an article from 2012
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.12135
India prepares to boost science - Nature
2012-12-30
Jayaraman; K S
<div><p>Five-year spending plan backs massive investment in research and scientific facilities.</p><div>
 <p>Bangalore</p><p>Spending plans that would give a huge boost to India's science spending and back the country's participation in several international science projects have brought researchers some unexpected festive cheer.</p><p>India's <a href="http://www.nature.com/polopoly_fs/7.8200!/file/Indiaplan.pdf">Twelfth Five Year Plan</a> proposes earmarking 1,204 billion rupees (US$24 billion) for research and development (R&amp;D) in six key scientific departments between April 2012 and March 2017 — more than 2.5 times what the country spent over the previous five-year period. Although the plan does not commit the government to making the proposed increases, it has buoyed the hopes of the nation's scientists after <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/indian-budget-disappoints-1.10263%23/related-links">a disappointing science budget earlier this year</a>.</p><div><div></div><p>The Indian Prime Minister's science adviser, C.N.R. Rao, has welcomed the proposed increases to R&amp;D budgets.
 Credit: Biswarup Ganguly</p></div><p>The plan, published on 27 December, backs Indian investment in the <a href="http://www.nature.com/news/winners-all-round-in-telescope-bid-1.10736">Square Kilometre Array</a> — the world's most powerful radio telescope, now being built in Australia and South Africa — and the Thirty Meter Telescope, a proposed optical telescope that would be built on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. An India-based neutrino observatory and a next-generation synchrotron are among the domestic facilities that are mentioned as funding priorities over the next five years. The plan also includes the goal of increasing the number of PhDs the country produces each year, from 8,900 to 12,500, and raising the number of full-time researchers from 154,000 to 250,000. Publications by Indian researchers should account for at least 5% of the world's total by 2017 (up from around 3% today), improving India's global ranking from ninth to better than sixth.</p><p>The Department of Space, which gets the largest share of the proposed R&amp;D budget, is to undertake 58 missions during the five-year period, including a mission to Mars in November 2013 and a follow-up to the country's 2008 Moon mission. India's biggest science agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, should plan to set up five new institutes in areas including systems biology, biomimetic materials and solar energy. Meanwhile, the Department of Science and Technology is set a target of helping to create 25 nanotechnology start-up companies and encouraged to push forward with plans to make India one of the top five nations in the world for supercomputing by building a peta-scale computer.</p><p>The Department of Biotechnology should press ahead with building five new research centres, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences should establish a National Centre for Seismology and pursue plans to drill an 8-kilometre-deep borehole in western India for seismological studies. There is also cash for the Department of Atomic Energy to build two research reactors at its two new campuses in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam.</p><p>Overall, the 1,204 billion rupees for R&amp;D is nearly double the 750 billion rupees allotted in the eleventh plan — although the actual spending over the five years covered by the eleventh plan came in at 475 billion rupees.</p><p>C.N.R. Rao, science adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, welcomed the proposed boost to R&amp;D spending but warned that, if it materializes, researchers might struggle to spend the money. "Sometimes I worry whether we have enough good people to use the research funds," he told <i>Nature</i>.</p><p>Some senior researchers are also sceptical of the new plan's aim to stimulate science spending by Indian businesses. India spends 0.9% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on R&amp;D, and that is pegged to rise to 2% by 2017, with the private sector's contribution rising from just 0.2% to 1% of GDP. The government hopes to rope businesses into spending more on science through public–private partnerships. Around 10–15% of the R&amp;D investment in the plan has been earmarked for such partnerships.</p><p>"I doubt if we could reach 1% of GDP on R&amp;D by the corporate sector," says Lingadahalli Shashidhara, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune. The culture of businesses funding research by public organizations is alien to India, Shashidhara says.</p><p>But he adds that none of the targets set out in the twelfth plan are completely out of reach. "I am very optimistic about Indian science," he says.</p>
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 India prepares to boost science

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 Five-year spending plan backs massive investment in research and scientific facilities.

 Bangalore

 Spending plans that would give a huge boost to India's science spending and back the country's participation in several international science projects have brought researchers some unexpected festive cheer.

 India's Twelfth Five Year Plan proposes earmarking 1,204 billion rupees (US$24 billion) for research and development (R&D) in six key scientific departments between April 2012 and March 2017 — more than 2.5 times what the country spent over the previous five-year period. Although the plan does not commit the government to making the proposed increases, it has buoyed the hopes of the nation's scientists after a disappointing science budget earlier this year.

 The Indian Prime Minister's science adviser, C.N.R. Rao, has welcomed the proposed increases to R&D budgets. Credit: Biswarup Ganguly

 The plan, published on 27 December, backs Indian investment in the Square Kilometre Array — the world's most powerful radio telescope, now being built in Australia and South Africa — and the Thirty Meter Telescope, a proposed optical telescope that would be built on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. An India-based neutrino observatory and a next-generation synchrotron are among the domestic facilities that are mentioned as funding priorities over the next five years. The plan also includes the goal of increasing the number of PhDs the country produces each year, from 8,900 to 12,500, and raising the number of full-time researchers from 154,000 to 250,000. Publications by Indian researchers should account for at least 5% of the world's total by 2017 (up from around 3% today), improving India's global ranking from ninth to better than sixth.

 The Department of Space, which gets the largest share of the proposed R&D budget, is to undertake 58 missions during the five-year period, including a mission to Mars in November 2013 and a follow-up to the country's 2008 Moon mission. India's biggest science agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, should plan to set up five new institutes in areas including systems biology, biomimetic materials and solar energy. Meanwhile, the Department of Science and Technology is set a target of helping to create 25 nanotechnology start-up companies and encouraged to push forward with plans to make India one of the top five nations in the world for supercomputing by building a peta-scale computer.

 The Department of Biotechnology should press ahead with building five new research centres, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences should establish a National Centre for Seismology and pursue plans to drill an 8-kilometre-deep borehole in western India for seismological studies. There is also cash for the Department of Atomic Energy to build two research reactors at its two new campuses in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam.

 Overall, the 1,204 billion rupees for R&D is nearly double the 750 billion rupees allotted in the eleventh plan — although the actual spending over the five years covered by the eleventh plan came in at 475 billion rupees.

 C.N.R. Rao, science adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, welcomed the proposed boost to R&D spending but warned that, if it materializes, researchers might struggle to spend the money. "Sometimes I worry whether we have enough good people to use the research funds," he told Nature.

 Some senior researchers are also sceptical of the new plan's aim to stimulate science spending by Indian businesses. India spends 0.9% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on R&D, and that is pegged to rise to 2% by 2017, with the private sector's contribution rising from just 0.2% to 1% of GDP. The government hopes to rope businesses into spending more on science through public–private partnerships. Around 10–15% of the R&D investment in the plan has been earmarked for such partnerships.

 "I doubt if we could reach 1% of GDP on R&D by the corporate sector," says Lingadahalli Shashidhara, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune. The culture of businesses funding research by public organizations is alien to India, Shashidhara says.

 But he adds that none of the targets set out in the twelfth plan are completely out of reach. "I am very optimistic about Indian science," he says.

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Five-year spending plan backs massive investment in research and scientific facilities. 
 Bangalore Spending plans that would give a huge boost to India's science spending and back the country's participation in several international science projects have brought researchers some unexpected festive cheer. India's Twelfth Five Year Plan proposes earmarking 1,204 billion rupees (US$24 billion) for research and development (R&amp;D) in six key scientific departments between April 2012 and March 2017 — more than 2.5 times what the country spent over the previous five-year period. Although the plan does not commit the government to making the proposed increases, it has buoyed the hopes of the nation's scientists after a disappointing science budget earlier this year.    The Indian Prime Minister's science adviser, C.N.R. Rao, has welcomed the proposed increases to R&amp;D budgets.
 Credit: Biswarup Ganguly  The plan, published on 27 December, backs Indian investment in the Square Kilometre Array — the world's most powerful radio telescope, now being built in Australia and South Africa — and the Thirty Meter Telescope, a proposed optical telescope that would be built on Mauna Kea, Hawaii. An India-based neutrino observatory and a next-generation synchrotron are among the domestic facilities that are mentioned as funding priorities over the next five years. The plan also includes the goal of increasing the number of PhDs the country produces each year, from 8,900 to 12,500, and raising the number of full-time researchers from 154,000 to 250,000. Publications by Indian researchers should account for at least 5% of the world's total by 2017 (up from around 3% today), improving India's global ranking from ninth to better than sixth. The Department of Space, which gets the largest share of the proposed R&amp;D budget, is to undertake 58 missions during the five-year period, including a mission to Mars in November 2013 and a follow-up to the country's 2008 Moon mission. India's biggest science agency, the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, should plan to set up five new institutes in areas including systems biology, biomimetic materials and solar energy. Meanwhile, the Department of Science and Technology is set a target of helping to create 25 nanotechnology start-up companies and encouraged to push forward with plans to make India one of the top five nations in the world for supercomputing by building a peta-scale computer. The Department of Biotechnology should press ahead with building five new research centres, and the Ministry of Earth Sciences should establish a National Centre for Seismology and pursue plans to drill an 8-kilometre-deep borehole in western India for seismological studies. There is also cash for the Department of Atomic Energy to build two research reactors at its two new campuses in Hyderabad and Visakhapatnam. Overall, the 1,204 billion rupees for R&amp;D is nearly double the 750 billion rupees allotted in the eleventh plan — although the actual spending over the five years covered by the eleventh plan came in at 475 billion rupees. C.N.R. Rao, science adviser to Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, welcomed the proposed boost to R&amp;D spending but warned that, if it materializes, researchers might struggle to spend the money. "Sometimes I worry whether we have enough good people to use the research funds," he told Nature. Some senior researchers are also sceptical of the new plan's aim to stimulate science spending by Indian businesses. India spends 0.9% of its gross domestic product (GDP) on R&amp;D, and that is pegged to rise to 2% by 2017, with the private sector's contribution rising from just 0.2% to 1% of GDP. The government hopes to rope businesses into spending more on science through public–private partnerships. Around 10–15% of the R&amp;D investment in the plan has been earmarked for such partnerships. "I doubt if we could reach 1% of GDP on R&amp;D by the corporate sector," says Lingadahalli Shashidhara, a biologist at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Pune. The culture of businesses funding research by public organizations is alien to India, Shashidhara says. But he adds that none of the targets set out in the twelfth plan are completely out of reach. "I am very optimistic about Indian science," he says.
India prepares to boost science - Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.12135
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11467
Amazon fire analysis hits new heights - Nature
2012-09-24
Angelo; Claudio
<div><p>Airborne measurements of smoke from burning forests may close gaps in climate models.</p><div>
 <div><div></div><p>Fires in the Amazon cause a host of environmental problems.
 Credit: Stock Connection Blue/Alamy</p></div><p>A group of scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom are taking an unusual tropical field trip: 21 days flying in and out of heavy smoke plumes from wildfires in the Amazon and measuring everything they can, from the size of cloud droplets to the thickness of the aerosol column up to the stratosphere.</p><p>The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance.</p><p>The SAMBBA (South American Biomass Burning Analysis) mission uses a four-engine jet aeroplane carrying a suite of instruments that can take measurements up to 12 kilometres above the canopy. Previous airborne campaigns used smaller planes and flew at much lower altitudes, so were unable to observe some crucial physical processes. “The Amazon is dominated by high-altitude convection clouds. If we don’t understand how they process energy and how fires interfere with them, we can’t make good weather predictions,” says Paulo Artaxo, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, one of the scientists leading SAMBBA along with researchers from Britain’s Met Office, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the UK's Natural Environment Research Council and several British universities.</p><p>One of the instruments on board is a LiDAR, a laser that measures how much light is being blocked by aerosol particles from smoke at various altitudes. That local “dimming” of the atmosphere hampers photosynthesis, sometimes dramatically: local-scale measurements have shown decreases in plant productivity of around 30%<sup><a href="/articles/nature.2012.11467#ref-CR1">1</a></sup>. “We want to have an estimate for the whole Amazon”, says Artaxo.</p><p>More importantly, aerosols may actually produce cooling at the surface as well as warming at mid altitudes, says Karla Longo, a senior scientist at INPE and one of the 40 SAMBBA field researchers. Current models cannot account for such complex interactions, and therefore can’t accurately predict how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and burning biomass will affect the radiation balance of the world’s largest tropical forest. “The very direction of the error signal in our models, whether it is towards warming or cooling, is hard to predict,” says Longo.</p><p>Ben Johnson, a member of the team from the Met Office, says that information on those aerosols is also important for improving global weather forecasts. “This is the first time we have measured biomass burning emissions from tropical forest with such comprehensive instrumentation.”</p><p>But SAMBBA will provide local benefits, too says Johnson. It is measuring substances that affect air quality in Amazonian cities, such as nitrogen oxides and other compounds that react to form polluting ozone at low altitudes. And ozone concentrations are known to be higher in the Amazon during the burning season than in the heavily polluted São Paulo metropolitan area. INPE has developed air-quality models that account for ozone and for particulate matter, but ozone-forming substances have never been measured before across the whole Amazon. One such compound, peroxyacetyl nitrate, was found in surprisingly high concentrations during SAMBBA’s first flights over Acre, in the Western Amazon. That kind of information will help to improve air-quality forecasting. “That result alone is worth the experiment,” says Artaxo. </p>
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 Amazon fire analysis hits new heights

 * Claudio Angelo

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 Airborne measurements of smoke from burning forests may close gaps in climate models.

 Fires in the Amazon cause a host of environmental problems. Credit: Stock Connection Blue/Alamy

 A group of scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom are taking an unusual tropical field trip: 21 days flying in and out of heavy smoke plumes from wildfires in the Amazon and measuring everything they can, from the size of cloud droplets to the thickness of the aerosol column up to the stratosphere.

 The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance.

 The SAMBBA (South American Biomass Burning Analysis) mission uses a four-engine jet aeroplane carrying a suite of instruments that can take measurements up to 12 kilometres above the canopy. Previous airborne campaigns used smaller planes and flew at much lower altitudes, so were unable to observe some crucial physical processes. “The Amazon is dominated by high-altitude convection clouds. If we don’t understand how they process energy and how fires interfere with them, we can’t make good weather predictions,” says Paulo Artaxo, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, one of the scientists leading SAMBBA along with researchers from Britain’s Met Office, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the UK's Natural Environment Research Council and several British universities.

 One of the instruments on board is a LiDAR, a laser that measures how much light is being blocked by aerosol particles from smoke at various altitudes. That local “dimming” of the atmosphere hampers photosynthesis, sometimes dramatically: local-scale measurements have shown decreases in plant productivity of around 30%1. “We want to have an estimate for the whole Amazon”, says Artaxo.

 More importantly, aerosols may actually produce cooling at the surface as well as warming at mid altitudes, says Karla Longo, a senior scientist at INPE and one of the 40 SAMBBA field researchers. Current models cannot account for such complex interactions, and therefore can’t accurately predict how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and burning biomass will affect the radiation balance of the world’s largest tropical forest. “The very direction of the error signal in our models, whether it is towards warming or cooling, is hard to predict,” says Longo.

 Ben Johnson, a member of the team from the Met Office, says that information on those aerosols is also important for improving global weather forecasts. “This is the first time we have measured biomass burning emissions from tropical forest with such comprehensive instrumentation.”

 But SAMBBA will provide local benefits, too says Johnson. It is measuring substances that affect air quality in Amazonian cities, such as nitrogen oxides and other compounds that react to form polluting ozone at low altitudes. And ozone concentrations are known to be higher in the Amazon during the burning season than in the heavily polluted São Paulo metropolitan area. INPE has developed air-quality models that account for ozone and for particulate matter, but ozone-forming substances have never been measured before across the whole Amazon. One such compound, peroxyacetyl nitrate, was found in surprisingly high concentrations during SAMBBA’s first flights over Acre, in the Western Amazon. That kind of information will help to improve air-quality forecasting. “That result alone is worth the experiment,” says Artaxo.

 References

 1. Oliveira, P. H. F. et al. Tellus B Chem Phys Meteorol. 59, 338–349 (2007).

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 Brazil unveils tool to track emissions 2012-Aug-29

 Break down boundaries in climate research 2012-Jan-18

 Atmospheric science: A towering experiment 2010-Sep-22

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 Angelo, C. Amazon fire analysis hits new heights. Nature (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2012.11467

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Airborne measurements of smoke from burning forests may close gaps in climate models. 
    Fires in the Amazon cause a host of environmental problems.
 Credit: Stock Connection Blue/Alamy  A group of scientists from Brazil and the United Kingdom are taking an unusual tropical field trip: 21 days flying in and out of heavy smoke plumes from wildfires in the Amazon and measuring everything they can, from the size of cloud droplets to the thickness of the aerosol column up to the stratosphere. The goal is to understand how burning biomass in South America is affecting the local weather and air quality, and to close crucial gaps in climate models about how the process changes Earth’s radiation balance. The SAMBBA (South American Biomass Burning Analysis) mission uses a four-engine jet aeroplane carrying a suite of instruments that can take measurements up to 12 kilometres above the canopy. Previous airborne campaigns used smaller planes and flew at much lower altitudes, so were unable to observe some crucial physical processes. “The Amazon is dominated by high-altitude convection clouds. If we don’t understand how they process energy and how fires interfere with them, we can’t make good weather predictions,” says Paulo Artaxo, a physicist and climate scientist at the University of São Paulo in Brazil, one of the scientists leading SAMBBA along with researchers from Britain’s Met Office, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), the UK's Natural Environment Research Council and several British universities. One of the instruments on board is a LiDAR, a laser that measures how much light is being blocked by aerosol particles from smoke at various altitudes. That local “dimming” of the atmosphere hampers photosynthesis, sometimes dramatically: local-scale measurements have shown decreases in plant productivity of around 30% 1 . “We want to have an estimate for the whole Amazon”, says Artaxo. More importantly, aerosols may actually produce cooling at the surface as well as warming at mid altitudes, says Karla Longo, a senior scientist at INPE and one of the 40 SAMBBA field researchers. Current models cannot account for such complex interactions, and therefore can’t accurately predict how increasing carbon dioxide concentrations and burning biomass will affect the radiation balance of the world’s largest tropical forest. “The very direction of the error signal in our models, whether it is towards warming or cooling, is hard to predict,” says Longo. Ben Johnson, a member of the team from the Met Office, says that information on those aerosols is also important for improving global weather forecasts. “This is the first time we have measured biomass burning emissions from tropical forest with such comprehensive instrumentation.” But SAMBBA will provide local benefits, too says Johnson. It is measuring substances that affect air quality in Amazonian cities, such as nitrogen oxides and other compounds that react to form polluting ozone at low altitudes. And ozone concentrations are known to be higher in the Amazon during the burning season than in the heavily polluted São Paulo metropolitan area. INPE has developed air-quality models that account for ozone and for particulate matter, but ozone-forming substances have never been measured before across the whole Amazon. One such compound, peroxyacetyl nitrate, was found in surprisingly high concentrations during SAMBBA’s first flights over Acre, in the Western Amazon. That kind of information will help to improve air-quality forecasting. “That result alone is worth the experiment,” says Artaxo.
Amazon fire analysis hits new heights - Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11467
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-minorities-will-decide-the-2012-u-s-election/
Why Minorities Will Decide the 2012 U.S. Election
2012-05-01
William H Frey
<div><div>
	<p>With Republican Mitt Romney now his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, both his campaign and President Obama’s re-election effort are barnstorming the nation for votes. </p>
<p>For former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, this means recapturing the enthusiasm of the 2010 midterm GOP rout, especially among white Republican leaning voting blocs concerned about taxes and excessive government spending. </p>
<p>For the Democratic president, it means tapping into the groundswell that got him elected in 2008, particularly when it comes to minority voters. </p>
<p>Obama and the Democrats believe demography is on their side. Census 2010 made abundantly clear that racial and ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, are dominating national growth and will for <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/2011/0325_census_demographics_frey.aspx">decades to come</a>. The Democratic agenda— favoring broader federal support for medical care, housing, and education seems designed to curry the favor of these groups, which played a huge role in tipping the balance in his favor in several <a href="http://www.frey-demographer.org/reports/R-2009-2_HowRaceAffect2008Election.pdf">key swing states</a>. </p>
<p>But while demography is often destiny, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk that minorities can carry the day for Obama this time. The reasons have to do with the complications of translating pure demographics into votes and the outsized role that the nation’s still large white population can exert on national politics. </p>
<p>The 2010 midterm Republican surge is an example. With the economy in freefall and disenchantment with early Obama initiatives rising, even sympathetic white voting blocs—like college graduate women— fled the Democrats in what The National Journal’s Ron Brownstein termed a “<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/print/2011/01/the-democrats-white-flight/69047/">white flight</a>.” </p>
<p>Of course the president’s public approval ratings have risen since then, and the economy has picked up some. The country is clearly not at the same place economically as it was in 2008 or 2010. </p>
<p>Recently released Census Bureau Current Population Survey data from January 2012 permit a simulation of this year’s election under different white and minority voting scenarios. They show that Obama’s reelection is even more dependent on minority support than in 2008—and not just in the most racially diverse states. Two factors are key to translating minority population into votes in 2012: eligibility and turnout. </p>
	
