short news article
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stephen-sondheim-loved-a-brassy-dame
Stephen Sondheim Loved a Brassy Dame
2021-12-01
Condé Nast; Rachel Syme
<div><div><p>In early March of 1971, <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/farewell-to-stephen-sondheim">Stephen Sondheim</a>, then forty years old, strode into the lounge area of Boston’s Colonial Theatre carrying a stack of fresh manuscript pages for a brand new song. His new musical, “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2001/04/23/out-of-the-past-9">Follies</a>”—about a gaggle of berouged, aging vaudevillians who reunite for one night at the decrepit theatre they once shimmied in—was about halfway through its out-of-town tryout, and the second act was not quite congealing. The actress Yvonne De Carlo, who was then pushing fifty, played the role of Carlotta Campion, a former showgirl who had a brief, blazing Hollywood career followed by a decade or so of disappointments and dead ends. De Carlo was a biggish name in her own right, having had her own marquee period in the movies—she was a go-to “temptress” in the nineteen-forties and fifties, starring in “Salome, Where She Danced,” “Song of Scheherazade,” and “The Ten Commandments,” in which she played Moses’ slinky wife Sephora. But she was also a semi-has-been, in that she had downshifted from voluptuous-vamp movie roles to television cheese, playing the macabre matriarch on CBS’s “The Munsters.” She was the perfect fit for Carlotta, a small side character in “Follies” whose main function is to serve as a beacon of showbiz longevity. What she did not have was the perfect song.</p><p>When the Boston run began, De Carlo’s signature number in the second act was a joke, literally. Carlotta sang “Can That Boy Foxtrot!,” a long, mostly inane song about a fellow-dancer’s sexual stamina (cut the “trot” off the end of the title, say it again, and you get the gag). The punch line was funny once, maybe twice, but there was certainly not enough zazz to sustain audience interest for the song’s nearly seven-minute duration. “The number was just sort of a filler,” Sondheim said, in a later interview. “It didn’t really relate to the emotions or the story of the evening. . . . We knew we could improve it.” The show’s book writer, James Goldman, suggested that “it should be a song of surviving, you know, ‘I’m still here.’ ” All Sondheim needed to hear was those three words. He thanked Goldman and disappeared for “several days,” according to his then assistant Ted Chapin. When he reëmerged, he had written one of the all-time great musical-theatre numbers for a broad.</p><p>“I’m Still Here” is a bluesy, blatty showstopper, tailor-made for an alto voice that has gone as scratchy as an old phonograph—a song for a smoker’s rasp. You know exactly who Carlotta is, and the war stories she has to tell, from the first lines: “Good times and bum times / I’ve seen them all, and my dear, I’m still here / Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer / But I’m here.” She sings about the whole of the twentieth century: the Great Depression (“Was I depressed? Nowhere near. I met a big financier!”), Wallis and Windsor’s affair, the submersible Bathysphere, “reefers and vino,” the Communist blacklist in Hollywood. Sondheim’s lyrics effortlessly weave together Carlotta’s personal struggles (having to dance in her scanties for “three bucks a night”) with those of the country writ large, turning one hoofer’s dogged persistence into a stark parable about what it takes to “succeed” in a world that often smacks you down. What you have to do to make it in America, Carlotta suggests, is just keep going—and lower your expectations. “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp,” she sings. “Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp / Then you career from career to career.” You roll with the punches, you improvise, you take the next paycheck. Sometimes you land in diamonds, sometimes in rocks.</p><p>When Chapin took Sondheim’s manuscript home to type it up into a script, he could not believe what he was reading. “Lyric after lyric was clever, perceptive, harsh, sad, piercing, funny, and honest,” he wrote in “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Was-Possible-Musical-Applause/dp/1557836531">Everything Was Possible</a>,” his memoir about the making of “Follies.” “In some ways the song seemed to be as much about Yvonne De Carlo herself as it was about Carlotta Campion.” Later, Sondheim’s party line was that he wrote the song about <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/01/03/escape-artist-david-denby">Joan Crawford</a>, having gone home and watched her entire filmography from her ingénue years through her mawkish final act in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” Perhaps he didn’t want to offend De Carlo by suggesting that she was in her flop era. Ultimately, though, “I’m Still Here” honors whoever steps onstage to sing it (they’ve included greats like Elaine Paige, Carol Burnett, and Judy Collins). It is essentially a no-fail number, in that all of its wistfulness and pain and wisecracking and pathos is baked into the lyrics and the slow, jazzy tempo. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/elaine-stritchs-long-goodbye">Elaine Stritch</a> performed the song at the age of seventy-six during her “At Liberty” show: “I told him, not that he asked me,” she said of Sondheim, “that I wouldn’t touch that song until I felt justified to sing it. Until I was, I don’t know, eighty years old.” She said that when she heard merely middle-aged women sing the number she would wonder, “<em>Where have they been</em>?”</p><p>When I heard that <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/stephen-sondheim-taught-me-how-to-be-a-person">Sondheim had died</a>—over Thanksgiving weekend, at the age of ninety-one—I turned immediately to the music. But it wasn’t “Into the Woods” or “Sweeney Todd” or “Company” that I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear “Follies.” I wanted to hear how he wrote about mortality and aging, about ghosts and irrelevance, about living hard right up until the end. Sondheim lived fifty more years after he wrote “I’m Still Here.” Did he predict his own steadfastness? Much has been written about Sondheim’s clear kinship with Georges Seurat, the subject of his Pulitzer-winning “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/01/21/finishing-the-hat">Sunday in the Park with George</a>,” the tortured painter who eschews personal connections in order to finish his masterwork. But I also think that he felt great tenderness for Carlotta, even as a young man, and perhaps identified with her ceaselessness, her lonely tromp through whatever came next.</p><p>Many of Sondheim’s best numbers for broads—and I mean this in the best sense of that word, as in a woman who <em>lived</em>, an adventuress, an indomitable dame—were written with their interpreters in mind. His first major collision with a formidable woman came in 1959, when he wrote the lyrics for Ethel Merman’s Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” and it set a tone for the way that Sondheim wrote for women moving forward. Merman was no wilting flower, and he had to write <em>into</em> her brassiness rather than around it. Sondheim did the same thing when he wrote “Send in the Clowns” in two days for Glynis Johns for his 1973 show “A Little Night Music.” Though Johns did not have a lot of breath control, she possessed, as Sondheim put it, “a nice little silvery voice.” Playing the part of a grizzled actress named Desiree, she had to carry the emotional heft of the second act. The song, which became Sondheim’s biggest hit by far, is a little ditty about bad timing and embarrassment, sung by someone who is old and experienced enough to make peace with both.</p><p>What I find so lovely about Sondheim’s “broad” songs—also including “<a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-sondheim-all-star-concert-showed-how-virtual-musical-theatre-can-work">The Ladies Who Lunch</a>,” “Could I Leave You?,” and “Losing My Mind”—is that actors are meant to age into them. He never felt that women became obsolete in the theatre—not if you write them the songs. So many of his young male characters (George, Anthony, Jack, the Baker) look out at the horizon to the future; even Sweeney Todd is an optimist, in his own twisted way. It is Sondheim’s women who look back, with a grin and a grimace. It’s a perch that one has to earn, sheerly by sticking it out long enough. Sondheim understood that with age comes sadness, but also perspective. It’s why his songs are still here.</p><hr /><h2>New Yorker Favorites</h2><ul><li>Why the <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/why-the-last-snow-on-earth-may-be-red?itm_content=footer-recirc">last snow on Earth</a> may be red.</li><li>When Toni Morrison was a young girl, her father taught her an <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/06/05/the-work-you-do-the-person-you-are?itm_content=footer-recirc?itm_content=footer-recirc">important lesson about work</a>.</li><li>The fantastical, earnest world of <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/ebay-fantastical-earnest-world-haunted-dolls?itm_content=footer-recirc">haunted dolls on eBay</a>.</li><li>Can neuroscience help us <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/05/19/partial-recall?itm_content=footer-recirc">rewrite our darkest memories</a>?</li><li>The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/the-case-for-not-being-born?itm_content=footer-recirc">no one had children ever again</a>.</li><li>What rampant materialism looks like, and <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/culture/photo-booth/what-rampant-materialism-looks-like-and-what-it-costs?itm_content=footer-recirc">what it costs</a>.</li><li>Sign up for our daily <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/newsletter/daily?itm_content=footer-recirc">newsletter</a> to receive the best stories from <em>The New Yorker</em>.</li></ul></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Stephen Sondheim wrote songs for indomitable women, often with their interpreters in mind. Photograph by Oliver Morris / Getty

 Culture Desk

 Stephen Sondheim Loved a Brassy Dame

 The composer and lyricist never felt that women become obsolete in the theatre—not if you write them the songs.

 By Rachel Syme

 December 1, 2021
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 In early March of 1971, Stephen Sondheim, then forty years old, strode into the lounge area of Boston’s Colonial Theatre carrying a stack of fresh manuscript pages for a brand new song. His new musical, “Follies”—about a gaggle of berouged, aging vaudevillians who reunite for one night at the decrepit theatre they once shimmied in—was about halfway through its out-of-town tryout, and the second act was not quite congealing. The actress Yvonne De Carlo, who was then pushing fifty, played the role of Carlotta Campion, a former showgirl who had a brief, blazing Hollywood career followed by a decade or so of disappointments and dead ends. De Carlo was a biggish name in her own right, having had her own marquee period in the movies—she was a go-to “temptress” in the nineteen-forties and fifties, starring in “Salome, Where She Danced,” “Song of Scheherazade,” and “The Ten Commandments,” in which she played Moses’ slinky wife Sephora. But she was also a semi-has-been, in that she had downshifted from voluptuous-vamp movie roles to television cheese, playing the macabre matriarch on CBS’s “The Munsters.” She was the perfect fit for Carlotta, a small side character in “Follies” whose main function is to serve as a beacon of showbiz longevity. What she did not have was the perfect song.

 When the Boston run began, De Carlo’s signature number in the second act was a joke, literally. Carlotta sang “Can That Boy Foxtrot!,” a long, mostly inane song about a fellow-dancer’s sexual stamina (cut the “trot” off the end of the title, say it again, and you get the gag). The punch line was funny once, maybe twice, but there was certainly not enough zazz to sustain audience interest for the song’s nearly seven-minute duration. “The number was just sort of a filler,” Sondheim said, in a later interview. “It didn’t really relate to the emotions or the story of the evening. . . . We knew we could improve it.” The show’s book writer, James Goldman, suggested that “it should be a song of surviving, you know, ‘I’m still here.’ ” All Sondheim needed to hear was those three words. He thanked Goldman and disappeared for “several days,” according to his then assistant Ted Chapin. When he reëmerged, he had written one of the all-time great musical-theatre numbers for a broad.

 “I’m Still Here” is a bluesy, blatty showstopper, tailor-made for an alto voice that has gone as scratchy as an old phonograph—a song for a smoker’s rasp. You know exactly who Carlotta is, and the war stories she has to tell, from the first lines: “Good times and bum times / I’ve seen them all, and my dear, I’m still here / Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer / But I’m here.” She sings about the whole of the twentieth century: the Great Depression (“Was I depressed? Nowhere near. I met a big financier!”), Wallis and Windsor’s affair, the submersible Bathysphere, “reefers and vino,” the Communist blacklist in Hollywood. Sondheim’s lyrics effortlessly weave together Carlotta’s personal struggles (having to dance in her scanties for “three bucks a night”) with those of the country writ large, turning one hoofer’s dogged persistence into a stark parable about what it takes to “succeed” in a world that often smacks you down. What you have to do to make it in America, Carlotta suggests, is just keep going—and lower your expectations. “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp,” she sings. “Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp / Then you career from career to career.” You roll with the punches, you improvise, you take the next paycheck. Sometimes you land in diamonds, sometimes in rocks.

 When Chapin took Sondheim’s manuscript home to type it up into a script, he could not believe what he was reading. “Lyric after lyric was clever, perceptive, harsh, sad, piercing, funny, and honest,” he wrote in “Everything Was Possible,” his memoir about the making of “Follies.” “In some ways the song seemed to be as much about Yvonne De Carlo herself as it was about Carlotta Campion.” Later, Sondheim’s party line was that he wrote the song about Joan Crawford, having gone home and watched her entire filmography from her ingénue years through her mawkish final act in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” Perhaps he didn’t want to offend De Carlo by suggesting that she was in her flop era. Ultimately, though, “I’m Still Here” honors whoever steps onstage to sing it (they’ve included greats like Elaine Paige, Carol Burnett, and Judy Collins). It is essentially a no-fail number, in that all of its wistfulness and pain and wisecracking and pathos is baked into the lyrics and the slow, jazzy tempo. Elaine Stritch performed the song at the age of seventy-six during her “At Liberty” show: “I told him, not that he asked me,” she said of Sondheim, “that I wouldn’t touch that song until I felt justified to sing it. Until I was, I don’t know, eighty years old.” She said that when she heard merely middle-aged women sing the number she would wonder, “Where have they been?”

 When I heard that Sondheim had died—over Thanksgiving weekend, at the age of ninety-one—I turned immediately to the music. But it wasn’t “Into the Woods” or “Sweeney Todd” or “Company” that I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear “Follies.” I wanted to hear how he wrote about mortality and aging, about ghosts and irrelevance, about living hard right up until the end. Sondheim lived fifty more years after he wrote “I’m Still Here.” Did he predict his own steadfastness? Much has been written about Sondheim’s clear kinship with Georges Seurat, the subject of his Pulitzer-winning “Sunday in the Park with George,” the tortured painter who eschews personal connections in order to finish his masterwork. But I also think that he felt great tenderness for Carlotta, even as a young man, and perhaps identified with her ceaselessness, her lonely tromp through whatever came next.

 Many of Sondheim’s best numbers for broads—and I mean this in the best sense of that word, as in a woman who lived, an adventuress, an indomitable dame—were written with their interpreters in mind. His first major collision with a formidable woman came in 1959, when he wrote the lyrics for Ethel Merman’s Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” and it set a tone for the way that Sondheim wrote for women moving forward. Merman was no wilting flower, and he had to write into her brassiness rather than around it. Sondheim did the same thing when he wrote “Send in the Clowns” in two days for Glynis Johns for his 1973 show “A Little Night Music.” Though Johns did not have a lot of breath control, she possessed, as Sondheim put it, “a nice little silvery voice.” Playing the part of a grizzled actress named Desiree, she had to carry the emotional heft of the second act. The song, which became Sondheim’s biggest hit by far, is a little ditty about bad timing and embarrassment, sung by someone who is old and experienced enough to make peace with both.

 What I find so lovely about Sondheim’s “broad” songs—also including “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Could I Leave You?,” and “Losing My Mind”—is that actors are meant to age into them. He never felt that women became obsolete in the theatre—not if you write them the songs. So many of his young male characters (George, Anthony, Jack, the Baker) look out at the horizon to the future; even Sweeney Todd is an optimist, in his own twisted way. It is Sondheim’s women who look back, with a grin and a grimace. It’s a perch that one has to earn, sheerly by sticking it out long enough. Sondheim understood that with age comes sadness, but also perspective. It’s why his songs are still here.

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 * Why the last snow on Earth may be red.
 * When Toni Morrison was a young girl, her father taught her an important lesson about work.
 * The fantastical, earnest world of haunted dolls on eBay.
 * Can neuroscience help us rewrite our darkest memories?
 * The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again.
 * What rampant materialism looks like, and what it costs.
 * Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
 Rachel Syme is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She has covered Hollywood, style, and other cultural subjects since 2012.
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In early March of 1971, Stephen Sondheim, then forty years old, strode into the lounge area of Boston’s Colonial Theatre carrying a stack of fresh manuscript pages for a brand new song. His new musical, “Follies”—about a gaggle of berouged, aging vaudevillians who reunite for one night at the decrepit theatre they once shimmied in—was about halfway through its out-of-town tryout, and the second act was not quite congealing. The actress Yvonne De Carlo, who was then pushing fifty, played the role of Carlotta Campion, a former showgirl who had a brief, blazing Hollywood career followed by a decade or so of disappointments and dead ends. De Carlo was a biggish name in her own right, having had her own marquee period in the movies—she was a go-to “temptress” in the nineteen-forties and fifties, starring in “Salome, Where She Danced,” “Song of Scheherazade,” and “The Ten Commandments,” in which she played Moses’ slinky wife Sephora. But she was also a semi-has-been, in that she had downshifted from voluptuous-vamp movie roles to television cheese, playing the macabre matriarch on CBS’s “The Munsters.” She was the perfect fit for Carlotta, a small side character in “Follies” whose main function is to serve as a beacon of showbiz longevity. What she did not have was the perfect song. When the Boston run began, De Carlo’s signature number in the second act was a joke, literally. Carlotta sang “Can That Boy Foxtrot!,” a long, mostly inane song about a fellow-dancer’s sexual stamina (cut the “trot” off the end of the title, say it again, and you get the gag). The punch line was funny once, maybe twice, but there was certainly not enough zazz to sustain audience interest for the song’s nearly seven-minute duration. “The number was just sort of a filler,” Sondheim said, in a later interview. “It didn’t really relate to the emotions or the story of the evening. . . . We knew we could improve it.” The show’s book writer, James Goldman, suggested that “it should be a song of surviving, you know, ‘I’m still here.’ ” All Sondheim needed to hear was those three words. He thanked Goldman and disappeared for “several days,” according to his then assistant Ted Chapin. When he reëmerged, he had written one of the all-time great musical-theatre numbers for a broad. “I’m Still Here” is a bluesy, blatty showstopper, tailor-made for an alto voice that has gone as scratchy as an old phonograph—a song for a smoker’s rasp. You know exactly who Carlotta is, and the war stories she has to tell, from the first lines: “Good times and bum times / I’ve seen them all, and my dear, I’m still here / Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer / But I’m here.” She sings about the whole of the twentieth century: the Great Depression (“Was I depressed? Nowhere near. I met a big financier!”), Wallis and Windsor’s affair, the submersible Bathysphere, “reefers and vino,” the Communist blacklist in Hollywood. Sondheim’s lyrics effortlessly weave together Carlotta’s personal struggles (having to dance in her scanties for “three bucks a night”) with those of the country writ large, turning one hoofer’s dogged persistence into a stark parable about what it takes to “succeed” in a world that often smacks you down. What you have to do to make it in America, Carlotta suggests, is just keep going—and lower your expectations. “First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp,” she sings. “Then someone’s mother, then you’re camp / Then you career from career to career.” You roll with the punches, you improvise, you take the next paycheck. Sometimes you land in diamonds, sometimes in rocks. When Chapin took Sondheim’s manuscript home to type it up into a script, he could not believe what he was reading. “Lyric after lyric was clever, perceptive, harsh, sad, piercing, funny, and honest,” he wrote in “Everything Was Possible,” his memoir about the making of “Follies.” “In some ways the song seemed to be as much about Yvonne De Carlo herself as it was about Carlotta Campion.” Later, Sondheim’s party line was that he wrote the song about Joan Crawford, having gone home and watched her entire filmography from her ingénue years through her mawkish final act in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane.” Perhaps he didn’t want to offend De Carlo by suggesting that she was in her flop era. Ultimately, though, “I’m Still Here” honors whoever steps onstage to sing it (they’ve included greats like Elaine Paige, Carol Burnett, and Judy Collins). It is essentially a no-fail number, in that all of its wistfulness and pain and wisecracking and pathos is baked into the lyrics and the slow, jazzy tempo. Elaine Stritch performed the song at the age of seventy-six during her “At Liberty” show: “I told him, not that he asked me,” she said of Sondheim, “that I wouldn’t touch that song until I felt justified to sing it. Until I was, I don’t know, eighty years old.” She said that when she heard merely middle-aged women sing the number she would wonder, “Where have they been?” When I heard that Sondheim had died—over Thanksgiving weekend, at the age of ninety-one—I turned immediately to the music. But it wasn’t “Into the Woods” or “Sweeney Todd” or “Company” that I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear “Follies.” I wanted to hear how he wrote about mortality and aging, about ghosts and irrelevance, about living hard right up until the end. Sondheim lived fifty more years after he wrote “I’m Still Here.” Did he predict his own steadfastness? Much has been written about Sondheim’s clear kinship with Georges Seurat, the subject of his Pulitzer-winning “Sunday in the Park with George,” the tortured painter who eschews personal connections in order to finish his masterwork. But I also think that he felt great tenderness for Carlotta, even as a young man, and perhaps identified with her ceaselessness, her lonely tromp through whatever came next. Many of Sondheim’s best numbers for broads—and I mean this in the best sense of that word, as in a woman who lived, an adventuress, an indomitable dame—were written with their interpreters in mind. His first major collision with a formidable woman came in 1959, when he wrote the lyrics for Ethel Merman’s Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” and it set a tone for the way that Sondheim wrote for women moving forward. Merman was no wilting flower, and he had to write into her brassiness rather than around it. Sondheim did the same thing when he wrote “Send in the Clowns” in two days for Glynis Johns for his 1973 show “A Little Night Music.” Though Johns did not have a lot of breath control, she possessed, as Sondheim put it, “a nice little silvery voice.” Playing the part of a grizzled actress named Desiree, she had to carry the emotional heft of the second act. The song, which became Sondheim’s biggest hit by far, is a little ditty about bad timing and embarrassment, sung by someone who is old and experienced enough to make peace with both. What I find so lovely about Sondheim’s “broad” songs—also including “The Ladies Who Lunch,” “Could I Leave You?,” and “Losing My Mind”—is that actors are meant to age into them. He never felt that women became obsolete in the theatre—not if you write them the songs. So many of his young male characters (George, Anthony, Jack, the Baker) look out at the horizon to the future; even Sweeney Todd is an optimist, in his own twisted way. It is Sondheim’s women who look back, with a grin and a grimace. It’s a perch that one has to earn, sheerly by sticking it out long enough. Sondheim understood that with age comes sadness, but also perspective. It’s why his songs are still here.  New Yorker Favorites  Why the last snow on Earth may be red. When Toni Morrison was a young girl, her father taught her an important lesson about work. The fantastical, earnest world of haunted dolls on eBay. Can neuroscience help us rewrite our darkest memories? The anti-natalist philosopher David Benatar argues that it would be better if no one had children ever again. What rampant materialism looks like, and what it costs. Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker.
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2021-12-01
Rachel Gutman-Wei
<div><article><header><div><div><p>A new, highly contagious variant could have terrible consequences. But if it ends up causing milder symptoms than Delta, there’s a real upside.</p></div><div><figure><div></div><figcaption>Carl Court / Getty</figcaption></figure></div></div></header><section><p>World, meet Omicron; Omicron, meet a lot of people who are very, <em>very</em> anxious to know more about you.</p><p>The arrival of the newest coronavirus variant, first identified in Botswana and South Africa and <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/12/01/first-case-omicron-coronavirus-variant-identified-united-states/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters&amp;utm_campaign=b8ddd155d1-breaking_COPY_01&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_term=0_8cab1d7961-b8ddd155d1-150880413">now present in the United States</a>, might be bad news, or it might be terrible news—or maybe it’s just a temporary distraction from Delta. Ultimately, Omicron’s effect on the course of the pandemic will be determined by three factors: its transmissibility; the degree to which it evades our existing immune defenses; and its virulence, or the severity of the disease that it causes. If Omicron turns out to jump between hosts with ease, blow past our neutralizing antibodies, and cause unusually dangerous complications, we’ll all be in deep trouble. But it could also turn out to do a lot of other things, with more subtle implications. If Omicron ends up being super contagious, for example, but mild in its symptoms, that might even be a <em>good</em> thing—a perfect variant, just in time for Christmas.</p><p>At this point, living with the coronavirus for years to come is all but inevitable. In many countries that have had vaccines in hand for the better part of a year, inoculation rates still aren’t close to 100 percent. Even if every human on Earth gained a degree of immunity from vaccination or infection, the virus could retreat into its many animal hosts, only to reenter the human population in a slightly different form. “There’s no reasonable person, I think, in public health now who thinks that eradication or elimination or having zero COVID is a realistic goal,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.</p><p>Given that this enemy cannot be vanquished, we’d all stand a better chance at survival if it were armed with a slingshot rather than a cannon. Doctors from South Africa and Israel have said that cases of Omicron seem to be <a href="https://www.statnews.com/2021/11/30/doctors-hope-omicron-causes-milder-cases-of-covid-but-its-still-too-early-to-say/">less serious</a> than Delta, so far. <a href="https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/news-events/epidemiological-update-omicron-data-1-december-2021">Zero severe cases or deaths</a> have been reported among the nearly 60 confirmed cases in the European Union. But the data are very limited and prone to bias. Fewer than 250 cases have been reported worldwide, and the plurality of them are from South Africa, where a younger-than-average populace might be less susceptible to COVID complications in general.</p><p><a href="https://newsletters.theatlantic.com/galaxy-brain/61a3d3032e822d00205bc1a5/the-omicron-information-gap/">Read: The Omicron information vacuum</a></p><p>If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be <em>great</em> news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them—that is, it’s more transmissible—or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have.</p><p>Immune escape sounds especially scary; after such a hard-fought battle to stay healthy until the vaccines arrived, or a hard-fought battle against the virus itself, no one wants to be told they’re susceptible again. But a reinfecting variant that doesn’t come with the risk of chronic symptoms or ventilators might not be such a bad thing, Elizabeth Halloran, a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. “If it can get around the vaccines, but in the end really causes less severe disease, that’s probably a step in the right direction.”</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/coronavirus-evolution-vaccines/619875/">Read: The coronavirus could get worse</a></p><p>One possible downside to a super-contagious (or immune-evading), super-mild Omicron would be that those who catch it won’t end up with much protection afterward, Scarpino said. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu has <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/09/infection-immunity-covid-19-vaccines/620099/">reported</a>, mild COVID cases may not lead the immune system to produce as many antibodies as do more serious illnesses. But Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me that mild infection doesn’t necessarily preclude a robust immune response. “Once you have a productive infection, your immune system has been engaged,” he told me. Even if you don’t feel sick, your body might be pumping out antibodies and training up T cells to fight off the invader the next time it arrives. And by stimulating even a relatively gentle immune response in enough people, a new, widespread version of the virus would make the global population that much better prepared for the future. “Any variant that comes will make it harder for the variant that comes next,” Ellebedy said.</p><p>Omicron could, of course, turn out to be pretty much anything. Maybe it’s somewhat more transmissible than Delta, but no more virulent; that, Kirk Sell said, could send us back to stricter masking and social-distancing programs for a while. Or else it might be less transmissible than Delta, and no better at slipping past our immune barriers, in which case “it’s going to be a blip on the horizon” regardless of how virulent it is, according to Halloran. If that happens, we’ll effectively be back where we were two weeks ago: stuck with Delta and waiting for the next shoe to drop.</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2021/11/omicron-variant-covid-what-we-know/620855/">Read: What we know about the Omicron variant</a></p><p>There are worse fates. “In some ways, Delta is the ideal variant,” Scarpino said: It’s transmissible enough to <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02177-3">dominate more</a> <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1201971221006354">dangerous variants</a>, and its virulence can be controlled through vaccination. In the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether Omicron will have its own silver lining—or whether it’ll be catastrophically worse.</p></section></article>||||I|||| Skip to content

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 Health

 Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios

 A new, highly contagious variant could have terrible consequences. But if it ends up causing milder symptoms than Delta, there’s a real upside.

 By Rachel Gutman-Wei

 Carl Court / Getty

 December 1, 2021
 Share

 World, meet Omicron; Omicron, meet a lot of people who are very, very anxious to know more about you.

 The arrival of the newest coronavirus variant, first identified in Botswana and South Africa and now present in the United States, might be bad news, or it might be terrible news—or maybe it’s just a temporary distraction from Delta. Ultimately, Omicron’s effect on the course of the pandemic will be determined by three factors: its transmissibility; the degree to which it evades our existing immune defenses; and its virulence, or the severity of the disease that it causes. If Omicron turns out to jump between hosts with ease, blow past our neutralizing antibodies, and cause unusually dangerous complications, we’ll all be in deep trouble. But it could also turn out to do a lot of other things, with more subtle implications. If Omicron ends up being super contagious, for example, but mild in its symptoms, that might even be a good thing—a perfect variant, just in time for Christmas.

 At this point, living with the coronavirus for years to come is all but inevitable. In many countries that have had vaccines in hand for the better part of a year, inoculation rates still aren’t close to 100 percent. Even if every human on Earth gained a degree of immunity from vaccination or infection, the virus could retreat into its many animal hosts, only to reenter the human population in a slightly different form. “There’s no reasonable person, I think, in public health now who thinks that eradication or elimination or having zero COVID is a realistic goal,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

 Given that this enemy cannot be vanquished, we’d all stand a better chance at survival if it were armed with a slingshot rather than a cannon. Doctors from South Africa and Israel have said that cases of Omicron seem to be less serious than Delta, so far. Zero severe cases or deaths have been reported among the nearly 60 confirmed cases in the European Union. But the data are very limited and prone to bias. Fewer than 250 cases have been reported worldwide, and the plurality of them are from South Africa, where a younger-than-average populace might be less susceptible to COVID complications in general.

 Read: The Omicron information vacuum

 If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them—that is, it’s more transmissible—or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have.

 Immune escape sounds especially scary; after such a hard-fought battle to stay healthy until the vaccines arrived, or a hard-fought battle against the virus itself, no one wants to be told they’re susceptible again. But a reinfecting variant that doesn’t come with the risk of chronic symptoms or ventilators might not be such a bad thing, Elizabeth Halloran, a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. “If it can get around the vaccines, but in the end really causes less severe disease, that’s probably a step in the right direction.”

 Read: The coronavirus could get worse

 One possible downside to a super-contagious (or immune-evading), super-mild Omicron would be that those who catch it won’t end up with much protection afterward, Scarpino said. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu has reported, mild COVID cases may not lead the immune system to produce as many antibodies as do more serious illnesses. But Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me that mild infection doesn’t necessarily preclude a robust immune response. “Once you have a productive infection, your immune system has been engaged,” he told me. Even if you don’t feel sick, your body might be pumping out antibodies and training up T cells to fight off the invader the next time it arrives. And by stimulating even a relatively gentle immune response in enough people, a new, widespread version of the virus would make the global population that much better prepared for the future. “Any variant that comes will make it harder for the variant that comes next,” Ellebedy said.

 Omicron could, of course, turn out to be pretty much anything. Maybe it’s somewhat more transmissible than Delta, but no more virulent; that, Kirk Sell said, could send us back to stricter masking and social-distancing programs for a while. Or else it might be less transmissible than Delta, and no better at slipping past our immune barriers, in which case “it’s going to be a blip on the horizon” regardless of how virulent it is, according to Halloran. If that happens, we’ll effectively be back where we were two weeks ago: stuck with Delta and waiting for the next shoe to drop.

 Read: What we know about the Omicron variant

 There are worse fates. “In some ways, Delta is the ideal variant,” Scarpino said: It’s transmissible enough to dominate more dangerous variants, and its virulence can be controlled through vaccination. In the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether Omicron will have its own silver lining—or whether it’ll be catastrophically worse.

A new, highly contagious variant could have terrible consequences. But if it ends up causing milder symptoms than Delta, there’s a real upside.      Carl Court / Getty      World, meet Omicron; Omicron, meet a lot of people who are very, very anxious to know more about you. The arrival of the newest coronavirus variant, first identified in Botswana and South Africa and now present in the United States, might be bad news, or it might be terrible news—or maybe it’s just a temporary distraction from Delta. Ultimately, Omicron’s effect on the course of the pandemic will be determined by three factors: its transmissibility; the degree to which it evades our existing immune defenses; and its virulence, or the severity of the disease that it causes. If Omicron turns out to jump between hosts with ease, blow past our neutralizing antibodies, and cause unusually dangerous complications, we’ll all be in deep trouble. But it could also turn out to do a lot of other things, with more subtle implications. If Omicron ends up being super contagious, for example, but mild in its symptoms, that might even be a good thing—a perfect variant, just in time for Christmas. At this point, living with the coronavirus for years to come is all but inevitable. In many countries that have had vaccines in hand for the better part of a year, inoculation rates still aren’t close to 100 percent. Even if every human on Earth gained a degree of immunity from vaccination or infection, the virus could retreat into its many animal hosts, only to reenter the human population in a slightly different form. “There’s no reasonable person, I think, in public health now who thinks that eradication or elimination or having zero COVID is a realistic goal,” says Tara Kirk Sell, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. Given that this enemy cannot be vanquished, we’d all stand a better chance at survival if it were armed with a slingshot rather than a cannon. Doctors from South Africa and Israel have said that cases of Omicron seem to be less serious than Delta, so far. Zero severe cases or deaths have been reported among the nearly 60 confirmed cases in the European Union. But the data are very limited and prone to bias. Fewer than 250 cases have been reported worldwide, and the plurality of them are from South Africa, where a younger-than-average populace might be less susceptible to COVID complications in general.  Read: The Omicron information vacuum  If Omicron continues to show signs of being milder than Delta, that’s good news, of course. But if it also turns out to spread more quickly than Delta, that could be great news. When two variants are circulating, the one that infects more people more quickly will tend to dominate, said Samuel Scarpino, of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute. That variant could win out either because it replicates more quickly in its human hosts and spreads more efficiently between them—that is, it’s more transmissible—or because it more deftly evades the immunity we already have. Immune escape sounds especially scary; after such a hard-fought battle to stay healthy until the vaccines arrived, or a hard-fought battle against the virus itself, no one wants to be told they’re susceptible again. But a reinfecting variant that doesn’t come with the risk of chronic symptoms or ventilators might not be such a bad thing, Elizabeth Halloran, a biostatistician at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, told me. “If it can get around the vaccines, but in the end really causes less severe disease, that’s probably a step in the right direction.”  Read: The coronavirus could get worse  One possible downside to a super-contagious (or immune-evading), super-mild Omicron would be that those who catch it won’t end up with much protection afterward, Scarpino said. As my colleague Katherine J. Wu has reported, mild COVID cases may not lead the immune system to produce as many antibodies as do more serious illnesses. But Ali Ellebedy, an immunologist at Washington University in St. Louis, told me that mild infection doesn’t necessarily preclude a robust immune response. “Once you have a productive infection, your immune system has been engaged,” he told me. Even if you don’t feel sick, your body might be pumping out antibodies and training up T cells to fight off the invader the next time it arrives. And by stimulating even a relatively gentle immune response in enough people, a new, widespread version of the virus would make the global population that much better prepared for the future. “Any variant that comes will make it harder for the variant that comes next,” Ellebedy said. Omicron could, of course, turn out to be pretty much anything. Maybe it’s somewhat more transmissible than Delta, but no more virulent; that, Kirk Sell said, could send us back to stricter masking and social-distancing programs for a while. Or else it might be less transmissible than Delta, and no better at slipping past our immune barriers, in which case “it’s going to be a blip on the horizon” regardless of how virulent it is, according to Halloran. If that happens, we’ll effectively be back where we were two weeks ago: stuck with Delta and waiting for the next shoe to drop.  Read: What we know about the Omicron variant  There are worse fates. “In some ways, Delta is the ideal variant,” Scarpino said: It’s transmissible enough to dominate more dangerous variants, and its virulence can be controlled through vaccination. In the next few weeks, we’ll find out whether Omicron will have its own silver lining—or whether it’ll be catastrophically worse.
Omicron’s Best- and Worst-Case Scenarios
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/how-bad-omicron-variant/620870/
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/politics/florida-state-guard-desantis/index.html
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 States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis’ plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis’ office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York. These guards are little-known auxiliary forces with origins dating back to the advent of state militias in the 18th century. While states and the Department of Defense share control of the National Guard, state guards are solely in the power of a governor. 
 </p>
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 The proposal from DeSantis comes on the heels of <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/30/politics/austin-national-guard-warning/index.html">Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s directive </a>warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.
 </p>
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 Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis’ announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, “No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police.” 
 </p>
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 State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a “wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we’ve seen in Cuba.”
 </p>
 <p>
 The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.
 </p>
 <p>
 “Reestablishing the Florida State Guard will allow civilians from all over the state to be trained in the best emergency response techniques and have the ability to mobilize very, very quickly,” DeSantis said during a visit to Pensacola on Thursday. 
 </p>
 <p>
 State guards are typically deployed to respond during a disaster, though governors have found other reasons to call them into action. 
 </p>
 <p>
 In 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott used the Texas state guard to monitor federal military exercises in his state, responding to what was at the time a fast-growing conspiracy theory that the federal government was using Walmart parking lots to prepare for a future state of martial law. Abbott said the guards were just collecting information to keep Texans safe during the multi-week exercises. 
 </p>
 <p>
 Florida law authorizes the governor to maintain a defense force as “necessary to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order,” meaning DeSantis would have another force to respond to unrest that may erupt in the future. DeSantis swiftly deployed the Florida National Guard to major cities after protests and violence broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. 
 </p>
 <p>
 DeSantis has also stationed Florida National Guard troops at the Texas-Mexico border and sent them to Washington, DC, to help protect the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden. 
 </p>
 <p>
 The announcement on Thursday came during a broader rollout of DeSantis’ plan to bolster Florida’s National Guard, which included $100 million in funding proposals to establish three new armories, build a new headquarters for the National Guard Counter Drug Program and provide support for Florida National Guardsmen seeking higher-education degrees.
 </p>
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 DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control

 By Steve Contorno , CNN
 Updated 9:47 AM EST, Fri December 3, 2021
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 St, Petersburg, Florida CNN —

 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control.

 DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines.

 But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be “not encumbered by the federal government.” He said this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.” DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them.

 States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis’ plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis’ office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York. These guards are little-known auxiliary forces with origins dating back to the advent of state militias in the 18th century. While states and the Department of Defense share control of the National Guard, state guards are solely in the power of a governor.

 The proposal from DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.

 Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis’ announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, “No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police.”

 State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a “wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we’ve seen in Cuba.”

 The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.

 “Reestablishing the Florida State Guard will allow civilians from all over the state to be trained in the best emergency response techniques and have the ability to mobilize very, very quickly,” DeSantis said during a visit to Pensacola on Thursday.

 State guards are typically deployed to respond during a disaster, though governors have found other reasons to call them into action.

 In 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott used the Texas state guard to monitor federal military exercises in his state, responding to what was at the time a fast-growing conspiracy theory that the federal government was using Walmart parking lots to prepare for a future state of martial law. Abbott said the guards were just collecting information to keep Texans safe during the multi-week exercises.

 Florida law authorizes the governor to maintain a defense force as “necessary to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order,” meaning DeSantis would have another force to respond to unrest that may erupt in the future. DeSantis swiftly deployed the Florida National Guard to major cities after protests and violence broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota.

 DeSantis has also stationed Florida National Guard troops at the Texas-Mexico border and sent them to Washington, DC, to help protect the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden.

 The announcement on Thursday came during a broader rollout of DeSantis’ plan to bolster Florida’s National Guard, which included $100 million in funding proposals to establish three new armories, build a new headquarters for the National Guard Counter Drug Program and provide support for Florida National Guardsmen seeking higher-education degrees.

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DeSantis proposes Florida civilian military force that he'd control
 
 01:06
 
 - Source:
 CNN
 
 
 
 
 
 Politics of the Day
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 St, Petersburg, Florida
 CNN
  — 
 
 
 Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis wants to reestablish a World War II-era civilian military force that he, not the Pentagon, would control. 
 
 
 DeSantis pitched the idea Thursday as a way to further support the Florida National Guard during emergencies, like hurricanes. The Florida National Guard has also played a vital role during the pandemic in administering Covid-19 tests and distributing vaccines. 
 
 
 But in a nod to the growing tension between Republican states and the Biden administration over the National Guard, DeSantis also said this unit, called the Florida State Guard, would be “not encumbered by the federal government.” He said this force would give him “the flexibility and the ability needed to respond to events in our state in the most effective way possible.” DeSantis is proposing bringing it back with a volunteer force of 200 civilians, and he is seeking $3.5 million from the state legislature in startup costs to train and equip them. 
 
 
 States have the power to create defense forces separate from the national guard, though not all of them use it. If Florida moves ahead with DeSantis’ plan to reestablish the civilian force, it would become the 23rd active state guard in the country, DeSantis’ office said in a press release, joining California, Texas and New York. These guards are little-known auxiliary forces with origins dating back to the advent of state militias in the 18th century. While states and the Department of Defense share control of the National Guard, state guards are solely in the power of a governor. 
 
 
 The proposal from DeSantis comes on the heels of Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s directive warning that National Guard members who refuse to get vaccinated against the coronavirus will have their pay withheld and barred from training. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt, a Republican, had requested an exemption for guard members in his state, which Austin denied.
 
 
 Democrats in Florida immediately expressed alarm at DeSantis’ announcement. US Rep. Charlie Crist, who is running as a Democrat to challenge the governor in 2022, tweeted, “No Governor should have his own handpicked secret police.” 
 
 
 State Sen. Annette Taddeo, another gubernatorial candidate, wrote on Twitter that DeSantis was a “wannabe dictator trying to make his move for his own vigilante militia like we’ve seen in Cuba.”
 
 
 The Florida State Guard was created in 1941 during World War II as a temporary force to fill the void left behind when the Florida National Guard was deployed to assist in the US combat efforts. It was disbanded after the war ended, but the authority for a governor to establish a state defense force remained.
 
 
 “Reestablishing the Florida State Guard will allow civilians from all over the state to be trained in the best emergency response techniques and have the ability to mobilize very, very quickly,” DeSantis said during a visit to Pensacola on Thursday. 
 
 
 State guards are typically deployed to respond during a disaster, though governors have found other reasons to call them into action. 
 
 
 In 2015, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott used the Texas state guard to monitor federal military exercises in his state, responding to what was at the time a fast-growing conspiracy theory that the federal government was using Walmart parking lots to prepare for a future state of martial law. Abbott said the guards were just collecting information to keep Texans safe during the multi-week exercises. 
 
 
 Florida law authorizes the governor to maintain a defense force as “necessary to assist the civil authorities in maintaining law and order,” meaning DeSantis would have another force to respond to unrest that may erupt in the future. DeSantis swiftly deployed the Florida National Guard to major cities after protests and violence broke out in response to the murder of George Floyd in Minnesota. 
 
 
 DeSantis has also stationed Florida National Guard troops at the Texas-Mexico border and sent them to Washington, DC, to help protect the US Capitol during the inauguration of President Joe Biden. 
 
 
 The announcement on Thursday came during a broader rollout of DeSantis’ plan to bolster Florida’s National Guard, which included $100 million in funding proposals to establish three new armories, build a new headquarters for the National Guard Counter Drug Program and provide support for Florida National Guardsmen seeking higher-education degrees.
DeSantis proposes a new civilian military force in Florida that he would control | CNN Politics
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/politics/florida-state-guard-desantis/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/entertainment/eddie-mekka-obit/index.html
Eddie Mekka, Carmine on 'Laverne & Shirley,' dead at 69 | CNN
2021-12-02
Chloe Melas
<div><section> <article>
 <section>
 <main>
 <div>
 
 
 </div>
 <div>
 <p><cite>
 
 CNN
  — 
 </cite>
</p>
 <p>
 Eddie Mekka, who found fame playing Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, on the hit series “Laverne &amp; Shirley,” died Saturday at his home in Newhall, California, according to his official Facebook account.
 </p>
 <p>
 He was 69.
 </p>
 <p>
 No details on his cause of death were made immediately available. 
 </p>
 <p>
 Mekka played Shirley’s love interest on the show.
 </p>
 <p>
 Cindy Williams, who played Shirley, <a href="https://twitter.com/Cindy_Williams1/status/1466446494366642184?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1466446494366642184%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fvariety.com%2F2021%2Ftv%2Fnews%2Feddie-mekka-dead-dies-laverne-and-shirley-1235124303%2F">tweeted</a>, “My darling Eddie, A world-class talent who could do it all. I love you dearly. I’ll miss you so much. But oh the marvelous memories.”
 </p>
 <p>
 The hit series ran on ABC from 1976-1983.
 </p>
 <p>
 A Massachusetts native, Mekka moved to Los Angeles and ended up garnering a Tony nomination for his lead role in “The Lieutenant” on Broadway in 1975. 
 </p>
 <p>
 Mekka had roles on “The Love Boat,” “Family Matters,” “Guiding Light,” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
 </p>
 <p>
 CNN has reached out to Mekka’s representative for comment. 
 </p>
 </div>
 </main>
 </section>
</article>
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 Eddie Mekka, Carmine on ‘Laverne & Shirley,’ dead at 69

 By Chloe Melas , CNN
 Updated 6:14 PM EST, Thu December 2, 2021
 Link Copied!
 Penny Marshal and Eddie Mekka in a scene from "Laverne & Shirley."
 ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images
 CNN —

 Eddie Mekka, who found fame playing Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, on the hit series “Laverne & Shirley,” died Saturday at his home in Newhall, California, according to his official Facebook account.

 He was 69.

 No details on his cause of death were made immediately available.

 Mekka played Shirley’s love interest on the show.

 Cindy Williams, who played Shirley, tweeted, “My darling Eddie, A world-class talent who could do it all. I love you dearly. I’ll miss you so much. But oh the marvelous memories.”

 The hit series ran on ABC from 1976-1983.

 A Massachusetts native, Mekka moved to Los Angeles and ended up garnering a Tony nomination for his lead role in “The Lieutenant” on Broadway in 1975.

 Mekka had roles on “The Love Boat,” “Family Matters,” “Guiding Light,” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

 CNN has reached out to Mekka’s representative for comment.

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 Terms of Use Privacy Policy Ad Choices Accessibility & CC About Newsletters Transcripts

 © 2023 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved.
 CNN Sans ™ & © 2016 Cable News Network.

CNN
  — 
 
 
 Eddie Mekka, who found fame playing Carmine “The Big Ragoo” Ragusa, on the hit series “Laverne &amp; Shirley,” died Saturday at his home in Newhall, California, according to his official Facebook account.
 
 
 He was 69.
 
 
 No details on his cause of death were made immediately available. 
 
 
 Mekka played Shirley’s love interest on the show.
 
 
 Cindy Williams, who played Shirley, tweeted, “My darling Eddie, A world-class talent who could do it all. I love you dearly. I’ll miss you so much. But oh the marvelous memories.”
 
 
 The hit series ran on ABC from 1976-1983.
 
 
 A Massachusetts native, Mekka moved to Los Angeles and ended up garnering a Tony nomination for his lead role in “The Lieutenant” on Broadway in 1975. 
 
 
 Mekka had roles on “The Love Boat,” “Family Matters,” “Guiding Light,” and “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”
 
 
 CNN has reached out to Mekka’s representative for comment.
Eddie Mekka, Carmine on 'Laverne & Shirley,' dead at 69 | CNN
https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/02/entertainment/eddie-mekka-obit/index.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/oh-internet-you-wonderful-newsy-readable-lovely-internet/481500/
Reading This on Your Phone Right Now?
2016-05-06
Adrienne LaFrance
<div><article><header><div><div><p></p><h2>The Golden Age of Reading the News </h2><p></p><p>Small screens don't deter readers—even from longer articles.</p></div><div><figure><div></div><figcaption>Damir Sagolj / Reuters</figcaption></figure></div></div></header><section><p>People used to say no one would ever actually read anything substantial on their cellphones. Back when it seemed normal to hold up an awkwardly large, inky sheet of paper in front of your face, the screens on mobile devices appeared tiny and, frankly, kind of absurd.</p><p>My, how the tables have turned.</p><p>People are reading on their smartphones, and they are reading a lot. A <a href="http://www.journalism.org/2016/05/05/long-form-reading-shows-signs-of-life-in-our-mobile-news-world/">new Pew study</a> finds high levels of engagement among readers of longer news articles—those that run at least 1,000 words long, by Pew’s definition. (For context, this story clocks in around 600 words long.)</p><p>Researchers assessed anonymized data reflecting the behaviors of readers who interacted with nearly 75,000 articles across 30 news websites in September 2015, using metrics provided by the analytics firm Parse.ly. Which means Pew’s findings don’t reflect reader behavior across the entire web; though researchers did get a decent bit of variety—including online-only sites, legacy news sites, niche news sites, general news sites, and so on. They also looked at articles from several categories of coverage: entertainment, science, technology, politics, business, sports, crime, and so on.</p><p>All in all, they found cellphone users spend more time on average with longer articles. Which, at first blush, makes intuitive sense. Longer articles are, well, longer. So, sure, people take a longer to read them. But the larger takeaway is that not only are people are reading the news on their phones, they’re more engaged with longer articles. Pew found an average of 123 seconds of interaction time (scrolling, clicking, and presumably reading) for stories longer than 1,000 words compared with 57 seconds for stories shorter than 1,000 words. (Which, okay, even two minutes isn’t a very long time, but we’re talking averages here, and averages include the people who click then immediately stop reading.) “Readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form,” Pew said.</p><p>Relatedly, Pew found engaged time steadily goes up along with word count. Stories under 250 words garner an average of 43 seconds of engagement time; whereas stories that exceed 5,000 words draw people in for a whopping 270 seconds—or four-and-a-half minutes.</p><div><figure></figure></div><p>These findings become more interesting still when you consider the sea of articles people are choosing from. The vast majority are quite short, and yet people still choose to spend their time in more immersive stories. “Fully 76 percent of the articles studied were less than 1,000 words in length,” Pew wrote. “But, article for article, long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form.”</p><p>Three other interesting nuggets from the Pew study worth mentioning: First, cellphone readers tend to be early birds and night owls, doing most of their reading between 4 a.m. and 9:59 a.m., or between midnight at 3:59 a.m. Second, even though social media is a huge driver of traffic to articles of all lengths, accounting for about 40 percent of cellphone visits to new sites, people who reach news stories through portals like Facebook and Twitter are <em>less</em> likely to spend long periods of time engaged with those stories. And third, cellphone readers seem to be appreciating the Internet-content buffet for what it is. “An overwhelming majority of both long-form readers (72 percent) and short-form readers (79 percent) view just one article on a given site over the course of a month on their cellphone,” Pew said.</p><p>The bottom line is this: Cellphones aren’t dissuading people from reading longer news stories. “Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research, said in a statement about the research, “suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work.”</p></section></article>||||I|||| Skip to content

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 Technology

 The Golden Age of Reading the News

 Small screens don't deter readers—even from longer articles.

 By Adrienne LaFrance

 Damir Sagolj / Reuters

 May 6, 2016
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 People used to say no one would ever actually read anything substantial on their cellphones. Back when it seemed normal to hold up an awkwardly large, inky sheet of paper in front of your face, the screens on mobile devices appeared tiny and, frankly, kind of absurd.

 My, how the tables have turned.

 People are reading on their smartphones, and they are reading a lot. A new Pew study finds high levels of engagement among readers of longer news articles—those that run at least 1,000 words long, by Pew’s definition. (For context, this story clocks in around 600 words long.)

 Researchers assessed anonymized data reflecting the behaviors of readers who interacted with nearly 75,000 articles across 30 news websites in September 2015, using metrics provided by the analytics firm Parse.ly. Which means Pew’s findings don’t reflect reader behavior across the entire web; though researchers did get a decent bit of variety—including online-only sites, legacy news sites, niche news sites, general news sites, and so on. They also looked at articles from several categories of coverage: entertainment, science, technology, politics, business, sports, crime, and so on.

 All in all, they found cellphone users spend more time on average with longer articles. Which, at first blush, makes intuitive sense. Longer articles are, well, longer. So, sure, people take a longer to read them. But the larger takeaway is that not only are people are reading the news on their phones, they’re more engaged with longer articles. Pew found an average of 123 seconds of interaction time (scrolling, clicking, and presumably reading) for stories longer than 1,000 words compared with 57 seconds for stories shorter than 1,000 words. (Which, okay, even two minutes isn’t a very long time, but we’re talking averages here, and averages include the people who click then immediately stop reading.) “Readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form,” Pew said.

 Relatedly, Pew found engaged time steadily goes up along with word count. Stories under 250 words garner an average of 43 seconds of engagement time; whereas stories that exceed 5,000 words draw people in for a whopping 270 seconds—or four-and-a-half minutes.

 These findings become more interesting still when you consider the sea of articles people are choosing from. The vast majority are quite short, and yet people still choose to spend their time in more immersive stories. “Fully 76 percent of the articles studied were less than 1,000 words in length,” Pew wrote. “But, article for article, long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form.”

