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Monday, February 13, 2023
POLITICO NIGHTLY: No aliens, but no answers
Do you want North Carolina to expand Medicaid?
ALL AMERICANS DESERVE HEALTH CARE & IT'S DISAPPOINTING THAT REPUBLICANS CONTINUE TO DENY IT IN NORTH CAROLINA - THEY'RE LOSING $$$ AS A CONSEQUENCE IT'S TIME TO STOP PARTISAN GAMES & WORK FOR NORTH CAROLINA!
Denying people the medical care they deserve is cruel. Wasting our state’s money is irresponsible. We need to end this mess NOW. Tell Republicans: Expand Medicaid this year >>> - Team Cooper
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Clay Higgins' Unhinged Rant
 Captain Conspiracy Clay Higgins' Unhinged Rant Congressman 😒 Clay Higgins launched into another unhinged rant last week in a House Oversight Committee. Higgins was not holding insurance executive's feet to the fire for abandoning home and small business owners in his Congressional district after Hurricane Laura. He wasn't railing against the national debt that he increased by voting for trillions in tax breaks for billionaires and corporations. No, Captain Conspiracy was yelling at former Twitter employees about Hunter Biden's laptop! Higgins' hypocrisy knows no bounds. He voted to overturn an election after his militiamen stormed the Capitol, yet he has the nerve to threaten to imprison employees of a private company for "stealing" the election. Thank you, Paid for by the Louisiana Democratic Party Louisiana Democratic Party |
FTX Bankruptcy Lawyers Channel their Inner Sam Bankman-Fried – Bill $21,000 for their Meals Over Just 20 Days
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FTX Bankruptcy Lawyers Channel their Inner Sam Bankman-Fried – Bill $21,000 for their Meals Over Just 20 Days
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: February 9, 2023 ~
James L Bromley, Partner at Sullivan & Cromwell
The shenanigans going on in Judge John Dorsey’s bankruptcy courtroom, which is overseeing the FTX bankruptcy proceedings of Sam Bankman-Fried’s collapsed crypto empire, are reaching levels that should be attracting the attention of federal prosecutors. The head of the newly-created FTX Task Force, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams, has called the looted FTX customer accounts “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”
On Monday, February 6, the lead counsel in the bankruptcy case, Sullivan & Cromwell, and its hand-picked CEO for FTX, John Ray, argued vehemently against the appointment of an independent examiner in the FTX matter. The independent examiner has been requested since December 1 by the U.S. Trustee, who works for the U.S. Department of Justice. Sullivan & Cromwell law partner, James Bromley, and Ray, cited the high cost likely to be charged by the independent examiner as one of their arguments against the appointment.
The very next day, Tuesday, February 7, Sullivan & Cromwell submitted a compensation request for $7.6 million in legal fees for 19 days work in November, plus $105,000 in expenses. As part of those expenses, Sullivan & Cromwell included a request to be reimbursed for $7,202.19 for “Conference Room Dining,” and $1,840.00 for “overtime” meals. Accentuating the increasingly tone deaf nature of this law firm, just a few months ago Sam Bankman-Fried was making headlines for spending $2500 on lavish lunches for himself and staff while his customers’ accounts were being looted.
Bromley, who was so concerned about the cost that might be incurred if an independent examiner was hired, billed at an hourly rate of $2,165 for a total of $381,689.50 in legal fees for the period of November 11 through November 30, 2022. Another Sullivan & Cromwell law partner, Andrew Dietderich, also billed at an hourly rate of $2,165 for a total of $465,042.00 over the same span of time. (Emails recently surfaced in another crypto bankruptcy case where Dietderich had written in an email to a different law firm on November 7 that FTX was “rock solid.” FTX halted customer withdrawals the next day and filed bankruptcy on November 11. See Bombshell Emails Raise Questions about What Sullivan & Cromwell Knew about Fraud at Sam Bankman-Fried’s Crypto Firms.)
As lead counsel in the FTX bankruptcy matter, Sullivan & Cromwell is well aware that the bankruptcy estate is missing $8 billion of looted customer funds. What it bills is highly likely to reduce what the defrauded customers get paid.
Sullivan & Cromwell’s $7.6 million in legal fees for 19 calendar days comes out to $400,000 per day. Annualized, that’s $146 million over the course of a year. The bankruptcy proceeding is expected to last as long as two years.
Another compensation request filed on Tuesday was from a firm advising FTX on restructuring, Alvarez & Marsal. Its legal fees for 20 days in November came in at $5 million while expenses tallied to more than $180,000. Its FTX team devoured meals worth $12,324.88 for which it requested compensation.
Another law firm that has been hired to work on the FTX bankruptcy, ostensibly to handle legal work that Sullivan & Cromwell is too deeply conflicted to handle, is Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan. For a span of 51 days ending on December 31, 2022, it requested legal fees of $1.2 million and a little over $4300 in expenses. There was zero request for repayment for meals.
Judge Dorsey did not rule on the request for an independent examiner on Monday, as had been expected. Instead, he called the lawyers, including the lawyer for the U.S. Trustee, into his chambers and, according to reports, told the lawyers to try to reach an agreement. Dorsey likely fears being overturned on appeal if he rules against the U.S. Trustee in one of the largest financial frauds in U.S. history. This could cast a decidedly negative light on the numerous times that this Delaware bankruptcy court’s judges (including Judge Dorsey) have ruled from the bench against appointing an independent examiner, despite legal precedent in published decisions and the clear statutory language.
Another hearing in the FTX bankruptcy was scheduled for yesterday, when Dorsey was expected to announce how the independent examiner issue had been resolved. Instead, the hearing was abruptly cancelled. One item of business that was to be taken up at that hearing was the appointment of the law firm Young Conaway Stargatt & Taylor to serve as Co-Counsel to the Official Committee of Unsecured Creditors. Judge Dorsey signed that order yesterday appointing the firm, despite the cancellation of the hearing. (See Docket entry 657 at this link.) Judge Dorsey worked as a partner for that law firm for 16 years prior to taking his seat on the bench.
Sullivan & Cromwell has come under withering criticism for serving as lead counsel in the bankruptcy despite voluminous conflicts of interest from its prior work for FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried and the hedge fund through which he allegedly looted the FTX customer accounts, Alameda Research.
The recently surfaced email by Sullivan & Cromwell partner Andrew Dietderich, in the bankruptcy case of Voyager Digital, means that Dietderich could be called as a witness. Sullivan & Cromwell is also fighting a subpoena from law firms Boies Schiller Flexner and The Moskowitz Law Firm. The law firms want troves of documents and depositions from Sullivan & Cromwell over the work they did for FTX and Alameda in the Voyager Digital case.
This is likely to mean that Sullivan & Cromwell will find itself in the problematic position of attempting to be both witness and advocate – which could potentially create unnecessary delays and billings to the FTX bankruptcy estate.
It’s not like Judge Dorsey wasn’t warned about this problem. In a letter sent to him on January 9, four sitting U.S. Senators – including bankruptcy law expert Elizabeth Warren – warned as follows:
“To name just one challenge: will the firm’s lawyers be able to effectively investigate their current and former partners who were central in FTX’s conduct? Additionally, given their longstanding legal work for FTX, they may well bear a measure of responsibility for the damage wrecked on the company’s victims. Put bluntly, the firm is simply not in a position to uncover the information needed to ensure confidence in any investigation or findings.”
An FTX customer, Warren Winter, also filed a formal objection to the appointment of Sullivan & Cromwell, telling the court:
“Sullivan & Cromwell was one of the FTX Group’s ‘primary external law firms’ before the FTX Group collapsed. To date, the FTX Group has paid the firm more than $20.5 million in fees and retainers. Now, in the most flagrant attempt by a fox to guard a henhouse in recent memory, Sullivan & Cromwell has applied to be appointed the FTX Group’s bankruptcy counsel with duties that would include ‘investigating all potential estate causes of action’….”
Despite the warnings, Judge Dorsey signed an order on January 20 making Sullivan & Cromwell lead counsel in the FTX bankruptcy.
It’s time for disinfecting sunshine on what’s going on in this courthouse. We urge our colleagues at mainstream business media to wake from their slumbers and provide it.
David Remnick | The Defiance of Salman Rushdie
12 February 23
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After a near-fatal stabbing—and decades of threats—the novelist speaks about writing as a death-defying act.
There were times, though, when the lingering threat made itself apparent, and not merely on the lunatic reaches of the Internet. In 2012, during the annual autumn gathering of world leaders at the United Nations, I joined a small meeting of reporters with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of Iran, and I asked him if the multimillion-dollar bounty that an Iranian foundation had placed on Rushdie’s head had been rescinded. Ahmadinejad smiled with a glint of malice. “Salman Rushdie, where is he now?” he said. “There is no news of him. Is he in the United States? If he is in the U.S., you shouldn’t broadcast that, for his own safety.”
Within a year, Ahmadinejad was out of office and out of favor with the mullahs. Rushdie went on living as a free man. The years passed. He wrote book after book, taught, lectured, travelled, met with readers, married, divorced, and became a fixture in the city that was his adopted home. If he ever felt the need for some vestige of anonymity, he wore a baseball cap.
Recalling his first few months in New York, Rushdie told me, “People were scared to be around me. I thought, The only way I can stop that is to behave as if I’m not scared. I have to show them there’s nothing to be scared about.” One night, he went out to dinner with Andrew Wylie, his agent and friend, at Nick & Toni’s, an extravagantly conspicuous restaurant in East Hampton. The painter Eric Fischl stopped by their table and said, “Shouldn’t we all be afraid and leave the restaurant?”
“Well, I’m having dinner,” Rushdie replied. “You can do what you like.”
Fischl hadn’t meant to offend, but sometimes there was a tone of derision in press accounts of Rushdie’s “indefatigable presence on the New York night-life scene,” as Laura M. Holson put it in the Times. Some people thought he should have adopted a more austere posture toward his predicament. Would Solzhenitsyn have gone onstage with Bono or danced the night away at Moomba?
For Rushdie, keeping a low profile would be capitulation. He was a social being and would live as he pleased. He even tried to render the fatwa ridiculous. Six years ago, he played himself in an episode of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” in which Larry David provokes threats from Iran for mocking the Ayatollah while promoting his upcoming production “Fatwa! The Musical.” David is terrified, but Rushdie’s character assures him that life under an edict of execution, though it can be “scary,” also makes a man alluring to women. “It’s not exactly you, it’s the fatwa wrapped around you, like sexy pixie dust!” he says.
With every public gesture, it appeared, Rushdie was determined to show that he would not merely survive but flourish, at his desk and on the town. “There was no such thing as absolute security,” he wrote in his third-person memoir, “Joseph Anton,” published in 2012. “There were only varying degrees of insecurity. He would have to learn to live with that.” He well understood that his demise would not require the coördinated efforts of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps or Hezbollah; a cracked loner could easily do the job. “But I had come to feel that it was a very long time ago, and that the world moves on,” he told me.
In September, 2021, Rushdie married the poet and novelist Rachel Eliza Griffiths, whom he’d met six years earlier, at a PEN event. It was his fifth marriage, and a happy one. They spent the pandemic together productively. By last July, Rushdie had made his final corrections on a new novel, titled “Victory City.”
One of the sparks for the novel was a trip decades ago to the town of Hampi, in South India, the site of the ruins of the medieval Vijayanagara empire. “Victory City,” which is presented as a recovered medieval Sanskrit epic, is the story of a young girl named Pampa Kampana, who, after witnessing the death of her mother, acquires divine powers and conjures into existence a glorious metropolis called Bisnaga, in which women resist patriarchal rule and religious tolerance prevails, at least for a while. The novel, firmly in the tradition of the wonder tale, draws on Rushdie’s readings in Hindu mythology and in the history of South Asia.
“The first kings of Vijayanagara announced, quite seriously, that they were descended from the moon,” Rushdie said. “So when these kings, Harihara and Bukka, announce that they’re members of the lunar dynasty, they’re basically associating themselves with those great heroes. It’s like saying, ‘I’ve descended from the same family as Achilles.’ Or Agamemnon. And so I thought, Well, if you could say that, I can say anything.”
Above all, the book is buoyed by the character of Pampa Kampana, who, Rushdie says, “just showed up in my head” and gave him his story, his sense of direction. The pleasure for Rushdie in writing the novel was in “world building” and, at the same time, writing about a character building that world: “It’s me doing it, but it’s also her doing it.” The pleasure is infectious. “Victory City” is an immensely enjoyable novel. It is also an affirmation. At the end, with the great city in ruins, what is left is not the storyteller but her words:
I, Pampa Kampana, am the author of this book.
I have lived to see an empire rise and fall.
How are they remembered now, these kings, these queens?
They exist now only in words . . .
I myself am nothing now. All that remains is this city of words.
Words are the only victors.
It is hard not to read this as a credo of sorts. Over the years, Rushdie’s friends have marvelled at his ability to write amid the fury unleashed on him. Martin Amis has said that, if he were in his shoes, “I would, by now, be a tearful and tranquilized three-hundred-pounder, with no eyelashes or nostril hairs.” And yet “Victory City” is Rushdie’s sixteenth book since the fatwa.
He was pleased with the finished manuscript and was getting encouragement from friends who had read it. (“I think ‘Victory City’ will be one of his books that will last,” the novelist Hari Kunzru told me.) During the pandemic, Rushdie had also completed a play about Helen of Troy, and he was already toying with an idea for another novel. He’d reread Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” and Franz Kafka’s “The Castle,” novels that deploy a naturalistic language to evoke strange, hermetic worlds—an alpine sanatorium, a remote provincial bureaucracy. Rushdie thought about using a similar approach to create a peculiar imaginary college as his setting. He started keeping notes. In the meantime, he looked forward to a peaceful summer and, come winter, a publicity tour to promote “Victory City.”
On August 11th, Rushdie arrived for a speaking engagement at the Chautauqua Institution, situated on an idyllic property bordering a lake in southwestern New York State. There, for nine weeks every summer, a prosperous crowd intent on self-improvement and fresh air comes to attend lectures, courses, screenings, performances, and readings. Chautauqua has been a going concern since 1874. Franklin Roosevelt delivered his “I hate war” speech there, in 1936. Over the years, Rushdie has occasionally suffered from nightmares, and a couple of nights before the trip he dreamed of someone, “like a gladiator,” attacking him with “a sharp object.” But no midnight portent was going to keep him home. Chautauqua was a wholesome venue, with cookouts, magic shows, and Sunday school. One donor described it to me as “the safest place on earth.”
