’s conviction have been raised since even before he was executed in April 1936, with several earlier books contending the baby’s death was an accident or that Lindbergh might have been involved somehow. But this medical theory of Pearlman’s is new and based on more than a decade of forensic investigation.
Pearlman said she became interested in the Lindbergh case when she wrote “The Sky’s the Limit” in 2012, which examined the 1968 murder trial of Black Panther leader Huey Newton and more than 30 other notable trials of the 20th century. She included the Lindbergh case in that International Book Awards-winning book, one of five she’s written.
“The more I looked into Lindbergh, the more my suspicions were raised about his involvement and the fact that he wasn’t treated as a suspect,” she said. “He was home when it happened. He should have been a suspect.”
But at the time of the kidnapping, he was too famous to be considered, she said, and because of that fame he was allowed to help lead the investigation. Scotland Yard investigators who consulted on the case suggested looking into the parents, and the local police chief suggested an insider in the house was involved, but they were ignored, she said.
Among the things Pearlman wants are DNA testing of the ransom note and envelope and the ladder police say the kidnapper used to get into the second-floor nursery. Great-great niece Love and her aunt have given Pearlman swabs of their DNA to use for comparison if she gets access to the evidence. They are all convinced the testing will show Hauptmann did not handle those key items.
True crime author and retired judge Lise Pearlman shows pages of her book at her home in Oakland.
True crime author and retired judge Lise Pearlman shows pages of her book at her home in Oakland.
Loren Elliott/Special to the Chronicle
The decades-old theories about the kidnapping are freely discussed at the Charles Lindbergh House and Museum in his hometown of Little Falls, Minn., and Pearlman’s book has made an impression there.
“It was a really interesting read,” said Lacey Fontaine, museum program associate. “But then, the kidnapping is the thing visitors ask about the most anyway,” even above his famous flight, his prewar Nazi sympathies, or the fact that he had seven children with three German mistresses in addition to the six he had with his wife.
“It’s hard to keep up with all the conspiracy theories, and the most popular one we get is that Charles Lindbergh had something to do with the kidnapping,” she said. “None of them ever holds enough water to reopen the case, though.”
That may change if those who back Pearlman’s theory have their way.
Noah Griffin, historian, former vice mayor of Tiburon, and spokesperson for Frank Jordan when he was San Francisco mayor, is among Pearlman’s supporters and wants to stage a mock trial in San Francisco City Hall reexamining the case.
“Lise’s book goes further than anything, and it has the ring of credibility to me,” Griffin said. He staged a mock retrial of the Lindbergh case in 1986, after his mention of the kidnapping on his KSFO radio show drew a tsunami of interest. He flew Anna Hauptmann out for that event.
“His widow was just a wonderful human being, and it was clear to me there was an injustice,” Griffin said. “Richard (Hauptmann) didn’t have much of a constituency. You had Lindbergh, who was a national hero, a lot of evidence was covered up, and there was a lot of anti-German sentiment in the country. He didn’t have a chance.”
Now that what could be a solid theory is gaining steam, he said, “I would love to have a debate onstage, maybe another mock retrial, maybe at City Hall. I think Lise is really onto something. People want to look back on history and get it right.
“They should get this one right.”
Reach Kevin Fagan: kfagan@sfchronicle.com
Jan 2, 2024
Photo of Kevin Fagan
By Kevin Fagan
Kevin Fagan is a longtime, award-winning reporter at The San Francisco Chronicle, specializing in homelessness, enterprise news-feature writing, breaking news and crime. He has ridden with the rails with modern-day hobos, witnessed seven prison executions, written extensively about serial killers including the Unabomber, Doodler and Zodiac, and covered disasters ranging from the Sept. 11 terror attacks at Ground Zero to California’s devastating wildfires. Homelessness remains a core focus of his, close to his heart as a journalist who cares passionately about the human condition.
He can be reached at kfagan@sfchronicle.com.
Top Of The News
Why S.F.’s biggest mall continues to see an exodus even as others recover
SAN FRANCISCO
Why S.F.’s biggest mall continues to see an exodus even as others recover
Retail experts say the steep pandemic decline of this mall stands out. Other California malls such as Westfield Valley Fair in San Jose and the Grove in Los Angeles are thriving.
Tuesday, January 23, 2024
Iran And The US Are Slipping Closer To War
JANUARY 22ND 2024
War Room - the defence newsletter from The Economist
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The War Room
The best of The Economist’s defence coverage
PHOTO: AP
Shashank Joshi
Defence editor
You could be forgiven for losing track of the missiles flying around the Middle East at present. Israel is dropping bombs on Gaza, Lebanon and Syria; rockets are returning in the other direction, as well as from Iraq and Yemen. America has bombed the Houthi rebels in Yemen six times in one week; the defiant Houthis continue to attack shipping. Jordan and Turkey have both bombed Syria. In this melee one country has been busier than most.
Last week Iran directly attacked three countries—Iraq, Syria and then Pakistan—within the space of 24 hours, apparently in retaliation for a devastating terrorist attack in Iran on January 3rd. The strike on Pakistan was against Jaish al-Adl, a Sunni militant group that is active in the Baloch region straddling the Iran-Pakistan border. Pakistan promptly hit back with air strikes. Both countries seem content to leave it at that—they have now agreed to restore full diplomatic ties after briefly suspending them.
But Iran’s relations with America and Israel show no sign of improving. On January 20th a suspected Israeli air strike in Damascus killed five members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), including a senior intelligence official. Shortly afterwards, and perhaps in response, Iran upped the ante further by launching ballistic missiles at an American air base in Iraq—the same base that it attacked in January 2020. The barrage was sufficiently large and threatening to force America to fire 15 interceptor missiles from its Patriot air-defence system.
All this underscores the fact that Iran has been at the centre of the region’s escalatory spiral. It funds, arms and trains Hamas, the militant group that massacred Israelis on October 7th—though Israel and Western intelligence officials say they have no evidence that Iran organised the attack or knew of it in advance. Since October 7th Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have launched around 140 rocket and drone attacks on American troops, as part of a strategy to put pressure on Israel and to squeeze America out of the region. Iran has also given the Houthis their anti-ship missiles and helped them target ships. Some reports suggest that an American strike against a Houthi launch site on January 20th may also have killed a pair of IRGC members.