 Three other interesting nuggets from the Pew study worth mentioning: First, cellphone readers tend to be early birds and night owls, doing most of their reading between 4 a.m. and 9:59 a.m., or between midnight at 3:59 a.m. Second, even though social media is a huge driver of traffic to articles of all lengths, accounting for about 40 percent of cellphone visits to new sites, people who reach news stories through portals like Facebook and Twitter are less likely to spend long periods of time engaged with those stories. And third, cellphone readers seem to be appreciating the Internet-content buffet for what it is. “An overwhelming majority of both long-form readers (72 percent) and short-form readers (79 percent) view just one article on a given site over the course of a month on their cellphone,” Pew said.

 The bottom line is this: Cellphones aren’t dissuading people from reading longer news stories. “Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research, said in a statement about the research, “suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work.”

The Golden Age of Reading the News    Small screens don't deter readers—even from longer articles.      Damir Sagolj / Reuters      People used to say no one would ever actually read anything substantial on their cellphones. Back when it seemed normal to hold up an awkwardly large, inky sheet of paper in front of your face, the screens on mobile devices appeared tiny and, frankly, kind of absurd. My, how the tables have turned. People are reading on their smartphones, and they are reading a lot. A new Pew study finds high levels of engagement among readers of longer news articles—those that run at least 1,000 words long, by Pew’s definition. (For context, this story clocks in around 600 words long.) Researchers assessed anonymized data reflecting the behaviors of readers who interacted with nearly 75,000 articles across 30 news websites in September 2015, using metrics provided by the analytics firm Parse.ly. Which means Pew’s findings don’t reflect reader behavior across the entire web; though researchers did get a decent bit of variety—including online-only sites, legacy news sites, niche news sites, general news sites, and so on. They also looked at articles from several categories of coverage: entertainment, science, technology, politics, business, sports, crime, and so on. All in all, they found cellphone users spend more time on average with longer articles. Which, at first blush, makes intuitive sense. Longer articles are, well, longer. So, sure, people take a longer to read them. But the larger takeaway is that not only are people are reading the news on their phones, they’re more engaged with longer articles. Pew found an average of 123 seconds of interaction time (scrolling, clicking, and presumably reading) for stories longer than 1,000 words compared with 57 seconds for stories shorter than 1,000 words. (Which, okay, even two minutes isn’t a very long time, but we’re talking averages here, and averages include the people who click then immediately stop reading.) “Readers spend about twice the time with long-form news content on their cellphones as with short-form,” Pew said. Relatedly, Pew found engaged time steadily goes up along with word count. Stories under 250 words garner an average of 43 seconds of engagement time; whereas stories that exceed 5,000 words draw people in for a whopping 270 seconds—or four-and-a-half minutes.     These findings become more interesting still when you consider the sea of articles people are choosing from. The vast majority are quite short, and yet people still choose to spend their time in more immersive stories. “Fully 76 percent of the articles studied were less than 1,000 words in length,” Pew wrote. “But, article for article, long-form stories attract visitors at nearly the same rate as short-form.” Three other interesting nuggets from the Pew study worth mentioning: First, cellphone readers tend to be early birds and night owls, doing most of their reading between 4 a.m. and 9:59 a.m., or between midnight at 3:59 a.m. Second, even though social media is a huge driver of traffic to articles of all lengths, accounting for about 40 percent of cellphone visits to new sites, people who reach news stories through portals like Facebook and Twitter are less likely to spend long periods of time engaged with those stories. And third, cellphone readers seem to be appreciating the Internet-content buffet for what it is. “An overwhelming majority of both long-form readers (72 percent) and short-form readers (79 percent) view just one article on a given site over the course of a month on their cellphone,” Pew said. The bottom line is this: Cellphones aren’t dissuading people from reading longer news stories. “Instead, the average user tends to stay engaged past the point of where short-form reading would end,” Amy Mitchell, Pew Research Center’s director of journalism research, said in a statement about the research, “suggesting that readers may be willing to commit more time to a longer piece of work.”
Reading This on Your Phone Right Now?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/05/oh-internet-you-wonderful-newsy-readable-lovely-internet/481500/
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/contraceptive-pill-the-lowdown
The Untold Story of the Contraceptive Pill
2021-10-27
Condé Nast; Rachael Pells
<div><div><div><p><strong>ALICE PELTON WAS</strong> 16 years old when she first went on the pill. Like many teenagers, she found the thought of becoming pregnant terrifying, and starting a course of the combined hormonal contraceptive pill, prescribed by her GP, felt like a logical step.</p><p>In the months that followed, Pelton’s mood was all over the place. “I would have these uncontrollable outbursts and cry at really stupid things,” she recalls. “There were blazing arguments with very confused ex-boyfriends and family members… I also would get these really low lows – when it felt like I had a piece of gauze in my brain that stopped the serotonin flowing around it properly – and everything was really flat.”</p><p>Looking back, Pelton recognises that her reactions were extreme, her “emotions out of control”. But, given the stereotypes placed on teenagers, none of it seemed too extraordinary at the time.</p><p>Years later, she stopped taking the pill following a break-up and noticed a big difference. She felt calmer, more levelled. When she began a new relationship and went back on the pill, her equilibrium shifted once again. “It was like night and day. I had incredible mood swings, cried at silly things all the time… it only took a few days for my mum to turn to me and say: ‘You’ve really changed,’” she says. “That’s when I started to cotton on to what a huge impact these hormones had played on my emotions for years.”</p><p>Pelton battled with several different brands of contraceptive pill, as well as other hormonal contraceptives such as the IUD (an intrauterine contraceptive coil), but each came with its own unwelcome side effects. It seemed like an endless game of trial and error. Talking with her boyfriend about it over dinner one night, an idea began to take shape. What if there was a way for women to help one another out, to report and compare their experiences? “I can't believe we don't review our contraception like we do everything else,” she said.</p><p>Contraception, she realised, could be approached like any other data problem – but what she found online was a mess of uncollated information. She couldn’t even locate a place where all the different brands of pill were listed. Conversations were happening on forums such as Mumsnet and Reddit, confirming that she was far from alone in her struggle to find the right contraceptive, but the threads were often disjointed and confusing.</p><p>A product manager by trade, Pelton took inspiration from an unusual source: Fantasy Football gaming apps, which she’d helped to build in a previous job. “A lot of sport is very data rich, and with Fantasy Football it's all about making choices about the players in your teams and trying to impart a lot of information on a small screen – numbers and assists and points and so on,” she explains.</p></div><div><p>In 2019, she launched <a href="https://theldown.com/">The Lowdown</a>, a contraception review platform and online community which now has more than 80,000 users. The Lowdown’s website offers contraception advice and contains independent reviews of contraceptives contributed by visitors to the site – there are around 4,500 published testimonials so far – all of which can be compared and contrasted through filters such as user age, brand of pill and time spent using it. Pelton describes it as a “Tripadvisor for contraceptives”. The Lowdown also offers telemedicine GP appointments and an online pharmacy.</p><p>Although the platform covers all contraceptives, including non-hormonal options, the majority of reviews (65 per cent) relate to the pill, with the combined pill making up 42 per cent of the total. The reviews often focus on side effects – mood swings, weight gain, depression. But unlike other product review sites which typically attract reviews from consumers who have had an especially good or terrible experience, users tend to be pragmatic. “Just my experience – other women might find it works for them,” is a common sentiment.</p><p>The overall message is clear: despite the pill’s major societal impact, not to mention its enormous global market, for many people the product is simply not up to standard. Sixty years since its invention, the pill could use an update – and Pelton believes a more user-centric approach is what’s needed.</p><figure><p>Alice Pelton, founder of The Lowdown. The Pill has transformed women’s lives, but its prescription still involves much trial and errorKatie Burdon</p></figure></div><div><p><strong>SINCE IT FIRST</strong> came into UK circulation in 1961 (initially via prescription to married women only), the contraceptive pill has revolutionised women’s health and family planning, and is often hailed as the biggest single contributor towards gender equality to date. The combined pill is consistently the most popular prescribed contraceptive across the globe,<sup>1</sup> and in the UK more than three million women are prescribed either the combined pill or progesterone-only pill each year.<sup>2</sup></p><p>“We know that women choose the combined pill as their number one option compared to other hormonal contraceptive methods,” says Diana Mansour, a consultant gynaecologist and senior vice-chair of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She believes the pill’s popularity is down to sheer convenience. “It's easy, it's under their control,” she says. “Women can know when to expect their period or avoid them altogether – it's much more adaptable to our way of life.”</p><p>But like any therapeutic drug, contraceptive pills come with a wide range of potential side effects. Irregular or unpredictable menstrual bleeding, headaches, acne, weight gain, depression, anxiety and other mood changes are just some of the more common hazards listed in a typical pill pack’s patient guidance leaflet. A study of women in Europe and the US found that 20-30 per cent were dissatisfied with their contraception, and concerns about side effects were the number one reason why women stopped using the pill.<sup>3</sup></p><p>Women have been putting up with the unwelcome and unpredictable side effects of the pill since it was invented – such are the risks we are willing to take to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But as access to information widens, some are pushing back.</p><p>Sarah Hill, a social psychologist based in Texas, US, speaks loudly of her discontent. “Women will often say something like: ‘I love my new birth control. Now, it made me gain 25 pounds and I don't have sex anymore and my hair is falling out. But other than that, it's amazing!’” she says. “The parameters are so low, because a lot of it sucks so bad.” This sentiment is detailed in her book on the subject, <em>How the Pill Changes Everything</em>: <em>Your Brain on Birth Control</em>.</p></div><div><p>Much like Pelton, Hill felt compelled to look into reported side effects of the pill following her own epiphany coming off it after a sustained period of time. The irony, she notes, is that during the 12-13 years while she was on the pill, she was studying and researching hormones – “and yet I’d never considered until then that the hormones might be influencing my brain in any way.”</p><p>Her aim, she says, is to educate people – not to put them off the pill altogether. “I think there is a bit of an old-guard mentality that we shouldn’t criticise the pill because it’s too important,” she says. “But we can simultaneously critique something and be aware of its flaws, while also understanding that it doesn’t mean we should take it away as a choice... It’s time to demand better.”</p><p>It’s hardly surprising if people lack understanding about the way the pill works. “It’s fair to say many of us get way into adulthood without understanding even some of the basic questions around reproductive health and birth control,” says Frances Yarlett, a GP at an NHS practice in Sheffield and one of The Lowdown’s two medical directors. This is nothing to be ashamed of, she adds: hormones are complex, and the science behind the pill extends far beyond a typical secondary school sex education lesson.</p><p>Here’s a quick top-level recap: the combined oral contraceptive pill works by preventing the user’s ovaries from releasing an egg each month (ovulation). It does this by tricking the body into thinking it is already pregnant, since it contains artificial versions of two female hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, which are produced naturally in the ovaries. It also thickens the mucus in the opening of the uterus, making it harder for sperm to make their way through to an egg, and thins the lining of the womb, which makes it less likely for a fertilised egg to be able to stay put and grow.</p><p>Used properly, the pill is over 99 per cent effective in stopping unwanted pregnancy – an incredible success rate when compared to many other therapeutic drugs. The modern-day pill comes in the form of several dozen different brands, each with varying ratios of oestrogen and progesterone. “Having so many different brands allows us the option to change the type of pill based on the side effect profile for each individual,” Yarlett says. A higher concentration of oestrogen may more effectively prevent breakthrough bleeding, while a lower oestrogen content may help with symptoms such as bloating, breast pain or headaches.</p></div><div><p>The synthetic progesterone part of the combined pill (known as progestogen) can also impact the different side effects experienced. “Progestogen can be classed as ‘androgenic’,” says Yarlett. “This means they have a greater or lesser effect on the male hormone levels (testosterone) within the body.” More highly androgenic progestogens can be associated with side effects such as acne and mood changes, while anti-androgenic progestogens come with a higher risk of blood clots and have been found to reduce libido in some cases.</p><p>All this paints a fairly bleak picture, but Yarlett is pragmatic, pointing out that there are plenty of options and that some women experience no noticeable side effects at all. “Hormonal contraception can have many benefits such as improving skin, controlling heavy bleeding and reducing pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS),” she adds. “Mood swings can often be improved with how the contraception is taken and there is no proven evidence that [taking the pill] causes weight gain.” The trick, she says, is finding the right contraceptive for the right person.</p><p>Unfortunately, prescribers are not yet able to accurately predict how each patient will react to a particular pill until they start taking it. “The big problem is we can't yet screen women for any of their genetic makeups that may put them more at risk of severe side effects,” Mansour says. Patients also come with their own additional potential risks: family history, age and weight can all be contributing factors.</p><p>Taking these different factors into account, side effects are “an exceptionally difficult area to research,” Yarlett concludes. “Currently, we are stuck with a trial-and-error process for finding the most ideal contraceptive for each person.”</p><figure><p>Dani, 24, a writer and virtual assistant from London. “I wrote a blog for The Lowdown about my terrible experience of the implant. I was having three or four periods a month but I felt awkward going to the doctor about it . It was the feedback I got from The Lowdown community that made me realise people change their contraception all the time and we don’t have to put up with things. People speak about reproductive health much more, and personal anecdotes are so valuable. We need both the stories and the science.”Katie Burdon</p></figure></div><div><p><strong>IN AN AGE</strong> of rapid medical discovery, why are researchers yet to develop a better pill for everyone? It’s not so straightforward. “A lot of the research that's been done into the side effects of contraception is very inconclusive, and that’s because it’s inherently difficult to do,” says Mel Davis-Hall, clinical editor for the <em>British Medical Journal</em> and co-medical director for The Lowdown. Side effects like change in sex drive and mood are notoriously difficult to measure because they are “so inherently multifactorial,” she explains. “Women are living their lives, going through ups and downs as a result of all sorts of external factors, so you're not going to really get definitive answers.”</p><p>It’s here that The Lowdown has limitations: however detailed users’ reviews may be, their experiences are largely subjective, making the information gathered difficult to quantify for use in scientific studies.</p><p>Pelton contests this, however, pointing to the mass data collection exercise undertaken through NHS Track and Trace for the spread of Covid-19. “There is a bit of snobbery around what we’re doing with The Lowdown – the criticisms will always be that it’s based on self-reported, biased data. OK, but hang on a minute – aren't we also doing that with Covid-19? Hasn't that proved that millions of people can self-report and talk about side effects and be listened to? Why is contraception any different?”</p><p>Making contraceptive data comparison even more difficult is the fact that there is “a dearth of existing data around what women's periods are like normally,” Pelton says. “I think there is a fundamentally sexist attitude towards women self-reporting pain, self-reporting problems, self-reporting periods. Women are being ignored because there is this attitude that we are somehow less reliable. It’s complete bullshit.”</p><p>As well as allowing women to share their experiences and make more informed choices, Pelton hopes the Lowdown will be able to contribute to research into contraceptives, particularly when it comes to side effects – and perhaps even help to steer development of new options.</p><p>Frederik Petursson Madsen, a Danish entrepreneur and CEO of Cirqle Biomedical, got in touch with Pelton through The Lowdown because he, too, wanted to try something radical: actually asking women what they wanted from a contraceptive product. “The approach was really to understand what makes the ideal contraceptive and trying to find the technology to do it,” he says. “It is my impression that for the past few decades, innovation has been primarily driven from the research side by scientists in labs, not so much by the user perspective.”</p></div><div><p>Petursson Madsen began brainstorming ideas for new contraceptives when his girlfriend wanted to come off the pill due to unwanted side effects. He believes that the lack of innovation in contraceptive design is down to a degree of ignorance among big investors – who are predominantly men. “I wasn't really aware of the problem,” he admits. “It didn't take long before I realised I wouldn't want to use hormonal contraception either. It just intuitively seemed wrong, something that should be improved. There are not many other areas in which you have a product that's so important for society and where the existing standard of care is so outdated.”</p><p>His team sought out specialist consultants working in hospitals and sexual health clinics to report back on conversations they had with more than 1,000 women about their contraceptive experiences. “That confirmed the problem at a much larger scale than we had imagined,” he says. The feedback also suggested a trend in women moving away from the combined pill, “especially when it comes to the mental health-side effects driving it”.</p><p>From here, the group arranged a series of workshops, led by Marie Lyhne, Cirqle Biomedical’s design manager. Participants were asked what they liked and disliked about different contraceptive methods, including the pill and condom, as well as what they believed the perfect solution might look like. “We quickly found out that they wanted something that was effective but didn’t interrupt the act,” says Lyhne.</p><p>Cirqle’s proposed product is Oui, a hormone-free gel capsule designed to mimic the natural barrier of cervical mucus which sits between the vagina and the uterus. Studies of the gel in action have been positive so far: researchers reported a 100 per cent success rate in sperm blockage in a lab setting. But Oui is yet to make it to human trials, and the company has struggled to secure investment to help it get there – something Petursson Madsen again blames on the gender gap. “The challenge is finding investors who are aware of this kind of need, which might seem surprising, but as a man, it's not something you are typically very aware of,” he says. “It’s definitely something we need to educate investors on.”</p><p>Indeed, one of the biggest barriers facing reproductive healthcare is a lack of investment in research for contraceptive development, combined with a lack of research into women’s health more broadly. An open letter published in <em>Nature</em> by a group of leading advisors into global women’s health in 2020 outlines an inconsistency in the fact that the contraceptive market seems to be healthy and growing, valued at $24bn (£17bn) in 2018 – and yet “women’s health issues, and their preferences, are simply under-studied and under-funded, and unmet needs are ignored and misunderstood by those who could work to address these issues.”</p></div><div><p>Pharmaceutical companies typically spend around 20 per cent of their sales revenue on research into new products, but for contraceptive products the expenditure is just two per cent – most of which is estimated to be focused on existing formulas rather than new alternatives.<sup>4</sup> While many of the same pills prescribed today have been in circulation for decades (Microgynon, the combined hormonal pill most commonly prescribed to first-timers in the UK, dates back to 1966)<sup>5</sup>, some more recent attempts have been made to produce pills with fewer risks of side effects. Loestrin, introduced in 2011, quickly became one of the world’s top-selling brands because it offered the lowest amount of daily oestrogen available, but the product was discontinued in 2019. For the people impacted, no straight swap was available on account of there being no other combined pill with exactly the same amounts of progestogen and oestrogen.<sup>6</sup> Loestrin’s distribution company, Galen, released a statement citing manufacturing issues and said that the company was unable to comment any further.<sup>7</sup></p><p>Despite the booming market, taking risks with new studies is something many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to do. “With contraceptive research, you're effectively taking healthy young women and putting them at risk of an unintended pregnancy if the contraception that you're trying doesn't work,” says Davis-Hall. Several high-profile cases have been recorded against leading contraceptive manufacturers in recent years, resulting in huge multimillion-dollar settlements. In 2002, Johnson &amp; Johnson launched Ortho Evra, a contraceptive patch designed to release hormones through the skin gradually as an alternative to the oral pill. Six years later, the company had reportedly paid out more than $68m to settle lawsuits brought by women who said they suffered serious side-effects including blood clots and stroke.<sup>8</sup></p><p>A hormonal contraceptive injection for men, meanwhile, was found to have 100 per cent efficacy in clinical trials, but side effects caused 20 men to drop out and the trial was halted.<sup>9</sup> More recently, a contraceptive pill for men passed initial human safety tests in 2019, but researchers say it could be a decade before such a product is ready for sale.</p><figure><p>Emily, 21, a recent graduate from Durham. “I was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2019, and the only treatment for symptoms apart from surgery is birth control. I had a bad run of side effects on the pill, but when I went to see a gynaecologist about it, she took my weight gain a lot more seriously than my mental health. It made me lose my trust in doctors for a while. I had an online appointment with Dr Fran, and I felt she saw me as a whole package. She gave me an action plan, which I’d never had before, and followed up with me over email to see how I was getting on.”Katie Burdon</p></figure></div><div><p><strong>FOR THE TIME BEING</strong>, the pill remains popular as one of the few reliable options available to women. It is crucial, therefore, that users get access to the best possible prescription and accompanying information to suit them.</p><p>This is one area where The Lowdown already hopes to help. Visitors to the website can search for a particular contraceptive brand or method, read up on its ingredients and reported side effects, or learn more about how to take it. They also have the option of filling in a short questionnaire to receive a recommendation for other contraceptive brands that might suit them, based on their previous experiences. If they like, they can book a private, 20-minute video consultation with medical experts for £37. “When you think the typical GP consultation is up to ten minutes to cover multiple problems as well as deal with administrative tasks, it’s not really long enough,” says Yarlett, who heads up the telemedicine division.</p><p>Online pharmacy dispensing increased 45 per cent in 2020, in part due to Covid-19 making in-person GP appointments more difficult. Pelton says she has seen a huge growth in sales of the pill through The Lowdown, but customers cite stock issues as one of the biggest reasons for going private – a problem which existed before the pandemic. “It’s really common for a woman to have used one brand for many years, move to another region or town and then suddenly find they can’t get hold of it anymore,” she explains. Manufacturers and distributors can experience broader supply problems too; when we speak in summer 2021, she says that women are going from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of progestogen-only pill Noriday, which is having stock issues.</p><p>Pelton and her team believe that the future of contraception will see more data-rich, personalised medical care that blends NHS services with online resources. “An awful lot of how we can support the NHS is by giving women better access to information and data before or after their appointment,” says Yarlett.</p><p>As part of her work with The Lowdown, she is also working to build an algorithm that she hopes could help women to understand their symptoms better as part of a larger consultation package. “The idea is that a woman can input her contraceptive method and her side effect or symptom,” she explains. “From this, she will be directed to either see a GP or healthcare professional for more investigations – with an explanation of which investigations and why we're doing them – or she will receive advice on how she can improve this side effect herself.” This could include changing the way she takes the pill, advising a change in oestrogen level or progestogen type, or trying an alternative form of contraception.</p></div><div><p>Yarlett hopes that this will help women to understand their own bodies and feel more in control of their contraception and health. She adds that such an algorithm may be classed as a medical device and could be regulated by the MHRA, which The Lowdown is looking into. “Personally, I feel allowing women to have access to this information and the thought process will increase user satisfaction of contraceptives and overall improved health outcomes,” she says.</p><p>One other idea is to share information recorded on The Lowdown with consenting patients’ GPs, as a way of saving time during NHS appointments and building more detailed patient profiles to help with diagnoses. “We're all trying to get to the same thing here, which is helping women make their own decisions, that they feel well informed and use their contraception properly.”</p><p>Public health officials have already taken note of The Lowdown; the company was approached by NHS England in 2021 to talk to women and answer some common queries about getting the vaccine while pregnant. “That was fantastic to do, and a great sign that we are not only building trust with women but we're also building trust with the NHS,” says Pelton. “It helps that we’ve already got a super engaged community of women who trust us, and we're able to talk to them in a much more free way than maybe NHS communications officials – who need lots of sign-offs for everything – can.”</p><p>Pharmaceutical companies have also begun to contact The Lowdown directly for market research into improving their products, and in June, the company provided data from 2,000 survey responses towards the UK government’s call for evidence on reproductive health.<sup>10</sup></p><p>For the time being, Pelton runs the startup from a co-working space in Brixton, central London, with a permanent workspace being set up in Waterloo. The Lowdown has begun to make a small but steady income from its telemedicine offering, and this year secured backing from health tech investors Calm/Storm VC and Nina Capital, as well as a host of independent tech entrepreneurs. The money is being used to rebuild the online platform for an autumn relaunch and work on expanding The Lowdown internationally.</p><p>Pelton hopes that, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s to take women’s healthcare – and the symptoms they report – more seriously. “I’ll say it to everyone until I’m blue in the face: listen to what women are telling you,” she says. “In the absence of real gold standard clinical research, self-reported reviews are the best we've got.”</p><hr /><p><strong>More great stories from WIRED</strong></p><ul><li>☀️ Sign-up to WIRED’s climate briefing: <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/newsletters/chasing-zero?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">Get Chasing Zero</a></li><li>Finally! A cryptocurrency for everyone <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/worldcoin-cryptocurrency-sam-altman?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">on the planet</a></li><li>AirPods 3 aren’t headphones. And that’s <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/apple-airpods-3?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">the point</a></li><li>The science that could help you <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/how-to-live-longer?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">live to 100</a></li><li>Want some new sneakers? 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 Photography Katie Burdon

 Rachael Pells

 Science
 27.10.2021 06:00 AM

 The Untold Story of the Contraceptive Pill

 Frustrated by a lack of information around birth control, Alice Pelton founded The Lowdown, a review platform and resource for contraception that’s run by women, for women.
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 ALICE PELTON WAS 16 years old when she first went on the pill. Like many teenagers, she found the thought of becoming pregnant terrifying, and starting a course of the combined hormonal contraceptive pill, prescribed by her GP, felt like a logical step.

 In the months that followed, Pelton’s mood was all over the place. “I would have these uncontrollable outbursts and cry at really stupid things,” she recalls. “There were blazing arguments with very confused ex-boyfriends and family members… I also would get these really low lows – when it felt like I had a piece of gauze in my brain that stopped the serotonin flowing around it properly – and everything was really flat.”

 Looking back, Pelton recognises that her reactions were extreme, her “emotions out of control”. But, given the stereotypes placed on teenagers, none of it seemed too extraordinary at the time.

 Years later, she stopped taking the pill following a break-up and noticed a big difference. She felt calmer, more levelled. When she began a new relationship and went back on the pill, her equilibrium shifted once again. “It was like night and day. I had incredible mood swings, cried at silly things all the time… it only took a few days for my mum to turn to me and say: ‘You’ve really changed,’” she says. “That’s when I started to cotton on to what a huge impact these hormones had played on my emotions for years.”

 Pelton battled with several different brands of contraceptive pill, as well as other hormonal contraceptives such as the IUD (an intrauterine contraceptive coil), but each came with its own unwelcome side effects. It seemed like an endless game of trial and error. Talking with her boyfriend about it over dinner one night, an idea began to take shape. What if there was a way for women to help one another out, to report and compare their experiences? “I can't believe we don't review our contraception like we do everything else,” she said.

 Contraception, she realised, could be approached like any other data problem – but what she found online was a mess of uncollated information. She couldn’t even locate a place where all the different brands of pill were listed. Conversations were happening on forums such as Mumsnet and Reddit, confirming that she was far from alone in her struggle to find the right contraceptive, but the threads were often disjointed and confusing.

 A product manager by trade, Pelton took inspiration from an unusual source: Fantasy Football gaming apps, which she’d helped to build in a previous job. “A lot of sport is very data rich, and with Fantasy Football it's all about making choices about the players in your teams and trying to impart a lot of information on a small screen – numbers and assists and points and so on,” she explains.

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 In 2019, she launched The Lowdown, a contraception review platform and online community which now has more than 80,000 users. The Lowdown’s website offers contraception advice and contains independent reviews of contraceptives contributed by visitors to the site – there are around 4,500 published testimonials so far – all of which can be compared and contrasted through filters such as user age, brand of pill and time spent using it. Pelton describes it as a “Tripadvisor for contraceptives”. The Lowdown also offers telemedicine GP appointments and an online pharmacy.

 Although the platform covers all contraceptives, including non-hormonal options, the majority of reviews (65 per cent) relate to the pill, with the combined pill making up 42 per cent of the total. The reviews often focus on side effects – mood swings, weight gain, depression. But unlike other product review sites which typically attract reviews from consumers who have had an especially good or terrible experience, users tend to be pragmatic. “Just my experience – other women might find it works for them,” is a common sentiment.

 The overall message is clear: despite the pill’s major societal impact, not to mention its enormous global market, for many people the product is simply not up to standard. Sixty years since its invention, the pill could use an update – and Pelton believes a more user-centric approach is what’s needed.

 Alice Pelton, founder of The Lowdown. The Pill has transformed women’s lives, but its prescription still involves much trial and error Katie Burdon

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 SINCE IT FIRST came into UK circulation in 1961 (initially via prescription to married women only), the contraceptive pill has revolutionised women’s health and family planning, and is often hailed as the biggest single contributor towards gender equality to date. The combined pill is consistently the most popular prescribed contraceptive across the globe,1 and in the UK more than three million women are prescribed either the combined pill or progesterone-only pill each year.2

 “We know that women choose the combined pill as their number one option compared to other hormonal contraceptive methods,” says Diana Mansour, a consultant gynaecologist and senior vice-chair of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She believes the pill’s popularity is down to sheer convenience. “It's easy, it's under their control,” she says. “Women can know when to expect their period or avoid them altogether – it's much more adaptable to our way of life.”

 But like any therapeutic drug, contraceptive pills come with a wide range of potential side effects. Irregular or unpredictable menstrual bleeding, headaches, acne, weight gain, depression, anxiety and other mood changes are just some of the more common hazards listed in a typical pill pack’s patient guidance leaflet. A study of women in Europe and the US found that 20-30 per cent were dissatisfied with their contraception, and concerns about side effects were the number one reason why women stopped using the pill.3

 Women have been putting up with the unwelcome and unpredictable side effects of the pill since it was invented – such are the risks we are willing to take to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But as access to information widens, some are pushing back.

 Sarah Hill, a social psychologist based in Texas, US, speaks loudly of her discontent. “Women will often say something like: ‘I love my new birth control. Now, it made me gain 25 pounds and I don't have sex anymore and my hair is falling out. But other than that, it's amazing!’” she says. “The parameters are so low, because a lot of it sucks so bad.” This sentiment is detailed in her book on the subject, How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control.

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 Much like Pelton, Hill felt compelled to look into reported side effects of the pill following her own epiphany coming off it after a sustained period of time. The irony, she notes, is that during the 12-13 years while she was on the pill, she was studying and researching hormones – “and yet I’d never considered until then that the hormones might be influencing my brain in any way.”

 Her aim, she says, is to educate people – not to put them off the pill altogether. “I think there is a bit of an old-guard mentality that we shouldn’t criticise the pill because it’s too important,” she says. “But we can simultaneously critique something and be aware of its flaws, while also understanding that it doesn’t mean we should take it away as a choice... It’s time to demand better.”

 It’s hardly surprising if people lack understanding about the way the pill works. “It’s fair to say many of us get way into adulthood without understanding even some of the basic questions around reproductive health and birth control,” says Frances Yarlett, a GP at an NHS practice in Sheffield and one of The Lowdown’s two medical directors. This is nothing to be ashamed of, she adds: hormones are complex, and the science behind the pill extends far beyond a typical secondary school sex education lesson.

 Here’s a quick top-level recap: the combined oral contraceptive pill works by preventing the user’s ovaries from releasing an egg each month (ovulation). It does this by tricking the body into thinking it is already pregnant, since it contains artificial versions of two female hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, which are produced naturally in the ovaries. It also thickens the mucus in the opening of the uterus, making it harder for sperm to make their way through to an egg, and thins the lining of the womb, which makes it less likely for a fertilised egg to be able to stay put and grow.

 Used properly, the pill is over 99 per cent effective in stopping unwanted pregnancy – an incredible success rate when compared to many other therapeutic drugs. The modern-day pill comes in the form of several dozen different brands, each with varying ratios of oestrogen and progesterone. “Having so many different brands allows us the option to change the type of pill based on the side effect profile for each individual,” Yarlett says. A higher concentration of oestrogen may more effectively prevent breakthrough bleeding, while a lower oestrogen content may help with symptoms such as bloating, breast pain or headaches.

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 The synthetic progesterone part of the combined pill (known as progestogen) can also impact the different side effects experienced. “Progestogen can be classed as ‘androgenic’,” says Yarlett. “This means they have a greater or lesser effect on the male hormone levels (testosterone) within the body.” More highly androgenic progestogens can be associated with side effects such as acne and mood changes, while anti-androgenic progestogens come with a higher risk of blood clots and have been found to reduce libido in some cases.

 All this paints a fairly bleak picture, but Yarlett is pragmatic, pointing out that there are plenty of options and that some women experience no noticeable side effects at all. “Hormonal contraception can have many benefits such as improving skin, controlling heavy bleeding and reducing pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS),” she adds. “Mood swings can often be improved with how the contraception is taken and there is no proven evidence that [taking the pill] causes weight gain.” The trick, she says, is finding the right contraceptive for the right person.

 Unfortunately, prescribers are not yet able to accurately predict how each patient will react to a particular pill until they start taking it. “The big problem is we can't yet screen women for any of their genetic makeups that may put them more at risk of severe side effects,” Mansour says. Patients also come with their own additional potential risks: family history, age and weight can all be contributing factors.

 Taking these different factors into account, side effects are “an exceptionally difficult area to research,” Yarlett concludes. “Currently, we are stuck with a trial-and-error process for finding the most ideal contraceptive for each person.”

 Dani, 24, a writer and virtual assistant from London. “I wrote a blog for The Lowdown about my terrible experience of the implant. I was having three or four periods a month but I felt awkward going to the doctor about it . It was the feedback I got from The Lowdown community that made me realise people change their contraception all the time and we don’t have to put up with things. People speak about reproductive health much more, and personal anecdotes are so valuable. We need both the stories and the science.” Katie Burdon

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 IN AN AGE of rapid medical discovery, why are researchers yet to develop a better pill for everyone? It’s not so straightforward. “A lot of the research that's been done into the side effects of contraception is very inconclusive, and that’s because it’s inherently difficult to do,” says Mel Davis-Hall, clinical editor for the British Medical Journal and co-medical director for The Lowdown. Side effects like change in sex drive and mood are notoriously difficult to measure because they are “so inherently multifactorial,” she explains. “Women are living their lives, going through ups and downs as a result of all sorts of external factors, so you're not going to really get definitive answers.”

 It’s here that The Lowdown has limitations: however detailed users’ reviews may be, their experiences are largely subjective, making the information gathered difficult to quantify for use in scientific studies.

 Pelton contests this, however, pointing to the mass data collection exercise undertaken through NHS Track and Trace for the spread of Covid-19. “There is a bit of snobbery around what we’re doing with The Lowdown – the criticisms will always be that it’s based on self-reported, biased data. OK, but hang on a minute – aren't we also doing that with Covid-19? Hasn't that proved that millions of people can self-report and talk about side effects and be listened to? Why is contraception any different?”

 Making contraceptive data comparison even more difficult is the fact that there is “a dearth of existing data around what women's periods are like normally,” Pelton says. “I think there is a fundamentally sexist attitude towards women self-reporting pain, self-reporting problems, self-reporting periods. Women are being ignored because there is this attitude that we are somehow less reliable. It’s complete bullshit.”

 As well as allowing women to share their experiences and make more informed choices, Pelton hopes the Lowdown will be able to contribute to research into contraceptives, particularly when it comes to side effects – and perhaps even help to steer development of new options.

 Frederik Petursson Madsen, a Danish entrepreneur and CEO of Cirqle Biomedical, got in touch with Pelton through The Lowdown because he, too, wanted to try something radical: actually asking women what they wanted from a contraceptive product. “The approach was really to understand what makes the ideal contraceptive and trying to find the technology to do it,” he says. “It is my impression that for the past few decades, innovation has been primarily driven from the research side by scientists in labs, not so much by the user perspective.”

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 Petursson Madsen began brainstorming ideas for new contraceptives when his girlfriend wanted to come off the pill due to unwanted side effects. He believes that the lack of innovation in contraceptive design is down to a degree of ignorance among big investors – who are predominantly men. “I wasn't really aware of the problem,” he admits. “It didn't take long before I realised I wouldn't want to use hormonal contraception either. It just intuitively seemed wrong, something that should be improved. There are not many other areas in which you have a product that's so important for society and where the existing standard of care is so outdated.”

 His team sought out specialist consultants working in hospitals and sexual health clinics to report back on conversations they had with more than 1,000 women about their contraceptive experiences. “That confirmed the problem at a much larger scale than we had imagined,” he says. The feedback also suggested a trend in women moving away from the combined pill, “especially when it comes to the mental health-side effects driving it”.

 From here, the group arranged a series of workshops, led by Marie Lyhne, Cirqle Biomedical’s design manager. Participants were asked what they liked and disliked about different contraceptive methods, including the pill and condom, as well as what they believed the perfect solution might look like. “We quickly found out that they wanted something that was effective but didn’t interrupt the act,” says Lyhne.

 Cirqle’s proposed product is Oui, a hormone-free gel capsule designed to mimic the natural barrier of cervical mucus which sits between the vagina and the uterus. Studies of the gel in action have been positive so far: researchers reported a 100 per cent success rate in sperm blockage in a lab setting. But Oui is yet to make it to human trials, and the company has struggled to secure investment to help it get there – something Petursson Madsen again blames on the gender gap. “The challenge is finding investors who are aware of this kind of need, which might seem surprising, but as a man, it's not something you are typically very aware of,” he says. “It’s definitely something we need to educate investors on.”

 Indeed, one of the biggest barriers facing reproductive healthcare is a lack of investment in research for contraceptive development, combined with a lack of research into women’s health more broadly. An open letter published in Nature by a group of leading advisors into global women’s health in 2020 outlines an inconsistency in the fact that the contraceptive market seems to be healthy and growing, valued at $24bn (£17bn) in 2018 – and yet “women’s health issues, and their preferences, are simply under-studied and under-funded, and unmet needs are ignored and misunderstood by those who could work to address these issues.”

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 Pharmaceutical companies typically spend around 20 per cent of their sales revenue on research into new products, but for contraceptive products the expenditure is just two per cent – most of which is estimated to be focused on existing formulas rather than new alternatives.4 While many of the same pills prescribed today have been in circulation for decades (Microgynon, the combined hormonal pill most commonly prescribed to first-timers in the UK, dates back to 1966)5, some more recent attempts have been made to produce pills with fewer risks of side effects. Loestrin, introduced in 2011, quickly became one of the world’s top-selling brands because it offered the lowest amount of daily oestrogen available, but the product was discontinued in 2019. For the people impacted, no straight swap was available on account of there being no other combined pill with exactly the same amounts of progestogen and oestrogen.6 Loestrin’s distribution company, Galen, released a statement citing manufacturing issues and said that the company was unable to comment any further.7

 Despite the booming market, taking risks with new studies is something many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to do. “With contraceptive research, you're effectively taking healthy young women and putting them at risk of an unintended pregnancy if the contraception that you're trying doesn't work,” says Davis-Hall. Several high-profile cases have been recorded against leading contraceptive manufacturers in recent years, resulting in huge multimillion-dollar settlements. In 2002, Johnson & Johnson launched Ortho Evra, a contraceptive patch designed to release hormones through the skin gradually as an alternative to the oral pill. Six years later, the company had reportedly paid out more than $68m to settle lawsuits brought by women who said they suffered serious side-effects including blood clots and stroke.8

 A hormonal contraceptive injection for men, meanwhile, was found to have 100 per cent efficacy in clinical trials, but side effects caused 20 men to drop out and the trial was halted.9 More recently, a contraceptive pill for men passed initial human safety tests in 2019, but researchers say it could be a decade before such a product is ready for sale.

 Emily, 21, a recent graduate from Durham. “I was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2019, and the only treatment for symptoms apart from surgery is birth control. I had a bad run of side effects on the pill, but when I went to see a gynaecologist about it, she took my weight gain a lot more seriously than my mental health. It made me lose my trust in doctors for a while. I had an online appointment with Dr Fran, and I felt she saw me as a whole package. She gave me an action plan, which I’d never had before, and followed up with me over email to see how I was getting on.” Katie Burdon

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 FOR THE TIME BEING, the pill remains popular as one of the few reliable options available to women. It is crucial, therefore, that users get access to the best possible prescription and accompanying information to suit them.

 This is one area where The Lowdown already hopes to help. Visitors to the website can search for a particular contraceptive brand or method, read up on its ingredients and reported side effects, or learn more about how to take it. They also have the option of filling in a short questionnaire to receive a recommendation for other contraceptive brands that might suit them, based on their previous experiences. If they like, they can book a private, 20-minute video consultation with medical experts for £37. “When you think the typical GP consultation is up to ten minutes to cover multiple problems as well as deal with administrative tasks, it’s not really long enough,” says Yarlett, who heads up the telemedicine division.

 Online pharmacy dispensing increased 45 per cent in 2020, in part due to Covid-19 making in-person GP appointments more difficult. Pelton says she has seen a huge growth in sales of the pill through The Lowdown, but customers cite stock issues as one of the biggest reasons for going private – a problem which existed before the pandemic. “It’s really common for a woman to have used one brand for many years, move to another region or town and then suddenly find they can’t get hold of it anymore,” she explains. Manufacturers and distributors can experience broader supply problems too; when we speak in summer 2021, she says that women are going from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of progestogen-only pill Noriday, which is having stock issues.

 Pelton and her team believe that the future of contraception will see more data-rich, personalised medical care that blends NHS services with online resources. “An awful lot of how we can support the NHS is by giving women better access to information and data before or after their appointment,” says Yarlett.

 As part of her work with The Lowdown, she is also working to build an algorithm that she hopes could help women to understand their symptoms better as part of a larger consultation package. “The idea is that a woman can input her contraceptive method and her side effect or symptom,” she explains. “From this, she will be directed to either see a GP or healthcare professional for more investigations – with an explanation of which investigations and why we're doing them – or she will receive advice on how she can improve this side effect herself.” This could include changing the way she takes the pill, advising a change in oestrogen level or progestogen type, or trying an alternative form of contraception.

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 * 

 Yarlett hopes that this will help women to understand their own bodies and feel more in control of their contraception and health. She adds that such an algorithm may be classed as a medical device and could be regulated by the MHRA, which The Lowdown is looking into. “Personally, I feel allowing women to have access to this information and the thought process will increase user satisfaction of contraceptives and overall improved health outcomes,” she says.

 One other idea is to share information recorded on The Lowdown with consenting patients’ GPs, as a way of saving time during NHS appointments and building more detailed patient profiles to help with diagnoses. “We're all trying to get to the same thing here, which is helping women make their own decisions, that they feel well informed and use their contraception properly.”

 Public health officials have already taken note of The Lowdown; the company was approached by NHS England in 2021 to talk to women and answer some common queries about getting the vaccine while pregnant. “That was fantastic to do, and a great sign that we are not only building trust with women but we're also building trust with the NHS,” says Pelton. “It helps that we’ve already got a super engaged community of women who trust us, and we're able to talk to them in a much more free way than maybe NHS communications officials – who need lots of sign-offs for everything – can.”

 Pharmaceutical companies have also begun to contact The Lowdown directly for market research into improving their products, and in June, the company provided data from 2,000 survey responses towards the UK government’s call for evidence on reproductive health.10

 For the time being, Pelton runs the startup from a co-working space in Brixton, central London, with a permanent workspace being set up in Waterloo. The Lowdown has begun to make a small but steady income from its telemedicine offering, and this year secured backing from health tech investors Calm/Storm VC and Nina Capital, as well as a host of independent tech entrepreneurs. The money is being used to rebuild the online platform for an autumn relaunch and work on expanding The Lowdown internationally.

 Pelton hopes that, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s to take women’s healthcare – and the symptoms they report – more seriously. “I’ll say it to everyone until I’m blue in the face: listen to what women are telling you,” she says. “In the absence of real gold standard clinical research, self-reported reviews are the best we've got.”