Rushdie had agreed to appear onstage with his friend Henry Reese. Eighteen years ago, Rushdie helped Reese raise funds to create City of Asylum, a program in Pittsburgh that supports authors who have been driven into exile. On the morning of August 12th, Rushdie had breakfast with Reese and some donors on the porch of the Athenaeum Hotel, a Victorian pile near the lake. At the table, he told jokes and stories, admitting that he sometimes ordered books from Amazon even if he felt a little guilty about it. With mock pride, he bragged about his speed as a signer of books, though he had to concede that Amy Tan was quicker: “But she has an advantage, because her name is so short.”
A crowd of more than a thousand was gathering at the amphitheatre. It was shorts-and-polo-shirt weather, sunny and clear. On the way into the venue, Reese introduced Rushdie to his ninety-three-year-old mother, and then they headed for the greenroom to spend time organizing their talk. The plan was to discuss the cultural hybridity of the imagination in contemporary literature, show some slides and describe City of Asylum, and, finally, open things up for questions.
At 10:45 A.M., Rushdie and Reese took their places onstage, settling into yellow armchairs. Off to the side, Sony Ton-Aime, a poet and the director of the literary-arts program at Chautauqua, stepped to a lectern to introduce the talk. At 10:47, there was a commotion. A young man ran down the aisle and climbed onto the stage. He was dressed all in black and armed with a knife.
Rushdie grew up in Bombay in a hillside villa with a view of the Arabian Sea. The family was Muslim, but secular. They were wealthy, though less so over time. Salman’s father, Anis Ahmed Rushdie, was a textile manufacturer who, according to his son, had the business acumen of a “four-year-old child.” But, for all his flaws, Rushdie’s father read to him from the “great wonder tales of the East,” including the stories of Scheherazade in the “Thousand and One Nights,” the Sanskrit animal fables of the Panchatantra, and the exploits of Amir Hamza, an uncle of the Prophet Muhammad. Salman became obsessed with stories; they were his most valued inheritance. He spent countless hours at his local bookstore, Reader’s Paradise. In time, he devoured the two vast Sanskrit epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata; the Greek and Roman myths; and the adventures of Bertie Wooster and Jeeves.
Nothing was sacred to young Rushdie, not even the stories with religious origins, but on some level he believed them all. He was particularly enraptured by the polytheistic storytelling traditions in which the gods behave badly, weirdly, hilariously. He was taken by a Hindu tale, the Samudra Manthan, in which gods and demons churn the Milky Way so that the stars release amrita, the nectar of immortality. He would look up at the night sky and imagine the nectar falling toward him. “Maybe if I opened my mouth,” he said to himself, “a drop might fall in and then I would be immortal, too.”
Later, Rushdie learned from the oral traditions as well. On a trip to Kerala, in South India, he listened to professional storytellers spin tales at outdoor gatherings where large crowds paid a few rupees and sat on the ground to listen for hours. What especially interested Rushdie was the style of these fabulists: circuitous, digressive, improvisational. “They’ve got three or four narrative balls in the air at any given moment, and they just juggle them,” he said. That, too, fed his imagination and, eventually, his sense of the novel’s possibilities.
At the age of thirteen, Rushdie was sent off to Rugby, a centuries-old British boarding school. There were three mistakes a boarder could make in those days, as he came to see it: be foreign, be clever, and be bad at games. He was all three. He was decidedly happier as a university student. At King’s College, Cambridge, he met several times with E. M. Forster, the author of “Howards End” and “A Passage to India.” “He was very encouraging when he heard that I wanted to be a writer,” Rushdie told me. “And he said something which I treasured, which is that he felt that the great novel of India would be written by somebody from India with a Western education.
“I hugely admire ‘A Passage to India,’ because it was an anti-colonial book at a time when it was not at all fashionable to be anti-colonial,” he went on. “What I kind of rebelled against was Forsterian English, which is very cool and meticulous. I thought, If there’s one thing that India is not, it’s not cool. It’s hot and noisy and crowded and excessive. How do you find a language that’s like that?”
As an undergraduate, Rushdie studied history, taking particular interest in the history of India, the United States, and Islam. Along the way, he read about the “Satanic verses,” an episode in which the Prophet Muhammad (“one of the great geniuses of world history,” Rushdie wrote years later) is said to have been deceived by Satan and made a proclamation venerating three goddesses; he soon reversed himself after the Archangel Gabriel revealed this deception, and the verses were expunged from the sacred record. The story raised many questions. The verses about the three goddesses had, it was said, initially been popular in Mecca, so why were they discredited? Was it to do with their subjects being female? Had Muhammad somehow flirted with polytheism, making the “revelation” false and satanic? “I thought, Good story,” Rushdie said. “I found out later how good.” He filed it away for later use.
After graduating from Cambridge, Rushdie moved to London and set to work as a writer. He wrote novels and stories, along with glowing reviews of his future work which, as he later noted, “offered a fleeting, onanistic comfort, usually followed by a pang of shame.” There was a great deal of typing, finishing, and then stashing away the results. One novel, “The Antagonist,” was heavily influenced by Thomas Pynchon and featured a secondary character named Saleem Sinai, who was born at midnight August 14-15, 1947, the moment of Indian independence. (More for the file.) Another misfire, “Madame Rama,” took aim at Indira Gandhi, who had imposed emergency rule in India. “Grimus” (1975), Rushdie’s first published novel, was a sci-fi fantasy based on a twelfth-century Sufi narrative poem called “The Conference of the Birds.” It attracted a few admirers, Ursula K. Le Guin among them, but had tepid reviews and paltry sales.
To underwrite this ever-lengthening apprenticeship, Rushdie, like F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Heller, and Don DeLillo, worked in advertising, notably at the firm Ogilvy & Mather. He wrote copy extolling the virtues of the Daily Mirror, Scotch Magic Tape, and Aero chocolate bars. He found the work easy. He has always been partial to puns, alliteration, limericks, wordplay of all kinds. In fact, as he approached his thirtieth birthday, his best-known achievement in letters was his campaign on behalf of Aero, “the bubbliest milk chocolate you can buy.” He indelibly described the aerated candy bar as “Adorabubble,” “Delectabubble,” “Irresistabubble,” and, when placed in store windows, “Availabubble here.”
But advertising was hardly his life’s ambition, and Rushdie now embarked on an “all or nothing” project. He went to India for an extended trip, a reimmersion in the subcontinent, with endless bus rides and countless conversations. It revived something in him; as he put it, “a world came flooding back.” Here was the hot and noisy Bombay English that he’d been looking for. In 1981, when Rushdie was thirty-three, he published “Midnight’s Children,” an autobiographical-national epic of Bombay and the rise of post-colonial India. The opening of the novel is a remarkable instance of a unique voice announcing itself:
I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nursing Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clockhands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence, I tumbled forth into the world. There were gasps. And, outside the window, fireworks and crowds. . . . I, Saleem Sinai, later variously called Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha and even Piece-of-the-Moon, had become heavily embroiled in Fate.
Perhaps the most distinct echo is from Saul Bellow’s “The Adventures of Augie March”: “I am an American, Chicago born—Chicago, that somber city—and go at things as I have taught myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way. . . .” When Rushdie shifted from the third-person narrator of his earlier drafts to the first-person address of the protagonist, Saleem Sinai, the novel took off. Rushdie was suddenly back “in the world that made me.” Forster had been onto something. In an English of his own devising, Rushdie had written a great Indian novel, a prismatic work with all the noise, abundance, multilingual complexity, wit, and, ultimately, political disappointment of the country he set out to describe. As he told me, “Bombay is a city built very largely on reclaimed land—reclaimed from the sea. And I thought of the book as being kind of an act of reclamation.”
“Midnight’s Children” is a novel of overwhelming muchness, of magic and mythologies. Saleem learns that a thousand other children were born at the same moment as he was, and that these thousand and one storytellers make up a vast subcontinental Scheherazade. Saleem is telepathically attuned to the cacophony of an infinitely varied post-colonial nation, with all its fissures and conflicts. “I was a radio receiver and could turn the volume down or up,” he tells us. “I could select individual voices; I could even, by an effort of will, switch off my newly discovered ear.”
The novel was quickly recognized as a classic. “We have an epic in our laps,” John Leonard wrote in the Times. “The obvious comparisons are to Günter Grass in ‘The Tin Drum’ and to Gabriel Garcia Márquez in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ I am happy to oblige the obvious.” “Midnight’s Children” won the Booker Prize in 1981, and, many years later, “the Booker of Bookers,” the best of the best. One of the few middling reviews Rushdie received was from his father. His reading of the novel was, at best, dismissive; he could not have been pleased by the depiction of the protagonist’s father, who, like him, had a drinking problem. “When you have a baby on your lap, sometimes it wets you, but you forgive it,” he told Rushdie. It was only years later, when he was dying, that he came clean: “I was angry because every word you wrote was true.”
Shortly after the publication of “Midnight’s Children,” Bill Buford, an American who had reinvented the literary quarterly Granta while studying at Cambridge, invited Rushdie to give a reading at a space above a hairdresser’s. “I didn’t know who was going to show up,” Rushdie recalled. “The room was packed, absolutely bursting at the seams, and a large percentage were Indian readers. I was unbelievably moved. A rather well-dressed middle-aged lady in a fancy sari stood up at the end of the reading, in this sort of Q. & A. bit, and she said, ‘I want to thank you, Mr. Rushdie, because you have told my story.’ It still almost makes me cry.”
“Midnight’s Children” and its equally extravagant successor, “Shame,” which is set in a country that is “not quite” Pakistan, managed to infuriate the leaders of India and Pakistan—Indira Gandhi sued Rushdie and his publisher, Jonathan Cape, for defamation; “Shame” was banned in Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s Pakistan—but politics was hardly the only reason that his example was so liberating. Rushdie takes from Milan Kundera the idea that the history of the modern novel came from two distinct eighteenth-century streams, the realism of Samuel Richardson’s “Clarissa” and the strangeness and irrealism of Laurence Sterne’s “Tristram Shandy”; Rushdie gravitated to the latter, more fantastical, less populated tradition. His youthful readings had been followed by later excursions into Franz Kafka, James Joyce, Italo Calvino, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Mikhail Bulgakov, all of whom drew on folktales, allegory, and local mythologies to produce their “antic, ludic, comic, eccentric” texts.
In turn, younger writers found inspiration in “Midnight’s Children,” especially those who came from backgrounds shaped by colonialism and migration. One such was Zadie Smith, who published her first novel, “White Teeth,” in 2000, when she was twenty-four. “By the time I came of age, it was already canonical,” Smith told me. “If I’m honest, I was a bit resistant to it as a monument—it felt very intimidating. But then, aged about eighteen, I finally read it, and I think the first twenty pages had as much influence on me as any book could. Bottled energy! That’s the best way I can put it. And I recognized the energy. ‘The empire writes back’ is what we used to say of Rushdie, and I was also a distant child of that empire, and had grown up around people with Rushdie-level energy and storytelling prowess. . . . I hate that cliché of ‘He kicked open the door so we could walk through it,’ but in Salman’s case it’s the truth.”
At the time, Rushdie had no idea that he would exert such an influence. “I was just thinking, I hope a few people read this weird book,” he said. “This book with almost no white people in it and written in such strange English.”
I first met Rushdie, fleetingly, in New York, at a 1986 convocation of PEN International. I was reporting on the gathering for the Washington Post and Rushdie was possibly the youngest luminary in a vast assemblage of writers from forty-five countries. Like a rookie at the all-star game, Rushdie enjoyed watching the veterans do their thing: Günter Grass throwing Teutonic thunderbolts at Saul Bellow; E. L. Doctorow lashing out at Norman Mailer, the president of PEN American Center, for inviting George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s Secretary of State, to speak; Grace Paley hurling high heat at Mailer for his failure to invite more women. One afternoon, Rushdie was outside on Central Park South, taking a break from the conference, when he ran into a photographer from Time, who asked him to hop into a horse carriage for a picture. Rushdie found himself sitting beside Czesław Miłosz and Susan Sontag. For once, Rushdie said, he was “tongue-tied.”
But the PEN convention was a diversion, as was a side project called “The Jaguar Smile,” a piece of reporting on the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Rushdie was wrestling with the manuscript of “The Satanic Verses.” The prose was no less vibrant and hallucinatory than that of “Midnight’s Children” or “Shame,” but the tale was mainly set in London. “There was a point in my life when I could have written a version of ‘Midnight’s Children’ every few years,” he said. “It would’ve sold, you know. But I always want to find a thing to do that I haven’t done.”
“The Satanic Verses” was published in September, 1988. Rushdie knew that, just as he had angered Indira Gandhi and General Zia-ul-Haq, he might offend some Muslim clerics with his treatment of Islamic history and various religious tropes. The Prophet is portrayed as imperfect yet earnest, courageous in the face of persecution. In any case, the novel is hardly dominated by religion. It is in large measure about identity in the modern world of migration. Rushdie thought of “The Satanic Verses” as a “love-song to our mongrel selves,” a celebration of “hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs.” In a tone more comic than polemical, it was at once a social novel, a novel of British Asians, and a phantasmagorical retelling of the grand narrative of Islam.
If there was going to be a fuss, Rushdie figured, it would pass soon enough. “It would be absurd to think that a book can cause riots,” he told the Indian reporter Shrabani Basu before publication. Three years earlier, some British and American Muslims had protested peacefully against “My Beautiful Laundrette,” with its irreverent screenplay by the British Pakistani writer Hanif Kureishi, but that ran its course quickly. What’s more, in an era of racist “Paki-bashing,” Rushdie was admired in London for speaking out about bigotry. In 1982, in a broadcast on Channel 4, he said, “British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism. It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.”