<p>
 <strong>The minority/eligible voter disconnect.</strong>
</p>
<p>The minority representation in the total population overstates its presence among eligible voters because our fastest growing minorities are either too young to vote or are less likely to be citizens, even when here legally. For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens. In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote. In this respect, Asians are more like Hispanics and blacks are more like whites. So even though minorities are growing faster than whites overall, the latter are more heavily represented among eligible voters (71 percent) than in the total population (63 percent). </p>
<p>
 </p>
<p>This disparity is even larger in many fast growing “new minority” states. In Nevada, whites comprise 51 percent of the population but fully 61 percent of eligible voters. Other states where minority voters are strongly underrepresented include Arizona, California, Texas, and Florida (<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/0501_race_election_frey_table1.pdf"><strong>Table 1</strong></a>).</p>
<p>Further diminishing minority electoral clout is lower voter turnout. In each of the last two elections, the share of eligible minority voters who voted was 15 to 20 percent less than for whites. Turnout rates were smallest for the fast growing Hispanic and Asian populations. As a consequence, the white share of actual voters will be even larger than it is among eligible voters (estimated to be about 75 percent of voters in November).</p>
<p>
 <strong>Why minorities mattered in 2008.</strong>
</p>
<p>Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.</p>
<p>The uptick in minority enthusiasm for the first black presidential candidate resulted in higher turnout rates, and larger Democratic vote margins nationally than in 2004. This was the case in most but not all states, including Nevada and Florida, where Hispanics, blacks, and other minorities turned the tide toward the Democrats.</p>
<p>
 </p>
<p>Often overlooked, but just as important, was weaker white Republican support in terms of both turnout and margin. Although whites dominated the electorate in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, their tepid support for McCain opened the door for those states’ much smaller minority populations to tip the balance to Obama. In more diverse states like North Carolina and Virginia, minorities would not have made the difference were it not for sharply lower white Republican support than in 2004.</p>
<p>
 <strong>Minorities and the 2012 election.</strong>
</p>
<p>As we approach November, minorities will account for a slightly larger share of eligible voters than in 2008. At the same time, white support for the Republican candidate may be greater than in 2008. Which dynamic will prevail? </p>
<p>Three simulations—based on January 2012 eligible voter populations in every state (<a href="https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/0501_race_election_frey_table2.pdf"><strong>Table 2</strong></a>), but with different assumptions about white and minority turnout and voting—provide clues as to November’s possible results Each simulation assesses how many states and Electoral College votes Obama and Romney would win, and for which states minorities are responsible for the win (states where whites voted for the losing candidate).</p>
<p>Scenario A, the best case for Democrats, assumes that the 2008 turnout and voting patterns again apply to new population. If that occurs, Obama wins with 29 states and 358 electoral votes. These are the same states he took in 2008—changing racial demographics did not put any new states in his column. As with the 2008 win, 10 state victories (representing 39 percent of his electoral votes) can be attributed to minority voters. These states put him over the winning 270 electoral vote threshold. </p>
<p>
 </p>
<p>Scenario B, the best-case for Republicans, applies 2004 turnout and voting patterns to the 2012 population. This time, Romney beats Obama with 286 electoral votes in 30 states. The stronger white support for Republicans here, compared with Scenario A, is evident even in big states taken by Democrats, like California, New York and Illinois where whites voted Republican and minorities were responsible for the wins.</p>
<p>Scenario C signals something closer to what this year’s election promises—strong partisan participation for both whites and minorities. Whites in each state are assumed to mimic their 2004 turnout and voting patterns, reflecting higher levels of enthusiasm for the Republican nominee than in 2008. Minorities are presumed to follow their strong 2008 turnout and voting margins. The results favor an Obama win—but barely. </p>
<p>Obama squeaks by with 292 electoral votes spread among 24 states. Of these votes, 230 are attributable to 14 states where the minorities were responsible for his victory (including eight where whites voted for Obama in 2008). In essence, about four-fifths of Obama’s electoral votes are attributable to states won by minorities. Among the new states where Obama depends on minorities under this scenario are California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Among the 14 states, Obama’s victories in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon (66 electoral votes total) would be particularly close. </p>
<p>This scenario awards Romney five states that Obama won in 2008: Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and Colorado. The 27 states (and 246 electoral votes) that Romney gains under this scenario are not all decisive wins either. While whites vote Republican in each, overall margins are very close in Ohio and Missouri, large states with substantial minority populations. </p>
<p>Whatever scenario comes to pass, minorities are going to matter in November. The new demography of the electorate guarantees it. Their significance lies not just in racially diverse battleground states on the coasts, Southeast, and Mountain West. If the white Republican base turns out in full force, the votes of African Americans and growing Hispanic populations will be necessary for Democratic wins in a slew of interior states with largely white electorates. The 2012 election will most assuredly be a battle of turnout and its outcome will greatly depend on the enthusiasm of minority voting blocs. </p>
<p>
 <em><strong>Editor’s Note: </strong>This piece has a <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2013/05/10-election-2012-minority-voter-turnout-frey">follow-up paper</a> written after the 2012 election.</em></p>
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 Op-Ed

 Why Minorities Will Decide the 2012 U.S. Election

 William H. Frey Tuesday, May 1, 2012
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 With Republican Mitt Romney now his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, both his campaign and President Obama’s re-election effort are barnstorming the nation for votes.

 For former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, this means recapturing the enthusiasm of the 2010 midterm GOP rout, especially among white Republican leaning voting blocs concerned about taxes and excessive government spending.

 For the Democratic president, it means tapping into the groundswell that got him elected in 2008, particularly when it comes to minority voters.

 Obama and the Democrats believe demography is on their side. Census 2010 made abundantly clear that racial and ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, are dominating national growth and will for decades to come. The Democratic agenda— favoring broader federal support for medical care, housing, and education seems designed to curry the favor of these groups, which played a huge role in tipping the balance in his favor in several key swing states.

 But while demography is often destiny, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk that minorities can carry the day for Obama this time. The reasons have to do with the complications of translating pure demographics into votes and the outsized role that the nation’s still large white population can exert on national politics.

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 Edited by Michael E. O’Hanlon
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 The 2010 midterm Republican surge is an example. With the economy in freefall and disenchantment with early Obama initiatives rising, even sympathetic white voting blocs—like college graduate women— fled the Democrats in what The National Journal’s Ron Brownstein termed a “white flight.”

 Of course the president’s public approval ratings have risen since then, and the economy has picked up some. The country is clearly not at the same place economically as it was in 2008 or 2010.

 Recently released Census Bureau Current Population Survey data from January 2012 permit a simulation of this year’s election under different white and minority voting scenarios. They show that Obama’s reelection is even more dependent on minority support than in 2008—and not just in the most racially diverse states. Two factors are key to translating minority population into votes in 2012: eligibility and turnout.

 William H. Frey

 Senior Fellow - Brookings Metro

 The minority/eligible voter disconnect.

 The minority representation in the total population overstates its presence among eligible voters because our fastest growing minorities are either too young to vote or are less likely to be citizens, even when here legally. For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens. In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote. In this respect, Asians are more like Hispanics and blacks are more like whites. So even though minorities are growing faster than whites overall, the latter are more heavily represented among eligible voters (71 percent) than in the total population (63 percent).

 This disparity is even larger in many fast growing “new minority” states. In Nevada, whites comprise 51 percent of the population but fully 61 percent of eligible voters. Other states where minority voters are strongly underrepresented include Arizona, California, Texas, and Florida (Table 1).

 Further diminishing minority electoral clout is lower voter turnout. In each of the last two elections, the share of eligible minority voters who voted was 15 to 20 percent less than for whites. Turnout rates were smallest for the fast growing Hispanic and Asian populations. As a consequence, the white share of actual voters will be even larger than it is among eligible voters (estimated to be about 75 percent of voters in November).

 Why minorities mattered in 2008.

 Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.

 The uptick in minority enthusiasm for the first black presidential candidate resulted in higher turnout rates, and larger Democratic vote margins nationally than in 2004. This was the case in most but not all states, including Nevada and Florida, where Hispanics, blacks, and other minorities turned the tide toward the Democrats.

 Often overlooked, but just as important, was weaker white Republican support in terms of both turnout and margin. Although whites dominated the electorate in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, their tepid support for McCain opened the door for those states’ much smaller minority populations to tip the balance to Obama. In more diverse states like North Carolina and Virginia, minorities would not have made the difference were it not for sharply lower white Republican support than in 2004.

 Minorities and the 2012 election.

 As we approach November, minorities will account for a slightly larger share of eligible voters than in 2008. At the same time, white support for the Republican candidate may be greater than in 2008. Which dynamic will prevail?

 Three simulations—based on January 2012 eligible voter populations in every state (Table 2), but with different assumptions about white and minority turnout and voting—provide clues as to November’s possible results Each simulation assesses how many states and Electoral College votes Obama and Romney would win, and for which states minorities are responsible for the win (states where whites voted for the losing candidate).

 Scenario A, the best case for Democrats, assumes that the 2008 turnout and voting patterns again apply to new population. If that occurs, Obama wins with 29 states and 358 electoral votes. These are the same states he took in 2008—changing racial demographics did not put any new states in his column. As with the 2008 win, 10 state victories (representing 39 percent of his electoral votes) can be attributed to minority voters. These states put him over the winning 270 electoral vote threshold.

 Scenario B, the best-case for Republicans, applies 2004 turnout and voting patterns to the 2012 population. This time, Romney beats Obama with 286 electoral votes in 30 states. The stronger white support for Republicans here, compared with Scenario A, is evident even in big states taken by Democrats, like California, New York and Illinois where whites voted Republican and minorities were responsible for the wins.

 Scenario C signals something closer to what this year’s election promises—strong partisan participation for both whites and minorities. Whites in each state are assumed to mimic their 2004 turnout and voting patterns, reflecting higher levels of enthusiasm for the Republican nominee than in 2008. Minorities are presumed to follow their strong 2008 turnout and voting margins. The results favor an Obama win—but barely.

 Obama squeaks by with 292 electoral votes spread among 24 states. Of these votes, 230 are attributable to 14 states where the minorities were responsible for his victory (including eight where whites voted for Obama in 2008). In essence, about four-fifths of Obama’s electoral votes are attributable to states won by minorities. Among the new states where Obama depends on minorities under this scenario are California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Among the 14 states, Obama’s victories in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon (66 electoral votes total) would be particularly close.

 This scenario awards Romney five states that Obama won in 2008: Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and Colorado. The 27 states (and 246 electoral votes) that Romney gains under this scenario are not all decisive wins either. While whites vote Republican in each, overall margins are very close in Ohio and Missouri, large states with substantial minority populations.

 Whatever scenario comes to pass, minorities are going to matter in November. The new demography of the electorate guarantees it. Their significance lies not just in racially diverse battleground states on the coasts, Southeast, and Mountain West. If the white Republican base turns out in full force, the votes of African Americans and growing Hispanic populations will be necessary for Democratic wins in a slew of interior states with largely white electorates. The 2012 election will most assuredly be a battle of turnout and its outcome will greatly depend on the enthusiasm of minority voting blocs.

 Editor’s Note: This piece has a follow-up paper written after the 2012 election.

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With Republican Mitt Romney now his party’s presumptive presidential nominee, both his campaign and President Obama’s re-election effort are barnstorming the nation for votes. 
For former Massachusetts Gov. Romney, this means recapturing the enthusiasm of the 2010 midterm GOP rout, especially among white Republican leaning voting blocs concerned about taxes and excessive government spending. 
For the Democratic president, it means tapping into the groundswell that got him elected in 2008, particularly when it comes to minority voters. 
Obama and the Democrats believe demography is on their side. Census 2010 made abundantly clear that racial and ethnic minorities, especially Hispanics, are dominating national growth and will for decades to come. The Democratic agenda— favoring broader federal support for medical care, housing, and education seems designed to curry the favor of these groups, which played a huge role in tipping the balance in his favor in several key swing states. 
But while demography is often destiny, it’s not necessarily a slam dunk that minorities can carry the day for Obama this time. The reasons have to do with the complications of translating pure demographics into votes and the outsized role that the nation’s still large white population can exert on national politics. 
The 2010 midterm Republican surge is an example. With the economy in freefall and disenchantment with early Obama initiatives rising, even sympathetic white voting blocs—like college graduate women— fled the Democrats in what The National Journal’s Ron Brownstein termed a “white flight.” 
Of course the president’s public approval ratings have risen since then, and the economy has picked up some. The country is clearly not at the same place economically as it was in 2008 or 2010. 
Recently released Census Bureau Current Population Survey data from January 2012 permit a simulation of this year’s election under different white and minority voting scenarios. They show that Obama’s reelection is even more dependent on minority support than in 2008—and not just in the most racially diverse states. Two factors are key to translating minority population into votes in 2012: eligibility and turnout. 
	
 The minority/eligible voter disconnect.
The minority representation in the total population overstates its presence among eligible voters because our fastest growing minorities are either too young to vote or are less likely to be citizens, even when here legally. For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens. In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote. In this respect, Asians are more like Hispanics and blacks are more like whites. So even though minorities are growing faster than whites overall, the latter are more heavily represented among eligible voters (71 percent) than in the total population (63 percent). 
 
This disparity is even larger in many fast growing “new minority” states. In Nevada, whites comprise 51 percent of the population but fully 61 percent of eligible voters. Other states where minority voters are strongly underrepresented include Arizona, California, Texas, and Florida ( Table 1 ).
Further diminishing minority electoral clout is lower voter turnout. In each of the last two elections, the share of eligible minority voters who voted was 15 to 20 percent less than for whites. Turnout rates were smallest for the fast growing Hispanic and Asian populations. As a consequence, the white share of actual voters will be even larger than it is among eligible voters (estimated to be about 75 percent of voters in November).
 Why minorities mattered in 2008.
Minorities mattered in 2008 for three reasons: first, their relative sizes compared with whites increased in each state; second, their enthusiasm for the Democratic candidate was greater than in 2004; and third, white support for the Republican candidate (John McCain) waned in comparison to the previous election.
The uptick in minority enthusiasm for the first black presidential candidate resulted in higher turnout rates, and larger Democratic vote margins nationally than in 2004. This was the case in most but not all states, including Nevada and Florida, where Hispanics, blacks, and other minorities turned the tide toward the Democrats.
 
Often overlooked, but just as important, was weaker white Republican support in terms of both turnout and margin. Although whites dominated the electorate in states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana, their tepid support for McCain opened the door for those states’ much smaller minority populations to tip the balance to Obama. In more diverse states like North Carolina and Virginia, minorities would not have made the difference were it not for sharply lower white Republican support than in 2004.
 Minorities and the 2012 election.
As we approach November, minorities will account for a slightly larger share of eligible voters than in 2008. At the same time, white support for the Republican candidate may be greater than in 2008. Which dynamic will prevail? 
Three simulations—based on January 2012 eligible voter populations in every state ( Table 2 ), but with different assumptions about white and minority turnout and voting—provide clues as to November’s possible results Each simulation assesses how many states and Electoral College votes Obama and Romney would win, and for which states minorities are responsible for the win (states where whites voted for the losing candidate).
Scenario A, the best case for Democrats, assumes that the 2008 turnout and voting patterns again apply to new population. If that occurs, Obama wins with 29 states and 358 electoral votes. These are the same states he took in 2008—changing racial demographics did not put any new states in his column. As with the 2008 win, 10 state victories (representing 39 percent of his electoral votes) can be attributed to minority voters. These states put him over the winning 270 electoral vote threshold. 
 