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ALICE PELTON WAS 16 years old when she first went on the pill. Like many teenagers, she found the thought of becoming pregnant terrifying, and starting a course of the combined hormonal contraceptive pill, prescribed by her GP, felt like a logical step. In the months that followed, Pelton’s mood was all over the place. “I would have these uncontrollable outbursts and cry at really stupid things,” she recalls. “There were blazing arguments with very confused ex-boyfriends and family members… I also would get these really low lows – when it felt like I had a piece of gauze in my brain that stopped the serotonin flowing around it properly – and everything was really flat.” Looking back, Pelton recognises that her reactions were extreme, her “emotions out of control”. But, given the stereotypes placed on teenagers, none of it seemed too extraordinary at the time. Years later, she stopped taking the pill following a break-up and noticed a big difference. She felt calmer, more levelled. When she began a new relationship and went back on the pill, her equilibrium shifted once again. “It was like night and day. I had incredible mood swings, cried at silly things all the time… it only took a few days for my mum to turn to me and say: ‘You’ve really changed,’” she says. “That’s when I started to cotton on to what a huge impact these hormones had played on my emotions for years.” Pelton battled with several different brands of contraceptive pill, as well as other hormonal contraceptives such as the IUD (an intrauterine contraceptive coil), but each came with its own unwelcome side effects. It seemed like an endless game of trial and error. Talking with her boyfriend about it over dinner one night, an idea began to take shape. What if there was a way for women to help one another out, to report and compare their experiences? “I can't believe we don't review our contraception like we do everything else,” she said. Contraception, she realised, could be approached like any other data problem – but what she found online was a mess of uncollated information. She couldn’t even locate a place where all the different brands of pill were listed. Conversations were happening on forums such as Mumsnet and Reddit, confirming that she was far from alone in her struggle to find the right contraceptive, but the threads were often disjointed and confusing. A product manager by trade, Pelton took inspiration from an unusual source: Fantasy Football gaming apps, which she’d helped to build in a previous job. “A lot of sport is very data rich, and with Fantasy Football it's all about making choices about the players in your teams and trying to impart a lot of information on a small screen – numbers and assists and points and so on,” she explains.   In 2019, she launched The Lowdown, a contraception review platform and online community which now has more than 80,000 users. The Lowdown’s website offers contraception advice and contains independent reviews of contraceptives contributed by visitors to the site – there are around 4,500 published testimonials so far – all of which can be compared and contrasted through filters such as user age, brand of pill and time spent using it. Pelton describes it as a “Tripadvisor for contraceptives”. The Lowdown also offers telemedicine GP appointments and an online pharmacy. Although the platform covers all contraceptives, including non-hormonal options, the majority of reviews (65 per cent) relate to the pill, with the combined pill making up 42 per cent of the total. The reviews often focus on side effects – mood swings, weight gain, depression. But unlike other product review sites which typically attract reviews from consumers who have had an especially good or terrible experience, users tend to be pragmatic. “Just my experience – other women might find it works for them,” is a common sentiment. The overall message is clear: despite the pill’s major societal impact, not to mention its enormous global market, for many people the product is simply not up to standard. Sixty years since its invention, the pill could use an update – and Pelton believes a more user-centric approach is what’s needed.  Alice Pelton, founder of The Lowdown. The Pill has transformed women’s lives, but its prescription still involves much trial and errorKatie Burdon     SINCE IT FIRST came into UK circulation in 1961 (initially via prescription to married women only), the contraceptive pill has revolutionised women’s health and family planning, and is often hailed as the biggest single contributor towards gender equality to date. The combined pill is consistently the most popular prescribed contraceptive across the globe,1 and in the UK more than three million women are prescribed either the combined pill or progesterone-only pill each year.2  “We know that women choose the combined pill as their number one option compared to other hormonal contraceptive methods,” says Diana Mansour, a consultant gynaecologist and senior vice-chair of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare at the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists. She believes the pill’s popularity is down to sheer convenience. “It's easy, it's under their control,” she says. “Women can know when to expect their period or avoid them altogether – it's much more adaptable to our way of life.” But like any therapeutic drug, contraceptive pills come with a wide range of potential side effects. Irregular or unpredictable menstrual bleeding, headaches, acne, weight gain, depression, anxiety and other mood changes are just some of the more common hazards listed in a typical pill pack’s patient guidance leaflet. A study of women in Europe and the US found that 20-30 per cent were dissatisfied with their contraception, and concerns about side effects were the number one reason why women stopped using the pill.3  Women have been putting up with the unwelcome and unpredictable side effects of the pill since it was invented – such are the risks we are willing to take to avoid unwanted pregnancy. But as access to information widens, some are pushing back. Sarah Hill, a social psychologist based in Texas, US, speaks loudly of her discontent. “Women will often say something like: ‘I love my new birth control. Now, it made me gain 25 pounds and I don't have sex anymore and my hair is falling out. But other than that, it's amazing!’” she says. “The parameters are so low, because a lot of it sucks so bad.” This sentiment is detailed in her book on the subject, How the Pill Changes Everything: Your Brain on Birth Control.   Much like Pelton, Hill felt compelled to look into reported side effects of the pill following her own epiphany coming off it after a sustained period of time. The irony, she notes, is that during the 12-13 years while she was on the pill, she was studying and researching hormones – “and yet I’d never considered until then that the hormones might be influencing my brain in any way.” Her aim, she says, is to educate people – not to put them off the pill altogether. “I think there is a bit of an old-guard mentality that we shouldn’t criticise the pill because it’s too important,” she says. “But we can simultaneously critique something and be aware of its flaws, while also understanding that it doesn’t mean we should take it away as a choice... It’s time to demand better.” It’s hardly surprising if people lack understanding about the way the pill works. “It’s fair to say many of us get way into adulthood without understanding even some of the basic questions around reproductive health and birth control,” says Frances Yarlett, a GP at an NHS practice in Sheffield and one of The Lowdown’s two medical directors. This is nothing to be ashamed of, she adds: hormones are complex, and the science behind the pill extends far beyond a typical secondary school sex education lesson. Here’s a quick top-level recap: the combined oral contraceptive pill works by preventing the user’s ovaries from releasing an egg each month (ovulation). It does this by tricking the body into thinking it is already pregnant, since it contains artificial versions of two female hormones, oestrogen and progesterone, which are produced naturally in the ovaries. It also thickens the mucus in the opening of the uterus, making it harder for sperm to make their way through to an egg, and thins the lining of the womb, which makes it less likely for a fertilised egg to be able to stay put and grow. Used properly, the pill is over 99 per cent effective in stopping unwanted pregnancy – an incredible success rate when compared to many other therapeutic drugs. The modern-day pill comes in the form of several dozen different brands, each with varying ratios of oestrogen and progesterone. “Having so many different brands allows us the option to change the type of pill based on the side effect profile for each individual,” Yarlett says. A higher concentration of oestrogen may more effectively prevent breakthrough bleeding, while a lower oestrogen content may help with symptoms such as bloating, breast pain or headaches.   The synthetic progesterone part of the combined pill (known as progestogen) can also impact the different side effects experienced. “Progestogen can be classed as ‘androgenic’,” says Yarlett. “This means they have a greater or lesser effect on the male hormone levels (testosterone) within the body.” More highly androgenic progestogens can be associated with side effects such as acne and mood changes, while anti-androgenic progestogens come with a higher risk of blood clots and have been found to reduce libido in some cases. All this paints a fairly bleak picture, but Yarlett is pragmatic, pointing out that there are plenty of options and that some women experience no noticeable side effects at all. “Hormonal contraception can have many benefits such as improving skin, controlling heavy bleeding and reducing pre-menstrual syndrome (PMS),” she adds. “Mood swings can often be improved with how the contraception is taken and there is no proven evidence that [taking the pill] causes weight gain.” The trick, she says, is finding the right contraceptive for the right person. Unfortunately, prescribers are not yet able to accurately predict how each patient will react to a particular pill until they start taking it. “The big problem is we can't yet screen women for any of their genetic makeups that may put them more at risk of severe side effects,” Mansour says. Patients also come with their own additional potential risks: family history, age and weight can all be contributing factors. Taking these different factors into account, side effects are “an exceptionally difficult area to research,” Yarlett concludes. “Currently, we are stuck with a trial-and-error process for finding the most ideal contraceptive for each person.”  Dani, 24, a writer and virtual assistant from London. “I wrote a blog for The Lowdown about my terrible experience of the implant. I was having three or four periods a month but I felt awkward going to the doctor about it . It was the feedback I got from The Lowdown community that made me realise people change their contraception all the time and we don’t have to put up with things. People speak about reproductive health much more, and personal anecdotes are so valuable. We need both the stories and the science.”Katie Burdon     IN AN AGE of rapid medical discovery, why are researchers yet to develop a better pill for everyone? It’s not so straightforward. “A lot of the research that's been done into the side effects of contraception is very inconclusive, and that’s because it’s inherently difficult to do,” says Mel Davis-Hall, clinical editor for the British Medical Journal and co-medical director for The Lowdown. Side effects like change in sex drive and mood are notoriously difficult to measure because they are “so inherently multifactorial,” she explains. “Women are living their lives, going through ups and downs as a result of all sorts of external factors, so you're not going to really get definitive answers.” It’s here that The Lowdown has limitations: however detailed users’ reviews may be, their experiences are largely subjective, making the information gathered difficult to quantify for use in scientific studies. Pelton contests this, however, pointing to the mass data collection exercise undertaken through NHS Track and Trace for the spread of Covid-19. “There is a bit of snobbery around what we’re doing with The Lowdown – the criticisms will always be that it’s based on self-reported, biased data. OK, but hang on a minute – aren't we also doing that with Covid-19? Hasn't that proved that millions of people can self-report and talk about side effects and be listened to? Why is contraception any different?” Making contraceptive data comparison even more difficult is the fact that there is “a dearth of existing data around what women's periods are like normally,” Pelton says. “I think there is a fundamentally sexist attitude towards women self-reporting pain, self-reporting problems, self-reporting periods. Women are being ignored because there is this attitude that we are somehow less reliable. It’s complete bullshit.” As well as allowing women to share their experiences and make more informed choices, Pelton hopes the Lowdown will be able to contribute to research into contraceptives, particularly when it comes to side effects – and perhaps even help to steer development of new options. Frederik Petursson Madsen, a Danish entrepreneur and CEO of Cirqle Biomedical, got in touch with Pelton through The Lowdown because he, too, wanted to try something radical: actually asking women what they wanted from a contraceptive product. “The approach was really to understand what makes the ideal contraceptive and trying to find the technology to do it,” he says. “It is my impression that for the past few decades, innovation has been primarily driven from the research side by scientists in labs, not so much by the user perspective.”   Petursson Madsen began brainstorming ideas for new contraceptives when his girlfriend wanted to come off the pill due to unwanted side effects. He believes that the lack of innovation in contraceptive design is down to a degree of ignorance among big investors – who are predominantly men. “I wasn't really aware of the problem,” he admits. “It didn't take long before I realised I wouldn't want to use hormonal contraception either. It just intuitively seemed wrong, something that should be improved. There are not many other areas in which you have a product that's so important for society and where the existing standard of care is so outdated.” His team sought out specialist consultants working in hospitals and sexual health clinics to report back on conversations they had with more than 1,000 women about their contraceptive experiences. “That confirmed the problem at a much larger scale than we had imagined,” he says. The feedback also suggested a trend in women moving away from the combined pill, “especially when it comes to the mental health-side effects driving it”. From here, the group arranged a series of workshops, led by Marie Lyhne, Cirqle Biomedical’s design manager. Participants were asked what they liked and disliked about different contraceptive methods, including the pill and condom, as well as what they believed the perfect solution might look like. “We quickly found out that they wanted something that was effective but didn’t interrupt the act,” says Lyhne. Cirqle’s proposed product is Oui, a hormone-free gel capsule designed to mimic the natural barrier of cervical mucus which sits between the vagina and the uterus. Studies of the gel in action have been positive so far: researchers reported a 100 per cent success rate in sperm blockage in a lab setting. But Oui is yet to make it to human trials, and the company has struggled to secure investment to help it get there – something Petursson Madsen again blames on the gender gap. “The challenge is finding investors who are aware of this kind of need, which might seem surprising, but as a man, it's not something you are typically very aware of,” he says. “It’s definitely something we need to educate investors on.” Indeed, one of the biggest barriers facing reproductive healthcare is a lack of investment in research for contraceptive development, combined with a lack of research into women’s health more broadly. An open letter published in Nature by a group of leading advisors into global women’s health in 2020 outlines an inconsistency in the fact that the contraceptive market seems to be healthy and growing, valued at $24bn (£17bn) in 2018 – and yet “women’s health issues, and their preferences, are simply under-studied and under-funded, and unmet needs are ignored and misunderstood by those who could work to address these issues.”   Pharmaceutical companies typically spend around 20 per cent of their sales revenue on research into new products, but for contraceptive products the expenditure is just two per cent – most of which is estimated to be focused on existing formulas rather than new alternatives.4 While many of the same pills prescribed today have been in circulation for decades (Microgynon, the combined hormonal pill most commonly prescribed to first-timers in the UK, dates back to 1966)5, some more recent attempts have been made to produce pills with fewer risks of side effects. Loestrin, introduced in 2011, quickly became one of the world’s top-selling brands because it offered the lowest amount of daily oestrogen available, but the product was discontinued in 2019. For the people impacted, no straight swap was available on account of there being no other combined pill with exactly the same amounts of progestogen and oestrogen.6 Loestrin’s distribution company, Galen, released a statement citing manufacturing issues and said that the company was unable to comment any further.7  Despite the booming market, taking risks with new studies is something many pharmaceutical companies are hesitant to do. “With contraceptive research, you're effectively taking healthy young women and putting them at risk of an unintended pregnancy if the contraception that you're trying doesn't work,” says Davis-Hall. Several high-profile cases have been recorded against leading contraceptive manufacturers in recent years, resulting in huge multimillion-dollar settlements. In 2002, Johnson &amp; Johnson launched Ortho Evra, a contraceptive patch designed to release hormones through the skin gradually as an alternative to the oral pill. Six years later, the company had reportedly paid out more than $68m to settle lawsuits brought by women who said they suffered serious side-effects including blood clots and stroke.8  A hormonal contraceptive injection for men, meanwhile, was found to have 100 per cent efficacy in clinical trials, but side effects caused 20 men to drop out and the trial was halted.9 More recently, a contraceptive pill for men passed initial human safety tests in 2019, but researchers say it could be a decade before such a product is ready for sale.  Emily, 21, a recent graduate from Durham. “I was diagnosed with endometriosis in 2019, and the only treatment for symptoms apart from surgery is birth control. I had a bad run of side effects on the pill, but when I went to see a gynaecologist about it, she took my weight gain a lot more seriously than my mental health. It made me lose my trust in doctors for a while. I had an online appointment with Dr Fran, and I felt she saw me as a whole package. She gave me an action plan, which I’d never had before, and followed up with me over email to see how I was getting on.”Katie Burdon     FOR THE TIME BEING, the pill remains popular as one of the few reliable options available to women. It is crucial, therefore, that users get access to the best possible prescription and accompanying information to suit them. This is one area where The Lowdown already hopes to help. Visitors to the website can search for a particular contraceptive brand or method, read up on its ingredients and reported side effects, or learn more about how to take it. They also have the option of filling in a short questionnaire to receive a recommendation for other contraceptive brands that might suit them, based on their previous experiences. If they like, they can book a private, 20-minute video consultation with medical experts for £37. “When you think the typical GP consultation is up to ten minutes to cover multiple problems as well as deal with administrative tasks, it’s not really long enough,” says Yarlett, who heads up the telemedicine division. Online pharmacy dispensing increased 45 per cent in 2020, in part due to Covid-19 making in-person GP appointments more difficult. Pelton says she has seen a huge growth in sales of the pill through The Lowdown, but customers cite stock issues as one of the biggest reasons for going private – a problem which existed before the pandemic. “It’s really common for a woman to have used one brand for many years, move to another region or town and then suddenly find they can’t get hold of it anymore,” she explains. Manufacturers and distributors can experience broader supply problems too; when we speak in summer 2021, she says that women are going from pharmacy to pharmacy in search of progestogen-only pill Noriday, which is having stock issues. Pelton and her team believe that the future of contraception will see more data-rich, personalised medical care that blends NHS services with online resources. “An awful lot of how we can support the NHS is by giving women better access to information and data before or after their appointment,” says Yarlett. As part of her work with The Lowdown, she is also working to build an algorithm that she hopes could help women to understand their symptoms better as part of a larger consultation package. “The idea is that a woman can input her contraceptive method and her side effect or symptom,” she explains. “From this, she will be directed to either see a GP or healthcare professional for more investigations – with an explanation of which investigations and why we're doing them – or she will receive advice on how she can improve this side effect herself.” This could include changing the way she takes the pill, advising a change in oestrogen level or progestogen type, or trying an alternative form of contraception.   Yarlett hopes that this will help women to understand their own bodies and feel more in control of their contraception and health. She adds that such an algorithm may be classed as a medical device and could be regulated by the MHRA, which The Lowdown is looking into. “Personally, I feel allowing women to have access to this information and the thought process will increase user satisfaction of contraceptives and overall improved health outcomes,” she says. One other idea is to share information recorded on The Lowdown with consenting patients’ GPs, as a way of saving time during NHS appointments and building more detailed patient profiles to help with diagnoses. “We're all trying to get to the same thing here, which is helping women make their own decisions, that they feel well informed and use their contraception properly.” Public health officials have already taken note of The Lowdown; the company was approached by NHS England in 2021 to talk to women and answer some common queries about getting the vaccine while pregnant. “That was fantastic to do, and a great sign that we are not only building trust with women but we're also building trust with the NHS,” says Pelton. “It helps that we’ve already got a super engaged community of women who trust us, and we're able to talk to them in a much more free way than maybe NHS communications officials – who need lots of sign-offs for everything – can.” Pharmaceutical companies have also begun to contact The Lowdown directly for market research into improving their products, and in June, the company provided data from 2,000 survey responses towards the UK government’s call for evidence on reproductive health.10  For the time being, Pelton runs the startup from a co-working space in Brixton, central London, with a permanent workspace being set up in Waterloo. The Lowdown has begun to make a small but steady income from its telemedicine offering, and this year secured backing from health tech investors Calm/Storm VC and Nina Capital, as well as a host of independent tech entrepreneurs. The money is being used to rebuild the online platform for an autumn relaunch and work on expanding The Lowdown internationally. Pelton hopes that, if there is a lesson to be learned from the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s to take women’s healthcare – and the symptoms they report – more seriously. “I’ll say it to everyone until I’m blue in the face: listen to what women are telling you,” she says. “In the absence of real gold standard clinical research, self-reported reviews are the best we've got.”   More great stories from WIRED   ☀️ Sign-up to WIRED’s climate briefing: Get Chasing Zero  Finally! A cryptocurrency for everyone on the planet  AirPods 3 aren’t headphones. And that’s the point  The science that could help you live to 100  Want some new sneakers? These are the best trainers  The horse, the drone and the fight for gambling success  The race to grab all the UK’s lithium before it’s too late  Glaciers are melting. One ski resort is fighting back  🔊 Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. New episodes every Friday
The Untold Story of the Contraceptive Pill
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/contraceptive-pill-the-lowdown
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/david-attenborough-climate-crisis
David Attenborough’s Unending Mission to Save Our Planet
2021-12-02
Condé Nast; Stephen Armstrong
<div><div><div><p><strong>WE MAKE LOTS</strong> of programs about natural history, but the basis of all life is plants.” Sir David Attenborough is at Kew Gardens on a cloudy, overcast August day waiting to deliver his final piece to camera for his latest natural history epic, <em>The Green Planet</em>. Planes roar overhead, constantly interrupting filming, and he keeps putting his jacket on during pauses. “We ignore them because they don’t seem to do much, but they can be very vicious things,” he says. “Plants throttle one another, you know—they can move very fast, have all sorts of strange techniques to make sure that they can disperse themselves over a whole continent, have many ways of meeting so they can fertilize one another and we never actually see it happening.” He smiles. “But now we can.”</p><p>Attenborough occupies a unique place in the world. Born on May 8, 1926, the year before television was invented, he is as close to a secular saint as we are likely to see, respected by scientists, entertainers, activists, politicians, and—hardest of all to please—kids and teenagers.</p><p>In 2018, he was voted the most popular person in the UK in <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/topics/entertainment/articles-reports/2018/11/07/david-attenborough-most-popular-person-britain">a YouGov poll</a>. So many Chinese viewers downloaded <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/blue-planet-2-technology-david-attenborough"><em>Blue Planet II</em></a> “that it temporarily slowed down the country’s internet,” according to the <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-quick-to-soak-up-blue-planet-3nh8h9zfl"><em>Sunday Times</em></a>. In 2019, Attenborough’s series <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/our-planet-netflix-david-attenborough"><em>Our Planet</em></a> became Netflix’s most-watched original documentary, viewed by 33 million people in its first month, and the <a href="https://www.nme.com/festivals/glastonbury/nice-see-david-attenborough-flesh-glastonbury-not-used-platform-wisely-2519913"><em>NME</em> reported</a> that his appearance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage where he thanked the crowd for accepting the festival’s no-single-use-plastic policy attracted the weekend’s third-largest crowd after Stormzy and The Killers.</p><p>On September 24, 2020, the 95-year-old broke the Guinness World Record for attracting 1 million followers just four hours and 44 minutes after <a href="https://www.instagram.com/davidattenborough/">he joined Instagram</a>, beating the previous record holder, Jennifer Aniston, by over 30 minutes. His first post was a video clip where he set out his reasons for signing up. “The world is in trouble,” he explained, standing in front of a row of trees at dusk in a light blue shirt and emphasizing each point with a sorrowful shake of the head. “Continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans. But we know what to do about it, and that’s why I’m tackling this new way, for me, of communication. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be explaining what the problems are and what we can do. Join me.”</p><p>The public response was so overwhelming that he left the platform 27 posts and just over a month later, after being inundated with messages. He’s always tried to reply to every communication he receives and can just about manage the 70 snail-mail letters he gets every day. Wherever he appears—wherever his team at the BBC’s Natural History Unit point their lenses—hundreds of millions of people will be watching. And right now, in the year of <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cop26-climate-change-numbers">COP26</a>, <em>The Green Planet</em> hopes to do for plants what Attenborough has done for oceans and animals … create understanding and encourage us to care.</p></div><div><p><em>The Green Planet</em>, as is typical with all Attenborough/BBC Natural History Unit productions, contains a number of firsts—technical firsts, scientific firsts, and just a few never-before-seen firsts. But it also includes one great reprise. Attenborough is out in the field again for the first time since 2008’s <em>Life in Cold Blood</em>, traveling to rainforests and deserts and revisiting some places he passed through decades ago.</p><p>Two moments stand out. In the first, Attenborough is explaining the biology of the seven-hour flower—Brazil’s Passion Flower, <em>Passiflora mucronate</em>, which opens around 1 am and closes again sometime between 7 am and 10 am. The white, long-stalked flower is pollinated by bats which gorge on its nectar, allowing pollen to brush on the bats’ heads. As Attenborough watches one flower open, a bat appears and flutters up to feed. Attenborough laughs with delight.</p><p>Later, the series examines the creosote bush, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth at 12,000 years old. A desert dweller, it’s adapted to the harsh conditions by preserving energy and water through an incredibly slow rate of growth—1 millimeter a year. The team at the Natural History Unit used Attenborough’s long experience to illustrate something even the slowest time lapse camera would struggle to capture.</p><p>“Sir David went to this particular desert and to a particular creosote bush when he did <em>Life on Earth</em> in 1979,” Mike Gunton, the BBC’s Natural History Unit’s creative director, explains. “We’ve gone back to exactly the same creosote bush and had David stand in exactly the same place and matched the shot from 1979 with the shot in 2019. So, we’ve used his human lifetime to illustrate how slowly this plant has grown. We’ve used the fact that he has traveled the world throughout his life on a number of occasions. He bears witness to the changes, and I think it’s rather lovely, actually.”</p><p>For the rest of the footage the unit turned to what it does best—hacking brand new equipment and pushing it to extreme limits in a bid to film the previously unfilmable and bring the hidden aspects of the natural world to our screens.</p><p>Previous firsts include the unit using the high-speed Phantom camera, which can shoot 2,000 frames per second, in 2012 to prove that a chameleon’s tongue isn’t sticky but muscular, wrapping itself around its prey rather than adhering to it. Or hacking the RED Epic Monochrome, a black-and-white camera with a sensor that can film 300 frames per second (an iPhone films at 25 frames per second), removing the cut-pass filter, which filters out infrared light from camera chips as it can blur color images. This added sensitivity to a night shoot in the Gobi Desert, allowing the third-ever filming of the long-eared <a href="https://www.wired.com/2015/09/absurd-creature-week-tiny-adorable-critter-half-kangaroo-half-velociraptor/">jerboa</a>, a rodent less than ten centimeters long and entirely nocturnal.</p></div><div><p>Plants may seem less complicated—and less exciting—than a near-invisible nocturnal rodent in a vast Mongolian desert, but the unit’s approach intends to prove otherwise. The best place to show this is in a Devon farmhouse with a robot called Otto and a hunter-killer vine that’s slaughtering its prey.</p><p>“We have cameras that can take a demonstration of a parasitic plant throttling another plant to death. It’s dramatic stuff,” Attenborough says gleefully.</p><figure><p>Mike Gunton, creative director of the BBC Natural History Unit and a long-time collaborator with David Attenborough.Photograph: Benedict Redgrove</p></figure><p><strong>WHEN FILMING A PREDATOR</strong> closing in for the kill, the BBC’s Natural History Unit always needs to improvise. For 2018’s <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/filming-big-cats-bbc-tv-programme-wildlife"><em>Big Cats</em></a>, director-producer Nick Easton adapted a buggy called the Mantis. He attached a Phantom Flex high-speed camera, originally designed as a lab tool for ballistics and particle imaging, to a remote-controlled trolley that could race alongside a cheetah at 100 kph, capturing every detail of a kill.</p><p>In early September 2021, the NHU is filming a predator just as vicious—the dodder—using technology that didn’t exist back in 2018. The dodder, C<em>uscuta europaea</em>, a k a strangleweed or the devil’s hair, is a parasitic plant. When a dodder seed germinates, it doesn’t take root and it cannot photosynthesize—instead it “sniffs,” by methods still unclear, certain chemicals released by nearby plants and grows toward them. So sophisticated is the dodder’s “nose” that it can differentiate between species and grow toward favored hosts like the nettle. It then wraps itself around the host and sinks tendrils into the stem to steal nutrients and water. It even picks up signals that the host plant is about to flower and opens its own rival petals.</p></div><div><p>The unit is filming one such attack on a nettle. To do this, they’re using an invention known as the botanical time-lapse robot, nicknamed the Otto, which tackles a slightly different set of problems to the Mantis. The Otto is a huge robotic gantry with a multi-axis arm attached to a multi-axis hand holding a camera. The gantry, arms, and gears can move the camera at high speed to any point on the X, Y, or Z axis—an effect that resembles the fairground claw grabber in that it can move freely through three dimensions, but with high precision and the ability to rotate the camera through any axis as well.</p><p>“The problem with filming plants is that you need the result to be as fluid and smooth as when you film animals,” explains Gunton, the scruffy, bespectacled, and genial creative director of the unit. His route to the role is fairly typical for unit staff. He has a degree in zoology and a doctorate in behavioral anatomy; he experimented with a Super 8 camera and, while at Cambridge, sold short films about life at the university to Japanese businessmen; then ended up at the BBC after shooting a trip to Sri Lanka.</p><p>Since 1990, Gunton has helped oversee the unit grow to become the world’s largest producer of wildlife programs, with 450 staff currently working on over 25 productions for the BBC, Apple TV, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and NBC. Every new program presents new takes on the same challenge—when filming the natural world, it doesn’t follow a director’s orders. “We use time-lapse photography to shoot plants,” Gunton explains. “But plants don’t do what you expect them to do. So, you set up a shot, find the plant’s gone somewhere else, and everything is wasted. It’s a very expensive, very time-consuming, very slow process.”</p><p>Preparing for the unit’s forthcoming <em>The Green Planet</em> series, producer Paul Williams spent a lot of time on crowdfunding websites to solve problems like this—“when I’m starting a series it’s the best place to find lots of people tinkering with gadgets,” he says—and came across a dead link for a strange new time-lapse system developed by an ex-military engineer called Chris Field who lived in Colorado. Williams sent off a speculative email, Field sent back some footage, and a few weeks later Williams was in a suburban basement in Denver.</p></div><div><figure><p>Photograph: Benedict Redgrove</p></figure><p>“He’d built this giant canopy, and in the square space in the middle his camera went anywhere he instructed it to,” Williams recalls gleefully. “He had carnivorous plants sitting in the middle, and he’d written sophisticated software which can move the camera around, rotate, roll, tilt, all of that at any speed at any time. We can get close-ups, we can get wide shots, we can get moving shots—it’s like five motion-controlled cameras all moving around the same subject. So, if we want to capture one plant grabbing another in an aggressive fighting scene, we can cover it from five different angles with just one camera.”</p><p>Right now, Field’s Otto robot is in a farmhouse in Devon belonging to Tim Shepherd, the quiet, precise enthusiast who pioneered time-lapse on <em>The Private Life of Plants</em> five years ago. He makes an odd pairing with Chris Field, whose arms are covered in tattoos of carnivorous plants, but the two of them set about helping Gunton achieve a brief that began as little more than a hunch.</p><p>“We wanted to cover plants in the <em>Planet Earth</em> series, so we went to Kew Gardens with a treatment full of things we wanted to capture plants doing like ‘fight,’ ‘think,’ ‘count,’ all animal-type words, and they were all in inverted commas,” Gunton says. “They said, great, but you can take all those inverted commas out. Plants do all of that, just in a different time frame. That’s been our mantra for <em>The Green Planet</em>—that the only difference between plants and animals is that they move on a different time frame.”</p></div><div><p>In order to capture this, they’re pushing technology from the simple to the surreal. Williams found a microscope in California that can film 10-micron-wide stomata—the minute openings in plant leaves and stems that allow carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor to diffuse in and out of plant tissues, opening and closing to illustrate photosynthesis. And then there are drones.</p><p>The unit pioneered the use of drones in filming, deploying them in 2011’s <em>Earthflight</em>, a good year before the first movie, 2012’s <em>Skyfall</em>, used them to shoot James Bond in a motorbike chase across the rooftop of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. For some <em>Green Planet</em> shots, however, drones were prohibited due to local air traffic regulations, so Williams adapted a window-cleaning pole into a lightweight extendible boom called the Emu with the body of a broken drone at the end and a drone camera hanging underneath.</p><p>The real drone challenge for <em>The Green Planet</em>, says Gunton, was hacking people, not technology. “We used FPV drones, racing drones, which have a camera pointing forward,” he explains. “The pilots are like computer gamers and have these extraordinary assault courses where they have to fly crazy acrobatics. What we wanted them to do is use all that incredible dexterous skill to be able to operate those drones in the most incredibly micro-detailed way, but take the foot off the gas pedal.”</p><p>The result is footage that appears much the same as a sweeping drone shot in any big-budget movie or TV program, showing events that take hours flying by at apparently normal speed. For the real “red in tooth and claw” stuff, however, time-lapse cameras were the only option. Williams, Field, and the unit engineers set about hacking the Otto robot, eventually coming up with the Triffid, which uses the same technology Field created attached to an extendible ladder known as a slider. At full extension, the Triffid stands 2.1 meters high, but can quickly swoop down to ground level. Williams then spent more time on kickstarter sites and came across a 24-mm probe lens—slim enough to enter an insect-sized hole.</p><p>Combining the Triffid and the super-slimline probe lens resulted in an astonishing sequence in the first tropical forest episode, which follows leaf cutter ants carrying their excised cargo from the high branches of the rainforest, down along a crowded trail and into their underground lair, where they feed leaf fragments to a carefully tended fungus garden.</p><p>“It’s a three-and-a-half-minute sequence that meant programming the Triffid with 7,000 individual camera positions,” Williams says. “But then you always want to push further and smaller, so I found a scientist in Austria who has a scanning electron microscope system, and this allowed us to do motion-controlled shots around a single fungal spore. It’s essentially taking photogrammetry, a trick from the computer-gaming industry which takes 10,000 photographs of a rock and uses software to turn all those images into a 3D rock that’s photorealistic in every possible way. We’re able to create an interactive 3D video of a spore or leaf fragment, to get closer than ever before.”</p></div><div><p>Back in Shepherd’s basement, Mike Gunton has the first edited clip of the dodder’s attack—a long, thin tendril circling the nettle before sending out probes, which pierce the stem and suck the life out of the plant. Speeded up, there’s something grotesque about the tentacle of doom that crushes to death a plant known for its expertise in self-defense.</p><p>“I brought it to David,” Gunton says, with a beam like an excited kid. “This is really the key moment in any innovation we try. Sir David has seen everything. He’s been everywhere in the world many times over; he’s watched pretty much everything the natural world can do, and so what drives us is the desire to bring him something new. The greatest pleasure you get in this job is what happened when I brought him this film—it’s showing some footage to David Attenborough and having him say, ‘I’ve never seen that before, that’s pretty innovative.’”</p><figure><p>Director and time-lapse photographer Tim Shepherd in a “jungle” environment in his Devon studio. The week before, this was set up as a lily pond. The camera has been fitted with a slim probe lens that can move inside the foliage without disturbing itPhotograph: Benedict Redgrove</p></figure><p><strong>ATTENBOROUGH’S BELIEF IN</strong> the importance of innovation, coupled with a delight in storytelling and respectful treatment of the world, is at the heart of the Natural History Unit. He was reluctant to give WIRED an interview that dwelled too much on his career to date. He wanted to avoid any living obituaries. He would talk about current projects and new technology, but he stressed he was still working and had no plans to retire. All the same, his route here helps understand why the unit is technically savvy, globally successful, scientifically relevant, and increasingly vocal about the dangers of environmental threats like <a href="https://www.wired.com/category/science/environment-climate-change/">climate change</a>.</p></div><div><p>David Attenborough joined the BBC as a trainee in 1952, having only ever watched one television program. His love of the natural world and his fascination with innovation were both part of his upbringing, and he graduated in zoology and geology from Cambridge. He was conscripted into the navy and worked in publishing before applying to the BBC, where his early career included the high-octane round-table debate <em>Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?</em>, but, then aged 28, he decided he wanted to take advantage of the smaller 16-mm film cameras used on battlefields by war correspondents. “A desire to exploit the latest technical innovation has been the defining stimulus of almost every major television series I have ever made,” he explains. “The first was television’s ability to get acceptable images from 16-mm film. Until 1952 it had to use 35-mm, the size used by cinemas. The cameras were mounted on bicycle wheels and had valves inside.”</p><figure><p>Solar-powered cameras are prepared by crew for on-location installation, to capture footage without the presence of humans.Photograph: Benedict Redgrove</p></figure><p>In 1954, he traveled to Sierra Leone with Jack Lester, London Zoo’s curator of reptiles, and cameraman Charles Lagus to film a new series, <em>Zoo Quest</em>, using a 16-mm camera—despite the BBC initially vetoing the lightweight camera as “beneath contempt.” Attenborough was the producer, director, sound recordist, and animal wrangler for the series, and only ended up appearing on screen after Lester was taken ill. <em>Zoo Quest</em> brought rare animals—including chimpanzees, pythons, and birds of paradise—into viewers’ living rooms and proved that wildlife programs could attract big audiences. The lighter camera allowed Lagus the mobility to capture shots of animals and places that television viewing audiences had never seen before and meant Attenborough was the first person to catch the elusive Komodo dragon on film.</p></div><div><p>His timing couldn’t have been better. The study of animals in the wild, or ethology, is arguably humanity’s oldest science—we have practiced it since nomadic people tried to predict the behavior of hunted animals. Until the publication of the first modern ethology textbook (<em>The Study of Instinct</em>, by Nikolaas Tinbergen) in 1951, however, field work wasn’t an important part of zoology. Tinbergen, a Dutch biologist, pioneered the study of animals outside the laboratory and moved to the UK after the Second World War to teach at Oxford, where his students included Richard Dawkins and zoologist and TV presenter Desmond Morris.</p><p>Although Attenborough wasn’t a student of Tinbergen, their work overlapped—indeed, Tinbergen’s approach inspired Attenborough and Attenborough invited Tinbergen to host shows for the unit. Many of Tinbergen’s students ended up working for the NHU helping create a new kind of wildlife television—ethology in action.</p><p>At the same time, Attenborough was continuing to innovate in television technology and program format. The only person to have won BAFTAs for programs produced in black and white, color, HD, and 3D, he’s also the reason tennis balls are bright yellow. As controller of BBC Two, Attenborough oversaw the first-ever color television broadcasts in Europe in 1967, including that summer’s coverage of the Wimbledon tournament.</p><p>“There were only three people with color sets, which were the size of a refrigerator,” he recalls with a slight smile. He is reserved and thoughtful in interviews, watching intently as questions are asked, then delivering precise answers with careful nods of the head. “The chief engineer at the BBC and I had two of them. We watched a program called <em>Late Night Line-Up</em> every night on BBC Two in color. We used to ring up one another in the morning and say what we thought. The chief engineer was a Scotsman, was very realistic, and all he was interested in was if the face looked natural. And after about three weeks, he thought the skin tone was finally fine, so he rang me up and said, ‘Tomorrow, we should go for a bowl of fruit.’”</p><p>At that time, tennis balls were either white or black—just as they had been since the 1800s. After watching a game, Attenborough suggested yellow tennis balls would be easier for viewers to follow in color; in 1972, the International Tennis Federation accepted his suggestion. His tenure at BBC Two also saw him commission a series of so-called “sledgehammer” projects—epic series of 10 or more parts that covered subjects in depth, starting with history and anthropology in shows like <em>Civilisation</em> and <em>The Ascent of Man</em>. With the NHU producer Christopher Parsons he started working up the first natural history sledgehammer, <em>Life on Earth</em>. A series of BBC promotions—first to director of programs, followed by an offer to become director general—took him away from program-making, so he resigned in 1973 to work on the show, which finally aired in 1979.</p></div><div><p>With its extraordinary wildlife images and compelling story tracing the path of evolution, <em>Life on Earth</em> reached an estimated global audience of 500 million. A scene where Attenborough encounters a female mountain gorilla in Rwanda, which reaches out and embraces him, remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of television. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know,” he ad-libbed.</p><p>The wildlife documentary changed forever—and the NHU began its evolution from being just another department at the BBC to what the movie industry trade paper <em>Variety</em> dubs “Green Hollywood.”</p><p><strong>FOR SOME YEARS</strong>, environmental activists like George Monbiot, who started his career at the NHU, have criticized the BBC and Attenborough for being Green Hollywood in style rather than substance. Monbiot argued that showing the natural world without the context of human harm was ignoring the perils the planet faces. This began to change in the 21st century. <em>State of the Planet</em> in 2000, as well as 2006’s <em>The Truth About Climate Change</em>, 2007’s <em>Saving Planet Earth,</em> and 2009’s <em>How Many People Can Live on Our Planet?</em> all saw Attenborough and the team deal with the effects of global heating, overpopulation, and endangered species.</p><p>“I think that really gathered pace with <em>Planet Earth II</em> in 2016,” Gunton says. “We had stories about human effects on the environment and audiences were saying ‘we want more.’ The response gave us the confidence to turn the dial up with <em>Blue Planet,</em> and now the challenge is to keep the story fresh. There’s a gratifying fire in the belly of the young generation of filmmakers.”</p><p><em>Blue Planet II</em> is best known for its explicit environmental message—in particular its depiction of the effects of marine plastic pollution. This influenced the UK government to extend a charge on using plastic carrier bags, which has been credited with a decrease in their use by 83 percent, and to set an ambitious target to eliminate avoidable plastic waste by 2041. A study by a team at Imperial College suggests that simply viewing <em>Blue Planet II</em> increases the likelihood that people will choose paper packaging over plastic.</p></div><div><p>Since then, explains Jo Shinner, one of the unit’s executive producers who oversees kids’ programming, “environmental issues are front and center of what we do.” She points to 2020’s <em>Bears About the House</em>, which included scenes from bear-bile farms in Laos. The episode prompted an unsolicited donation of $1.5 million to NGO Free the Bears—which would otherwise have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It used the money to rescue 38 bears.</p><p>“Hacking technology allows us to run alongside cheetahs or using drones to explore forest canopies,” Gunton says. “And it helps us stay true to the environmental message. You can do carbon offsetting, but filming in a helicopter for six hours is a lot of carbon. A battery-powered drone is a game changer.”</p><p>In 2020, Attenborough issued his most explicit warning of environmental catastrophe in <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/netflix-attenborough-a-life-on-our-planet"><em>A Life on Our Planet</em></a>, his Netflix documentary and testament that opened in Chernobyl with his stark personal warning that “the natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It’s happened in my lifetime. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. This film is my witness statement and my vision for the future, the story of how we came to make this our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.”</p><p>In 2021, he was appointed People’s Advocate for the <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/cop-26-climate-crisis-negotiations">COP26 UN climate change summit</a> in Glasgow, where he warned global leaders they faced “our last opportunity to make the necessary step-change” toward protecting the planet. “Perhaps the most significant lesson brought by these last 12 months has been that we are no longer separate nations, each best served by looking after its own needs and security,” he told the UN security council. “We are a single, truly global species, whose greatest threats are shared and whose security must ultimately come from acting together in the interests of us all.”</p><figure><p>Photograph: Benedict Redgrove</p></figure></div><div><p><strong>THE GREEN PLANET</strong> may not be the last show Attenborough presents, but it does mark a new era for the Natural History Unit. During filming, the unit opened its first office in Los Angeles. The show itself, coproduced with PBS, Bilibili, ZDF German Television, France Télévisions, and NHK, was sold to a dozen territories before filming was finished, including DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway, Movistar+ in Spain, ERR in Estonia, LRT in Lithuania, LTV in Latvia, RTVS in Slovenia, Friday in Russia, Channel Nine in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand, and Radio-Canada. The ethos Attenborough established of working with research scientists, modifying technology, taking time to capture nature, and placing our world in context has grown from amateur naturalists discussing woodpeckers to a technical, creative, and scientific endeavor that’s making programs for the entire world.</p><p>Attenborough’s desire to bring people as close as possible to the natural world has taken him to many surprising places—the latest being the government-funded 5G trials announced in January. The Green Planet 5G AR Consortium, comprising the BBC, 5G mobile network operator EE, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and immersive-content studio Factory 42, is collaborating on an augmented reality app funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media &amp; Sport. The app will lock into a mini 5G network in a retail space in central London, where a hologram of Attenborough will talk people through the plants featured in the show.</p><p>Gunton and the scientists at Kew Gardens suggested plants that would be suitable for adapting for digitized interaction, such as the light balsa tree seed, which takes flight on the breeze. Factory 42 and EE developed software that could be triggered when people blow into their phone’s mic to make a digital seed take flight on their handset.</p><p>“The idea is that you’re stepping into a natural history program, and you can interact with it,” explains John Cassy, Factory 42’s founder and CEO. “If people are doing things, it’s nine times more effective in engaging them than just reading or watching. Sir David got it immediately—he gets really excited by new things and progress. We filmed him for nearly seven hours in a holographic studio, he understood how and what the tech can do, he nailed every take and made suggestions which always turned out to be right.”</p></div><div><p>“Younger audiences—their phones are the main way to reach them,” Attenborough says. “I hope as a consequence that the needs and wonder and importance of the natural world are seen. We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. We’re both the victims and benefactors, and the sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.”</p><p>“If new technology enables us to bring that home to viewers, that’s important,” he continues. “Anything that transports people into an environment which is unfamiliar, but which is an important natural one, is very valuable, and I think people will find it exciting. I was in a television studio when the Apollo mission launched. I remember very well a blue sphere in the blackness, and in that one shot, there was the whole of humanity. I realized our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence. And I would feel very guilty if I saw what the problems are and decided to ignore them.”</p><hr /><p>More Great WIRED Stories</p><ul><li>Why bosses are inflexible <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/employers-flexible-working-post-pandemic?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">about flexible working</a></li><li>Humans have broken a fundamental <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ocean-creature-size?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">law of the ocean</a></li><li>The world needs to <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ev-battery-recycling-cobalt?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">crack battery recycling, fast</a></li><li>Body language pseudoscience is <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/youtube-body-language?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">flourishing on YouTube</a></li><li>TikTok’s next big move? <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/tiktok-future-facebook?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">To become Facebook</a></li><li>Norway is running out of <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/norway-electric-vehicle-tax?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">gas-guzzling cars to tax</a></li><li>Locked out of ‘God Mode,’ runners are <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/nordictrack-ifit-treadmill-privilege-mode?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">hacking their treadmills</a></li><li>Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. <a href="https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-wired-podcast?itm_campaign=BottomRelatedStories&amp;itm_content=footer-recirc">New episodes every Friday</a></li></ul></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 David Attenborough’s Green Planet is his latest series in a career that began in the 1950s and is as notable for its variety of firsts—pioneering 16-mm film in TV; first to film a Komodo dragon; first to use drone cameras—as it is for his long-standing commitment to bringing wildlife and environmental issues into the homes of viewers around the world. Photograph: Nadav Kander

 Stephen Armstrong

 Long Reads
 02.12.2021 12:00 PM

 David Attenborough’s Unending Mission to Save Our Planet

 “We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. The sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.”
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 WE MAKE LOTS of programs about natural history, but the basis of all life is plants.” Sir David Attenborough is at Kew Gardens on a cloudy, overcast August day waiting to deliver his final piece to camera for his latest natural history epic, The Green Planet. Planes roar overhead, constantly interrupting filming, and he keeps putting his jacket on during pauses. “We ignore them because they don’t seem to do much, but they can be very vicious things,” he says. “Plants throttle one another, you know—they can move very fast, have all sorts of strange techniques to make sure that they can disperse themselves over a whole continent, have many ways of meeting so they can fertilize one another and we never actually see it happening.” He smiles. “But now we can.”

 Attenborough occupies a unique place in the world. Born on May 8, 1926, the year before television was invented, he is as close to a secular saint as we are likely to see, respected by scientists, entertainers, activists, politicians, and—hardest of all to please—kids and teenagers.

 In 2018, he was voted the most popular person in the UK in a YouGov poll. So many Chinese viewers downloaded Blue Planet II “that it temporarily slowed down the country’s internet,” according to the Sunday Times. In 2019, Attenborough’s series Our Planet became Netflix’s most-watched original documentary, viewed by 33 million people in its first month, and the NME reported that his appearance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage where he thanked the crowd for accepting the festival’s no-single-use-plastic policy attracted the weekend’s third-largest crowd after Stormzy and The Killers.

 On September 24, 2020, the 95-year-old broke the Guinness World Record for attracting 1 million followers just four hours and 44 minutes after he joined Instagram, beating the previous record holder, Jennifer Aniston, by over 30 minutes. His first post was a video clip where he set out his reasons for signing up. “The world is in trouble,” he explained, standing in front of a row of trees at dusk in a light blue shirt and emphasizing each point with a sorrowful shake of the head. “Continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans. But we know what to do about it, and that’s why I’m tackling this new way, for me, of communication. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be explaining what the problems are and what we can do. Join me.”

 The public response was so overwhelming that he left the platform 27 posts and just over a month later, after being inundated with messages. He’s always tried to reply to every communication he receives and can just about manage the 70 snail-mail letters he gets every day. Wherever he appears—wherever his team at the BBC’s Natural History Unit point their lenses—hundreds of millions of people will be watching. And right now, in the year of COP26, The Green Planet hopes to do for plants what Attenborough has done for oceans and animals … create understanding and encourage us to care.

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 The Green Planet, as is typical with all Attenborough/BBC Natural History Unit productions, contains a number of firsts—technical firsts, scientific firsts, and just a few never-before-seen firsts. But it also includes one great reprise. Attenborough is out in the field again for the first time since 2008’s Life in Cold Blood, traveling to rainforests and deserts and revisiting some places he passed through decades ago.

 Two moments stand out. In the first, Attenborough is explaining the biology of the seven-hour flower—Brazil’s Passion Flower, Passiflora mucronate, which opens around 1 am and closes again sometime between 7 am and 10 am. The white, long-stalked flower is pollinated by bats which gorge on its nectar, allowing pollen to brush on the bats’ heads. As Attenborough watches one flower open, a bat appears and flutters up to feed. Attenborough laughs with delight.

 Later, the series examines the creosote bush, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth at 12,000 years old. A desert dweller, it’s adapted to the harsh conditions by preserving energy and water through an incredibly slow rate of growth—1 millimeter a year. The team at the Natural History Unit used Attenborough’s long experience to illustrate something even the slowest time lapse camera would struggle to capture.

 “Sir David went to this particular desert and to a particular creosote bush when he did Life on Earth in 1979,” Mike Gunton, the BBC’s Natural History Unit’s creative director, explains. “We’ve gone back to exactly the same creosote bush and had David stand in exactly the same place and matched the shot from 1979 with the shot in 2019. So, we’ve used his human lifetime to illustrate how slowly this plant has grown. We’ve used the fact that he has traveled the world throughout his life on a number of occasions. He bears witness to the changes, and I think it’s rather lovely, actually.”

 For the rest of the footage the unit turned to what it does best—hacking brand new equipment and pushing it to extreme limits in a bid to film the previously unfilmable and bring the hidden aspects of the natural world to our screens.

 Previous firsts include the unit using the high-speed Phantom camera, which can shoot 2,000 frames per second, in 2012 to prove that a chameleon’s tongue isn’t sticky but muscular, wrapping itself around its prey rather than adhering to it. Or hacking the RED Epic Monochrome, a black-and-white camera with a sensor that can film 300 frames per second (an iPhone films at 25 frames per second), removing the cut-pass filter, which filters out infrared light from camera chips as it can blur color images. This added sensitivity to a night shoot in the Gobi Desert, allowing the third-ever filming of the long-eared jerboa, a rodent less than ten centimeters long and entirely nocturnal.

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 Plants may seem less complicated—and less exciting—than a near-invisible nocturnal rodent in a vast Mongolian desert, but the unit’s approach intends to prove otherwise. The best place to show this is in a Devon farmhouse with a robot called Otto and a hunter-killer vine that’s slaughtering its prey.

 “We have cameras that can take a demonstration of a parasitic plant throttling another plant to death. It’s dramatic stuff,” Attenborough says gleefully.

 Mike Gunton, creative director of the BBC Natural History Unit and a long-time collaborator with David Attenborough. Photograph: Benedict Redgrove

 WHEN FILMING A PREDATOR closing in for the kill, the BBC’s Natural History Unit always needs to improvise. For 2018’s Big Cats, director-producer Nick Easton adapted a buggy called the Mantis. He attached a Phantom Flex high-speed camera, originally designed as a lab tool for ballistics and particle imaging, to a remote-controlled trolley that could race alongside a cheetah at 100 kph, capturing every detail of a kill.

 In early September 2021, the NHU is filming a predator just as vicious—the dodder—using technology that didn’t exist back in 2018. The dodder, Cuscuta europaea, a k a strangleweed or the devil’s hair, is a parasitic plant. When a dodder seed germinates, it doesn’t take root and it cannot photosynthesize—instead it “sniffs,” by methods still unclear, certain chemicals released by nearby plants and grows toward them. So sophisticated is the dodder’s “nose” that it can differentiate between species and grow toward favored hosts like the nettle. It then wraps itself around the host and sinks tendrils into the stem to steal nutrients and water. It even picks up signals that the host plant is about to flower and opens its own rival petals.

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 * 

 The unit is filming one such attack on a nettle. To do this, they’re using an invention known as the botanical time-lapse robot, nicknamed the Otto, which tackles a slightly different set of problems to the Mantis. The Otto is a huge robotic gantry with a multi-axis arm attached to a multi-axis hand holding a camera. The gantry, arms, and gears can move the camera at high speed to any point on the X, Y, or Z axis—an effect that resembles the fairground claw grabber in that it can move freely through three dimensions, but with high precision and the ability to rotate the camera through any axis as well.

 “The problem with filming plants is that you need the result to be as fluid and smooth as when you film animals,” explains Gunton, the scruffy, bespectacled, and genial creative director of the unit. His route to the role is fairly typical for unit staff. He has a degree in zoology and a doctorate in behavioral anatomy; he experimented with a Super 8 camera and, while at Cambridge, sold short films about life at the university to Japanese businessmen; then ended up at the BBC after shooting a trip to Sri Lanka.

 Since 1990, Gunton has helped oversee the unit grow to become the world’s largest producer of wildlife programs, with 450 staff currently working on over 25 productions for the BBC, Apple TV, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and NBC. Every new program presents new takes on the same challenge—when filming the natural world, it doesn’t follow a director’s orders. “We use time-lapse photography to shoot plants,” Gunton explains. “But plants don’t do what you expect them to do. So, you set up a shot, find the plant’s gone somewhere else, and everything is wasted. It’s a very expensive, very time-consuming, very slow process.”

 Preparing for the unit’s forthcoming The Green Planet series, producer Paul Williams spent a lot of time on crowdfunding websites to solve problems like this—“when I’m starting a series it’s the best place to find lots of people tinkering with gadgets,” he says—and came across a dead link for a strange new time-lapse system developed by an ex-military engineer called Chris Field who lived in Colorado. Williams sent off a speculative email, Field sent back some footage, and a few weeks later Williams was in a suburban basement in Denver.

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 Photograph: Benedict Redgrove

 “He’d built this giant canopy, and in the square space in the middle his camera went anywhere he instructed it to,” Williams recalls gleefully. “He had carnivorous plants sitting in the middle, and he’d written sophisticated software which can move the camera around, rotate, roll, tilt, all of that at any speed at any time. We can get close-ups, we can get wide shots, we can get moving shots—it’s like five motion-controlled cameras all moving around the same subject. So, if we want to capture one plant grabbing another in an aggressive fighting scene, we can cover it from five different angles with just one camera.”

 Right now, Field’s Otto robot is in a farmhouse in Devon belonging to Tim Shepherd, the quiet, precise enthusiast who pioneered time-lapse on The Private Life of Plants five years ago. He makes an odd pairing with Chris Field, whose arms are covered in tattoos of carnivorous plants, but the two of them set about helping Gunton achieve a brief that began as little more than a hunch.

 “We wanted to cover plants in the Planet Earth series, so we went to Kew Gardens with a treatment full of things we wanted to capture plants doing like ‘fight,’ ‘think,’ ‘count,’ all animal-type words, and they were all in inverted commas,” Gunton says. “They said, great, but you can take all those inverted commas out. Plants do all of that, just in a different time frame. That’s been our mantra for The Green Planet—that the only difference between plants and animals is that they move on a different time frame.”

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 In order to capture this, they’re pushing technology from the simple to the surreal. Williams found a microscope in California that can film 10-micron-wide stomata—the minute openings in plant leaves and stems that allow carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor to diffuse in and out of plant tissues, opening and closing to illustrate photosynthesis. And then there are drones.

 The unit pioneered the use of drones in filming, deploying them in 2011’s Earthflight, a good year before the first movie, 2012’s Skyfall, used them to shoot James Bond in a motorbike chase across the rooftop of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. For some Green Planet shots, however, drones were prohibited due to local air traffic regulations, so Williams adapted a window-cleaning pole into a lightweight extendible boom called the Emu with the body of a broken drone at the end and a drone camera hanging underneath.

 The real drone challenge for The Green Planet, says Gunton, was hacking people, not technology. “We used FPV drones, racing drones, which have a camera pointing forward,” he explains. “The pilots are like computer gamers and have these extraordinary assault courses where they have to fly crazy acrobatics. What we wanted them to do is use all that incredible dexterous skill to be able to operate those drones in the most incredibly micro-detailed way, but take the foot off the gas pedal.”

 The result is footage that appears much the same as a sweeping drone shot in any big-budget movie or TV program, showing events that take hours flying by at apparently normal speed. For the real “red in tooth and claw” stuff, however, time-lapse cameras were the only option. Williams, Field, and the unit engineers set about hacking the Otto robot, eventually coming up with the Triffid, which uses the same technology Field created attached to an extendible ladder known as a slider. At full extension, the Triffid stands 2.1 meters high, but can quickly swoop down to ground level. Williams then spent more time on kickstarter sites and came across a 24-mm probe lens—slim enough to enter an insect-sized hole.

 Combining the Triffid and the super-slimline probe lens resulted in an astonishing sequence in the first tropical forest episode, which follows leaf cutter ants carrying their excised cargo from the high branches of the rainforest, down along a crowded trail and into their underground lair, where they feed leaf fragments to a carefully tended fungus garden.

 “It’s a three-and-a-half-minute sequence that meant programming the Triffid with 7,000 individual camera positions,” Williams says. “But then you always want to push further and smaller, so I found a scientist in Austria who has a scanning electron microscope system, and this allowed us to do motion-controlled shots around a single fungal spore. It’s essentially taking photogrammetry, a trick from the computer-gaming industry which takes 10,000 photographs of a rock and uses software to turn all those images into a 3D rock that’s photorealistic in every possible way. We’re able to create an interactive 3D video of a spore or leaf fragment, to get closer than ever before.”

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 Back in Shepherd’s basement, Mike Gunton has the first edited clip of the dodder’s attack—a long, thin tendril circling the nettle before sending out probes, which pierce the stem and suck the life out of the plant. Speeded up, there’s something grotesque about the tentacle of doom that crushes to death a plant known for its expertise in self-defense.

 “I brought it to David,” Gunton says, with a beam like an excited kid. “This is really the key moment in any innovation we try. Sir David has seen everything. He’s been everywhere in the world many times over; he’s watched pretty much everything the natural world can do, and so what drives us is the desire to bring him something new. The greatest pleasure you get in this job is what happened when I brought him this film—it’s showing some footage to David Attenborough and having him say, ‘I’ve never seen that before, that’s pretty innovative.’”

 Director and time-lapse photographer Tim Shepherd in a “jungle” environment in his Devon studio. The week before, this was set up as a lily pond. The camera has been fitted with a slim probe lens that can move inside the foliage without disturbing it Photograph: Benedict Redgrove

 ATTENBOROUGH’S BELIEF IN the importance of innovation, coupled with a delight in storytelling and respectful treatment of the world, is at the heart of the Natural History Unit. He was reluctant to give WIRED an interview that dwelled too much on his career to date. He wanted to avoid any living obituaries. He would talk about current projects and new technology, but he stressed he was still working and had no plans to retire. All the same, his route here helps understand why the unit is technically savvy, globally successful, scientifically relevant, and increasingly vocal about the dangers of environmental threats like climate change.

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 David Attenborough joined the BBC as a trainee in 1952, having only ever watched one television program. His love of the natural world and his fascination with innovation were both part of his upbringing, and he graduated in zoology and geology from Cambridge. He was conscripted into the navy and worked in publishing before applying to the BBC, where his early career included the high-octane round-table debate Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, but, then aged 28, he decided he wanted to take advantage of the smaller 16-mm film cameras used on battlefields by war correspondents. “A desire to exploit the latest technical innovation has been the defining stimulus of almost every major television series I have ever made,” he explains. “The first was television’s ability to get acceptable images from 16-mm film. Until 1952 it had to use 35-mm, the size used by cinemas. The cameras were mounted on bicycle wheels and had valves inside.”

 Solar-powered cameras are prepared by crew for on-location installation, to capture footage without the presence of humans. Photograph: Benedict Redgrove

 In 1954, he traveled to Sierra Leone with Jack Lester, London Zoo’s curator of reptiles, and cameraman Charles Lagus to film a new series, Zoo Quest, using a 16-mm camera—despite the BBC initially vetoing the lightweight camera as “beneath contempt.” Attenborough was the producer, director, sound recordist, and animal wrangler for the series, and only ended up appearing on screen after Lester was taken ill. Zoo Quest brought rare animals—including chimpanzees, pythons, and birds of paradise—into viewers’ living rooms and proved that wildlife programs could attract big audiences. The lighter camera allowed Lagus the mobility to capture shots of animals and places that television viewing audiences had never seen before and meant Attenborough was the first person to catch the elusive Komodo dragon on film.

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 His timing couldn’t have been better. The study of animals in the wild, or ethology, is arguably humanity’s oldest science—we have practiced it since nomadic people tried to predict the behavior of hunted animals. Until the publication of the first modern ethology textbook (The Study of Instinct, by Nikolaas Tinbergen) in 1951, however, field work wasn’t an important part of zoology. Tinbergen, a Dutch biologist, pioneered the study of animals outside the laboratory and moved to the UK after the Second World War to teach at Oxford, where his students included Richard Dawkins and zoologist and TV presenter Desmond Morris.

 Although Attenborough wasn’t a student of Tinbergen, their work overlapped—indeed, Tinbergen’s approach inspired Attenborough and Attenborough invited Tinbergen to host shows for the unit. Many of Tinbergen’s students ended up working for the NHU helping create a new kind of wildlife television—ethology in action.

 At the same time, Attenborough was continuing to innovate in television technology and program format. The only person to have won BAFTAs for programs produced in black and white, color, HD, and 3D, he’s also the reason tennis balls are bright yellow. As controller of BBC Two, Attenborough oversaw the first-ever color television broadcasts in Europe in 1967, including that summer’s coverage of the Wimbledon tournament.

 “There were only three people with color sets, which were the size of a refrigerator,” he recalls with a slight smile. He is reserved and thoughtful in interviews, watching intently as questions are asked, then delivering precise answers with careful nods of the head. “The chief engineer at the BBC and I had two of them. We watched a program called Late Night Line-Up every night on BBC Two in color. We used to ring up one another in the morning and say what we thought. The chief engineer was a Scotsman, was very realistic, and all he was interested in was if the face looked natural. And after about three weeks, he thought the skin tone was finally fine, so he rang me up and said, ‘Tomorrow, we should go for a bowl of fruit.’”

 At that time, tennis balls were either white or black—just as they had been since the 1800s. After watching a game, Attenborough suggested yellow tennis balls would be easier for viewers to follow in color; in 1972, the International Tennis Federation accepted his suggestion. His tenure at BBC Two also saw him commission a series of so-called “sledgehammer” projects—epic series of 10 or more parts that covered subjects in depth, starting with history and anthropology in shows like Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. With the NHU producer Christopher Parsons he started working up the first natural history sledgehammer, Life on Earth. A series of BBC promotions—first to director of programs, followed by an offer to become director general—took him away from program-making, so he resigned in 1973 to work on the show, which finally aired in 1979.