In India, though, ahead of a national election, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi’s government banned “The Satanic Verses.” It was not immediately clear that the censorious fury would spread. In the U.K., the novel made the shortlist for the Booker Prize. (The winner was Peter Carey’s “Oscar and Lucinda.”) “The Satanic Verses” was even reviewed in the Iranian press. Attempts by religious authorities in Saudi Arabia to arouse anger about the book and have it banned throughout the world had at first only limited success, even in Arab countries. But soon the dam gave way. There were deadly riots in Kashmir and Islamabad; marches and book burnings in Bolton, Bradford, London, and Oldham; bomb threats against the publisher, Viking Penguin, in New York.
In Tehran, Ayatollah Khomeini was ailing and in crisis. After eight years of war with Iraq and hundreds of thousands of casualties, he had been forced to drink from the “poisoned chalice,” as he put it, and accept a ceasefire with Saddam Hussein. The popularity of the revolutionary regime had declined. Khomeini’s son admitted that his father never read “The Satanic Verses,” but the mullahs around him saw an opportunity to reassert the Ayatollah’s authority at home and to expand it abroad, even beyond the reach of his Shia followers. Khomeini issued the fatwa calling for Rushdie’s execution. As Kenan Malik writes in “From Fatwa to Jihad,” the edict “was a sign of weakness rather than of strength,” a matter more of politics than of theology.
A reporter from the BBC called Rushdie at home and said, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by the Ayatollah Khomeini?”
Rushdie thought, I’m a dead man. That’s it. One day. Two days. For the rest of his life, he would no longer be merely a storyteller; he would be a story, a controversy, an affair.
After speaking with a few more reporters, Rushdie went to a memorial service for his close friend Bruce Chatwin. Many of his friends were there. Some expressed concern, others tried consolation via wisecrack. “Next week we’ll be back here for you!” Paul Theroux said. In those early days, Theroux recalled in a letter to Rushdie, he thought the fatwa was “a very bad joke, a bit like Papa Doc Duvalier putting a voodoo curse on Graham Greene for writing ‘The Comedians.’ ” After the service, Martin Amis picked up a newspaper that carried the headline “EXECUTE RUSHDIE ORDERS THE AYATOLLAH.” Rushdie, Amis thought, had now “vanished into the front page.”
For the next decade, Rushdie lived underground, guarded by officers of the Special Branch, a unit of London’s Metropolitan Police. The headlines and the threats were unceasing. People behaved well. People behaved disgracefully. There were friends of great constancy—Buford, Amis, James Fenton, Ian McEwan, Nigella Lawson, Christopher Hitchens, many more—and yet some regarded the fatwa as a problem Rushdie had brought on himself. Prince Charles made his antipathy clear at a dinner party that Amis attended: What should you expect if you insult people’s deepest convictions? John le Carré instructed Rushdie to withdraw his book “until a calmer time has come.” Roald Dahl branded him a “dangerous opportunist” who “knew exactly what he was doing and cannot plead otherwise.” The singer-songwriter Cat Stevens, who had a hit with “Peace Train” and converted to Islam, said, “The Quran makes it clear—if someone defames the Prophet, then he must die.” Germaine Greer, George Steiner, and Auberon Waugh all expressed their disapproval. So did Jimmy Carter, the British Foreign Secretary, and the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Among his detractors, an image hardened of a Rushdie who was dismissive of Muslim sensitivities and, above all, ungrateful for the expensive protection the government was providing him. The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper remarked, “I would not shed a tear if some British Muslims, deploring his manners, should waylay him in a dark street and seek to improve them. If that should cause him thereafter to control his pen, society would benefit, and literature would not suffer.”
The horror was that, thanks to Khomeini’s cruel edict, so many people did suffer. In separate incidents, Hitoshi Igarashi, the novel’s Japanese translator, and Ettore Capriolo, its Italian translator, were stabbed, Igarashi fatally; the book’s Norwegian publisher, William Nygaard, was fortunate to survive being shot multiple times. Bookshops from London to Berkeley were firebombed. Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy, the organization in Stockholm that awards the annual Nobel Prize in Literature, declined to issue a statement in support of Rushdie. This was a silence that went unbroken for decades.
Rushdie was in ten kinds of misery. His marriage to the novelist Marianne Wiggins fell apart. He was consumed by worry for the safety of his young son, Zafar. Initially, he maintained a language of bravado—“Frankly, I wish I had written a more critical book,” he told a reporter the day that the fatwa was announced—but he was living, he wrote, “in a waking nightmare.” “The Satanic Verses” was a sympathetic book about the plight of the deracinated, the very same young people he now saw on the evening news burning him in effigy. His antagonists were not merely offended; they insisted on a right not to be offended. As he told me, “This paradox is part of the story of my life.”
It was part of a still larger paradox. “The Satanic Verses” was published at a time when liberty was ascendant: by late 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen; in the Soviet Union, the authority of the Communist Party was imploding. And yet the Rushdie affair prefigured other historical trends: struggles over multiculturalism and the boundaries of free speech; the rise of radical Islam and the reaction to it.
For some young writers, the work proved intensely generative. The playwright and novelist Ayad Akhtar, who is now the president of PEN America, grew up in a Muslim community in Milwaukee. He told me he remembers how friends and loved ones were gravely offended by “The Satanic Verses”; at the same time, the novel changed his life. “It was one of those experiences where I couldn’t believe what I was reading, both the beauty of it and, as a believing Muslim, I grappled with the shock of its extraordinary irreverence,” he said. “By the time I got to the end of that book, I was a different person. I suppose it was like being a young believing Irish Catholic in the twenties and encountering ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.’ ”
Amid the convulsions of the late nineteen-eighties, though, the book was vilified by people who knew it only through caricature and vitriol. A novelist who had set out to write about the complexities of South Asians in London was now, in mosques around the city and around the world, described as a figure of traitorous evil. Rushdie, out of a desire to calm the waters, met with a group of local Muslim leaders and signed a declaration affirming his faith in Islam. It was, he reasoned, true in a way: although he did not believe in supernaturalism or the orthodoxies of the creed, he had regard for the culture and civilization of Islam. He now attested that he did not agree with any statement made by any character in the novel that cast aspersions on Islam or the Prophet Muhammad, and that he would suspend the publication of the paperback edition “while any risk of further offense exists.”
Ayatollah Khomeini had died by this time, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was unmoved. His response was that the fatwa would remain in place even if Rushdie “repents and becomes the most pious man of his time.” A newspaper in Tehran advised Rushdie to “prepare for death.”
He was humiliated. It had been a mistake, he decided, to try to appease those who wanted his head. He would not make it again. As he put it in “Joseph Anton”:
He needed to understand that there were people who would never love him. No matter how carefully he explained his work or clarified his intentions in creating it, they would not love him. The unreasoning mind, driven by the doubt-free absolutes of faith, could not be convinced by reason. Those who had demonized him would never say, “Oh, look, he’s not a demon after all.” . . . He needed, now, to be clear of what he was fighting for. Freedom of speech, freedom of the imagination, freedom from fear, and the beautiful, ancient art of which he was privileged to be a practitioner. Also skepticism, irreverence, doubt, satire, comedy, and unholy glee. He would never again flinch from the defense of these things.
Since 1989, Rushdie has had to shut out not only the threats to his person but the constant dissections of his character, in the press and beyond. “There was a moment when there was a ‘me’ floating around that had been invented to show what a bad person I was,” he said. “ ‘Evil.’ ‘Arrogant.’ ‘Terrible writer.’ ‘Nobody would’ve read him if there hadn’t been an attack against his book.’ Et cetera. I’ve had to fight back against that false self. My mother used to say that her way of dealing with unhappiness was to forget it. She said, ‘Some people have a memory. I have a forget-ory.’ ”
Rushdie went on, “I just thought, There are various ways in which this event can destroy me as an artist.” He could refrain from writing altogether. He could write “revenge books” that would make him a creature of circumstances. Or he could write “scared books,” novels that “shy away from things, because you worry about how people will react to them.” But he didn’t want the fatwa to become a determining event in his literary trajectory: “If somebody arrives from another planet who has never heard of anything that happened to me, and just has the books on the shelf and reads them chronologically, I don’t think that alien would think, Something terrible happened to this writer in 1989. The books go on their own journey. And that was really an act of will.”
Some people in Rushdie’s circle and beyond are convinced that, in the intervening decades, self-censorship, a fear of giving offense, has too often become the order of the day. His friend Hanif Kureishi has said, “Nobody would have the balls today to write ‘The Satanic Verses,’ let alone publish it.”
At the height of the fatwa, Rushdie set out to make good on a promise to his son, Zafar, and complete a book of stories, tales that he told the boy in his bath. That book, which appeared in 1990, is “Haroun and the Sea of Stories.” (Haroun is Zafar’s middle name.) It concerns a twelve-year-old boy’s attempt to restore his father’s gift for storytelling. “Luck has a way of running out without the slightest warning,” Rushdie writes, and so it has been with Rashid, the Shah of Blah, a storyteller. His wife leaves him; he loses his gift. When he opens his mouth, he can say only “Ark, ark, ark.” His nemesis is the Cultmaster, a tyrant from the land of Chup, who opposes “stories and fancies and dreams,” and imposes Silence Laws on his subjects; some of his devotees “work themselves up into great frenzies and sew their lips together with stout twine.” In the end, the son is a savior, and stories triumph over tyranny. “My father has definitely not given up,” Haroun concludes. “You can’t cut off his Story Water supply.” And so, in the midst of a nightmare, Rushdie wrote one of his most enjoyable books, and an allegory of the necessity and the resilience of art.
Among the stories Rushdie was determined to tell was the story of his life. This required a factual approach, and when he published that memoir, “Joseph Anton,” a decade ago, he intended to be self-scrutinizing, tougher on himself than on anybody else. That is not invariably the case. He is harsh about publishers who, while standing fully behind Rushdie and his novel, felt it necessary to make compromises along the way (notably, delaying paperback publication) to protect the lives of their staffs. Some of the passages about his second, third, and fourth wives—Marianne Wiggins, Elizabeth West, and Padma Lakshmi—are unkind, even vindictive. He is, in general, not known for restraint in his public utterances, and his responses to personal and literary chastisements are sometimes ill-tempered. In some ways, “Joseph Anton” reminded me of Solzhenitsyn’s memoir “The Oak and the Calf,” not because the two writers share similar personalities or politics but because both, while showing extraordinary courage, remain human, sometimes heroic and sometimes petulant.
At the end of “Joseph Anton”—the title is his fatwa-era code name, the first names of two favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov—there is a movement into the light, a resolution. His “little battle,” he wrote in the final pages, “was coming to an end.” With a sense of joy, he embarks on a new novel:
This in the end was who he was, a teller of tales, a creator of shapes, a maker of things that were not. It would be wise to withdraw from the world of commentary and polemic and rededicate himself to what he loved most, the art that had claimed his heart, mind and spirit ever since he was a young man, and to live again in the universe of once upon a time, of kan ma kan, it was so and it was not so, and to make the journey to the truth upon the waters of make-believe.
Rushdie moved to New York and tried to put the turmoil behind him.
On the night of August 11th, a twenty-four-year-old man named Hadi Matar slept under the stars on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution. His parents, Hassan Matar and Silvana Fardos, came from Yaroun, Lebanon, a village just north of the Israeli border, and immigrated to California, where Hadi was born. In 2004, they divorced. Hassan Matar returned to Lebanon; Silvana Fardos, her son, and her twin daughters eventually moved to New Jersey. In recent years, the family has lived in a two-story house in Fairview, a suburb across the Hudson River from Manhattan.
In 2018, Matar went to Lebanon to visit his father. At least initially, the journey was not a success. “The first hour he gets there he called me, he wanted to come back,” Fardos told a reporter for the Daily Mail. “He stayed for approximately twenty-eight days, but the trip did not go well with his father, he felt very alone.”
When he returned to New Jersey, Matar became a more devout Muslim. He was also withdrawn and distant; he took to criticizing his mother for failing to provide a proper religious upbringing. “I was expecting him to come back motivated, to complete school, to get his degree and a job,” Fardos said. Instead, she said, Matar stashed himself away in the basement, where he stayed up all night, reading and playing video games, and slept during the day. He held a job at a nearby Marshall’s, the discount department store, but quit after a couple of months. Many weeks would go by without his saying a word to his mother or his sisters.
Matar did occasionally venture out of the house. He joined the State of Fitness Boxing Club, a gym in North Bergen, a couple of miles away, and took evening classes: jump rope, speed bag, heavy bag, sparring. He impressed no one with his skills. The owner, a firefighter named Desmond Boyle, takes pride in drawing out the people who come to his gym. He had no luck with Matar. “The only way to describe him was that every time you saw him it seemed like the worst day of his life,” Boyle told me. “There was always this look on him that his dog had just died, a look of sadness and dread every day. After he was here for a while, I tried to reach out to him, and he barely whispered back.” He kept his distance from everyone else in the class. As Boyle put it, Matar was “the definition of a lone wolf.” In early August, Matar sent an e-mail to the gym dropping his membership. On the header, next to his name, was the image of the current Supreme Leader of Iran.
Matar read about Rushdie’s upcoming event at Chautauqua on Twitter. On August 11th, he took a bus to Buffalo and then hired a Lyft to bring him to the grounds. He bought a ticket for Rushdie’s appearance and killed time. “I was hanging around pretty much,” he said in a brief interview in the New York Post. “Not doing anything in particular, just walking around.”
In Zadie Smith’s “White Teeth,” a radicalized young man named Millat joins a group called KEVIN (Keepers of the Eternal and Victorious Islamic Nation) and, along with some like-minded friends, heads for a demonstration against an offending novel and its author: “ ‘You read it?’ asked Ranil, as they whizzed past Finsbury Park. There was a general pause. Millat said, ‘I haven’t exackly read it exackly—but I know all about that shit, yeah?’ To be more precise, Millat hadn’t read it.” Neither had Matar. He had looked at only a couple of pages of “The Satanic Verses,” but he had watched videos of Rushdie on YouTube. “I don’t like him very much,” he told the Post. “He’s someone who attacked Islam, he attacked their beliefs, the belief systems.” He pronounced the author “disingenuous.”