Scenario B, the best-case for Republicans, applies 2004 turnout and voting patterns to the 2012 population. This time, Romney beats Obama with 286 electoral votes in 30 states. The stronger white support for Republicans here, compared with Scenario A, is evident even in big states taken by Democrats, like California, New York and Illinois where whites voted Republican and minorities were responsible for the wins.
Scenario C signals something closer to what this year’s election promises—strong partisan participation for both whites and minorities. Whites in each state are assumed to mimic their 2004 turnout and voting patterns, reflecting higher levels of enthusiasm for the Republican nominee than in 2008. Minorities are presumed to follow their strong 2008 turnout and voting margins. The results favor an Obama win—but barely. 
Obama squeaks by with 292 electoral votes spread among 24 states. Of these votes, 230 are attributable to 14 states where the minorities were responsible for his victory (including eight where whites voted for Obama in 2008). In essence, about four-fifths of Obama’s electoral votes are attributable to states won by minorities. Among the new states where Obama depends on minorities under this scenario are California, New York, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin. Among the 14 states, Obama’s victories in Florida, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Oregon (66 electoral votes total) would be particularly close. 
This scenario awards Romney five states that Obama won in 2008: Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana and Colorado. The 27 states (and 246 electoral votes) that Romney gains under this scenario are not all decisive wins either. While whites vote Republican in each, overall margins are very close in Ohio and Missouri, large states with substantial minority populations. 
Whatever scenario comes to pass, minorities are going to matter in November. The new demography of the electorate guarantees it. Their significance lies not just in racially diverse battleground states on the coasts, Southeast, and Mountain West. If the white Republican base turns out in full force, the votes of African Americans and growing Hispanic populations will be necessary for Democratic wins in a slew of interior states with largely white electorates. The 2012 election will most assuredly be a battle of turnout and its outcome will greatly depend on the enthusiasm of minority voting blocs. 
  Editor’s Note: This piece has a follow-up paper written after the 2012 election.
Why Minorities Will Decide the 2012 U.S. Election
https://www.brookings.edu/opinions/why-minorities-will-decide-the-2012-u-s-election/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/
Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
2012-06-13
Anne-Marie Slaughter
<div><article><header><div><div><p>It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.</p></div><div><figure><div></div><figcaption>Philip Toledano</figcaption></figure></div></div></header><section><p>Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.</p><div><p><a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/debates/women-workplace"></a></p><p> A debate on career and family <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/debates/women-workplace/"> <b>See full coverage</b> </a></p></div><p>As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”</p><p>She was horrified. “You <i>can’t</i> write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.</p><p>A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. <i>I’ve</i> never had to compromise, and <i>my</i> kids turned out great”).</p><p>The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you <i>can</i> have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that <i>they</i> are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).</p><hr /><p><b>VIDEO:</b> Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.</p><hr /><p>Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/12/having-it-all/488636/">make compromises</a> that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.</p><p>The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.</p><p>I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.</p><p>Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.</p><p>I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).</p><p>In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.</p><p>I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”</p><p>Yet the decision to <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/05/why-dont-more-american-moms-work-part-time/618741/">step down</a> from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, <i>The</i><i>New York Times </i>covered her decision as follows:</p><div><blockquote>Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.</blockquote></div><p>Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would <i>actually</i> step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.</p><p>Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”</p><p>A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?”</p><p>They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.</p><p>I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching <i>Mad Men</i>, and who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.</p><p>But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of <i>Midlife Crisis at 30</i>, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:</p><div><blockquote>What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.</blockquote></div><p>I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.</p><p>Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.</p><p>The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.</p><p></p><h3><b>The Half-Truths We Hold Dear </b></h3><p></p><p>Let’s briefly examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.</p><p><i><b>It’s possible if you are just committed enough. </b> </i></p><p>Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. <i>They are not committed enough</i>, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.</p><p>Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.”</p><p>What’s more, among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family. Can “insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.</p><p>The line of high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.</p><p>These numbers are all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.</p><p>Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.</p><p>Consider some of the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for <i>The Boston Globe</i>, told Zenko that among other reasons,</p><div><blockquote>the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.</blockquote></div><p>Jolynn Shoemaker, the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”</p><p>These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/school-day-sleep-workday/570658/">school schedules and work schedules</a>, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.</p><p><b><i>It’s possible if you marry the right person.</i></b></p><p>Sandberg’s second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal. During the Q&amp;A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian <i>palacsinta</i>; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.</p><p>Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will <i>feel</i> as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.</p><p>Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.</p><p>Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.</p><p>Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In <i>Midlife Crisis at 30</i>, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:</p><div><blockquote>Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.</blockquote></div><p>But Matalin goes on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:</p><div><blockquote>I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.</blockquote></div><p>To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying.</p><p>It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.</p><p>In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.</p><p><b><i>It’s possible if you sequence it right.</i></b></p><p>Young women should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong.</p><p>The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.</p><p>Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.</p><p>When I was the dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of <i>The Good Wife</i> notwithstanding.</p><p>These considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/07/how-long-can-you-wait-to-have-a-baby/309374/">trying to have a baby</a>. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply left having a biological child until it was too late.</p><p>And when everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.</p><p>Many women of my generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.</p><p>Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.</p><p>You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.</p><p></p><h3><b>Changing the Culture of Face Time </b></h3><p></p><p>Back in the Reagan administration, a <i>New York Times</i> story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)</p><p>The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.</p><p>But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski observed:</p><div><blockquote>Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.</blockquote></div><p>I have worked very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take his jacket home. <i> </i></p><p>Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office <i>some</i> of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.</p><p>Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.</p><p>One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon.</p><p>One real-world example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to France, writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to London to coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room (or chatting at the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do intensive ‘network maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the distance and quiet to be a real advantage in a strategic role, providing I have put in the investment up front to develop very strong personal relationships with the game changers.” Owen recognizes that not every job can be done this way. But she says that for her part, she has been able to combine family requirements with her career.</p><p>Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.” When I was the dean of the Wilson School, I managed with the mantra “Family comes first”—any family—and found that my employees were both productive and intensely loyal.</p><p>None of these changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in 2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.</p><p></p><h3><b>Revaluing Family Values </b></h3><p></p><p>While employers shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead. Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities. Consider the following proposition: An employer has two equally talented and productive employees. One trains for and runs marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of two children. What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the marathon runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out there even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and willing to push himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when nothing seems to go right in the service of a goal far in the distance. That he must manage his time exceptionally well to squeeze all of that in.</p><p>Be honest: Do you think the employer makes those same assumptions about the parent? Even though she likely rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at work, organizes her children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets them off to school, figures out shopping and other errands even if she is lucky enough to have a housekeeper—and does much the same work at the end of the day. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of staff, has twins in elementary school; even with a fully engaged husband, she famously gets up at four every morning to check and send e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three young children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time.</p><p>Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar story. When she had two young children and a part-time law practice, she struggled to find enough time to write the papers and articles that would help get her an academic position. In her words:</p><div><blockquote>I needed a plan. I figured out that writing time was when Alex was asleep. So the minute I put him down for a nap or he fell asleep in the baby swing, I went to my desk and started working on something—footnotes, reading, outlining, writing … I learned to do everything else with a baby on my hip.</blockquote></div><p>The discipline, organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week. But that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making allowances, but when making promotions. Perhaps because people <i>choose </i>to have children? People also choose to run marathons.</p><p>One final example: I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with an enormously demanding job.</p><p>It is hard to imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work.</p><p>Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.</p><p></p><h3><b>Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career </b></h3><p></p><p>The American definition of a successful professional is someone who can climb the ladder the furthest in the shortest time, generally peaking between ages 45 and 55. It is a definition well suited to the mid-20th century, an era when people had kids in their 20s, stayed in one job, retired at 67, and were dead, on average, by age 71.</p><p>It makes far less sense today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has increased to 80; men and women in good health can easily work until they are 75. They can expect to have multiple jobs and even multiple careers throughout their working life. Couples marry later, have kids later, and can expect to live on two incomes. They may well retire <i>earlier</i>—the average retirement age has gone down from 67 to 63—but that is commonly “retirement” only in the sense of collecting retirement benefits. Many people go on to “encore” careers.</p><p>Assuming the priceless gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman can thus expect her <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/07/work-peak-professional-decline/590650/">working life</a> to stretch some 50 years, from her early or mid-20s to her mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she will build her credentials and establish herself, at least in her first career, between 22 and 35; she will have children, if she wants them, sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18; and she should plan to take positions of maximum authority and demands on her time after her children are out of the house. Women who have children in their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top in their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing director, or senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical practice before having children in their late 30s should be coming back on line for the most demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age.</p><p>Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years. I think of these plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical in Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an election year when many of my friends were advising various candidates on foreign-policy issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting money in the family bank,” taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a close year together in a foreign culture. But we were also investing in our children’s ability to learn Mandarin and in our own knowledge of Asia.</p><p>Peaking in your late 50s and early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes particular sense for women, who live longer than men. And many of the stereotypes about older workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of human-resources professionals shows that only 23 percent think older workers are less flexible than younger workers; only 11 percent think older workers require more training than younger workers; and only 7 percent think older workers have less drive than younger workers.</p><p>Whether women will really have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however, will again depend in part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of promotions, taking time out periodically, pursuing an alternative path during crucial parenting or parent-care years—all have to become more visible and more noticeably accepted as a pause rather than an opt-out. (In an encouraging sign, <i>Mass Career Customization</i>, a 2007 book by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that “today’s career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a <i>Wall Street Journal </i>best seller.)</p><p>Institutions can also take concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in 1970, Princeton established a tenure-extension policy that allowed female assistant professors expecting a child to request a one-year extension on their tenure clocks. This policy was later extended to men, and broadened to include adoptions. In the early 2000s, two reports on the status of female faculty discovered that only about 3 percent of assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given year. And in response to a survey question, women were much more likely than men to think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant professor’s career.</p><p>So in 2005, under President Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The administration announced that all assistant professors, female and male, who had a new child would <i>automatically</i> receive a one-year extension on the tenure clock, with no opt-outs allowed. Instead, assistant professors could request early consideration for tenure if they wished. The number of assistant professors who receive a tenure extension has tripled since the change.</p><p>One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are poles apart politically, but he went way up in my estimation when he announced that one reason he decided against running for president in 2012 was the impact his campaign would have had on his children. He reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in Louisiana that he didn’t want to be away from his children for long periods of time; according to a Republican official at the event, he said that “his son [missed] him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for president, but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn around and join the GOP ticket this fall).</p><p>If we are looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her determination to limit her participation in the presidential election campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for college.</p><p></p><h3><b>Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness </b></h3><p></p><p>One of the most complicated and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was coming to grips with what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried to work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time at home. I might have been able to get my family to join me in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get classified technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week instead of five. (While this last change would have still left me very little time at home, given the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for another year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just <i>need</i> to go home. Deep down, I <i>wanted</i> to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions is deeply satisfying.</p><p>The flip side of my realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the importance of bringing the different parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:</p><div><blockquote>If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.</blockquote></div><p>Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I was a law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school performance, but instead invented a much more neutral excuse.</p><p>Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.</p><p>After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You <i>have</i> to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.</p><p>Ten years later, whenever I am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I insist that the person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and <i>not</i> include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I make the request. They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted me to mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life.</p><p>This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later in the evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction.</p><p>Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book <i>The Top Five Regrets of the Dying</i>, writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”</p><p>Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the <a href="http://www.happiness-project.com/">“happiness project,”</a> meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.)</p><p>It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home.</p><p></p><h3><b>Innovation Nation </b></h3><p></p><p>As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.</p><p>In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the <i>Academy of Management Journal</i> in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.</p><p>This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.</p><p>Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book <i>Law and Reorder</i>, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.</p><p>At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.</p><p>Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, <i>A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change</i>, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”</p><p>Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.</p><p>No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote <i>The Strategy of Conflict</i>, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”</p><p>The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.</p><p></p><h3><b>Enlisting Men </b></h3><p></p><p>Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives.</p><p>Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career.</p><p>Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:</p><div><blockquote>I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home.</blockquote></div><p>Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real).</p><p>Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money.</p><p>I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council.</p><p>These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”</p><p>I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with <i>Salve</i> (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.</p><p>I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate <i>our</i> choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.</p><p>We’ll create a better society in the process, for <i>all</i> women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek.</p></section></article></div>||||I|||| Skip to content

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 More From Votes for Women

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 Why Women Still Can’t Have It All

 It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.

 By Anne-Marie Slaughter

 Philip Toledano

 July/August 2012 Issue
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 Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.

 A debate on career and family See full coverage

 As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’”

 She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could.

 A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”).

 The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).

 VIDEO: Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.

 Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make.

 The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk.

 I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed.

 B efore my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation.

 I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home).

 In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long.

 I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”

 Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, TheNew York Times covered her decision as follows:

 Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.

 Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out.

 Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.”

 A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?”

 They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family.

 I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers.

 But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:

 What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.

 I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks.

 Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men.

 The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

 The Half-Truths We Hold Dear

 Let’s briefly examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.

 It’s possible if you are just committed enough.

 Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made.

 Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.”

 What’s more, among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family. Can “insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure.

 The line of high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions.

 These numbers are all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream.

 Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed.

 Consider some of the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for The Boston Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,

 the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.

 Jolynn Shoemaker, the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.”

 These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.

 It’s possible if you marry the right person.

 Sandberg’s second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal. During the Q&A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help.

 Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case.

 Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job.

 Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive.

 Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:

 Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.

 But Matalin goes on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:

 I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.

 To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying.

 It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism.

 In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.

 It’s possible if you sequence it right.

 Young women should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong.

 The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement.

 Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act.

 When I was the dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife notwithstanding.

 These considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune trying to have a baby. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply left having a biological child until it was too late.

 And when everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life.

 Many women of my generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire.

 Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make.

 You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.

 Changing the Culture of Face Time

 Back in the Reagan administration, a New York Times story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.)

 The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s.

 But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski observed:

 Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.

 I have worked very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take his jacket home.

 Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work.

 Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances.

 One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon.

 One real-world example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to France, writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to London to coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room (or chatting at the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do intensive ‘network maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the distance and quiet to be a real advantage in a strategic role, providing I have put in the investment up front to develop very strong personal relationships with the game changers.” Owen recognizes that not every job can be done this way. But she says that for her part, she has been able to combine family requirements with her career.

 Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.” When I was the dean of the Wilson School, I managed with the mantra “Family comes first”—any family—and found that my employees were both productive and intensely loyal.

 None of these changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in 2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.

 Revaluing Family Values

 While employers shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead. Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities. Consider the following proposition: An employer has two equally talented and productive employees. One trains for and runs marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of two children. What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the marathon runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out there even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and willing to push himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when nothing seems to go right in the service of a goal far in the distance. That he must manage his time exceptionally well to squeeze all of that in.

 Be honest: Do you think the employer makes those same assumptions about the parent? Even though she likely rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at work, organizes her children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets them off to school, figures out shopping and other errands even if she is lucky enough to have a housekeeper—and does much the same work at the end of the day. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of staff, has twins in elementary school; even with a fully engaged husband, she famously gets up at four every morning to check and send e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three young children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time.

 Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar story. When she had two young children and a part-time law practice, she struggled to find enough time to write the papers and articles that would help get her an academic position. In her words:

 I needed a plan. I figured out that writing time was when Alex was asleep. So the minute I put him down for a nap or he fell asleep in the baby swing, I went to my desk and started working on something—footnotes, reading, outlining, writing … I learned to do everything else with a baby on my hip.

 The discipline, organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week. But that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making allowances, but when making promotions. Perhaps because people choose to have children? People also choose to run marathons.

 One final example: I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with an enormously demanding job.

 It is hard to imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work.

 Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.

 Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career

 The American definition of a successful professional is someone who can climb the ladder the furthest in the shortest time, generally peaking between ages 45 and 55. It is a definition well suited to the mid-20th century, an era when people had kids in their 20s, stayed in one job, retired at 67, and were dead, on average, by age 71.

 It makes far less sense today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has increased to 80; men and women in good health can easily work until they are 75. They can expect to have multiple jobs and even multiple careers throughout their working life. Couples marry later, have kids later, and can expect to live on two incomes. They may well retire earlier—the average retirement age has gone down from 67 to 63—but that is commonly “retirement” only in the sense of collecting retirement benefits. Many people go on to “encore” careers.

 Assuming the priceless gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman can thus expect her working life to stretch some 50 years, from her early or mid-20s to her mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she will build her credentials and establish herself, at least in her first career, between 22 and 35; she will have children, if she wants them, sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18; and she should plan to take positions of maximum authority and demands on her time after her children are out of the house. Women who have children in their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top in their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing director, or senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical practice before having children in their late 30s should be coming back on line for the most demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age.

 Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years. I think of these plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical in Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an election year when many of my friends were advising various candidates on foreign-policy issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting money in the family bank,” taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a close year together in a foreign culture. But we were also investing in our children’s ability to learn Mandarin and in our own knowledge of Asia.

 Peaking in your late 50s and early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes particular sense for women, who live longer than men. And many of the stereotypes about older workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of human-resources professionals shows that only 23 percent think older workers are less flexible than younger workers; only 11 percent think older workers require more training than younger workers; and only 7 percent think older workers have less drive than younger workers.

 Whether women will really have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however, will again depend in part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of promotions, taking time out periodically, pursuing an alternative path during crucial parenting or parent-care years—all have to become more visible and more noticeably accepted as a pause rather than an opt-out. (In an encouraging sign, Mass Career Customization, a 2007 book by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that “today’s career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a Wall Street Journal best seller.)

 Institutions can also take concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in 1970, Princeton established a tenure-extension policy that allowed female assistant professors expecting a child to request a one-year extension on their tenure clocks. This policy was later extended to men, and broadened to include adoptions. In the early 2000s, two reports on the status of female faculty discovered that only about 3 percent of assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given year. And in response to a survey question, women were much more likely than men to think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant professor’s career.

 So in 2005, under President Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The administration announced that all assistant professors, female and male, who had a new child would automatically receive a one-year extension on the tenure clock, with no opt-outs allowed. Instead, assistant professors could request early consideration for tenure if they wished. The number of assistant professors who receive a tenure extension has tripled since the change.

 One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are poles apart politically, but he went way up in my estimation when he announced that one reason he decided against running for president in 2012 was the impact his campaign would have had on his children. He reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in Louisiana that he didn’t want to be away from his children for long periods of time; according to a Republican official at the event, he said that “his son [missed] him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for president, but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn around and join the GOP ticket this fall).

 If we are looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her determination to limit her participation in the presidential election campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for college.

 Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness

 One of the most complicated and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was coming to grips with what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried to work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time at home. I might have been able to get my family to join me in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get classified technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week instead of five. (While this last change would have still left me very little time at home, given the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for another year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions is deeply satisfying.

 The flip side of my realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the importance of bringing the different parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:

 If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.

 Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I was a law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school performance, but instead invented a much more neutral excuse.

 Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference.

 After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You have to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together.

 Ten years later, whenever I am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I insist that the person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I make the request. They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted me to mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life.

 This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later in the evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction.

 Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.”

 Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.)

 It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home.

 Innovation Nation

 As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company.

 In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health.

 This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her.

 Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening.

 At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike.

 Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.”

 Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note.

 No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.”

 The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.

 Enlisting Men

 Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives.

 Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career.

 Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:

 I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home.

 Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real).

 Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money.

 I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council.

 These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.”

 I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about.

 I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us.

 We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek.