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 With its extraordinary wildlife images and compelling story tracing the path of evolution, Life on Earth reached an estimated global audience of 500 million. A scene where Attenborough encounters a female mountain gorilla in Rwanda, which reaches out and embraces him, remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of television. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know,” he ad-libbed.

 The wildlife documentary changed forever—and the NHU began its evolution from being just another department at the BBC to what the movie industry trade paper Variety dubs “Green Hollywood.”

 FOR SOME YEARS, environmental activists like George Monbiot, who started his career at the NHU, have criticized the BBC and Attenborough for being Green Hollywood in style rather than substance. Monbiot argued that showing the natural world without the context of human harm was ignoring the perils the planet faces. This began to change in the 21st century. State of the Planet in 2000, as well as 2006’s The Truth About Climate Change, 2007’s Saving Planet Earth, and 2009’s How Many People Can Live on Our Planet? all saw Attenborough and the team deal with the effects of global heating, overpopulation, and endangered species.

 “I think that really gathered pace with Planet Earth II in 2016,” Gunton says. “We had stories about human effects on the environment and audiences were saying ‘we want more.’ The response gave us the confidence to turn the dial up with Blue Planet, and now the challenge is to keep the story fresh. There’s a gratifying fire in the belly of the young generation of filmmakers.”

 Blue Planet II is best known for its explicit environmental message—in particular its depiction of the effects of marine plastic pollution. This influenced the UK government to extend a charge on using plastic carrier bags, which has been credited with a decrease in their use by 83 percent, and to set an ambitious target to eliminate avoidable plastic waste by 2041. A study by a team at Imperial College suggests that simply viewing Blue Planet II increases the likelihood that people will choose paper packaging over plastic.

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 Since then, explains Jo Shinner, one of the unit’s executive producers who oversees kids’ programming, “environmental issues are front and center of what we do.” She points to 2020’s Bears About the House, which included scenes from bear-bile farms in Laos. The episode prompted an unsolicited donation of $1.5 million to NGO Free the Bears—which would otherwise have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It used the money to rescue 38 bears.

 “Hacking technology allows us to run alongside cheetahs or using drones to explore forest canopies,” Gunton says. “And it helps us stay true to the environmental message. You can do carbon offsetting, but filming in a helicopter for six hours is a lot of carbon. A battery-powered drone is a game changer.”

 In 2020, Attenborough issued his most explicit warning of environmental catastrophe in A Life on Our Planet, his Netflix documentary and testament that opened in Chernobyl with his stark personal warning that “the natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It’s happened in my lifetime. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. This film is my witness statement and my vision for the future, the story of how we came to make this our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.”

 In 2021, he was appointed People’s Advocate for the COP26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow, where he warned global leaders they faced “our last opportunity to make the necessary step-change” toward protecting the planet. “Perhaps the most significant lesson brought by these last 12 months has been that we are no longer separate nations, each best served by looking after its own needs and security,” he told the UN security council. “We are a single, truly global species, whose greatest threats are shared and whose security must ultimately come from acting together in the interests of us all.”

 Photograph: Benedict Redgrove

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 THE GREEN PLANET may not be the last show Attenborough presents, but it does mark a new era for the Natural History Unit. During filming, the unit opened its first office in Los Angeles. The show itself, coproduced with PBS, Bilibili, ZDF German Television, France Télévisions, and NHK, was sold to a dozen territories before filming was finished, including DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway, Movistar+ in Spain, ERR in Estonia, LRT in Lithuania, LTV in Latvia, RTVS in Slovenia, Friday in Russia, Channel Nine in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand, and Radio-Canada. The ethos Attenborough established of working with research scientists, modifying technology, taking time to capture nature, and placing our world in context has grown from amateur naturalists discussing woodpeckers to a technical, creative, and scientific endeavor that’s making programs for the entire world.

 Attenborough’s desire to bring people as close as possible to the natural world has taken him to many surprising places—the latest being the government-funded 5G trials announced in January. The Green Planet 5G AR Consortium, comprising the BBC, 5G mobile network operator EE, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and immersive-content studio Factory 42, is collaborating on an augmented reality app funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport. The app will lock into a mini 5G network in a retail space in central London, where a hologram of Attenborough will talk people through the plants featured in the show.

 Gunton and the scientists at Kew Gardens suggested plants that would be suitable for adapting for digitized interaction, such as the light balsa tree seed, which takes flight on the breeze. Factory 42 and EE developed software that could be triggered when people blow into their phone’s mic to make a digital seed take flight on their handset.

 “The idea is that you’re stepping into a natural history program, and you can interact with it,” explains John Cassy, Factory 42’s founder and CEO. “If people are doing things, it’s nine times more effective in engaging them than just reading or watching. Sir David got it immediately—he gets really excited by new things and progress. We filmed him for nearly seven hours in a holographic studio, he understood how and what the tech can do, he nailed every take and made suggestions which always turned out to be right.”

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 “Younger audiences—their phones are the main way to reach them,” Attenborough says. “I hope as a consequence that the needs and wonder and importance of the natural world are seen. We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. We’re both the victims and benefactors, and the sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.”

 “If new technology enables us to bring that home to viewers, that’s important,” he continues. “Anything that transports people into an environment which is unfamiliar, but which is an important natural one, is very valuable, and I think people will find it exciting. I was in a television studio when the Apollo mission launched. I remember very well a blue sphere in the blackness, and in that one shot, there was the whole of humanity. I realized our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence. And I would feel very guilty if I saw what the problems are and decided to ignore them.”

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WE MAKE LOTS of programs about natural history, but the basis of all life is plants.” Sir David Attenborough is at Kew Gardens on a cloudy, overcast August day waiting to deliver his final piece to camera for his latest natural history epic, The Green Planet. Planes roar overhead, constantly interrupting filming, and he keeps putting his jacket on during pauses. “We ignore them because they don’t seem to do much, but they can be very vicious things,” he says. “Plants throttle one another, you know—they can move very fast, have all sorts of strange techniques to make sure that they can disperse themselves over a whole continent, have many ways of meeting so they can fertilize one another and we never actually see it happening.” He smiles. “But now we can.” Attenborough occupies a unique place in the world. Born on May 8, 1926, the year before television was invented, he is as close to a secular saint as we are likely to see, respected by scientists, entertainers, activists, politicians, and—hardest of all to please—kids and teenagers. In 2018, he was voted the most popular person in the UK in a YouGov poll. So many Chinese viewers downloaded  Blue Planet II  “that it temporarily slowed down the country’s internet,” according to the  Sunday Times . In 2019, Attenborough’s series  Our Planet  became Netflix’s most-watched original documentary, viewed by 33 million people in its first month, and the  NME reported that his appearance on Glastonbury’s Pyramid stage where he thanked the crowd for accepting the festival’s no-single-use-plastic policy attracted the weekend’s third-largest crowd after Stormzy and The Killers. On September 24, 2020, the 95-year-old broke the Guinness World Record for attracting 1 million followers just four hours and 44 minutes after he joined Instagram, beating the previous record holder, Jennifer Aniston, by over 30 minutes. His first post was a video clip where he set out his reasons for signing up. “The world is in trouble,” he explained, standing in front of a row of trees at dusk in a light blue shirt and emphasizing each point with a sorrowful shake of the head. “Continents are on fire, glaciers are melting, coral reefs are dying, fish are disappearing from our oceans. But we know what to do about it, and that’s why I’m tackling this new way, for me, of communication. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be explaining what the problems are and what we can do. Join me.” The public response was so overwhelming that he left the platform 27 posts and just over a month later, after being inundated with messages. He’s always tried to reply to every communication he receives and can just about manage the 70 snail-mail letters he gets every day. Wherever he appears—wherever his team at the BBC’s Natural History Unit point their lenses—hundreds of millions of people will be watching. And right now, in the year of COP26, The Green Planet hopes to do for plants what Attenborough has done for oceans and animals … create understanding and encourage us to care.    The Green Planet, as is typical with all Attenborough/BBC Natural History Unit productions, contains a number of firsts—technical firsts, scientific firsts, and just a few never-before-seen firsts. But it also includes one great reprise. Attenborough is out in the field again for the first time since 2008’s Life in Cold Blood, traveling to rainforests and deserts and revisiting some places he passed through decades ago. Two moments stand out. In the first, Attenborough is explaining the biology of the seven-hour flower—Brazil’s Passion Flower, Passiflora mucronate, which opens around 1 am and closes again sometime between 7 am and 10 am. The white, long-stalked flower is pollinated by bats which gorge on its nectar, allowing pollen to brush on the bats’ heads. As Attenborough watches one flower open, a bat appears and flutters up to feed. Attenborough laughs with delight. Later, the series examines the creosote bush, one of the oldest living organisms on Earth at 12,000 years old. A desert dweller, it’s adapted to the harsh conditions by preserving energy and water through an incredibly slow rate of growth—1 millimeter a year. The team at the Natural History Unit used Attenborough’s long experience to illustrate something even the slowest time lapse camera would struggle to capture. “Sir David went to this particular desert and to a particular creosote bush when he did Life on Earth in 1979,” Mike Gunton, the BBC’s Natural History Unit’s creative director, explains. “We’ve gone back to exactly the same creosote bush and had David stand in exactly the same place and matched the shot from 1979 with the shot in 2019. So, we’ve used his human lifetime to illustrate how slowly this plant has grown. We’ve used the fact that he has traveled the world throughout his life on a number of occasions. He bears witness to the changes, and I think it’s rather lovely, actually.” For the rest of the footage the unit turned to what it does best—hacking brand new equipment and pushing it to extreme limits in a bid to film the previously unfilmable and bring the hidden aspects of the natural world to our screens. Previous firsts include the unit using the high-speed Phantom camera, which can shoot 2,000 frames per second, in 2012 to prove that a chameleon’s tongue isn’t sticky but muscular, wrapping itself around its prey rather than adhering to it. Or hacking the RED Epic Monochrome, a black-and-white camera with a sensor that can film 300 frames per second (an iPhone films at 25 frames per second), removing the cut-pass filter, which filters out infrared light from camera chips as it can blur color images. This added sensitivity to a night shoot in the Gobi Desert, allowing the third-ever filming of the long-eared jerboa, a rodent less than ten centimeters long and entirely nocturnal.   Plants may seem less complicated—and less exciting—than a near-invisible nocturnal rodent in a vast Mongolian desert, but the unit’s approach intends to prove otherwise. The best place to show this is in a Devon farmhouse with a robot called Otto and a hunter-killer vine that’s slaughtering its prey. “We have cameras that can take a demonstration of a parasitic plant throttling another plant to death. It’s dramatic stuff,” Attenborough says gleefully.  Mike Gunton, creative director of the BBC Natural History Unit and a long-time collaborator with David Attenborough.Photograph: Benedict Redgrove   WHEN FILMING A PREDATOR closing in for the kill, the BBC’s Natural History Unit always needs to improvise. For 2018’s  Big Cats , director-producer Nick Easton adapted a buggy called the Mantis. He attached a Phantom Flex high-speed camera, originally designed as a lab tool for ballistics and particle imaging, to a remote-controlled trolley that could race alongside a cheetah at 100 kph, capturing every detail of a kill. In early September 2021, the NHU is filming a predator just as vicious—the dodder—using technology that didn’t exist back in 2018. The dodder, Cuscuta europaea, a k a strangleweed or the devil’s hair, is a parasitic plant. When a dodder seed germinates, it doesn’t take root and it cannot photosynthesize—instead it “sniffs,” by methods still unclear, certain chemicals released by nearby plants and grows toward them. So sophisticated is the dodder’s “nose” that it can differentiate between species and grow toward favored hosts like the nettle. It then wraps itself around the host and sinks tendrils into the stem to steal nutrients and water. It even picks up signals that the host plant is about to flower and opens its own rival petals.   The unit is filming one such attack on a nettle. To do this, they’re using an invention known as the botanical time-lapse robot, nicknamed the Otto, which tackles a slightly different set of problems to the Mantis. The Otto is a huge robotic gantry with a multi-axis arm attached to a multi-axis hand holding a camera. The gantry, arms, and gears can move the camera at high speed to any point on the X, Y, or Z axis—an effect that resembles the fairground claw grabber in that it can move freely through three dimensions, but with high precision and the ability to rotate the camera through any axis as well. “The problem with filming plants is that you need the result to be as fluid and smooth as when you film animals,” explains Gunton, the scruffy, bespectacled, and genial creative director of the unit. His route to the role is fairly typical for unit staff. He has a degree in zoology and a doctorate in behavioral anatomy; he experimented with a Super 8 camera and, while at Cambridge, sold short films about life at the university to Japanese businessmen; then ended up at the BBC after shooting a trip to Sri Lanka. Since 1990, Gunton has helped oversee the unit grow to become the world’s largest producer of wildlife programs, with 450 staff currently working on over 25 productions for the BBC, Apple TV, the Discovery Channel, National Geographic, and NBC. Every new program presents new takes on the same challenge—when filming the natural world, it doesn’t follow a director’s orders. “We use time-lapse photography to shoot plants,” Gunton explains. “But plants don’t do what you expect them to do. So, you set up a shot, find the plant’s gone somewhere else, and everything is wasted. It’s a very expensive, very time-consuming, very slow process.” Preparing for the unit’s forthcoming The Green Planet series, producer Paul Williams spent a lot of time on crowdfunding websites to solve problems like this—“when I’m starting a series it’s the best place to find lots of people tinkering with gadgets,” he says—and came across a dead link for a strange new time-lapse system developed by an ex-military engineer called Chris Field who lived in Colorado. Williams sent off a speculative email, Field sent back some footage, and a few weeks later Williams was in a suburban basement in Denver.    Photograph: Benedict Redgrove  “He’d built this giant canopy, and in the square space in the middle his camera went anywhere he instructed it to,” Williams recalls gleefully. “He had carnivorous plants sitting in the middle, and he’d written sophisticated software which can move the camera around, rotate, roll, tilt, all of that at any speed at any time. We can get close-ups, we can get wide shots, we can get moving shots—it’s like five motion-controlled cameras all moving around the same subject. So, if we want to capture one plant grabbing another in an aggressive fighting scene, we can cover it from five different angles with just one camera.” Right now, Field’s Otto robot is in a farmhouse in Devon belonging to Tim Shepherd, the quiet, precise enthusiast who pioneered time-lapse on The Private Life of Plants five years ago. He makes an odd pairing with Chris Field, whose arms are covered in tattoos of carnivorous plants, but the two of them set about helping Gunton achieve a brief that began as little more than a hunch. “We wanted to cover plants in the Planet Earth series, so we went to Kew Gardens with a treatment full of things we wanted to capture plants doing like ‘fight,’ ‘think,’ ‘count,’ all animal-type words, and they were all in inverted commas,” Gunton says. “They said, great, but you can take all those inverted commas out. Plants do all of that, just in a different time frame. That’s been our mantra for The Green Planet—that the only difference between plants and animals is that they move on a different time frame.”   In order to capture this, they’re pushing technology from the simple to the surreal. Williams found a microscope in California that can film 10-micron-wide stomata—the minute openings in plant leaves and stems that allow carbon dioxide, oxygen, and water vapor to diffuse in and out of plant tissues, opening and closing to illustrate photosynthesis. And then there are drones. The unit pioneered the use of drones in filming, deploying them in 2011’s Earthflight, a good year before the first movie, 2012’s Skyfall, used them to shoot James Bond in a motorbike chase across the rooftop of the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul. For some Green Planet shots, however, drones were prohibited due to local air traffic regulations, so Williams adapted a window-cleaning pole into a lightweight extendible boom called the Emu with the body of a broken drone at the end and a drone camera hanging underneath. The real drone challenge for The Green Planet, says Gunton, was hacking people, not technology. “We used FPV drones, racing drones, which have a camera pointing forward,” he explains. “The pilots are like computer gamers and have these extraordinary assault courses where they have to fly crazy acrobatics. What we wanted them to do is use all that incredible dexterous skill to be able to operate those drones in the most incredibly micro-detailed way, but take the foot off the gas pedal.” The result is footage that appears much the same as a sweeping drone shot in any big-budget movie or TV program, showing events that take hours flying by at apparently normal speed. For the real “red in tooth and claw” stuff, however, time-lapse cameras were the only option. Williams, Field, and the unit engineers set about hacking the Otto robot, eventually coming up with the Triffid, which uses the same technology Field created attached to an extendible ladder known as a slider. At full extension, the Triffid stands 2.1 meters high, but can quickly swoop down to ground level. Williams then spent more time on kickstarter sites and came across a 24-mm probe lens—slim enough to enter an insect-sized hole. Combining the Triffid and the super-slimline probe lens resulted in an astonishing sequence in the first tropical forest episode, which follows leaf cutter ants carrying their excised cargo from the high branches of the rainforest, down along a crowded trail and into their underground lair, where they feed leaf fragments to a carefully tended fungus garden. “It’s a three-and-a-half-minute sequence that meant programming the Triffid with 7,000 individual camera positions,” Williams says. “But then you always want to push further and smaller, so I found a scientist in Austria who has a scanning electron microscope system, and this allowed us to do motion-controlled shots around a single fungal spore. It’s essentially taking photogrammetry, a trick from the computer-gaming industry which takes 10,000 photographs of a rock and uses software to turn all those images into a 3D rock that’s photorealistic in every possible way. We’re able to create an interactive 3D video of a spore or leaf fragment, to get closer than ever before.”   Back in Shepherd’s basement, Mike Gunton has the first edited clip of the dodder’s attack—a long, thin tendril circling the nettle before sending out probes, which pierce the stem and suck the life out of the plant. Speeded up, there’s something grotesque about the tentacle of doom that crushes to death a plant known for its expertise in self-defense. “I brought it to David,” Gunton says, with a beam like an excited kid. “This is really the key moment in any innovation we try. Sir David has seen everything. He’s been everywhere in the world many times over; he’s watched pretty much everything the natural world can do, and so what drives us is the desire to bring him something new. The greatest pleasure you get in this job is what happened when I brought him this film—it’s showing some footage to David Attenborough and having him say, ‘I’ve never seen that before, that’s pretty innovative.’”  Director and time-lapse photographer Tim Shepherd in a “jungle” environment in his Devon studio. The week before, this was set up as a lily pond. The camera has been fitted with a slim probe lens that can move inside the foliage without disturbing itPhotograph: Benedict Redgrove   ATTENBOROUGH’S BELIEF IN the importance of innovation, coupled with a delight in storytelling and respectful treatment of the world, is at the heart of the Natural History Unit. He was reluctant to give WIRED an interview that dwelled too much on his career to date. He wanted to avoid any living obituaries. He would talk about current projects and new technology, but he stressed he was still working and had no plans to retire. All the same, his route here helps understand why the unit is technically savvy, globally successful, scientifically relevant, and increasingly vocal about the dangers of environmental threats like climate change.   David Attenborough joined the BBC as a trainee in 1952, having only ever watched one television program. His love of the natural world and his fascination with innovation were both part of his upbringing, and he graduated in zoology and geology from Cambridge. He was conscripted into the navy and worked in publishing before applying to the BBC, where his early career included the high-octane round-table debate Animal, Vegetable, Mineral?, but, then aged 28, he decided he wanted to take advantage of the smaller 16-mm film cameras used on battlefields by war correspondents. “A desire to exploit the latest technical innovation has been the defining stimulus of almost every major television series I have ever made,” he explains. “The first was television’s ability to get acceptable images from 16-mm film. Until 1952 it had to use 35-mm, the size used by cinemas. The cameras were mounted on bicycle wheels and had valves inside.”  Solar-powered cameras are prepared by crew for on-location installation, to capture footage without the presence of humans.Photograph: Benedict Redgrove  In 1954, he traveled to Sierra Leone with Jack Lester, London Zoo’s curator of reptiles, and cameraman Charles Lagus to film a new series, Zoo Quest, using a 16-mm camera—despite the BBC initially vetoing the lightweight camera as “beneath contempt.” Attenborough was the producer, director, sound recordist, and animal wrangler for the series, and only ended up appearing on screen after Lester was taken ill. Zoo Quest brought rare animals—including chimpanzees, pythons, and birds of paradise—into viewers’ living rooms and proved that wildlife programs could attract big audiences. The lighter camera allowed Lagus the mobility to capture shots of animals and places that television viewing audiences had never seen before and meant Attenborough was the first person to catch the elusive Komodo dragon on film.   His timing couldn’t have been better. The study of animals in the wild, or ethology, is arguably humanity’s oldest science—we have practiced it since nomadic people tried to predict the behavior of hunted animals. Until the publication of the first modern ethology textbook (The Study of Instinct, by Nikolaas Tinbergen) in 1951, however, field work wasn’t an important part of zoology. Tinbergen, a Dutch biologist, pioneered the study of animals outside the laboratory and moved to the UK after the Second World War to teach at Oxford, where his students included Richard Dawkins and zoologist and TV presenter Desmond Morris. Although Attenborough wasn’t a student of Tinbergen, their work overlapped—indeed, Tinbergen’s approach inspired Attenborough and Attenborough invited Tinbergen to host shows for the unit. Many of Tinbergen’s students ended up working for the NHU helping create a new kind of wildlife television—ethology in action. At the same time, Attenborough was continuing to innovate in television technology and program format. The only person to have won BAFTAs for programs produced in black and white, color, HD, and 3D, he’s also the reason tennis balls are bright yellow. As controller of BBC Two, Attenborough oversaw the first-ever color television broadcasts in Europe in 1967, including that summer’s coverage of the Wimbledon tournament. “There were only three people with color sets, which were the size of a refrigerator,” he recalls with a slight smile. He is reserved and thoughtful in interviews, watching intently as questions are asked, then delivering precise answers with careful nods of the head. “The chief engineer at the BBC and I had two of them. We watched a program called Late Night Line-Up every night on BBC Two in color. We used to ring up one another in the morning and say what we thought. The chief engineer was a Scotsman, was very realistic, and all he was interested in was if the face looked natural. And after about three weeks, he thought the skin tone was finally fine, so he rang me up and said, ‘Tomorrow, we should go for a bowl of fruit.’” At that time, tennis balls were either white or black—just as they had been since the 1800s. After watching a game, Attenborough suggested yellow tennis balls would be easier for viewers to follow in color; in 1972, the International Tennis Federation accepted his suggestion. His tenure at BBC Two also saw him commission a series of so-called “sledgehammer” projects—epic series of 10 or more parts that covered subjects in depth, starting with history and anthropology in shows like Civilisation and The Ascent of Man. With the NHU producer Christopher Parsons he started working up the first natural history sledgehammer, Life on Earth. A series of BBC promotions—first to director of programs, followed by an offer to become director general—took him away from program-making, so he resigned in 1973 to work on the show, which finally aired in 1979.   With its extraordinary wildlife images and compelling story tracing the path of evolution, Life on Earth reached an estimated global audience of 500 million. A scene where Attenborough encounters a female mountain gorilla in Rwanda, which reaches out and embraces him, remains one of the most celebrated moments in the history of television. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know,” he ad-libbed. The wildlife documentary changed forever—and the NHU began its evolution from being just another department at the BBC to what the movie industry trade paper Variety dubs “Green Hollywood.”  FOR SOME YEARS, environmental activists like George Monbiot, who started his career at the NHU, have criticized the BBC and Attenborough for being Green Hollywood in style rather than substance. Monbiot argued that showing the natural world without the context of human harm was ignoring the perils the planet faces. This began to change in the 21st century. State of the Planet in 2000, as well as 2006’s The Truth About Climate Change, 2007’s Saving Planet Earth, and 2009’s How Many People Can Live on Our Planet? all saw Attenborough and the team deal with the effects of global heating, overpopulation, and endangered species. “I think that really gathered pace with Planet Earth II in 2016,” Gunton says. “We had stories about human effects on the environment and audiences were saying ‘we want more.’ The response gave us the confidence to turn the dial up with Blue Planet, and now the challenge is to keep the story fresh. There’s a gratifying fire in the belly of the young generation of filmmakers.”  Blue Planet II is best known for its explicit environmental message—in particular its depiction of the effects of marine plastic pollution. This influenced the UK government to extend a charge on using plastic carrier bags, which has been credited with a decrease in their use by 83 percent, and to set an ambitious target to eliminate avoidable plastic waste by 2041. A study by a team at Imperial College suggests that simply viewing Blue Planet II increases the likelihood that people will choose paper packaging over plastic.   Since then, explains Jo Shinner, one of the unit’s executive producers who oversees kids’ programming, “environmental issues are front and center of what we do.” She points to 2020’s Bears About the House, which included scenes from bear-bile farms in Laos. The episode prompted an unsolicited donation of $1.5 million to NGO Free the Bears—which would otherwise have closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. It used the money to rescue 38 bears. “Hacking technology allows us to run alongside cheetahs or using drones to explore forest canopies,” Gunton says. “And it helps us stay true to the environmental message. You can do carbon offsetting, but filming in a helicopter for six hours is a lot of carbon. A battery-powered drone is a game changer.” In 2020, Attenborough issued his most explicit warning of environmental catastrophe in  A Life on Our Planet , his Netflix documentary and testament that opened in Chernobyl with his stark personal warning that “the natural world is fading. The evidence is all around. It’s happened in my lifetime. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. This film is my witness statement and my vision for the future, the story of how we came to make this our greatest mistake, and how, if we act now, we can yet put it right.” In 2021, he was appointed People’s Advocate for the COP26 UN climate change summit in Glasgow, where he warned global leaders they faced “our last opportunity to make the necessary step-change” toward protecting the planet. “Perhaps the most significant lesson brought by these last 12 months has been that we are no longer separate nations, each best served by looking after its own needs and security,” he told the UN security council. “We are a single, truly global species, whose greatest threats are shared and whose security must ultimately come from acting together in the interests of us all.”  Photograph: Benedict Redgrove     THE GREEN PLANET may not be the last show Attenborough presents, but it does mark a new era for the Natural History Unit. During filming, the unit opened its first office in Los Angeles. The show itself, coproduced with PBS, Bilibili, ZDF German Television, France Télévisions, and NHK, was sold to a dozen territories before filming was finished, including DR in Denmark, NRK in Norway, Movistar+ in Spain, ERR in Estonia, LRT in Lithuania, LTV in Latvia, RTVS in Slovenia, Friday in Russia, Channel Nine in Australia, TVNZ in New Zealand, and Radio-Canada. The ethos Attenborough established of working with research scientists, modifying technology, taking time to capture nature, and placing our world in context has grown from amateur naturalists discussing woodpeckers to a technical, creative, and scientific endeavor that’s making programs for the entire world. Attenborough’s desire to bring people as close as possible to the natural world has taken him to many surprising places—the latest being the government-funded 5G trials announced in January. The Green Planet 5G AR Consortium, comprising the BBC, 5G mobile network operator EE, Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, and immersive-content studio Factory 42, is collaborating on an augmented reality app funded by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media &amp; Sport. The app will lock into a mini 5G network in a retail space in central London, where a hologram of Attenborough will talk people through the plants featured in the show. Gunton and the scientists at Kew Gardens suggested plants that would be suitable for adapting for digitized interaction, such as the light balsa tree seed, which takes flight on the breeze. Factory 42 and EE developed software that could be triggered when people blow into their phone’s mic to make a digital seed take flight on their handset. “The idea is that you’re stepping into a natural history program, and you can interact with it,” explains John Cassy, Factory 42’s founder and CEO. “If people are doing things, it’s nine times more effective in engaging them than just reading or watching. Sir David got it immediately—he gets really excited by new things and progress. We filmed him for nearly seven hours in a holographic studio, he understood how and what the tech can do, he nailed every take and made suggestions which always turned out to be right.”   “Younger audiences—their phones are the main way to reach them,” Attenborough says. “I hope as a consequence that the needs and wonder and importance of the natural world are seen. We tend to think we are the be all and end all—but we’re not. We’re both the victims and benefactors, and the sooner we can realize that the natural world goes its way, not our way, the better.” “If new technology enables us to bring that home to viewers, that’s important,” he continues. “Anything that transports people into an environment which is unfamiliar, but which is an important natural one, is very valuable, and I think people will find it exciting. I was in a television studio when the Apollo mission launched. I remember very well a blue sphere in the blackness, and in that one shot, there was the whole of humanity. I realized our home is not limitless. There is an edge to our existence. And I would feel very guilty if I saw what the problems are and decided to ignore them.”  More Great WIRED Stories  Why bosses are inflexible about flexible working  Humans have broken a fundamental law of the ocean  The world needs to crack battery recycling, fast  Body language pseudoscience is flourishing on YouTube  TikTok’s next big move? To become Facebook  Norway is running out of gas-guzzling cars to tax  Locked out of ‘God Mode,’ runners are hacking their treadmills  Subscribe to the WIRED Podcast. New episodes every Friday
David Attenborough’s Unending Mission to Save Our Planet
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/david-attenborough-climate-crisis
https://www.gq.com/story/freediver-alexey-molchanov-profile
The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver
2021-09-21
Condé Nast; Daniel Riley
<div><div><div><h2>1. Rhapsody in Blue</h2><p>For all the complex techniques required to succeed, the objective is remarkably simple: Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying.</p><p>This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down.</p><p>The competition, Vertical Blue, is the Wimbledon of freediving, summoning the planet's best to battle in perhaps the most amenable freediving waters in the world. As the event's founder, William Trubridge, who's spent a lifetime scouring the earth's surface for conducive spots to go deep, put it to me: “You could not design a better place for freediving if you sat down with pen and paper.”</p><p>But this is more than the pinnacle competition of a sport. Yes, the divers here devote their lives to the pursuit of record depths, but they also dedicate themselves to a novel way of interacting with this world and its oceans—and of being alive, of breathing. They come from Italy and Japan and New Zealand and Peru. They live and train in Sardinia and Okinawa and Cyprus and Tulum. They compete in the glorious depths off of Egypt and Turkey and Honduras and Greece. They prepare together, rent group houses on the road, often fall into bed with one another, and occasionally marry. They are specialized professionals but don't really make any money; their sport hasn't yet hit the big time. But no matter: To spend time in their midst is to begin to comprehend that they are after something greater, something sublime.</p><figure><p><p>Freediving seemed to a young Molchanov like a door to another world—a life of “travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.”</p>
</p></figure></div><div><p>Freediving is, after all, a lifelong opportunity to radically reshape one's body and mind in the process. In pursuing depth, humans must train their lungs and brains to unlock secret sources of clarity and strength and oxygen and potential that are hidden within the body. They are secrets that, once revealed, make the divers not just more effective at their craft, they argue, but more effective, conscious, skillful, and thoughtful as human beings. There is a shift in perspective. A global realignment within one's consciousness. The look in their eyes when they talk about this thing…every diver who's gone truly deep sounds like those rarest of individuals who've seen the earth from the moon, or died and been resuscitated.</p><p>The seemingly unique techniques of freediving, then, translate beyond the bounds of freediving. To other sports, to work, to relationships with colleagues and friends and family. There are, it turns out, benefits to better breathing, to masterful body control, and to pursuing the state of mindfulness that is required to plunge to unfathomable depths without freaking the fuck out and accidentally killing yourself. “There is a part of freediving,” the world's best freediver, Alexey Molchanov, says, “that can be very useful for everyone.”</p><p>Like other activities in which the sublime is sought, danger is an animating feature. Blackouts are frequent, especially at shallow depths, even for the most skilled divers. Pressure, which builds as one goes deeper, can rupture the soft tissues of the ears, throat, and lungs if it's not properly managed. The risks are deceptive. There is a temptation to go deeper before one is ready, which means that even the world's best tend to bite off only incremental gains in depth. There are no shortcuts in freediving; no cheat codes to water pressure, buoyancy, and gravity. At the surface, after reacquainting with the air, there can be loss of motor skills, uncontrollable shaking, blackouts, blood. Death is rare, but ever present. At this same competition in the Bahamas eight years ago, a young American from Brooklyn who was quickly ascending the ranks of the world's elite divers (perhaps too quickly, some say) died in this very cove, above this very blue hole. Safety protocols are always improving, but the specter lingers. It is not a stretch to suggest that when we humans deliberately cut off our access to oxygen, and then exert ourselves in athletic performance, we are inviting disaster, or at least tempting fate. And yet this is what it's all about. When we tempt fate in this way, our bodies and minds surprise us. This is the allure of the practice of freediving.</p><p>There is, though, also the allure of records. The raw number. <em>How deep can we go as a species?</em> Today, there is one diver who goes the deepest, who blends the physical and metaphysical like no one else in the sport. Watching the 34-year-old Russian Alexey Molchanov dive can be dangerously disorienting. Seemingly anyone else attempting what he does would die. It is like watching the world's best rock climber scale a sheer face with ease, only the inverse. That's one way to think of what he's doing: <em>Free Solo</em> but for drowning. <em>Free Solo</em> but down. And no one alive goes down like Alexey Molchanov.</p><hr /></div><div><figure><p><p>Mindset, Molchanov, says, is everything. “I can make this whole dive superhard or super successful just by having a different perspective.”</p>
</p></figure></div><div><h2>2. Down</h2><p>Long Island, Bahamas, looks from above like a seagull in the sky of a child's drawing. It is long, low-lying, rustic, remote. It is buttressed by a water so Bahamian blue the color looks borrowed from the nation's flag. There are roadside grills and whitewashed churches and goats strolling the highway and hurricane damage stretching back many hurricanes. It is hot. Here is where the Tropic of Cancer passes through. If you can picture that bird in the sky, right where the wings come together there is a pitted dirt road to a secluded cove, and in that cove, a blue hole.</p></div><div><p>Dean's Blue Hole sits within a natural amphitheater of scrub and rock, about 50 feet off of a secluded beach. Today, people are watching the action from those rocks, and from the surface of the water, and from well beneath, down in the hole. It is day four of Vertical Blue, and Alexey is attempting to break one of his own world records—in a discipline called Constant Weight—with a dive of 131 meters (or about 43 stories). In Constant Weight, competitors can dive with the assistance of a small amount of weight and the fin, or fins, on their feet. This is the deepest dive that anyone will attempt in the nine days of Vertical Blue. It is the deepest any diver has ever attempted in the history of the competition.</p><p>Alexey bobs vertically in the water. He is maskless but he has just affixed his nose clip. His golden wet suit clings tightly to his head and his body. Though he may be better known for the capabilities of his lungs and his brain, his body is different from many other bodies in freediving, as well. He is just short of six feet tall, bald, and looks as squat as a Soviet boxer. There is no ideal body shape in freediving but many of the divers at Vertical Blue are as long and lithe as distance runners. Alexey's legs are like fire hydrants. On more than one occasion, I overhear other divers describe his ass as “meaty.” He is a unit. He sticks out.</p><p>Fans and fellow divers hang on the floating PVC pipe that delineates mere civilian waters from the “competition zone” above the blue hole. All around are tan chests, taut arms, and high butts bobbing at the surface. There is stillness. No current, no breeze. There is a palpable buzz all around. The safety chief asks the crowd to quiet down. But Alexey will not notice us, anyway—not us or the commentators floating on that platform or the cameras in his face or the implications of his attempt. He is already in transit to another realm.</p><p>When Alexey was younger, his mother, Natalia Molchanova, was the world's best freediver, a distinction that she held for many years. She was a pioneer in the sport and the practitioner of a mind-and-body-control technique called “attention deconcentration.” She passed her secrets to her son, who perfected them and uses the regimen to reach a state of intense calm. By doing so, he can slow his heart rate, his metabolic rate, while simultaneously slowing the activity of his brain and his body. His focus deepens. He relaxes to the point of seeming asleep. He takes deep, drowsy breaths, like a summer breeze filling a sail.</p><p>The judges count him down to the start of his dive: <em>One minute…</em></p><p>His jaw is slack. His eyes are half-mast. He is there, but not there. The breaths fill his enormous lungs, which he's worked to accommodate over years by developing flexibility in his rib cage and chest. You know how stretching a balloon makes it easier to blow up? Alexey has been doing something like that for the past 20 years—stretching out the balloons of his lungs to maximize their capacity to hold air.</p></div><div><p>With one hand, he holds the dive line—a long cable that marks the path down the blue hole. The dive line serves two primary purposes: to lead the diver to their depth; and to pull the diver up by a winch, as though they are a hooked fish, if he or she blacks out on their way down or up. Once the judges' countdown reaches zero, Alexey fills his lungs with one great inhalation, and then begins to sip little mouthfuls of air that he compresses on top of his already full lungs. It's like putting another shirt in an already stuffed suitcase, then another shirt, and then upwards of, like, 30 more shirts. This advanced method is, naturally, called <em>packing.</em> Once Alexey can pack no longer, it's time. He rolls over into a dolphin dive, his head disappears beneath the surface, and the large monofin that he wears on his feet shoots straight up in the air, lightly spraying the spectators on the pipe.</p><p>From the edge of the competition zone, a spectator can, at this point, dip beneath the surface and watch the sleek form in its golden wet suit plunge toward the abyss. Alexey takes several big dolphin kicks, his powerful legs working like the first stage of a rocket. He is fighting the positive buoyancy at the surface, the thing that keeps us afloat in the sea and returns us to the surface after a shallow dive. Alexey eats up that depth quickly, and then, at around 20 meters, he vanishes from view altogether.</p><p>At 22 meters, a small alarm from Alexey's watch signals to him that it's time to transfer reserves of air from his lungs into his mouth and neck so that he can equalize his ears as he goes deeper. Alexey is doing that once every few seconds during the first 20 meters, preempting the change in pressure, which comes quickly. In the first 10 meters, the pressure doubles. By 20 meters, it's tripled. To combat the mounting pressure, Alexey heeds his alarm and moves air to his neck and mouth and pushes his tongue toward his eardrums. All this while remaining utterly calm, present, unthinking, practically catatonic.</p><p>There is a moment not much deeper into the dive when the body realizes that it is not getting oxygen the way that it usually does. This is, in part, the effect of the elevated carbon dioxide in the system. Bodies react differently, but among less advanced divers there is often an involuntary panic that sets in, convulsions or contractions; an internal spasm by the cells and alveoli, which scream for fresh air. And yet, if you pass through this traumatic phase, on the other side there is one of those unlocked secrets of the body: more oxygen. If pushed to its limit in this way, the body flips a switch, part of the mammalian diving reflex, like toggling to a reserve tank of gas. It is just one of the body's many extraordinary automatic mechanisms for staving off death—drowning, asphyxiation, brain damage, whatever—and one of the mechanisms that freedivers train to exploit. Blood begins to flow in from the extremities to the core, to the lungs and vital organs, drawing limited oxygen away from less critical body parts to those necessary to sustain life. Alexey can feel the capillaries in his lungs expand and the capillaries in his extremities constrict. A warming occurs all over. A bear hug from the depths.</p><p>For Alexey, at around 30 meters the buoyancy shifts to negative and he begins to free-fall. Alexey relaxes his body further. With his arms down at his sides to reduce drag, he starts plummeting to the bottom of the ocean. There is a long, warm embrace and a drift toward nothingness in a sort of zero G. It is a physical manifestation of his mental state. Calmness. Stillness. Barely-there-ness. There are dreamlike contours to the plunge.</p></div><div><p>At 45 meters: a second alarm. Alexey can hear it clear as a bell, thanks to the acoustics of the deep. The notification means that his free fall has reached its maximum speed and his lungs are compressed to almost one-sixth their size at the surface. The oxygen is no less than it was up there. It's just taking up a much smaller amount of space, as gases can and do. He is racing toward the bottom, neither accelerating nor decelerating. He is equalizing all the way, but his mind is empty. His fin works as a rudder, moving subtly to hold the absolute vertical of his position. He is goggle-less and his eyes are still half-mast. There but not there.</p><p>A third alert sounds as he approaches his attempted depth, marked by a plate at the bottom of the dive line. Three meters short of the plate, the line goes from white to striped, letting Alexey know he is close. All around him, it has been lightless for some time, except for the light from the lamp on his head. If it were to go out, he would not be able to see his hand in front of his face. Given that he's not breathing, there's no real sound either. Just: a sensory oblivion. Spooky stuff.</p><p>At the bottom plate, he grabs a tag—a symbolic gesture to signify that he's been here, like the seizing of a shell off the ocean floor—rolls forward, executes a simple turn, and with one tug on the rope, thrusts himself back toward the surface. Up there, in the Bahamian daylight, the judges have been tracking Alexey's descent, counting depth off like mission control as the lunar module approaches the moon. <em>110…120…touchdown!</em> The crowd claps, cheers, splashes. At the end of the dive line he is halfway home, but halfway is always as far from breathing as you can be.</p><hr /><figure><p><p>Alexey's mother, Natalia Molchanov, a legendary figure in freediving, regarded it as more than a sport. “It's a way to understand who we are," she said. </p>
</p></figure><h2>3. Mother</h2><p>During the five days that Alexey and I spend together in the Bahamas, the question that makes him most uncomfortable is not whether he ever worries about blacking out 400 feet beneath breathable air, but about whether he might one day have to give up the vagabond existence he's cultivated—moving to dive spots for weeks or months at a time. “I'm not thinking in the categories of really settling somewhere…,” he says, on the porch of the house he's renting here with his wife and infant son and some other divers for several weeks. “I can just go somewhere, live somewhere for a month.” Just as he's doing here. “Since I finished university, I haven't spent more than five, six months at home in Moscow.”</p></div><div><p>That these divers orient their lives around the oceans, around the planet's best spots to dive, around these long competitions, is a matter of course. They move around the world at significant cost and with little in the manner of sponsorship and prize money. They are simply in pursuit of these pure experiences: It is, like surfing specific breaks or claiming particular peaks, a devotional framework for one's life. At dinner one night, Alexey shows me a marine navigation app he uses to look for new sites to chase depth. Most places on the planet we scroll over he seems to have been to before. This was the dream: To see the world, to encounter the ocean's riches, to experience things no other human has—it's what drew Alexey to freediving from the start.</p><p>Alexey grew up in southernmost Russia, in Volgograd (“the old name is Stalingrad”), and, like many busy children of the '90s, his schedule was packed with activities. Swimming and violin and chess and tae kwon do. He marvels at the way his parents balanced that life for him without pushing too hard on any one pursuit. He chose swimming and, as a teen, went to Saint Petersburg for a swim-focused boarding school, a thrilling and impactful first taste of life away from home, followed by university in Moscow. There, Alexey transitioned from competitive swimming to freediving. He'd been doing something like it all his life, even if he didn't call it that—swimming and diving as early as three, messing around with breath holds on vacations to the Black Sea not long after. It hadn't occurred to him that he might build his life around diving. “But one day,” he says, “I saw these articles in magazines about freediving competitions. And <em>trips.</em> It wasn't just a sport, the way it was presented, it was already this whole lifestyle. Of travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.” It was a specific grand way of experiencing the world, of living in the world, of orienting his life around this new thing that he could be extraordinary at.</p><p>His mother had caught on only a little earlier. Natalia was, like Alexey, a competitive swimmer, but only took up freediving when she was 40, after a challenging divorce from Alexey's father. By her 50th birthday, she had set numerous world records in various disciplines. “Many people, when they reach 50, they think life is over,” she said. “I want to show them, there is more they can do.” The next year, in 2013, she broke the world record in five disciplines. Concurrent to her development, Natalia built a freediving school in Moscow. When Alexey graduated from university and threw himself into the sport, he worked side by side with his mother, first at the school, then in their business, Molchanovs, which mostly sold wet suits and fins. (The logo, a fish tail designed by Alexey, is also two <em>m</em>'s: “The big <em>m</em> is my mom and the little <em>m</em> is me.”)</p><p>Natalia was regarded as a sort of sage in the sport. “Freediving is not only sport,” she once said, “it's a way to understand who we are. When we go down, if we don't think, we understand we are whole. We are one with world.” Through deconcentration, a form of advanced meditation she described as having evolved from techniques used by ancient warriors, she could reset her mind and feel more prepared to take on the world. But in 2015, during a presumably routine training dive near the Mediterranean island of Formentera, she disappeared. She never resurfaced—just literally vanished into the sea. Her presence hovers above freediving and freedivers, and naturally, her legacy lives on most urgently through Alexey, who remains in charge of the school and business, and serves as the conduit to her tenets of diving and deconcentration. Those techniques provide anyone with ways to breathe better, to go deeper more safely, and to expand one's capacity to operate without air. But, in a broader sense, they also give individuals tools to stare life's gravest challenges in the face and not look away.</p></div><div><p>When Alexey teaches these skills, they are not theoretical. They are techniques, after all, that come from a man whose mother disappeared from this world while doing the very thing he's devoted his life to. At one point, as I alluded to, I asked Alexey if he ever gets consumed by the risks, the potential implications, of a dive gone wrong. “Statistically,” he says, “it's very safe. When you have this strength and connection between your mind and body, you have this awareness, a sense of if you're at the limit.” But was there ever a moment, in the wake of what happened to his mother, I asked, when he had hesitation about going on? “Sometimes when I had blackouts and other traumas, she was worried for me and wanted me to stop,” he says. “But I didn't want to. I wanted to continue.” He wanted to go deeper.</p><hr /></div><div><figure><p><p>“He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time,” Vertical Blue founder William Trubridge said of Molchanov in July. </p>
</p></figure></div><div><h2>4. Up</h2><p>Alexey is unaware of what's happening at the surface on his world-record attempt at Vertical Blue. He is unaware of anything at all except the hug at depth. His mind has retreated and his body has taken over. He is flying through space in the opposite direction now, but what are directions in the black?</p><p>On the way up, his arms are in an aerodynamic position over his head. He kicks calmly with his monofin, focusing all his efforts on efficient and economical movement. He is fighting negative buoyancy now. Any extra tension can eat up energy and precious oxygen. The whole game is this balance of action and inaction. Of optimal motion.</p><p>He has been underwater for two-and-a-half minutes now. This is nowhere near as long as he can last. He has a personal Static Apnea record (holding breath in a pool) of 8:33 officially, and nine minutes in training. But in motion, one's capacity for breath hold is usually only half what it is sitting still, and, anyway, from the surface it feels like he's been down there for an eternity. He climbs and climbs, and the judges begin to count him back to the surface. <em>50 meters…40 meters…</em></p><p>This is where divers can get into trouble. They are climbing and they are starting to feel the effects of their breathlessness. When you sense that you're out of oxygen, you might start to feel tired, your legs might start to get lactic, and it's natural to want to speed up or tense up. But tensing up, particularly in the shoulders and neck, can restrict blood flow, and right now Alexey needs especially good blood flow to the lungs and brain. This is the discipline: resisting the overreaction, suppressing the desperate move, balancing the need to rush toward the surface with a calmness that keeps one from overriding the plan. Alexey controls his mind and his body with totality.</p><p>At 40 meters, a safety diver meets Alexey in the blue hole. At 30 meters, he's joined by another. They dive to his depth, get close to him, but not too close—they don't want to contribute to lost focus. They watch Alexey's face for signals of distress, and kick up alongside him to the surface.</p><p>At 20 meters, the spectators watching from above with their faces in the water spot Alexey's form emerging from the abyss, shrouded by the blurred motion of the safety divers. Positive buoyancy has returned and it begins to lift him. He slows himself down but still breaches the surface with tremendous force, popping up like a rubber ball held underwater. He grabs the line and the air rushes from his body. He fills his lungs with fresh air in forceful draws, his “active inhales.” If a diver blacks out, it's usually at this moment.</p></div><div><p>Once Alexey emerges, he has 15 seconds to meet the surface protocol. He must show the judges that he is okay (by flashing an okay sign). He must keep his airways above the water. He must flash the tag he grabbed at depth. And he must not pass out. He can cough up blood from a torn lung. He can produce pink foam or his lips can turn blue. But if he meets protocol, the dive is good.</p><p>Alexey looks strong. In complete control. He receives a white card from the judges. The dive counts. It is yet another world record. The large crowd, which had to be implored not to put too much weight on the PVC pipe of the competition zone so as not to sink it, erupts with cheers and splashes.</p><p>As Alexey swims away toward the recovery platform, the safety chief yells over to him jovially: “Alexey, what is your secret?!”</p><p>Alexey is huffing for air still, unable to speak.</p><p>“You won't disclose!”</p><p>Alexey catches his breath and smiles. “I won't disclose….”</p><hr /><figure><p><p>Molchanov wants to create freediving schools in busy cities, “where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.”</p>
</p></figure><h2>5. The Secret; or the Physicality of Nowness</h2><p>But, in fact, he is happy to disclose. Just as Denzel Washington is willing to tell you how he acts without worrying that you're going to steal his roles. It's easy to share secrets when you know no one can do what you can do with the information.</p><p>Learning to control one's breathing is important, but so is learning to control one's mind. Oxygen deprivation is, after all, Alexey says, one of the most physiologically stressful things we can experience in life. When every bit of our body starts to scream for air, it surfaces our fears. It emphasizes our proximity to death. Our pulse increases. Panic sets in. Every reaction we are trying to suppress rears itself with fangs. The test is what we will do in that moment.</p></div><div><p>For Alexey, the goal is to sink into that challenge, that panic, and maintain the focus, the stillness, the meditation, even as it only gets harder to do so. The whole thing is a test of faith: Do I believe that I have more oxygen on the other side of this stress? Do I believe that I will be okay? Our minds are sharpened by facing that test of faith and ultimately passing through to the other side, where there are, it turns out, reserves of oxygen and an even deeper state of focus, stillness, and calm. “Learning how to deal with it,” Alexey says, “gives us this mental strength and focus with other challenging things that happen in our lives—for them to feel less important to us, and less provoking.”</p><p>What Alexey has discovered is a way of playing with perspective. “I can,” he says, “make this whole dive superhard or super successful, just by having a different perspective on the dive.” The key is to snap his attention back to the present moment, to train his brain as vigorously as he can train his body to almost physically overcome his thoughts and hold his mind in a state of nothingness and nowness. “I feel how my attention can get broadened in time and space,” he says. “I can be thinking about the future, I can be thinking about the past. All these thoughts everywhere. We have that a lot in life. But if I was just to pull them back into the now moment, pull my thoughts back, <em>really physically,</em> that's the technique that feels like a technique that can be learned. When I practice it a lot, it's like an arm movement. <em>Physical.</em> You just pull it back. And you get your attention to the shortest possible time moment.”</p><p>The past vanishes. The future does not exist (because it does not exist). Only nowness, only hereness. There is nothing beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter, centimeter, millimeter of depth. The focal length of time and space shortens to practically nothing. After thousands of training dives, the body knows what it is meant to do, but the mind is always threatening to wander. The key, he says, is physically pulling it back. Here. Now. Flatness. One dimension. Not even a line, but a point. Nothing in front or behind, above or below or to the sides. Just this. We can all handle just this.</p><p>This is how one goes deep, lowers the heart rate, seems to practically fall asleep at the bottom of a world-record-setting dive, while doing the thing in the water that most of our bodies revolt against most violently. If you can learn to handle that trial, you can learn to focus your way through a penalty kick or a presentation to the partners or a live TV appearance or a job interview. We can remind ourselves that we've put ourselves in that position, said yes to the opportunity, pushed ourselves to the outer limits of our comfort zone, and done so willingly.</p><p>I ask if he is ever fearful, ever nervous, if he ever gets butterflies before a major competition. “No. That's something I learned over the years to control,” he says. “The thoughts that you don't want to do this. Because this super important moment comes. It can be whatever, a dive, a presentation. And you feel sick because of your thought process, where you don't want to do this because of this pressure. <em>Will he do it? Will he meet others' expectations?</em> It's a lack of self-assurance in your abilities. But the shift should be: This is the area of my expertise. This is what I want to do. I have the current skills that I have, I've prepared as much as I can, and I will do the best that I can. But I do this because it's my choice. Realizing your best potential is only possible while being relaxed, while calm.</p></div><div><p>“With a big event,” he says, “instead of focusing on the importance of an event, I switch to focusing on how much I enjoy deep diving, and how much I enjoy the process. I'm doing this because I like it, and I know how to do this really well. I'm diving with this reason in mind. And I'm doing this because I <em>want</em> to…. When I know I am capable of this, then I can really pull in all my focus to the pleasure of it all.”</p><hr /></div><div><figure><p><p>Molchanov's official record for holding his breath while motionless in a pool is 8:33. In training, he's held it for nine minutes.</p>
</p></figure></div><div><h2>6. Family</h2><p><em>The pleasure of it all.</em> It is a version of Alexey's story that connects each of the competitors at Vertical Blue. These divers, in pursuit of both depth and width of experience—of searching the surface of this watery planet for miraculous marinescapes, for blue holes. At first, divers might go off in pairs, or little packs. Spreading their wings, dusting off their passports. But what a competition like Vertical Blue does is serve as the great pilgrimage for all serious comers. It brings this group of 42 divers to this sparsely populated island of 3,000 (nearest town to Dean's Blue Hole, population: 86) together for a nine-day competition. There is not much besides one another. There are just a couple restaurants open nearby. There are more churches to attend on Sundays than places to buy potable water. Things can be hard and a little lonely if you don't find each other. But they always do. This community. It is addicting. The dives are one pleasure. The family is another.</p><p>During my time in the Bahamas, I bump up against the edges of this family. For example, while waiting for Alexey to wake up from a nap one afternoon, his housemate Arnaud Jerald (the new Constant Weight Bi-Fins world-record holder until Alexey breaks it five days later) insists on making me an <em>omelette</em> and <em>salade</em>. He is from Marseille, has been at this house near the blue hole for a month, training and taking pictures. He has grand designs for his life in the sport, a plan to excite more high-end sponsors into supporting freediving. He just signed with Richard Mille—making him one of the few freedivers to ink an endorsement deal with a luxury-watch company. He shows me some underwater photos that his partner, Charlotte, had just taken of him in a polo walking on the edge of the blue hole, like it was the surface of a distant planet. He wants would-be sponsors to see what's possible with divers in the picture.</p><p>At a waterfront restaurant one night, sitting at the bar and reading a book, I find myself surrounded by a third of the field of divers. There are groupings that I relish. Pods of nationalities. Clusters by age. A married couple. A couple that might like to be married. I count off the countries represented in my midst: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Slovenia, France, Tunisia, and Mexico. On the beach each day are competitors, of course, but there are also mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. While a Czech diver pursues records, her young daughter snorkels in the shallows. The son of an Italian national-record holder is well on his way to matching his father's tan. There are babies, too, like I've never seen in the water. Naked little infants squawking in the waves. You come this far for this long, everyone comes with.</p><p>At the restaurant, I help Turkey's top female diver, Sahika Ercumen, find some fish on the menu that isn't fried. She's known Alexey since they were teenagers, “since he had hair,” she says, smiling. “2006, Tenerife. Natalia was there. We were kids, and now he has a baby.” They came up together, live in their respective corners of the world, but then, a few times a year, there are events like this one, with this family, where, Ercumen says, it's just about “making these memories together.” Ercumen had COVID last year, was terrified about how it would react with her asthma, what it would do to her lungs. Over the course of her six dives, she set five new Turkish records.</p></div><div><p>All gratitude for the annual family reunion is owed to William Trubridge, the founder of Vertical Blue and one of freediving's all-timers. Alexey would ultimately break three of the four world records in the competitive depth disciplines at this year's Vertical Blue, but the fourth is still held by Trubridge, in his specialty discipline, Constant Weight No Fins. No Fins is considered the purest of the dives, as it most resembles the sort of purpose-driven plunges that humans have been taking for thousands of years, to spearfish, to scoop sponges and pearls, to explore the ocean.</p><p>Raised in New Zealand, Trubridge moved to Long Island, not far from Dean's Blue Hole, in 2006, to train. Since then, freediving and Vertical Blue have experienced a rapid evolution. By 2010, he had built a world-class competition. Then, in 2013, in just its sixth edition, tragedy struck. An American diver named Nicholas Mevoli experienced a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by barometric pressure and died at a medical center near the blue hole. Still nascent by the standards of most organized sports, freediving has a growing infrastructure in place for better education, better training, and safer competition. When I ask Trubridge what prior accounts of freediving tend to get wrong, he thinks for a moment, then says the sensationalism of it: “Some people have only focused on the coughing up blood, the blacking out. That is part of it, sure, and that's a risk that is there. But it's like auto sports: If you were to just focus on the crashes, you wouldn't be telling the story in full.”</p><p>Still, the effects of diving to these depths day after day are cumulative. In the lungs, in the legs, in the head. Which is one reason why things at the surface get dicier by the last days of competition. Even Alexey, on day eight, takes longer on his Bi-Fins dive than expected. And though he winds up breaking Arnaud's short-held world record, watching someone fail to emerge from the deep for even just seconds beyond their projected time is enough to make a viewer acutely uncomfortable. On day nine, seven divers fail to reach their attempted depths and five divers black out. Alexey, having nothing left to prove, does a sort of victory-lap dive in recreational fins. Before the dive, Trubridge is in the commentator booth, adding some color to the event's livecast on YouTube. “Alexey's been in incredible form this whole competition,” he says. “He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time.”</p><hr /><figure><p><p>Alexey is not just freediving's greatest champion, he has also become the sport's most important evangelist. </p>
</p></figure><h2>7. Now</h2><p>Despite being the world's best freediver, Alexey makes most of his money from the family business. He's turned down all sponsorship offers to this point, holding out instead for when the sport's profile grows further. Every once in a while, he'll participate in an exhibition in Dubai where the winner gets a car—and then he'll sell the car for cash. There's a real opportunity for luxury sponsors in the sport, he says, but it's slow. And so for now, everyone does their own thing. (Slovenian Alenka Artnik, one of the world's top female divers, is sponsored by, among others, a port and the Slovenian police.) Alexey knows that the future—for the sport and his role in it—will be forged on several potential fronts.</p></div><div><p>First, a global tour. Like Formula 1 or the ATP. Can't you see it? These beautiful coves and coastlines and island-fronts the world over, where there's just enough depth for some world-record attempts and some yachts to anchor up? It feels like the sport is one breath-hold-obsessed billionaire away from a fully funded tour of Grands Prix, one luxury-car title sponsor away from a 10-event season in the Mediterranean, one viral Netflix documentary away from becoming the world's fastest-growing sport.</p><p>Second, amateur events. “Why do people run marathons and participate in triathlons?” he says. “Not to become a national champion or a world champion. They do it as a way to grow and get healthier and structure their life and feel progress.” These exotic locations. The effects on the body and mind. Just listen to a diver describe seeing the sun and sky and gradients of blue from a hundred meters beneath the surface, and it's easy to imagine novices training up from zero to travel the world for a new hobby.</p><p>Third, freediving schools and studios. In the past, Alexey says, diving schools have primarily been set up in coastal diving locations. But Alexey wants to put his new schools mostly in cities. “I really like the concept of having a school in a busy city, where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.” The Moscow school is a hit among business executives, entrepreneurs, and average Vlads. His next target? New York. Imagine, then, next to the yoga studio and the climbing gym, a place to train in freediving breath techniques. It reminds me of something a newer diver said to me on the beach at Dean's Blue Hole one afternoon: “It's hard to resist getting hooked. You go down for four minutes, and you come up feeling like you've been sitting on a zafu pillow for two hours.”</p><p>If Trubridge had been the steward of the spirit of freediving all these years, then maybe Alexey could be the steward of its business viability. They were both necessary. Trubridge had done extraordinary things to grow the sport, but it had remained niche. Alexey had ambitions to make freediving big enough for his friends and fellow competitors to earn real money. To build it for the next generation. To make freediving a thing not just for a global tour but also a thing for your bourgeois neighborhood. Yet despite his focus on the business potential for the sport, he is no less consumed by the beauty of it.</p><p>The day I arrived in the Bahamas, I went to the blue hole several times. It wasn't all that close to where I was staying, but I kept going back all week, again and again, to watch other divers, or to sit on the beach with locals grilling seafood close by, just looking at those blues in a lot of different lights. Well, that first night, I went back on a whim near dusk and accidentally met our hero, Speedo-clad and strolling jovially through the sandy parking lot toward the beach.</p></div><div><p>I hadn't planned to see Alexey at all that night, but if I had, I would've expected to find him in deep, almost monastic, preparation for yet another world-record dive. But his wife and infant son were with him, too, just swimming at the blue hole. Here was Alexey, the fearsomest of all the freedivers, splashing around in the depths. I was stunned. It was like happening upon Roger Federer hitting balls with his kids at Centre Court the night before a final. There was no anxiety, no stress, no fear.</p><p>His mother had died freediving in waters much shallower than these, half a world away. A man had died from freediving at this very spot not long ago. Alexey had been there. But all that noise was irrelevant. Those things were not now. Alexey had big ideas for this sport he was here to carry forward, but that was nothing to be bothered with now, either. When the moment called for it, he was as talented as anyone alive at shrinking the focal length to practically zero. It was his great gift. The thing that made it possible for him to go deeper on one breath than anyone. When he chose to, he could make it so all there was in the world was what was in front of him. And that night, the world was just: Man. Wife. Baby. Blue hole.</p><p><strong>Daniel Riley</strong> <em>is a</em> <em>GQ</em> <em>correspondent</em>.</p><p><em>A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue with the title "Secrets of The Deep."</em></p><h2>Subscribe to GQ. <a href="https://subscribe.gq.com/subscribe/gq/129831?source=EDT_GQM_EDIT_IN_ARTICLE_TOUT_0_OCT2021COVER_ZZ">Click here &gt;&gt;</a></h2></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Alexey Molchanov at Dean’s Blue Hole, in the Bahamas.