As my colleague Anton LaGuardia wrote over the weekend, the White House faces growing pressure to hit back. Neither side wants an all-out war. The Biden administration does not want to be dragged into a big conflict in the Middle East in an election year. Iran’s regime, which faces a succession crisis and a weak economy, knows that a war could be highly destabilising. Yet Iranian attacks could easily cross a red line.
My colleagues have also written about other news: Ukraine’s use of ketamine to treat war trauma, why a war scare on the Korean peninsula is probably overblown and the Pentagon’s hunt for new types of explosives.
Thanks for reading. Any thoughts on our defence coverage? You can reach us at thewarroom@economist.com.
Monday, January 22, 2024
Expensive Refrigerators Fail Too Soon
RESPONDS
Expensive fridges are dying young. Owners are suing, claiming fraud
Attorney says thousands of families were surprised, but the manufacturer was not
By Christine Roher, Chris Chmura and Michael Cervantes • Published January 21, 2024 • Updated on January 21, 2024 at 6:09 pm
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More than 100 people are making a federal case out of their refrigerator troubles. They’re suing over fridges that they say failed far faster than they ever expected. Chris Chmura and the NBC Bay Area Responds team recently looked into the issue — including one Redwood City woman who’s had three new fridges in just five years.
Betsy Anderson’s luck with refrigerators stinks as badly as the food she’s tried to keep cold.
“One morning I went to get milk out and it was sour,” said the Redwood City homeowner.
First, a $2,800 Kenmore Elite fridge — with an LG compressor inside — died in late 2019. “It was like 15 months old,” she said. “It basically stopped working. It wasn’t cold.”
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Anderson filed for warranty service. But after two months of replacement parts failing, techs canceling service calls, and Thanksgiving approaching, she broke down and bought another fridge: a brand-new LG.
Groundhog day: $2K fridge edition
It only lived four years. “That just died, this year. Same thing. And I didn’t even bother calling them,” Anderson said.
If you’re keeping score, that’s one Redwood City home with two dead fridges in just five years. “Yeah, two,” Anderson said. “Unfortunately, we bought another LG fridge. So, I guess that’s the definition of insanity, right?”
Betsy’s not alone. We searched our nationwide Responds complaint database. Over the past few years, our NBC and Telemundo sister stations around the country have heard from dozens of upset LG and Kenmore owners.
Terese in Philadelphia said her fridge failed when it was “only seven months old.” Bernadette in San Diego said “technicians have been to my home seven times.” That sounds a lot like Kaare in LA’s story… “[The] fix lasted one week. I have had a total of six repair visits and have not had a working refrigerator for two months.”
Some frustrated fridge owners are heading to court.
Fed up and off to federal court
“It’s a nationwide issue,” said Los Angeles attorney Azar Mouzari. She represents plaintiffs who are now suing LG. She says her firm is focused on a critical part called the linear compressor inside LG and some Kenmore refrigerators. “Which is really the heart of the refrigerator," Mouzari said. "It’s what keeps the food cold.”
According to LG literature, the linear compressor uses less energy and makes less noise than other compressors. LG offers a 10-year warranty and, online, boasts “20-year durability.” But Mouzari argues in the lawsuit the linear compressor’s actual lifespan is nowhere near 10 years, let alone 20. Her suit claims they frequently break down far earlier — and LG knows it.
Mouzari is asking a federal judge to make her clients' lawsuit a class action because she believes droves of families are facing the same breakdown. “Thousands, if not tens of thousands,” she said. “We have been inundated with calls.”
Old problem, new claim: fraud
LG previously faced litigation over its refrigerator, including compressor failures. In 2018, LG settled a different, class-action lawsuit. Mouzari’s suit is new. And it makes a new claim: fraud. She argues in the suit that LG is defrauding people like Betsy because it continues to make a linear compressor that falls short of its “20-year durability.”
“We know that they’ve known about this issue. And they know the rate of failure is just unreasonably high,” Mouzari said.
Mouzari also names in her suit several major, national chain stores that sold LG and Kenmore refrigerators. “Because those retailers were aware of the issue,” she explained.
We contacted LG and Kenmore about the lawsuit. LG told our L.A. responds team that the company does not comment on pending litigation. It is fighting the suit in court.
When LG settled the previous class action suit, the agreement said LG, “specifically denies any alleged defect in the LG refrigerators.” Kenmore says it no longer sells refrigerators with an LG compressor.
Mouzari says the new lawsuit is gaining traction.
100+ plaintiffs, so far
“Currently, we have 102 plaintiffs,” she noted. “We are getting calls all the time.”
She wants LG to extend people’s warranties up to 20 years. And refund anyone who says they bought a dud LG or Kenmore after 2018. People like Betsy.
“It’s a tremendous hassle,” she said. “I think they should make it right. And I think they should do a recall like an automaker.”
If you bought an LG or Kenmore refrigerator after 2018, you can contact Mouzari’s firm to learn more about the lawsuit.
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RESPONDSCONSUMERFRIDGE
Sunday, January 21, 2024
Saturday, January 20, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 01/20/2024
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JANUARY 20TH 2024
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Zanny Minton Beddoes
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Our covers this week look at what a second Trump presidency would mean for big business in America, and India’s unstoppable prime minister, Narendra Modi.
People who run large organisations are optimistic by necessity. They are paid to find opportunities when others are panicking. Although bosses had an uneasy relationship with the first Trump administration, they enjoyed his more conventional policies. It was hard for corporate America to be miserable amid a soaring stockmarket.
Our cover argues that Trump 2 would be different. In today’s debt-fuelled, high-employment economy, the deficit-funded tax cuts and tariffs that define Trumponomics would be harmful. What’s more, Mr Trump’s most chaotic tendencies could threaten American business.
The case is simply put. In January 2013 America had 1.3 unemployed workers for every job opening; today it has only 0.7. In 2016 the annual federal deficit was 3.2% of GDP and debt was 76% of GDP. The forecasts for 2024 are 5.8% and 100%, respectively. As a result, America is much more prone to inflation. The threat to the economy is exacerbated by the tariff increases promised by Mr Trump’s team—especially if they follow through on their idea of imposing a punitive 60% rate on imports from China.