It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.      Philip Toledano      Eighteen months into my job as the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department, a foreign-policy dream job that traces its origins back to George Kennan, I found myself in New York, at the United Nations’ annual assemblage of every foreign minister and head of state in the world. On a Wednesday evening, President and Mrs. Obama hosted a glamorous reception at the American Museum of Natural History. I sipped champagne, greeted foreign dignitaries, and mingled. But I could not stop thinking about my 14-year-old son, who had started eighth grade three weeks earlier and was already resuming what had become his pattern of skipping homework, disrupting classes, failing math, and tuning out any adult who tried to reach him. Over the summer, we had barely spoken to each other—or, more accurately, he had barely spoken to me. And the previous spring I had received several urgent phone calls—invariably on the day of an important meeting—that required me to take the first train from Washington, D.C., where I worked, back to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived. My husband, who has always done everything possible to support my career, took care of him and his 12-year-old brother during the week; outside of those midweek emergencies, I came home only on weekends.       A debate on career and family  See full coverage    As the evening wore on, I ran into a colleague who held a senior position in the White House. She has two sons exactly my sons’ ages, but she had chosen to move them from California to D.C. when she got her job, which meant her husband commuted back to California regularly. I told her how difficult I was finding it to be away from my son when he clearly needed me. Then I said, “When this is over, I’m going to write an op-ed titled ‘Women Can’t Have It All.’” She was horrified. “You can’t write that,” she said. “You, of all people.” What she meant was that such a statement, coming from a high-profile career woman—a role model—would be a terrible signal to younger generations of women. By the end of the evening, she had talked me out of it, but for the remainder of my stint in Washington, I was increasingly aware that the feminist beliefs on which I had built my entire career were shifting under my feet. I had always assumed that if I could get a foreign-policy job in the State Department or the White House while my party was in power, I would stay the course as long as I had the opportunity to do work I loved. But in January 2011, when my two-year public-service leave from Princeton University was up, I hurried home as fast as I could. A rude epiphany hit me soon after I got there. When people asked why I had left government, I explained that I’d come home not only because of Princeton’s rules (after two years of leave, you lose your tenure), but also because of my desire to be with my family and my conclusion that juggling high-level government work with the needs of two teenage boys was not possible. I have not exactly left the ranks of full-time career women: I teach a full course load; write regular print and online columns on foreign policy; give 40 to 50 speeches a year; appear regularly on TV and radio; and am working on a new academic book. But I routinely got reactions from other women my age or older that ranged from disappointed (“It’s such a pity that you had to leave Washington”) to condescending (“I wouldn’t generalize from your experience. I’ve never had to compromise, and my kids turned out great”). The first set of reactions, with the underlying assumption that my choice was somehow sad or unfortunate, was irksome enough. But it was the second set of reactions—those implying that my parenting and/or my commitment to my profession were somehow substandard—that triggered a blind fury. Suddenly, finally, the penny dropped. All my life, I’d been on the other side of this exchange. I’d been the woman smiling the faintly superior smile while another woman told me she had decided to take some time out or pursue a less competitive career track so that she could spend more time with her family. I’d been the woman congratulating herself on her unswerving commitment to the feminist cause, chatting smugly with her dwindling number of college or law-school friends who had reached and maintained their place on the highest rungs of their profession. I’d been the one telling young women at my lectures that you can have it all and do it all, regardless of what field you are in. Which means I’d been part, albeit unwittingly, of making millions of women feel that they are to blame if they cannot manage to rise up the ladder as fast as men and also have a family and an active home life (and be thin and beautiful to boot).   VIDEO: Anne-Marie Slaughter talks with Hanna Rosin about the struggles of working mothers.  Last spring, I flew to Oxford to give a public lecture. At the request of a young Rhodes Scholar I know, I’d agreed to talk to the Rhodes community about “work-family balance.” I ended up speaking to a group of about 40 men and women in their mid-20s. What poured out of me was a set of very frank reflections on how unexpectedly hard it was to do the kind of job I wanted to do as a high government official and be the kind of parent I wanted to be, at a demanding time for my children (even though my husband, an academic, was willing to take on the lion’s share of parenting for the two years I was in Washington). I concluded by saying that my time in office had convinced me that further government service would be very unlikely while my sons were still at home. The audience was rapt, and asked many thoughtful questions. One of the first was from a young woman who began by thanking me for “not giving just one more fatuous ‘You can have it all’ talk.” Just about all of the women in that room planned to combine careers and family in some way. But almost all assumed and accepted that they would have to make compromises that the men in their lives were far less likely to have to make. The striking gap between the responses I heard from those young women (and others like them) and the responses I heard from my peers and associates prompted me to write this article. Women of my generation have clung to the feminist credo we were raised with, even as our ranks have been steadily thinned by unresolvable tensions between family and career, because we are determined not to drop the flag for the next generation. But when many members of the younger generation have stopped listening, on the grounds that glibly repeating “you can have it all” is simply airbrushing reality, it is time to talk. I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. My experiences over the past three years have forced me to confront a number of uncomfortable facts that need to be widely acknowledged—and quickly changed. Before my service in government, I’d spent my career in academia: as a law professor and then as the dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Both were demanding jobs, but I had the ability to set my own schedule most of the time. I could be with my kids when I needed to be, and still get the work done. I had to travel frequently, but I found I could make up for that with an extended period at home or a family vacation. I knew that I was lucky in my career choice, but I had no idea how lucky until I spent two years in Washington within a rigid bureaucracy, even with bosses as understanding as Hillary Clinton and her chief of staff, Cheryl Mills. My workweek started at 4:20 on Monday morning, when I got up to get the 5:30 train from Trenton to Washington. It ended late on Friday, with the train home. In between, the days were crammed with meetings, and when the meetings stopped, the writing work began—a never-ending stream of memos, reports, and comments on other people’s drafts. For two years, I never left the office early enough to go to any stores other than those open 24 hours, which meant that everything from dry cleaning to hair appointments to Christmas shopping had to be done on weekends, amid children’s sporting events, music lessons, family meals, and conference calls. I was entitled to four hours of vacation per pay period, which came to one day of vacation a month. And I had it better than many of my peers in D.C.; Secretary Clinton deliberately came in around 8 a.m. and left around 7 p.m., to allow her close staff to have morning and evening time with their families (although of course she worked earlier and later, from home). In short, the minute I found myself in a job that is typical for the vast majority of working women (and men), working long hours on someone else’s schedule, I could no longer be both the parent and the professional I wanted to be—at least not with a child experiencing a rocky adolescence. I realized what should have perhaps been obvious: having it all, at least for me, depended almost entirely on what type of job I had. The flip side is the harder truth: having it all was not possible in many types of jobs, including high government office—at least not for very long. I am hardly alone in this realization. Michèle Flournoy stepped down after three years as undersecretary of defense for policy, the third-highest job in the department, to spend more time at home with her three children, two of whom are teenagers. Karen Hughes left her position as the counselor to President George W. Bush after a year and a half in Washington to go home to Texas for the sake of her family. Mary Matalin, who spent two years as an assistant to Bush and the counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney before stepping down to spend more time with her daughters, wrote: “Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.” Yet the decision to step down from a position of power—to value family over professional advancement, even for a time—is directly at odds with the prevailing social pressures on career professionals in the United States. One phrase says it all about current attitudes toward work and family, particularly among elites. In Washington, “leaving to spend time with your family” is a euphemism for being fired. This understanding is so ingrained that when Flournoy announced her resignation last December, The New York Times covered her decision as follows:  Ms. Flournoy’s announcement surprised friends and a number of Pentagon officials, but all said they took her reason for resignation at face value and not as a standard Washington excuse for an official who has in reality been forced out. “I can absolutely and unequivocally state that her decision to step down has nothing to do with anything other than her commitment to her family,” said Doug Wilson, a top Pentagon spokesman. “She has loved this job and people here love her.  Think about what this “standard Washington excuse” implies: it is so unthinkable that an official would actually step down to spend time with his or her family that this must be a cover for something else. How could anyone voluntarily leave the circles of power for the responsibilities of parenthood? Depending on one’s vantage point, it is either ironic or maddening that this view abides in the nation’s capital, despite the ritual commitments to “family values” that are part of every political campaign. Regardless, this sentiment makes true work-life balance exceptionally difficult. But it cannot change unless top women speak out. Only recently have I begun to appreciate the extent to which many young professional women feel under assault by women my age and older. After I gave a recent speech in New York, several women in their late 60s or early 70s came up to tell me how glad and proud they were to see me speaking as a foreign-policy expert. A couple of them went on, however, to contrast my career with the path being traveled by “younger women today.” One expressed dismay that many younger women “are just not willing to get out there and do it.” Said another, unaware of the circumstances of my recent job change: “They think they have to choose between having a career and having a family.” A similar assumption underlies Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg’s widely publicized 2011 commencement speech at Barnard, and her earlier TED talk, in which she lamented the dismally small number of women at the top and advised young women not to “leave before you leave.” When a woman starts thinking about having children, Sandberg said, “she doesn’t raise her hand anymore … She starts leaning back.” Although couched in terms of encouragement, Sandberg’s exhortation contains more than a note of reproach. We who have made it to the top, or are striving to get there, are essentially saying to the women in the generation behind us: “What’s the matter with you?” They have an answer that we don’t want to hear. After the speech I gave in New York, I went to dinner with a group of 30-somethings. I sat across from two vibrant women, one of whom worked at the UN and the other at a big New York law firm. As nearly always happens in these situations, they soon began asking me about work-life balance. When I told them I was writing this article, the lawyer said, “I look for role models and can’t find any.” She said the women in her firm who had become partners and taken on management positions had made tremendous sacrifices, “many of which they don’t even seem to realize … They take two years off when their kids are young but then work like crazy to get back on track professionally, which means that they see their kids when they are toddlers but not teenagers, or really barely at all.” Her friend nodded, mentioning the top professional women she knew, all of whom essentially relied on round-the-clock nannies. Both were very clear that they did not want that life, but could not figure out how to combine professional success and satisfaction with a real commitment to family. I realize that I am blessed to have been born in the late 1950s instead of the early 1930s, as my mother was, or the beginning of the 20th century, as my grandmothers were. My mother built a successful and rewarding career as a professional artist largely in the years after my brothers and I left home—and after being told in her 20s that she could not go to medical school, as her father had done and her brother would go on to do, because, of course, she was going to get married. I owe my own freedoms and opportunities to the pioneering generation of women ahead of me—the women now in their 60s, 70s, and 80s who faced overt sexism of a kind I see only when watching Mad Men, and who knew that the only way to make it as a woman was to act exactly like a man. To admit to, much less act on, maternal longings would have been fatal to their careers. But precisely thanks to their progress, a different kind of conversation is now possible. It is time for women in leadership positions to recognize that although we are still blazing trails and breaking ceilings, many of us are also reinforcing a falsehood: that “having it all” is, more than anything, a function of personal determination. As Kerry Rubin and Lia Macko, the authors of Midlife Crisis at 30, their cri de coeur for Gen-X and Gen-Y women, put it:  What we discovered in our research is that while the empowerment part of the equation has been loudly celebrated, there has been very little honest discussion among women of our age about the real barriers and flaws that still exist in the system despite the opportunities we inherited.  I am well aware that the majority of American women face problems far greater than any discussed in this article. I am writing for my demographic—highly educated, well-off women who are privileged enough to have choices in the first place. We may not have choices about whether to do paid work, as dual incomes have become indispensable. But we have choices about the type and tempo of the work we do. We are the women who could be leading, and who should be equally represented in the leadership ranks. Millions of other working women face much more difficult life circumstances. Some are single mothers; many struggle to find any job; others support husbands who cannot find jobs. Many cope with a work life in which good day care is either unavailable or very expensive; school schedules do not match work schedules; and schools themselves are failing to educate their children. Many of these women are worrying not about having it all, but rather about holding on to what they do have. And although women as a group have made substantial gains in wages, educational attainment, and prestige over the past three decades, the economists Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson have shown that women are less happy today than their predecessors were in 1972, both in absolute terms and relative to men. The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.    The Half-Truths We Hold Dear     Let’s briefly examine the stories we tell ourselves, the clichés that I and many other women typically fall back on when younger women ask us how we have managed to “have it all.” They are not necessarily lies, but at best partial truths. We must clear them out of the way to make room for a more honest and productive discussion about real solutions to the problems faced by professional women.   It’s possible if you are just committed enough.    Our usual starting point, whether we say it explicitly or not, is that having it all depends primarily on the depth and intensity of a woman’s commitment to her career. That is precisely the sentiment behind the dismay so many older career women feel about the younger generation. They are not committed enough, we say, to make the trade-offs and sacrifices that the women ahead of them made. Yet instead of chiding, perhaps we should face some basic facts. Very few women reach leadership positions. The pool of female candidates for any top job is small, and will only grow smaller if the women who come after us decide to take time out, or drop out of professional competition altogether, to raise children. That is exactly what has Sheryl Sandberg so upset, and rightly so. In her words, “Women are not making it to the top. A hundred and ninety heads of state; nine are women. Of all the people in parliament in the world, 13 percent are women. In the corporate sector, [the share of] women at the top—C-level jobs, board seats—tops out at 15, 16 percent.” What’s more, among those who have made it to the top, a balanced life still is more elusive for women than it is for men. A simple measure is how many women in top positions have children compared with their male colleagues. Every male Supreme Court justice has a family. Two of the three female justices are single with no children. And the third, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, began her career as a judge only when her younger child was almost grown. The pattern is the same at the National Security Council: Condoleezza Rice, the first and only woman national-security adviser, is also the only national-security adviser since the 1950s not to have a family. Can “insufficient commitment” even plausibly explain these numbers? To be sure, the women who do make it to the top are highly committed to their profession. On closer examination, however, it turns out that most of them have something else in common: they are genuine superwomen. Consider the number of women recently in the top ranks in Washington—Susan Rice, Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall, Michelle Gavin, Nancy-Ann Min DeParle—who are Rhodes Scholars. Samantha Power, another senior White House official, won a Pulitzer Prize at age 32. Or consider Sandberg herself, who graduated with the prize given to Harvard’s top student of economics. These women cannot possibly be the standard against which even very talented professional women should measure themselves. Such a standard sets up most women for a sense of failure. The line of high-level women appointees in the Obama administration is one woman deep. Virtually all of us who have stepped down have been succeeded by men; searches for women to succeed men in similar positions come up empty. Just about every woman who could plausibly be tapped is already in government. The rest of the foreign-policy world is not much better; Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently surveyed the best data he could find across the government, the military, the academy, and think tanks, and found that women hold fewer than 30 percent of the senior foreign-policy positions in each of these institutions. These numbers are all the more striking when we look back to the 1980s, when women now in their late 40s and 50s were coming out of graduate school, and remember that our classes were nearly 50-50 men and women. We were sure then that by now, we would be living in a 50-50 world. Something derailed that dream. Sandberg thinks that “something” is an “ambition gap”—that women do not dream big enough. I am all for encouraging young women to reach for the stars. But I fear that the obstacles that keep women from reaching the top are rather more prosaic than the scope of their ambition. My longtime and invaluable assistant, who has a doctorate and juggles many balls as the mother of teenage twins, e-mailed me while I was working on this article: “You know what would help the vast majority of women with work/family balance? MAKE SCHOOL SCHEDULES MATCH WORK SCHEDULES.” The present system, she noted, is based on a society that no longer exists—one in which farming was a major occupation and stay-at-home moms were the norm. Yet the system hasn’t changed. Consider some of the responses of women interviewed by Zenko about why “women are significantly underrepresented in foreign policy and national security positions in government, academia, and think tanks.” Juliette Kayyem, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2011 and now writes a foreign-policy and national-security column for The Boston Globe, told Zenko that among other reasons,  the basic truth is also this: the travel sucks. As my youngest of three children is now 6, I can look back at the years when they were all young and realize just how disruptive all the travel was. There were also trips I couldn’t take because I was pregnant or on leave, the conferences I couldn’t attend because (note to conference organizers: weekends are a bad choice) kids would be home from school, and the various excursions that were offered but just couldn’t be managed.  Jolynn Shoemaker, the director of Women in International Security, agreed: “Inflexible schedules, unrelenting travel, and constant pressure to be in the office are common features of these jobs.” These “mundane” issues—the need to travel constantly to succeed, the conflicts between school schedules and work schedules, the insistence that work be done in the office—cannot be solved by exhortations to close the ambition gap. I would hope to see commencement speeches that finger America’s social and business policies, rather than women’s level of ambition, in explaining the dearth of women at the top. But changing these policies requires much more than speeches. It means fighting the mundane battles—every day, every year—in individual workplaces, in legislatures, and in the media.   It’s possible if you marry the right person.   Sandberg’s second message in her Barnard commencement address was: “The most important career decision you’re going to make is whether or not you have a life partner and who that partner is.” Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, recently drove that message home to an audience of Princeton students and alumni gathered to hear her acceptance speech for the James Madison Medal. During the Q&amp;A session, an audience member asked her how she managed her career and her family. She laughed and pointed to her husband in the front row, saying: “There’s my work-life balance.” I could never have had the career I have had without my husband, Andrew Moravcsik, who is a tenured professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Andy has spent more time with our sons than I have, not only on homework, but also on baseball, music lessons, photography, card games, and more. When each of them had to bring in a foreign dish for his fourth-grade class dinner, Andy made his grandmother’s Hungarian palacsinta; when our older son needed to memorize his lines for a lead role in a school play, he turned to Andy for help. Still, the proposition that women can have high-powered careers as long as their husbands or partners are willing to share the parenting load equally (or disproportionately) assumes that most women will feel as comfortable as men do about being away from their children, as long as their partner is home with them. In my experience, that is simply not the case. Here I step onto treacherous ground, mined with stereotypes. From years of conversations and observations, however, I’ve come to believe that men and women respond quite differently when problems at home force them to recognize that their absence is hurting a child, or at least that their presence would likely help. I do not believe fathers love their children any less than mothers do, but men do seem more likely to choose their job at a cost to their family, while women seem more likely to choose their family at a cost to their job. Many factors determine this choice, of course. Men are still socialized to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the breadwinner; women, to believe that their primary family obligation is to be the caregiver. But it may be more than that. When I described the choice between my children and my job to Senator Jeanne Shaheen, she said exactly what I felt: “There’s really no choice.” She wasn’t referring to social expectations, but to a maternal imperative felt so deeply that the “choice” is reflexive. Men and women also seem to frame the choice differently. In Midlife Crisis at 30, Mary Matalin recalls her days working as President Bush’s assistant and Vice President Cheney’s counselor:  Even when the stress was overwhelming—those days when I’d cry in the car on the way to work, asking myself “Why am I doing this??”—I always knew the answer to that question: I believe in this president.  But Matalin goes on to describe her choice to leave in words that are again uncannily similar to the explanation I have given so many people since leaving the State Department:  I finally asked myself, “Who needs me more?” And that’s when I realized, it’s somebody else’s turn to do this job. I’m indispensable to my kids, but I’m not close to indispensable to the White House.  To many men, however, the choice to spend more time with their children, instead of working long hours on issues that affect many lives, seems selfish. Male leaders are routinely praised for having sacrificed their personal life on the altar of public or corporate service. That sacrifice, of course, typically involves their family. Yet their children, too, are trained to value public service over private responsibility. At the diplomat Richard Holbrooke’s memorial service, one of his sons told the audience that when he was a child, his father was often gone, not around to teach him to throw a ball or to watch his games. But as he grew older, he said, he realized that Holbrooke’s absence was the price of saving people around the world—a price worth paying. It is not clear to me that this ethical framework makes sense for society. Why should we want leaders who fall short on personal responsibilities? Perhaps leaders who invested time in their own families would be more keenly aware of the toll their public choices—on issues from war to welfare—take on private lives. (Kati Marton, Holbrooke’s widow and a noted author, says that although Holbrooke adored his children, he came to appreciate the full importance of family only in his 50s, at which point he became a very present parent and grandparent, while continuing to pursue an extraordinary public career.) Regardless, it is clear which set of choices society values more today. Workers who put their careers first are typically rewarded; workers who choose their families are overlooked, disbelieved, or accused of unprofessionalism. In sum, having a supportive mate may well be a necessary condition if women are to have it all, but it is not sufficient. If women feel deeply that turning down a promotion that would involve more travel, for instance, is the right thing to do, then they will continue to do that. Ultimately, it is society that must change, coming to value choices to put family ahead of work just as much as those to put work ahead of family. If we really valued those choices, we would value the people who make them; if we valued the people who make them, we would do everything possible to hire and retain them; if we did everything possible to allow them to combine work and family equally over time, then the choices would get a lot easier.   It’s possible if you sequence it right.   