Rushdie was accustomed to events like the one at Chautauqua. He had done countless readings, panels, and lectures, even revelled in them. His partner onstage, Henry Reese, had not. To settle his nerves, Reese took a deep breath and gazed out at the crowd. It was calming, all the friendly, expectant faces. Then there was noise—quick steps, a huffing and puffing, an exertion. Reese turned to the noise, to Rushdie. A black-clad man was all over the writer. At first, Reese said, “I thought it was a prank, some really bad-taste imitation attack, something like the Will Smith slap.” Then he saw blood on Rushdie’s neck, blood flecked on the backdrop with Chautauqua signage. “It then became clear there was a knife there, but at first it seemed like just hitting. For a second, I froze. Then I went after the guy. Instinctively. I ran over and tackled him at the back and held him by his legs.” Matar had stabbed Rushdie about a dozen times. Now he turned on Reese and stabbed him, too, opening a gash above his eye.
A doctor who had had breakfast with Rushdie that morning was sitting on the aisle in the second row. He got out of his seat, charged up the stairs, and headed for the melee. Later, the doctor, who asked me not to use his name, said he was sure that Reese, by tackling Matar, had helped save the writer’s life. A New York state trooper put Matar in handcuffs and led him off the stage.
Rushdie was on his back, still conscious, bleeding from stab wounds to the right side of his neck and face, his left hand, and his abdomen just under his rib cage. By now, a firefighter was at Rushdie’s side, along with four doctors—an anesthesiologist, a radiologist, an internist, and an obstetrician. Two of the doctors held Rushdie’s legs up to return blood flow to the body. The fireman had one hand on the right side of Rushdie’s neck to stanch the bleeding and another hand near his eye. The fireman told Rushdie, “Don’t blink your eye, we are trying to stop the bleeding. Keep it closed.” Rushdie was responsive. “O.K. I agree,” he said. “I understand.”
Rushdie’s left hand was bleeding badly. Using a pair of scissors, one of the doctors cut the sleeve off his jacket and tried to stanch the wound with a clean handkerchief. Within seconds, the handkerchief was saturated, the blood coming out “like holy hell,” the doctor recalled. Someone handed him a bunch of paper towels. “I squeezed the tissues as hard as I possibly could.”
“What’s going on with my left hand?” Rushdie said. “It hurts so much!” There was a spreading pool of blood near his left hip.
E.M.T.s arrived, hooked Rushdie up to an I.V., and eased him onto a stretcher. They wheeled him out of the amphitheatre and got him on a helicopter, which transferred him to a Level 2 trauma center, Hamot, part of the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, in Erie, Pennsylvania.
Rushdie had travelled alone to Chautauqua. Back in New York, his wife, Rachel Eliza Griffiths, got a call at around midday telling her that her husband had been attacked and was in surgery. She raced to arrange a flight to Erie and get to the hospital. When she arrived, he was still in the operating room.
In Chautauqua, people walked around the grounds in a daze. As one of the doctors who had run onto the stage to help Rushdie told me, “Chautauqua was the one place where I felt completely at ease. For a second, it was like a dream. And then it wasn’t. It made no sense, then it made all the sense in the world.”
Rushdie was hospitalized for six weeks. In the months since his release, he has mostly stayed home save for trips to doctors, sometimes two or three a day. He’d lived without security for more than two decades. Now he’s had to rethink that.
Just before Christmas, on a cold and rainy morning, I arrived at the midtown office of Andrew Wylie, Rushdie’s literary agent, where we’d arranged to meet. After a while, I heard the door to the agency open. Rushdie, in an accent that bears traces of all his cities—Bombay, London, New York—was greeting agents and assistants, people he had not seen in many months. The sight of him making his way down the hall was startling: He has lost more than forty pounds since the stabbing. The right lens of his eyeglasses is blacked over. The attack left him blind in that eye, and he now usually reads with an iPad so that he can adjust the light and the size of the type. There is scar tissue on the right side of his face. He speaks as fluently as ever, but his lower lip droops on one side. The ulnar nerve in his left hand was badly damaged.
Rushdie took off his coat and settled into a chair across from his agent’s desk. I asked how his spirits were.
“Well, you know, I’ve been better,” he said dryly. “But, considering what happened, I’m not so bad. As you can see, the big injuries are healed, essentially. I have feeling in my thumb and index finger and in the bottom half of the palm. I’m doing a lot of hand therapy, and I’m told that I’m doing very well.”
“Can you type?”
“Not very well, because of the lack of feeling in the fingertips of these fingers.”
What about writing?
“I just write more slowly. But I’m getting there.”
Sleeping has not always been easy. “There have been nightmares—not exactly the incident, but just frightening. Those seem to be diminishing. I’m fine. I’m able to get up and walk around. When I say I’m fine, I mean, there’s bits of my body that need constant checkups. It was a colossal attack.”
More than once, Rushdie looked around the office and smiled. “It’s great to be back,” he said. “It’s someplace which is not a hospital, which is mostly where I’ve been to. And to be in this agency is—I’ve been coming here for decades, and it’s a very familiar space to me. And to be able to come here to talk about literature, talk about books, to talk about this novel, ‘Victory City,’ to be able to talk about the thing that most matters to me . . .”
At this meeting and in subsequent conversations, I sensed conflicting instincts in Rushdie when he replied to questions about his health: there was the instinct to move on—to talk about literary matters, his book, anything but the decades-long fatwa and now the attack—and the instinct to be absolutely frank. “There is such a thing as P.T.S.D., you know,” he said after a while. “I’ve found it very, very difficult to write. I sit down to write, and nothing happens. I write, but it’s a combination of blankness and junk, stuff that I write and that I delete the next day. I’m not out of that forest yet, really.”
He added, “I’ve simply never allowed myself to use the phrase ‘writer’s block.’ Everybody has a moment when there’s nothing in your head. And you think, Oh, well, there’s never going to be anything. One of the things about being seventy-five and having written twenty-one books is that you know that, if you keep at it, something will come.”
Had that happened in the past months?
Rushdie frowned. “Not really. I mean, I’ve tried, but not really.” He was only lately “just beginning to feel the return of the juices.”
How to go on living after thinking you had emerged from years of threat, denunciation, and mortal danger? And now how to recover from an attack that came within millimetres of killing you, and try to live, somehow, as if it could never recur?
He seemed grateful for a therapist he had seen since before the attack, a therapist “who has a lot of work to do. He knows me and he’s very helpful, and I just talk things through.”
The talk was plainly in the service of a long-standing resolution. “I’ve always tried very hard not to adopt the role of a victim,” he said. “Then you’re just sitting there saying, Somebody stuck a knife in me! Poor me. . . . Which I do sometimes think.” He laughed. “It hurts. But what I don’t think is: That’s what I want people reading the book to think. I want them to be captured by the tale, to be carried away.”
Many years ago, he recalled, there were people who seemed to grow tired of his persistent existence. “People didn’t like it. Because I should have died. Now that I’ve almost died, everybody loves me. . . . That was my mistake, back then. Not only did I live but I tried to live well. Bad mistake. Get fifteen stab wounds, much better.”
As he lay in the hospital, Rushdie received countless texts and e-mails sending love, wishing for his recovery. “I was in utter shock,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian novelist, told me. “I just didn’t believe he was still in any real danger. For two days, I kept vigil, sending texts to friends all over the world, searching the Internet to make sure he was still alive.” There was a reading in his honor on the steps of the New York Public Library.
For some writers, the shock brought certain issues into hard focus. “The attack on Salman clarified a lot of things for me,” Ayad Akhtar told me. “I know I have a much brighter line that I draw for myself between the potential harms of speech and the freedom of the imagination. They are incommensurate and shouldn’t be placed in the same paragraph.”
Rushdie was stirred by the tributes that his near-death inspired. “It’s very nice that everybody was so moved by this, you know?” he said. “I had never thought about how people would react if I was assassinated, or almost assassinated.”
And yet, he said, “I’m lucky. What I really want to say is that my main overwhelming feeling is gratitude.” He was grateful to those who showed their support. He was grateful to the doctors, the E.M.T. workers, and the fireman in Chautauqua who stanched his wounds, and he was grateful to the surgeons in Erie. “At some point, I’d like to go back up there and say thank you.” He was also grateful to his two grown sons, Zafar and Milan, who live in London, and to Griffiths. “She kind of took over at a point when I was helpless.” She dealt with the doctors, the police, and the investigators, and with transport from Pennsylvania to New York. “She just took over everything, as well as having the emotional burden of my almost being killed.”
Did he think it had been a mistake to let his guard down since moving to New York? “Well, I’m asking myself that question, and I don’t know the answer to it,” he said. “I did have more than twenty years of life. So, is that a mistake? Also, I wrote a lot of books. ‘The Satanic Verses’ was my fifth published book—my fourth published novel—and this is my twenty-first. So, three-quarters of my life as a writer has happened since the fatwa. In a way, you can’t regret your life.”
Whom does he blame for the attack?
“I blame him,” he said.
Anyone else? Was he let down by security at Chautauqua?
“I’ve tried very hard over these years to avoid recrimination and bitterness,” he said. “I just think it’s not a good look. One of the ways I’ve dealt with this whole thing is to look forward and not backwards. What happens tomorrow is more important than what happened yesterday.”
The publication of “Victory City,” he made plain, was his focus. He’s interested to see how the novel will be received. Will it be viewed through the prism of the stabbing? He recalled the “sympathy wave” that came with “The Satanic Verses,” how sales shot up with the fatwa. It happened again after he was stabbed nearly to death last summer.
He is eager, always, to talk about the new novel’s grounding in Indian history and mythology, how the process of writing accelerated, just as it had with “Midnight’s Children,” once he found the voice of his main character; how the book can be read as an allegory about the abuse of power and the curse of sectarianism—the twin curses of India under its current Prime Minister, the Hindu supremacist Narendra Modi. But, once more, Rushdie knows, his new novel will have to compete for attention with the ugliness of real life. “I’m hoping that to some degree it might change the subject. I’ve always thought that my books are more interesting than my life,” he said. “Unfortunately, the world appears to disagree.”
Hadi Matar is being held in the Chautauqua County Jail, in the village of Mayville. He’s been charged with attempted murder in the second degree, which could bring twenty-five years in prison; he’s also been charged with assault in the second degree, for the attack on Henry Reese, which could bring an additional seven. The trial is unlikely to take place until next year.
“It’s a relatively simple event when you think about it,” Jason Schmidt, the Chautauqua County district attorney, told me. “We know this was a preplanned, unprovoked attack by an individual who had no prior interaction with the criminal-justice system.” The prosecutor’s job is no doubt made easier by the fact that there were hundreds of witnesses to the crime.
Matar is being represented by Nathaniel Barone, a public defender. At a court hearing not long after the stabbing, Barone accompanied Matar, who wore handcuffs, a face mask, and prison garb with broad black and white stripes. Matar’s hair and beard were closely cropped. He said very little save for his plea of not guilty. Barone, wearing a suit and tie, stood by his client. He seems unillusioned. When I suggested that he had a near-impossible case, he did not dispute it: “Almost to a person they are saying, ‘What is this guy’s defense? Everyone saw him do it!’ ” Barone said he has hundreds of expert witnesses on file, and he will be consulting some of them on matters of psychology and radicalization. He also indicated that he might challenge the admissibility of Matar’s interview with the New York Post, saying (without supplying any evidence) that it was possibly obtained under false pretenses. (The Post said that its journalist had identified himself and that “Mr. Matar absolutely understood that he was speaking to a reporter.”)
It is unknown if Matar was acting under anyone’s tutelage or instructions, but the Iranian state media has repeatedly expressed its approval of his attempt to kill Rushdie. Just last month, Hossein Salami, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, said Matar had acted “bravely” and warned that the staff of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which had been attacked by Muslim extremists in 2015, should consider “the fate” of Rushdie if it continues to mock Ayatollah Khamenei.
As for Matar’s mother and her remarks to the press about his behavior and their fraught relationship, Barone sighed and said, “Obviously, it’s always concerning when you see a description from the mother about your client which can be interpreted in a negative way.” He did not contest her remarks.
Barone has met with Matar on his cellblock and has found him coöperative. “I’ve had absolutely no problems with Mr. Matar,” he said. “He has been cordial and respectful, openly discussing things with me. He is a very sincere young man. It would be like meeting any young man. There’s nothing that sets him apart.”
Matar is in a “private area” of the cellblock. He spends much of his time reading the Quran and other material. “I’m getting to know him, but it’s not easy,” Barone said. “The reality of sitting in jail, incarcerated—it’s easy to have no hope. It’s easy to think things aren’t going to work out for you. But I tell clients you have to have hope.” He assured me that Matar “isn’t taking this lightly. Some people just don’t give a damn about things.”
Does he show any remorse?
Barone replied that he could not say “at this point.”
Rushdie told me that he thought of Matar as an “idiot.” He paused and, aware that it wasn’t much of an observation, said, “I don’t know what I think of him, because I don’t know him.” One had a faint sense of a writer grappling with a character—and a human being grappling with a nemesis—who remains frustratingly vaporous. “All I’ve seen is his idiotic interview in the New York Post. Which only an idiot would do. I know that the trial is still a long way away. It might not happen until late next year. I guess I’ll find out some more about him then.”
Rushdie has spent these past months healing. He’s watched his share of “crap television.” He couldn’t find anything or anyone to like in “The White Lotus” (“Awful!”) or the Netflix documentary on Meghan and Harry (“The banality of it!”). The World Cup was an extended pleasure, though. He was thrilled by the advance of the Moroccans and the preternatural performances of France’s Kylian Mbappé and Argentina’s Lionel Messi, and he was moved by the support shown by players for the protests in Iran, which he hopes could be a “tipping point” for the regime in Tehran.
There will, of course, be no book tour for “Victory City.” But so long as his health is good and security is squared away he is hoping to go to London for the opening of “Helen,” his play about Helen of Troy. “I’m going to tell you really truthfully, I’m not thinking about the long term,” he said. “I’m thinking about little step by little step. I just think, Bop till you drop.”