That makes for scary reading. But not as scary as this chainsaw massacre. This design is hyperbole, of course. And yet Mr Trump so successfully goads his critics into overreacting that our attempt at irony risks being misinterpreted as genuine horror.
Our other worry about a second Trump term is chaos. His administration would lack establishment types like Gary Cohn, once of Goldman Sachs, who shuffled the president’s in-tray to hide the madder ideas from him during Trump 1. More moments like January 6th would be possible, as would a full-on revenge presidency. Amid so much civil strife, business leaders could struggle to stay out of the fray.
We thought about illustrating this by having Donnie Kong run rampant in New York. This has a certain manic energy and no doubt the man himself would be thrilled at being portrayed as the alpha double plus of alpha males.
One way or another, Mr Trump is going to feature on our cover a lot in 2024. That inclines us to use his image sparingly. We liked this idea, in which his vast silhouette is projected onto an office building being washed down by a team of window cleaners. It is a first cousin to our cover in November, when we looked at the consequences of Trump 2 for foreign policy.
This was fresher. Some worried that a burning Benjamin suggested we were writing about the economy rather than business. But the title could make our focus clear. In any case, as our US editor pointed out, this design is a homage to Trumpy tycoons who torch $100 bills to light their cigars.
The greater problem was that not all of us immediately saw the flame licking the top of the banknote as a representation of Mr Trump’s wispy combover. We tried charring parts of the note to create a face, but that destroyed the elegance of the original.
Better to use the words. We were writing days after the Iowa caucus, in which Mr Trump trampled his opponents, by claiming 51% of the vote and 98 of the state’s 99 counties. Simply adding “He’s winning” nudges readers to ask who “he” is and causes the most recognisable face in world politics to leap out.
Our second cover was on India. On January 22nd millions will watch Mr Modi preside over the consecration of a controversial $220m Hindu temple in Ayodhya. The ceremony will also be the informal launch of his campaign for a third term as prime minister in elections to be held by May. To the alarm of India’s 200m Muslims, and many secular-minded Indians, it will mark a high point of a decades-long Hindu-nationalist project to dominate India.
Even as Mr Modi appears at the temple in Ayodhya in northern India, the other part of his mission continues apace: India’s extraordinary modernisation. The country is the planet’s fastest-growing major economy and now its fifth-biggest. Global investors toast its infrastructure boom and growing technological sophistication.
Our cover set out to bring together the mix of economic development and Hindu exceptionalism that informs Mr Modi’s vision for India as a world power. We liked the idea of featuring the temple itself, built on the site of a mosque that was destroyed in riots in 1992. One possibility was a collage set against the saffron of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). More charming is this artist’s mockup of the finished building with a Modi-moon gazing benignantly down at it.
The question for our cover leader was whether Mr Modi’s religious agenda and India’s rapid economic development are compatible. The answer is yes, but only up to a point. In the past ten years the BJP’s parliamentary strength and Mr Modi’s popularity have made it possible to push through difficult reforms, including a national sales tax. Yet if Mr Modi in his third term were to lurch further towards Hindu-first ideology and autocratic rule, the economic calculus would change.
We sought to get at that ambiguity with these designs.
These covers are evocative. Their sparing use of colour set against black-and-white photography brings to mind Indian graphic design from earlier decades. We liked Mr Modi in religious garb, but we also preferred the temple to the huddled masses. And the saint/sinner title pointed at a dichotomy that was a question a decade ago, but no longer seems quite so relevant: like most people, he is both.
Our cover does not absolve Mr Modi of the need to choose. He wants to be India’s most consequential leader since Jawaharlal Nehru. His vision of national greatness is about wealth as well as religion. It would be a disaster for India’s 1.4bn people if his hubristic Hindu chauvinism weighed on their growing prosperity.
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The Battle Of Rzhev-A Giant Battle On The Russian Front Larger Than Stalingrad
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Robert Hansen
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Freelance Writer, Amateur Chess EnthusiastAug 28
Would Russia (Soviet Union) still win World War II even if Germany doesn't lose at Stalingrad but loses somewhere else in Russia?
This question gets at a simple but often-forgotten concept — you can only send more of your resources to this place by sending less to that place. If Germany had made a greater effort in the Caucasus and relied less on under-equipped Axis Allies there, it would have had to have been drawn away from the other great battle of 1942 — the Rzhev meatgrinder.
While the Battle of Stalingrad is what everyone remembers for its decisive result, it was dwarfed by the Battles of Rzhev. After the Battle of Moscow, the Germans clung stubbornly to the Rzhev Salient in order to maintain a potential launching point for a future offensive against Moscow. This indirectly helped them in their Caucasus offensive of 1942, as the strongest Soviet forces were arrayed in front of Moscow rather than in the gates to the Caucasus.
Throughout the year, the Battle of Rzhev got the majority of German manpower replacements and other assets, and the size of the forces engaged on both sides dwarfed that at Stalingrad. Losses were immense on both sides, with roughly 650,000 killed, wounded, and missing on the German side and 2.3 million killed, wounded, missing, and sick on the Soviet side.
One of the Battles of Rzhev, Operation Mars, began shortly after the Soviet counteroffensive around Stalingrad. The battle was a costly, poorly executed failure, but containing it prevented the release of numerous strong divisions to aid the situation in the South. It’s conceivable that strengthening the German effort in the South would have required weakening the defense of Rzhev, resulting in victory in the South and a catastrophic defeat at Rzhev.
However, losing at Stalingrad and losing the Caucasus would have been an economic disaster for the Soviet Union. The overwhelming majority of Soviet oil sources would be lost, as well as about half of the USSR’s arable land. The Red Army would lose much of its offensive capacity and the second-largest lend-lease route would be shut down. Shipments of trucks, communications equipment, industrial gear, etc. would need to be severely curtailed in favor of food and fuel to keep the Soviet Union from collapsing.
Now, the USSR did have significant stockpiles of fuel, and the infrastructure for Germany to effectively exploit their captured oil wells did not exist. Unless the Red Army managed to use their extant fuel reserves to mount an offensive to the Black Sea and liberate the Caucasus, the war would probably dwindle into a stalemate.
When talking about grand battles, people often get tunnel vision and forget there’s a whole war going on around it. A battle is just a snapshot of a campaign, and when talking about what could or should have been done, you need to know its context.