 Culture

 The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver

 With only a single breath, Alexey Molchanov, history’s most daring freediver, is reaching improbable depths—and discovering a new kind of enlightenment as he conquers one of the world’s wildest sports.

 By Daniel Riley

 Photography by Daan Verhoeven

 September 21, 2021
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 1. Rhapsody in Blue

 For all the complex techniques required to succeed, the objective is remarkably simple: Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying.

 This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down.

 The competition, Vertical Blue, is the Wimbledon of freediving, summoning the planet's best to battle in perhaps the most amenable freediving waters in the world. As the event's founder, William Trubridge, who's spent a lifetime scouring the earth's surface for conducive spots to go deep, put it to me: “You could not design a better place for freediving if you sat down with pen and paper.”

 But this is more than the pinnacle competition of a sport. Yes, the divers here devote their lives to the pursuit of record depths, but they also dedicate themselves to a novel way of interacting with this world and its oceans—and of being alive, of breathing. They come from Italy and Japan and New Zealand and Peru. They live and train in Sardinia and Okinawa and Cyprus and Tulum. They compete in the glorious depths off of Egypt and Turkey and Honduras and Greece. They prepare together, rent group houses on the road, often fall into bed with one another, and occasionally marry. They are specialized professionals but don't really make any money; their sport hasn't yet hit the big time. But no matter: To spend time in their midst is to begin to comprehend that they are after something greater, something sublime.

 Freediving seemed to a young Molchanov like a door to another world—a life of “travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.”

 Freediving is, after all, a lifelong opportunity to radically reshape one's body and mind in the process. In pursuing depth, humans must train their lungs and brains to unlock secret sources of clarity and strength and oxygen and potential that are hidden within the body. They are secrets that, once revealed, make the divers not just more effective at their craft, they argue, but more effective, conscious, skillful, and thoughtful as human beings. There is a shift in perspective. A global realignment within one's consciousness. The look in their eyes when they talk about this thing…every diver who's gone truly deep sounds like those rarest of individuals who've seen the earth from the moon, or died and been resuscitated.

 The seemingly unique techniques of freediving, then, translate beyond the bounds of freediving. To other sports, to work, to relationships with colleagues and friends and family. There are, it turns out, benefits to better breathing, to masterful body control, and to pursuing the state of mindfulness that is required to plunge to unfathomable depths without freaking the fuck out and accidentally killing yourself. “There is a part of freediving,” the world's best freediver, Alexey Molchanov, says, “that can be very useful for everyone.”

 Like other activities in which the sublime is sought, danger is an animating feature. Blackouts are frequent, especially at shallow depths, even for the most skilled divers. Pressure, which builds as one goes deeper, can rupture the soft tissues of the ears, throat, and lungs if it's not properly managed. The risks are deceptive. There is a temptation to go deeper before one is ready, which means that even the world's best tend to bite off only incremental gains in depth. There are no shortcuts in freediving; no cheat codes to water pressure, buoyancy, and gravity. At the surface, after reacquainting with the air, there can be loss of motor skills, uncontrollable shaking, blackouts, blood. Death is rare, but ever present. At this same competition in the Bahamas eight years ago, a young American from Brooklyn who was quickly ascending the ranks of the world's elite divers (perhaps too quickly, some say) died in this very cove, above this very blue hole. Safety protocols are always improving, but the specter lingers. It is not a stretch to suggest that when we humans deliberately cut off our access to oxygen, and then exert ourselves in athletic performance, we are inviting disaster, or at least tempting fate. And yet this is what it's all about. When we tempt fate in this way, our bodies and minds surprise us. This is the allure of the practice of freediving.

 There is, though, also the allure of records. The raw number. How deep can we go as a species? Today, there is one diver who goes the deepest, who blends the physical and metaphysical like no one else in the sport. Watching the 34-year-old Russian Alexey Molchanov dive can be dangerously disorienting. Seemingly anyone else attempting what he does would die. It is like watching the world's best rock climber scale a sheer face with ease, only the inverse. That's one way to think of what he's doing: Free Solo but for drowning. Free Solo but down. And no one alive goes down like Alexey Molchanov.

 Mindset, Molchanov, says, is everything. “I can make this whole dive superhard or super successful just by having a different perspective.”

 2. Down

 Long Island, Bahamas, looks from above like a seagull in the sky of a child's drawing. It is long, low-lying, rustic, remote. It is buttressed by a water so Bahamian blue the color looks borrowed from the nation's flag. There are roadside grills and whitewashed churches and goats strolling the highway and hurricane damage stretching back many hurricanes. It is hot. Here is where the Tropic of Cancer passes through. If you can picture that bird in the sky, right where the wings come together there is a pitted dirt road to a secluded cove, and in that cove, a blue hole.

 Dean's Blue Hole sits within a natural amphitheater of scrub and rock, about 50 feet off of a secluded beach. Today, people are watching the action from those rocks, and from the surface of the water, and from well beneath, down in the hole. It is day four of Vertical Blue, and Alexey is attempting to break one of his own world records—in a discipline called Constant Weight—with a dive of 131 meters (or about 43 stories). In Constant Weight, competitors can dive with the assistance of a small amount of weight and the fin, or fins, on their feet. This is the deepest dive that anyone will attempt in the nine days of Vertical Blue. It is the deepest any diver has ever attempted in the history of the competition.

 Alexey bobs vertically in the water. He is maskless but he has just affixed his nose clip. His golden wet suit clings tightly to his head and his body. Though he may be better known for the capabilities of his lungs and his brain, his body is different from many other bodies in freediving, as well. He is just short of six feet tall, bald, and looks as squat as a Soviet boxer. There is no ideal body shape in freediving but many of the divers at Vertical Blue are as long and lithe as distance runners. Alexey's legs are like fire hydrants. On more than one occasion, I overhear other divers describe his ass as “meaty.” He is a unit. He sticks out.

 Fans and fellow divers hang on the floating PVC pipe that delineates mere civilian waters from the “competition zone” above the blue hole. All around are tan chests, taut arms, and high butts bobbing at the surface. There is stillness. No current, no breeze. There is a palpable buzz all around. The safety chief asks the crowd to quiet down. But Alexey will not notice us, anyway—not us or the commentators floating on that platform or the cameras in his face or the implications of his attempt. He is already in transit to another realm.

 When Alexey was younger, his mother, Natalia Molchanova, was the world's best freediver, a distinction that she held for many years. She was a pioneer in the sport and the practitioner of a mind-and-body-control technique called “attention deconcentration.” She passed her secrets to her son, who perfected them and uses the regimen to reach a state of intense calm. By doing so, he can slow his heart rate, his metabolic rate, while simultaneously slowing the activity of his brain and his body. His focus deepens. He relaxes to the point of seeming asleep. He takes deep, drowsy breaths, like a summer breeze filling a sail.

 The judges count him down to the start of his dive: One minute…

 His jaw is slack. His eyes are half-mast. He is there, but not there. The breaths fill his enormous lungs, which he's worked to accommodate over years by developing flexibility in his rib cage and chest. You know how stretching a balloon makes it easier to blow up? Alexey has been doing something like that for the past 20 years—stretching out the balloons of his lungs to maximize their capacity to hold air.

 With one hand, he holds the dive line—a long cable that marks the path down the blue hole. The dive line serves two primary purposes: to lead the diver to their depth; and to pull the diver up by a winch, as though they are a hooked fish, if he or she blacks out on their way down or up. Once the judges' countdown reaches zero, Alexey fills his lungs with one great inhalation, and then begins to sip little mouthfuls of air that he compresses on top of his already full lungs. It's like putting another shirt in an already stuffed suitcase, then another shirt, and then upwards of, like, 30 more shirts. This advanced method is, naturally, called packing. Once Alexey can pack no longer, it's time. He rolls over into a dolphin dive, his head disappears beneath the surface, and the large monofin that he wears on his feet shoots straight up in the air, lightly spraying the spectators on the pipe.

 From the edge of the competition zone, a spectator can, at this point, dip beneath the surface and watch the sleek form in its golden wet suit plunge toward the abyss. Alexey takes several big dolphin kicks, his powerful legs working like the first stage of a rocket. He is fighting the positive buoyancy at the surface, the thing that keeps us afloat in the sea and returns us to the surface after a shallow dive. Alexey eats up that depth quickly, and then, at around 20 meters, he vanishes from view altogether.

 At 22 meters, a small alarm from Alexey's watch signals to him that it's time to transfer reserves of air from his lungs into his mouth and neck so that he can equalize his ears as he goes deeper. Alexey is doing that once every few seconds during the first 20 meters, preempting the change in pressure, which comes quickly. In the first 10 meters, the pressure doubles. By 20 meters, it's tripled. To combat the mounting pressure, Alexey heeds his alarm and moves air to his neck and mouth and pushes his tongue toward his eardrums. All this while remaining utterly calm, present, unthinking, practically catatonic.

 There is a moment not much deeper into the dive when the body realizes that it is not getting oxygen the way that it usually does. This is, in part, the effect of the elevated carbon dioxide in the system. Bodies react differently, but among less advanced divers there is often an involuntary panic that sets in, convulsions or contractions; an internal spasm by the cells and alveoli, which scream for fresh air. And yet, if you pass through this traumatic phase, on the other side there is one of those unlocked secrets of the body: more oxygen. If pushed to its limit in this way, the body flips a switch, part of the mammalian diving reflex, like toggling to a reserve tank of gas. It is just one of the body's many extraordinary automatic mechanisms for staving off death—drowning, asphyxiation, brain damage, whatever—and one of the mechanisms that freedivers train to exploit. Blood begins to flow in from the extremities to the core, to the lungs and vital organs, drawing limited oxygen away from less critical body parts to those necessary to sustain life. Alexey can feel the capillaries in his lungs expand and the capillaries in his extremities constrict. A warming occurs all over. A bear hug from the depths.

 The techniques Alexey has mastered provide anyone with ways to breathe better—but they also give individuals tools to stare life's gravest challenges in the face and not look away.

 For Alexey, at around 30 meters the buoyancy shifts to negative and he begins to free-fall. Alexey relaxes his body further. With his arms down at his sides to reduce drag, he starts plummeting to the bottom of the ocean. There is a long, warm embrace and a drift toward nothingness in a sort of zero G. It is a physical manifestation of his mental state. Calmness. Stillness. Barely-there-ness. There are dreamlike contours to the plunge.

 At 45 meters: a second alarm. Alexey can hear it clear as a bell, thanks to the acoustics of the deep. The notification means that his free fall has reached its maximum speed and his lungs are compressed to almost one-sixth their size at the surface. The oxygen is no less than it was up there. It's just taking up a much smaller amount of space, as gases can and do. He is racing toward the bottom, neither accelerating nor decelerating. He is equalizing all the way, but his mind is empty. His fin works as a rudder, moving subtly to hold the absolute vertical of his position. He is goggle-less and his eyes are still half-mast. There but not there.

 A third alert sounds as he approaches his attempted depth, marked by a plate at the bottom of the dive line. Three meters short of the plate, the line goes from white to striped, letting Alexey know he is close. All around him, it has been lightless for some time, except for the light from the lamp on his head. If it were to go out, he would not be able to see his hand in front of his face. Given that he's not breathing, there's no real sound either. Just: a sensory oblivion. Spooky stuff.

 At the bottom plate, he grabs a tag—a symbolic gesture to signify that he's been here, like the seizing of a shell off the ocean floor—rolls forward, executes a simple turn, and with one tug on the rope, thrusts himself back toward the surface. Up there, in the Bahamian daylight, the judges have been tracking Alexey's descent, counting depth off like mission control as the lunar module approaches the moon. 110…120…touchdown! The crowd claps, cheers, splashes. At the end of the dive line he is halfway home, but halfway is always as far from breathing as you can be.

 Alexey's mother, Natalia Molchanov, a legendary figure in freediving, regarded it as more than a sport. “It's a way to understand who we are," she said.

 3. Mother

 During the five days that Alexey and I spend together in the Bahamas, the question that makes him most uncomfortable is not whether he ever worries about blacking out 400 feet beneath breathable air, but about whether he might one day have to give up the vagabond existence he's cultivated—moving to dive spots for weeks or months at a time. “I'm not thinking in the categories of really settling somewhere…,” he says, on the porch of the house he's renting here with his wife and infant son and some other divers for several weeks. “I can just go somewhere, live somewhere for a month.” Just as he's doing here. “Since I finished university, I haven't spent more than five, six months at home in Moscow.”

 That these divers orient their lives around the oceans, around the planet's best spots to dive, around these long competitions, is a matter of course. They move around the world at significant cost and with little in the manner of sponsorship and prize money. They are simply in pursuit of these pure experiences: It is, like surfing specific breaks or claiming particular peaks, a devotional framework for one's life. At dinner one night, Alexey shows me a marine navigation app he uses to look for new sites to chase depth. Most places on the planet we scroll over he seems to have been to before. This was the dream: To see the world, to encounter the ocean's riches, to experience things no other human has—it's what drew Alexey to freediving from the start.

 Alexey grew up in southernmost Russia, in Volgograd (“the old name is Stalingrad”), and, like many busy children of the '90s, his schedule was packed with activities. Swimming and violin and chess and tae kwon do. He marvels at the way his parents balanced that life for him without pushing too hard on any one pursuit. He chose swimming and, as a teen, went to Saint Petersburg for a swim-focused boarding school, a thrilling and impactful first taste of life away from home, followed by university in Moscow. There, Alexey transitioned from competitive swimming to freediving. He'd been doing something like it all his life, even if he didn't call it that—swimming and diving as early as three, messing around with breath holds on vacations to the Black Sea not long after. It hadn't occurred to him that he might build his life around diving. “But one day,” he says, “I saw these articles in magazines about freediving competitions. And trips. It wasn't just a sport, the way it was presented, it was already this whole lifestyle. Of travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.” It was a specific grand way of experiencing the world, of living in the world, of orienting his life around this new thing that he could be extraordinary at.

 The key for Alexey is to train his brain to almost physically overcome his thoughts and hold his mind in a state of nothingness and nowness.

 His mother had caught on only a little earlier. Natalia was, like Alexey, a competitive swimmer, but only took up freediving when she was 40, after a challenging divorce from Alexey's father. By her 50th birthday, she had set numerous world records in various disciplines. “Many people, when they reach 50, they think life is over,” she said. “I want to show them, there is more they can do.” The next year, in 2013, she broke the world record in five disciplines. Concurrent to her development, Natalia built a freediving school in Moscow. When Alexey graduated from university and threw himself into the sport, he worked side by side with his mother, first at the school, then in their business, Molchanovs, which mostly sold wet suits and fins. (The logo, a fish tail designed by Alexey, is also two m's: “The big m is my mom and the little m is me.”)

 Natalia was regarded as a sort of sage in the sport. “Freediving is not only sport,” she once said, “it's a way to understand who we are. When we go down, if we don't think, we understand we are whole. We are one with world.” Through deconcentration, a form of advanced meditation she described as having evolved from techniques used by ancient warriors, she could reset her mind and feel more prepared to take on the world. But in 2015, during a presumably routine training dive near the Mediterranean island of Formentera, she disappeared. She never resurfaced—just literally vanished into the sea. Her presence hovers above freediving and freedivers, and naturally, her legacy lives on most urgently through Alexey, who remains in charge of the school and business, and serves as the conduit to her tenets of diving and deconcentration. Those techniques provide anyone with ways to breathe better, to go deeper more safely, and to expand one's capacity to operate without air. But, in a broader sense, they also give individuals tools to stare life's gravest challenges in the face and not look away.

 When Alexey teaches these skills, they are not theoretical. They are techniques, after all, that come from a man whose mother disappeared from this world while doing the very thing he's devoted his life to. At one point, as I alluded to, I asked Alexey if he ever gets consumed by the risks, the potential implications, of a dive gone wrong. “Statistically,” he says, “it's very safe. When you have this strength and connection between your mind and body, you have this awareness, a sense of if you're at the limit.” But was there ever a moment, in the wake of what happened to his mother, I asked, when he had hesitation about going on? “Sometimes when I had blackouts and other traumas, she was worried for me and wanted me to stop,” he says. “But I didn't want to. I wanted to continue.” He wanted to go deeper.

 “He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time,” Vertical Blue founder William Trubridge said of Molchanov in July.

 4. Up

 Alexey is unaware of what's happening at the surface on his world-record attempt at Vertical Blue. He is unaware of anything at all except the hug at depth. His mind has retreated and his body has taken over. He is flying through space in the opposite direction now, but what are directions in the black?

 On the way up, his arms are in an aerodynamic position over his head. He kicks calmly with his monofin, focusing all his efforts on efficient and economical movement. He is fighting negative buoyancy now. Any extra tension can eat up energy and precious oxygen. The whole game is this balance of action and inaction. Of optimal motion.

 He has been underwater for two-and-a-half minutes now. This is nowhere near as long as he can last. He has a personal Static Apnea record (holding breath in a pool) of 8:33 officially, and nine minutes in training. But in motion, one's capacity for breath hold is usually only half what it is sitting still, and, anyway, from the surface it feels like he's been down there for an eternity. He climbs and climbs, and the judges begin to count him back to the surface. 50 meters…40 meters…

 This is where divers can get into trouble. They are climbing and they are starting to feel the effects of their breathlessness. When you sense that you're out of oxygen, you might start to feel tired, your legs might start to get lactic, and it's natural to want to speed up or tense up. But tensing up, particularly in the shoulders and neck, can restrict blood flow, and right now Alexey needs especially good blood flow to the lungs and brain. This is the discipline: resisting the overreaction, suppressing the desperate move, balancing the need to rush toward the surface with a calmness that keeps one from overriding the plan. Alexey controls his mind and his body with totality.

 “Instead of focusing on the importance of an event, I switch to focusing on how much I enjoy deep diving, and how much I enjoy the process. I'm doing this because I like it.”

 At 40 meters, a safety diver meets Alexey in the blue hole. At 30 meters, he's joined by another. They dive to his depth, get close to him, but not too close—they don't want to contribute to lost focus. They watch Alexey's face for signals of distress, and kick up alongside him to the surface.

 At 20 meters, the spectators watching from above with their faces in the water spot Alexey's form emerging from the abyss, shrouded by the blurred motion of the safety divers. Positive buoyancy has returned and it begins to lift him. He slows himself down but still breaches the surface with tremendous force, popping up like a rubber ball held underwater. He grabs the line and the air rushes from his body. He fills his lungs with fresh air in forceful draws, his “active inhales.” If a diver blacks out, it's usually at this moment.

 Once Alexey emerges, he has 15 seconds to meet the surface protocol. He must show the judges that he is okay (by flashing an okay sign). He must keep his airways above the water. He must flash the tag he grabbed at depth. And he must not pass out. He can cough up blood from a torn lung. He can produce pink foam or his lips can turn blue. But if he meets protocol, the dive is good.

 Alexey looks strong. In complete control. He receives a white card from the judges. The dive counts. It is yet another world record. The large crowd, which had to be implored not to put too much weight on the PVC pipe of the competition zone so as not to sink it, erupts with cheers and splashes.

 As Alexey swims away toward the recovery platform, the safety chief yells over to him jovially: “Alexey, what is your secret?!”

 Alexey is huffing for air still, unable to speak.

 “You won't disclose!”

 Alexey catches his breath and smiles. “I won't disclose….”

 Molchanov wants to create freediving schools in busy cities, “where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.”

 5. The Secret; or the Physicality of Nowness

 But, in fact, he is happy to disclose. Just as Denzel Washington is willing to tell you how he acts without worrying that you're going to steal his roles. It's easy to share secrets when you know no one can do what you can do with the information.

 Learning to control one's breathing is important, but so is learning to control one's mind. Oxygen deprivation is, after all, Alexey says, one of the most physiologically stressful things we can experience in life. When every bit of our body starts to scream for air, it surfaces our fears. It emphasizes our proximity to death. Our pulse increases. Panic sets in. Every reaction we are trying to suppress rears itself with fangs. The test is what we will do in that moment.

 For Alexey, the goal is to sink into that challenge, that panic, and maintain the focus, the stillness, the meditation, even as it only gets harder to do so. The whole thing is a test of faith: Do I believe that I have more oxygen on the other side of this stress? Do I believe that I will be okay? Our minds are sharpened by facing that test of faith and ultimately passing through to the other side, where there are, it turns out, reserves of oxygen and an even deeper state of focus, stillness, and calm. “Learning how to deal with it,” Alexey says, “gives us this mental strength and focus with other challenging things that happen in our lives—for them to feel less important to us, and less provoking.”

 What Alexey has discovered is a way of playing with perspective. “I can,” he says, “make this whole dive superhard or super successful, just by having a different perspective on the dive.” The key is to snap his attention back to the present moment, to train his brain as vigorously as he can train his body to almost physically overcome his thoughts and hold his mind in a state of nothingness and nowness. “I feel how my attention can get broadened in time and space,” he says. “I can be thinking about the future, I can be thinking about the past. All these thoughts everywhere. We have that a lot in life. But if I was just to pull them back into the now moment, pull my thoughts back, really physically, that's the technique that feels like a technique that can be learned. When I practice it a lot, it's like an arm movement. Physical. You just pull it back. And you get your attention to the shortest possible time moment.”

 “Some people have only focused on the coughing up blood, the blacking out. But it's like auto sports: If you were to just focus on the crashes, you wouldn't be telling the story in full.”

 William Trubridge

 The past vanishes. The future does not exist (because it does not exist). Only nowness, only hereness. There is nothing beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter, centimeter, millimeter of depth. The focal length of time and space shortens to practically nothing. After thousands of training dives, the body knows what it is meant to do, but the mind is always threatening to wander. The key, he says, is physically pulling it back. Here. Now. Flatness. One dimension. Not even a line, but a point. Nothing in front or behind, above or below or to the sides. Just this. We can all handle just this.

 This is how one goes deep, lowers the heart rate, seems to practically fall asleep at the bottom of a world-record-setting dive, while doing the thing in the water that most of our bodies revolt against most violently. If you can learn to handle that trial, you can learn to focus your way through a penalty kick or a presentation to the partners or a live TV appearance or a job interview. We can remind ourselves that we've put ourselves in that position, said yes to the opportunity, pushed ourselves to the outer limits of our comfort zone, and done so willingly.

 I ask if he is ever fearful, ever nervous, if he ever gets butterflies before a major competition. “No. That's something I learned over the years to control,” he says. “The thoughts that you don't want to do this. Because this super important moment comes. It can be whatever, a dive, a presentation. And you feel sick because of your thought process, where you don't want to do this because of this pressure. Will he do it? Will he meet others' expectations? It's a lack of self-assurance in your abilities. But the shift should be: This is the area of my expertise. This is what I want to do. I have the current skills that I have, I've prepared as much as I can, and I will do the best that I can. But I do this because it's my choice. Realizing your best potential is only possible while being relaxed, while calm.

 “With a big event,” he says, “instead of focusing on the importance of an event, I switch to focusing on how much I enjoy deep diving, and how much I enjoy the process. I'm doing this because I like it, and I know how to do this really well. I'm diving with this reason in mind. And I'm doing this because I want to…. When I know I am capable of this, then I can really pull in all my focus to the pleasure of it all.”

 Molchanov's official record for holding his breath while motionless in a pool is 8:33. In training, he's held it for nine minutes.

 6. Family

 The pleasure of it all. It is a version of Alexey's story that connects each of the competitors at Vertical Blue. These divers, in pursuit of both depth and width of experience—of searching the surface of this watery planet for miraculous marinescapes, for blue holes. At first, divers might go off in pairs, or little packs. Spreading their wings, dusting off their passports. But what a competition like Vertical Blue does is serve as the great pilgrimage for all serious comers. It brings this group of 42 divers to this sparsely populated island of 3,000 (nearest town to Dean's Blue Hole, population: 86) together for a nine-day competition. There is not much besides one another. There are just a couple restaurants open nearby. There are more churches to attend on Sundays than places to buy potable water. Things can be hard and a little lonely if you don't find each other. But they always do. This community. It is addicting. The dives are one pleasure. The family is another.

 During my time in the Bahamas, I bump up against the edges of this family. For example, while waiting for Alexey to wake up from a nap one afternoon, his housemate Arnaud Jerald (the new Constant Weight Bi-Fins world-record holder until Alexey breaks it five days later) insists on making me an omelette and salade. He is from Marseille, has been at this house near the blue hole for a month, training and taking pictures. He has grand designs for his life in the sport, a plan to excite more high-end sponsors into supporting freediving. He just signed with Richard Mille—making him one of the few freedivers to ink an endorsement deal with a luxury-watch company. He shows me some underwater photos that his partner, Charlotte, had just taken of him in a polo walking on the edge of the blue hole, like it was the surface of a distant planet. He wants would-be sponsors to see what's possible with divers in the picture.

 At a waterfront restaurant one night, sitting at the bar and reading a book, I find myself surrounded by a third of the field of divers. There are groupings that I relish. Pods of nationalities. Clusters by age. A married couple. A couple that might like to be married. I count off the countries represented in my midst: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Slovenia, France, Tunisia, and Mexico. On the beach each day are competitors, of course, but there are also mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. While a Czech diver pursues records, her young daughter snorkels in the shallows. The son of an Italian national-record holder is well on his way to matching his father's tan. There are babies, too, like I've never seen in the water. Naked little infants squawking in the waves. You come this far for this long, everyone comes with.

 Alexey was as talented as anyone alive at shrinking the focal length to practically zero. It was his great gift. The thing that made it possible for him to go deeper on one breath than anyone.

 At the restaurant, I help Turkey's top female diver, Sahika Ercumen, find some fish on the menu that isn't fried. She's known Alexey since they were teenagers, “since he had hair,” she says, smiling. “2006, Tenerife. Natalia was there. We were kids, and now he has a baby.” They came up together, live in their respective corners of the world, but then, a few times a year, there are events like this one, with this family, where, Ercumen says, it's just about “making these memories together.” Ercumen had COVID last year, was terrified about how it would react with her asthma, what it would do to her lungs. Over the course of her six dives, she set five new Turkish records.

 All gratitude for the annual family reunion is owed to William Trubridge, the founder of Vertical Blue and one of freediving's all-timers. Alexey would ultimately break three of the four world records in the competitive depth disciplines at this year's Vertical Blue, but the fourth is still held by Trubridge, in his specialty discipline, Constant Weight No Fins. No Fins is considered the purest of the dives, as it most resembles the sort of purpose-driven plunges that humans have been taking for thousands of years, to spearfish, to scoop sponges and pearls, to explore the ocean.

 Raised in New Zealand, Trubridge moved to Long Island, not far from Dean's Blue Hole, in 2006, to train. Since then, freediving and Vertical Blue have experienced a rapid evolution. By 2010, he had built a world-class competition. Then, in 2013, in just its sixth edition, tragedy struck. An American diver named Nicholas Mevoli experienced a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by barometric pressure and died at a medical center near the blue hole. Still nascent by the standards of most organized sports, freediving has a growing infrastructure in place for better education, better training, and safer competition. When I ask Trubridge what prior accounts of freediving tend to get wrong, he thinks for a moment, then says the sensationalism of it: “Some people have only focused on the coughing up blood, the blacking out. That is part of it, sure, and that's a risk that is there. But it's like auto sports: If you were to just focus on the crashes, you wouldn't be telling the story in full.”

 Still, the effects of diving to these depths day after day are cumulative. In the lungs, in the legs, in the head. Which is one reason why things at the surface get dicier by the last days of competition. Even Alexey, on day eight, takes longer on his Bi-Fins dive than expected. And though he winds up breaking Arnaud's short-held world record, watching someone fail to emerge from the deep for even just seconds beyond their projected time is enough to make a viewer acutely uncomfortable. On day nine, seven divers fail to reach their attempted depths and five divers black out. Alexey, having nothing left to prove, does a sort of victory-lap dive in recreational fins. Before the dive, Trubridge is in the commentator booth, adding some color to the event's livecast on YouTube. “Alexey's been in incredible form this whole competition,” he says. “He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time.”

 Alexey is not just freediving's greatest champion, he has also become the sport's most important evangelist.

 7. Now

 Despite being the world's best freediver, Alexey makes most of his money from the family business. He's turned down all sponsorship offers to this point, holding out instead for when the sport's profile grows further. Every once in a while, he'll participate in an exhibition in Dubai where the winner gets a car—and then he'll sell the car for cash. There's a real opportunity for luxury sponsors in the sport, he says, but it's slow. And so for now, everyone does their own thing. (Slovenian Alenka Artnik, one of the world's top female divers, is sponsored by, among others, a port and the Slovenian police.) Alexey knows that the future—for the sport and his role in it—will be forged on several potential fronts.

 First, a global tour. Like Formula 1 or the ATP. Can't you see it? These beautiful coves and coastlines and island-fronts the world over, where there's just enough depth for some world-record attempts and some yachts to anchor up? It feels like the sport is one breath-hold-obsessed billionaire away from a fully funded tour of Grands Prix, one luxury-car title sponsor away from a 10-event season in the Mediterranean, one viral Netflix documentary away from becoming the world's fastest-growing sport.

 Second, amateur events. “Why do people run marathons and participate in triathlons?” he says. “Not to become a national champion or a world champion. They do it as a way to grow and get healthier and structure their life and feel progress.” These exotic locations. The effects on the body and mind. Just listen to a diver describe seeing the sun and sky and gradients of blue from a hundred meters beneath the surface, and it's easy to imagine novices training up from zero to travel the world for a new hobby.

 Third, freediving schools and studios. In the past, Alexey says, diving schools have primarily been set up in coastal diving locations. But Alexey wants to put his new schools mostly in cities. “I really like the concept of having a school in a busy city, where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.” The Moscow school is a hit among business executives, entrepreneurs, and average Vlads. His next target? New York. Imagine, then, next to the yoga studio and the climbing gym, a place to train in freediving breath techniques. It reminds me of something a newer diver said to me on the beach at Dean's Blue Hole one afternoon: “It's hard to resist getting hooked. You go down for four minutes, and you come up feeling like you've been sitting on a zafu pillow for two hours.”

 If Trubridge had been the steward of the spirit of freediving all these years, then maybe Alexey could be the steward of its business viability. They were both necessary. Trubridge had done extraordinary things to grow the sport, but it had remained niche. Alexey had ambitions to make freediving big enough for his friends and fellow competitors to earn real money. To build it for the next generation. To make freediving a thing not just for a global tour but also a thing for your bourgeois neighborhood. Yet despite his focus on the business potential for the sport, he is no less consumed by the beauty of it.

 The day I arrived in the Bahamas, I went to the blue hole several times. It wasn't all that close to where I was staying, but I kept going back all week, again and again, to watch other divers, or to sit on the beach with locals grilling seafood close by, just looking at those blues in a lot of different lights. Well, that first night, I went back on a whim near dusk and accidentally met our hero, Speedo-clad and strolling jovially through the sandy parking lot toward the beach.

 I hadn't planned to see Alexey at all that night, but if I had, I would've expected to find him in deep, almost monastic, preparation for yet another world-record dive. But his wife and infant son were with him, too, just swimming at the blue hole. Here was Alexey, the fearsomest of all the freedivers, splashing around in the depths. I was stunned. It was like happening upon Roger Federer hitting balls with his kids at Centre Court the night before a final. There was no anxiety, no stress, no fear.

 His mother had died freediving in waters much shallower than these, half a world away. A man had died from freediving at this very spot not long ago. Alexey had been there. But all that noise was irrelevant. Those things were not now. Alexey had big ideas for this sport he was here to carry forward, but that was nothing to be bothered with now, either. When the moment called for it, he was as talented as anyone alive at shrinking the focal length to practically zero. It was his great gift. The thing that made it possible for him to go deeper on one breath than anyone. When he chose to, he could make it so all there was in the world was what was in front of him. And that night, the world was just: Man. Wife. Baby. Blue hole.

 Daniel Riley is a GQ correspondent.

 A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue with the title "Secrets of The Deep."