When we picked up the subject a couple of weeks later, in a conversation over Zoom, he said, “I’ve got nothing else to do. I would like to have a second skill, but I don’t. I always envied writers like Günter Grass, who had a second career as a visual artist. I thought how nice it must be to spend a day wrestling with words, and then get up and walk down the street to your art studio and become something completely else. I don’t have that. So, all I can do is this. As long as there’s a story that I think is worth giving my time to, then I will. When I have a book in my head, it’s as if the rest of the world is in its correct shape.”
It’s “depressing” when he’s struggling at his desk, he admits. He wonders if the stories will come. But he’s still there, putting in the time.
Rushdie looked around his desk, gestured to the books that line the walls of his study. “I feel everything’s O.K. when I’m sitting here, and I have something to think about,” he said. “Because that takes over from the outside world. Of course, the interior world is connected to the exterior world, but, when you are in the act of making, it takes over from everything else.”
For now, he has set aside the idea for a novel inspired by Kafka and Mann, and is thinking through a kind of sequel to “Joseph Anton.” At first, he was irritated by the idea, “because it felt almost like it was being forced on me—the attack demanded that I should write about the attack.” In recent weeks, though, the idea has taken hold. Rushdie’s books tend to be IMAX-scale, large-cast productions, but in order to write about the attack in Chautauqua, an event that took place in a matter of seconds, he envisions something more “microscopic.”
And the voice would be different. The slightly distanced, third-person voice that “Joseph Anton” employed seems wrong for the task. “This doesn’t feel third-person-ish to me,” Rushdie said. “I think when somebody sticks a knife into you, that’s a first-person story. That’s an ‘I’ story.”
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A partly collapsed building in Adiyaman, Turkey, on Saturday. (photo: Emin Ozmen/NYT)
A top U.N. official said that aid efforts in neighboring Syria had “failed” so far. More than 33,000 people have died in the two countries.
The 7.8-magnitude quake on Feb. 6 caused widespread destruction in 10 provinces in southern Turkey as well as in northern Syria, and killed more than 33,000 people. More than one million people have been rendered homeless in Turkey, and many others have been left without shelter in Syria.
Amid the destruction, the attention in Turkey has turned to what earthquake victims and building experts have called inferior construction that left people’s homes particularly vulnerable to collapse. The government has started to respond.
Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag told reporters on Sunday that 134 people had been detained and seven others barred from traveling abroad on charges related to collapsed buildings.
“We will follow this up meticulously until the necessary judicial process is concluded, especially for buildings that suffered heavy damage and buildings that caused deaths and injuries,” Vice President Fuat Oktay told reporters in the capital, Ankara.
Two contractors responsible for collapsed buildings in the city of Adiyaman, Yavuz Karakus and Sevilay Karakus, were detained on Sunday at Istanbul Airport, the state-run news media reported. They carried more than $17,000 in cash and were planning to fly to Georgia.
“My conscience is clear,” Mr. Karakus told reporters after his arrest. “I built 44 buildings; only four have collapsed.”
The Turkish Justice Ministry has set up earthquake crimes investigation bureaus in the affected areas, Mr. Oktay said, and prosecutors will be appointed to bring charges against contractors and others connected to poorly constructed buildings that collapsed, often killing their residents instantly and leaving others buried in the ruins in near-freezing temperatures.
Murat Kurum, the environment minister, said that more than 24,000 buildings across the quake zone had been heavily damaged or had collapsed in the quake, based on an assessment of some 170,000 buildings.
The quake destroyed buildings and damaged infrastructure on both sides of the border, but while aid for Turkey has flowed in from around the world, almost none has reached northern Syria because of the complex political situation after more than 12 years of civil war.
The United Nations’ top aid official said on Sunday that aid efforts so far had “failed the people of northwest Syria,” while calling the earthquake the “worst event” in the region in a century.
“They rightly feel abandoned,” the official, Martin Griffiths, wrote on Twitter from the Turkey-Syria border. “Looking for international help that hasn’t arrived.”
He praised the response of the Turkish government, saying that victims of natural disasters were always disappointed by early relief efforts.
The death toll rose above 29,000 on Sunday in Turkey and more than 3,500 in Syria, a combined figure that makes the quake one of the century’s deadliest natural disasters.
The Turkish government has mobilized an enormous aid effort, with tens of thousands of rescue workers and volunteers from around the world digging through the rubble of collapsed buildings for bodies and, occasionally, survivors. The government has also erected tent cities for residents whose homes were destroyed and is distributing food, medicine and other items.
But largely because of political divisions on the ground in Syria, which is much poorer, aid efforts are severely lagging. The earthquake caused heavy damage in areas controlled by the government of President Bashar al-Assad and in enclaves controlled by anti-government rebels who are backed by Turkey.
Mr. al-Assad, considered a pariah by much of the world for his troops’ brutality in the civil war, has sought to have all aid sent through his government. That aid, critics say, is then routed to his loyalists.
Only one border crossing into the rebel-held areas, Bab al-Hawa, has been authorized by the United Nations for the transit of aid shipments, but it has yet to become a major channel. The Syrian Red Crescent received permission to send 14 trucks from government-held areas into the rebel-held Idlib Province, but on Sunday, the convoy appeared to be tied up. Even if it goes, the cargo would be minuscule in comparison with the needs.
On Saturday, the authorities in Turkey began arresting contractors who had built structures that collapsed after the quake.
They included Mehmet Ertan Akay, the licensed builder of a collapsed complex in the city of Gaziantep, who was charged with involuntary manslaughter and violation of public construction law, a Turkish news agency reported. The Gaziantep prosecutor’s office said it had issued the detention order after inspecting evidence collected from the rubble of the complex he had built.
Mehmet Yasar Coskun, the contractor who built a 12-story building in Hatay Province with 250 apartments that was completely destroyed, was detained on Friday at an Istanbul airport while trying to board a flight to Montenegro. Dozens of people are thought to have died when the building collapsed. Mr. Coskun told prosecutors his building had been properly licensed and audited by local and state authorities, according to the state-run Anadolu News Agency. His lawyer suggested the main reason he had been detained was to assuage public anger.
Two builders of a collapsed 14-story building in Adana, who reportedly fled Turkey immediately after the quake, were detained in Northern Cyprus, according to the Turkish-controlled Northern Cyprus administration.
Turkey, which suffered a powerful earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 17,000 people, has upgraded its building codes since to make buildings more earthquake resistant.
But quake survivors and building experts say that the codes are often not followed.
Bugra Gokce, an urban planner and senior official in the Istanbul municipality, said in an interview that focusing on only the contractors missed all of the other people who may have failed in their duties, allowing for a subpar building to be built.
“This is a system problem,” he said.
Others involved in the process included building designers, officials who issued approvals for construction and permits for residency, and the government itself for its history of issuing blanket “amnesties” for buildings known to contain violations.
“The responsibility belongs to everyone involved in the process,” Mr. Gokce said.
Members of the Turkish Chamber of Engineers and Architects, a professional association, have fanned out across the quake zone to collect rubble samples that could be used as evidence of poor construction.
While most of the search effort in hard-hit Turkish cities on Sunday focused on finding and removing bodies, unlikely rescues were made.
In Hatay Province, a team from Romania removed a 35-year-old man alive from a pile of rubble 149 hours after the quake, the CNN Turk television station reported.
“His health is good, he was talking,” one of the rescuers told the station. “He was saying: ‘Get me out of here quickly, I’ve got claustrophobia.’”
In another rescue broadcast live on HaberTurk television, a 6-year-old boy was pulled from the ruins of a building in the city of Adiyaman 151 hours after the quake.
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The folder was seen in Donald Trump's residence by a team of investigators he hired to search his properties last year for any remaining classified documents. (photo: Logan Cyrus/AFP/Getty Images)
Exclusive: Subpoena was issued last month after the folder was observed in Trump’s private quarters at the property
The previously unreported subpoena was issued last month, the sources said, as the recently appointed special counsel escalates the inquiry into Trump’s possible unauthorized retention of national security materials and obstruction of justice.
The folder was seen in Trump’s residence by a team of investigators he hired to search his properties last year for any remaining documents marked as classified. The team transparently included the observation in an inventory of Mar-a-Lago and Trump properties in Florida, New Jersey and New York.
Weeks after the report was sent to the justice department, the sources said, federal prosecutors subpoenaed the folder. The folder is understood to have not been initially returned because the lawyers thought “Classified Evening Briefing” did not make it classified, nor is it a formal classification marking.
The backstory the justice department was told about the folder was that Trump would sometimes ask to keep the envelopes, featuring only the “Classified Evening Briefings” in red lettering, as keepsakes after briefings were delivered, one of the sources said.
Around the same time that Trump’s lawyers turned over the empty folder – earlier reported by CNN – they also returned in December a box of presidential schedules at Mar-a-Lago of which a couple were marked as classified, and in January, a laptop on to which the contents of the box had been scanned last year by a junior aide.
The mishandling of those materials appears to have been inadvertent – in which case, the justice department would be unlikely to include them in the criminal investigation, which has been far more focused on the documents that the FBI seized from Mar-a-Lago last summer.
But the contentious saga reflects the deteriorating relationship between federal prosecutors who have become frustrated at Trump’s resistance towards the inquiry and his lawyers who have complained that the justice department has been unnecessarily heavy-handed at every turn.
A spokesperson for the special counsel’s office declined to comment.
Late last year, Trump hired a team of two private contractors with security clearances to search his properties after the department told his lawyers that they suspected the former president was still in possession of classified-marked documents even after the FBI search in August.
The contractors found and immediately returned two documents, both marked as classified at the “SECRET” level, from boxes that appeared to have been unopened since they were shipped from the White House at the end of the Trump administration, the Guardian previously reported.
Then, at Mar-a-Lago in December, the contractors found a box that mainly contained presidential schedules, in which they found a couple of classified-marked documents to also be present and alerted the legal team to return the materials to the justice department, the sources said.
The exact nature of the classified-marked documents remains unclear, but a person with knowledge of the search likened their sensitivity to schedules for presidential movements – for instance, presidential travel to Afghanistan – that are considered sensitive until they have taken place.
After the Trump legal team turned over the box of schedules, the sources said, they learned that a junior Trump aide – employed by Trump’s Save America political action committee who acted as an assistant in Trump’s political “45 Office” – last year scanned and uploaded the contents of the box to a laptop.
The junior Trump aide, according to what one of the sources said, was apparently instructed to upload the documents by top Trump aide Molly Michael to create a repository of what Trump was doing while in office and was apparently careless in scanning them on to her work laptop.
When the Trump legal team told the justice department about the uploads, federal prosecutors demanded the laptop and its password, warning that they would otherwise move to obtain a grand jury subpoena summoning the junior aide to Washington to grant them access to the computer.
To avoid a subpoena, the Trump legal team agreed to turn over the laptop in its entirety last month, though they did not allow federal prosecutors to collect it from Mar-a-Lago.
ABC News earlier reported the handover.
“This is nothing more than a politically-motivated witch-hunt against President Trump,” a spokesman for Trump said in a statement. “The weaponized Department of Injustice has shown no regard for common decency and key rules that govern the legal system.”
It was around the same time in January as the justice department retrieved the laptop that federal prosecutors in the office of the Trump special counsel Jack Smith issued a grand jury subpoena for the manilla folder marked “Classified Evening Briefing” observed in Trump’s Mar-a-Lago private quarters.
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Jordan Lewis, Eddie Lewis Sr. and Eddie Lewis III standing on the ground of their Louisiana farm. (photo: Eddie Lewis/NPR)
Then there was a class action from Native Americans.
And one from Hispanic farmers.
And then women farmers filed their own.
They all alleged, through various years of examples, that the USDA discriminated against them by denying them access to low-interest rate loans and loan servicing, grant programs and assistance, causing them hundreds of millions of dollars in economic loss and record-breaking land loss through foreclosures.
But two decades later despite being at the forefront of a landmark case against the USDA, Black farmers argue they are still left far behind.
"We're still struggling," said Eddie Lewis, a sugarcane farmer in Louisiana. "We're struggling to the point where we're going to be extinct."
Then, President Joe Biden came into office with a little-known goal: bring equity to farming.
"For more than 100 years the USDA did little to alleviate the burdens of systemic inequality for Black, Brown and Native farmers and was often the site of injustice," the then-candidate stated in his plan for rural America. Referencing class action and large lawsuits brought by farmers, Biden vowed to bring equity to the Agriculture Department's methods of supporting farmers.
As a part of the plan, the Agriculture Department created an Equity Commission. And Congress, led by Democratic Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Rafael Warnock of Georgia, approved a large debt relief program.
But advocates representing farmers of color say more has to be done.
"It is a behemoth of an operation," said NAACP President Derrick Johnson, who sits on the Equity Commission, about the USDA. "Many communities, particularly African-American communities, have been left out of understanding how to navigate the many offerings of the Department of [Agriculture] and really leverage opportunities to come out of that to improve their quality of life."
Mending a damaged history
Black farmers who should have gotten relief from lawsuits say not all the settlements made it into their hands, resulting in rapid land loss, steep debt and a history of distrust in the department that left farmers behind on accessing capital and programs needed to make their businesses thrive.
Over the course of 100 years, the amount of Black-owned farmland dropped by 90%, according to Data for Progress, due to higher rates of loan and credit denials, lack of legal and industry support and "outright acts of violence and intimidation."
There are only 48,697 producers who identified as Black, making up about 1.4% of the nation's 3.4 million producers, according to the 2017 Census of Agriculture, the latest federal dataset on American farmland demographics. A majority live in the southeastern and mid-Atlantic states.
Following the Civil War, Black Americans were promised "40 acres and a mule" by the federal government, a promise that never came to pass.
Advocates say the inability for Black farmers to get a start, and later the sharp drop in population totals, is in part due to what they call USDA's discriminatory lending practices, and often specific loan officers' biases.
"They never gave us any type of assistance," Lewis said.
This systemic discrimination was at the center of the 1999 class-action lawsuit Pigford v. Glickman, which resulted in a $1.25 billion settlement to Black farmers in 2010 — though some farmers say they never received their settlements.
"Several years ago, we formed the farmer of color network to work against some of those issues, not only the policy, but to assist them with grants to support their operations and make them more viable," said B. Ray Jeffers, director of the Farmers of Color Network at Rural Advancement Foundation International-USA. "The years and decades-long history of discrimination against BIPOC, and especially Black farmers, is well documented."