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Hit Men Are Hard To Find In Real Life
The New York Times
Hit Men Are Easy to Find in the Movies. Real Life Is Another Story.
Jesse McKinley
Updated Sun, January 14, 2024 at 10:36 AM PST·7 min read
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Conceptual illustration. (Boris Zhitkov via Getty Images)
It’s a scene as old as celluloid: a shadowy figure named Luca Brasi or John Wick or Barry Berkman lurking in the darkness, outfitted with sinister intent and nifty weapons, effortlessly committing a murder for cash, animus or cold political calculations.
Whether they’re called hit men, contract killers or assassins, figures who kill for a living are a staple of Hollywood thrillers — and, by extension, the public imagination.
But experts in law enforcement and international espionage say that murders-for-hire are notoriously difficult to successfully arrange, let alone get away with.
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Take, for example, what prosecutors say was a recent foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist in New York City, which American intelligence officials believe was ordered by the Indian government. Once the plot reached the point where the alleged conspirators needed to employ a killer, things got complicated: The would-be hit man turned out to be an undercover agent working for the U.S. government.
Robert Baer, a former CIA officer and the author of several books, including “The Perfect Kill: 21 Laws for Assassins,” said he has known many bad guys during his decades in law enforcement and espionage. But even he said finding a real-life killer would stump him.
“I could not find you a hit man,” he said. “And I know a lot of murderers.”
Dennis Kenney, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, concurred, calling the public perception of a slick, skilled hit man “pretty much myth,” adding that a for-hire killer is usually “nothing more than a thug who offers or agrees to a one-off payday.”
“Which is why they get caught,” Kenney said.
Only about half of all murders in the United States are cleared or solved each year, according to the FBI, making it difficult to say definitively how many people are killed specifically by hit men. While there are also no handy stats on how many murder-for-hire attempts fail, experts and indictments indicate that many are marred by amateurism and ineptitude.
Still, the non-hits just keep on coming.
“There isn’t a real efficient, high-quality hit service out there like in the movies,” said Michael Farkas, a defense attorney who has worked as a New York City homicide prosecutor.
There are murder plots that unfortunately succeed — as Canadian officials believe was the case in June with the killing of another Sikh separatist, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in British Columbia, though it is not known if for-hire killers were involved. That case chilled Canadian and Indian relations and has cast suspicion on Narendra Modi, India’s conservative prime minister and a Hindu nationalist.
Law enforcement officials and academics who study killers-for-hire put them into several large buckets.
There are the civilians engaged in everyday murder plots, which often end in sloppy or tragic fashion.
There are also hit men for the mob, the enforcers working in-house to illegally police the criminal underworld. These killers, perhaps the source of most urban lore about the illicit profession, have been luridly overexposed in shows like “The Sopranos” and films like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas.”
Employed in a similar fashion are so-called sicarios, whose use by drug cartels has been heinously prolific at times. And of course there are the professionals employed by government intelligence agencies, who have been suspected in assassinations in London and elsewhere.
Still, even in those attempts with James Bond-ian overtones, law enforcement has proved adept at thwarting some of those crimes, as illustrated by the foiled murder plot against the Sikh separatist in New York.
For the average person wanting to engage a hit man, the perils of purchasing such a service are myriad, particularly in cases involving inexperienced killers, many of whom are stymied by basic logistics like keeping quiet about their plans.
“It’s more complicated than it seems,” said David Carter, a professor of criminal justice at Michigan State University. “And sometimes these aren’t the brightest people.”
Unsuccessful attempts on the lives of lovers — or, more to the point, former lovers — are perhaps the most common, experts say, and many have been stopped by the police. In other grim cases, targets have included children and family members.
A typical real-life murder plot involves a bar, some sinister banter and poor decision-making, said Gary Jenkins, a former police investigator from Kansas City, Missouri, who now hosts the “Gangland Wire” podcast.
“They’ll say, you know, ‘I’d like to get her taken care of,’” Jenkins said. “So the bartender, or the local fixer, or the kind of quasi-criminal that’s there will go to his friendly ATF agent or the FBI and say, ‘Hey, this person is talking about wanting their spouse killed.’ And then the police will go in and be the hit man.”
There is also an ever-expanding web of forensic tools and electronic tripwires used by the police, including cellphone tracking and text messages.
These tools play prominently in many cases, including that of a former beauty queen, Lindsay Shiver, who is awaiting trial on charges of trying to have her estranged husband killed in the Bahamas. Shiver is said to have sent text messages to her bartender boyfriend and a purported hit man before her arrest, along with a photo of her husband.
“Kill him,” Shiver allegedly wrote.
There is also the internet, of course, which emerges as a source of so many problems: In November, for example, a Louisiana woman was sentenced to 18 months in prison for trying to use a parody website, Rentahitman.com, to hire someone to kill a romantic rival.
That site, which advertises a “point & click solution” to problems, was linked to an FBI crime complaint center, and recently may have ensnared a Tennessee Air National Guardsman, whom federal prosecutors accused of applying to become a hit man and even sending along a resume.
Such sites, experts say, are often linked to law enforcement, even those on the dark web. “You have all these wonderful honey traps, the advertisements for people saying, ‘Oh, I can do this. No deed too immoral!’” said David Shapiro, a John Jay professor and former FBI special agent. “And a lot of those are FBI-sponsored.”
Shapiro added that there was also a peculiar cheapskate quality to some of those involved in deadly plots, with their interest in looking for low-cost liquidations of those they hate.
“It’s costly,” he said, adding: “You get people who really can’t afford to do it right.”
A lot of distrust permeates the planning of these crimes, which creates its own problems. Would-be killers, for example, will accept payment for a hit — and then disappear.
“You’re navigating risk every step of the way with every potential contact,” said Sean Patrick Griffin, a criminal justice professor at the Citadel in South Carolina, adding that like many shady activities — including money laundering — only a small number of people are known to make their living by killing.
“It’s a very niche, very unique thing,” he added. “There are not that many people, silly as it sounds, with the talents available for that type of commodity.”
Statistics from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services show that in 2022, there were only seven arrests statewide for contract killing, which the state considers first-degree murder. And that was a banner year for arrests for such badness, matching the total for the five previous years combined. Murder for hire is also a federal crime, with penalties ranging from fines and lengthy prison time for failed attempts to life imprisonment or the death penalty “if death results.”