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1. Rhapsody in Blue For all the complex techniques required to succeed, the objective is remarkably simple: Go as deep as you can go on one breath and return to the surface without passing out or dying. This is the point of freediving. At least the competitive point. And here in the Bahamas, 42 divers from around the world have gathered, like filings to a magnet, at a geological marvel called a blue hole, in this case a 660-foot elevator shaft of ocean water, to see how many stories they can plunge themselves down. The competition, Vertical Blue, is the Wimbledon of freediving, summoning the planet's best to battle in perhaps the most amenable freediving waters in the world. As the event's founder, William Trubridge, who's spent a lifetime scouring the earth's surface for conducive spots to go deep, put it to me: “You could not design a better place for freediving if you sat down with pen and paper.” But this is more than the pinnacle competition of a sport. Yes, the divers here devote their lives to the pursuit of record depths, but they also dedicate themselves to a novel way of interacting with this world and its oceans—and of being alive, of breathing. They come from Italy and Japan and New Zealand and Peru. They live and train in Sardinia and Okinawa and Cyprus and Tulum. They compete in the glorious depths off of Egypt and Turkey and Honduras and Greece. They prepare together, rent group houses on the road, often fall into bed with one another, and occasionally marry. They are specialized professionals but don't really make any money; their sport hasn't yet hit the big time. But no matter: To spend time in their midst is to begin to comprehend that they are after something greater, something sublime.   Freediving seemed to a young Molchanov like a door to another world—a life of “travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.”
    Freediving is, after all, a lifelong opportunity to radically reshape one's body and mind in the process. In pursuing depth, humans must train their lungs and brains to unlock secret sources of clarity and strength and oxygen and potential that are hidden within the body. They are secrets that, once revealed, make the divers not just more effective at their craft, they argue, but more effective, conscious, skillful, and thoughtful as human beings. There is a shift in perspective. A global realignment within one's consciousness. The look in their eyes when they talk about this thing…every diver who's gone truly deep sounds like those rarest of individuals who've seen the earth from the moon, or died and been resuscitated. The seemingly unique techniques of freediving, then, translate beyond the bounds of freediving. To other sports, to work, to relationships with colleagues and friends and family. There are, it turns out, benefits to better breathing, to masterful body control, and to pursuing the state of mindfulness that is required to plunge to unfathomable depths without freaking the fuck out and accidentally killing yourself. “There is a part of freediving,” the world's best freediver, Alexey Molchanov, says, “that can be very useful for everyone.” Like other activities in which the sublime is sought, danger is an animating feature. Blackouts are frequent, especially at shallow depths, even for the most skilled divers. Pressure, which builds as one goes deeper, can rupture the soft tissues of the ears, throat, and lungs if it's not properly managed. The risks are deceptive. There is a temptation to go deeper before one is ready, which means that even the world's best tend to bite off only incremental gains in depth. There are no shortcuts in freediving; no cheat codes to water pressure, buoyancy, and gravity. At the surface, after reacquainting with the air, there can be loss of motor skills, uncontrollable shaking, blackouts, blood. Death is rare, but ever present. At this same competition in the Bahamas eight years ago, a young American from Brooklyn who was quickly ascending the ranks of the world's elite divers (perhaps too quickly, some say) died in this very cove, above this very blue hole. Safety protocols are always improving, but the specter lingers. It is not a stretch to suggest that when we humans deliberately cut off our access to oxygen, and then exert ourselves in athletic performance, we are inviting disaster, or at least tempting fate. And yet this is what it's all about. When we tempt fate in this way, our bodies and minds surprise us. This is the allure of the practice of freediving. There is, though, also the allure of records. The raw number. How deep can we go as a species? Today, there is one diver who goes the deepest, who blends the physical and metaphysical like no one else in the sport. Watching the 34-year-old Russian Alexey Molchanov dive can be dangerously disorienting. Seemingly anyone else attempting what he does would die. It is like watching the world's best rock climber scale a sheer face with ease, only the inverse. That's one way to think of what he's doing: Free Solo but for drowning. Free Solo but down. And no one alive goes down like Alexey Molchanov.      Mindset, Molchanov, says, is everything. “I can make this whole dive superhard or super successful just by having a different perspective.”
    2. Down Long Island, Bahamas, looks from above like a seagull in the sky of a child's drawing. It is long, low-lying, rustic, remote. It is buttressed by a water so Bahamian blue the color looks borrowed from the nation's flag. There are roadside grills and whitewashed churches and goats strolling the highway and hurricane damage stretching back many hurricanes. It is hot. Here is where the Tropic of Cancer passes through. If you can picture that bird in the sky, right where the wings come together there is a pitted dirt road to a secluded cove, and in that cove, a blue hole.   Dean's Blue Hole sits within a natural amphitheater of scrub and rock, about 50 feet off of a secluded beach. Today, people are watching the action from those rocks, and from the surface of the water, and from well beneath, down in the hole. It is day four of Vertical Blue, and Alexey is attempting to break one of his own world records—in a discipline called Constant Weight—with a dive of 131 meters (or about 43 stories). In Constant Weight, competitors can dive with the assistance of a small amount of weight and the fin, or fins, on their feet. This is the deepest dive that anyone will attempt in the nine days of Vertical Blue. It is the deepest any diver has ever attempted in the history of the competition. Alexey bobs vertically in the water. He is maskless but he has just affixed his nose clip. His golden wet suit clings tightly to his head and his body. Though he may be better known for the capabilities of his lungs and his brain, his body is different from many other bodies in freediving, as well. He is just short of six feet tall, bald, and looks as squat as a Soviet boxer. There is no ideal body shape in freediving but many of the divers at Vertical Blue are as long and lithe as distance runners. Alexey's legs are like fire hydrants. On more than one occasion, I overhear other divers describe his ass as “meaty.” He is a unit. He sticks out. Fans and fellow divers hang on the floating PVC pipe that delineates mere civilian waters from the “competition zone” above the blue hole. All around are tan chests, taut arms, and high butts bobbing at the surface. There is stillness. No current, no breeze. There is a palpable buzz all around. The safety chief asks the crowd to quiet down. But Alexey will not notice us, anyway—not us or the commentators floating on that platform or the cameras in his face or the implications of his attempt. He is already in transit to another realm. When Alexey was younger, his mother, Natalia Molchanova, was the world's best freediver, a distinction that she held for many years. She was a pioneer in the sport and the practitioner of a mind-and-body-control technique called “attention deconcentration.” She passed her secrets to her son, who perfected them and uses the regimen to reach a state of intense calm. By doing so, he can slow his heart rate, his metabolic rate, while simultaneously slowing the activity of his brain and his body. His focus deepens. He relaxes to the point of seeming asleep. He takes deep, drowsy breaths, like a summer breeze filling a sail. The judges count him down to the start of his dive: One minute…  His jaw is slack. His eyes are half-mast. He is there, but not there. The breaths fill his enormous lungs, which he's worked to accommodate over years by developing flexibility in his rib cage and chest. You know how stretching a balloon makes it easier to blow up? Alexey has been doing something like that for the past 20 years—stretching out the balloons of his lungs to maximize their capacity to hold air.   With one hand, he holds the dive line—a long cable that marks the path down the blue hole. The dive line serves two primary purposes: to lead the diver to their depth; and to pull the diver up by a winch, as though they are a hooked fish, if he or she blacks out on their way down or up. Once the judges' countdown reaches zero, Alexey fills his lungs with one great inhalation, and then begins to sip little mouthfuls of air that he compresses on top of his already full lungs. It's like putting another shirt in an already stuffed suitcase, then another shirt, and then upwards of, like, 30 more shirts. This advanced method is, naturally, called packing. Once Alexey can pack no longer, it's time. He rolls over into a dolphin dive, his head disappears beneath the surface, and the large monofin that he wears on his feet shoots straight up in the air, lightly spraying the spectators on the pipe. From the edge of the competition zone, a spectator can, at this point, dip beneath the surface and watch the sleek form in its golden wet suit plunge toward the abyss. Alexey takes several big dolphin kicks, his powerful legs working like the first stage of a rocket. He is fighting the positive buoyancy at the surface, the thing that keeps us afloat in the sea and returns us to the surface after a shallow dive. Alexey eats up that depth quickly, and then, at around 20 meters, he vanishes from view altogether. At 22 meters, a small alarm from Alexey's watch signals to him that it's time to transfer reserves of air from his lungs into his mouth and neck so that he can equalize his ears as he goes deeper. Alexey is doing that once every few seconds during the first 20 meters, preempting the change in pressure, which comes quickly. In the first 10 meters, the pressure doubles. By 20 meters, it's tripled. To combat the mounting pressure, Alexey heeds his alarm and moves air to his neck and mouth and pushes his tongue toward his eardrums. All this while remaining utterly calm, present, unthinking, practically catatonic. There is a moment not much deeper into the dive when the body realizes that it is not getting oxygen the way that it usually does. This is, in part, the effect of the elevated carbon dioxide in the system. Bodies react differently, but among less advanced divers there is often an involuntary panic that sets in, convulsions or contractions; an internal spasm by the cells and alveoli, which scream for fresh air. And yet, if you pass through this traumatic phase, on the other side there is one of those unlocked secrets of the body: more oxygen. If pushed to its limit in this way, the body flips a switch, part of the mammalian diving reflex, like toggling to a reserve tank of gas. It is just one of the body's many extraordinary automatic mechanisms for staving off death—drowning, asphyxiation, brain damage, whatever—and one of the mechanisms that freedivers train to exploit. Blood begins to flow in from the extremities to the core, to the lungs and vital organs, drawing limited oxygen away from less critical body parts to those necessary to sustain life. Alexey can feel the capillaries in his lungs expand and the capillaries in his extremities constrict. A warming occurs all over. A bear hug from the depths. For Alexey, at around 30 meters the buoyancy shifts to negative and he begins to free-fall. Alexey relaxes his body further. With his arms down at his sides to reduce drag, he starts plummeting to the bottom of the ocean. There is a long, warm embrace and a drift toward nothingness in a sort of zero G. It is a physical manifestation of his mental state. Calmness. Stillness. Barely-there-ness. There are dreamlike contours to the plunge.   At 45 meters: a second alarm. Alexey can hear it clear as a bell, thanks to the acoustics of the deep. The notification means that his free fall has reached its maximum speed and his lungs are compressed to almost one-sixth their size at the surface. The oxygen is no less than it was up there. It's just taking up a much smaller amount of space, as gases can and do. He is racing toward the bottom, neither accelerating nor decelerating. He is equalizing all the way, but his mind is empty. His fin works as a rudder, moving subtly to hold the absolute vertical of his position. He is goggle-less and his eyes are still half-mast. There but not there. A third alert sounds as he approaches his attempted depth, marked by a plate at the bottom of the dive line. Three meters short of the plate, the line goes from white to striped, letting Alexey know he is close. All around him, it has been lightless for some time, except for the light from the lamp on his head. If it were to go out, he would not be able to see his hand in front of his face. Given that he's not breathing, there's no real sound either. Just: a sensory oblivion. Spooky stuff. At the bottom plate, he grabs a tag—a symbolic gesture to signify that he's been here, like the seizing of a shell off the ocean floor—rolls forward, executes a simple turn, and with one tug on the rope, thrusts himself back toward the surface. Up there, in the Bahamian daylight, the judges have been tracking Alexey's descent, counting depth off like mission control as the lunar module approaches the moon. 110…120…touchdown! The crowd claps, cheers, splashes. At the end of the dive line he is halfway home, but halfway is always as far from breathing as you can be.    Alexey's mother, Natalia Molchanov, a legendary figure in freediving, regarded it as more than a sport. “It's a way to understand who we are," she said. 
  3. Mother During the five days that Alexey and I spend together in the Bahamas, the question that makes him most uncomfortable is not whether he ever worries about blacking out 400 feet beneath breathable air, but about whether he might one day have to give up the vagabond existence he's cultivated—moving to dive spots for weeks or months at a time. “I'm not thinking in the categories of really settling somewhere…,” he says, on the porch of the house he's renting here with his wife and infant son and some other divers for several weeks. “I can just go somewhere, live somewhere for a month.” Just as he's doing here. “Since I finished university, I haven't spent more than five, six months at home in Moscow.”   That these divers orient their lives around the oceans, around the planet's best spots to dive, around these long competitions, is a matter of course. They move around the world at significant cost and with little in the manner of sponsorship and prize money. They are simply in pursuit of these pure experiences: It is, like surfing specific breaks or claiming particular peaks, a devotional framework for one's life. At dinner one night, Alexey shows me a marine navigation app he uses to look for new sites to chase depth. Most places on the planet we scroll over he seems to have been to before. This was the dream: To see the world, to encounter the ocean's riches, to experience things no other human has—it's what drew Alexey to freediving from the start. Alexey grew up in southernmost Russia, in Volgograd (“the old name is Stalingrad”), and, like many busy children of the '90s, his schedule was packed with activities. Swimming and violin and chess and tae kwon do. He marvels at the way his parents balanced that life for him without pushing too hard on any one pursuit. He chose swimming and, as a teen, went to Saint Petersburg for a swim-focused boarding school, a thrilling and impactful first taste of life away from home, followed by university in Moscow. There, Alexey transitioned from competitive swimming to freediving. He'd been doing something like it all his life, even if he didn't call it that—swimming and diving as early as three, messing around with breath holds on vacations to the Black Sea not long after. It hadn't occurred to him that he might build his life around diving. “But one day,” he says, “I saw these articles in magazines about freediving competitions. And trips. It wasn't just a sport, the way it was presented, it was already this whole lifestyle. Of travels and adventures. With dolphins and sea lions and whales and sharks.” It was a specific grand way of experiencing the world, of living in the world, of orienting his life around this new thing that he could be extraordinary at. His mother had caught on only a little earlier. Natalia was, like Alexey, a competitive swimmer, but only took up freediving when she was 40, after a challenging divorce from Alexey's father. By her 50th birthday, she had set numerous world records in various disciplines. “Many people, when they reach 50, they think life is over,” she said. “I want to show them, there is more they can do.” The next year, in 2013, she broke the world record in five disciplines. Concurrent to her development, Natalia built a freediving school in Moscow. When Alexey graduated from university and threw himself into the sport, he worked side by side with his mother, first at the school, then in their business, Molchanovs, which mostly sold wet suits and fins. (The logo, a fish tail designed by Alexey, is also two m's: “The big m is my mom and the little m is me.”) Natalia was regarded as a sort of sage in the sport. “Freediving is not only sport,” she once said, “it's a way to understand who we are. When we go down, if we don't think, we understand we are whole. We are one with world.” Through deconcentration, a form of advanced meditation she described as having evolved from techniques used by ancient warriors, she could reset her mind and feel more prepared to take on the world. But in 2015, during a presumably routine training dive near the Mediterranean island of Formentera, she disappeared. She never resurfaced—just literally vanished into the sea. Her presence hovers above freediving and freedivers, and naturally, her legacy lives on most urgently through Alexey, who remains in charge of the school and business, and serves as the conduit to her tenets of diving and deconcentration. Those techniques provide anyone with ways to breathe better, to go deeper more safely, and to expand one's capacity to operate without air. But, in a broader sense, they also give individuals tools to stare life's gravest challenges in the face and not look away.   When Alexey teaches these skills, they are not theoretical. They are techniques, after all, that come from a man whose mother disappeared from this world while doing the very thing he's devoted his life to. At one point, as I alluded to, I asked Alexey if he ever gets consumed by the risks, the potential implications, of a dive gone wrong. “Statistically,” he says, “it's very safe. When you have this strength and connection between your mind and body, you have this awareness, a sense of if you're at the limit.” But was there ever a moment, in the wake of what happened to his mother, I asked, when he had hesitation about going on? “Sometimes when I had blackouts and other traumas, she was worried for me and wanted me to stop,” he says. “But I didn't want to. I wanted to continue.” He wanted to go deeper.      “He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time,” Vertical Blue founder William Trubridge said of Molchanov in July. 
    4. Up Alexey is unaware of what's happening at the surface on his world-record attempt at Vertical Blue. He is unaware of anything at all except the hug at depth. His mind has retreated and his body has taken over. He is flying through space in the opposite direction now, but what are directions in the black? On the way up, his arms are in an aerodynamic position over his head. He kicks calmly with his monofin, focusing all his efforts on efficient and economical movement. He is fighting negative buoyancy now. Any extra tension can eat up energy and precious oxygen. The whole game is this balance of action and inaction. Of optimal motion. He has been underwater for two-and-a-half minutes now. This is nowhere near as long as he can last. He has a personal Static Apnea record (holding breath in a pool) of 8:33 officially, and nine minutes in training. But in motion, one's capacity for breath hold is usually only half what it is sitting still, and, anyway, from the surface it feels like he's been down there for an eternity. He climbs and climbs, and the judges begin to count him back to the surface. 50 meters…40 meters…  This is where divers can get into trouble. They are climbing and they are starting to feel the effects of their breathlessness. When you sense that you're out of oxygen, you might start to feel tired, your legs might start to get lactic, and it's natural to want to speed up or tense up. But tensing up, particularly in the shoulders and neck, can restrict blood flow, and right now Alexey needs especially good blood flow to the lungs and brain. This is the discipline: resisting the overreaction, suppressing the desperate move, balancing the need to rush toward the surface with a calmness that keeps one from overriding the plan. Alexey controls his mind and his body with totality. At 40 meters, a safety diver meets Alexey in the blue hole. At 30 meters, he's joined by another. They dive to his depth, get close to him, but not too close—they don't want to contribute to lost focus. They watch Alexey's face for signals of distress, and kick up alongside him to the surface. At 20 meters, the spectators watching from above with their faces in the water spot Alexey's form emerging from the abyss, shrouded by the blurred motion of the safety divers. Positive buoyancy has returned and it begins to lift him. He slows himself down but still breaches the surface with tremendous force, popping up like a rubber ball held underwater. He grabs the line and the air rushes from his body. He fills his lungs with fresh air in forceful draws, his “active inhales.” If a diver blacks out, it's usually at this moment.   Once Alexey emerges, he has 15 seconds to meet the surface protocol. He must show the judges that he is okay (by flashing an okay sign). He must keep his airways above the water. He must flash the tag he grabbed at depth. And he must not pass out. He can cough up blood from a torn lung. He can produce pink foam or his lips can turn blue. But if he meets protocol, the dive is good. Alexey looks strong. In complete control. He receives a white card from the judges. The dive counts. It is yet another world record. The large crowd, which had to be implored not to put too much weight on the PVC pipe of the competition zone so as not to sink it, erupts with cheers and splashes. As Alexey swims away toward the recovery platform, the safety chief yells over to him jovially: “Alexey, what is your secret?!” Alexey is huffing for air still, unable to speak. “You won't disclose!” Alexey catches his breath and smiles. “I won't disclose….”    Molchanov wants to create freediving schools in busy cities, “where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.”
  5. The Secret; or the Physicality of Nowness But, in fact, he is happy to disclose. Just as Denzel Washington is willing to tell you how he acts without worrying that you're going to steal his roles. It's easy to share secrets when you know no one can do what you can do with the information. Learning to control one's breathing is important, but so is learning to control one's mind. Oxygen deprivation is, after all, Alexey says, one of the most physiologically stressful things we can experience in life. When every bit of our body starts to scream for air, it surfaces our fears. It emphasizes our proximity to death. Our pulse increases. Panic sets in. Every reaction we are trying to suppress rears itself with fangs. The test is what we will do in that moment.   For Alexey, the goal is to sink into that challenge, that panic, and maintain the focus, the stillness, the meditation, even as it only gets harder to do so. The whole thing is a test of faith: Do I believe that I have more oxygen on the other side of this stress? Do I believe that I will be okay? Our minds are sharpened by facing that test of faith and ultimately passing through to the other side, where there are, it turns out, reserves of oxygen and an even deeper state of focus, stillness, and calm. “Learning how to deal with it,” Alexey says, “gives us this mental strength and focus with other challenging things that happen in our lives—for them to feel less important to us, and less provoking.” What Alexey has discovered is a way of playing with perspective. “I can,” he says, “make this whole dive superhard or super successful, just by having a different perspective on the dive.” The key is to snap his attention back to the present moment, to train his brain as vigorously as he can train his body to almost physically overcome his thoughts and hold his mind in a state of nothingness and nowness. “I feel how my attention can get broadened in time and space,” he says. “I can be thinking about the future, I can be thinking about the past. All these thoughts everywhere. We have that a lot in life. But if I was just to pull them back into the now moment, pull my thoughts back, really physically, that's the technique that feels like a technique that can be learned. When I practice it a lot, it's like an arm movement. Physical. You just pull it back. And you get your attention to the shortest possible time moment.” The past vanishes. The future does not exist (because it does not exist). Only nowness, only hereness. There is nothing beyond the body, the breathing, the intense focus of the next meter, centimeter, millimeter of depth. The focal length of time and space shortens to practically nothing. After thousands of training dives, the body knows what it is meant to do, but the mind is always threatening to wander. The key, he says, is physically pulling it back. Here. Now. Flatness. One dimension. Not even a line, but a point. Nothing in front or behind, above or below or to the sides. Just this. We can all handle just this. This is how one goes deep, lowers the heart rate, seems to practically fall asleep at the bottom of a world-record-setting dive, while doing the thing in the water that most of our bodies revolt against most violently. If you can learn to handle that trial, you can learn to focus your way through a penalty kick or a presentation to the partners or a live TV appearance or a job interview. We can remind ourselves that we've put ourselves in that position, said yes to the opportunity, pushed ourselves to the outer limits of our comfort zone, and done so willingly. I ask if he is ever fearful, ever nervous, if he ever gets butterflies before a major competition. “No. That's something I learned over the years to control,” he says. “The thoughts that you don't want to do this. Because this super important moment comes. It can be whatever, a dive, a presentation. And you feel sick because of your thought process, where you don't want to do this because of this pressure. Will he do it? Will he meet others' expectations? It's a lack of self-assurance in your abilities. But the shift should be: This is the area of my expertise. This is what I want to do. I have the current skills that I have, I've prepared as much as I can, and I will do the best that I can. But I do this because it's my choice. Realizing your best potential is only possible while being relaxed, while calm.   “With a big event,” he says, “instead of focusing on the importance of an event, I switch to focusing on how much I enjoy deep diving, and how much I enjoy the process. I'm doing this because I like it, and I know how to do this really well. I'm diving with this reason in mind. And I'm doing this because I want to…. When I know I am capable of this, then I can really pull in all my focus to the pleasure of it all.”      Molchanov's official record for holding his breath while motionless in a pool is 8:33. In training, he's held it for nine minutes.
    6. Family  The pleasure of it all. It is a version of Alexey's story that connects each of the competitors at Vertical Blue. These divers, in pursuit of both depth and width of experience—of searching the surface of this watery planet for miraculous marinescapes, for blue holes. At first, divers might go off in pairs, or little packs. Spreading their wings, dusting off their passports. But what a competition like Vertical Blue does is serve as the great pilgrimage for all serious comers. It brings this group of 42 divers to this sparsely populated island of 3,000 (nearest town to Dean's Blue Hole, population: 86) together for a nine-day competition. There is not much besides one another. There are just a couple restaurants open nearby. There are more churches to attend on Sundays than places to buy potable water. Things can be hard and a little lonely if you don't find each other. But they always do. This community. It is addicting. The dives are one pleasure. The family is another. During my time in the Bahamas, I bump up against the edges of this family. For example, while waiting for Alexey to wake up from a nap one afternoon, his housemate Arnaud Jerald (the new Constant Weight Bi-Fins world-record holder until Alexey breaks it five days later) insists on making me an omelette and salade. He is from Marseille, has been at this house near the blue hole for a month, training and taking pictures. He has grand designs for his life in the sport, a plan to excite more high-end sponsors into supporting freediving. He just signed with Richard Mille—making him one of the few freedivers to ink an endorsement deal with a luxury-watch company. He shows me some underwater photos that his partner, Charlotte, had just taken of him in a polo walking on the edge of the blue hole, like it was the surface of a distant planet. He wants would-be sponsors to see what's possible with divers in the picture. At a waterfront restaurant one night, sitting at the bar and reading a book, I find myself surrounded by a third of the field of divers. There are groupings that I relish. Pods of nationalities. Clusters by age. A married couple. A couple that might like to be married. I count off the countries represented in my midst: Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Chile, Turkey, Italy, Slovenia, France, Tunisia, and Mexico. On the beach each day are competitors, of course, but there are also mothers and fathers and sons and daughters. While a Czech diver pursues records, her young daughter snorkels in the shallows. The son of an Italian national-record holder is well on his way to matching his father's tan. There are babies, too, like I've never seen in the water. Naked little infants squawking in the waves. You come this far for this long, everyone comes with. At the restaurant, I help Turkey's top female diver, Sahika Ercumen, find some fish on the menu that isn't fried. She's known Alexey since they were teenagers, “since he had hair,” she says, smiling. “2006, Tenerife. Natalia was there. We were kids, and now he has a baby.” They came up together, live in their respective corners of the world, but then, a few times a year, there are events like this one, with this family, where, Ercumen says, it's just about “making these memories together.” Ercumen had COVID last year, was terrified about how it would react with her asthma, what it would do to her lungs. Over the course of her six dives, she set five new Turkish records.   All gratitude for the annual family reunion is owed to William Trubridge, the founder of Vertical Blue and one of freediving's all-timers. Alexey would ultimately break three of the four world records in the competitive depth disciplines at this year's Vertical Blue, but the fourth is still held by Trubridge, in his specialty discipline, Constant Weight No Fins. No Fins is considered the purest of the dives, as it most resembles the sort of purpose-driven plunges that humans have been taking for thousands of years, to spearfish, to scoop sponges and pearls, to explore the ocean. Raised in New Zealand, Trubridge moved to Long Island, not far from Dean's Blue Hole, in 2006, to train. Since then, freediving and Vertical Blue have experienced a rapid evolution. By 2010, he had built a world-class competition. Then, in 2013, in just its sixth edition, tragedy struck. An American diver named Nicholas Mevoli experienced a pulmonary hemorrhage caused by barometric pressure and died at a medical center near the blue hole. Still nascent by the standards of most organized sports, freediving has a growing infrastructure in place for better education, better training, and safer competition. When I ask Trubridge what prior accounts of freediving tend to get wrong, he thinks for a moment, then says the sensationalism of it: “Some people have only focused on the coughing up blood, the blacking out. That is part of it, sure, and that's a risk that is there. But it's like auto sports: If you were to just focus on the crashes, you wouldn't be telling the story in full.” Still, the effects of diving to these depths day after day are cumulative. In the lungs, in the legs, in the head. Which is one reason why things at the surface get dicier by the last days of competition. Even Alexey, on day eight, takes longer on his Bi-Fins dive than expected. And though he winds up breaking Arnaud's short-held world record, watching someone fail to emerge from the deep for even just seconds beyond their projected time is enough to make a viewer acutely uncomfortable. On day nine, seven divers fail to reach their attempted depths and five divers black out. Alexey, having nothing left to prove, does a sort of victory-lap dive in recreational fins. Before the dive, Trubridge is in the commentator booth, adding some color to the event's livecast on YouTube. “Alexey's been in incredible form this whole competition,” he says. “He's really untouchable in pretty much all the disciplines at this time.”    Alexey is not just freediving's greatest champion, he has also become the sport's most important evangelist. 
  7. Now Despite being the world's best freediver, Alexey makes most of his money from the family business. He's turned down all sponsorship offers to this point, holding out instead for when the sport's profile grows further. Every once in a while, he'll participate in an exhibition in Dubai where the winner gets a car—and then he'll sell the car for cash. There's a real opportunity for luxury sponsors in the sport, he says, but it's slow. And so for now, everyone does their own thing. (Slovenian Alenka Artnik, one of the world's top female divers, is sponsored by, among others, a port and the Slovenian police.) Alexey knows that the future—for the sport and his role in it—will be forged on several potential fronts.   First, a global tour. Like Formula 1 or the ATP. Can't you see it? These beautiful coves and coastlines and island-fronts the world over, where there's just enough depth for some world-record attempts and some yachts to anchor up? It feels like the sport is one breath-hold-obsessed billionaire away from a fully funded tour of Grands Prix, one luxury-car title sponsor away from a 10-event season in the Mediterranean, one viral Netflix documentary away from becoming the world's fastest-growing sport. Second, amateur events. “Why do people run marathons and participate in triathlons?” he says. “Not to become a national champion or a world champion. They do it as a way to grow and get healthier and structure their life and feel progress.” These exotic locations. The effects on the body and mind. Just listen to a diver describe seeing the sun and sky and gradients of blue from a hundred meters beneath the surface, and it's easy to imagine novices training up from zero to travel the world for a new hobby. Third, freediving schools and studios. In the past, Alexey says, diving schools have primarily been set up in coastal diving locations. But Alexey wants to put his new schools mostly in cities. “I really like the concept of having a school in a busy city, where it's needed to help people calm down and find balance.” The Moscow school is a hit among business executives, entrepreneurs, and average Vlads. His next target? New York. Imagine, then, next to the yoga studio and the climbing gym, a place to train in freediving breath techniques. It reminds me of something a newer diver said to me on the beach at Dean's Blue Hole one afternoon: “It's hard to resist getting hooked. You go down for four minutes, and you come up feeling like you've been sitting on a zafu pillow for two hours.” If Trubridge had been the steward of the spirit of freediving all these years, then maybe Alexey could be the steward of its business viability. They were both necessary. Trubridge had done extraordinary things to grow the sport, but it had remained niche. Alexey had ambitions to make freediving big enough for his friends and fellow competitors to earn real money. To build it for the next generation. To make freediving a thing not just for a global tour but also a thing for your bourgeois neighborhood. Yet despite his focus on the business potential for the sport, he is no less consumed by the beauty of it. The day I arrived in the Bahamas, I went to the blue hole several times. It wasn't all that close to where I was staying, but I kept going back all week, again and again, to watch other divers, or to sit on the beach with locals grilling seafood close by, just looking at those blues in a lot of different lights. Well, that first night, I went back on a whim near dusk and accidentally met our hero, Speedo-clad and strolling jovially through the sandy parking lot toward the beach.   I hadn't planned to see Alexey at all that night, but if I had, I would've expected to find him in deep, almost monastic, preparation for yet another world-record dive. But his wife and infant son were with him, too, just swimming at the blue hole. Here was Alexey, the fearsomest of all the freedivers, splashing around in the depths. I was stunned. It was like happening upon Roger Federer hitting balls with his kids at Centre Court the night before a final. There was no anxiety, no stress, no fear. His mother had died freediving in waters much shallower than these, half a world away. A man had died from freediving at this very spot not long ago. Alexey had been there. But all that noise was irrelevant. Those things were not now. Alexey had big ideas for this sport he was here to carry forward, but that was nothing to be bothered with now, either. When the moment called for it, he was as talented as anyone alive at shrinking the focal length to practically zero. It was his great gift. The thing that made it possible for him to go deeper on one breath than anyone. When he chose to, he could make it so all there was in the world was what was in front of him. And that night, the world was just: Man. Wife. Baby. Blue hole.  Daniel Riley is a GQ correspondent.  A version of this story originally appeared in the October 2021 issue with the title "Secrets of The Deep."  Subscribe to GQ. Click here &gt;&gt;
The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Freediver
https://www.gq.com/story/freediver-alexey-molchanov-profile
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22788620/single-living-alone-cost
In America, being single is expensive by design
2021-12-02
Anne Helen Petersen
<div><div>
 <p>Think about your household’s monthly expenses. There are the big-ticket items — your rent or mortgage, your health care, maybe a student loan. Then there’s the smaller stuff: the utility bills; the internet and phone bills; Netflix, Hulu, and all your other streaming subscriptions. If you drive a car, there’s gas and insurance. If you take the subway, there’s a public transit pass. You pay for food, and household items like toilet paper and garbage bags and lightbulbs. You buy furniture and sheets and dishes.</p>
<p>Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own. </p>
<p>If you live by yourself — or as a single parent or caregiver — you don’t have to imagine. This is your life. All the expenses of existing in society, on one set of shoulders. For the more than 40 million people who live in this kind of single-income household, it’s also become increasingly untenable. When we talk about all the ways it’s become harder and harder for people to find solid financial footing in the middle class, we have to talk about how our society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2021/10/05/rising-share-of-u-s-adults-are-living-without-a-spouse-or-partner/">fall through the cracks</a>.</p>
<p>First, we need to define a clunky but essential term. Single or solo-living people may or may not be partnered with someone in the long or short term, and they may or may not be parents, but they all live and bear the responsibility for their bills alone. Some are retired; some are widowed or divorced; some are in long-distance relationships that require two households. Some have lived alone, purposely or regretfully, their entire lives. </p>
<p>There are so many routes to and reasons for arriving at the single or solo-living life, and more people are living it than ever before: As of 2021, <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/families-and-living-arrangements.html">37 million Americans</a> live alone — about 15 percent of adults. 28 percent of US households have one person; back in 1960, that was just 13 percent. An additional <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2016/cb16-192.html">11 million households</a> are headed by a single parent, a number that has <a href="https://www.census.gov/newsroom/stories/single-parent-day.html">tripled</a> since 1965. </p>
<p>Overall, 31 percent of US adults <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/">identify</a> today as single, defined as not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship. </p>
<p>The 31 percent figure <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/">holds true</a> for both men and women in the aggregate but varies significantly by race and sexual orientation: According to Pew’s most recent survey data, 47 percent of Black adults are single, compared to 28 percent of white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults; 47 percent of adults who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are single, compared to 29 percent of straight adults.<strong> </strong> </p>
<p>Then there’s the age breakdown:<strong> </strong>Women live significantly longer — and, over their lifetimes, make less money. Men, as a general rule, are far more likely to be single when they’re young, marry later (or for a second time), and stay married until their deaths. The reverse is true for women: They’re more likely to marry young but then end up divorced or widowed and living alone as they age. Given these and other trends — including the<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22639674/elder-care-family-costs-nursing-home-health-care"> high cost of aging</a>, the fact that <a href="https://www.aauw.org/resources/article/older-women-pay-gap/">women</a> (and <a href="https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2021/08/03/black-women-equal-pay-day">Black women in particular</a>) make significantly less money over their lifetimes — it is women (and again, Black women in particular) who often bear the biggest financial load of single life.</p>
<p>You can attribute some of these increases to no-fault divorce, which began to standardize in the 1970s; the continued aging of boomers — who are growing old but not always together; and college-educated people, in particular, delaying marriage until later in life. Add in the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the mass incarceration of Black men, the inability for same-sex couples to marry one another or, in some states, safely cohabitate until relatively recently, and declining rates of religious observance, and you have a whole slew of intersecting reasons people are single or solo-living at far greater rates than ever before. </p>
<p>To be clear, these numbers aren’t increasing because society has shifted to accommodate the single or solo-living. Quite the contrary; they are increasing even though the United States is still organized, in pretty much every way, to accommodate and facilitate the lives of partnered and cohabitating people, particularly married people. We don’t seem to like or respect single people and their choices. It doesn’t matter how many songs or books or movies seem to champion the triumphs of the single person. Our societal actions — the way we support and reward people — suggest otherwise. </p>
<hr />
<p>Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism. That they’re not speaks to the fact that we don’t venerate the individual — we venerate the individual <em>family</em>. The family fosters the conditions for the individual’s success: The spouse helps create the conditions that make success possible; children (at least theoretically) keep the individual grounded, focused, and humble. Which is why so many narratives of “individual” success either start with that family already firmly in place or — as is the case with so many rom-coms and memoirs, from <em>Sex in the City </em>to <em>How to Be Single —</em> end there. </p>
<p>The celebrated single life is, in truth, incredibly narrow. For women, you have to be 1) actively and successfully in search of partnership; 2) unspeakably wealthy and above scrutiny; and/or 3) a self-sacrificing mother. “Confirmed” bachelors can sometimes get a pass so long as they don’t move back in with their parents; so do the elderly, the widowed (but only for a brief window of time), and the very young. Other single and solo-living people are still stigmatized in various and overlapping ways, depending on their age, class, race, and sexual identity. We don’t call single or unmarried people spinsters, deviants, or social problems anymore, at least not explicitly. But that underlying hostility to single and solo-living people? It’s everywhere. </p>
<p>This was the difficulty for me when I revisited <a href="https://bookshop.org/books/all-the-single-ladies-unmarried-women-and-the-rise-of-an-independent-nation-9781476716572/9781476716572">Rebecca Traister’s <em>All the Single Ladies</em></a><em> </em>in preparation for this article. The book, chock-full of stories of how women have carved successful and meaningful unpartnered lives for themselves, includes a clear-eyed look at the costs of exclusion. Yet it is still an advertisement, of sorts, for a way of life. Reading it, as I did, after combing through the stories of women who’d written to me about the small and insurmountable barriers to stability, made me realize just how much we’ve learned to excuse. Just because single people have managed to survive — and even thrive — in the face of societal hostility does not mean they have not suffered enduring consequences or that others do not suffer them today. </p>
<p>In the fall of 2019, 28-year-old Amelia was splitting a two-bedroom apartment with a friend in Los Angeles. Like a lot of people, she needed a roommate to drive down costs, but having a roommate is not a cure-all for the instability of single life: People move out, sometimes to live with partners or on their own. For many, living with a roommate means always waiting for your situation to change, without your say, when the lease comes up. Amelia was getting by, but she could never save up to pay off her credit card bills or pay down her student loans, let alone build an emergency fund. (Amelia, like the other people I spoke to for this story, is being referred to by first name only to protect her privacy around personal finances.)<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Then she lost her job, and after four months of searching without success, she had no other option than to move back into her parents’ home in Las Vegas. She eventually found a “white-collar knowledge industry job” that she could do remotely and watched as her financial footing got more solid with each month. </p>
<p>Nearly two years later, Amelia has paid off several of her student loans and her car loan, amassed an emergency fund, <em>and</em> saved enough for a small down payment on a house. You could say that’s because she was no longer paying rent. Part of it, though, was just living with her parents: She rotated paying for groceries, borrowed their car when hers needed repair, and didn’t have to go further into credit card debt while she continued to look for a job. She had a glimpse, in other words, of what it might be like to share financial responsibilities with a partner, not just split utilities and rent with a roommate. </p>
<p>Now that Amelia’s moving out on her own, though, the costs of living alone will start to show up, like quiet guests arriving through the back door at a party. You don’t even realize how much work you’re doing to host them until you look at the house across the street and see that they have the same number of guests, but there are two hosts working in concert to handle all the tasks and cover all the costs.</p>
<p>That’s kind of the reverse of what happened to Rachel, 37, when she and her husband divorced three years ago. “If anything will throw your basic beliefs about the nuclear family and the partnered American dream out the window,” Rachel told me, “it’s an emotionally devastating breakup coinciding with the birth of your child.” </p>
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<p>Shortly after the divorce, Rachel’s brother told her that the house next door to him was about to go up for sale. The rents in Bellingham, the midsize Washington state college town where they both lived, were becoming more unsustainable every year. Soon, buying a house on her public school teacher salary — which, with nine years of experience, plus a bonus for teaching in a Title I School, adds up to around $100,000 a year —<strong> </strong>might be out of reach. So Rachel did something impulsive: She cashed out the entirety of her IRA, borrowed some money from her parents and her ex-husband, and bought the house, which she shares with her 5-year-old son. </p>
<p>Something else lives there, too: “the giant, scary beast” that is her mortgage payment. “I can make it month to month, but any sort of savings or emergency fund is very off the table,” Rachel explained. “That’s the huge difference between being partnered and being solo: the ability to build savings. And I feel like if an emergency happened, there would be some sort of safety net.” There’s an oft-cited stat that only 39 percent of Americans think they could <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/11/just-39percent-of-americans-could-pay-for-a-1000-emergency-expense.html">cover a $1,000 emergency expense</a> — but a 2018 Federal Reserve study showed that just <a href="https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/assessing-families-liquid-savings-using-the-survey-of-consumer-finances-20181119.htm">15 percent</a> of single parents had three months of expenses on hand, and 41 percent didn’t have more than $400 in savings.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>In many ways, Amelia and Rachel are privileged in the single world. Both have managed to buy their own homes — even if, in Rachel’s case, it also meant mortgaging some of her retirement. For many of the hundreds of people I heard from during my reporting, cobbling together enough for a down payment, let alone qualifying for a mortgage on a single income, feels impossible. Same, too, for having kids on one’s own or going through the process to adopt. </p>
<p>Caitlin, who’s 33 and lives in the Washington, DC, area, is asexual and aromantic and is not looking to be partnered. She could get a roommate, which might help with some monthly bills, but between DC’s high cost of living and the student loans she’s only recently been able to get below six figures, it would still take her years to save up enough for a down payment. As she put it, “not being able to save much, or even just depending on the savings of one person, means that homebuying and having kids are just a fantasy.” And that’s on a pre-tax salary of around $100,000 a year. </p>
<p>Caroline, who’s 46, lives in Vermont and has been in a relationship with someone for 10 years. A number of factors, including logistics and jobs and divorces, have meant that they’ve never been able to live together, and she’s not sure that she’d want to. Yet “life is so freaking expensive,” she said. “With two people contributing, perhaps you could actually take a vacation. I could probably pay for things like haircuts, or new clothes, without going into debt. And, of course, the finances are only half of the story: There’s also the cost of time and energy. Whether it’s time spent on the phone to find someone to fix the roof, the energy it takes to plan a college tour for my kid, or the stress of the heating bill, having someone to share that with would be nearly invaluable.” </p>
<hr />
<p>These issues aren’t just about personal attitudes: American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Even as more couples than ever “cohabitate” without being married, so many of the structural privileges of partnership still revolve around the institution of marriage. (The US Census still conceives of the status of “single” as anyone who is not, at present, married.) </p>
<p>First, there’s the tax code. Most people don’t realize that until 1948, everyone filed income taxes alone, regardless of marital status. The policy changed in the hopes of discouraging “income shifting,” in which, say, a husband who was making $100,000 would transfer $50,000 of that money to their wife, ensuring that both of them were taxed at a lower rate. (This period was also, it should be noted, when the income tax rate for top earners was between 80 and 90 percent.) “Joint” filing was created as a means of replacing income shifting with income splitting. </p>
<p>The scenario was pretty great for married people, particularly married people with one income. For single people? Less great. As legal scholar Anne L. Alstott argues in “<a href="https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/4867/">Updating the Welfare State: Marriage, the Income Tax, and Social Security in the Age of Individualism</a>,” the vast majority of adults at the time were either married or planning to get married. (The median age of first marriage in 1950: <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/us/19marriage.html">23 for men, 20 for women</a>, with <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/26/us/26marry.html#:~:text=This%20was%20slightly%20less%20than,by%20married%20couples%20in%201950.&amp;text=In%20recent%20history%2C%20the%20marriage,a%20person's%20place%20in%20society.">78 percent </a>of adults married, and many of the unmarried widowed.) Who would protest? </p>
<p>By the end of the 1960s, that foundational assumption of the tax code began to falter. Divorce rates were slowly climbing, and more and more women were entering the workforce. Congress decided to modify the tax brackets so that joint filers wouldn’t have quite as large a tax benefit. That modification created its own problem: the so-called “marriage penalty” for couples where both spouses were working for pay outside the home, which often pushed them into a higher tax bracket than if they were filing as single people. </p>
<p>The marriage penalty has <a href="https://money.usnews.com/money/personal-finance/articles/what-to-know-about-the-marriage-tax-penalty">faded in recent years</a>, particularly after the 2017 Republican tax cuts that targeted high incomes. But the singles penalty remains — the tax code is still <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stimulus-check-child-tax-credit-pandemic-aid-roundup-2021-07-12/">written</a> to benefit people in 1950s middle-class marriages <a href="https://apps.urban.org/features/race-and-taxes/#housing-and-homeownership">who own their homes</a>. That’s not great for the millions of households who are shouldering other cost burdens around single life. </p>
<p>Progressive tax codes are intended, at least theoretically, to ensure equitable distribution of the costs of maintaining civilization. They should (again, theoretically) be readjusted when a certain group begins to shoulder a disproportionate amount of that burden — like, for instance, single or divorced people. That’s not what’s happened, not for couples with two earners and not for the growing number of single or solo households. The reality of how people live and who works has changed. The policy has not kept pace.</p>
<p>The same principle holds true for Social Security, which was created first and foremost as a means of protecting the elderly from living out their final years in the literal poorhouse. The idea was simple: You and your employers pay in part of your salary now, and when you retire, you have enough to survive. </p>
<p>The architects of the program were aware that it would only work if you also created a means for women who never worked for pay (housewives), those whose paid work was ineligible for Social Security (domestic workers), and those whose work was intermittent and always paid less than men’s to have access to their husband’s benefits, either as partners in retirement or in case of death or disability. They needed a system that acknowledged the patriarchal formation both of the home and of paid work. So they offered women who reached Social Security age a choice: You can claim your own benefits, which are probably paltry or nonexistent; you can claim a “half” benefit as a spouse; or, if your husband dies, you can claim full “survivor’s” benefits. </p>
<p>But what happened to divorced women? Initially, if you’d been married for 20 years before divorcing, you could still claim that half benefit. When more and more people started getting divorced, Congress reduced the minimum marriage length to 10 years. That was a useful corrective, but it still limits the “better” benefit — that is, the ability to access a man’s benefit, which, given the enduring wage gap, is almost always higher — to people who are men, or who are or were married to men for a significant period. </p>
<p>Between 1990 and 2009, for example, the number of women who reached retirement age without claim to a man’s benefits <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/blog/social-mobility-memos/2014/10/09/retired-women-at-risk-for-downward-income-mobility/">increased</a> from 7.5 percent to 16.2 percent; for Black women, it went from 13.4 percent to 33.9 percent. To be clear, most of these women did have benefits of their own, but the pay gap and the fact that women are far more likely to work in “feminized” fields with lower pay mean they almost certainly received less than a man in their demographic would have. In 2019, the average overall benefit for a retired man was $1,671 a month, compared to $1,337 for a woman. A divorced woman’s benefit would likely still be larger than the half benefit she’d receive from her ex-husband, but a widowed woman’s whole “survivor” benefit would presumably be higher than her own, especially if she took any time out of the workforce to care for children or elders. </p>
<p>All of this is complicated and something that most people don’t think about until they start to near retirement age (<a href="https://www.vox.com/the-goods/22639674/elder-care-family-costs-nursing-home-health-care">or their parents do</a>). It matters because it again underlines the structure of American life that’s prioritized and favored. It’s not that Social Security necessarily penalizes people who are single. In fact, it has been modified several times to account for the newly single. The problem, then, is that it’s still organized around the understanding that American women will get and stay married to a man at some point in their lives, even as that understanding has ceased to hold true for millions. </p>
<p>As Suzanne Kahn notes in <a href="https://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/16209.html"><em>Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era</em></a>, other public safety net programs — and private ones intended to supplement them — were built in the same model. Pensions, health insurance benefits, IRAs: All of them are organized to best accommodate the needs of married (or widowed) family units. If you’re married, you can be added to a spouse’s insurance policy, which allows spouses to drop in and out of the workforce as needed or seek out jobs that don’t provide full-time insurance. Single people, particularly single people with chronic health conditions, have fewer options, even after the rollout of Obamacare. (In many states, the available options on the marketplace exchange can be prohibitively expensive and <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/01/us/politics/build-back-better-act-health-coverage.html">need fixing</a>.)<strong> </strong></p>
<p>Then there’s the sheer amount of benefits conferred by many workplaces to people who have children. Parental leave is fantastic. We should have more of it. But there should also be forms of leave, caregiving or not, for people who choose not to have children. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows many workers unpaid time off to recover from a serious illness or care for a family member, but it does not allow people to take time off to care for someone who is not legally family. (Paid family and sick leave protections have <a href="https://www.vox.com/22796307/paid-leave-budget-reconciliation-senate-joe-manchin">gone in and out</a> of the <a href="https://www.vox.com/2021/11/19/22776638/house-democrats-pass-185-trillion-social-spending-bill">Build Back Better social spending legislation</a> that’s moving through Congress; the current proposal would expand leave to include family by “blood or affinity.”) </p>
<p>These policies and programs were created to decrease suffering, to lessen the effects of catastrophe (or <a href="https://www.vox.com/22600143/poverty-us-covid-19-pandemic-stimulus-checks">pandemic</a>), to protect people from descending into poverty. Yet in too many cases, they are built in a way that suggests that single or solo-living people are expected to be, provide, or pay for their own safety nets. </p>
<hr />
<p>Back in 2013, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-high-price-of-being-single-in-america/267043/">persuasively laid out</a> the high costs of being single in the Atlantic. Using various calculations based on housing, health care, taxes, and Social Security income, they estimated that an unmarried woman, making around $40,000 in 2010, could pay almost $500,000 more over her lifetime than a married woman. An unmarried woman making $80,000 could pay more than $1 million. That’s a very expensive life choice. </p>
<p>If those numbers are hard to believe, a chart of the wage and salary income of married versus unmarried men and women might be useful in showing another big gap.</p>
 <figure>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 <cite>Christina Animashaun/Vox</cite>
 
 
 
</figure>
<p>Do married men earn more because they’re married? Or do people who earn more get married more often? That’s a difficult question, but it’s worthwhile to parse who, exactly, is getting married and staying that way. As I wrote <a href="https://annehelen.substack.com/p/blue-marriage-and-the-terror-of-divorce">in October</a>, there’s a popular conception that the divorce rate is actually decreasing (from a high of 22.6 percent in 1980 to 14.9 percent today). </p>
<p>While this statistic is true in the aggregate, it obscures significant trends, particularly with education levels. (Among other factors: Same-sex marriage has not been legal long enough to directly compare broader trends.) A 2015 <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/12/04/education-and-marriage/">Pew report</a> estimated that women with a bachelor’s degree have a 78 percent chance of their marriage lasting 20 years or longer; for women with some college, the number drops to 48 percent, and 40 percent for women who’ve completed high school or less.<strong> </strong></p>
<p>While divorce trends have decreased for people with a college degree, they decreased, leveled off, and then began rising again in the 1990s for people without one. The more education you have, the more likely you are to make more money; the more money you make, the more likely you are to be able to patch over some of the potholes that can doom a marriage. In 2015, 25 percent of low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 55 were married, <a href="https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-marriage-divide-how-and-why-working-class-families-are-more-fragile-today">compared</a> with 39 percent of lower-middle-class adults and 56 percent of families making above median income.</p>
<p>And then there are the thousands of people who would like to be married but can’t afford to be because additional income from a spouse would result in taking away the disability, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or child support benefits that make life sustainable. For them, marriage might be financially stabilizing down the line but not stabilizing enough to make up for the loss of other safety nets in the short term. </p>
<p>Marriage is stabilizing, then, but largely for people who are <em>already</em> stable or on the route to it. It’s become a tool of class reproduction, benefiting those who’ve always benefited within the American class hierarchy: financially stable white men and the women married to them.</p>
<p>The current situation is an example of economist Jacob Hacker’s theory of “policy drift,” in which situations that policy was created to serve have changed significantly but the policy itself has failed to adapt, expand, or respond to that new reality. Alstott, the legal scholar, describes this gap as one between “legal fiction” and “social reality”: one that “undermines the ability of the tax-and-transfer system to achieve any of a range of objectives, whether fostering individual freedom, aiding the poor, or shoring up the traditional family.” Put differently, our designs no longer do what they were intended to do.</p>
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<p>The refusal to build a real safety net for people who aren’t partnered means that some people may feel pressure to do anything to be and stay partnered, even if it means enduring psychological or physical abuse. It also means that single people deal with all the same things that anyone without a safety net deals with: They often stay in bad jobs, they take fewer entrepreneurial risks, they’re less likely to follow opportunities that people with a spousal safety net could. They simply don’t have the stability that makes it not just possible but also conceivable to do so much else. It seems clear, if we want to actually support “liberty” or lift people out of poverty, or even make it easier for people to have traditional (or nontraditional!) families, then we need to reconsider the way we organize tax policy and public benefits.</p>
<p>Some single people love being single; some are fairly ambivalent about it; others despise it. None of those postures are made easier when your way of life is implicitly and explicitly understood as a sort of cultural and financial backwater, to be avoided at all costs. If we want to start thinking about how to make it easier for single people to find financial stability, we have to start to understand single life as something that’s not just thinkable, not just survivable, but actually desirable. </p>
<p>Right now, that idea is too threatening to the institution of marriage and, by extension, a pillar of the United States as we know it. The integrity of that pillar has been crumbling for years, as marriage, even with its myriad financial and cultural benefits, has ceased to prove its worth. Today, people want options for partnership that are more flexible and more like actual partnerships. You can cultivate that within a marriage, sure, but it, perhaps ironically, often takes more work than trying to figure out your own rules outside one. </p>
<p>Some people crave something more than what marriage can provide. They wonder: What would it look like to create small systems of care for one another that go beyond one other individual? What if we could figure out how to acknowledge that the most important person in our lives isn’t always someone bound to us by family or sexual relationship? How can we think about housing, health care, caregiving, and work in ways that actually acknowledge and actively include single and solo-living people — not as afterthoughts but as the <a href="https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/08/20/a-profile-of-single-americans/">third, if not more, of the population</a> that they are? </p>
<p>There’s a whole lot that straight white single people today can learn from past and present work in <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/community-care-in-the-aids-crisis/">queer communities</a>, the <a href="https://emorywheel.com/the-black-panthers-and-young-lords-how-todays-mutual-aid-strategies-took-shape/">Black Power movement</a>, and <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9780807848418/from-mutual-aid-to-the-welfare-state/">immigrant communities</a> — where members have <a href="https://www.vox.com/the-highlight/22784054/estrangement-family-friends-friendsgiving">long formed systems of mutual aid</a>, many of whom were forced to come up with these systems because the existing legal and religious systems excluded them from participation. There’s also a lot to learn from other countries where single populations thrive. Denmark, for example, has offered three cycles of IVF to residents up to the age of 40 since 2007, leading to a sharp increase in “solomor” or elective single mothers. </p>
<p>That policy interlocks with a safety net that makes other parts of single parenting life easier: significant maternity leave, affordable and accessible day care, and universal health care. More stability means fewer of the behavioral and educational problems associated with kids who grow up in single-parent homes, the vast majority of which can be <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/sep/14/no-stigma-single-mothers-denmark-solomors">traced back</a> not to the fact that they only had one parent but that the one parent’s finances were unstable, because of either a divorce or an unplanned pregnancy. Giving single people <em>access</em> to parenthood — and, just as importantly, the assurance of support once it happens, for whatever reason — could dramatically change the experience of single parenting. </p>
<p>Denmark isn’t perfect, and I’m always wary of holding up Scandinavian policy, simply because the paradigm shift necessary to bring the United States closer to that reality can often feel altogether out of reach. But it’s still worth thinking about what makes Denmark less hostile to single people generally. Part of it is a real feeling of community support: 95 percent of Danes feel that they could <a href="https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/denmark/">rely on someone in a time of need</a>. But that’s also <a href="https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/united-states/">true</a> for 91 percent of Americans. So part of it is a safety net that readily expands and contracts for all — not just the middle class, not just those in poverty, not just people who can and want to work full time, not just nondisabled or gender-conforming or straight people or partnered people, but all people, simply because they are people. </p>
<p>“Marriage today is no longer the primary and normal state for adult Americans,” Alstott <a href="https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5876&amp;context=fss_papers">explains</a> in a 2013 paper for the <em>Yale Review</em>. “It is no longer the expected route to maturity or the exclusive site for sex, romance, and child-rearing.” It has been, in sociologists’ terms, “deinstitutionalized.” When a society fails to make policy adaptive to its new institutions — its new ways of life — it puts our fingers on the scales to favor a certain class of people. We can say we cherish single people and their contributions to society. We can yell that they are no more or less worthy of success and stability. Until policy shifts to reflect that reality, those sentiments will remain hollow. </p>
<p>People will continue to bemoan the erosion of the traditional family and the decline in the birthrate, because that is what people do when they feel the world is changing and they, personally, are not — maybe out of fear, but maybe, too, out of lack of imagination. We’re already a country full of people forging new institutions: of partnership, of care, of parenting. Imagine what we would look like, imagine the ways in which we’d thrive, if we decided to actually support them. </p>
<p><em>If you’d like to share with The Goods your experience as part of the hollow middle class, email </em><a href="mailto:annehelenpetersen@vox.com"><em><strong>annehelenpetersen@vox.com</strong></em></a><em> or fill out </em><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScc-Rm_NMsyRPfevs25lhxHFoq2k72fwxyhGpgEOpWbSxZjoQ/viewform?gxids=7628"><em><strong>this form</strong></em></a><em>.</em></p>
<p><strong>Correction, December 3, 2021, 11 am: </strong>An earlier version of this story misstated an estimation in a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/01/the-high-price-of-being-single-in-america/267043/">2013 Atlantic article</a> on costs for unmarried women. The story also misstated provisions of the <a href="https://www.dol.gov/agencies/whd/fmla">Family and Medical Leave Act</a>, which includes unpaid time off for individuals recovering from a serious illness.</p>
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 The escalating costs of being single in America

 Why is life in this country so hostile to single people?

 By Anne Helen Petersen Dec 2, 2021, 8:10am EST
 Illustrations by Daniela Jordan-Villaveces

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 Think about your household’s monthly expenses. There are the big-ticket items — your rent or mortgage, your health care, maybe a student loan. Then there’s the smaller stuff: the utility bills; the internet and phone bills; Netflix, Hulu, and all your other streaming subscriptions. If you drive a car, there’s gas and insurance. If you take the subway, there’s a public transit pass. You pay for food, and household items like toilet paper and garbage bags and lightbulbs. You buy furniture and sheets and dishes.

 Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own.

 If you live by yourself — or as a single parent or caregiver — you don’t have to imagine. This is your life. All the expenses of existing in society, on one set of shoulders. For the more than 40 million people who live in this kind of single-income household, it’s also become increasingly untenable. When we talk about all the ways it’s become harder and harder for people to find solid financial footing in the middle class, we have to talk about how our society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to fall through the cracks.

 First, we need to define a clunky but essential term. Single or solo-living people may or may not be partnered with someone in the long or short term, and they may or may not be parents, but they all live and bear the responsibility for their bills alone. Some are retired; some are widowed or divorced; some are in long-distance relationships that require two households. Some have lived alone, purposely or regretfully, their entire lives.

 There are so many routes to and reasons for arriving at the single or solo-living life, and more people are living it than ever before: As of 2021, 37 million Americans live alone — about 15 percent of adults. 28 percent of US households have one person; back in 1960, that was just 13 percent. An additional 11 million households are headed by a single parent, a number that has tripled since 1965.

 Overall, 31 percent of US adults identify today as single, defined as not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship.

 The 31 percent figure holds true for both men and women in the aggregate but varies significantly by race and sexual orientation: According to Pew’s most recent survey data, 47 percent of Black adults are single, compared to 28 percent of white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults; 47 percent of adults who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are single, compared to 29 percent of straight adults.

 Then there’s the age breakdown: Women live significantly longer — and, over their lifetimes, make less money. Men, as a general rule, are far more likely to be single when they’re young, marry later (or for a second time), and stay married until their deaths. The reverse is true for women: They’re more likely to marry young but then end up divorced or widowed and living alone as they age. Given these and other trends — including the high cost of aging, the fact that women (and Black women in particular) make significantly less money over their lifetimes — it is women (and again, Black women in particular) who often bear the biggest financial load of single life.

 You can attribute some of these increases to no-fault divorce, which began to standardize in the 1970s; the continued aging of boomers — who are growing old but not always together; and college-educated people, in particular, delaying marriage until later in life. Add in the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the mass incarceration of Black men, the inability for same-sex couples to marry one another or, in some states, safely cohabitate until relatively recently, and declining rates of religious observance, and you have a whole slew of intersecting reasons people are single or solo-living at far greater rates than ever before.

 To be clear, these numbers aren’t increasing because society has shifted to accommodate the single or solo-living. Quite the contrary; they are increasing even though the United States is still organized, in pretty much every way, to accommodate and facilitate the lives of partnered and cohabitating people, particularly married people. We don’t seem to like or respect single people and their choices. It doesn’t matter how many songs or books or movies seem to champion the triumphs of the single person. Our societal actions — the way we support and reward people — suggest otherwise.

 Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism. That they’re not speaks to the fact that we don’t venerate the individual — we venerate the individual family. The family fosters the conditions for the individual’s success: The spouse helps create the conditions that make success possible; children (at least theoretically) keep the individual grounded, focused, and humble. Which is why so many narratives of “individual” success either start with that family already firmly in place or — as is the case with so many rom-coms and memoirs, from Sex in the City to How to Be Single — end there.

 "Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism"

 The celebrated single life is, in truth, incredibly narrow. For women, you have to be 1) actively and successfully in search of partnership; 2) unspeakably wealthy and above scrutiny; and/or 3) a self-sacrificing mother. “Confirmed” bachelors can sometimes get a pass so long as they don’t move back in with their parents; so do the elderly, the widowed (but only for a brief window of time), and the very young. Other single and solo-living people are still stigmatized in various and overlapping ways, depending on their age, class, race, and sexual identity. We don’t call single or unmarried people spinsters, deviants, or social problems anymore, at least not explicitly. But that underlying hostility to single and solo-living people? It’s everywhere.

 This was the difficulty for me when I revisited Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies in preparation for this article. The book, chock-full of stories of how women have carved successful and meaningful unpartnered lives for themselves, includes a clear-eyed look at the costs of exclusion. Yet it is still an advertisement, of sorts, for a way of life. Reading it, as I did, after combing through the stories of women who’d written to me about the small and insurmountable barriers to stability, made me realize just how much we’ve learned to excuse. Just because single people have managed to survive — and even thrive — in the face of societal hostility does not mean they have not suffered enduring consequences or that others do not suffer them today.

 In the fall of 2019, 28-year-old Amelia was splitting a two-bedroom apartment with a friend in Los Angeles. Like a lot of people, she needed a roommate to drive down costs, but having a roommate is not a cure-all for the instability of single life: People move out, sometimes to live with partners or on their own. For many, living with a roommate means always waiting for your situation to change, without your say, when the lease comes up. Amelia was getting by, but she could never save up to pay off her credit card bills or pay down her student loans, let alone build an emergency fund. (Amelia, like the other people I spoke to for this story, is being referred to by first name only to protect her privacy around personal finances.)

 Then she lost her job, and after four months of searching without success, she had no other option than to move back into her parents’ home in Las Vegas. She eventually found a “white-collar knowledge industry job” that she could do remotely and watched as her financial footing got more solid with each month.

 Nearly two years later, Amelia has paid off several of her student loans and her car loan, amassed an emergency fund, and saved enough for a small down payment on a house. You could say that’s because she was no longer paying rent. Part of it, though, was just living with her parents: She rotated paying for groceries, borrowed their car when hers needed repair, and didn’t have to go further into credit card debt while she continued to look for a job. She had a glimpse, in other words, of what it might be like to share financial responsibilities with a partner, not just split utilities and rent with a roommate.

 Now that Amelia’s moving out on her own, though, the costs of living alone will start to show up, like quiet guests arriving through the back door at a party. You don’t even realize how much work you’re doing to host them until you look at the house across the street and see that they have the same number of guests, but there are two hosts working in concert to handle all the tasks and cover all the costs.

 That’s kind of the reverse of what happened to Rachel, 37, when she and her husband divorced three years ago. “If anything will throw your basic beliefs about the nuclear family and the partnered American dream out the window,” Rachel told me, “it’s an emotionally devastating breakup coinciding with the birth of your child.”

 Shortly after the divorce, Rachel’s brother told her that the house next door to him was about to go up for sale. The rents in Bellingham, the midsize Washington state college town where they both lived, were becoming more unsustainable every year. Soon, buying a house on her public school teacher salary — which, with nine years of experience, plus a bonus for teaching in a Title I School, adds up to around $100,000 a year — might be out of reach. So Rachel did something impulsive: She cashed out the entirety of her IRA, borrowed some money from her parents and her ex-husband, and bought the house, which she shares with her 5-year-old son.

 Something else lives there, too: “the giant, scary beast” that is her mortgage payment. “I can make it month to month, but any sort of savings or emergency fund is very off the table,” Rachel explained. “That’s the huge difference between being partnered and being solo: the ability to build savings. And I feel like if an emergency happened, there would be some sort of safety net.” There’s an oft-cited stat that only 39 percent of Americans think they could cover a $1,000 emergency expense — but a 2018 Federal Reserve study showed that just 15 percent of single parents had three months of expenses on hand, and 41 percent didn’t have more than $400 in savings.