Congress has held multiple hearings on the topic. The most recent was in 2020 hosted by the House Agriculture Committee.
Jeffers said he has heard from farmers who to this day face difficulties reaching their local loan officers, and USDA loans and programs.
"The Farm Service Agency was there for the farmers that could not get a traditional loan at a traditional bank. They would be the next option or the last option," Jeffers said. "They actually have leeway built into the rules to work with these farmers and, we're hearing, those rules are only being applied to more white farmers."
Barriers to access to programs range from incorrect denials, to cumbersome paperwork, to a failure to know what applicants could qualify for to begin with.
Lawsuits block Biden's plan
As a part of the American Rescue Plan, the early 2020 pandemic relief bill, lawmakers approved $5 billion toward debt relief and cancellation for farmers of color. The legislation was specifically targeting what was labeled "socially disadvantaged" farmers, or African Americans, Hispanics, Asian Americans and Native Americans, but it excluded white women.
But the program was swiftly blocked by about 12 lawsuits, including one out of Texas led by former President Donald Trump's adviser Stephen Miller and current state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller. They argued the program was discriminating against them for being white.
In an unusual move, the Justice Department let the deadline to appeal the injunctions that froze the program slide, opting to continue the court battle at the local level.
"The government vigorously defended this program in the courts but because of these injunctions, the $5 billion provided in ARPA remained frozen," said Marissa Perry, press secretary at USDA. "This litigation would likely have not been resolved for years."
That left any timely remedy in the hands of Congress, who has the authority to repeal or amend any program it authorizes.
As a part of the Inflation Reduction Act, members slipped in a provision that repealed and replaced the original program with $3.1 billion in debt relief for "economically distressed borrowers," which includes white borrowers. They also added $2.2 billion for farmers who have faced discrimination.
Payments under this program began rolling out in the fall.
For some farmers, that means complete cancellation. For others, it means partial assistance, even after they were promised full cancellation one year ago.
"They just basically came up with new programs that benefit white people, but they used Black farmers basically to get the white farmers assistance as well, and we help them get it," Lewis said. "And we are still stuck without the help."
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Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, 78, who was found dead after being brutally detained by the Netzah Yehuda unit of the IDF in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, on Jan. 13, 2022. (photo: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images)
Israeli Army Battalion Puts U.S. Ban on Funding Abusive Units to the Test
Omar Assad had already stopped breathing when the soldiers left him, a man detained alongside him told reporters. When a doctor finally arrived, he found that Assad had been dead “for 15 or 20 minutes.” An autopsy found that he had suffered a fatal, stress-induced heart attack.
The brutal death of Assad, a U.S. citizen who had retired to his home village near the Palestinian city of Ramallah after four decades in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, sparked widespread outrage. B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group, denounced the soldiers’ “utter indifference” in failing to provide first aid or call an ambulance; the U.S. State Department called Assad’s death “troubling.” Following an internal review, the IDF itself acknowledged that “the incident showed a clear lapse of moral judgment.”
Israel recently moved the unit involved in Assad’s death out of the occupied West Bank. But the soldiers’ treatment of Assad was not unusual. While hardly the only ones accused of human rights abuses in the occupied Palestinian territories, members of the Netzah Yehuda unit often committed gratuitous acts of violence, a former member of the unit told The Intercept in his first interview with an international news organization.
The Netzah Yehuda battalion was originally set up to allow ultra-Orthodox Israelis to serve in the military. But over the years, the unit has attracted not only some of the most religious soldiers, but also a growing number of far-right extremists, including many settlers. Unlike other units, enlistment in Netzah Yehuda is voluntary; until recently, it was deployed exclusively in the West Bank, where its members were in daily contact with Palestinians living under occupation. As such, the unit — whose name is an acronym for “Haredi Military Youth” — was known for getting “a lot of action,” the former member said.
The ex-Netzah Yehuda soldier asked not to be identified because of the enormous social cost associated with publicly criticizing Israel’s military. Since leaving the unit, he has come to reject the occupation and his own role in it. Netzah Yehuda has long been criticized in Israel — some senior political and military figures have even called for the unit to be disbanded — but testimonies from former members are rare. While The Intercept could not independently verify some of the incidents the former soldier described, he also spoke to Breaking the Silence, an organization of Israeli veterans who gather testimony from soldiers in the occupied territories.
The IDF did not answer a detailed list of questions for this story nor address the former soldier’s allegations on the record. But in a statement to The Intercept, a spokesperson wrote that the Netzah Yehuda unit was moved from the West Bank to the Golan Heights “to diversify the IDF’s area of operation and accumulate operational experience.”
The spokesperson also referred The Intercept to an earlier statement in which the IDF wrote that “is considering filing indictments” against the soldiers involved in Assad’s death. “As part of the investigation, anomalies were found in the conduct of the commander of the checkup force and the commander of the soldiers that guarded the detainees,” that statement read. “It was also found that it is not possible to establish a correlation between these abnormalities and the death.”
U.S. Pressure
Even before Assad’s death last January, Netzah Yehuda members had been accused of extrajudicial killings, torture, and beatings, among other abuses. In August, the unit made headlines after a video of some members beating two young Palestinians went viral on TikTok. The IDF suspended the soldiers involved in that beating and opened a criminal investigation. It wasn’t the first time: According to Israeli human rights group Yesh Din, Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been convicted of offenses against Palestinians at a rate higher than those in any other IDF unit.
But it was the death of Assad — which came only weeks before the killing by a different IDF unit of another Palestinian American, journalist Shireen Abu Akleh — that put the unit on the radar of U.S. officials. The incident prompted calls for the U.S. government to impose consequences on a foreign military it supports to the tune of $3.3 billion a year. In particular, a growing number of critics have urged the Biden administration to apply U.S. legislation known as the “Leahy Law,” after recently retired Sen. Patrick Leahy, which limits the ability of the State and Defense departments to provide military assistance to foreign units that have a record of human rights violations. The law has never been applied to any units of the Israeli military, despite a number of cases — including the killings of several U.S. citizens by Israeli forces — likely meeting its criteria.
“The very least the US can do is to impose Leahy Law sanctions for the murder of an American against a repeat offender Israeli unit that has been killing and abusing Palestinians with impunity for years,” said Adam Shapiro, advocacy director for Israel-Palestine at Democracy for the Arab World Now, a U.S.-based human rights group focused on the Middle East and North Africa. DAWN also submitted a complaint detailing a series of incidents involving the unit to the International Criminal Court, accusing its members and two of its commanders of war crimes. “While Netzah Yehuda might not be the worst abuser in the Israeli Army, its actions have been well-documented by Israeli and international media, offering a unique insight into the absolute unwillingness by Israeli governments to hold its soldiers accountable for violating international law and the Israeli army’s own rules of engagement,” the group noted last fall.
The State Department began looking into the unit’s record following Assad’s death, although officials would not confirm reports that they had asked the U.S. Embassy in Israel to draft an internal report on the unit’s conduct and begun interviewing witnesses. The IDF characterized the unit’s recent move out of the West Bank and its redeployment to the Golan Heights as an operational decision. But many have pointed out that the move followed increased U.S. scrutiny of the unit’s record. Israeli authorities have also opened a criminal investigation into Assad’s death and made a rare offer of compensation to his family — a signal, to some, that U.S. pressure was having an impact.
The State Department and the U.S. Embassy in Israel did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story. At a press briefing in December, State Department spokesperson Ned Price did not directly answer a reporter’s question regarding calls to apply the Leahy Law to Netzah Yehuda but said, “We manage our security relationships around the world in the context of human rights and the rule of law and in accordance with U.S. legislation, including in this case with the Leahy vetting laws.”
Stanley Cohen, an attorney representing the Assad family in the U.S., told The Intercept that the family has repeatedly asked the Justice Department to open an investigation into Assad’s death but has received no response. “The U.S. government has an obligation at this point to initiate a grand jury investigation or certainly a preliminary FBI investigation of what happened and why and how,” Cohen said. “This is an elderly man, simply driving home, in a community filled largely with elderly Palestinians, many of whom are American Palestinians.” (The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.)
Cohen noted that the Assad family declined the Israeli government’s offer of compensation and rejected “Israel’s interpretation that the family only cared about money and not justice.”
For Shapiro, of DAWN, there is no question that U.S. pressure played a role in the redeployment and the compensation offer, even if those measures fall far short of Leahy Law requirements. “It wasn’t just a random decision to move this unit,” he told The Intercept. “For me, the biggest lesson of all of this is that when the U.S. does something even as minor as asking questions, there can actually be very positive results, though this is not a full, positive outcome yet.”
“Of course, we would like to see a cutting of aid,” Shapiro added. “But we didn’t have to press the so-called nuclear button in order to get accountability. There are things that can be done, and this is a perfect example of that.”
With Netzah Yehuda soldiers now out of the West Bank, however, it’s unclear whether the State Department will continue to investigate their record or demand accountability for their crimes. It also seems unlikely that U.S. officials will heed calls to finally apply the Leahy Law against a unit of the IDF.
“The fact that they moved the unit out of there was a positive step,” Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide to Leahy, told The Intercept. “But they should have disbanded it altogether and punished the soldiers who were responsible.”
Troubled Youth
The Netzah Yehuda unit, originally known as Nahal Haredi, was established in 1999 to offer ultra-Orthodox Israeli men, who are usually exempt from mandatory military service, an opportunity to serve in the IDF while keeping to strict religious codes. No women are allowed in the unit or on its bases, which also adhere to strict kosher standards. A rabbi works with the unit, and soldiers’ terms of service are shorter than in other branches of the military so that members can focus on religious studies. But the 500-man battalion, which started with only a few dozen recruits, was also intended to provide discipline to young men with troubled backgrounds, including some who had been shunned by their families or who had violent and sometimes criminal pasts, the former soldier said.
He had been drawn to Netzah Yehuda because of its religious accommodations, he noted, but had also been impressed to learn that the unit had received a series of awards, including for thwarting several attacks and “neutralizing” alleged terrorists.
“I knew it wasn’t going to be boring,” he told The Intercept. “As a 19-year-old, that gets the testosterone going. It was ‘Black Hawk Down,’ that type of thing.”
He soon realized, however, that putting troubled young men, many with ultra-nationalist views, in a position of power and with constant access to Palestinians was a recipe for abuse. “I think that the intentions of the rabbis that came up with this were in the right place. I get where they came from, but I don’t think that it panned out very well because it put a lot of very problematic people in the same place,” the former soldier said. “Some were very politically motivated, I would say the settlers were the most politically motivated. And then there were a bunch of teenagers who drew a short straw in life and tried to take it out on other people.”
“There’s definitely a problem with discipline,” he added. “Some officers would not take some people with them on missions because they knew that they might lose a couple of soldiers on the way, because they might just wander off in the middle of a Palestinian village and do whatever they want.”
While it wasn’t until years later that the former Netzah Yehuda soldier began to reevaluate and ultimately disavowed his time in the military, the racist beliefs and often unruly behavior of his peers were readily apparent. One of the soldiers, he recalled, said that the assassination of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who signed the Oslo Accords with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat in 1994, by an Israeli extremist was “justified.” The soldier was disciplined over the remark, “but most people in the unit didn’t understand why — because in the eyes of a lot of people there, it was obvious that the murder of Rabin was justified.”
There were other incidents that revealed the unit’s extremist tendencies. On one occasion, while he was stationed in the northern West Bank, a group of unit members slashed the tires of an Arab driver — a fellow member of the Israeli military — in a nod to the “price tag” attacks frequently carried out by Israeli settlers against Palestinians. The incident infuriated some officers, “but a lot of people thought it was completely fine,” the former soldier recalled. “They said that we shouldn’t have Arabs in the military.”
Members of the unit made no secret of their extremism. On Friday nights, after sharing their Shabbat meal, they would sing racist anthems about Jewish power, including songs glorifying Meir Kahane, the U.S.-born founder of the Kach party, an ultranationalist political group that until recently was listed as a terrorist organization in both the U.S. and Israel. Kahane’s grandson himself served in the unit. “I had no idea how he got into the military to begin with,” the soldier said. “Usually, they wouldn’t let someone like that in.”
The IDF does not “intentionally” recruit soldiers with a criminal background and launches investigations “in cases where criminal offenses are suspected,” the spokesperson wrote in the statement to The Intercept, which also noted that “the IDF is a stately body and prohibits any form of political expression.”
Collective Punishment and “Hannukah Parties”
The Palestinians who members of Netzah Yehuda met daily had been completely dehumanized, the former soldier added. While The Intercept could not independently corroborate details about the specific incidents he described, the episodes are well in line with the violence, harassment, and restriction of movement that Palestinians living under occupation are routinely exposed to and that human rights groups have documented for decades.
The former soldier said that he once witnessed a commander punch a Palestinian man in the stomach and shove him into a military car, apparently because the man was moving too slowly. Some of the soldiers were not allowed to guard Palestinian detainees, he added, because their superiors “didn’t trust everyone to do that without harming them.”
Some of the most violent incidents happened when the ex-soldier was stationed near a large settlement in the West Bank. Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are illegal under international law and, in some cases, even under Israeli law. Nevertheless, the military is routinely deployed to protect settlers there, even as settler violence against Palestinians has been on the rise.
One Friday, after a funeral for a man killed by the IDF in a Palestinian village near the settlement, a crowd of residents turned up to protest, the former soldier recalled. “Usually, it would just be a couple kids throwing rocks. We would shoot a couple of gas grenades back. There would be back and forth for half an hour, and then we would each go home,” he said. “But after this funeral a huge crowd came together, and when we got there, we had almost no crowd control equipment because all that ammunition, like the rubber bullets and the gas canisters, had run out. So all we had was live ammunition, and it’s very difficult to do crowd control with live ammunition. That day, they actually told us that we are not allowed to shoot at anyone, because they had just killed someone. And in a situation like that, when you start opening fire on a crowd, you can kill a lot of people, and that was going to be an even bigger problem.”
Instead, the soldiers were instructed to pour mounds of dirt over the main road to the village, essentially trapping its residents. “It was collective punishment,” said the soldier.