Young women should be wary of the assertion “You can have it all; you just can’t have it all at once.” This 21st-century addendum to the original line is now proffered by many senior women to their younger mentees. To the extent that it means, in the words of one working mother, “I’m going to do my best and I’m going to keep the long term in mind and know that it’s not always going to be this hard to balance,” it is sound advice. But to the extent that it means that women can have it all if they just find the right sequence of career and family, it’s cheerfully wrong. The most important sequencing issue is when to have children. Many of the top women leaders of the generation just ahead of me—Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sandra Day O’Connor, Patricia Wald, Nannerl Keohane—had their children in their 20s and early 30s, as was the norm in the 1950s through the 1970s. A child born when his mother is 25 will finish high school when his mother is 43, an age at which, with full-time immersion in a career, she still has plenty of time and energy for advancement. Yet this sequence has fallen out of favor with many high-potential women, and understandably so. People tend to marry later now, and anyway, if you have children earlier, you may have difficulty getting a graduate degree, a good first job, and opportunities for advancement in the crucial early years of your career. Making matters worse, you will also have less income while raising your children, and hence less ability to hire the help that can be indispensable to your juggling act. When I was the dean, the Woodrow Wilson School created a program called Pathways to Public Service, aimed at advising women whose children were almost grown about how to go into public service, and many women still ask me about the best “on-ramps” to careers in their mid-40s. Honestly, I’m not sure what to tell most of them. Unlike the pioneering women who entered the workforce after having children in the 1970s, these women are competing with their younger selves. Government and NGO jobs are an option, but many careers are effectively closed off. Personally, I have never seen a woman in her 40s enter the academic market successfully, or enter a law firm as a junior associate, Alicia Florrick of The Good Wife notwithstanding. These considerations are why so many career women of my generation chose to establish themselves in their careers first and have children in their mid-to-late 30s. But that raises the possibility of spending long, stressful years and a small fortune trying to have a baby. I lived that nightmare: for three years, beginning at age 35, I did everything possible to conceive and was frantic at the thought that I had simply left having a biological child until it was too late. And when everything does work out? I had my first child at 38 (and counted myself blessed) and my second at 40. That means I will be 58 when both of my children are out of the house. What’s more, it means that many peak career opportunities are coinciding precisely with their teenage years, when, experienced parents advise, being available as a parent is just as important as in the first years of a child’s life. Many women of my generation have found themselves, in the prime of their careers, saying no to opportunities they once would have jumped at and hoping those chances come around again later. Many others who have decided to step back for a while, taking on consultant positions or part-time work that lets them spend more time with their children (or aging parents), are worrying about how long they can “stay out” before they lose the competitive edge they worked so hard to acquire. Given the way our work culture is oriented today, I recommend establishing yourself in your career first but still trying to have kids before you are 35—or else freeze your eggs, whether you are married or not. You may well be a more mature and less frustrated parent in your 30s or 40s; you are also more likely to have found a lasting life partner. But the truth is, neither sequence is optimal, and both involve trade-offs that men do not have to make. You should be able to have a family if you want one—however and whenever your life circumstances allow—and still have the career you desire. If more women could strike this balance, more women would reach leadership positions. And if more women were in leadership positions, they could make it easier for more women to stay in the workforce. The rest of this essay details how.    Changing the Culture of Face Time     Back in the Reagan administration, a New York Times story about the ferociously competitive budget director Dick Darman reported, “Mr. Darman sometimes managed to convey the impression that he was the last one working in the Reagan White House by leaving his suit coat on his chair and his office light burning after he left for home.” (Darman claimed that it was just easier to leave his suit jacket in the office so he could put it on again in the morning, but his record of psychological manipulation suggests otherwise.) The culture of “time macho”—a relentless competition to work harder, stay later, pull more all-nighters, travel around the world and bill the extra hours that the international date line affords you—remains astonishingly prevalent among professionals today. Nothing captures the belief that more time equals more value better than the cult of billable hours afflicting large law firms across the country and providing exactly the wrong incentives for employees who hope to integrate work and family. Yet even in industries that don’t explicitly reward sheer quantity of hours spent on the job, the pressure to arrive early, stay late, and be available, always, for in-person meetings at 11 a.m. on Saturdays can be intense. Indeed, by some measures, the problem has gotten worse over time: a study by the Center for American Progress reports that nationwide, the share of all professionals—women and men—working more than 50 hours a week has increased since the late 1970s. But more time in the office does not always mean more “value added”—and it does not always add up to a more successful organization. In 2009, Sandra Pocharski, a senior female partner at Monitor Group and the head of the firm’s Leadership and Organization practice, commissioned a Harvard Business School professor to assess the factors that helped or hindered women’s effectiveness and advancement at Monitor. The study found that the company’s culture was characterized by an “always on” mode of working, often without due regard to the impact on employees. Pocharski observed:  Clients come first, always, and sometimes burning the midnight oil really does make the difference between success and failure. But sometimes we were just defaulting to behavior that overloaded our people without improving results much, if at all. We decided we needed managers to get better at distinguishing between these categories, and to recognize the hidden costs of assuming that “time is cheap.” When that time doesn’t add a lot of value and comes at a high cost to talented employees, who will leave when the personal cost becomes unsustainable—well, that is clearly a bad outcome for everyone.  I have worked very long hours and pulled plenty of all-nighters myself over the course of my career, including a few nights on my office couch during my two years in D.C. Being willing to put the time in when the job simply has to get done is rightfully a hallmark of a successful professional. But looking back, I have to admit that my assumption that I would stay late made me much less efficient over the course of the day than I might have been, and certainly less so than some of my colleagues, who managed to get the same amount of work done and go home at a decent hour. If Dick Darman had had a boss who clearly valued prioritization and time management, he might have found reason to turn out the lights and take his jacket home.    Long hours are one thing, and realistically, they are often unavoidable. But do they really need to be spent at the office? To be sure, being in the office some of the time is beneficial. In-person meetings can be far more efficient than phone or e-mail tag; trust and collegiality are much more easily built up around the same physical table; and spontaneous conversations often generate good ideas and lasting relationships. Still, armed with e-mail, instant messaging, phones, and videoconferencing technology, we should be able to move to a culture where the office is a base of operations more than the required locus of work. Being able to work from home—in the evening after children are put to bed, or during their sick days or snow days, and at least some of the time on weekends—can be the key, for mothers, to carrying your full load versus letting a team down at crucial moments. State-of-the-art videoconferencing facilities can dramatically reduce the need for long business trips. These technologies are making inroads, and allowing easier integration of work and family life. According to the Women’s Business Center, 61 percent of women business owners use technology to “integrate the responsibilities of work and home”; 44 percent use technology to allow employees “to work off-site or to have flexible work schedules.” Yet our work culture still remains more office-centered than it needs to be, especially in light of technological advances. One way to change that is by changing the “default rules” that govern office work—the baseline expectations about when, where, and how work will be done. As behavioral economists well know, these baselines can make an enormous difference in the way people act. It is one thing, for instance, for an organization to allow phone-ins to a meeting on an ad hoc basis, when parenting and work schedules collide—a system that’s better than nothing, but likely to engender guilt among those calling in, and possibly resentment among those in the room. It is quite another for that organization to declare that its policy will be to schedule in-person meetings, whenever possible, during the hours of the school day—a system that might normalize call-ins for those (rarer) meetings still held in the late afternoon. One real-world example comes from the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, a place most people are more likely to associate with distinguished gentlemen in pinstripes than with progressive thinking about work-family balance. Like so many other places, however, the FCO worries about losing talented members of two-career couples around the world, particularly women. So it recently changed its basic policy from a default rule that jobs have to be done on-site to one that assumes that some jobs might be done remotely, and invites workers to make the case for remote work. Kara Owen, a career foreign-service officer who was the FCO’s diversity director and will soon become the British deputy ambassador to France, writes that she has now done two remote jobs. Before her current maternity leave, she was working a London job from Dublin to be with her partner, using teleconferencing technology and timing her trips to London to coincide “with key meetings where I needed to be in the room (or chatting at the pre-meeting coffee) to have an impact, or to do intensive ‘network maintenance.’” In fact, she writes, “I have found the distance and quiet to be a real advantage in a strategic role, providing I have put in the investment up front to develop very strong personal relationships with the game changers.” Owen recognizes that not every job can be done this way. But she says that for her part, she has been able to combine family requirements with her career. Changes in default office rules should not advantage parents over other workers; indeed, done right, they can improve relations among co-workers by raising their awareness of each other’s circumstances and instilling a sense of fairness. Two years ago, the ACLU Foundation of Massachusetts decided to replace its “parental leave” policy with a “family leave” policy that provides for as much as 12 weeks of leave not only for new parents, but also for employees who need to care for a spouse, child, or parent with a serious health condition. According to Director Carol Rose, “We wanted a policy that took into account the fact that even employees who do not have children have family obligations.” The policy was shaped by the belief that giving women “special treatment” can “backfire if the broader norms shaping the behavior of all employees do not change.” When I was the dean of the Wilson School, I managed with the mantra “Family comes first”—any family—and found that my employees were both productive and intensely loyal. None of these changes will happen by themselves, and reasons to avoid them will seldom be hard to find. But obstacles and inertia are usually surmountable if leaders are open to changing their assumptions about the workplace. The use of technology in many high-level government jobs, for instance, is complicated by the need to have access to classified information. But in 2009, Deputy Secretary of State James Steinberg, who shares the parenting of his two young daughters equally with his wife, made getting such access at home an immediate priority so that he could leave the office at a reasonable hour and participate in important meetings via videoconferencing if necessary. I wonder how many women in similar positions would be afraid to ask, lest they be seen as insufficiently committed to their jobs.    Revaluing Family Values     While employers shouldn’t privilege parents over other workers, too often they end up doing the opposite, usually subtly, and usually in ways that make it harder for a primary caregiver to get ahead. Many people in positions of power seem to place a low value on child care in comparison with other outside activities. Consider the following proposition: An employer has two equally talented and productive employees. One trains for and runs marathons when he is not working. The other takes care of two children. What assumptions is the employer likely to make about the marathon runner? That he gets up in the dark every day and logs an hour or two running before even coming into the office, or drives himself to get out there even after a long day. That he is ferociously disciplined and willing to push himself through distraction, exhaustion, and days when nothing seems to go right in the service of a goal far in the distance. That he must manage his time exceptionally well to squeeze all of that in. Be honest: Do you think the employer makes those same assumptions about the parent? Even though she likely rises in the dark hours before she needs to be at work, organizes her children’s day, makes breakfast, packs lunch, gets them off to school, figures out shopping and other errands even if she is lucky enough to have a housekeeper—and does much the same work at the end of the day. Cheryl Mills, Hillary Clinton’s indefatigable chief of staff, has twins in elementary school; even with a fully engaged husband, she famously gets up at four every morning to check and send e-mails before her kids wake up. Louise Richardson, now the vice chancellor of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, combined an assistant professorship in government at Harvard with mothering three young children. She organized her time so ruthlessly that she always keyed in 1:11 or 2:22 or 3:33 on the microwave rather than 1:00, 2:00, or 3:00, because hitting the same number three times took less time. Elizabeth Warren, who is now running for the U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, has a similar story. When she had two young children and a part-time law practice, she struggled to find enough time to write the papers and articles that would help get her an academic position. In her words:  I needed a plan. I figured out that writing time was when Alex was asleep. So the minute I put him down for a nap or he fell asleep in the baby swing, I went to my desk and started working on something—footnotes, reading, outlining, writing … I learned to do everything else with a baby on my hip.  The discipline, organization, and sheer endurance it takes to succeed at top levels with young children at home is easily comparable to running 20 to 40 miles a week. But that’s rarely how employers see things, not only when making allowances, but when making promotions. Perhaps because people choose to have children? People also choose to run marathons. One final example: I have worked with many Orthodox Jewish men who observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. Jack Lew, the two-time director of the Office of Management and Budget, former deputy secretary of state for management and resources, and now White House chief of staff, is a case in point. Jack’s wife lived in New York when he worked in the State Department, so he would leave the office early enough on Friday afternoon to take the shuttle to New York and a taxi to his apartment before sundown. He would not work on Friday after sundown or all day Saturday. Everyone who knew him, including me, admired his commitment to his faith and his ability to carve out the time for it, even with an enormously demanding job. It is hard to imagine, however, that we would have the same response if a mother told us she was blocking out mid-Friday afternoon through the end of the day on Saturday, every week, to spend time with her children. I suspect this would be seen as unprofessional, an imposition of unnecessary costs on co-workers. In fact, of course, one of the great values of the Sabbath—whether Jewish or Christian—is precisely that it carves out a family oasis, with rituals and a mandatory setting-aside of work. Our assumptions are just that: things we believe that are not necessarily so. Yet what we assume has an enormous impact on our perceptions and responses. Fortunately, changing our assumptions is up to us.    Redefining the Arc of a Successful Career     The American definition of a successful professional is someone who can climb the ladder the furthest in the shortest time, generally peaking between ages 45 and 55. It is a definition well suited to the mid-20th century, an era when people had kids in their 20s, stayed in one job, retired at 67, and were dead, on average, by age 71. It makes far less sense today. Average life expectancy for people in their 20s has increased to 80; men and women in good health can easily work until they are 75. They can expect to have multiple jobs and even multiple careers throughout their working life. Couples marry later, have kids later, and can expect to live on two incomes. They may well retire earlier—the average retirement age has gone down from 67 to 63—but that is commonly “retirement” only in the sense of collecting retirement benefits. Many people go on to “encore” careers. Assuming the priceless gifts of good health and good fortune, a professional woman can thus expect her working life to stretch some 50 years, from her early or mid-20s to her mid-70s. It is reasonable to assume that she will build her credentials and establish herself, at least in her first career, between 22 and 35; she will have children, if she wants them, sometime between 25 and 45; she’ll want maximum flexibility and control over her time in the 10 years that her children are 8 to 18; and she should plan to take positions of maximum authority and demands on her time after her children are out of the house. Women who have children in their late 20s can expect to immerse themselves completely in their careers in their late 40s, with plenty of time still to rise to the top in their late 50s and early 60s. Women who make partner, managing director, or senior vice president; get tenure; or establish a medical practice before having children in their late 30s should be coming back on line for the most demanding jobs at almost exactly the same age. Along the way, women should think about the climb to leadership not in terms of a straight upward slope, but as irregular stair steps, with periodic plateaus (and even dips) when they turn down promotions to remain in a job that works for their family situation; when they leave high-powered jobs and spend a year or two at home on a reduced schedule; or when they step off a conventional professional track to take a consulting position or project-based work for a number of years. I think of these plateaus as “investment intervals.” My husband and I took a sabbatical in Shanghai, from August 2007 to May 2008, right in the thick of an election year when many of my friends were advising various candidates on foreign-policy issues. We thought of the move in part as “putting money in the family bank,” taking advantage of the opportunity to spend a close year together in a foreign culture. But we were also investing in our children’s ability to learn Mandarin and in our own knowledge of Asia. Peaking in your late 50s and early 60s rather than your late 40s and early 50s makes particular sense for women, who live longer than men. And many of the stereotypes about older workers simply do not hold. A 2006 survey of human-resources professionals shows that only 23 percent think older workers are less flexible than younger workers; only 11 percent think older workers require more training than younger workers; and only 7 percent think older workers have less drive than younger workers. Whether women will really have the confidence to stair-step their careers, however, will again depend in part on perceptions. Slowing down the rate of promotions, taking time out periodically, pursuing an alternative path during crucial parenting or parent-care years—all have to become more visible and more noticeably accepted as a pause rather than an opt-out. (In an encouraging sign, Mass Career Customization, a 2007 book by Cathleen Benko and Anne Weisberg arguing that “today’s career is no longer a straight climb up the corporate ladder, but rather a combination of climbs, lateral moves, and planned descents,” was a Wall Street Journal best seller.) Institutions can also take concrete steps to promote this acceptance. For instance, in 1970, Princeton established a tenure-extension policy that allowed female assistant professors expecting a child to request a one-year extension on their tenure clocks. This policy was later extended to men, and broadened to include adoptions. In the early 2000s, two reports on the status of female faculty discovered that only about 3 percent of assistant professors requested tenure extensions in a given year. And in response to a survey question, women were much more likely than men to think that a tenure extension would be detrimental to an assistant professor’s career. So in 2005, under President Shirley Tilghman, Princeton changed the default rule. The administration announced that all assistant professors, female and male, who had a new child would automatically receive a one-year extension on the tenure clock, with no opt-outs allowed. Instead, assistant professors could request early consideration for tenure if they wished. The number of assistant professors who receive a tenure extension has tripled since the change. One of the best ways to move social norms in this direction is to choose and celebrate different role models. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and I are poles apart politically, but he went way up in my estimation when he announced that one reason he decided against running for president in 2012 was the impact his campaign would have had on his children. He reportedly made clear at a fund-raiser in Louisiana that he didn’t want to be away from his children for long periods of time; according to a Republican official at the event, he said that “his son [missed] him after being gone for the three days on the road, and that he needed to get back.” He may not get my vote if and when he does run for president, but he definitely gets my admiration (providing he doesn’t turn around and join the GOP ticket this fall). If we are looking for high-profile female role models, we might begin with Michelle Obama. She started out with the same résumé as her husband, but has repeatedly made career decisions designed to let her do work she cared about and also be the kind of parent she wanted to be. She moved from a high-powered law firm first to Chicago city government and then to the University of Chicago shortly before her daughters were born, a move that let her work only 10 minutes away from home. She has spoken publicly and often about her initial concerns that her husband’s entry into politics would be bad for their family life, and about her determination to limit her participation in the presidential election campaign to have more time at home. Even as first lady, she has been adamant that she be able to balance her official duties with family time. We should see her as a full-time career woman, but one who is taking a very visible investment interval. We should celebrate her not only as a wife, mother, and champion of healthy eating, but also as a woman who has had the courage and judgment to invest in her daughters when they need her most. And we should expect a glittering career from her after she leaves the White House and her daughters leave for college.    Rediscovering the Pursuit of Happiness     One of the most complicated and surprising parts of my journey out of Washington was coming to grips with what I really wanted. I had opportunities to stay on, and I could have tried to work out an arrangement allowing me to spend more time at home. I might have been able to get my family to join me in Washington for a year; I might have been able to get classified technology installed at my house the way Jim Steinberg did; I might have been able to commute only four days a week instead of five. (While this last change would have still left me very little time at home, given the intensity of my job, it might have made the job doable for another year or two.) But I realized that I didn’t just need to go home. Deep down, I wanted to go home. I wanted to be able to spend time with my children in the last few years that they are likely to live at home, crucial years for their development into responsible, productive, happy, and caring adults. But also irreplaceable years for me to enjoy the simple pleasures of parenting—baseball games, piano recitals, waffle breakfasts, family trips, and goofy rituals. My older son is doing very well these days, but even when he gives us a hard time, as all teenagers do, being home to shape his choices and help him make good decisions is deeply satisfying. The flip side of my realization is captured in Macko and Rubin’s ruminations on the importance of bringing the different parts of their lives together as 30-year-old women:  If we didn’t start to learn how to integrate our personal, social, and professional lives, we were about five years away from morphing into the angry woman on the other side of a mahogany desk who questions her staff’s work ethic after standard 12-hour workdays, before heading home to eat moo shoo pork in her lonely apartment.  Women have contributed to the fetish of the one-dimensional life, albeit by necessity. The pioneer generation of feminists walled off their personal lives from their professional personas to ensure that they could never be discriminated against for a lack of commitment to their work. When I was a law student in the 1980s, many women who were then climbing the legal hierarchy in New York firms told me that they never admitted to taking time out for a child’s doctor appointment or school performance, but instead invented a much more neutral excuse. Today, however, women in power can and should change that environment, although change is not easy. When I became dean of the Woodrow Wilson School, in 2002, I decided that one of the advantages of being a woman in power was that I could help change the norms by deliberately talking about my children and my desire to have a balanced life. Thus, I would end faculty meetings at 6 p.m. by saying that I had to go home for dinner; I would also make clear to all student organizations that I would not come to dinner with them, because I needed to be home from six to eight, but that I would often be willing to come back after eight for a meeting. I also once told the Dean’s Advisory Committee that the associate dean would chair the next session so I could go to a parent-teacher conference. After a few months of this, several female assistant professors showed up in my office quite agitated. “You have to stop talking about your kids,” one said. “You are not showing the gravitas that people expect from a dean, which is particularly damaging precisely because you are the first woman dean of the school.” I told them that I was doing it deliberately and continued my practice, but it is interesting that gravitas and parenthood don’t seem to go together. Ten years later, whenever I am introduced at a lecture or other speaking engagement, I insist that the person introducing me mention that I have two sons. It seems odd to me to list degrees, awards, positions, and interests and not include the dimension of my life that is most important to me—and takes an enormous amount of my time. As Secretary Clinton once said in a television interview in Beijing when the interviewer asked her about Chelsea’s upcoming wedding: “That’s my real life.” But I notice that my male introducers are typically uncomfortable when I make the request. They frequently say things like “And she particularly wanted me to mention that she has two sons”—thereby drawing attention to the unusual nature of my request, when my entire purpose is to make family references routine and normal in professional life. This does not mean that you should insist that your colleagues spend time cooing over pictures of your baby or listening to the prodigious accomplishments of your kindergartner. It does mean that if you are late coming in one week, because it is your turn to drive the kids to school, that you be honest about what you are doing. Indeed, Sheryl Sandberg recently acknowledged not only that she leaves work at 5:30 to have dinner with her family, but also that for many years she did not dare make this admission, even though she would of course make up the work time later in the evening. Her willingness to speak out now is a strong step in the right direction. Seeking out a more balanced life is not a women’s issue; balance would be better for us all. Bronnie Ware, an Australian blogger who worked for years in palliative care and is the author of the 2011 book The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, writes that the regret she heard most often was “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” The second-most-common regret was “I wish I didn’t work so hard.” She writes: “This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship.” Juliette Kayyem, who several years ago left the Department of Homeland Security soon after her husband, David Barron, left a high position in the Justice Department, says their joint decision to leave Washington and return to Boston sprang from their desire to work on the “happiness project,” meaning quality time with their three children. (She borrowed the term from her friend Gretchen Rubin, who wrote a best-selling book and now runs a blog with that name.) It’s time to embrace a national happiness project. As a daughter of Charlottesville, Virginia, the home of Thomas Jefferson and the university he founded, I grew up with the Declaration of Independence in my blood. Last I checked, he did not declare American independence in the name of life, liberty, and professional success. Let us rediscover the pursuit of happiness, and let us start at home.    