 In many ways, Amelia and Rachel are privileged in the single world. Both have managed to buy their own homes — even if, in Rachel’s case, it also meant mortgaging some of her retirement. For many of the hundreds of people I heard from during my reporting, cobbling together enough for a down payment, let alone qualifying for a mortgage on a single income, feels impossible. Same, too, for having kids on one’s own or going through the process to adopt.

 Caitlin, who’s 33 and lives in the Washington, DC, area, is asexual and aromantic and is not looking to be partnered. She could get a roommate, which might help with some monthly bills, but between DC’s high cost of living and the student loans she’s only recently been able to get below six figures, it would still take her years to save up enough for a down payment. As she put it, “not being able to save much, or even just depending on the savings of one person, means that homebuying and having kids are just a fantasy.” And that’s on a pre-tax salary of around $100,000 a year.

 Caroline, who’s 46, lives in Vermont and has been in a relationship with someone for 10 years. A number of factors, including logistics and jobs and divorces, have meant that they’ve never been able to live together, and she’s not sure that she’d want to. Yet “life is so freaking expensive,” she said. “With two people contributing, perhaps you could actually take a vacation. I could probably pay for things like haircuts, or new clothes, without going into debt. And, of course, the finances are only half of the story: There’s also the cost of time and energy. Whether it’s time spent on the phone to find someone to fix the roof, the energy it takes to plan a college tour for my kid, or the stress of the heating bill, having someone to share that with would be nearly invaluable.”

 These issues aren’t just about personal attitudes: American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Even as more couples than ever “cohabitate” without being married, so many of the structural privileges of partnership still revolve around the institution of marriage. (The US Census still conceives of the status of “single” as anyone who is not, at present, married.)

 First, there’s the tax code. Most people don’t realize that until 1948, everyone filed income taxes alone, regardless of marital status. The policy changed in the hopes of discouraging “income shifting,” in which, say, a husband who was making $100,000 would transfer $50,000 of that money to their wife, ensuring that both of them were taxed at a lower rate. (This period was also, it should be noted, when the income tax rate for top earners was between 80 and 90 percent.) “Joint” filing was created as a means of replacing income shifting with income splitting.

 The scenario was pretty great for married people, particularly married people with one income. For single people? Less great. As legal scholar Anne L. Alstott argues in “Updating the Welfare State: Marriage, the Income Tax, and Social Security in the Age of Individualism,” the vast majority of adults at the time were either married or planning to get married. (The median age of first marriage in 1950: 23 for men, 20 for women, with 78 percent of adults married, and many of the unmarried widowed.) Who would protest?

 "American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people"

 By the end of the 1960s, that foundational assumption of the tax code began to falter. Divorce rates were slowly climbing, and more and more women were entering the workforce. Congress decided to modify the tax brackets so that joint filers wouldn’t have quite as large a tax benefit. That modification created its own problem: the so-called “marriage penalty” for couples where both spouses were working for pay outside the home, which often pushed them into a higher tax bracket than if they were filing as single people.

 The marriage penalty has faded in recent years, particularly after the 2017 Republican tax cuts that targeted high incomes. But the singles penalty remains — the tax code is still written to benefit people in 1950s middle-class marriages who own their homes. That’s not great for the millions of households who are shouldering other cost burdens around single life.

 Progressive tax codes are intended, at least theoretically, to ensure equitable distribution of the costs of maintaining civilization. They should (again, theoretically) be readjusted when a certain group begins to shoulder a disproportionate amount of that burden — like, for instance, single or divorced people. That’s not what’s happened, not for couples with two earners and not for the growing number of single or solo households. The reality of how people live and who works has changed. The policy has not kept pace.

 The same principle holds true for Social Security, which was created first and foremost as a means of protecting the elderly from living out their final years in the literal poorhouse. The idea was simple: You and your employers pay in part of your salary now, and when you retire, you have enough to survive.

 The architects of the program were aware that it would only work if you also created a means for women who never worked for pay (housewives), those whose paid work was ineligible for Social Security (domestic workers), and those whose work was intermittent and always paid less than men’s to have access to their husband’s benefits, either as partners in retirement or in case of death or disability. They needed a system that acknowledged the patriarchal formation both of the home and of paid work. So they offered women who reached Social Security age a choice: You can claim your own benefits, which are probably paltry or nonexistent; you can claim a “half” benefit as a spouse; or, if your husband dies, you can claim full “survivor’s” benefits.

 But what happened to divorced women? Initially, if you’d been married for 20 years before divorcing, you could still claim that half benefit. When more and more people started getting divorced, Congress reduced the minimum marriage length to 10 years. That was a useful corrective, but it still limits the “better” benefit — that is, the ability to access a man’s benefit, which, given the enduring wage gap, is almost always higher — to people who are men, or who are or were married to men for a significant period.

 Between 1990 and 2009, for example, the number of women who reached retirement age without claim to a man’s benefits increased from 7.5 percent to 16.2 percent; for Black women, it went from 13.4 percent to 33.9 percent. To be clear, most of these women did have benefits of their own, but the pay gap and the fact that women are far more likely to work in “feminized” fields with lower pay mean they almost certainly received less than a man in their demographic would have. In 2019, the average overall benefit for a retired man was $1,671 a month, compared to $1,337 for a woman. A divorced woman’s benefit would likely still be larger than the half benefit she’d receive from her ex-husband, but a widowed woman’s whole “survivor” benefit would presumably be higher than her own, especially if she took any time out of the workforce to care for children or elders.

 All of this is complicated and something that most people don’t think about until they start to near retirement age (or their parents do). It matters because it again underlines the structure of American life that’s prioritized and favored. It’s not that Social Security necessarily penalizes people who are single. In fact, it has been modified several times to account for the newly single. The problem, then, is that it’s still organized around the understanding that American women will get and stay married to a man at some point in their lives, even as that understanding has ceased to hold true for millions.

 "The reality of how people live and who works has changed. The policy has not kept pace."

 As Suzanne Kahn notes in Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era, other public safety net programs — and private ones intended to supplement them — were built in the same model. Pensions, health insurance benefits, IRAs: All of them are organized to best accommodate the needs of married (or widowed) family units. If you’re married, you can be added to a spouse’s insurance policy, which allows spouses to drop in and out of the workforce as needed or seek out jobs that don’t provide full-time insurance. Single people, particularly single people with chronic health conditions, have fewer options, even after the rollout of Obamacare. (In many states, the available options on the marketplace exchange can be prohibitively expensive and need fixing.)

 Then there’s the sheer amount of benefits conferred by many workplaces to people who have children. Parental leave is fantastic. We should have more of it. But there should also be forms of leave, caregiving or not, for people who choose not to have children. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows many workers unpaid time off to recover from a serious illness or care for a family member, but it does not allow people to take time off to care for someone who is not legally family. (Paid family and sick leave protections have gone in and out of the Build Back Better social spending legislation that’s moving through Congress; the current proposal would expand leave to include family by “blood or affinity.”)

 These policies and programs were created to decrease suffering, to lessen the effects of catastrophe (or pandemic), to protect people from descending into poverty. Yet in too many cases, they are built in a way that suggests that single or solo-living people are expected to be, provide, or pay for their own safety nets.

 Back in 2013, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell persuasively laid out the high costs of being single in the Atlantic. Using various calculations based on housing, health care, taxes, and Social Security income, they estimated that an unmarried woman, making around $40,000 in 2010, could pay almost $500,000 more over her lifetime than a married woman. An unmarried woman making $80,000 could pay more than $1 million. That’s a very expensive life choice.

 If those numbers are hard to believe, a chart of the wage and salary income of married versus unmarried men and women might be useful in showing another big gap.

 Christina Animashaun/Vox

 Do married men earn more because they’re married? Or do people who earn more get married more often? That’s a difficult question, but it’s worthwhile to parse who, exactly, is getting married and staying that way. As I wrote in October, there’s a popular conception that the divorce rate is actually decreasing (from a high of 22.6 percent in 1980 to 14.9 percent today).

 While this statistic is true in the aggregate, it obscures significant trends, particularly with education levels. (Among other factors: Same-sex marriage has not been legal long enough to directly compare broader trends.) A 2015 Pew report estimated that women with a bachelor’s degree have a 78 percent chance of their marriage lasting 20 years or longer; for women with some college, the number drops to 48 percent, and 40 percent for women who’ve completed high school or less.

 While divorce trends have decreased for people with a college degree, they decreased, leveled off, and then began rising again in the 1990s for people without one. The more education you have, the more likely you are to make more money; the more money you make, the more likely you are to be able to patch over some of the potholes that can doom a marriage. In 2015, 25 percent of low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 55 were married, compared with 39 percent of lower-middle-class adults and 56 percent of families making above median income.

 And then there are the thousands of people who would like to be married but can’t afford to be because additional income from a spouse would result in taking away the disability, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or child support benefits that make life sustainable. For them, marriage might be financially stabilizing down the line but not stabilizing enough to make up for the loss of other safety nets in the short term.

 Marriage is stabilizing, then, but largely for people who are already stable or on the route to it. It’s become a tool of class reproduction, benefiting those who’ve always benefited within the American class hierarchy: financially stable white men and the women married to them.

 The current situation is an example of economist Jacob Hacker’s theory of “policy drift,” in which situations that policy was created to serve have changed significantly but the policy itself has failed to adapt, expand, or respond to that new reality. Alstott, the legal scholar, describes this gap as one between “legal fiction” and “social reality”: one that “undermines the ability of the tax-and-transfer system to achieve any of a range of objectives, whether fostering individual freedom, aiding the poor, or shoring up the traditional family.” Put differently, our designs no longer do what they were intended to do.

 The refusal to build a real safety net for people who aren’t partnered means that some people may feel pressure to do anything to be and stay partnered, even if it means enduring psychological or physical abuse. It also means that single people deal with all the same things that anyone without a safety net deals with: They often stay in bad jobs, they take fewer entrepreneurial risks, they’re less likely to follow opportunities that people with a spousal safety net could. They simply don’t have the stability that makes it not just possible but also conceivable to do so much else. It seems clear, if we want to actually support “liberty” or lift people out of poverty, or even make it easier for people to have traditional (or nontraditional!) families, then we need to reconsider the way we organize tax policy and public benefits.

 Some single people love being single; some are fairly ambivalent about it; others despise it. None of those postures are made easier when your way of life is implicitly and explicitly understood as a sort of cultural and financial backwater, to be avoided at all costs. If we want to start thinking about how to make it easier for single people to find financial stability, we have to start to understand single life as something that’s not just thinkable, not just survivable, but actually desirable.

 Right now, that idea is too threatening to the institution of marriage and, by extension, a pillar of the United States as we know it. The integrity of that pillar has been crumbling for years, as marriage, even with its myriad financial and cultural benefits, has ceased to prove its worth. Today, people want options for partnership that are more flexible and more like actual partnerships. You can cultivate that within a marriage, sure, but it, perhaps ironically, often takes more work than trying to figure out your own rules outside one.

 Some people crave something more than what marriage can provide. They wonder: What would it look like to create small systems of care for one another that go beyond one other individual? What if we could figure out how to acknowledge that the most important person in our lives isn’t always someone bound to us by family or sexual relationship? How can we think about housing, health care, caregiving, and work in ways that actually acknowledge and actively include single and solo-living people — not as afterthoughts but as the third, if not more, of the population that they are?

 There’s a whole lot that straight white single people today can learn from past and present work in queer communities, the Black Power movement, and immigrant communities — where members have long formed systems of mutual aid, many of whom were forced to come up with these systems because the existing legal and religious systems excluded them from participation. There’s also a lot to learn from other countries where single populations thrive. Denmark, for example, has offered three cycles of IVF to residents up to the age of 40 since 2007, leading to a sharp increase in “solomor” or elective single mothers.

 That policy interlocks with a safety net that makes other parts of single parenting life easier: significant maternity leave, affordable and accessible day care, and universal health care. More stability means fewer of the behavioral and educational problems associated with kids who grow up in single-parent homes, the vast majority of which can be traced back not to the fact that they only had one parent but that the one parent’s finances were unstable, because of either a divorce or an unplanned pregnancy. Giving single people access to parenthood — and, just as importantly, the assurance of support once it happens, for whatever reason — could dramatically change the experience of single parenting.

 "What would it look like to create small systems of care for one another that go beyond one other individual?"

 Denmark isn’t perfect, and I’m always wary of holding up Scandinavian policy, simply because the paradigm shift necessary to bring the United States closer to that reality can often feel altogether out of reach. But it’s still worth thinking about what makes Denmark less hostile to single people generally. Part of it is a real feeling of community support: 95 percent of Danes feel that they could rely on someone in a time of need. But that’s also true for 91 percent of Americans. So part of it is a safety net that readily expands and contracts for all — not just the middle class, not just those in poverty, not just people who can and want to work full time, not just nondisabled or gender-conforming or straight people or partnered people, but all people, simply because they are people.

 “Marriage today is no longer the primary and normal state for adult Americans,” Alstott explains in a 2013 paper for the Yale Review. “It is no longer the expected route to maturity or the exclusive site for sex, romance, and child-rearing.” It has been, in sociologists’ terms, “deinstitutionalized.” When a society fails to make policy adaptive to its new institutions — its new ways of life — it puts our fingers on the scales to favor a certain class of people. We can say we cherish single people and their contributions to society. We can yell that they are no more or less worthy of success and stability. Until policy shifts to reflect that reality, those sentiments will remain hollow.

 People will continue to bemoan the erosion of the traditional family and the decline in the birthrate, because that is what people do when they feel the world is changing and they, personally, are not — maybe out of fear, but maybe, too, out of lack of imagination. We’re already a country full of people forging new institutions: of partnership, of care, of parenting. Imagine what we would look like, imagine the ways in which we’d thrive, if we decided to actually support them.

 If you’d like to share with The Goods your experience as part of the hollow middle class, email annehelenpetersen@vox.com or fill out this form.

 Correction, December 3, 2021, 11 am: An earlier version of this story misstated an estimation in a 2013 Atlantic article on costs for unmarried women. The story also misstated provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which includes unpaid time off for individuals recovering from a serious illness.

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 In This Stream

 The Hollow Middle Class

 * The escalating costs of being single in America
 * Caring for the elderly has never been more expensive, exhausting, or invisible
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Think about your household’s monthly expenses. There are the big-ticket items — your rent or mortgage, your health care, maybe a student loan. Then there’s the smaller stuff: the utility bills; the internet and phone bills; Netflix, Hulu, and all your other streaming subscriptions. If you drive a car, there’s gas and insurance. If you take the subway, there’s a public transit pass. You pay for food, and household items like toilet paper and garbage bags and lightbulbs. You buy furniture and sheets and dishes.
Now imagine paying for all those things completely on your own. 
If you live by yourself — or as a single parent or caregiver — you don’t have to imagine. This is your life. All the expenses of existing in society, on one set of shoulders. For the more than 40 million people who live in this kind of single-income household, it’s also become increasingly untenable. When we talk about all the ways it’s become harder and harder for people to find solid financial footing in the middle class, we have to talk about how our society is still set up in a way that makes it much easier for single people to fall through the cracks.
First, we need to define a clunky but essential term. Single or solo-living people may or may not be partnered with someone in the long or short term, and they may or may not be parents, but they all live and bear the responsibility for their bills alone. Some are retired; some are widowed or divorced; some are in long-distance relationships that require two households. Some have lived alone, purposely or regretfully, their entire lives. 
There are so many routes to and reasons for arriving at the single or solo-living life, and more people are living it than ever before: As of 2021, 37 million Americans live alone — about 15 percent of adults. 28 percent of US households have one person; back in 1960, that was just 13 percent. An additional 11 million households are headed by a single parent, a number that has tripled since 1965. 
Overall, 31 percent of US adults identify today as single, defined as not married, living with a partner, or in a committed relationship. 
The 31 percent figure holds true for both men and women in the aggregate but varies significantly by race and sexual orientation: According to Pew’s most recent survey data, 47 percent of Black adults are single, compared to 28 percent of white adults and 27 percent of Hispanic adults; 47 percent of adults who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual are single, compared to 29 percent of straight adults.  
Then there’s the age breakdown: Women live significantly longer — and, over their lifetimes, make less money. Men, as a general rule, are far more likely to be single when they’re young, marry later (or for a second time), and stay married until their deaths. The reverse is true for women: They’re more likely to marry young but then end up divorced or widowed and living alone as they age. Given these and other trends — including the high cost of aging, the fact that women (and Black women in particular) make significantly less money over their lifetimes — it is women (and again, Black women in particular) who often bear the biggest financial load of single life.
You can attribute some of these increases to no-fault divorce, which began to standardize in the 1970s; the continued aging of boomers — who are growing old but not always together; and college-educated people, in particular, delaying marriage until later in life. Add in the sexual revolution, the feminist movement, the mass incarceration of Black men, the inability for same-sex couples to marry one another or, in some states, safely cohabitate until relatively recently, and declining rates of religious observance, and you have a whole slew of intersecting reasons people are single or solo-living at far greater rates than ever before. 
To be clear, these numbers aren’t increasing because society has shifted to accommodate the single or solo-living. Quite the contrary; they are increasing even though the United States is still organized, in pretty much every way, to accommodate and facilitate the lives of partnered and cohabitating people, particularly married people. We don’t seem to like or respect single people and their choices. It doesn’t matter how many songs or books or movies seem to champion the triumphs of the single person. Our societal actions — the way we support and reward people — suggest otherwise. 
Single people should, in theory, be the purest embodiment of American values of self-sufficiency and individualism. That they’re not speaks to the fact that we don’t venerate the individual — we venerate the individual family. The family fosters the conditions for the individual’s success: The spouse helps create the conditions that make success possible; children (at least theoretically) keep the individual grounded, focused, and humble. Which is why so many narratives of “individual” success either start with that family already firmly in place or — as is the case with so many rom-coms and memoirs, from Sex in the City to How to Be Single — end there. 
The celebrated single life is, in truth, incredibly narrow. For women, you have to be 1) actively and successfully in search of partnership; 2) unspeakably wealthy and above scrutiny; and/or 3) a self-sacrificing mother. “Confirmed” bachelors can sometimes get a pass so long as they don’t move back in with their parents; so do the elderly, the widowed (but only for a brief window of time), and the very young. Other single and solo-living people are still stigmatized in various and overlapping ways, depending on their age, class, race, and sexual identity. We don’t call single or unmarried people spinsters, deviants, or social problems anymore, at least not explicitly. But that underlying hostility to single and solo-living people? It’s everywhere. 
This was the difficulty for me when I revisited Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies   in preparation for this article. The book, chock-full of stories of how women have carved successful and meaningful unpartnered lives for themselves, includes a clear-eyed look at the costs of exclusion. Yet it is still an advertisement, of sorts, for a way of life. Reading it, as I did, after combing through the stories of women who’d written to me about the small and insurmountable barriers to stability, made me realize just how much we’ve learned to excuse. Just because single people have managed to survive — and even thrive — in the face of societal hostility does not mean they have not suffered enduring consequences or that others do not suffer them today. 
In the fall of 2019, 28-year-old Amelia was splitting a two-bedroom apartment with a friend in Los Angeles. Like a lot of people, she needed a roommate to drive down costs, but having a roommate is not a cure-all for the instability of single life: People move out, sometimes to live with partners or on their own. For many, living with a roommate means always waiting for your situation to change, without your say, when the lease comes up. Amelia was getting by, but she could never save up to pay off her credit card bills or pay down her student loans, let alone build an emergency fund. (Amelia, like the other people I spoke to for this story, is being referred to by first name only to protect her privacy around personal finances.)  
Then she lost her job, and after four months of searching without success, she had no other option than to move back into her parents’ home in Las Vegas. She eventually found a “white-collar knowledge industry job” that she could do remotely and watched as her financial footing got more solid with each month. 
Nearly two years later, Amelia has paid off several of her student loans and her car loan, amassed an emergency fund, and saved enough for a small down payment on a house. You could say that’s because she was no longer paying rent. Part of it, though, was just living with her parents: She rotated paying for groceries, borrowed their car when hers needed repair, and didn’t have to go further into credit card debt while she continued to look for a job. She had a glimpse, in other words, of what it might be like to share financial responsibilities with a partner, not just split utilities and rent with a roommate. 
Now that Amelia’s moving out on her own, though, the costs of living alone will start to show up, like quiet guests arriving through the back door at a party. You don’t even realize how much work you’re doing to host them until you look at the house across the street and see that they have the same number of guests, but there are two hosts working in concert to handle all the tasks and cover all the costs.
That’s kind of the reverse of what happened to Rachel, 37, when she and her husband divorced three years ago. “If anything will throw your basic beliefs about the nuclear family and the partnered American dream out the window,” Rachel told me, “it’s an emotionally devastating breakup coinciding with the birth of your child.” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Shortly after the divorce, Rachel’s brother told her that the house next door to him was about to go up for sale. The rents in Bellingham, the midsize Washington state college town where they both lived, were becoming more unsustainable every year. Soon, buying a house on her public school teacher salary — which, with nine years of experience, plus a bonus for teaching in a Title I School, adds up to around $100,000 a year — might be out of reach. So Rachel did something impulsive: She cashed out the entirety of her IRA, borrowed some money from her parents and her ex-husband, and bought the house, which she shares with her 5-year-old son. 
Something else lives there, too: “the giant, scary beast” that is her mortgage payment. “I can make it month to month, but any sort of savings or emergency fund is very off the table,” Rachel explained. “That’s the huge difference between being partnered and being solo: the ability to build savings. And I feel like if an emergency happened, there would be some sort of safety net.” There’s an oft-cited stat that only 39 percent of Americans think they could cover a $1,000 emergency expense — but a 2018 Federal Reserve study showed that just 15 percent of single parents had three months of expenses on hand, and 41 percent didn’t have more than $400 in savings.  
In many ways, Amelia and Rachel are privileged in the single world. Both have managed to buy their own homes — even if, in Rachel’s case, it also meant mortgaging some of her retirement. For many of the hundreds of people I heard from during my reporting, cobbling together enough for a down payment, let alone qualifying for a mortgage on a single income, feels impossible. Same, too, for having kids on one’s own or going through the process to adopt. 
Caitlin, who’s 33 and lives in the Washington, DC, area, is asexual and aromantic and is not looking to be partnered. She could get a roommate, which might help with some monthly bills, but between DC’s high cost of living and the student loans she’s only recently been able to get below six figures, it would still take her years to save up enough for a down payment. As she put it, “not being able to save much, or even just depending on the savings of one person, means that homebuying and having kids are just a fantasy.” And that’s on a pre-tax salary of around $100,000 a year. 
Caroline, who’s 46, lives in Vermont and has been in a relationship with someone for 10 years. A number of factors, including logistics and jobs and divorces, have meant that they’ve never been able to live together, and she’s not sure that she’d want to. Yet “life is so freaking expensive,” she said. “With two people contributing, perhaps you could actually take a vacation. I could probably pay for things like haircuts, or new clothes, without going into debt. And, of course, the finances are only half of the story: There’s also the cost of time and energy. Whether it’s time spent on the phone to find someone to fix the roof, the energy it takes to plan a college tour for my kid, or the stress of the heating bill, having someone to share that with would be nearly invaluable.” 
These issues aren’t just about personal attitudes: American society is structurally antagonistic toward single and solo-living people. Some of this isn’t deliberate, as households cost a baseline amount of money to maintain, and that amount is lessened when the burden is shared by more than one person. There are other forms of antagonism, too, deeply embedded in the infrastructure of everyday life. Even as more couples than ever “cohabitate” without being married, so many of the structural privileges of partnership still revolve around the institution of marriage. (The US Census still conceives of the status of “single” as anyone who is not, at present, married.) 
First, there’s the tax code. Most people don’t realize that until 1948, everyone filed income taxes alone, regardless of marital status. The policy changed in the hopes of discouraging “income shifting,” in which, say, a husband who was making $100,000 would transfer $50,000 of that money to their wife, ensuring that both of them were taxed at a lower rate. (This period was also, it should be noted, when the income tax rate for top earners was between 80 and 90 percent.) “Joint” filing was created as a means of replacing income shifting with income splitting. 
The scenario was pretty great for married people, particularly married people with one income. For single people? Less great. As legal scholar Anne L. Alstott argues in “Updating the Welfare State: Marriage, the Income Tax, and Social Security in the Age of Individualism,” the vast majority of adults at the time were either married or planning to get married. (The median age of first marriage in 1950: 23 for men, 20 for women, with 78 percent of adults married, and many of the unmarried widowed.) Who would protest? 
By the end of the 1960s, that foundational assumption of the tax code began to falter. Divorce rates were slowly climbing, and more and more women were entering the workforce. Congress decided to modify the tax brackets so that joint filers wouldn’t have quite as large a tax benefit. That modification created its own problem: the so-called “marriage penalty” for couples where both spouses were working for pay outside the home, which often pushed them into a higher tax bracket than if they were filing as single people. 
The marriage penalty has faded in recent years, particularly after the 2017 Republican tax cuts that targeted high incomes. But the singles penalty remains — the tax code is still written to benefit people in 1950s middle-class marriages who own their homes. That’s not great for the millions of households who are shouldering other cost burdens around single life. 
Progressive tax codes are intended, at least theoretically, to ensure equitable distribution of the costs of maintaining civilization. They should (again, theoretically) be readjusted when a certain group begins to shoulder a disproportionate amount of that burden — like, for instance, single or divorced people. That’s not what’s happened, not for couples with two earners and not for the growing number of single or solo households. The reality of how people live and who works has changed. The policy has not kept pace.
The same principle holds true for Social Security, which was created first and foremost as a means of protecting the elderly from living out their final years in the literal poorhouse. The idea was simple: You and your employers pay in part of your salary now, and when you retire, you have enough to survive. 
The architects of the program were aware that it would only work if you also created a means for women who never worked for pay (housewives), those whose paid work was ineligible for Social Security (domestic workers), and those whose work was intermittent and always paid less than men’s to have access to their husband’s benefits, either as partners in retirement or in case of death or disability. They needed a system that acknowledged the patriarchal formation both of the home and of paid work. So they offered women who reached Social Security age a choice: You can claim your own benefits, which are probably paltry or nonexistent; you can claim a “half” benefit as a spouse; or, if your husband dies, you can claim full “survivor’s” benefits. 
But what happened to divorced women? Initially, if you’d been married for 20 years before divorcing, you could still claim that half benefit. When more and more people started getting divorced, Congress reduced the minimum marriage length to 10 years. That was a useful corrective, but it still limits the “better” benefit — that is, the ability to access a man’s benefit, which, given the enduring wage gap, is almost always higher — to people who are men, or who are or were married to men for a significant period. 
Between 1990 and 2009, for example, the number of women who reached retirement age without claim to a man’s benefits increased from 7.5 percent to 16.2 percent; for Black women, it went from 13.4 percent to 33.9 percent. To be clear, most of these women did have benefits of their own, but the pay gap and the fact that women are far more likely to work in “feminized” fields with lower pay mean they almost certainly received less than a man in their demographic would have. In 2019, the average overall benefit for a retired man was $1,671 a month, compared to $1,337 for a woman. A divorced woman’s benefit would likely still be larger than the half benefit she’d receive from her ex-husband, but a widowed woman’s whole “survivor” benefit would presumably be higher than her own, especially if she took any time out of the workforce to care for children or elders. 
All of this is complicated and something that most people don’t think about until they start to near retirement age (or their parents do). It matters because it again underlines the structure of American life that’s prioritized and favored. It’s not that Social Security necessarily penalizes people who are single. In fact, it has been modified several times to account for the newly single. The problem, then, is that it’s still organized around the understanding that American women will get and stay married to a man at some point in their lives, even as that understanding has ceased to hold true for millions. 
As Suzanne Kahn notes in  Divorce, American Style: Fighting for Women’s Economic Citizenship in the Neoliberal Era , other public safety net programs — and private ones intended to supplement them — were built in the same model. Pensions, health insurance benefits, IRAs: All of them are organized to best accommodate the needs of married (or widowed) family units. If you’re married, you can be added to a spouse’s insurance policy, which allows spouses to drop in and out of the workforce as needed or seek out jobs that don’t provide full-time insurance. Single people, particularly single people with chronic health conditions, have fewer options, even after the rollout of Obamacare. (In many states, the available options on the marketplace exchange can be prohibitively expensive and need fixing.)  
Then there’s the sheer amount of benefits conferred by many workplaces to people who have children. Parental leave is fantastic. We should have more of it. But there should also be forms of leave, caregiving or not, for people who choose not to have children. The Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) allows many workers unpaid time off to recover from a serious illness or care for a family member, but it does not allow people to take time off to care for someone who is not legally family. (Paid family and sick leave protections have gone in and out of the Build Back Better social spending legislation that’s moving through Congress; the current proposal would expand leave to include family by “blood or affinity.”) 
These policies and programs were created to decrease suffering, to lessen the effects of catastrophe (or pandemic), to protect people from descending into poverty. Yet in too many cases, they are built in a way that suggests that single or solo-living people are expected to be, provide, or pay for their own safety nets. 
Back in 2013, Lisa Arnold and Christina Campbell persuasively laid out the high costs of being single in the Atlantic. Using various calculations based on housing, health care, taxes, and Social Security income, they estimated that an unmarried woman, making around $40,000 in 2010, could pay almost $500,000 more over her lifetime than a married woman. An unmarried woman making $80,000 could pay more than $1 million. That’s a very expensive life choice. 
If those numbers are hard to believe, a chart of the wage and salary income of married versus unmarried men and women might be useful in showing another big gap.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Christina Animashaun/Vox
 
 
 
Do married men earn more because they’re married? Or do people who earn more get married more often? That’s a difficult question, but it’s worthwhile to parse who, exactly, is getting married and staying that way. As I wrote in October, there’s a popular conception that the divorce rate is actually decreasing (from a high of 22.6 percent in 1980 to 14.9 percent today). 
While this statistic is true in the aggregate, it obscures significant trends, particularly with education levels. (Among other factors: Same-sex marriage has not been legal long enough to directly compare broader trends.) A 2015 Pew report estimated that women with a bachelor’s degree have a 78 percent chance of their marriage lasting 20 years or longer; for women with some college, the number drops to 48 percent, and 40 percent for women who’ve completed high school or less.  
While divorce trends have decreased for people with a college degree, they decreased, leveled off, and then began rising again in the 1990s for people without one. The more education you have, the more likely you are to make more money; the more money you make, the more likely you are to be able to patch over some of the potholes that can doom a marriage. In 2015, 25 percent of low-income adults between the ages of 18 and 55 were married, compared with 39 percent of lower-middle-class adults and 56 percent of families making above median income.
And then there are the thousands of people who would like to be married but can’t afford to be because additional income from a spouse would result in taking away the disability, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or child support benefits that make life sustainable. For them, marriage might be financially stabilizing down the line but not stabilizing enough to make up for the loss of other safety nets in the short term. 
Marriage is stabilizing, then, but largely for people who are already stable or on the route to it. It’s become a tool of class reproduction, benefiting those who’ve always benefited within the American class hierarchy: financially stable white men and the women married to them.
The current situation is an example of economist Jacob Hacker’s theory of “policy drift,” in which situations that policy was created to serve have changed significantly but the policy itself has failed to adapt, expand, or respond to that new reality. Alstott, the legal scholar, describes this gap as one between “legal fiction” and “social reality”: one that “undermines the ability of the tax-and-transfer system to achieve any of a range of objectives, whether fostering individual freedom, aiding the poor, or shoring up the traditional family.” Put differently, our designs no longer do what they were intended to do.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The refusal to build a real safety net for people who aren’t partnered means that some people may feel pressure to do anything to be and stay partnered, even if it means enduring psychological or physical abuse. It also means that single people deal with all the same things that anyone without a safety net deals with: They often stay in bad jobs, they take fewer entrepreneurial risks, they’re less likely to follow opportunities that people with a spousal safety net could. They simply don’t have the stability that makes it not just possible but also conceivable to do so much else. It seems clear, if we want to actually support “liberty” or lift people out of poverty, or even make it easier for people to have traditional (or nontraditional!) families, then we need to reconsider the way we organize tax policy and public benefits.
Some single people love being single; some are fairly ambivalent about it; others despise it. None of those postures are made easier when your way of life is implicitly and explicitly understood as a sort of cultural and financial backwater, to be avoided at all costs. If we want to start thinking about how to make it easier for single people to find financial stability, we have to start to understand single life as something that’s not just thinkable, not just survivable, but actually desirable. 
Right now, that idea is too threatening to the institution of marriage and, by extension, a pillar of the United States as we know it. The integrity of that pillar has been crumbling for years, as marriage, even with its myriad financial and cultural benefits, has ceased to prove its worth. Today, people want options for partnership that are more flexible and more like actual partnerships. You can cultivate that within a marriage, sure, but it, perhaps ironically, often takes more work than trying to figure out your own rules outside one. 
Some people crave something more than what marriage can provide. They wonder: What would it look like to create small systems of care for one another that go beyond one other individual? What if we could figure out how to acknowledge that the most important person in our lives isn’t always someone bound to us by family or sexual relationship? How can we think about housing, health care, caregiving, and work in ways that actually acknowledge and actively include single and solo-living people — not as afterthoughts but as the third, if not more, of the population that they are? 
There’s a whole lot that straight white single people today can learn from past and present work in queer communities, the Black Power movement, and immigrant communities — where members have long formed systems of mutual aid, many of whom were forced to come up with these systems because the existing legal and religious systems excluded them from participation. There’s also a lot to learn from other countries where single populations thrive. Denmark, for example, has offered three cycles of IVF to residents up to the age of 40 since 2007, leading to a sharp increase in “solomor” or elective single mothers. 
That policy interlocks with a safety net that makes other parts of single parenting life easier: significant maternity leave, affordable and accessible day care, and universal health care. More stability means fewer of the behavioral and educational problems associated with kids who grow up in single-parent homes, the vast majority of which can be traced back not to the fact that they only had one parent but that the one parent’s finances were unstable, because of either a divorce or an unplanned pregnancy. Giving single people access to parenthood — and, just as importantly, the assurance of support once it happens, for whatever reason — could dramatically change the experience of single parenting. 
Denmark isn’t perfect, and I’m always wary of holding up Scandinavian policy, simply because the paradigm shift necessary to bring the United States closer to that reality can often feel altogether out of reach. But it’s still worth thinking about what makes Denmark less hostile to single people generally. Part of it is a real feeling of community support: 95 percent of Danes feel that they could rely on someone in a time of need. But that’s also true for 91 percent of Americans. So part of it is a safety net that readily expands and contracts for all — not just the middle class, not just those in poverty, not just people who can and want to work full time, not just nondisabled or gender-conforming or straight people or partnered people, but all people, simply because they are people. 
“Marriage today is no longer the primary and normal state for adult Americans,” Alstott explains in a 2013 paper for the Yale Review. “It is no longer the expected route to maturity or the exclusive site for sex, romance, and child-rearing.” It has been, in sociologists’ terms, “deinstitutionalized.” When a society fails to make policy adaptive to its new institutions — its new ways of life — it puts our fingers on the scales to favor a certain class of people. We can say we cherish single people and their contributions to society. We can yell that they are no more or less worthy of success and stability. Until policy shifts to reflect that reality, those sentiments will remain hollow. 
People will continue to bemoan the erosion of the traditional family and the decline in the birthrate, because that is what people do when they feel the world is changing and they, personally, are not — maybe out of fear, but maybe, too, out of lack of imagination. We’re already a country full of people forging new institutions: of partnership, of care, of parenting. Imagine what we would look like, imagine the ways in which we’d thrive, if we decided to actually support them. 
 If you’d like to share with The Goods your experience as part of the hollow middle class, email    annehelenpetersen@vox.com    or fill out    this form   . 
 Correction, December 3, 2021, 11 am: An earlier version of this story misstated an estimation in a 2013 Atlantic article on costs for unmarried women. The story also misstated provisions of the Family and Medical Leave Act, which includes unpaid time off for individuals recovering from a serious illness.
 
 
 
 
 
 
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Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism
2021-12-02
William Cook
<div><div><p>In a pretty little town called Murnau, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, there is a pretty little house that changed the course of modern art. It was here, in 1911, that a group of German and Russian artists assembled the Blaue Reiter Almanac. This book of essays and illustrations became a manifesto for a new generation of artists, who painted not only what they saw but also what they felt. These Blaue Reiter artists revolutionised European art, and the men among them became famous, most notably Wassily Kandinsky. But the Blaue Reiter wasn’t just a group of male artists. It included several female artists too, most notably Gabriele Münter. Münter was a brilliant artist, just as good as Kandinsky. So why is she hardly known about outside her native Germany, while Kandinsky is renowned worldwide?</p><p>Münter was no bit-part player in the Blaue Reiter. She was a prolific painter, with an evocative, innovative style. However, she was also Kandinsky’s lover, and while Kandinsky became a household name, Münter has gone down in history as his girlfriend, rather than an artist in her own right. It’s an injustice many female artists have had to face, but for her it seems especially unfair. Münter was a major influence on Kandinsky, and on the other Blaue Reiter artists too. She helped to fund the Almanac. She owned the house where it all happened. Without her creative input, it’s quite possible the Blaue Reiter never would have got off the ground, and the history of modern art would have taken an entirely different course.</p><figure><figcaption><p>Kandinsky painting landscapes: Münter, 1903</p><p> (VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020)</p></figcaption></figure></div>||||I|||| Jump to content

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 Independent PremiumLong Reads

 The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 She was a prolific painter with an evocative style. She was also Kandinsky’s lover, and has been relegated in history to simply being his girlfriend. William Cook on the genius of Gabriele Munter

 Thursday 02 December 2021 21:30
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 Münter painting outdoors, at Kochel

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 I n a pretty little town called Murnau, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, there is a pretty little house that changed the course of modern art. It was here, in 1911, that a group of German and Russian artists assembled the Blaue Reiter Almanac. This book of essays and illustrations became a manifesto for a new generation of artists, who painted not only what they saw but also what they felt. These Blaue Reiter artists revolutionised European art, and the men among them became famous, most notably Wassily Kandinsky. But the Blaue Reiter wasn’t just a group of male artists. It included several female artists too, most notably Gabriele Münter. Münter was a brilliant artist, just as good as Kandinsky. So why is she hardly known about outside her native Germany, while Kandinsky is renowned worldwide?

 Münter was no bit-part player in the Blaue Reiter. She was a prolific painter, with an evocative, innovative style. However, she was also Kandinsky’s lover, and while Kandinsky became a household name, Münter has gone down in history as his girlfriend, rather than an artist in her own right. It’s an injustice many female artists have had to face, but for her it seems especially unfair. Münter was a major influence on Kandinsky, and on the other Blaue Reiter artists too. She helped to fund the Almanac. She owned the house where it all happened. Without her creative input, it’s quite possible the Blaue Reiter never would have got off the ground, and the history of modern art would have taken an entirely different course.

 Kandinsky painting landscapes: Münter, 1903

 (VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020)

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 1 / 11 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Kandinsky painting landscapes: Münter, 1903

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 View from the window in Sevres: Münter, 1906

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Münter and Kandinsky at the Murnau house, 1910

 Johannes Eichner Foundation/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Gasse in Tunis: Münter, 1905

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Blossom in Lana: Münter, 1908

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Geschwister Wallin Stockholm: Münter, 1916

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Münter with her bicycle on a field path near Krachenhausen, Kallmunz, in the summer of 1903, taken by Kandinsky

 Wassily Kandinsky

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Münter’s house in Murnau

 Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Miss Ellen im Gras: Münter, 1934

 VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2019

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Münter’s room in Murnau, with a bedside table painted by Kandinsky. The paintings are by Münter

 Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and Kunstbau Munich

 Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism

 Münter painting outdoors, at Kochel

 Unknown

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In a pretty little town called Murnau, in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, there is a pretty little house that changed the course of modern art. It was here, in 1911, that a group of German and Russian artists assembled the Blaue Reiter Almanac. This book of essays and illustrations became a manifesto for a new generation of artists, who painted not only what they saw but also what they felt. These Blaue Reiter artists revolutionised European art, and the men among them became famous, most notably Wassily Kandinsky. But the Blaue Reiter wasn’t just a group of male artists. It included several female artists too, most notably Gabriele Münter. Münter was a brilliant artist, just as good as Kandinsky. So why is she hardly known about outside her native Germany, while Kandinsky is renowned worldwide? Münter was no bit-part player in the Blaue Reiter. She was a prolific painter, with an evocative, innovative style. However, she was also Kandinsky’s lover, and while Kandinsky became a household name, Münter has gone down in history as his girlfriend, rather than an artist in her own right. It’s an injustice many female artists have had to face, but for her it seems especially unfair. Münter was a major influence on Kandinsky, and on the other Blaue Reiter artists too. She helped to fund the Almanac. She owned the house where it all happened. Without her creative input, it’s quite possible the Blaue Reiter never would have got off the ground, and the history of modern art would have taken an entirely different course.   Kandinsky painting landscapes: Münter, 1903  (VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020)
Gabriele Munter: The forgotten woman of German expressionism
https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/long-reads/gabriele-munter-german-expressionism-kandinsky-b1954137.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/
The Bad Guys Are Winning
2021-11-15
Anne Applebaum
<div><article><header><div><div><figure><div></div><figcaption>Illustration by Oliver Munday*</figcaption></figure></div><div><p>If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.</p><div><address>By <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/author/anne-applebaum/">Anne Applebaum</a><p>Illustrations by Michael Houtz</p></address></div></div></div></header><section><figure></figure><p>The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.</p><p>I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she <a href="https://apnews.com/article/international-news-ap-top-news-europe-72e43a8b9e4c56362d4c1d6393bd54fb">probably won</a> the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.</p><section><figure><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2021/12/"></a></figure><div><h2>Explore the December 2021 Issue</h2><p>Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.</p></div><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2021/12/">View More</a></section><p>Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.</p><p>Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.</p><p>“At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.</p><p>Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/09/belarus-protests-women/616288/">Read: When women lead protest movements</a></p><p>Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/07/20/in-belarus-3-women-unite-to-fight-strongman-lukashenko-a70925">photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya</a>, her campaign became something more: <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/09/belarus-protests-women/616288/">a campaign about ordinary women</a>—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/09/yet-another-opposition-leader-targeted-in-belarus/">targeted</a> all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.</p><p>On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/after-a-rigged-election-belarus-crushes-protests-amid-an-information-blackout">The internet was cut off</a>, and Tsikhanouskaya was <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya-is-overcoming-her-fears">detained by police</a> and then forced out of the country. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2020/08/photos-anger-and-protest-over-presidential-election-belarus/615451/">Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus</a>. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/22-year-old-blogger-behind-protests-belarus/615526/">run by young people</a>, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/17/world/europe/belarus-crackdown-protests-minsk.html">with real brutality</a>. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/outraged-police-throw-away-uniforms-after-belarus-crackdown-rjjjnl3ds?region%3Dglobal&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1636487243529000&amp;usg=AOvVaw08X4PO2nk4zqwwZx8elJh0">threw them in the garbage</a>.</p><p>Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.</p><p>At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belarus-election-russia-airplane/russian-government-plane-makes-quick-flight-to-belarus-and-back-tracking-data-idUSKCN25F0SQ">flew from Moscow to Minsk</a>. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/9/18/how-russian-media-is-trying-to-save-lukashenkos-belarus">replace the Belarusian journalists</a> who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have <a href="https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2020/12/18/russian-national-guard-to-partner-with-belarus-police-amid-protests-a72408">supplemented their Belarusian colleagues</a>, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.</p><p>The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/belarus-eu-sanctions-help-russia-lukashenka-potash-tobacco/31327255.html">offered markets for Belarusian products</a> that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, <a href="https://www.dw.com/en/how-russian-money-keeps-belarus-afloat/a-58680063">smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union</a>. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile.</p><p>Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same?</p><p>Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that <a href="https://prisoners.spring96.org/en">more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail</a>—but torture. <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-belarus-election-un/u-n-experts-alarmed-over-reports-of-torture-mistreatment-of-detainees-in-belarus-idUSKBN25S5PB">Not just torture but rape</a>. Not just torture and rape <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/08/world/kolesnikova-belarus-opposition-detention-intl/index.html">but kidnapping</a> and, quite possibly, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/15/belarus-thousands-protest-against-death-of-teacher-in-police-custody">murder</a>.</p><p>Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/02/europe/belarus-lukashenko-interview/index.html">stony-faced denials</a> of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/belarus-lukashenko-hijack-plane-precedent-dictators/618971/">could be arrested</a>; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/world/europe/belarus-activist-dead-kyiv.html">hanged in a Kyiv park</a>. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/poland-belarus-eu-border-migrants-refugees-caught-in-middle-and-dying/">forcing streams of refugees across their borders</a>: Belarus <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/08/29/1032169510/this-tourist-trap-is-sending-unwitting-iraqis-to-detention-centers-in-the-eu">lured</a> Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/belarus-forces-migrants-into-eu-at-gunpoint-xgqr0v37x">forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally</a>.</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/11/belarus-eu-poland-migrants-refugees-border/620700/">Anne Applebaum: A dictator is exploiting these human beings</a></p><p>Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/belarus-ryanair-hijacking/619028/">laws regarding air traffic control</a>, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not.</p><p>So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: <i>I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells</i>. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/05/sviatlana-tsikhanouskaya-belarus-flight-hijacking/618995/">What she wants is sanctions</a>, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out.</p><p>To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/08/09/1026117240/u-s-imposes-sanctions-on-allies-of-belarus-authoritarian-leader">broadened American sanctions on Belarus</a> to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?”</p><p>Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like <a href="https://www.rferl.org/a/the-73-year-old-great-grandmother-detained-at-belarus-protest/30849987.html">Nina Bahinskaya</a>, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_belarus-sends-reporter-prison-over-deleted-chat-messages/6209106.html">Siarhei Hardziyevich</a>, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections.</p><p>Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause.</p><p>But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.</p><div><figure><figcaption>Michael Houtz</figcaption></figure></div><p>All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.</p><p>But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/trump-fraud-stop-steal-copycats/619226/">the same messages about the weakness of democracy</a> and the evil of America.</p><p>This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.</p><p>Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs.</p><p>In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/26/nyregion/venezuela-president-drug-trafficking-nicolas-maduro.html">international narcotics trade</a> keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a3dc76c4-d86a-4d20-8dc4-d5f97dd34d2d">has observed</a> that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”</p><p>Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/revolt-in-venezuela-11548289111">persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest</a>. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity.</p><p>The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1960/10/13/archives/khrushchev-bangs-his-shoe-on-desk-khrushchev-adds-shoewaving-to-his.html">brandished his shoe</a> at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”</p><p>Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy  Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/alexei-navalny-showing-russians-what-courage/618666/">arrested earlier this year</a>, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/press-release/2021/05/statement-on-alexei-navalnys-status-as-prisoner-of-conscience/">they restored it</a>. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement.</p><p>Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/russia-duma-election-putin-fraud-claims/2021/09/19/a2d942ae-165c-11ec-a019-cb193b28aa73_story.html">elections</a>” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/no-one-saving-myanmar/618658/">murdered hundreds of protesters</a>, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong.</p><p>At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/2aad0b12-7449-4a79-9706-961098312bcf">told the<i> Financial Times</i></a>, “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge.</p><p>The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.</p><p>How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.</p><div><figure><figcaption>Michael Houtz</figcaption></figure></div><p>If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams.</p><p>A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke.</p><p>Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/07/china-xinjiang-one-child-birth-control/614014/">strict rules</a> limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.</p><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/the-uyghur-chronicles/">Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps</a></p><p>That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe.</p><p>Tursun showed me <a href="https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/uyghur-women-fighting-china-surveillance/">the video of her daughter</a>. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck.</p><p>Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story.</p><p>Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “<a href="https://supchina.com/2020/07/01/the-imprisonment-of-the-model-villagers/">preparing to commit terrorist activities</a>.”</p><p>A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. <i>Prove it</i>, they responded, then added: <i>Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer</i>. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to <a href="https://twitter.com/CevlanJevlan">speak out on social media</a> instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me.</p><p>Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/04/uyghur-women-china-xinjiang/618531/">there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there</a>. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed.</p><p>Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children <a href="https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-03-24/uyghur-mothers-turkey-walk-miles-ask-politicians-help-locating-their-children&amp;sa=D&amp;source=docs&amp;ust=1636489011303000&amp;usg=AOvVaw11SqAPkmIMEtbtlJap5kox">staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara</a>, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YG1GeGaZ0g">she told the audience</a>. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it.</p><p>In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “<a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-turkey-china-sb/turkish-leader-calls-xinjiang-killings-genocide-idUSTRE56957D20090710">genocide</a>.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize.</p><p>Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/07/how-erdogan-made-turkey-authoritarian-again/492374/">turned against the rule of law</a>, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published <a href="https://twitter.com/SelimKoru/status/1410591011802214417?s=20">a long, solemn article</a>—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too.</p><p>In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/21/world/asia/xinjiang-turkey-china-muslims-fear.html">on bogus terrorism charges</a>, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was <a href="https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_turkish-opposition-challenge-erdogan-over-uighur-silence/6201354.html">cut</a> from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek <a href="https://www.indyturk.com/node/308491/haber/i%CC%87yi%CC%87-parti-grubunda-konu%C5%9Ftuktan-sonra-perin%C3%A7ekin-hedef-ald%C4%B1%C4%9F%C4%B1-nursiman%C4%B1n-6">described her as a “terrorist” on television</a>, a wave of online attacks followed.</p><p>The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere.</p><p>For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, <a href="https://www.cfr.org/blog/turkeys-elections-partially-free-fair-and-fake">even skewed ones</a>, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “<a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/7/2/pakistan-imran-khan-china-uighurs">we accept the Chinese version</a>” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.</p><div><figure><figcaption>Michael Houtz</figcaption></figure></div><p>And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. <i>We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.</i></p><p>A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/11/us/politics/trump-russia-email-clinton.html">wrote</a> to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.</p><p>Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/07/chinas-influence-efforts-germany-students/593689/">The United Front</a> is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “<a href="https://docs.house.gov/meetings/IG/IG00/20190516/109462/HHRG-116-IG00-Wstate-MattisP-20190516.pdf">This is not Australia</a>,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. <i>We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.</i></p><p>Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who <a href="https://www.foxnews.com/politics/doj-fbi-indictment-chinese-operatives">try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home</a>. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.</p><p>Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to <i>The New York Times</i>, the consulting giant at the time of that event <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/15/world/asia/mckinsey-china-russia.html">advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies</a>, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military.</p><p>But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:</p><div><blockquote>It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.</blockquote></div><p>The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, <a href="http://www.asapsports.com/show_conference.php?id=154382">expressed remorse</a> to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was <i>Qazaq: History of the Golden Man</i>, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/_fXpeQr8Ul/?utm_medium=copy_link">two</a> <a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/_feXhmL8TP/?utm_medium=copy_link">photos</a> of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!”</p><p>If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors?</p><p>If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “<a href="https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege">Democracy Under Siege</a>.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date.</p><p>The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/when-sanctions-go-too-far/566771/">do not have the impact they once did</a>. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them.</p><p>America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/01/27/959661875/firings-foosball-and-a-conspiracy-theory-trumpism-at-voice-of-america">still inexplicable attempt to destroy them</a>, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world.</p><p>Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies.</p><p>President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/11/what-biden-presidency-means-belarus/617083/">reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it</a>. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.”</p><p>That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy.</p><p>The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.</p><p>This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/01/donald-trump-theresa-may-angela-merkel-setbacks">losers</a>” and the Canadian prime minister as <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/09/world/americas/donald-trump-g7-nafta.html">“dishonest” and “weak,”</a> while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev <a href="https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/2020/09/15/trumps-sale-palm-beach-mansion-gains-scrutiny-again/5798386002/">paid Trump $95 million</a>—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/13/donald-trumps-worst-deal">put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan</a>, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.</p><p>At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/03/world/asia/hong-kong-protesters-call-for-us-help-china-sees-a-conspiracy.html">the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags</a> believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.</p><p>Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.</p><hr /><p><small><em>*Source images (</em>left to right<em>): Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo / Getty; Andrea Verdelli / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty; TPG / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty</em></small></p><p><small><i>This article appears in the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/2021/12/">December 2021</a> print edition with the headline “The Autocrats Are Winning.”</i></small></p></section></article>||||I|||| Skip to content

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 December 2021 Issue
 Explore
 The autocrats are winning, the antiquities cop, death comes to the boxing ring, and France’s God complex. Plus the end of trust, the advertising singularity, BBQ chips, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, Mozart and forgiveness, new fiction by hurmat kazmi, and more. View Magazine
 * The Bad Guys Are Winning
 Anne Applebaum
 * The Tomb Raiders of the Upper East Side
 Ariel Sabar
 * Can a Boxer Return to the Ring After Killing?
 Jacob Stern
 * Why Is France So Afraid of God?
 Rachel Donadio
 * The Armpits of White Boys
 hurmat kazmi
 * The Singularity Is Here
 Ayad Akhtar

 Illustration by Oliver Munday*

 Ideas

 The Bad Guys Are Winning

 If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.