Another time, the former soldier recalled, a commander took a group of soldiers into a Palestinian village, where they went door to door, knocking and then throwing flash-bang and gas grenades into each home — retribution after some children from the village had thrown rocks on a nearby road earlier that day.
The former soldier, who said he was not directly involved in the grenade-throwing or some of the other, more egregious incidents he described, remembers being disturbed by the episode. “The company commander said, ‘Let’s throw them a Hanukkah party, because it was during Hanukkah,’” he told The Intercept. His fellow soldiers, he said, “were very excited about that whole thing. They would say, ‘You should have seen the face of the family when we opened the door. Everyone was sitting and watching TV, and all of a sudden, they got tear-gassed.’”
“A lot of soldiers were excited about being able to just walk into a stranger’s house with little to no consequences,” he said. “You couldn’t do that in Tel Aviv.”
No Accountability
The harassment and dehumanization of Palestinians living under Israeli military occupation are a daily affair, and Netzah Yehuda soldiers are hardly the only culprits. But on some occasions, the unit’s actions in the West Bank escalated into gross human rights violations and potential war crimes. Since 2015, members of the unit have killed several Palestinians and beaten and tortured others with electric shocks, according to documentation submitted by DAWN to the ICC, which in 2021 opened an investigation into alleged crimes committed in the occupied territories.
In that time frame, Netzah Yehuda soldiers killed three Palestinians, including a 16-year-old boy, “in incidents in which soldiers used lethal force against unarmed civilians without justification,” DAWN charged. “In almost every case […] soldiers were found to be lying or covering up the incidents to suggest that they were acting in self-defense.” In October 2021, unit members were also accused of beating and sexually assaulting a Palestinian man they had detained in the back of a military vehicle and later at a military base. Four soldiers were arrested following that incident; one of them was demoted and sentenced to four and a half months in prison. In 2016, another Netzah Yehuda soldier received a nine-month sentence and demotion for torturing Palestinian detainees on two separate occasions. In one instance, the soldier had attached electrodes to the neck of a man who was blindfolded and handcuffed, increasing the voltage when the man pleaded with him to stop. He did the same to a second detainee a few days later, while fellow soldiers filmed the torture on a cellphone.
It’s unclear whether Netzah Yehuda’s abuses were on the State Department’s radar before last year, but after Omar Assad’s death, U.S. officials began making inquiries about the unit. In September, the State Department’s Special Representative for Palestinian Affairs, Hady Amr, met with Assad’s family and publicly called for accountability for his death. Israel’s offer of a reported $141,000 settlement to the family and later the decision to move Netzah Yehuda out of the West Bank also coincided with a growing chorus of voices, including in Congress, calling for a U.S. investigation into the killing of Shireen Abu Akleh, the Al Jazeera journalist who was shot in the head in May while reporting from the West Bank city of Jenin. Furor over the killing of Abu Akleh, who was wearing a clearly visible press vest at the time, eventually forced the U.S. Justice Department to launch an investigation — the first time the U.S. government has heeded demands for an independent, American investigation of an incident involving Israeli forces.
Whether growing demands for accountability for Abu Akleh’s killing or calls for Leahy sanctions against Netzah Yehuda — or both — factored into Israeli officials’ decision to move the unit is hard to establish. “I don’t know how much of this has to do with Israel being afraid of the Leahy Law versus Israel trying to manage a relationship with the U.S. after they have killed two U.S. citizens,” Brad Parker, a legislative consultant at the Center for Constitutional Rights who has represented the Abu Akleh family in the U.S., told The Intercept. The Leahy Law hardly seems to work as a deterrent when it comes to Israel, he added. “Even if it means absolutely nothing, a statement saying ‘This unit is problematic’ or something like that would be significant, given the fact that the U.S. really doesn’t do anything.”
Other critics argue that anything short of blocking U.S. financial support for Netzah Yehuda is not enough.
“That’s not accountability,” Matt Duss, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Intercept, referring to the unit’s redeployment and the compensation offer. “Some people might claim, ‘Hey, look, high five, we got the Israelis to do something,’ but that doesn’t begin to solve the systemic problem. What we need is the political will to apply the law, and thus far this administration has lacked that will.”
U.S. officials’ failure to apply their own laws against Israel has increasingly become a liability, Duss said, noting that while the U.S. “tends to be very serious about human rights in countries that don’t buy our weapons,” intervening in Israel and with some other allies is viewed as “too politically controversial … despite systemic abuses.”
For Rieser, Leahy’s longtime foreign policy adviser, that’s long been a cause of frustration. “The law has not been applied as consistently as Senator Leahy believes it should be with respect to Israel and some other key U.S. allies,” he told The Intercept. “I think that’s partly due to political calculations by the administration, whose job it is to apply the law.”
Leahy’s Legacy
There is no public record listing when and where the Leahy Law has been invoked, though public reports indicate that it has been applied to Colombian, Mexican, Turkish, Indonesian, and Pakistani forces, among others. The law is also used as basis for the State Department to vet thousands of foreign military personnel every year — a requirement for the provision of U.S. weapons and training.
More than two decades after it was first introduced, Leahy’s signature legislation “has been institutionalized to the point that it’s not going away,” said Rieser. “It has been built into the training and guidance of the State and Defense departments. It is permanent law. But Congress and human rights defenders still need to ensure that the law is applied as intended.”
Defense officials have at times resisted the law’s implementation. The Intercept reported last year on one of several programs set up to circumvent it. Before he retired, Leahy also worked to close a major loophole in the law that made it difficult to apply against countries that receive U.S. assistance in bulk installments, like Israel, whose security agreements with the U.S. are outlined on a 10-year basis. Previous arrangements made it hard for U.S. officials to know which units of the IDF received what — something Leahy addressed through a recent amendment to the defense budget. “We don’t know with certainty which IDF units receive U.S. equipment,” Rieser said. “We realized that was a loophole for countries that receive bulk shipments of equipment, and Congress modified the law to address that issue.”
The ultimate obstacle to the law’s implementation, however, remains a political one. “Many members of Congress or administration officials are reluctant to suggest that Israeli soldiers may have committed a gross violation of human rights,” said Rieser, noting that Leahy repeatedly called on multiple administrations to apply the law with respect to Israel. He noted that during the Trump administration, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, suggested that the law should not apply there.
The argument, Rieser noted, was that “Israel is a democracy, it has a credible justice system, and therefore the Leahy Law doesn’t apply.” But Israel’s investigations of alleged military misconduct are carried out by the IDF itself, he noted; they have often been cursory and rarely resulted in appropriate punishment. “The Israeli justice system, particularly the military justice system, is not perceived as being impartial in cases involving Palestinians.”
An Extreme Symptom
Shawan Jabarin, the general director of Al-Haq, a prominent Palestinian human rights organization based in the West Bank, told The Intercept that he first heard about the Leahy Law during a trip to the U.S. in 2001, a few years after the legislation was introduced. “We first called for Leahy sanctions to be applied against the IDF two decades ago,” he said.
Over the years, the State Department has flagged several incidents of human rights abuses committed by Israeli forces as potential Leahy cases, including the 2003 killing by an Israeli military bulldozer of American peace activist Rachel Corrie. (Last year, The Intercept published exclusive documents revealing internal deliberations about the law’s application to that case).
Yet none of those incidents resulted in sanctions against any unit of the IDF. “Nothing happened,” said Jabarin. “Nothing happened because this is Israel.”
Multiple U.S. administrations have in the past responded to Israeli abuses with measured words of condemnation, but the U.S. government has never publicly imposed consequences on Israel for its military’s misconduct — neither by applying the Leahy Law nor by threatening to withhold military assistance or limit arms exports under other U.S. statutes. A formal sanctioning of Netzah Yehuda would have only minor practical impact but would convey that the U.S. government is ready to draw a line.
“Israelis got very upset when Ben and Jerry’s said it didn’t want to have ice cream sold in settlements,” said the former soldier. A U.S. rebuke of Netzah Yehuda would likely renew calls to address its history of abuses, he noted, but warned that singling out one unit for censure risks giving a pass to the rest of Israel’s military apparatus.
“For the Israeli public, Netzah Yehuda is very convenient because it’s a group of people that are not very popular in Israeli society to begin with, the Haredim. So it’s very easy to scapegoat and say these Haredim and these settlers, they are the ones who are a problem, it’s not our kids from Tel Aviv and these other nice cities, who also go and kill Palestinians.”
Ori Givati, advocacy director at Breaking the Silence — the group of former Israeli soldiers who have denounced the abuses of Israel’s occupation — told The Intercept that “anything that pushes the U.S. to do anything is a step in the right direction.”
“Every unit that serves in the territories is violent toward Palestinians — every unit,” he said. “Some are documented less, some are documented more. Netzah Yehuda has maybe a tendency to be more violent than others toward Palestinians, but they are not worse than any other unit which invades people’s homes in the middle of the night. They’re not the problem; they’re maybe an extreme symptom.”
Jabarin, the Palestinian human rights activist, agreed that sanctioning Netzah Yehuda would have only symbolic impact — but would be important nonetheless.
“It’s not just the unit, it’s the system behind it,” he said. “Still, this is a test. Can [the U.S.] act according to its principles, its laws, the values they speak about?”
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Dueling signs dot Virginia's Arlington County as residents debate the zoning reform proposal. This photo first appeared in DCist. Click here to read that story. (photo: Margaret Barthel/WAMU/DCist)
"We saw a lot of homes," Siegel says, "but when we brought it back down to what we could afford, what our price range was, suddenly all the homes disappeared."
It was a rude surprise. The couple makes above the local median household income, which is more than $120,000. They knew houses can approach a million dollars, but it turned out that even tw0- or three-bedroom condos are too pricey.
"It was sad for me and made me feel, just, discouraged ... for our community," says Siegel, who is 35 and a State Department contractor.
Arlington is among a growing number of places debating an end to the single-family zoning mandates that have defined the iconic American suburb. The hope is to create housing that more people like Siegel can afford, but the changes are controversial.
Three states — Oregon, California and Maine — and a handful of cities have already opened up their zoning. Housing experts say this is key to eventually ending the severe housing shortage — a deficit of millions of homes — that's a main driver of sky-high prices. These new laws legalize all kinds of housing that's been banned for generations, including duplexes, townhomes and smaller apartment buildings. It's called the "missing middle" and is meant to fill the gap between single-family homes and high-rise apartments.
Supporters are motivated by more than affordability. Racial equity is a goal, since many single-family zoning laws were used to segregate cities by race and class. And denser housing can help limit the reliance on cars and long commutes that exacerbate climate change.
The zoning changes also address a serious demographic mismatch. Most residential land in many cities is devoted to stand-along homes that have grown ever bigger, even as the average size of households has shrunk: Today, nearly two-thirds are just 1 or 2 people.
Relaxing single-family zoning is controversial, and many homeowners oppose it
Despite a growing push for denser housing, these decisions can be tough to pass. In fact, after backlash in Gainesville, Fla., city commissioners recently moved to reverse last year's decision to end single-family zoning.
On a Saturday in January, Arlington's County Board strapped in for five hours of public comment from more than 150 people. Community sentiment on the missing middle plan was sharply divided.
"Our street can't handle that," said opponent Michael Lynch. "The neighborhood can't handle that. The school system can't handle that. And the city infrastructure can't handle that."
Many current homeowners fear added density will lead to parking nightmares, fewer trees, overtaxed county services, and more impervious surfaces that could cause flooding. They also worry it will change the character of their neighborhoods, and they prefer that apartment buildings stay in dense commercial corridors.
"We don't have the space to incorporate a city, or urbanized living, within this small village of a community that we have," says Julie Lee, president of a neighborhood civic association and founding member of Arlingtonians for Upzoning Transparency, a group fighting the plan.
Lee says "missing middle" housing would still be too costly for many. And she worries the plan could further incentivize the tearing down of smaller, more affordable single-family homes in favor of multifamily units that could be about as expensive.
Supporters like County Board member Katie Cristol say it's important to change zoning rules that have long priced out families of color. And she worries about the growing gap between multimillion dollar single-family homes and subsidized affordable housing — and the people who are falling through it.
"We risk losing the future of our ... young to mid-career professionals who want to make Arlington home permanently," Cristol says. That's a sizable number of people, she adds — Arlington is majority-renter and its largest age demographic is 25 to 34.
After two days of contentious public comment, Arlington's board scaled back key aspects of the plan that's now up for final consideration, in an attempt to placate opponents. It lowered the maximum number of units the board could ultimately approve from eight to six. And it added an option that would say five- to six-unit buildings could be constructed only near transit or on sites bigger than 12,000 square feet. That would mean many areas of the county would be opened just to two- to four-unit homes.
The move brought condemnation from the Arlington NAACP, whose president tweeted, "This is de facto segregation and our leaders missed the mark on such a historic vote."
A final vote, which will solidify details of the policy, is planned for March.
New zoning laws have not produced much new housing so far
"Missing middle" zoning changes are specifically designed so that neighborhoods aren't completely transformed overnight. They may limit how much construction can happen each year, and it'll likely take decades for big change. Home construction generally also slowed over the past year or so.
Still, the small amount of housing built so far in places where zoning laws have passed provides a reality check.
"It is not yet clear if this wave of state and local zoning changes will result in a significant number of new homes," concludes a recent analysis by the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at the University of California, Berkeley.
The researchers held roundtable conversations with developers in seven states to understand what's holding up construction.
"I was surprised that there was not more enthusiasm around building these smaller scale housing types amongst the developers that we interviewed," says co-author David Garcia. "There is a belief that zoning is the key to unlocking all of these new housing units, and I think maybe it's more like the first step."
The report identifies a number of barriers. One example: Garcia says it simply won't work if a developer must fit, say, a four-unit building in the exact same space they'd have put a 2,000-square-foot house. He says cities need other design and land-use changes to allow more square feet, and perhaps a smaller setback from the street. Ending parking requirements can free up space that would have been used for a driveway.
Another barrier is the high cost of construction and land, a major challenge in places like California. Garcia says it makes the economics of two- to four-unit buildings challenging; developers say they find six to eight units or higher more financially viable.
He cites Portland, Ore., as a model for making changes beyond zoning that have helped the city permit dozens of fourplexes. He's hopeful other cities can use these lessons to craft the most effective policies.