Still, despite the fail rates and steep penalties, people — and governments — keep trying to have other people killed, whether because they are deluded by fictional images of sleek assassins or because they’ve given in to the fantasy of operating outside the law with impunity, according to those who have studied these would-be killers.
“The Hollywood attraction is the suspense, the intrigue, the secrecy, the ‘super-person’ aura of the hit men that they depict,” Shapiro said. “And on the layperson’s side, I mean, who among us has not at one time or another wished for the death of somebody else? But for getting our hands dirty, we declined to do it.”
Even with professional assassins, plots often unravel, said Baer, the former CIA officer. Three former senior American officials recently described what they said was a foiled Russian plot to kill an informant in Florida.
“Political assassinations just rarely work,” Baer said. “They are a tactic of desperation or insanity. You can’t get away with murder.”
c.2024 The New York Times Company
Sunday, January 14, 2024
The Sopranos New Jersey 25 Years Later
Then and Now: Revisiting the Sopranos’ New Jersey 25 Years Later
On the anniversary of the show’s premiere, its creator and location manager reflect on some of its iconic settings and why they were chosen.
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A man in a black shirt and beige pants stands next to a man in a black jacket and blue shirt, who is sitting at a counter.
James Gandolfini and David Chase in 2006 on the set of “The Sopranos,” which made its debut 25 years ago this week. Mr. Chase was insistent that his characters were depicted in real New Jersey settings: “I just didn’t think there was any other way.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Anna Kodé
By Anna Kodé
To report this story, Anna Kodé interviewed cast members, the location manager and the creator behind “The Sopranos.”
Published Jan. 10, 2024
Updated Jan. 12, 2024
As much as it was a show about Italian American mobsters, “The Sopranos” was a show about New Jersey. From scenes of domestic life in a North Caldwell McMansion to after-hours debauchery at a strip club in Lodi, the show captured a snapshot of the Garden State in the late 1990s and 2000s, beguiling viewers with its regional authenticity.
“The reality factor for ‘Sopranos’ is what’s so important and so effective,” said Mark Kamine, the show’s location manager and author of the upcoming memoir “On Locations,” which details his time working on the show. “If you’re shooting suburban houses, you can go to Long Island, you can go to Westchester.” But David Chase, the show’s creator, was insistent that his Jersey characters were depicted in the real Jersey.
“I just didn’t think there was any other way,” Mr. Chase, 78, said in an interview. “It was part of the whole thing of hiring only Italian American actors from the tristate area.”
It was a costly decision. When the team first started making “The Sopranos,” which premiered 25 years ago this week, New Jersey didn’t offer tax breaks for productions filming there. But much of the pilot episode and many of the show’s exterior shots were filmed around local homes, businesses and streets.
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“Obviously, it paid off,” said Mr. Kamine, 66.
Eventually, some of the interiors — including Tony’s house and the backroom of the Bada Bing — were built out in sets in Queens, New York.
Here’s a look back at some of the show’s iconic Jersey locations, why they were chosen and what’s there today.
Image
A person in a white robe walks on a paved driveway toward a house with a beige facade and dark roof.
THEN Tony Soprano ascends the driveway of his McMansion in North Caldwell, N.J.Credit...HBO
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A large house with a long paved driveway and a landscaped front yard.
NOW The driveway looks the same 25 years later.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Tony Soprano’s House
Built in 1987 at the end of a cul-de-sac in leafy North Caldwell, this 5,600-square-foot McMansion was decadent compared with the home Tony grew up in — fitting for a character who had become wealthier than his parents but felt he was losing touch with their values.
Its placement atop a hill was crucial. Comparing it to the cliché of “the mob guy who goes into the restaurant and wants to sit with his back to the wall,” Mr. Kamine said that the elevation added a protective element to Tony’s house. “No one’s gonna surprise him there.”
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The first episode was filmed in the home, though its owner was hesitant about hosting a film crew. “After the pilot, he said, ‘We’re not doing it again. That was a disaster,’” Mr. Kamine said.
He convinced the owner to allow the show to film just the exteriors there, and eventually his attitude shifted. “The fees would go up as the years went by and the show became successful, and he put an addition on his house probably partially thanks to us,” Mr. Kamine said.
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Four people gather around a kitchen island with a green countertop.
The Soprano family in their home. Credit...HBO/Photofest
Mr. Chase remembered touring several McMansions in preproduction, some of which were “almost comical” in how gaudy they were. One main prerequisite: It had to have a pool, Mr. Chase noted, “for the ducks to land in.”
Over the years, Mr. Chase, who grew up not far from Tony’s house, couldn’t help but notice New Jersey’s evolving landscape — woods being cleared for housing developments, natural beauty becoming commercial streets. Tony’s fascination with the ducks is, in part, his feeling that “something was not right in our capitalist society, that we were destroying nature,” Mr. Chase said.
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In 2019, Tony’s home went on the market with a listing price of $3.4 million.
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A black car sits in front of a white house surrounded by trees.
THEN Livia Soprano’s house had a chain-link fence around the front yard.Credit...HBO
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A white house with a bare tree in the grassy front yard.
NOW The house looks almost exactly the same today, but it’s missing the fence.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Livia Soprano’s House
A roughly 10-minute drive from Tony’s home, his mother, Livia, lives on a quiet street in Verona, N.J. Built in 1926, her house is smaller, older and lacking the grandiosity that Tony and his younger cohort aim to project. The house becomes a wedge between mother and son when Tony moves Livia into a retirement community.
“That palace you live in, up there on that hill,” Livia tells Tony in Season 2. “Ugh.”
The chain-link fence caging the property symbolized Livia’s chilly, repellent nature. Mr. Kamine said the team would often install the fence when they shot there, only to remove it afterward.
Logistically, the location was ideal. “That house was in the right place for us, production wise,” said Mr. Chase. “It was close to other places we were shooting.”
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Three cars in the foreground are parked in front of a white-faced building near a roadway and a sign that says 'Bada Bing!'
THEN Tony and his associates often met in the Bada Bing strip club, where he even had an office.Credit...HBO
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A parking lot fronts a stone-clad building near a roadway, with a sign that says Satin Dolls.