Innovation Nation     As I write this, I can hear the reaction of some readers to many of the proposals in this essay: It’s all fine and well for a tenured professor to write about flexible working hours, investment intervals, and family-comes-first management. But what about the real world? Most American women cannot demand these things, particularly in a bad economy, and their employers have little incentive to grant them voluntarily. Indeed, the most frequent reaction I get in putting forth these ideas is that when the choice is whether to hire a man who will work whenever and wherever needed, or a woman who needs more flexibility, choosing the man will add more value to the company. In fact, while many of these issues are hard to quantify and measure precisely, the statistics seem to tell a different story. A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers. These findings accorded with a 2003 study conducted by Michelle Arthur at the University of New Mexico. Examining 130 announcements of family-friendly policies in The Wall Street Journal, Arthur found that the announcements alone significantly improved share prices. In 2011, a study on flexibility in the workplace by Ellen Galinsky, Kelly Sakai, and Tyler Wigton of the Families and Work Institute showed that increased flexibility correlates positively with job engagement, job satisfaction, employee retention, and employee health. This is only a small sampling from a large and growing literature trying to pin down the relationship between family-friendly policies and economic performance. Other scholars have concluded that good family policies attract better talent, which in turn raises productivity, but that the policies themselves have no impact on productivity. Still others argue that results attributed to these policies are actually a function of good management overall. What is evident, however, is that many firms that recruit and train well-educated professional women are aware that when a woman leaves because of bad work-family balance, they are losing the money and time they invested in her. Even the legal industry, built around the billable hour, is taking notice. Deborah Epstein Henry, a former big-firm litigator, is now the president of Flex-Time Lawyers, a national consulting firm focused partly on strategies for the retention of female attorneys. In her book Law and Reorder, published by the American Bar Association in 2010, she describes a legal profession “where the billable hour no longer works”; where attorneys, judges, recruiters, and academics all agree that this system of compensation has perverted the industry, leading to brutal work hours, massive inefficiency, and highly inflated costs. The answer—already being deployed in different corners of the industry—is a combination of alternative fee structures, virtual firms, women-owned firms, and the outsourcing of discrete legal jobs to other jurisdictions. Women, and Generation X and Y lawyers more generally, are pushing for these changes on the supply side; clients determined to reduce legal fees and increase flexible service are pulling on the demand side. Slowly, change is happening. At the core of all this is self-interest. Losing smart and motivated women not only diminishes a company’s talent pool; it also reduces the return on its investment in training and mentoring. In trying to address these issues, some firms are finding out that women’s ways of working may just be better ways of working, for employees and clients alike. Experts on creativity and innovation emphasize the value of encouraging nonlinear thinking and cultivating randomness by taking long walks or looking at your environment from unusual angles. In their new book, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change, the innovation gurus John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas write, “We believe that connecting play and imagination may be the single most important step in unleashing the new culture of learning.” Space for play and imagination is exactly what emerges when rigid work schedules and hierarchies loosen up. Skeptics should consider the “California effect.” California is the cradle of American innovation—in technology, entertainment, sports, food, and lifestyles. It is also a place where people take leisure as seriously as they take work; where companies like Google deliberately encourage play, with Ping-Pong tables, light sabers, and policies that require employees to spend one day a week working on whatever they wish. Charles Baudelaire wrote: “Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will.” Google apparently has taken note. No parent would mistake child care for childhood. Still, seeing the world anew through a child’s eyes can be a powerful source of stimulation. When the Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling wrote The Strategy of Conflict, a classic text applying game theory to conflicts among nations, he frequently drew on child-rearing for examples of when deterrence might succeed or fail. “It may be easier to articulate the peculiar difficulty of constraining [a ruler] by the use of threats,” he wrote, “when one is fresh from a vain attempt at using threats to keep a small child from hurting a dog or a small dog from hurting a child.” The books I’ve read with my children, the silly movies I’ve watched, the games I’ve played, questions I’ve answered, and people I’ve met while parenting have broadened my world. Another axiom of the literature on innovation is that the more often people with different perspectives come together, the more likely creative ideas are to emerge. Giving workers the ability to integrate their non-work lives with their work—whether they spend that time mothering or marathoning—will open the door to a much wider range of influences and ideas.    Enlisting Men     Perhaps the most encouraging news of all for achieving the sorts of changes that I have proposed is that men are joining the cause. In commenting on a draft of this article, Martha Minow, the dean of the Harvard Law School, wrote me that one change she has observed during 30 years of teaching law at Harvard is that today many young men are asking questions about how they can manage a work-life balance. And more systematic research on Generation Y confirms that many more men than in the past are asking questions about how they are going to integrate active parenthood with their professional lives. Abstract aspirations are easier than concrete trade-offs, of course. These young men have not yet faced the question of whether they are prepared to give up that more prestigious clerkship or fellowship, decline a promotion, or delay their professional goals to spend more time with their children and to support their partner’s career. Yet once work practices and work culture begin to evolve, those changes are likely to carry their own momentum. Kara Owen, the British foreign-service officer who worked a London job from Dublin, wrote me in an e-mail:  I think the culture on flexible working started to change the minute the Board of Management (who were all men at the time) started to work flexibly—quite a few of them started working one day a week from home.  Men have, of course, become much more involved parents over the past couple of decades, and that, too, suggests broad support for big changes in the way we balance work and family. It is noteworthy that both James Steinberg, deputy secretary of state, and William Lynn, deputy secretary of defense, stepped down two years into the Obama administration so that they could spend more time with their children (for real). Going forward, women would do well to frame work-family balance in terms of the broader social and economic issues that affect both women and men. After all, we have a new generation of young men who have been raised by full-time working mothers. Let us presume, as I do with my sons, that they will understand “supporting their families” to mean more than earning money. I have been blessed to work with and be mentored by some extraordinary women. Watching Hillary Clinton in action makes me incredibly proud—of her intelligence, expertise, professionalism, charisma, and command of any audience. I get a similar rush when I see a front-page picture of Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, and Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, deep in conversation about some of the most important issues on the world stage; or of Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, standing up forcefully for the Syrian people in the Security Council. These women are extraordinary role models. If I had a daughter, I would encourage her to look to them, and I want a world in which they are extraordinary but not unusual. Yet I also want a world in which, in Lisa Jackson’s words, “to be a strong woman, you don’t have to give up on the things that define you as a woman.” That means respecting, enabling, and indeed celebrating the full range of women’s choices. “Empowering yourself,” Jackson said in her speech at Princeton, “doesn’t have to mean rejecting motherhood, or eliminating the nurturing or feminine aspects of who you are.” I gave a speech at Vassar last November and arrived in time to wander the campus on a lovely fall afternoon. It is a place infused with a spirit of community and generosity, filled with benches, walkways, public art, and quiet places donated by alumnae seeking to encourage contemplation and connection. Turning the pages of the alumni magazine (Vassar is now coed), I was struck by the entries of older alumnae, who greeted their classmates with Salve (Latin for “hello”) and wrote witty remembrances sprinkled with literary allusions. Theirs was a world in which women wore their learning lightly; their news is mostly of their children’s accomplishments. Many of us look back on that earlier era as a time when it was fine to joke that women went to college to get an “M.R.S.” And many women of my generation abandoned the Seven Sisters as soon as the formerly all-male Ivy League universities became coed. I would never return to the world of segregated sexes and rampant discrimination. But now is the time to revisit the assumption that women must rush to adapt to the “man’s world” that our mothers and mentors warned us about. I continually push the young women in my classes to speak more. They must gain the confidence to value their own insights and questions, and to present them readily. My husband agrees, but he actually tries to get the young men in his classes to act more like the women—to speak less and listen more. If women are ever to achieve real equality as leaders, then we have to stop accepting male behavior and male choices as the default and the ideal. We must insist on changing social policies and bending career tracks to accommodate our choices, too. We have the power to do it if we decide to, and we have many men standing beside us. We’ll create a better society in the process, for all women. We may need to put a woman in the White House before we are able to change the conditions of the women working at Walmart. But when we do, we will stop talking about whether women can have it all. We will properly focus on how we can help all Americans have healthy, happy, productive lives, valuing the people they love as much as the success they seek.
Why Women Still Can’t Have It All
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/07/why-women-still-cant-have-it-all/309020/
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/
John McAfee Fled to Belize, But He Couldn't Escape Himself
2012-12-24
Condé Nast; Joshua Davis
<div><div><div><p><strong>On November 12, 2012, Belizean police</strong> announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee's life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.</p><p>Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith &amp; Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.</p><p>More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he's holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about 15 miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.</p><p>McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. "This is a bullet, right?" he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.</p><p>"Let's put the gun back," I tell him. I'd come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I'm not so sure.</p><p>But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. "Maybe what happened didn't actually happen," he says, staring hard at me. "Can I do a demonstration?"</p><p>He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.</p><p>"This scares you, right?" he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.</p><p>My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. "Yeah, I'm scared," I admit. "We don't have to do this."</p><p>"I know we don't," he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.</p><p>"Reholster the gun," I demand.</p><p>He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. "I can do this all day long," he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. "I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong."</p><p>It's the same thing, he argues, with the government's accusations. They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there's one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of April 30, 2012.</p></div><div><p><strong>It was a Monday, about 4:50 am.</strong> A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee's newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at <em>Blond Ambition</em>, a Madonna concert DVD.</p><p>The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize's Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations.</p><p>The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn't over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. "This is the police," a voice blared over a bullhorn. "Everyone out!"</p><p>Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts 20 feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned—estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his 10-passenger plane—and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were 31 of them; he was outgunned and outmanned.</p><p>McAfee walked back inside to the 17-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.</p><p>As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him.</p><p>"You're being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine," one of the cops said.</p><p>McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. "That's a startling hypothesis, sir," he responded. "Because I haven't sold drugs since 1983."</p><figure><p>BRIAN FINKE</p></figure></div><div><p><strong>Nineteen eighty-three was a pivotal</strong> year for McAfee. He was 38 and director of engineering at Omex, a company that built information storage systems in Santa Clara, California. He was also selling cocaine to his subordinates and snorting massive amounts himself. When he got too high to focus, he'd take a quaalude. If he started to fall asleep at his desk, he'd snort some more coke to wake up. McAfee had trouble making it through the day and spent his afternoons drinking scotch to even out the tumult in his head.</p><p>He'd been a mess for a long time. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, where his father was a road surveyor and his mother a bank teller. His father, McAfee recalls, was a heavy drinker and "a very unhappy man" who McAfee says beat him and his mother severely. When McAfee was 15, his father shot himself. "Every day I wake up with him," McAfee says. "Every relationship I have, he's by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is fucked."</p><p>McAfee started drinking heavily his first year at Roanoke College and supported himself by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. He would knock and announce that the lucky resident had won an absolutely free subscription; all they had to do was pay a small shipping and handling fee. "So, in fact, I am explaining to them why it's not free and why they are going to pay for it. But the ruse worked," McAfee recalls. He learned that confidence was all that mattered. He smiled, fixed them with his penetrating blue-eyed gaze, and hit them with a nonstop stream of patter. "I made a fortune," he says.</p><p>He spent his money on booze but managed to graduate and start a PhD in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College in 1968. He got kicked out for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students (whom he later married) and ended up coding old-school punch-card programs for Univac in Bristol, Tennessee. That didn't last long, either. He was arrested for buying marijuana, and though his lawyer got him off without a conviction, he was summarily fired.</p><p>Still, he had learned enough to gin up an impressive, totally fake résumé and used it to get a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis. It was 1969 and the company was attempting to use an IBM computer to schedule trains. After six months, McAfee's system began to churn out optimized train-routing patterns. Unfortunately, he had also discovered LSD. He would drop acid in the morning, go to work, and route trains all day. One morning he decided to experiment with another psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to snort a whole bag of the orangish powder. "Within an hour my mind was shattered," McAfee says.</p><p>People asked him questions, but he didn't understand what they were saying. The computer was spitting out train schedules to the moon; he couldn't make sense of it. He ended up behind a garbage can in downtown St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping that nobody would look at him. He never went back to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd's <em>Dark Side of the Moon</em>.</p></div><div><p>From then on he felt like he was always one step away from a total breakdown, which finally came at Omex in 1983. He was snorting lines of coke off his desk most mornings, polishing off a bottle of scotch every day, and living in constant fear that he would run out of drugs. His wife had left him, he'd given away his dog, and in the wake of what he calls a mutual agreement, he left Omex. He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. "My life was total hell," he says.</p><p>Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn't alone.</p><p>"That's when life really began for me," he says.</p><p>He says he's been sober ever since.</p><p><strong>When the Madonna concert</strong> ended, McAfee's drunken guard finally emerged from his station and strolled over to find out what was going on. The police quickly surrounded him. They knew who he was: Austin "Tino" Allen had been convicted 28 times for crimes ranging from robbery to assault, and he had spent most of his life in and out of prison.</p><p>The police lined everybody up against a rock wall as the sun rose. A low, heavy heat filled the jungle. Everybody began to sweat when the police fanned out to search the property. As an officer headed toward an outlying building, one of McAfee's dogs cut him off, growled, and, according to police, went in for an attack. The cop immediately shot the dog through the rib cage.</p><p>"What the fuck!" McAfee screamed. "That's my dog."</p><p>The police ignored him. They left the dead dog in the dirt while they rummaged through the compound. They found shotguns, pistols, a huge cache of ammunition, and hundreds of bottles of chemicals they couldn't identify. McAfee and the others were left in the sun for hours. (GSU commander Marco Vidal claims they were under the shade of a large tree.) By the time the police announced that they were taking several of them to jail, McAfee says his face was turning pink with sunburn. He and Allen were loaded into the back of a pickup. The truck tore off, heading southeast toward Belize City at 80 miles per hour.</p><p>McAfee tried to stay calm, but he had to admit that this was a bad situation. He had walked away from a luxurious life—mansions on multiple continents, sports cars, a private plane—only to end up in the back of a pickup cuffed to a notoriously violent man. Allen pulled McAfee close so he could be heard over the roar of the wind. McAfee tensed. "Boss, I just want to say that it's an honor to be here with you," Allen shouted. "You must be a really important person for them to send all these men to get you."</p><p><strong>In 1986 two brothers in Pakistan</strong> coded the first known computer virus aimed at PCs. They weren't trying to destroy anything; it was simple curiosity. They wanted to see how far their creation would travel, so they included their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the code of the virus. They named it Brain after their computer services shop in Lahore.</p><p>Within a year the phone at the shop was ringing: Brain had infected computers around the world. At the time, McAfee had been sober for four years and gotten a security clearance to work on a classified voice-recognition program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. But then he came across an article in the <em>San Jose Mercury News</em> about the spread of the Pakistani Brain virus in the US.</p></div><div><p>He found the idea terrifying. Nobody knew for sure at the time why these intrusions were occurring. It reminded him of his childhood, when his father would hit him for no reason. "I didn't know why he did it," McAfee says. "I just knew a beating could happen any time." As a boy, he wasn't able to fight back. Now, faced with a new form of attack that was hard to rationalize, he decided to do something.</p><p>He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara. His business plan: Create an antivirus program and give it away on electronic bulletin boards. McAfee didn't expect users to pay. His real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five years, half of the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt compelled to pay a license fee. By 1990, McAfee was making $5 million a year with very little overhead or investment.</p><p>His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack. Soon after launching his company, he bought a 27-foot Winnebago, loaded it with computers, and announced that he had formed the first "antivirus paramedic unit." When he got a call from someone experiencing computer problems in the San Jose area, he drove to the site and searched for "virus residue." Like a good door-to-door salesman, there was a kernel of truth to his pitch, but he amplified and embellished the facts to sell his product. The RV therefore was not just an RV; it was "the first specially customized unit to wage effective, on-the-spot counterattacks in the virus war."</p><p>It was great publicity, executed with drama and sly wit. By the end of 1988, he was on <em>The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour</em> telling the country that viruses were causing so much damage, some companies were "near collapse from financial loss." He underscored the danger with his 1989 book, <em>Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System</em>. "The reality is so alarming that it would be very difficult to exaggerate," he wrote. "Even if no new viruses are ever created, there are already enough circulating to cause a growing problem as they reproduce. A major disaster seems inevitable."</p><p>In 1992 McAfee told almost every major news network and newspaper that the recently discovered Michelangelo virus was a huge threat; he believed it could destroy as many as 5 million computers around the world. Sales of his software spiked, but in the end only tens of thousands of infections were reported. Though McAfee was roundly criticized for his proclamation, the criticism worked in his favor, as he explained in an email in 2000 to a computer-security blogger: "My business increased tenfold in the two months following the stories and six months later our revenues were 50 times greater and we had captured the lion's share of the anti-virus market."</p></div><div><p>This ability to infect others with his own paranoia made McAfee a wealthy man. In October 1992 his company debuted on Nasdaq, and his shares were suddenly worth $80 million.</p><p><strong>The jail cell was about 10 feet by 10 feet.</strong> The concrete floor was bare and cold, the smell of urine overpowering. A plastic milk container in the corner had been hacked open and was serving as a toilet. The detention center was located in the Queen Street police station, but everybody in Belize City called it the Pisshouse. In the shadows of his cell, McAfee could see the other inmates staring at him.</p><p>No charges had been filed yet, though the police had confiscated what they said were two unlicensed firearms on McAfee's property; they still couldn't identify the chemicals they had found. McAfee said he had licenses for all his firearms and explained that the chemicals were part of his antibiotic research. The police weren't buying it.</p><p>McAfee pulled 20 Belizean dollars out of his shoe and passed it through the bars to a guard. "You got a cigarette?" he asked.</p><p>McAfee hadn't smoked for 10 years, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The guard handed him a book of matches and a pack of Benson &amp; Hedges. McAfee lit one and took a deep drag. He was supposed to be living out a peaceful retirement in a tropical paradise. Now he was standing in jail, holding up his pants with one hand because the police had confiscated his belt. "Use this," Allen said, offering him a dirty plastic bag.</p><p>McAfee looked confused. "You tie your pants," Allen explained.</p><p>McAfee fed the bag through two of his belt loops, cinched it tight, and tied a knot. It worked.</p><p>"Welcome to the Pisshouse," Allen said, smiling.</p><p><strong>McAfee lived in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years.</strong> Outwardly he seemed to lead a traditional life with his second wife, Judy. He was a seasoned businessman whom startups turned to for advice. Stanford Graduate School of Business wrote two case studies highlighting his strategies. He was regularly invited to lecture at the school, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Roanoke College. In 2000 he started a yoga institute near his 10,000-square-foot mansion in the Colorado Rockies and wrote four books about spirituality. Even after his marriage fell apart in 2002, he was a respectable citizen who donated computers to schools and took out newspaper ads discouraging drug use.</p><p>But as he neared retirement age in the late 2000s, he started to feel like he was deluding himself. His properties, cars, and planes had become a burden, and he realized that he didn't want the traditional rich man's life anymore. Maintaining so many possessions was a constant distraction; it was time, he felt, to try to live more rustically. "John has always been searching for something," says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee's girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach "the expansive horizon."</p></div><div><p>He was also hurting financially. The economic collapse in 2008 hit him hard, and he couldn't afford to maintain his lifestyle. By 2009 he'd auctioned off almost everything he owned, including more than 1,000 acres of land in Hawaii and the private airport he'd built in New Mexico. He was trying in part to deter people from suing him on the assumption that he had deep pockets. He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he'd be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas.</p><p>In early 2008 McAfee started searching for property in the Caribbean. His criteria were pretty basic: He was looking for an English-speaking country near the US with beautiful beaches. He quickly came across a villa on Ambergris Caye in Belize. In the early '90s he had visited the nation of 189,000 people and loved it. (Today the population is around 356,000.) He looked at the property on Google Earth, decided it was perfect, and bought it. The first time he saw it in person was in April 2008, when he moved in.</p><p>Soon after his arrival, McAfee began to explore the country. He was particularly fascinated by stories of a majestic Mayan city in the jungle and hired a guide to go see it. Boating up a river that snaked into the northern jungle, they stopped at a makeshift dock that jutted from the dense vegetation. McAfee jumped ashore, pushed through the vines, and caught sight of a towering, crumbling temple. Trees had grown up through the ancient buildings, encasing them in roots. Giant stone faces glared out through the foliage, mouths agape. As the men walked up the steps of the temple, the guide described how the Mayans sacrificed their prisoners, sending torrents of blood down the very stairs he and McAfee were now climbing.