One advantage for developers: "Missing middle" zoning laws generally let them avoid the neighborhood opposition and appeals process that hold up so many housing projects.
"The appeal provides unpredictability and risk for a builder. And when you're talking about small builders, they can't take that risk," says Eli Spevak, who owns a company called Orange Splot in Portland.
He's developing two townhomes and a couple of six-unit buildings, which will not be subject to appeal. "If you check all the boxes — and it's a long list — then you're guaranteed to go to a building permit."
Newly built 'missing middle' homes will still be out of reach for many
For the most part, "missing middle" housing is not intended for the lowest-income Americans, though laws can include incentives for that. Spevak is only allowed to build six units because three of them will be publicly subsidized.
The bulk of these duplexes and other multifamily homes are market rate, and that's not exactly affordable for a lot of people right now. Still, they can cost less than single-family homes in the same neighborhood. Spevak says his non-subsidized units will sell in the $400,000 range, while nearby homes go for $700,000 to $800,000.
In Arlington, the county's own estimates find that newly developed duplexes would run above $1.1 million, which is actually more than some of its older, smaller single-family homes. Supporters of the zoning change say those units would become relatively more affordable as they age over time.
For now, that's not much help to Tara Siegel, the renter who wants a bigger place. She and her partner have since put their Arlington home search on pause, and are questioning if they even want to buy a home at all. But she still supports the zoning proposal.
"Maybe I won't be in Arlington because of it," Siegel says, "but 'missing middle' could help some people down the line."
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In 2008, a Pilgrim's Pride contract chicken farmer holds a chicken at a farm just outside Pittsburg, Texas. (photo: LM Otero/AP)
The accidental origins of the chicken on your plate, explained.
The reason? We eat so many chickens. So, so many. In 2020 alone, people around the world consumed over 70 billion of them, up from 8 billion in 1965. Just this Sunday, Americans will likely eat a record-breaking 1.45 billion chicken wings as they watch the Eagles take on the Chiefs at Super Bowl LVII. And that makes it all the more astonishing that, according to chicken industry lore, the system that makes it possible for us to eat so much chicken in the first place originated with a minor clerical error.
The story begins 100 years ago in 1923, with homemaker and farmer Cecile Steele of Ocean View, Delaware. Steele, like many other rural Americans in her time, kept a small flock of chickens that she raised for eggs and waited to slaughter them for meat once their productivity waned. But one day by accident the local chick hatchery delivered 500 birds, 10 times more than the 50 Steele had ordered.
Five hundred hens was a lot — bigger farms at the time had only 300. Returns weren’t really an option in these pre-Amazon days, so she kept them anyway, feeding and watering the chicks by hand in a barn the size of a studio apartment — 256 square feet — that was heated by a coal stove. Four and a half months later, over 100 of the original 500 chicks had died, but she still made a sizable profit off the 2-pound survivors — almost $11 per pound in today’s dollars, adjusted for inflation — and began to ramp up her operations.
Her husband, David “Wilmer” Steele, quit his job in the Coast Guard to help Cecile expand, and within three years, they were raising 10,000 chickens. Word of the Steele family’s success spread, and by 1928 there were hundreds of farmers in the area raising chickens primarily for their meat (before Steele, most farmers raised chickens just for their eggs).
By today’s standards, a 10,000-chicken farm is tiny — a single industrial-style chicken barn will now house upward of 40,000 birds at a time, and farmers usually own several barns apiece. But in Steele’s day, her operation was massive. And the hatchery accident occurred at a fortuitous time — it was the Roaring ’20s, a decade of immense economic growth in the US, which meant Americans had more money in their pockets to eat more meat. Simultaneous advancements in agricultural refrigeration and transportation, along with the rise of chain grocery stores and the expansion of agriculture financing, made that meat more plentiful.
Around this time there were also seemingly small advances around nutrition that had huge implications for mass agriculture. One was the discovery of vitamin D in 1922, according to Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken: A History of America’s Favorite Bird. Chickens would often die of rickets when kept indoors during cold winter months (rickets is caused by a lack of vitamin D, stemming from lack of sunlight). That helped cap the number of chickens that could be raised at any given time, especially in cooler climates. But once farmers began fortifying chicken feed with vitamin D, they could suddenly raise them in larger numbers indoors and year-round.
Not only was Steele’s timing lucky, but so was her location. The Delmarva Peninsula, where Steele’s farm was located, was also the perfect place for large-scale chicken farming to take off. There was cheap, abundant land a relatively short distance from the hungry consumers of Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City.
Steele’s accident set off the chicken revolution as we know it. In the first half of the 20th century, chicken accounted for well under 20 percent of meat consumption in the US. Today, it’s about 44 percent. Over time, chicken benefited from perceptions that it was healthier than red meat, and became cheaper to produce, thus cheaper for consumers. Today grocery stores charge $4 to $10 a pound for beef and pork, while chicken can cost as little as $1.80 a pound. Bacon and steak may take center stage for meat lovers, but when it comes to what’s for dinner, the answer is more often poultry.
Steele didn’t live to see where her experiments ultimately led. With earnings from their burgeoning poultry empire, Steele and her husband — who had become a state senator in 1937 — bought a $10,000 yacht named The Lure. One October day in 1940 they took it out fishing with three guests, and while near Ocean City, Maryland, the carburetor backfired, causing the boat to explode. The others survived, but tragically, Cecile and Wilmer Steele did not.
Through a mix of coincidence and ambition, Steele set off a race to put chicken at the center of the American plate, changing the face of agriculture forever. In the process, we bent the chicken to our will, pushing the species to its biological limits, polluting waterways and our lungs along the way, all to supply a growing population with cheap protein.
The chicken of tomorrow — and today
There’s disagreement over when and where humans first domesticated the spry, tropical, multi-colored red junglefowl of South and Southeast Asia — the ancestor of modern-day chickens — but the latest research estimates it occurred over 3,000 years ago in what is now Thailand. Over the following centuries, humans brought the species through China, India, the Middle East, Northeast Africa, Italy, Britain, and up to Scandinavia, and at some point it was likely cross-bred with India’s gray junglefowl. Chickens have been in the Americas almost as long as Europeans, first stepping foot on what is now the Dominican Republic in 1493, on Christopher Columbus’s second voyage.
As prevalent as chicken is today, archaeologists believe they were first domesticated for cockfighting, not farming — the ancient Greek city of Pergamum even built a cockfighting amphitheater. And even up until the 1940s, chickens played a small role in agriculture compared to beef and pork. That all changed, due to Steele and other pioneers in the 1920s and 1930s, but also sophisticated breeding techniques in the decades that followed, which transformed the chicken from a small egg-layer into a giant, meat-producing machine.
In 1946, two decades after Steele demonstrated how to raise thousands of chickens for meat indoors, a legion of scientists, government employees, meat producers, and volunteers launched a nationwide contest — called The Chicken of Tomorrow — to design a bigger bird. At the time, chickens were bred to lay a lot of eggs, but the grocery chain A&P wanted a chicken that could provide as much meat as possible. And that meant a bird with a big breast.
Out of 40 final contestants, California farmer Charles Vantress came out on top. Vantress cross-bred two varieties — the New Hampshire Red and the Cornish — to create a hybrid bird that, most importantly, converted feed to muscle more efficiently than his competitors (judges scored chickens on 18 criteria in total). For his achievement, Vantress was celebrated with a parade through Georgetown, Delaware — a 40-minute drive from Cecile Steele’s farm — replete with a Festival Broiler Queen (the industry calls chickens raised for meat “broilers”).
Vantress went on to dominate the field of poultry genetics, eventually selling his breeding lines to chicken giant Tyson Foods in 1974. Twelve years later, Tyson merged his company with a breeding competitor called Cobb to form Cobb-Vantress and by 2016, almost half of the world’s chickens raised for meat were the “Cobb 500” breed.
Around the same time, there was also a leap forward in animal feed. In 1928, Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, a class of antibiotics that revolutionized modern medicine. Two decades later, American scientists discovered that feeding the antibiotic aureomycin to farmed animals made them grow much faster, a revelation that sparked the rapid adoption of antibiotic use on the farm (one that public health officials, worried about growing antibiotic resistance in humans, have been trying to reverse for decades, with little success).
Human health concerns played a role as well: By the 1970s, public health professionals had increasingly linked consumption of dietary fat to rising rates of heart disease, culminating in a 1977 Senate report — “Dietary Goals for the United States” — that advised Americans to “decrease consumption of animal fat, and choose meats … which will reduce saturated fat intake.”
They recommended chicken, turkey, and fish instead — and for once, Americans listened to experts’ medical advice. Between 1970 and 2019, US beef consumption per person fell 28 percent, while poultry consumption has increased by 173 percent. (Pork consumption per person, despite the industry’s efforts to mimic the success of chicken with the “other white meat” ad campaign, remained largely unchanged over the decades.)
Soon food companies got to work. The chicken nugget was invented in 1963 by an American poultry scientist as a frozen, breaded “chicken stick,” but it wasn’t until the 1983 national launch of the McNugget, which was concocted by a French chef, that it shot into the stratosphere. Stores quickly sold out amid long lines, and 40 years later it’s still a top earner for the company. In 2019, Americans ate an estimated 2.3 billion servings of chicken nuggets.
Chicken has also undergone a cultural makeover. Emelyn Rude, author of Tastes Like Chicken, notes that chicken was long considered feminine, while beef was considered masculine. According to the humorism system of medicine developed by ancient Greek physician Hippocrates, chicken “was mainly just considered a weak and delicate food suitable for weak and delicate people,” Rude said.
But over time, chicken has changed into the meat of choice for bodybuilders and Paleo dieters, due in part to the rise of nutrition science, which classifies foods by their constituent parts — protein, fat, and carbohydrates. “Chicken contained protein, so it was like other meats, but less fat, so it was superior to them, according to dietary guidelines published in the 1980s,” said Rude. “You can still see this sort of idea of red meat and masculinity. … But chicken has definitely made a lot of inroads.”
As much as the chicken has come to be an affordable source of protein, breeding over 9 billion of them for meat in the US each year has proven to be an environmental, labor, and animal welfare catastrophe. We’ve changed them, and in turn, they’ve changed us — and the planet.
What our love for chicken has done to chickens (and us)
If you went inside one of the industrial barns that are home to America’s 9 billion chickens, you’d find most of them sitting down in their own waste. It’s not because they’re lazy, or that they like to hang out in manure. It’s because most of them simply can’t walk.
The Chicken of Tomorrow contests of the 1940s gave way to a new breed of bird so top-heavy that their skinny legs can easily buckle under the weight of their enormous body. Back then, it took 84 days for chickens to reach their “market weight” of three pounds; today, it takes almost half the time to grow more than twice as big.
A now-famous study by Canadian poultry researchers illustrates just how far poultry companies have pushed chickens’ biology. The researchers took breeds from 1957, 1978, and 2005, and fed each bird the same diet for 56 days. At the end of the experiment, the 1957 breed had reached 2 pounds, the 1978 breed reached 4 pounds, and the 2005 breed reached a gigantic 9.2 pounds.
Making chickens grow bigger and faster may be good for the consumer (and the poultry companies), and counterintuitively, today’s rapid-growth model has a smaller carbon footprint than slower-growing, “heritage” breeds. But the rapid-growth model of today is godawful for the chickens, saddling them with a long list of health problems. And as we’ve covered at Vox, the societal shift of replacing beef with chicken means we’re killing far more individual animals for food. Because chickens are so small, you have to kill about 100 of them to get the same amount of meat you would from one cow.
And over the last 50 years, despite a growing US population, the total number of cattle raised and slaughtered for beef each year has actually declined by a few million. Meanwhile, the number of chickens killed annually has increased by 6 billion. Another way to think about it: In 1970, around 16 chickens and one-fifth of a cow were slaughtered for each American. In 2020, it was 23.5 chickens and less than one-tenth of a cow. And while conventionally raised cattle hardly have it great, chickens suffer far more.
Raising and slaughtering chickens is dangerous, precarious work, too. Most chicken farmers work on contract and take on huge amounts of debt to start their farm; the margins are razor-thin, leaving some to say they feel more like a serf than a farmer, while slaughterhouse work is considered to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America.
Simply living near a chicken farm or slaughter plant can be bad for your health. That much is apparent in Steele’s home state of Delaware which, despite making up less than 0.1 percent of the US land mass, raises 6 percent of the country’s 9 billion birds. Over 500 million are raised in the Delmarva Peninsula alone each year.
Sacoby Wilson, a professor of applied environmental health at the University of Maryland, said pollution from chicken manure comes in many forms: Nitrates can contaminate wells, ammonia can cause respiratory issues, and “poultry dust,” or particulate matter, can cause respiratory and cardiovascular problems. Last year, the Environmental Integrity Project — a nonprofit that advocates for stronger enforcement of environmental laws — found that Delaware and Maryland were the only states where 100 percent of their estuaries were impaired with pollution, in large part due to the high amounts of chicken manure that leaks into streams near farms.
When Cecile Steele took a chance a century ago and raised 500 birds instead of 50, she had no idea of the long chain of events she set off, and she died many years before chicken took over our plates. But she sparked a wholesale transformation of our farming and food systems, our air and water, and the chicken itself — a transformation that made meat more affordable than ever, but with a high cost diffused throughout society and the environment.
It occurred at a time in American history when such costs could hardly be conceived of, a time when people had suffered immense poverty and hunger for years during World War I. But in the 100 years since, we’ve overcorrected, valuing abundance and affordability over public health and environmental sustainability while pushing over 9 billion chickens — and hundreds of thousands of workers and farmers — to their limit.
And there’s seemingly no relief in sight. “The problem is we have this food system geared towards incredibly efficient meat production, so it just keeps going and keeps increasing,” Rude said. “There’s no indication that global meat consumption will decline.”
But over this next century, we may witness another overhaul of our food system. Late last year, the US Food and Drug Administration approved the first chicken made directly from animal cells, known as “lab-grown” or cultivated meat. One hundred years from now — if artificial intelligence hasn’t put journalists out of work — a future writer might regale us with the story of the next Cecile Steele. Instead of a farmer, she could be a scientist in a lab somewhere, cooking up the chicken-free chicken of 2123.
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