NOW The building, still an active club, has a new facade.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Bada Bing
The Bada Bing strip club, where Tony and crew partied in the front and did business in the back, is a real-life club called Satin Dolls, on Route 17 in Lodi, N.J. The owner was, fittingly, a man named Tony with mob connections.
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“I never feel fully at ease in his office, wondering if it’s bugged,” Mr. Kamine writes in his book. The owner initially gave the show permission to film there while the business was closed, but that proved difficult — the club was open from 11 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week. At first, they’d buy out his lunches on Mondays and Tuesdays, and as the show became more popular, “he would just rub his hands when he saw me coming and be like, ‘how much money are you going to give me this time?’” Mr. Kamine said.
Over the years, Satin Dolls has drawn hordes of fans — even ones that normally wouldn’t find themselves at an adult entertainment club. Vincent Pastore, 77, who played Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero, recalled that at one point the club even offered a “Big Pussy cocktail.”
“That guy was cleaning up,” he said.
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A one-story building with a stone facade, a sign reading 'Satriale's' and the statue of a pig standing on the roof.
THEN The fictional Satriale’s was created in an available storefront on Kearny Avenue in Kearny, N.J.Credit...HBO
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A parking lot with a gray pickup truck parked on the right side.
NOW The building was razed in 2007. Today, it’s a parking lot.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Satriale’s Pork Store
Satriale’s — the pork store and sandwich shop that Tony’s father took over when its owner couldn’t pay a gambling debt — wasn’t always Satriale’s. In the pilot episode, the hangout was Centanni’s, a real-life butcher shop in Elizabeth, N.J. But the store’s owners told producers that filming was too disruptive to the already thriving business. (It’s still open today.)
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In need of a new location, Mr. Kamine found a vacant storefront on a commercial street in Kearny, N.J., that he thought could work. He tracked down the owner, who had bought the place to open up a cleaning company.
“He was like, ‘I’m just starting my business, why would I do this?’” Mr. Kamine recalled. “But it ended being a great deal for him, because we said, ‘we’ll pay you a nice rent to take over the store, and we’ll pay your rent for your office somewhere else.’”
The production designer transformed the storefront into a pork store resembling what was seen in the pilot — including the pig mounted to the roof. The building was demolished in 2007 and is now a parking lot.
Steve Schirripa, who played Bobby Baccalieri, was disappointed when he learned it had been knocked down. “I would have liked to go to Satriale’s one more time, because I’m looking at it, this time, with different set of eyes,” said Mr. Schirripa, 66.
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A three-story house with a red-brick bottom and light brown top sits on a street corner, with a car parked out front.
THEN Bucco’s Vesuvio in Elizabeth, N.J., before it erupted in Season 1.Credit...HBO
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A three-story house with a dark gray bottom and light brown top sits on a street corner, with a white car parked out front.
NOW The corner storefront houses an Italian restaurant called Del Porto Ristorante.Credit...Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
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Bucco’s Vesuvio
“It was a great home away from home,” said Mr. Pastore of the restaurant where Tony would regularly sit down with both of his families. “It wasn’t a place where the wiseguys would take their girlfriends. It was a place where Carmela and Tony would go. It was a family restaurant.”
A family restaurant that got blown up. The original Vesuvio, located on the ground floor of a building on the corner of South First Street and Elizabeth Avenue in Elizabeth, N.J., erupted during Season 1. To film the scene, Mr. Chase said, “we added a wing that got blown up that we destroyed,” Mr. Chase explained. “The real restaurant wasn’t touched.”
The name was inspired by Vesuvius, a restaurant Mr. Chase went to growing up. “My parents used to go there on special occasions, and I was there as a kid and it had really good food.”
Today, the location is home to Del Porto Ristorante.
Image
A brick building, with a sign on top of the facade that says "Pizzaland," has a large square window and a door with a pane of glass.
THEN Pizza Land, in North Arlington, N.J., was seen for a brief moment in the show’s opening credits.Credit...HBO
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A sunnier shot of the "Pizzaland" building shows advertising in the window and an "open" sign on the door.
NOW After closing briefly, the shop was rescued by a new owner, Eddie Twdroos. “It’s a landmark,” he said.Credit...Karsten Moran for The New York Times
Pizza Land
Each week in the mood-setting opening credits, Tony would drive past this tiny pizza shack in North Arlington, N.J., making it one of the most recognized facades in Sopranos lore — even though no scenes ever took place there. At one point, its previous owner said, they’d ship pies, shrink-wrapped and on dry ice, to fans around the country.
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Its current owner, Eddie Twdroos, said he still gets plenty of visitors who want to take pictures — and maybe eat the pizza. After the store’s previous owner died in 2010, Mr. Twdroos was passing by when he saw Pizza Land was shut down. He’d run a few pizza shops before, and he recalled thinking, “This is like a perfect location, and a nice little store with a lot of story behind it.” So he decided to rescue it.
“You want to keep everything the way it is from the show — the same front, the same sign at the top of the store, everything was left the same,” said Mr. Twdroos, 53. “It’s a landmark.”
Anna Kodé writes about design and culture for the Real Estate section of The Times. More about Anna Kodé
A version of this article appears in print on Jan. 14, 2024, Section RE, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Sopranos’ New Jersey, Now. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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Inside the World of ‘The Sopranos’
The show, starring James Gandolfini as the mafia boss Tony Soprano, beguiled viewers over the course of six seasons with its depictions of New Jersey mobsters.
25 Years Later: On the anniversary of the show’s premiere, its creator and location manager reflect on some of its iconic settings.
Episode Guide: Want to re-immerse yourself into “The Sopranos”? Here are some suggestions, for both a short dip and a deeper dive.
1999 Review: “Combining dark comedy and psychological drama, the show achieves a fresh tone to match its irresistibly winning concept,” our critic wrote after the series’s debut.
A New Audience: “The Sopranos” experienced a resurgence during the pandemic. Somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there was an openly left-wing subcurrent within it.
‘The Many Saints of Newark’: The 2021 movie prequel follows, among other characters, a young Tony Soprano, played by Gandolfini’s son, Michael. Here is what the actor said about inhabiting the role after his father, who died in 2013.
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The Economist Magazine Cover For 01/13/2024
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JANUARY 13TH 2024
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How we chose this week’s image
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Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
Our covers this week looked at the challenge from China’s astonishing progress in electric vehicles (EVs), and the growing tensions on the high seas.