</p><p>McAfee was spellbound. "Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There's an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can't really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other," McAfee says. The jungle, in other words, would give him the chance to find out exactly who he was, and that opportunity was irresistible.</p><p>So in February 2010 he bought two and a half acres of swampy land along the New River, 10 miles upriver from the Mayan ruins. Over the next year, he spent more than a million dollars filling in the swamp and constructing an array of thatched-roofed bungalows. While his girlfriend, Irwin, stayed on Ambergris Caye, McAfee outfitted the place like Kublai Khan's sumptuous house of pleasure. He imported ancient Tibetan art and shipped in a baby grand piano even though he had never taken lessons. There was no Internet. At night, when the construction stopped, there was just the sound of the river flowing quietly past. He sat at the piano and played exuberant odes of his own creation. "It was magical," he says.</p></div><div><p>He didn't like the idea of getting old, though, so he injected testosterone into his buttocks every other week. He felt that it gave him youthful energy and kept him lean. Plus, he wasn't looking for a quiet retirement. He started a cigar manufacturing business, a coffee distribution company, and a water taxi service that connected parts of Ambergris Caye. He continued to build more bungalows on his property even though he had no pressing need for them.</p><p>In 2010 McAfee visited a beachfront resort for lunch and met Allison Adonizio, a 31-year-old microbiologist who was on vacation. In the resort's dining room, Adonizio explained that she was doing postgrad research at Harvard on how plants combat bacteria. She was particularly interested in plant compounds that appeared to prevent bacteria from causing infections by interfering with the way the microbes communicated. Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead to an entire new class of antibiotics.</p><p>McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones. It was perfect.</p><p>He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries. Adonizio was astounded. "He offered me my dream job," she says. "My own lab, assistants. It was incredible."</p><p>Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston, sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee touted the business to the international press.</p><p>But the methodical pace of Adonizio's scientific research couldn't keep up with McAfee's enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander. He began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13,000 people that was 5 miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an email to friends as "the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated." He liked to walk the town's poorly paved streets and take pictures of the residents. "I gravitate to the world's outcasts," he explained in another email. "Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped ... For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures."</p><p>Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a saloon called Lover's Bar. The proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to "shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions." McAfee quickly noticed that the place doubled as a whorehouse, servicing, as he put it, "cane field workers, street vendors, fishermen, farmers—anyone who has managed to save up $15 for a good time."</p><p>This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers, vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more. One reported drinking 50 beers in one day. "Ninety-nine percent of people would run because they'd fear for their safety or sanity," McAfee says. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't walk away."</p></div><div><p>McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover's. After six months, he sent out another update to his friends: "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed," he wrote. "My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight."</p><p>McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. "I have no illusions," he noted in another dispatch. "We are tainted by everything we touch."</p><p><strong>Evaristo "Paz" Novelo, the obese</strong> Belizean proprietor of Lover's, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers through perpetually puffy eyes. He admits to a long history of operating brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy. McAfee declined again. Then Novelo showed up at McAfee's compound with a 16-year-old girl named Amy Emshwiller.</p><p>Emshwiller had a brassy toughness that belied her girlishness. In a matter-of-fact tone, she told McAfee that she had been abused as a child and said that her mother had forced her to sleep with dozens of men for money. "I don't fall in love," she told him. "That's not my job." She carried a gun, wore aviator sunglasses, and had on a low-cut shirt that framed her ample cleavage.</p><p>McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. "I am the male version of Amy," he says. "I resonated with her story because I lived it."</p><p>Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. "I know how to control men," she says. "I told him my story because I wanted him to feel sorry for me, and it worked." All Emshwiller saw was an easy mark. "A millionaire in freaking Belize, where people work all day just to make a dime?" she says. "Who wouldn't want to rob him?"</p><p>McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but that was part of her attractiveness. "She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known," he says. "And she can be alluring, she can be very beautiful, she can be butchlike. She's a chameleon." Within a month they were sleeping together, and McAfee started building a new bungalow on his property for her.</p><p>Visiting from Ambergris Caye, McAfee's girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, was flabbergasted. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. "What I basically did was can a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman," he says. "But I honestly fell in love."</p><p>One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. She slipped out of bed and pulled McAfee's Smith &amp; Wesson out of a holster hanging from an ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. Her plan, if it could be called that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could scrounge up. She crept to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to pull the trigger. But at the last moment she closed her eyes, and the bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. "I guess I didn't want to kill the bastard," she admits.</p></div><div><p>McAfee leaped out of bed and grabbed the gun before she could fire again. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and asked if he was going to shoot her. He couldn't hear out of his left ear and was trying to get his bearings. Finally he told her he was going to take away her phone and TV for a month. She was furious.</p><p>“I basically canned a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman,” McAfee says. “But I fell in love.”</p><p>"But I didn't even kill you!" she shouted.</p><p><strong>McAfee decided it was better for</strong> Emshwiller to have her own place about a mile down the road in the village of Carmelita. So in early 2011 he built her a house in the village. Many of the homes are made of stripped tree trunks and topped with sheets of corrugated iron; 10 percent have no electricity. The village has a handful of dirt roads populated with colonies of biting ants and a grassy soccer field surrounded by palm trees and stray dogs. The town's biggest source of income: sand from a pit by the river that locals sell to construction companies.</p><p>Emshwiller, who had grown up in the area, warned McAfee that the village was not what it appeared to be. She told him that the tiny, impoverished town of 1,600 was in fact a major shipment site for drugs moving overland into Mexico, 35 miles to the north. As Emshwiller described it, this village in McAfee's backyard was crawling with narco-traffickers.</p><p>It was a revelation perfectly tailored to feed into McAfee's latent paranoia. "I was massively disturbed," he says. "I fell in love with the river, but then I discovered the horrors of Carmelita."</p><p>He asked Emshwiller what he should do. "She wanted me to shoot all the men in the town," McAfee says. It occurred to him that she might be using him to exact revenge on people who had wronged her, so he asked the denizens of Lover's for more information. They told him stories of killings, torture, and gang wars in the area. For McAfee, the town began to take on mythic proportions. "Carmelita was literally the Wild West," he says. "I didn't realize that 2 miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet."</p><p>He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multibillion-dollar company. Even though he had lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, he was still wealthy. Maybe he couldn't maintain multiple estates around the world, but surely he could clean up one village.</p><p>He started by solving some obvious problems. Carmelita had no police station, so McAfee bought a small cement house and hired workers to install floor-to-ceiling iron bars. Then he told the national cops responsible for the area to start arresting people. The police protested that they were ill-equipped for the job, so McAfee furnished them with imported M16s, boots, pepper spray, stun guns, and batons. Eventually he started paying officers to patrol during their off-hours. The police, in essence, became McAfee's private army, and he began issuing orders. "What I'd like you to do is go into Carmelita and start getting information for me," he told the officers on his payroll. "Who's dealing drugs, and where are the drugs coming from?"</p></div><div><p>When a 22-year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside Emshwiller's house in November 2011, McAfee decided he couldn't rely on others to get the work done; he needed to take action himself. An eyewitness told him that Burger had shot at a motorcycle—it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Burger's sister said that he was firing at stray dogs that attacked him. Either way, McAfee was incensed. He drove his gray Dodge pickup to the family's wooden shack near the river and strode into the muddy yard with Emshwiller as his backup (she was carrying a matte-black air rifle with a large scope). Burger wasn't there, but his mother, sister, and brother-in-law were. "I'm giving you a last chance here," McAfee said, holding his Smith &amp; Wesson. "Your brother will be a dead man if he doesn't turn in that gun. It doesn't matter where he goes."</p><p>"It was like he thought he was in a movie," says Amelia Allen, the shooter's sister. But she wasn't going to argue with McAfee. Her mother pulled the gun out of a bush and handed it to him.</p><p>Soon, McAfee was everywhere. He pulled over a suspicious car on the road only to discover that it was filled with elderly people and children. He offered a new flatscreen TV to a small-time marijuana peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing (the guy accepted, though the TV soon broke). "It was like John Wayne came to town," says Elvis Reynolds, former chair of the village council.</p><p>When I visited the village, Reynolds and others admitted that there were fights and petty theft but insisted that Carmelita was simply an impoverished little village, not a major transit point for international narco-traffickers, as McAfee alleges. The village leaders, for their part, were dumbfounded. Many were unfamiliar with antivirus software and had never heard of John McAfee. "I thought he would come by, introduce himself, and explain what he was doing here, but he never did," says Feliciano Salam, a soft-spoken resident who has served on the village council for two years. "He just showed up and started telling us what to do."</p><p>The fact that he was running a laboratory on his property only added to the mystery. Adonizio was continuing to research botanical compounds, but McAfee didn't want to tell the locals anything about it. In part he was worried about corporate espionage. He had seen white men in suits standing beside their cars on the heavily trafficked toll bridge near his property and was sure they were spies. "Do you realize that Glaxo, Bayer, every single drug company in the world sent people out there?" McAfee says. "I was working on a project that had some paradigm-shifting impact on the drug world. It would be insanity to talk about it."</p><p>McAfee became convinced that he was being watched at all hours. Across the river, he saw people lurking in the forest and would surveil them with binoculars. When Emshwiller visited, she never noticed anybody but repeatedly told McAfee to be careful. She heard rumors that gang members were out to "jack" him—rob and kill him. On one occasion, she recorded a village councilman discussing how to dispatch McAfee with a grenade. McAfee was wowed by her street smarts—"She is brilliant beyond description," he says—and relished the fact that she had come full circle and was now defending him. "He got himself into a very entangled, dysfunctional situation," says Katrina Ancona, the wife of McAfee's partner in the water taxi business. "We kept telling him to get out."</p></div><div><p>Adonizio was also worried about McAfee's behavior. He had initially told her that the area was perfectly safe, but now she was surrounded by armed men. When she went to talk to McAfee in his bungalow, she noticed garbage bags filled with cash and blister packs of pharmaceuticals, including Viagra. She lived just outside of Carmelita and had never had any problems. If there was any danger, she felt that it was coming from McAfee. "He turned into a very scary person," she says. She wasn't comfortable living there anymore and left the country.</p><p>George Lovell, CEO of the Ministry of National Security, was also concerned that McAfee was buying guns and hiring guards. "When I see people doing this, my question is, what are you trying to protect?" Lovell says. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred. "We got information to suggest that there may have been a meth laboratory at his location," he wrote in an email. "Given the intelligence on McAfee, there was no scope for making efforts to resolve the matter." He proposed a raid, and his superiors approved it.</p><p>When members of the GSU swept into McAfee's compound on April 30, 2012, they found no meth. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They did confiscate 10 weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition. Three of McAfee's security guards were operating without a security guard license, and charges were filed against them. McAfee was accused of possessing an unlicensed firearm and spent a night in the Queen Street jail, aka the Pisshouse.</p><p>But the next morning, the charges were dropped and McAfee was released. He was convinced, however, that his war on drugs had made him some powerful enemies.</p><p>He had reason to worry. According to Vidal, McAfee was still a "person of interest," primarily because the authorities still couldn't explain what he was up to. "The GSU makes no apologies for deeming a person in control of a laboratory, with no approval for manufacturing any substance, having gang connections and heavily armed security guards, as a person of interest," Vidal wrote.</p><p>Vidal's suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.ru, a drug discussion forum. He explained that he had started to experiment with MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, a class of designer drugs that have effects similar to amphetamines and cocaine. "When I first started doing this I accidently got a few drops on my fingers while handling a used flask and didn't sleep for four days," McAfee posted. "I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life."</p><p>McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the drug's risks and claimed to have produced 50 pounds of MDPV in 2010. "I have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country," he wrote. But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced 50 pounds without anyone noticing?</p></div><div><p>McAfee has a simple explanation: The whole thing was an elaborate prank aimed at tricking drug users into trying a notoriously noxious drug. "It was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world," he says, and denies ever taking the substance. "If I'm gonna do drugs, I'm gonna do something that I know is good," he says. "I'm gonna grab some mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine.</p><p>"But anybody who knows me knows I would never do drugs," he says.</p><p><strong>In August, McAfee and I meet</strong> for a final in-person interview at his villa on Ambergris Caye. He greets me wearing a pistol strapped across his bare chest. Guards patrol the beach in front of us. He tells me that he's now living with five women who appear to be between the ages of 17 and 20; each has her own bungalow on the property. Emshwiller is here, though McAfee's attention is focused on the other women.</p><p>He has barely left the property since he came out of hiding in April. He says he spends his days shuttling from bungalow to bungalow, trying to mediate among the women. I ask why he doesn't leave the country, given that the Belizean government has returned his passport. "I would be perceived as running away," McAfee says. "Within three days, all of Carmelita would return to no-man's-land, and it would be the staging post for every illegal activity in northern Belize."</p><p>As McAfee tells it, he is all that stands between Carmelita and rampant criminality. The police raided him, he says, because he had run the local drug dealers out of town. These dealers had political connections and had successfully lobbied to have the police attack him. They wanted him gone. He says he also refused to make political contributions to a local politician, further antagonizing the ruling party. If he gives in, he argues, it will send a message that Belize's corrupt government can control anybody, even a rich American.</p><p>As McAfee talks, we walk across the white sand beach and into his bungalow. In many ways, his life has devolved into a complex web of contradictions. He says he's battling drugs in Carmelita, but at the same time he's trying to trick people online into taking drugs. He professes to care about laws—and castigates the police for violating his rights—but he moved to Belize in part to subvert the US legal system in the event he lost a civil case. The police suggest he's a drug kingpin; I can't help but wonder if he has lost track of reality. Maybe he imagines that he can fix himself by fixing Carmelita.</p><p>His bungalow is sparsely furnished. The small open kitchen is strewn with dishes, rotting vegetables, half-drunk bottles of Coke, and boxes of Rice Krispies and Cheerios. A dog is licking a stick of butter off the counter. A bandolier of shotgun shells hangs from a chair. He pops open a plastic bottle of Lucas Pelucas, a tamarind-flavored Mexican candy, and depresses the plunger, extruding the gooey liquid through small holes in the top. "I fucking love these things," he says.</p></div><div><p>I tell him that while I was in Carmelita, the villagers described the place as quiet and slow-moving. There is crime, most admitted, but it is limited to stolen bicycles and drunken fights. It did not seem like a particularly dangerous place to me.</p><p>"Ninety-nine percent of all crimes are never, ever reported to the police," he says. "Because if the gang kills your sister and you report it, the gang will come back and kill you. Nobody says anything."</p><p>When I tell him that the locals I spoke with can remember only two murders in the past three years, he argues that I'm not asking the right questions. To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol.</p><p>"Let's do this one more time," he says, and puts it to his head. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. "It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber," he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I'm missing something.</p><p>The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I'm not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. "You thought you were creating your reality," he says. "You were not. I was."</p><p>He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It's still warm.</p><p><strong>Eight weeks later, my phone rings</strong> at 4:30 in the morning. I'm back in the US and groggily pick up. "I'm sorry to wake you up at this hour, sir, but the GSU had me surrounded all night," McAfee says in a breathless rush. He explains that he's staying at Captain Morgan's Retreat, a resort on Ambergris Caye, and he decided to go for a walk at dusk. As he strolled along the beach, he heard the sound of approaching gas-powered golf carts. "You can tell the GSU vehicles because they have this low roar," he says, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. "I think they put special mufflers on them to scare people."</p><p>He dashed onto the porch of a nearby hotel room and hid behind the bushes. Then he heard someone cough on the balcony above him. "As soon as I heard that, my heart sank," he says. "They were fucking everywhere."</p><p>McAfee spends the next 25 minutes describing to me how the GSU silently surrounded him in the darkness. "Two of them were less than 3 feet away," he says "They stood unmoving. No one said a word all night long. They just surround you and stand still. Think about it. It's freaky shit, sir."</p><p>He sat there all night, he tells me, terrified that the shadowy figures he was seeing would kill him if he moved. Around 4 o'clock in the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared.</p></div><div><p>McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He thought he could see Marco Vidal, head of the GSU, motoring away in a boat. He screamed Vidal's name. (Vidal denies any GSU encounters with McAfee after the April 30 raid.)</p><p>A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. "After a while my heart was beating so fast it was like one big hum," he says. "I was bursting with perspiration."</p><p>I suggest he get some rest. He sounds frantic and scared.</p><p>"They're coming back," he says suddenly. "This is too fucking much. I'm hanging up. I'm going."</p><p>The line goes dead.</p><p>A week later, McAfee calls me from the Belizean-Mexican border. He tells me he's had enough of Belize. A day ago, he was walking down the beach on Ambergris Caye when several GSU "frogmen" walked out of the water. Later, he says, a troop of GSU officers crowded into his room but didn't say or do anything. "I have just escaped from hell," he says.</p><p>The next day he's in an $800-a-night suite at the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. "It has a sushi restaurant," he says. "Do you realize I haven't had sushi in years?" He sounds refreshed and says he's feeling better.</p><p>Six days pass, and McAfee calls again. "Good morning, John," I say.</p><p>"Good evening, I think it is," McAfee says.</p><p>I explain that it's 9:41 am.</p><p>"You're kidding me," he says. "I haven't slept for a couple nights. It felt like evening to me."</p><p>"What's going on?" I ask.</p><p>"I am back from Mexico, thank God," he says, explaining that he was robbed and beaten outside of Cancun. Now he's on Ambergris Caye. "Here it's clear that they're not going to harm me, they're just trying to scare me," he says. "They have to up the ante if they're going to continue scaring me."</p><p>I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him. He hires William Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the fact that he's married to a Belizean woman.</p><p>On Friday, November 9, 2012, I receive an email from McAfee telling me that "a contingent of black-suited thugs" disembarked on the dock next to his property at 10:30 pm. The men dispersed on the beach. "A half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned," he writes. "Mellow, Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. I had to call Amy and tell her about Mellow. She is hysterical."</p><p>The next morning, November 10, 2012, McAfee calls to tell me that his dogs died horrific deaths. They were vomiting blood and convulsing on the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. "It was an ugly thing," he says.</p><p>"How is Amy doing?" I ask.</p><p>"I've tried calling her twice," he says. "She's not answering. She's not doing well."</p><p>I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August. She was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a chill, I remember her reaction: "Mess with my dog, you're gonna get it, man," she'd said.</p></div><div><p>In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly committed to McAfee. "If he asked me to blow someone's fucking brains out, I would," she said.</p><p>Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is surrounded by boot prints—"military-style boot prints," he says—and cites this as evidence that the police were involved. "I'm a paranoid person," he says. "I really am. But the whole thing is looking really weird to me."</p><p>I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the beach, asked one of McAfee's guards to do something to control the 11 dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence to corral them.</p><p>Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee's mutts. Faull was a big man—5'11", around 220 pounds—who owned a sports bars in Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee's dogs created. They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the beach.</p><p>Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. According to McAfee, Faull once threatened to shoot them, but McAfee didn't believe he'd do it. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull's house when she first moved to Belize in 2010, says there was bad blood between the two men back then. "McAfee hated his guts," she wrote in an email to me.</p><p>Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the dogs with the mayor's office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent poisoning of the animals. "They're still dog lovers," he says. "And I talked to them this morning. No one here would ever poison the dogs."</p><p>He speaks specifically about Faull. "This is not something he would ever do," McAfee says. "I mean, he's an angry sort of guy, but he would never hurt a dog."</p><p>On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying faceup in a pool of blood. He's been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A 9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say.</p><p>That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee's property to question him about Faull's death. McAfee sees them coming and is sure the authorities are intent on tormenting him again. He quickly digs a shallow trench in the sand and buries himself, pulling a cardboard box over his head. He stays there for hours.</p><p>"It was extraordinarily uncomfortable," he says.</p><p>The police confiscate all the weapons on the property and take Mulligan in for questioning. When they leave, Cassian Chavarria, McAfee's groundskeeper, tells him that Faull has been killed. According to McAfee, that was the first he heard of the murder. His initial reaction, he says, is that it was the GSU trying to kill McAfee himself. "I thought maybe they were coming for me," he says. "They mistook him for me. They got the wrong house. He's dead. They killed him. It spooked me out."</p></div><div><p>McAfee decides to go on the run and begins calling me at all hours. I ask him if he shot Faull. "No sir, no sir," he says. "That's not even funny." (Emshwiller also denies any involvement in Faull's death.)</p><p>All McAfee knew about the murder, he says, was that the police were after him, and he believed that if they caught him, he would be tortured or killed. "Once they collect me, it's the end of me," he says.</p><p>Over the next 48 hours, McAfee bounces from place to place around Belize, aided by a network of "people who can't be followed," he tells me. "It's complicated, and there are a lot of risks, and people could turn south at any minute." Samantha Vanegas, one of his girlfriends, is with him, and he says that they've been subsisting on Oreo Cakester cookies and cigarettes. On Tuesday morning, he says, the police raided the house next door, but they evaded capture, eventually landing in a house with no hot water and a broken toilet. There is, however, a working TV.</p><p>"We watched <em>Swiss Family Robinson</em>," he says. "It's about castaways. That's why we got into it. It was like, wow, we could do that. We could get bamboo and build something like that."</p><p>The movie had a happy ending. McAfee liked that.</p><p><em>When this article was published, John McAfee was still in hiding and in communication with the author. For updates on his case, visit</em> <a href="https://www.wired.com/"><em>Wired.com</em></a><em>.</em></p><hr /><p><em>Contributing editor Joshua Davis</em> (<a href="https://twitter.com/JoshuaDavisNow/status/272769693004222464">@JoshuaDavisNow</a>) <em>has traveled the world reporting for</em> Wired <em>(Colombia, China, Nepal, South Korea, Iraq, Israel, Russia). His writing is anthologized in the 2012 edition of</em> The Best American Science and Nature Writing, <em>and he is the author of</em> The Underdog, <em>an account of his adventures as a sumo wrestler, matador, and backward runner.</em></p></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 John McAfee Fled to Belize, But He Couldn't Escape Himself
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 Brian Finke