 By Anne Applebaum
 Illustrations by Michael Houtz
 November 15, 2021
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 T he future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town.

 I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.

 Explore the December 2021 Issue

 Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.

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 Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park.

 Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News ” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus.

 “At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him.

 Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”

 Read: When women lead protest movements

 Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning.

 Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others.

 On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. The internet was cut off, and Tsikhanouskaya was detained by police and then forced out of the country. Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project run by young people, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, with real brutality. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or threw them in the garbage.

 Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan.

 At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change.

 The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies offered markets for Belarusian products that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile.

 Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same?

 Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder.

 Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally.

 Anne Applebaum: A dictator is exploiting these human beings

 Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not.

 So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells. What she wants is sanctions, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out.

 To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently broadened American sanctions on Belarus to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?”

 Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like Nina Bahinskaya, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like Siarhei Hardziyevich, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections.

 Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause.

 But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.

 Michael Houtz

 All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.

 But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

 This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines.

 Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs.

 In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.”

 Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity.

 How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along.

 The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.”

 Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement.

 Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “elections” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong.

 At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region told the Financial Times, “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge.

 The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else.

 How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.

 Michael Houtz

 If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams.

 A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke.

 Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are strict rules limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.

 Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps

 That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe.

 Tursun showed me the video of her daughter. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck.

 Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story.

 Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “preparing to commit terrorist activities.”

 A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. Prove it, they responded, then added: Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to speak out on social media instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me.

 Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed.

 Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” she told the audience. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it.

 In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “genocide.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize.

 Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself turned against the rule of law, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published a long, solemn article—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too.

 In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs on bogus terrorism charges, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was cut from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek described her as a “terrorist” on television, a wave of online attacks followed.

 The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere.

 For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “we accept the Chinese version” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.

 Michael Houtz

 And how different are we ? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

 A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies.

 The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to autocratic regimes is very long.

 Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. The United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “This is not Australia,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.

 Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.

 Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military.

 But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:

 It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.

 The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, expressed remorse to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted two photos of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!”

 If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors?

 If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date.

 The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them.

 The centrality of democracy in American foreign policy has been declining for many years.

 America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world.

 Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies.

 President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.”

 That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy.

 The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem.

 This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America.

 At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s.

 Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.

 *Source images (left to right): Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo / Getty; Andrea Verdelli / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty; TPG / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty

 This article appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Autocrats Are Winning.”

Illustration by Oliver Munday*    If the 20th century was the story of slow, uneven progress toward the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse.  By Anne Applebaum Illustrations by Michael Houtz         The future of democracy may well be decided in a drab office building on the outskirts of Vilnius, alongside a highway crammed with impatient drivers heading out of town. I met Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya there this spring, in a room that held a conference table, a whiteboard, and not much else. Her team—more than a dozen young journalists, bloggers, vloggers, and activists—was in the process of changing offices. But that wasn’t the only reason the space felt stale and perfunctory. None of them, especially not Tsikhanouskaya, really wanted to be in this ugly building, or in the Lithuanian capital at all. She is there because she probably won the 2020 presidential election in Belarus, and because the Belarusian dictator she probably defeated, Alexander Lukashenko, forced her out of the country immediately afterward. Lithuania offered her asylum. Her husband, Siarhei Tsikhanouski, remains imprisoned in Belarus.       Explore the December 2021 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.  View More  Here is the first thing she said to me: “My story is a little bit different from other people.” This is what she tells everyone—that hers was not the typical life of a dissident or budding politician. Before the spring of 2020, she didn’t have much time for television or newspapers. She has two children, one of whom was born deaf. On an ordinary day, she would take them to kindergarten, to the doctor, to the park. Then her husband bought a house and ran into the concrete wall of Belarusian bureaucracy and corruption. Exasperated, he started making videos about his experiences, and those of others. These videos yielded a YouTube channel; the channel attracted thousands of followers. He went around the country, recording the frustrations of his fellow citizens, driving a car with the phrase “Real News” plastered on the side. Siarhei Tsikhanouski held up a mirror to his society. People saw themselves in that mirror and responded with the kind of enthusiasm that opposition politicians had found hard to create in Belarus. “At the beginning it was really difficult because people were afraid,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya told me. “But step-by-step, slowly, they realized that Siarhei isn’t afraid.” He wasn’t afraid to speak the truth as he saw it; his absence of fear inspired others. He decided to run for president. The regime, recognizing the power of Siarhei’s mirror, would not allow him to register his candidacy, just as it had not allowed him to register the ownership of his house. It ended his campaign and arrested him. Tsikhanouskaya ran in his place, with no motive other than “to show my love for him.” The police and bureaucrats let her. Because what harm could she do, this simple housewife, this woman with no political experience? And so, in July 2020, she registered as a candidate. Unlike her husband, she was afraid. She woke up “so scared” every morning, she told me, and sometimes she stayed scared all day long. But she kept going. Which was, though she doesn’t say so, incredibly brave. “You feel this responsibility, you wake up with this pain for those people who are in jail, you go to bed with the same feeling.”  Read: When women lead protest movements  Unexpectedly, Tsikhanouskaya was a success—not despite her inexperience, but because of it. Her campaign became a campaign about ordinary people standing up to the regime. Two other prominent opposition politicians endorsed her after their own campaigns were blocked, and when the wife of one of them and the female campaign manager of the other were photographed alongside Tsikhanouskaya, her campaign became something more: a campaign about ordinary women—women who had been neglected, women who had no voice, even just women who loved their husbands. In return, the regime targeted all three of these women. Tsikhanouskaya received an anonymous threat: Her children would be “sent to an orphanage.” She dispatched them with her mother abroad, to Vilnius, and kept campaigning. On August 9, election officials announced that Lukashenko had won 80 percent of the vote, a number nobody believed. The internet was cut off, and Tsikhanouskaya was detained by police and then forced out of the country. Mass demonstrations unfolded across Belarus. These were both a spontaneous outburst of feeling—a popular response to the stolen election—and a carefully coordinated project run by young people, some based in Warsaw, who had been experimenting with social media and new forms of communication for several years. For a brief, tantalizing moment, it looked like this democratic uprising might prevail. Belarusians shared a sense of national unity they had never felt before. The regime immediately pushed back, with real brutality. Yet the mood at the protests was generally happy, optimistic; people literally danced in the streets. In a country of fewer than 10 million, up to 1.5 million people would come out in a single day, among them pensioners, villagers, factory workers, and even, in a few places, members of the police and the security services, some of whom removed insignia from their uniforms or threw them in the garbage. Tsikhanouskaya says she and many others naively believed that under this pressure, the dictator would just give up. “We thought he would understand that we are against him,” she told me. “That people don’t want to live under his dictatorship, that he lost the elections.” They had no other plan. At first, Lukashenko seemed to have no plan either. But his neighbors did. On August 18, a plane belonging to the FSB, the Russian security services, flew from Moscow to Minsk. Soon after that, Lukashenko’s tactics underwent a dramatic change. Stephen Biegun, who was the U.S. deputy secretary of state at the time, describes the change as a shift to “more sophisticated, more controlled ways to repress the population.” Belarus became a textbook example of what the journalist William J. Dobson has called “the dictator’s learning curve”: Techniques that had been used successfully in the past to repress crowds in Russia were seamlessly transferred to Belarus, along with personnel who understood how to deploy them. Russian television journalists arrived to replace the Belarusian journalists who had gone on strike, and immediately stepped up the campaign to portray the demonstrations as the work of Americans and other foreign “enemies.” Russian police appear to have supplemented their Belarusian colleagues, or at least given them advice, and a policy of selective arrests began. As Vladimir Putin figured out a long time ago, mass arrests are unnecessary if you can jail, torture, or possibly murder just a few key people. The rest will be frightened into staying home. Eventually they will become apathetic, because they believe nothing can change. The Lukashenko rescue package, reminiscent of the one Putin had designed for Bashar al-Assad in Syria six years earlier, contained economic elements too. Russian companies offered markets for Belarusian products that had been banned by the democratic West—for example, smuggling Belarusian cigarettes into the European Union. Some of this was possible because the two countries share a language. (Though roughly a third to half of the country speaks Belarusian, most public business in Belarus is conducted in Russian.) But this close cooperation was also possible because Lukashenko and Putin, though they famously dislike each other, share a common way of seeing the world. Both believe that their personal survival is more important than the well-being of their people. Both believe that a change of regime would result in their death, imprisonment, or exile. Both also learned lessons from the Arab Spring, as well as from the more distant memory of 1989, when Communist dictatorships fell like dominoes: Democratic revolutions are contagious. If you can stamp them out in one country, you might prevent them from starting in others. The anti-corruption, prodemocracy demonstrations of 2014 in Ukraine, which resulted in the overthrow of President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, reinforced this fear of democratic contagion. Putin was enraged by those protests, not least because of the precedent they set. After all, if Ukrainians could get rid of their corrupt dictator, why wouldn’t Russians want to do the same? Lukashenko gladly accepted Russian help, turned against his people, and transformed himself from an autocratic, patriarchal grandfather—a kind of national collective-farm boss—into a tyrant who revels in cruelty. Reassured by Putin’s support, he began breaking new ground. Not just selective arrests—a year later, human-rights activists say that more than 800 political prisoners remain in jail—but torture. Not just torture but rape. Not just torture and rape but kidnapping and, quite possibly, murder. Lukashenko’s sneering defiance of the rule of law—he issues stony-faced denials of the existence of political repression in his country—and of anything resembling decency spread beyond his borders. In May 2021, Belarusian air traffic control forced an Irish-owned Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk so that one of the passengers, Roman Protasevich, a young dissident living in exile, could be arrested; he later made public confessions on television that appeared to be coerced. In August, another young dissident living in exile, Vitaly Shishov, was found hanged in a Kyiv park. At about the same time, Lukashenko’s regime set out to destabilize its EU neighbors by forcing streams of refugees across their borders: Belarus lured Afghan and Iraqi refugees to Minsk with a proffer of tourist visas, then escorted them to the borders of Lithuania, Latvia, and Poland and forced them at gunpoint to cross, illegally.  Anne Applebaum: A dictator is exploiting these human beings  Lukashenko began to act, in other words, as if he were untouchable, both at home and abroad. He began breaking not only the laws and customs of his own country, but also the laws and customs of other countries, and of the international community—laws regarding air traffic control, homicide, borders. Exiles flowed out of the country; Tsikhanouskaya’s team scrambled to book hotel rooms or Airbnbs in Vilnius, to find means of support, to learn new languages. Tsikhanouskaya herself had to make another, even more difficult transition—from people’s-choice candidate to sophisticated diplomat. This time her inexperience initially worked against her. At first, she thought that if she could just speak with Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron, one of them could fix the problem. “I was sure they are so powerful that they can call Lukashenko and say, ‘Stop! How dare you?’ ” she told me. But they could not. So she tried to talk as foreign leaders did, to speak in sophisticated political language. That didn’t work either. The experience was demoralizing: “It’s very difficult sometimes to talk about your people, about their sufferings, and see the emptiness in the eyes of those you are talking to.” She began using the plain English that she had learned in school, in order to convey plain things. “I started to tell stories that would touch their hearts. I tried to make them feel just a little of the pain that Belarusians feel.” Now she tells anyone who will listen exactly what she told me: I am an ordinary person, a housewife, a mother of two children, and I am in politics because other ordinary people are being beaten naked in prison cells. What she wants is sanctions, democratic unity, pressure on the regime—anything that will raise the cost for Lukashenko to stay in power, for Russia to keep him in power. Anything that might induce the business and security elites in Belarus to abandon him. Anything that might persuade China and Iran to keep out. To her surprise, Tsikhanouskaya became, for the second time, a runaway success. She charmed Merkel and Macron, and the diplomats of multiple countries. In July, she met President Joe Biden, who subsequently broadened American sanctions on Belarus to include major companies in several industries (tobacco, potash, construction) and their executives. The EU had already banned a range of people, companies, and technologies from Belarus; after the Ryanair kidnapping, the EU and the U.K. banned the Belarusian national airline as well. What was once a booming trade between Belarus and Europe has been reduced to a trickle. Tsikhanouskaya inspires people to make sacrifices of their own. The Lithuanian foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, told me that his country was proud to host her, even if it meant trouble on the border. “If we’re not free to invite other free people into our country because it’s somehow not safe, then the question is, can we consider ourselves free?” Tsikhanouskaya has acquired many other supporters and admirers. She has not only the talented young activists in Vilnius, but colleagues in Poland and Ukraine as well. She promotes values that unite millions of her compatriots, including pensioners like Nina Bahinskaya, a great-grandmother who has been filmed shouting at the police, and ordinary working people like Siarhei Hardziyevich, a 50-year-old journalist from a provincial town, Drahichyn, who was convicted of “insulting the president.” On her side she also has the friends and relatives of the hundreds of political prisoners who, like her own husband, are paying a high price just because they want to live in a country with free elections. Most of all, though, Tsikhanouskaya has on her side the combined narrative power of what we used to call the free world. She has the language of human rights, democracy, and justice. She has the NGOs and human-rights organizations that work inside the United Nations and other international institutions to put pressure on autocratic regimes. She has the support of people around the world who still fervently believe that politics can be made more civilized, more rational, more humane, who can see in her an authentic representative of that cause. But will that be enough? A lot depends on the answer.   Michael Houtz   All of us have in our minds a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups, surveillance), and professional propagandists. The members of these networks are connected not only within a given country, but among many countries. The corrupt, state-controlled companies in one dictatorship do business with corrupt, state-controlled companies in another. The police in one country can arm, equip, and train the police in another. The propagandists share resources—the troll farms that promote one dictator’s propaganda can also be used to promote the propaganda of another—and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America. This is not to say that there is some supersecret room where bad guys meet, as in a James Bond movie. Nor does the new autocratic alliance have a unifying ideology. Among modern autocrats are people who call themselves communists, nationalists, and theocrats. No one country leads this group. Washington likes to talk about Chinese influence, but what really bonds the members of this club is a common desire to preserve and enhance their personal power and wealth. Unlike military or political alliances from other times and places, the members of this group don’t operate like a bloc, but rather like an agglomeration of companies—call it Autocracy Inc. Their links are cemented not by ideals but by deals—deals designed to take the edge off Western economic boycotts, or to make them personally rich—which is why they can operate across geographical and historical lines. Thus in theory, Belarus is an international pariah—Belarusian planes cannot land in Europe, many Belarusian goods cannot be sold in the U.S., Belarus’s shocking brutality has been criticized by many international institutions. But in practice, the country remains a respected member of Autocracy Inc. Despite Lukashenko’s flagrant flouting of international norms, despite his reaching across borders to break laws, Belarus remains the site of one of China’s largest overseas development projects. Iran has expanded its relationship with Belarus over the past year. Cuban officials have expressed their solidarity with Lukashenko at the UN, calling for an end to “foreign interference” in the country’s affairs. In theory, Venezuela, too, is an international pariah. Since 2008, the U.S. has repeatedly added more Venezuelans to personal-sanctions lists; since 2019, U.S. citizens and companies have been forbidden to do any business there. Canada, the EU, and many of Venezuela’s South American neighbors maintain sanctions on the country. And yet Nicolás Maduro’s regime receives loans as well as oil investment from Russia and China. Turkey facilitates the illicit Venezuelan gold trade. Cuba has long provided security advisers, as well as security technology, to the country’s rulers. The international narcotics trade keeps individual members of the regime well supplied with designer shoes and handbags. Leopoldo López, a onetime star of the opposition now living in exile in Spain, has observed that although Maduro’s opponents have received some foreign assistance, it’s “nothing comparable with what Maduro has received.” Like the Belarusian opposition, the Venezuelan opposition has charismatic leaders and dedicated grassroots activists who have persuaded millions of people to go out into the streets and protest. If their only enemy was the corrupt, bankrupt Venezuelan regime, they might win. But Lopez and his fellow dissidents are in fact fighting multiple autocrats, in multiple countries. Like so many other ordinary people propelled into politics by the experience of injustice—like Sviatlana and Siarhei Tsikhanouski in Belarus, like the leaders of the extraordinary Hong Kong protest movement, like the Cubans and the Iranians and the Burmese pushing for democracy in their countries—they are fighting against people who control state companies and can make investment decisions worth billions of dollars for purely political reasons. They are fighting against people who can buy sophisticated surveillance technology from China or bots from St. Petersburg. Above all, they are fighting against people who have inured themselves to the feelings and opinions of their countrymen, as well as the feelings and opinions of everybody else. Because Autocracy Inc. grants its members not only money and security, but also something less tangible and yet just as important: impunity. The leaders of the Soviet Union, the most powerful autocracy in the second half of the 20th century, cared deeply about how they were perceived around the world. They vigorously promoted the superiority of their political system and they objected when it was criticized. When the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev famously brandished his shoe at a meeting of the UN General Assembly in 1960, it was because a Filipino delegate had expressed sympathy for “the peoples of Eastern Europe and elsewhere which have been deprived of the free exercise of their civil and political rights.” Today, the most brutal members of Autocracy  Inc. don’t much care if their countries are criticized, or by whom. The leaders of Myanmar don’t really have any ideology beyond nationalism, self-enrichment, and the desire to remain in power. The leaders of Iran confidently discount the views of Western infidels. The leaders of Cuba and Venezuela dismiss the statements of foreigners on the grounds that they are “imperialists.” The leaders of China have spent a decade disputing the human-rights language long used by international institutions, successfully convincing many people around the world that these “Western” concepts don’t apply to them. Russia has gone beyond merely ignoring foreign criticism to outright mocking it. After the Russian dissident Alexei Navalny was arrested earlier this year, Amnesty International designated him a “prisoner of conscience,” a venerable term that the human-rights organization has been using since the 1960s. Russian social-media trolls immediately mounted a campaign designed to draw Amnesty’s attention to 15-year-old statements by Navalny that seemed to break the group’s rules on offensive language. Amnesty took the bait and removed the title. Then, when Amnesty officials realized they’d been manipulated by trolls, they restored it. Russian state media cackled derisively. It was not a good moment for the human-rights movement. Impervious to international criticism, modern autocrats are using aggressive tactics to push back against mass protest and widespread discontent. Putin was unembarrassed to stage “elections” earlier this year in which some 9 million people were barred from being candidates, the progovernment party received five times more television coverage than all the other parties put together, television clips of officials stealing votes circulated online, and vote counts were mysteriously altered. The Burmese junta is unashamed to have murdered hundreds of protesters, including young teenagers, on the streets of Yangon. The Chinese government boasts about its destruction of the popular democracy movement in Hong Kong. At the extremes, this kind of contempt can devolve into what the international democracy activist Srdja Popovic calls the “Maduro model” of governance, which may be what Lukashenko is preparing for in Belarus. Autocrats who adopt it are “willing to pay the price of becoming a totally failed country, to see their country enter the category of failed states,” accepting economic collapse, isolation, and mass poverty if that’s what it takes to stay in power. Assad has applied the Maduro model in Syria. And it seems to be what the Taliban leadership had in mind this summer when they occupied Kabul and immediately began arresting and murdering Afghan officials and civilians. Financial collapse was looming, but they didn’t care. As one Western official working in the region told the Financial Times , “They assume that any money that the west doesn’t give them will be replaced by China, Pakistan, Russia and Saudi Arabia.” And if the money doesn’t come, so what? Their goal is not a flourishing, prosperous Afghanistan, but an Afghanistan where they are in charge. The widespread adoption of the Maduro model helps explain why Western statements at the time of Kabul’s fall sounded so pathetic. The EU’s foreign-policy chief expressed “deep concern about reports of serious human rights violations” and called for “meaningful negotiations based on democracy, the rule of law and constitutional rule”—as if the Taliban was interested in any of that. Whether it was “deep concern,” “sincere concern,” or “profound concern,” whether it was expressed on behalf of Europe or the Holy See, none of it mattered: Statements like that mean nothing to the Taliban, the Cuban security services, or the Russian FSB. Their goals are money and personal power. They are not concerned—deeply, sincerely, profoundly, or otherwise—about the happiness or well-being of their fellow citizens, let alone the views of anyone else. How have modern autocrats achieved such impunity? In part by persuading so many other people in so many other countries to play along. Some of those people, and some of those countries, might surprise you.   Michael Houtz   If the stories told by the young dissidents in Vilnius make you angry, the stories told by the Uyghurs of Istanbul will haunt your dreams. A few months ago, in a hot, airless apartment over a dress shop, I met Kalbinur Tursun. She was dressed in a dark-green gown with ruffled sleeves. Her face, framed by a tightly drawn headscarf, resembled that of a saint in a medieval triptych. Her small daughter, in Mickey Mouse leggings, played with an electronic tablet while we spoke. Tursun is a Uyghur, a member of China’s predominantly Muslim Chinese minority, born in the territory that the Chinese call Xinjiang and that many Uyghurs know as East Turkestan. Tursun had six children—too many in a country where there are strict rules limiting births. Also, she wanted to raise them as Muslims; that, too, was a problem in China. When she became pregnant again, she feared being harassed by police, as women with more than two children often are. She and her husband decided to move to Turkey. They got passports for themselves and for their youngest child, but were told the other passports would take longer. Because of her pregnancy, the three of them came to Istanbul anyway; after she and her daughter were settled, her husband returned for the rest of the family. Then he disappeared.  Read: One by one, my friends were sent to the camps  That was five years ago. Tursun has not spoken with her husband since. In July 2017, she spoke with her sister, who promised to take care of her remaining children. Then they lost contact. A year after that, Tursun came across a video being passed around on WhatsApp. Shot at what appeared to be a Chinese orphanage, it showed Uyghur children, heads shaved and all dressed alike, learning to speak Chinese. One of the children was her daughter Ayshe. Tursun showed me the video of her daughter. She also showed me a picture of her husband standing in an Istanbul mosque. She cannot speak to either one of them, or to any of the rest of her children in China. She has no way to know what they are thinking. They might not know she has searched for them. They might believe she has abandoned them on purpose. They might have forgotten she exists. Meanwhile, time is passing. The child in the Mickey Mouse leggings, who sang to herself while we talked, is the one born in Turkey. She has never met her father, or her brothers and sisters in China. But she knows something is very wrong; when Tursun fell silent for a moment, overcome with emotion, the girl put down her tablet and put her arms around her mother’s neck. Sinister though it sounds, Tursun’s story is not unique. The translator for my conversation with Tursun was Nursiman Abdureshid. She is also a Uyghur, also from Xinjiang, also married, also with a daughter, also now living in Istanbul. Abdureshid came to Turkey as a student, convinced that she had the backing of the Chinese state. A graduate of Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, she had studied business administration, learned excellent Turkish and English, made ethnic-Chinese friends. She had never thought of herself as a rebel or a dissident. Why would she have? She was a Chinese success story. Abdureshid’s break with her old life came in June 2017, when, after an ordinary conversation with her family back in China, they stopped answering her calls. She texted and got no response. Weeks passed. After many months, she contacted the consulate in Istanbul—she asked a Turkish friend to call for her—and officials there finally told her the truth: Her father, mother, and younger brother were in prison camps, each for “preparing to commit terrorist activities.” A similar charge was thrown at Jevlan Shirmemet, another Uyghur student in Istanbul. Like Abdureshid, he realized something was wrong when his mother and other relatives stopped responding to texts. Then they blocked him on WeChat, the Chinese messaging app. Nearly two years later, he learned that they were in prison camps. Chinese diplomats accused him of having “anti-Chinese” contacts in Egypt, as well. Shirmemet told them he had never been to Egypt. Prove it, they responded, then added: Cooperate with us, tell us who all of your friends are, list every place you have ever been, become an informer. He refused and—though not temperamentally inclined to be a dissident either—decided to speak out on social media instead. “I had remained silent, but my silence didn’t protect my family,” he told me. Turkey is home to some 50,000 exiled Uyghurs, and there are dozens, hundreds, perhaps thousands of such stories there. İlyas Doğan, a Turkish lawyer who has represented some of the Uyghurs, told me that, until 2017, very few of them were politically active. But after friends and relatives began disappearing into “reeducation camps”—concentration camps, in fact—set up by the Chinese state, the situation changed. Tursun and a group of other women who had lost children staged a protest walk from Istanbul to Ankara, a distance of more than 270 miles, and then stood in front of a UN building, demanding to be heard. Abdureshid spoke at the conference of one of the Turkish opposition parties. “I haven’t heard my mother’s voice for four years,” she told the audience. A video of the speech went viral; when we had lunch at a restaurant in a Uyghur neighborhood, a waiter recognized her and thanked her for it. In another era—in a world with a different geopolitical configuration, at a time when the language of human rights had not been so comprehensively undermined—these dissidents would have plenty of official sympathy in Turkey, a nation that is singularly linked to the Uyghur community by ties of religion, ethnicity, and language. In 2009, even before the concentration camps were opened, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was then the Turkish prime minister, called the Chinese repression of the Uyghurs a “genocide.” In 2012, he brought businessmen with him to Xinjiang and promised to invest in Uyghur businesses there. He did this because it was popular. To the extent that ordinary Turks know what is happening to their Uyghur cousins, they sympathize. Yet since then, Erdoğan—who became president in 2014—has himself turned against the rule of law, independent media, and independent courts at home. As he has become openly hostile to former European and NATO allies, and as he has arrested and jailed his own dissidents, Erdoğan’s interest in Chinese friendship, investment, and technology has increased, along with his willingness to echo Chinese propaganda. On the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party, his party’s flagship newspaper published a long, solemn article—which was in fact sponsored content—beneath the headline “The Chinese Communist Party’s 100 Years of Glorious History and the Secrets to Its Success.” Alongside these changes, government policy toward the Uyghurs has shifted too. In recent years, the Turkish government has surveilled and detained Uyghurs on bogus terrorism charges, and deported some, including four who were sent to Tajikistan and then immediately turned over to China in 2019. In Istanbul, I met one Uyghur—he preferred to remain anonymous—who had spent time in a Turkish detention center, along with some of his family, following what he said were bogus charges of “terrorism.” The presence of pro-Chinese forces in Turkish media, politics, and business has been growing, and lately they are keen to belittle the Uyghurs. Curiously, Abdureshid’s speech was cut from the public-television broadcast of the opposition-party conference she attended. After it started circulating on social media, she was publicly attacked by a Turkish politician, Doğu Perinçek, a former Maoist who is pro-Chinese, anti-Western, and quite influential. After Perinçek described her as a “terrorist” on television, a wave of online attacks followed. The atmosphere worsened in late 2020, when a delayed Chinese shipment of COVID-19 vaccines coincided with Beijing’s pressure on Turkey to sign an extradition treaty that would have made deportation of Uyghurs even easier. After opposition parties objected, both the Turkish and Chinese governments denied that delivery of the vaccine shipment was in any way conditioned on deporting Uyghurs, but the timing remains suspicious. Several Uyghurs in Istanbul told me that corrupt elements in the Turkish police work directly with the Chinese already. They have no proof, and Doğan, the Turkish lawyer, told me that he doubts this is the case; still, he thinks that, despite all of the old cultural ties, the Turkish government might not mind if the Uyghurs stopped protesting or quietly moved elsewhere. For the moment, the Uyghurs in Turkey are still protected by what remains of democracy there: the opposition parties, some of the media, public opinion. A government that faces democratic elections, even skewed ones, must still take these things into account. In countries where opposition, media, and public opinion matter less, the balance is different. You can see this even in Muslim countries, which might be expected to object to the oppression of other Muslims. Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan has stated baldly that “we accept the Chinese version” of the Chinese-Uyghur dispute. The Saudis, the Emiratis, and the Egyptians have all allegedly arrested, detained, and deported Uyghurs without much discussion. Not coincidentally, these are all countries that seek good economic relations with China, and that have purchased Chinese surveillance technology. For autocrats and would-be autocrats around the world, the Chinese offer a package that looks something like this: Agree to follow China’s lead on Hong Kong, Tibet, the Uyghurs, and human rights more broadly. Buy Chinese surveillance equipment. Accept massive Chinese investment (preferably into companies you personally control, or that at least pay you kickbacks). Then sit back and relax, knowing that however bad your image becomes in the eyes of the international human-rights community, you and your friends will remain in power.   Michael Houtz   And how different are we? We Americans? We Europeans? Are we so sure that our institutions, our political parties, our media could never be manipulated in the same way? In the spring of 2016, I helped publish a report on the Russian use of disinformation in Central and Eastern Europe—the now familiar Russian efforts to manipulate political conversations in other countries using social media, fake websites, funding for extremist parties, hacked private communications, and more. My colleague Edward Lucas, a senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis, and I took it to Capitol Hill, to the State Department, and to anyone in Washington who would listen. The response was polite interest, nothing more. We are very sorry that Slovakia and Slovenia are having these problems, but it can’t happen here.  A few months later, it did happen here. Russian trolls operating from St. Petersburg sought to shift the outcome of an American election in much the same way they had done in Central Europe, using fake Facebook pages (sometimes impersonating anti-immigration groups, sometimes impersonating Black activists), fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to infiltrate groups like the National Rifle Association, as well as weaponizing hacked material from the Democratic National Committee. Some Americans actively welcomed this intervention, and even sought to take advantage of what they imagined might be broader Russian technical capabilities. “If it’s what you say I love it,” Donald Trump Jr. wrote to an intermediary for a Russian lawyer who he believed had access to damaging information about Hillary Clinton. In 2008, Trump Jr. had told a business conference that “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” and in 2016, Russia’s long-term investment in the Trump business empire paid off. In the Trump family, the Kremlin had something better than spies: cynical, nihilistic, indebted, long-term allies. Despite the raucous national debate on Russian election interference, we don’t seem to have learned much from it, if our thinking about Chinese influence operations is any indication. The United Front is the Chinese Communist Party’s influence project, subtler and more strategic than the Russian version, designed not to upend democratic politics but to shape the nature of conversations about China around the world. Among other endeavors, the United Front creates educational and exchange programs, tries to mold the atmosphere within Chinese exile communities, and courts anyone willing to be a de facto spokesperson for China. But in 2019, when Peter Mattis, a China expert and democracy promoter, tried to discuss the United Front program with a CIA analyst, he got the same kind of polite dismissal that Lucas and I had heard a few years earlier. “This is not Australia,” the CIA analyst told him, according to testimony Mattis gave to Congress, referring to a series of scandals involving Chinese and Chinese Australian businesspeople allegedly attempting to buy political influence in Canberra. We are very sorry that Australia is having these problems, but it can’t happen here.  Can’t it? Controversy has already engulfed many of the Chinese-funded Confucius Institutes set up at American universities, some of whose faculty, under the guise of offering benign Chinese-language and calligraphy courses, got involved in efforts to shape academic debate in China’s favor—a classic United Front enterprise. The long arm of the Chinese state has reached Chinese dissidents in the U.S. as well. The Washington, D.C., and Maryland offices of the Wei Jingsheng Foundation, a group named after one of China’s most famous democracy activists, have been broken into more than a dozen times in the past two decades. Ciping Huang, the foundation’s executive director, told me that old computers have disappeared, phone lines have been cut, and mail has been thrown in the toilet. The main objective seems to be to let the activists know that someone was there. Chinese democracy activists living in the U.S. have, like the Uyghurs in Istanbul, been visited by Chinese agents who try to persuade them, or blackmail them, to return home. Still others have had strange car accidents—mishaps regularly happen while people are on their way to attend an annual ceremony held in New York on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese influence, like authoritarian influence more broadly, can take even subtler forms, using carrots rather than sticks. If you go along with the official line, if you don’t criticize China’s human-rights record, opportunities will emerge for you. In 2018, McKinsey held a tone-deaf corporate retreat in Kashgar, just a few miles away from a Uyghur internment camp—the same kind of camp where the husbands, parents, and siblings of Tursun, Shirmemet, and Abdureshid have been imprisoned. McKinsey had good reasons not to talk about human rights at the retreat: According to The New York Times, the consulting giant at the time of that event advised 22 of the 100 largest Chinese-state companies, including one that had helped construct the artificial islands in the South China Sea that have so alarmed the U.S. military. But perhaps it’s unfair to pick on McKinsey. The list of major American corporations caught in tangled webs of personal, financial, and business links to China, Russia, and other autocracies is very long. During the heavily manipulated and deliberately confusing Russian elections in September 2021, both Apple and Google removed apps that had been designed to help Russian voters decide which opposition candidates to select, after Russian authorities threatened to prosecute the companies’ local employees. The apps had been created by Alexei Navalny’s anti-corruption movement, the most viable opposition movement in the country, which was itself not allowed to participate in the election campaign. Navalny, who remains in prison on ludicrous charges, made a statement via Twitter excoriating American democracy’s most famous corporate moguls:  It’s one thing when the Internet monopolists are ruled by cute freedom-loving nerds with solid life principles. It is completely different when the people in charge of them are both cowardly and greedy … Standing in front of the huge screens, they tell us about “making the world a better place,” but on the inside they are liars and hypocrites.  The list of other industries that might be similarly described as “cowardly and greedy” is also very long, extending even to Hollywood, pop music, and sports. When distributors became nervous about a possible Chinese backlash to a 2012 MGM remake of a Cold War–era movie that recast the Soviet invaders as Chinese, the studio had the film digitally altered to make the bad guys North Korean instead. In 2019, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, along with a number of basketball stars, expressed remorse to China after the general manager of the Houston Rockets tweeted support for the democrats of Hong Kong. Even more abject was Qazaq: History of the Golden Man, a fawning eight-hour documentary about the life of Nursultan Nazarbayev, the brutal longtime ruler of Kazakhstan, produced in 2021 by the Hollywood director Oliver Stone. Or consider what the rapper Nicki Minaj did in 2015, when she was criticized for giving a concert in Angola, hosted by a company co-owned by the daughter of that country’s dictator, José Eduardo dos Santos. Minaj posted two photos of herself on Instagram, one in which she’s draped in the Angolan flag and another alongside the dictator’s daughter, captioned with these immortal words: “Oh no big deal … she’s just the 8th richest woman in the world. (At least that’s what I was told by someone b4 we took this photo) Lol. Yikes!!!!! GIRL POWER!!!!! This motivates me soooooooooo much!!!!” If the autocrats and the kleptocrats feel no shame, why should American celebrities who profit from their largesse? Why should their fans? Why should their sponsors? If the 20th century was the story of a slow, uneven struggle, ending with the victory of liberal democracy over other ideologies—communism, fascism, virulent nationalism—the 21st century is, so far, a story of the reverse. Freedom House, which has published an annual “Freedom in the World” report for nearly 50 years, called its 2021 edition “Democracy Under Siege.” The Stanford scholar Larry Diamond calls this an era of “democratic regression.” Not everyone is equally gloomy—Srdja Popovic, the democracy activist, argues that confrontations between autocrats and their populations are growing harsher precisely because democratic movements are becoming more articulate and better organized. But just about everyone who thinks hard about this subject agrees that the old diplomatic toolbox once used to support democrats around the world is rusty and out of date. The tactics that used to work no longer do. Certainly sanctions, especially when hastily applied in the aftermath of some outrage, do not have the impact they once did. They can sometimes seem, as Stephen Biegun, the former deputy secretary of state, puts it, “an exercise in self-gratification,” on par with “sternly worded condemnations of the latest farcical election.” That doesn’t mean they have no impact at all. But although personal sanctions on corrupt Russian officials might make it impossible for some Russians to visit their homes in Cap Ferrat, say, or their children at the London School of Economics, they haven’t persuaded Putin to stop invading other countries, interfering in European and American politics, or poisoning his own dissidents. Neither have decades of U.S. sanctions changed the behavior of the Iranian regime or the Venezuelan regime, despite their indisputable economic impact. Too often, sanctions are allowed to deteriorate over time; just as often, autocracies now help one another get around them. America does still spend money on projects that might loosely be called “democracy assistance,” but the amounts are very low compared with what the authoritarian world is prepared to put up. The National Endowment for Democracy, a unique institution that has an independent board (of which I am a member), received $300 million of congressional funding in 2020 to support civic organizations, non-state media, and educational projects in about 100 autocracies and weak democracies around the world. American foreign-language broadcasters, having survived the Trump administration’s still inexplicable attempt to destroy them, also continue to serve as independent sources of information in some closed societies. But while Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty spends just over $22 million on Russian-language broadcasting (to take one example) every year, and Voice of America just over $8 million more, the Russian government spends billions on the Russian-language state media that are seen and heard all over Eastern Europe, from Germany to Moldova to Kazakhstan. The $33 million that Radio Free Asia spends to broadcast in Burmese, Cantonese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Mandarin, Tibetan, Uyghur, and Vietnamese pales beside the billions that China spends on media and communications both inside its borders and around the world. Our efforts are even smaller than they look, because traditional media are only a part of how modern autocracies promote themselves. We don’t yet have a real answer to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which offers infrastructure deals to countries around the globe, often enabling local leaders to skim kickbacks and garnering positive China-subsidized media coverage in return. We don’t have the equivalent of a United Front, or any other strategy for shaping debate within and about China. We don’t run online influence campaigns inside Russia. We don’t have an answer to the disinformation, injected by troll farms abroad, that circulates on Facebook inside the U.S., let alone a plan for countering the disinformation that circulates inside autocracies. President Biden is well aware of this imbalance and says he wants to reinvigorate the democratic alliance and America’s leading role within it. To that end, the president is convening an online summit on December 9 and 10 to “galvanize commitments and initiatives” in aid of three themes: “defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.” That sounds nice, but unless it heralds deep changes in our own behavior it means very little. “Fighting corruption” is not just a foreign-policy issue, after all. If we in the democratic world are serious about it, then we can no longer allow Kazakhs and Venezuelans to purchase property anonymously in London or Miami, or the rulers of Angola and Myanmar to hide money in Delaware or Nevada. We need, in other words, to make changes to our own system, and that may require overcoming fierce domestic resistance from the business groups that benefit from it. We need to shut down tax havens, enforce money-laundering laws, stop selling security and surveillance technology to autocracies, and divest from the most vicious regimes altogether. “We” here will need to include Europe, especially the U.K., as well as partners elsewhere—and that will require a lot of vigorous diplomacy. The same is true of the fight for human rights. Statements made at a diplomatic summit won’t achieve much if politicians, citizens, and businesses don’t act as if they matter. To effect real change, the Biden administration will have to ask hard questions and make big decisions. How can we force Apple and Google to respect the rights of Russian democrats? How can we ensure that Western manufacturers have excluded from their supply chains anything produced in a Uyghur concentration camp? We need a major investment in independent media around the world, a strategy for reaching people inside autocracies, new international institutions to replace the defunct human-rights bodies at the UN. We need a way to coordinate democratic nations’ response when autocracies commit crimes outside their borders—whether that’s the Russian state murdering people in Berlin or Salisbury, England; the Belarusian dictator hijacking a commercial flight; or Chinese operatives harassing exiles in Washington, D.C. As of now, we have no transnational strategy designed to confront this transnational problem. This absence of strategy reflects more than negligence. The centrality of democracy to American foreign policy has been declining for many years—at about the same pace, perhaps not coincidentally, as the decline of respect for democracy in America itself. The Trump presidency was a four-year display of contempt not just for the American political process, but for America’s historic democratic allies, whom he singled out for abuse. The president described the British and German leaders as “losers” and the Canadian prime minister as “dishonest” and “weak,” while he cozied up to autocrats—the Turkish president, the Russian president, the Saudi ruling family, and the North Korean dictator, among them—with whom he felt more comfortable, and no wonder: He has shared their ethos of no-questions-asked investments for many years. In 2008, the Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev paid Trump $95 million—more than twice what Trump had paid just four years earlier—for a house in Palm Beach no one else seemed to want; in 2012, Trump put his name on a building in Baku, Azerbaijan, owned by a company with apparent links to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps. Trump feels perfectly at home in Autocracy Inc., and he accelerated the erosion of the rules and norms that has allowed it to take root in America. At the same time, a part of the American left has abandoned the idea that “democracy” belongs at the heart of U.S. foreign policy—not out of greed and cynicism but out of a loss of faith in democracy at home. Convinced that the history of America is the history of genocide, slavery, exploitation, and not much else, they don’t see the value of making common cause with Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Nursiman Abdureshid, or any of the other ordinary people around the world forced into politics by their experience of profound injustice. Focused on America’s own bitter problems, they no longer believe America has anything to offer the rest of the world: Although the Hong Kong prodemocracy protesters waving American flags believe many of the same things we believe, their requests for American support in 2019 did not elicit a significant wave of youthful activism in the United States, not even something comparable to the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s. Incorrectly identifying the promotion of democracy around the world with “forever wars,” they fail to understand the brutality of the zero-sum competition now unfolding in front of us. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so does geopolitics. If America removes the promotion of democracy from its foreign policy, if America ceases to interest itself in the fate of other democracies and democratic movements, then autocracies will quickly take our place as sources of influence, funding, and ideas. If Americans, together with our allies, fail to fight the habits and practices of autocracy abroad, we will encounter them at home; indeed, they are already here. If Americans don’t help to hold murderous regimes to account, those regimes will retain their sense of impunity. They will continue to steal, blackmail, torture, and intimidate, inside their countries—and inside ours.    *Source images (left to right): Sven Creutzmann / Mambo Photo / Getty; Andrea Verdelli / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty; TPG / Getty; Mikhail Svetlov / Getty     This article appears in the December 2021 print edition with the headline “The Autocrats Are Winning.”
The Bad Guys Are Winning
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/12/the-autocrats-are-winning/620526/
https://www.newsday.com/
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2023-05-18
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 Credit: Newsday</figcaption></figure></div><p><strong></strong> Dance instructor arrested ... Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court ... Students learn beauty business ... What's up on LI this weekend</p><p><a href="https://www.newsday.com/video/newsdaytv-top-stories">Get more on these and other NewsdayTV stories</a></p></section><section><div><p><a href="/textsignup">SIGN UP FOR OUR<strong>TEXT MESSAGES</strong></a><a href="/entertainment/crossword-puzzle">NEWSDAY<strong>CROSSWORD</strong></a><a href="https://link.newsday.com/join/55i/newsdaysignup">SIGN UP FOR OUR<strong>NEWSLETTERS</strong></a></p></div><div><a href="https://paper.newsday.com/"><strong>READ</strong> TODAY'S PAPER</a></div></section><section><p></p><h2>LONG ISLANDERS' FAVORITES</h2><p></p></section><div><a href="/opinion"><h2>Opinion</h2></a><p><a href="https://newsday.com/matt">Cartoons by Matt Davies</a></p></div></div></section><section><div><section><div><a href="/long-island"><h2>More Long Island</h2></a><div><p><a href="/long-island/nassau">Nassau</a><a href="/long-island/suffolk">Suffolk</a></p></div></div></section><section><p></p><h2>Nation / World</h2><p></p></section></div><div><section><p><a href="/newsday-live"><h2>Newsday Live</h2></a></p></section><section><a href="/services/contest"></a></section></div></section><section><div><section><p><a href="/sports"><h2>Sports</h2></a></p></section><section><p><a href="/long-island/watchdog"><h2>Investigations</h2></a></p><div><p>MORE ON THIS TOPIC<a href="/long-island/politics/suffolk-county-child-protective-services-thomas-valva-v2l64xwi">Suffolk CPS cites higher pay, reduced caseloads in effort to improve</a><a href="/long-island/politics/thomas-valva-suffolk-cps-caseloads-qj2hse8s">Nearly 60% of Suffolk CPS workers had caseloads above standards set after boy's death</a><a href="/long-island/crime/thomas-valva-murder-trial-updates-fqzo0wua">Complete coverage: Thomas Valva murder trial updates</a></p></div></section><section><a href="/lifestyle/restaurants/elisa-distefano-pancakes-hatch-maureens-w0s6ugfr"></a><a href="/lifestyle/restaurants/best-restaurants-garden-city-ulzkogck"></a><a href="/lifestyle/restaurants/good-jujus-bbq-seafood-shack-aquebogue-lucharitos-lnravynr"></a><a href="/lifestyle/restaurants/jolly-fisherman-roslyn-seafood-bwf53kyf"></a></section></div><div><div><a href="/sports/high-school"><h2>High School Sports</h2></a><p><a href="https://scores.newsday.com/sports/highschool">Scores</a></p></div><section><a href="https://tv.newsday.com/"></a></section><section><a href="/top100"></a></section><section><p><a href="/entertainment"><h2>Entertainment</h2></a></p></section><div><div><p><strong>Sign up for the Morning Update newsletter</strong></p></div><p>By clicking Sign up, you agree to our <a href="/privacy">privacy policy</a>.</p></div></div></section></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to contentMenuToday's paper
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 Thursday, May 18

 Michael LaFauci, LI officer wounded in shooting, released from hospital

 Hundreds of officers lined the hospital exit for the release of LaFauci, who police said was shot by suspect Janell Funderburke on May 11.

 8 mins ago 1m read
 MORE ON THIS TOPIC Suspect in shooting of LI officer pleads not guilty, says he is 'sorry'Suffolk police officer shot, in stable condition, officials say

 Only in Newsday Population goes down in LI's cities, towns, Census Bureau says, experts say it could be the housing
 Streaming Now

 Shot SCPD cop released from hospital … Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court … LI towns, cities lose population Credit: Newsday

 Dance instructor arrested ... Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court ... Students learn beauty business ... What's up on LI this weekend

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 Shot SCPD cop released from hospital … Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court … LI towns, cities lose population Credit: Newsday

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School board, budget voting results Complete coverage: George Santos Read FeedMe Magazine Meet our journalists        Top Stories  Thursday, May 18                  Michael LaFauci, LI officer wounded in shooting, released from hospital  Hundreds of officers lined the hospital exit for the release of LaFauci, who police said was shot by suspect Janell Funderburke on May 11.  8 mins ago1m read    MORE ON THIS TOPICSuspect in shooting of LI officer pleads not guilty, says he is 'sorry' Suffolk police officer shot, in stable condition, officials say       Only in NewsdayPopulation goes down in LI's cities, towns, Census Bureau says, experts say it could be the housing       Streaming Now           Shot SCPD cop released from hospital … Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court … LI towns, cities lose population
 Credit: Newsday      Dance instructor arrested ... Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court ... Students learn beauty business ... What's up on LI this weekend  Get more on these and other NewsdayTV stories      SIGN UP FOR OURTEXT MESSAGES  NEWSDAYCROSSWORD  SIGN UP FOR OURNEWSLETTERS      READ TODAY'S PAPER       Dance teacher charged with making sexually explicit videos with teen students, police say 42 mins ago1m read     Only in NewsdayMeet LI's Class of 2023 valedictorians      Only in NewsdayChicken chain Raising Cane's cooking up Long Island entrance  2m read       Things to do          Streaming Now           Shot SCPD cop released from hospital … Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court … LI towns, cities lose population
 Credit: Newsday      Dance instructor arrested ... Accused killer in Copiague stabbing in court ... Students learn beauty business ... What's up on LI this weekend  Get more on these and other NewsdayTV stories      SIGN UP FOR OURTEXT MESSAGES  NEWSDAYCROSSWORD  SIGN UP FOR OURNEWSLETTERS      READ TODAY'S PAPER      LONG ISLANDERS' FAVORITES      Opinion   Cartoons by Matt Davies          More Long Island    Nassau Suffolk        Nation / World         Newsday Live               Sports       Investigations    MORE ON THIS TOPICSuffolk CPS cites higher pay, reduced caseloads in effort to improve Nearly 60% of Suffolk CPS workers had caseloads above standards set after boy's death Complete coverage: Thomas Valva murder trial updates                  High School Sports   Scores              Entertainment       Sign up for the Morning Update newsletter   By clicking Sign up, you agree to our privacy policy.
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<div><div><div><h2>Highlights</h2><ol><li><article><figure>Photo<a href="/2023/02/05/us/north-carolina-supreme-court-voting-rights.html"><p></p></a><figcaption>CreditSean Rayford/Getty Images</figcaption></figure><div><h2><a href="/2023/02/05/us/north-carolina-supreme-court-voting-rights.html">On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings</a></h2><p>The court’s new majority will rehear two major voting rights cases decided two months ago. The rare move heightens the debate over partisan influences on state courts.</p><p> By Michael Wines</p></div></article></li><li><ol><li><article><figure>Photo<a href="/2023/02/05/us/austin-power-outages-ice-storm.html"><p></p></a><figcaption>CreditCarter Johnston for The New York Times</figcaption></figure><div><h2><a href="/2023/02/05/us/austin-power-outages-ice-storm.html">In Austin, Recovery From Winter Storm Is Slow and Piecemeal</a></h2><p>More than 30,000 customers did not have power on Sunday night. Officials said downed trees and power lines were responsible for persistent outages.</p><p> By Dave Montgomery and Ava Sasani</p></div></article></li><li><article><figure>Photo<a href="/2023/01/29/us/russian-asylum-boat-alaska.html"><p></p></a><figcaption>CreditGrant Hindsley for The New York Times</figcaption></figure><div><h2><a href="/2023/01/29/us/russian-asylum-boat-alaska.html">A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia</a></h2><p>In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.</p><p> By Mike Baker</p></div></article></li><li><article><figure>Photo<a href="/2023/02/04/us/big-sur-storms-california.html"><p></p></a><figcaption>Credit</figcaption></figure><div><h2><a href="/2023/02/04/us/big-sur-storms-california.html">In Big Sur, Living With Nature’s Beauty but Trapped by Its Fury</a></h2><p>The succession of storms last month that left some residents in that treasured region cut off from the rest of California is another reminder of the perils and adventure of Central Coast life.</p><p> By Victoria Kim and Ian C. Bates</p></div></article></li></ol></li></ol></div><div><p>Advertisement</p><p><a href="#after-mid1">Continue reading the main story</a></p></div></div>||||I|||| Sections
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 On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings

 The court’s new majority will rehear two major voting rights cases decided two months ago. The rare move heightens the debate over partisan influences on state courts.

 By Michael Wines

 2. 

 1. Photo

 Credit Carter Johnston for The New York Times

 In Austin, Recovery From Winter Storm Is Slow and Piecemeal

 More than 30,000 customers did not have power on Sunday night. Officials said downed trees and power lines were responsible for persistent outages.

 By Dave Montgomery and Ava Sasani

 2. Photo

 Credit Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

 A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia

 In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.

 By Mike Baker

 3. Photo

 Credit

 In Big Sur, Living With Nature’s Beauty but Trapped by Its Fury

 The succession of storms last month that left some residents in that treasured region cut off from the rest of California is another reminder of the perils and adventure of Central Coast life.

 By Victoria Kim and Ian C. Bates

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 He drew headlines across the world when, during a hunting trip, he was accidentally blasted in the face and torso by Vice President Dick Cheney — then apologized himself for the incident.

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 7. On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings

 The court’s new majority will rehear two major voting rights cases decided two months ago. The rare move heightens the debate over partisan influences on state courts.

 By Michael Wines

 8. In Austin, Recovery From Winter Storm Is Slow and Piecemeal

 More than 30,000 customers did not have power on Sunday night. Officials said downed trees and power lines were responsible for persistent outages.

 By Dave Montgomery and Ava Sasani

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Highlights    Photo    CreditSean Rayford/Getty Images    On North Carolina’s Supreme Court, G.O.P. Justices Move to Reconsider Democratic Rulings  The court’s new majority will rehear two major voting rights cases decided two months ago. The rare move heightens the debate over partisan influences on state courts.  By Michael Wines        Photo    CreditCarter Johnston for The New York Times    In Austin, Recovery From Winter Storm Is Slow and Piecemeal  More than 30,000 customers did not have power on Sunday night. Officials said downed trees and power lines were responsible for persistent outages.  By Dave Montgomery and Ava Sasani      Photo    CreditGrant Hindsley for The New York Times    A Small Boat, a Vast Sea and a Desperate Escape From Russia  In September, two men set out from Russia, hoping a boat could carry them to asylum on U.S. soil. Their quest for freedom did not go as planned.  By Mike Baker      Photo    Credit    In Big Sur, Living With Nature’s Beauty but Trapped by Its Fury  The succession of storms last month that left some residents in that treasured region cut off from the rest of California is another reminder of the perils and adventure of Central Coast life.  By Victoria Kim and Ian C. Bates         Advertisement  Continue reading the main story
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