One cover is based on a Briefing that shows how rapidly China has come to dominate EVs. Just five years ago its motor industry shipped only a quarter as many cars as Japan, then the world’s biggest exporter. This week the Chinese industry claimed to have exported more than 5m cars in 2023, exceeding the Japanese total. By 2030, China could double its share of the global market to a third, ending the dominance of the West’s national champions, especially in Europe.
In the leader we wanted to focus on the reaction this is likely to provoke in the West. The “China shock”, when about 1m American manufacturing workers lost their jobs to Chinese competition, has been blamed for everything from rising deaths among working-class Americans to the election of Donald Trump. It is also one of the reasons politicians enthusiastically embrace industrial policy today.
The brief for our cover designers was to capture both sides of this story—China’s emergence, as well as the fear that the West is about to undergo a second China shock.
Inevitably, we began with pandas. Here is the sketch of one of our furry friends lounging on the stripped-down chassis of an EV. In the final design we added a steering wheel to help make sense of the image: not everyone is an engineer. Some of us loved this, but others remained confused. The problem is that it tells only half the story—that Chinese companies have made this technology their own. If anything, our cuddly panda obscures the reality of a looming trade war.
This is more aggressive. Some of us did not see the tyre-track in the dragon’s body. When we worked up the final design we therefore added texture and the logos of some of the European marques likely to suffer. This cover also divided opinion. Some found it messy, others refreshingly vivid. Our reservation was that, by portraying a predator, we appeared to be endorsing the wild fears of Western politicians. In fact, our leader argues that value-for-money Chinese imports could bring great economic and environmental benefits.
We decided to use hyperbole to get that message across. This sketch of a fleet of EVs invading from orbit is so over the top that readers should understand the irony. Many people will complain about the onrush of cars from China. But if Xi Jinping wants to spend taxpayers’ money subsidising global consumers and speeding up the energy transition, the best response is to welcome it.
Our second cover was about sea power. In the Red Sea this week America and Britain hit back against Houthi militias, who have launched dozens of attacks on ships with drones and missiles, cutting container activity in the Suez Canal by 90%. The Black Sea is filling up with mines and crippled warships. The Baltic and North seas face a shadow-war of pipeline and cable sabotage. And amid tensions over Taiwan, Asia is seeing the largest build-up of naval power since the second world war.
To illustrate this, we thought about using this picture of a convoy of destroyers on exercises in the South China Sea. It’s an impressive sight. Or how about a shot of a warship set against a setting sun? It’s certainly moody.
However, our message is that superpower rivalry and the decay of global rules and norms are deepening geopolitical tensions. We thought we could do better.
To convey that this drama is being played out at sea, we decided to turn the ocean into a giant chessboard. It is easy to identify where conflict could break out. Attacks by, say, Iran or Russia on pipelines, liquefied-natural-gas routes or data cables could be crippling. Spats over strategic islands could trigger confrontation in the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. And embargoes of economies more sophisticated than Russia’s or Iran’s could do enormous damage. A simulation by Bloomberg shows a blockade of Taiwan and Western countermeasures might cut global GDP by 5%.
We preferred this. The bow wave from the naval ship is distorting the black and white squares of the chessboard. But there was a problem. This particular vessel is a Freedom Class Littoral Combat Ship, so plagued with design and operational snafus that it became known as the Little Crappy Ship. It was hardly the emblem to herald a mighty new era of sea power. So we decommissioned the LCS and procured an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer instead. To illustrate the dangerous waters that lie ahead, we relied on the workhorse of the US Navy.
Cover image
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View large image (“China’s EV onslaught”)
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View large image (“Who rules the waves?”)
Backing stories
An influx of Chinese cars is terrifying the West (Leader)
Western firms are quaking as China’s electric-car industry speeds up (Briefing)
Saturday, January 13, 2024
Friday, January 12, 2024
Stalin And Hitler Should Have Never Happened
David Stockman on Why Stalin and Hitler Should Never Have Happened
by David Stockman
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Herewith is a capsulized dissection which attempts to explain why Stalin and Hitler should have never happened. Accordingly, the hot, cold and Forever Wars wars that followed thereafter condemn the case for the American Empire, not make it; and they show that Trump’s America First is a far more appropriate lodestone for national security policy than Imperial Washington’s specious claim that America is the Indispensable Nation.
The Great War had been destined to end in 1917 by mutual exhaustion, bankruptcy and withdrawal from the utterly stalemated trenches of the Western Front. In the end, upwards of 3.3 million combatants had been killed and 8.3 million wounded over four years for movement along blood-drenched front-lines that could be measured in mere miles and yards.
Still, had America stayed on its side of the great Atlantic moat, the ultimate outcomes everywhere would have been far different. Foremostly, the infant democracy that came to power in February 1917 in Russia would not have been so easily smothered in its crib.
There surely would have been no disastrous summer offensive by the Kerensky government to rollback Germany on the eastern front where the czarist armies had earlier been humiliated and dismembered. In turn, an early end to Russia’s bloody and bankrupting impalement on the eastern front would also likely have precluded the return of Lenin to Russia in a German boxcar and the subsequent armed insurrection in Petrograd in November 1917. The flukish seizure of power by Lenin and his small band of fanatical Bolsheviks, in turn, would most certainly never have happened.
That is, the 20th century would not have been saddled with what inexorably morphed into the Stalinist nightmare. Nor would a garrisoned Soviet state have poisoned the peace of nations for 74 years thereafter, while causing the nuclear sword of Damocles to hang precariously over the planet.
Likewise, there would have been no abomination known as the Versailles peace treaty because it was a toxic peace of victors. But without America’s billions of aid and munitions and two million fresh dough-boys there would have been no Allied victors, as we demonstrate below.
Without Versailles, in turn, there would have been no "stab in the back" legends owing to the Weimar government’s forced signing of the "war guilt" clause; no continuance of England’s brutal post-armistice blockade that delivered hundreds of thousands of Germany’s women and children into starvation and death; and no demobilized 3-million man German army left humiliated, destitute, bitter and on a permanent political rampage of vengeance.
So, too, there would have been no acquiescence in the dismemberment of Germany at the Versailles "peace" table.
As it happened nearly one-fifth of Germany’s pre-war territory and population was spread in parts and pieces to Poland (the Danzig Corridor and Upper Silesia), Czechoslovakia (the Sudetenland), Denmark (Schleswig), France (the Saar, Alsace-Lorraine and the neutralized Rhineland) and Belgium (Eupen and Malmedy).
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This sweeping loss of territory also meant Germany lost 50% of its iron production capacity, 16% of its coal output and 100% of its far flung colonies in Africa and East Asia to England and France.
Needless to say, God did not create the map of Europe on the 6th day of his labors. But it is absolutely the case that it was the vast German territories and peoples "stolen" at Versailles that provided the fuel for Hitler’s revanchist agitation during the years before his seizure of power; and it was that campaign to regain the lost territories which nourished the Nazis with patriotic public support in the rump of the fatherland.
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Wednesday, January 10, 2024
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Monday, January 8, 2024
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Saturday, January 6, 2024
The Economist Magazine Cover For 01/06/2024
The Economist
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JANUARY 6TH 2024
Cover Story newsletter from The Economist
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Cover Story
How we chose this week’s image
The Economist
Zanny Minton Beddoes
Editor-in-chief
It’s always good to start the year by looking ahead. Inevitably, that means we are thinking about the Big Election in November. It may seem a long way off but it isn’t really, at least by the relentless calendar of American politics, and much of the world is already in a state of panic about the prospect of Donald Trump returning to the White House.
Lots of Democrats would rather Joe Biden were not their presidential candidate. He doesn't excite them. They also fear that he will lose and see Mr Trump as a threat to democracy. The odd thing—and a further reason for this week’s cover—is that, instead of being moved either to challenge Mr Biden or to give their all in support of his campaign, many Democrats have fallen into a glassy-eyed stupor.
We began by looking at photographs. Here we have a craggy president in his aviator sunglasses. There’s no getting away from it: Mr Biden’s biggest and most intractable problem is his age. Most Americans know someone in their 80s who is starting to show their years. They also know that no matter how fine that person’s character, they do not expect them to take on the world’s hardest job.
This says that time is running out—not only for Mr Biden but also for the Democratic Party. Filing deadlines have already passed in many states and the only other candidates on the ballot are a little-known congressman called Dean Phillips and a self-help guru called Marianne Williamson. State legislatures would have to approve new dates for the primaries closer to the convention in August. Debates would have to be organised. The field could be vast: in the Democratic primary in 2020, 29 candidates put themselves forward.
We could not shake off the theme of time. We thought of a typographic variation —but whereas we are writing about Mr Biden’s political viability, this looks uncomfortably as if we think his time is up in a more cosmic sense.
An alarm clock was weirder, but less offensive. And it chimed with the notion that this story is about missed opportunities. If Mr Biden had decided to be a one-term president, he would now be revered as a paragon of public service and a rebuke to Mr Trump’s boundless ego. But he has succumbed to the vainglorious belief that his country needs him as a proven Trump-beater. His staff’s desire to serve has been tainted by their knowledge that if he goes they will never again be so close to power.
An alternative was to focus on Mr Biden and his party. Here he is riding a disobedient donkey. But this could hardly be more at odds with the truth. Like pusillanimous congressional Republicans—who could not find it within themselves to impeach or even criticise Mr Trump—Democratic stalwarts have been too meek to act on their concerns about Mr Biden’s folly.
We thought about the donkey leaping through a ring of fire. Perhaps we could raise the ring to show that the president and his party might not make it. Just now that looks all too possible. Mr Trump is leading polls in the swing states where the election will be decided. Mr Biden’s net approval rating stands at minus 16 points. If he withdrew, his replacement could be equally unelectable—Bernie Sanders, say, a self-declared democratic socialist who is a year older than the president. Or, more likely, Kamala Harris, the vice-president. Yet her chances of beating Mr Trump look even worse than her boss’s. Her campaign in 2020 was awful. Her autocue sometimes seems to have been hacked by a satirist.
The simplest solution would have been to find a photograph of Mr Biden. Here he is looking like Clint Eastwood with colic. But as a cover, this has something cheap about it. Which of us, in the blink of the shutter’s eye, has not appeared feeble-minded or intoxicated? We needed something more classy.
What could be classier than a 1942 Buick? Our observant readers will spot the personalised number plate from Pennsylvania, where Mr Biden was born in that year.
This cover was ready for the showroom—except for its title. Barring illness or disaster, we think that Mr Biden will almost certainly be running in November. Despite his shortcomings, finding an alternative candidate at this stage would be a desperate and unwise throw of the dice. That is why, rather than fret, Democrats need to unlock some excitement and create a sense of possibility about a second Biden term.
For our cover strap we posed a more subtle question: is Mr Biden roadworthy? Our observant readers will also spot that our rusting Buick has no wing mirrors. That may be legal, but is it wise?
Cover image
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View large image (“Made in ’42. Roadworthy in ’24?”)
Backing stories
The man supposed to stop Donald Trump is an unpopular 81-year-old (Leader)
Joe Biden’s chances do not look good. The Democrats have no plan B (Briefing)
A clash over Trump’s disqualification tests the Supreme Court (United States)
Also from The Economist
Friday, January 5, 2024
Thursday, January 4, 2024
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
Tuesday, January 2, 2024
A Traumatic Event Can Affect A Person's Life For Decades Afterwards
Some of us have unpleasant events in the past that continue to haunt us years or decades later. I had a sad and life-changing event happen to me on November 29, 1973. I recently passed the 50-year anniversary of this sad moment. I spent some time analyzing what happened. I looked at what each person did during and after that moment. I got some new revelations. I realized that my father had got the whole thing right 49 years ago.
I found a fascinating story concerning a woman whose father died when an airliner crashed on landing at Boston Logan Airport. Her father was among 89 passengers who died that day 50 years ago. When COVID hit, the daughter of one of the passengers killed spent a lot of time tracking down the families of each passenger killed that day.
It was quite a revelation, including how a traumatic event affects the rest of the person's life who was in some way involved with that event. Here is a link to the article for those interested:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/07/health/flight-723-plane-crash-children.html?campaign_id=190&emc=edit_ufn_20240101&instance_id=111449&nl=from-the-times®i_id=75987289&segment_id=154019&te=1&user_id=ac40b2619ed705944d682f50f32deca4
Monday, January 1, 2024
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