 Joshua Davis

 Backchannel
 Dec 24, 2012 6:30 AM

 John McAfee Fled to Belize, But He Couldn't Escape Himself

 On November 12, 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee’s life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.
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 On November 12, 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee's life. This is the chronicle of that investigation.

 Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith & Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders.

 More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he's holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about 15 miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier.

 McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. "This is a bullet, right?" he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia.

 "Let's put the gun back," I tell him. I'd come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I'm not so sure.

 But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. "Maybe what happened didn't actually happen," he says, staring hard at me. "Can I do a demonstration?"

 He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder.

 "This scares you, right?" he says. Then he puts the gun to his head.

 My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. "Yeah, I'm scared," I admit. "We don't have to do this."

 "I know we don't," he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers.

 "Reholster the gun," I demand.

 He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. "I can do this all day long," he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. "I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong."

 It's the same thing, he argues, with the government's accusations. They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there's one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of April 30, 2012.

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 It was a Monday, about 4:50 am. A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee's newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD.

 The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize's Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations.

 The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn't over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. "This is the police," a voice blared over a bullhorn. "Everyone out!"

 Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts 20 feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned—estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his 10-passenger plane—and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were 31 of them; he was outgunned and outmanned.

 McAfee walked back inside to the 17-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified.

 As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him.

 "You're being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine," one of the cops said.

 McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. "That's a startling hypothesis, sir," he responded. "Because I haven't sold drugs since 1983."

 BRIAN FINKE

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 Nineteen eighty-three was a pivotal year for McAfee. He was 38 and director of engineering at Omex, a company that built information storage systems in Santa Clara, California. He was also selling cocaine to his subordinates and snorting massive amounts himself. When he got too high to focus, he'd take a quaalude. If he started to fall asleep at his desk, he'd snort some more coke to wake up. McAfee had trouble making it through the day and spent his afternoons drinking scotch to even out the tumult in his head.

 He'd been a mess for a long time. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, where his father was a road surveyor and his mother a bank teller. His father, McAfee recalls, was a heavy drinker and "a very unhappy man" who McAfee says beat him and his mother severely. When McAfee was 15, his father shot himself. "Every day I wake up with him," McAfee says. "Every relationship I have, he's by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is fucked."

 McAfee started drinking heavily his first year at Roanoke College and supported himself by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. He would knock and announce that the lucky resident had won an absolutely free subscription; all they had to do was pay a small shipping and handling fee. "So, in fact, I am explaining to them why it's not free and why they are going to pay for it. But the ruse worked," McAfee recalls. He learned that confidence was all that mattered. He smiled, fixed them with his penetrating blue-eyed gaze, and hit them with a nonstop stream of patter. "I made a fortune," he says.

 He spent his money on booze but managed to graduate and start a PhD in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College in 1968. He got kicked out for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students (whom he later married) and ended up coding old-school punch-card programs for Univac in Bristol, Tennessee. That didn't last long, either. He was arrested for buying marijuana, and though his lawyer got him off without a conviction, he was summarily fired.

 Still, he had learned enough to gin up an impressive, totally fake résumé and used it to get a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis. It was 1969 and the company was attempting to use an IBM computer to schedule trains. After six months, McAfee's system began to churn out optimized train-routing patterns. Unfortunately, he had also discovered LSD. He would drop acid in the morning, go to work, and route trains all day. One morning he decided to experiment with another psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to snort a whole bag of the orangish powder. "Within an hour my mind was shattered," McAfee says.

 People asked him questions, but he didn't understand what they were saying. The computer was spitting out train schedules to the moon; he couldn't make sense of it. He ended up behind a garbage can in downtown St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping that nobody would look at him. He never went back to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.

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 * 

 From then on he felt like he was always one step away from a total breakdown, which finally came at Omex in 1983. He was snorting lines of coke off his desk most mornings, polishing off a bottle of scotch every day, and living in constant fear that he would run out of drugs. His wife had left him, he'd given away his dog, and in the wake of what he calls a mutual agreement, he left Omex. He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. "My life was total hell," he says.

 Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn't alone.

 "That's when life really began for me," he says.

 He says he's been sober ever since.

 When the Madonna concert ended, McAfee's drunken guard finally emerged from his station and strolled over to find out what was going on. The police quickly surrounded him. They knew who he was: Austin "Tino" Allen had been convicted 28 times for crimes ranging from robbery to assault, and he had spent most of his life in and out of prison.

 The police lined everybody up against a rock wall as the sun rose. A low, heavy heat filled the jungle. Everybody began to sweat when the police fanned out to search the property. As an officer headed toward an outlying building, one of McAfee's dogs cut him off, growled, and, according to police, went in for an attack. The cop immediately shot the dog through the rib cage.

 "What the fuck!" McAfee screamed. "That's my dog."

 The police ignored him. They left the dead dog in the dirt while they rummaged through the compound. They found shotguns, pistols, a huge cache of ammunition, and hundreds of bottles of chemicals they couldn't identify. McAfee and the others were left in the sun for hours. (GSU commander Marco Vidal claims they were under the shade of a large tree.) By the time the police announced that they were taking several of them to jail, McAfee says his face was turning pink with sunburn. He and Allen were loaded into the back of a pickup. The truck tore off, heading southeast toward Belize City at 80 miles per hour.

 McAfee tried to stay calm, but he had to admit that this was a bad situation. He had walked away from a luxurious life—mansions on multiple continents, sports cars, a private plane—only to end up in the back of a pickup cuffed to a notoriously violent man. Allen pulled McAfee close so he could be heard over the roar of the wind. McAfee tensed. "Boss, I just want to say that it's an honor to be here with you," Allen shouted. "You must be a really important person for them to send all these men to get you."

 BRIAN FINKE

 In 1986 two brothers in Pakistan coded the first known computer virus aimed at PCs. They weren't trying to destroy anything; it was simple curiosity. They wanted to see how far their creation would travel, so they included their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the code of the virus. They named it Brain after their computer services shop in Lahore.

 Within a year the phone at the shop was ringing: Brain had infected computers around the world. At the time, McAfee had been sober for four years and gotten a security clearance to work on a classified voice-recognition program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. But then he came across an article in the San Jose Mercury News about the spread of the Pakistani Brain virus in the US.

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 He found the idea terrifying. Nobody knew for sure at the time why these intrusions were occurring. It reminded him of his childhood, when his father would hit him for no reason. "I didn't know why he did it," McAfee says. "I just knew a beating could happen any time." As a boy, he wasn't able to fight back. Now, faced with a new form of attack that was hard to rationalize, he decided to do something.

 He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara. His business plan: Create an antivirus program and give it away on electronic bulletin boards. McAfee didn't expect users to pay. His real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five years, half of the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt compelled to pay a license fee. By 1990, McAfee was making $5 million a year with very little overhead or investment.

 His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack. Soon after launching his company, he bought a 27-foot Winnebago, loaded it with computers, and announced that he had formed the first "antivirus paramedic unit." When he got a call from someone experiencing computer problems in the San Jose area, he drove to the site and searched for "virus residue." Like a good door-to-door salesman, there was a kernel of truth to his pitch, but he amplified and embellished the facts to sell his product. The RV therefore was not just an RV; it was "the first specially customized unit to wage effective, on-the-spot counterattacks in the virus war."

 It was great publicity, executed with drama and sly wit. By the end of 1988, he was on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour telling the country that viruses were causing so much damage, some companies were "near collapse from financial loss." He underscored the danger with his 1989 book, Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System. "The reality is so alarming that it would be very difficult to exaggerate," he wrote. "Even if no new viruses are ever created, there are already enough circulating to cause a growing problem as they reproduce. A major disaster seems inevitable."

 In 1992 McAfee told almost every major news network and newspaper that the recently discovered Michelangelo virus was a huge threat; he believed it could destroy as many as 5 million computers around the world. Sales of his software spiked, but in the end only tens of thousands of infections were reported. Though McAfee was roundly criticized for his proclamation, the criticism worked in his favor, as he explained in an email in 2000 to a computer-security blogger: "My business increased tenfold in the two months following the stories and six months later our revenues were 50 times greater and we had captured the lion's share of the anti-virus market."

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 This ability to infect others with his own paranoia made McAfee a wealthy man. In October 1992 his company debuted on Nasdaq, and his shares were suddenly worth $80 million.

 The jail cell was about 10 feet by 10 feet. The concrete floor was bare and cold, the smell of urine overpowering. A plastic milk container in the corner had been hacked open and was serving as a toilet. The detention center was located in the Queen Street police station, but everybody in Belize City called it the Pisshouse. In the shadows of his cell, McAfee could see the other inmates staring at him.

 No charges had been filed yet, though the police had confiscated what they said were two unlicensed firearms on McAfee's property; they still couldn't identify the chemicals they had found. McAfee said he had licenses for all his firearms and explained that the chemicals were part of his antibiotic research. The police weren't buying it.

 McAfee pulled 20 Belizean dollars out of his shoe and passed it through the bars to a guard. "You got a cigarette?" he asked.

 McAfee hadn't smoked for 10 years, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The guard handed him a book of matches and a pack of Benson & Hedges. McAfee lit one and took a deep drag. He was supposed to be living out a peaceful retirement in a tropical paradise. Now he was standing in jail, holding up his pants with one hand because the police had confiscated his belt. "Use this," Allen said, offering him a dirty plastic bag.

 McAfee looked confused. "You tie your pants," Allen explained.

 McAfee fed the bag through two of his belt loops, cinched it tight, and tied a knot. It worked.

 "Welcome to the Pisshouse," Allen said, smiling.

 McAfee lived in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years. Outwardly he seemed to lead a traditional life with his second wife, Judy. He was a seasoned businessman whom startups turned to for advice. Stanford Graduate School of Business wrote two case studies highlighting his strategies. He was regularly invited to lecture at the school, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Roanoke College. In 2000 he started a yoga institute near his 10,000-square-foot mansion in the Colorado Rockies and wrote four books about spirituality. Even after his marriage fell apart in 2002, he was a respectable citizen who donated computers to schools and took out newspaper ads discouraging drug use.

 But as he neared retirement age in the late 2000s, he started to feel like he was deluding himself. His properties, cars, and planes had become a burden, and he realized that he didn't want the traditional rich man's life anymore. Maintaining so many possessions was a constant distraction; it was time, he felt, to try to live more rustically. "John has always been searching for something," says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee's girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach "the expansive horizon."

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 He was also hurting financially. The economic collapse in 2008 hit him hard, and he couldn't afford to maintain his lifestyle. By 2009 he'd auctioned off almost everything he owned, including more than 1,000 acres of land in Hawaii and the private airport he'd built in New Mexico. He was trying in part to deter people from suing him on the assumption that he had deep pockets. He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he'd be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas.

 In early 2008 McAfee started searching for property in the Caribbean. His criteria were pretty basic: He was looking for an English-speaking country near the US with beautiful beaches. He quickly came across a villa on Ambergris Caye in Belize. In the early '90s he had visited the nation of 189,000 people and loved it. (Today the population is around 356,000.) He looked at the property on Google Earth, decided it was perfect, and bought it. The first time he saw it in person was in April 2008, when he moved in.

 Soon after his arrival, McAfee began to explore the country. He was particularly fascinated by stories of a majestic Mayan city in the jungle and hired a guide to go see it. Boating up a river that snaked into the northern jungle, they stopped at a makeshift dock that jutted from the dense vegetation. McAfee jumped ashore, pushed through the vines, and caught sight of a towering, crumbling temple. Trees had grown up through the ancient buildings, encasing them in roots. Giant stone faces glared out through the foliage, mouths agape. As the men walked up the steps of the temple, the guide described how the Mayans sacrificed their prisoners, sending torrents of blood down the very stairs he and McAfee were now climbing.

 McAfee was spellbound. "Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There's an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can't really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other," McAfee says. The jungle, in other words, would give him the chance to find out exactly who he was, and that opportunity was irresistible.

 So in February 2010 he bought two and a half acres of swampy land along the New River, 10 miles upriver from the Mayan ruins. Over the next year, he spent more than a million dollars filling in the swamp and constructing an array of thatched-roofed bungalows. While his girlfriend, Irwin, stayed on Ambergris Caye, McAfee outfitted the place like Kublai Khan's sumptuous house of pleasure. He imported ancient Tibetan art and shipped in a baby grand piano even though he had never taken lessons. There was no Internet. At night, when the construction stopped, there was just the sound of the river flowing quietly past. He sat at the piano and played exuberant odes of his own creation. "It was magical," he says.

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 He didn't like the idea of getting old, though, so he injected testosterone into his buttocks every other week. He felt that it gave him youthful energy and kept him lean. Plus, he wasn't looking for a quiet retirement. He started a cigar manufacturing business, a coffee distribution company, and a water taxi service that connected parts of Ambergris Caye. He continued to build more bungalows on his property even though he had no pressing need for them.

 BRIAN FINKE

 In 2010 McAfee visited a beachfront resort for lunch and met Allison Adonizio, a 31-year-old microbiologist who was on vacation. In the resort's dining room, Adonizio explained that she was doing postgrad research at Harvard on how plants combat bacteria. She was particularly interested in plant compounds that appeared to prevent bacteria from causing infections by interfering with the way the microbes communicated. Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead to an entire new class of antibiotics.

 McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones. It was perfect.

 He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries. Adonizio was astounded. "He offered me my dream job," she says. "My own lab, assistants. It was incredible."

 Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston, sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee touted the business to the international press.

 But the methodical pace of Adonizio's scientific research couldn't keep up with McAfee's enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander. He began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13,000 people that was 5 miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an email to friends as "the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated." He liked to walk the town's poorly paved streets and take pictures of the residents. "I gravitate to the world's outcasts," he explained in another email. "Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped ... For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures."

 Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a saloon called Lover's Bar. The proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to "shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions." McAfee quickly noticed that the place doubled as a whorehouse, servicing, as he put it, "cane field workers, street vendors, fishermen, farmers—anyone who has managed to save up $15 for a good time."

 This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers, vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more. One reported drinking 50 beers in one day. "Ninety-nine percent of people would run because they'd fear for their safety or sanity," McAfee says. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't walk away."

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 McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover's. After six months, he sent out another update to his friends: "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed," he wrote. "My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight."

 McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. "I have no illusions," he noted in another dispatch. "We are tainted by everything we touch."

 Evaristo "Paz" Novelo, the obese Belizean proprietor of Lover's, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers through perpetually puffy eyes. He admits to a long history of operating brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy. McAfee declined again. Then Novelo showed up at McAfee's compound with a 16-year-old girl named Amy Emshwiller.

 Emshwiller had a brassy toughness that belied her girlishness. In a matter-of-fact tone, she told McAfee that she had been abused as a child and said that her mother had forced her to sleep with dozens of men for money. "I don't fall in love," she told him. "That's not my job." She carried a gun, wore aviator sunglasses, and had on a low-cut shirt that framed her ample cleavage.

 McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. "I am the male version of Amy," he says. "I resonated with her story because I lived it."

 Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. "I know how to control men," she says. "I told him my story because I wanted him to feel sorry for me, and it worked." All Emshwiller saw was an easy mark. "A millionaire in freaking Belize, where people work all day just to make a dime?" she says. "Who wouldn't want to rob him?"

 McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but that was part of her attractiveness. "She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known," he says. "And she can be alluring, she can be very beautiful, she can be butchlike. She's a chameleon." Within a month they were sleeping together, and McAfee started building a new bungalow on his property for her.

 Visiting from Ambergris Caye, McAfee's girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, was flabbergasted. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. "What I basically did was can a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman," he says. "But I honestly fell in love."

 One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. She slipped out of bed and pulled McAfee's Smith & Wesson out of a holster hanging from an ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. Her plan, if it could be called that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could scrounge up. She crept to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to pull the trigger. But at the last moment she closed her eyes, and the bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. "I guess I didn't want to kill the bastard," she admits.

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 McAfee leaped out of bed and grabbed the gun before she could fire again. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and asked if he was going to shoot her. He couldn't hear out of his left ear and was trying to get his bearings. Finally he told her he was going to take away her phone and TV for a month. She was furious.

 “I basically canned a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman,” McAfee says. “But I fell in love.”

 "But I didn't even kill you!" she shouted.

 McAfee decided it was better for Emshwiller to have her own place about a mile down the road in the village of Carmelita. So in early 2011 he built her a house in the village. Many of the homes are made of stripped tree trunks and topped with sheets of corrugated iron; 10 percent have no electricity. The village has a handful of dirt roads populated with colonies of biting ants and a grassy soccer field surrounded by palm trees and stray dogs. The town's biggest source of income: sand from a pit by the river that locals sell to construction companies.

 Emshwiller, who had grown up in the area, warned McAfee that the village was not what it appeared to be. She told him that the tiny, impoverished town of 1,600 was in fact a major shipment site for drugs moving overland into Mexico, 35 miles to the north. As Emshwiller described it, this village in McAfee's backyard was crawling with narco-traffickers.

 It was a revelation perfectly tailored to feed into McAfee's latent paranoia. "I was massively disturbed," he says. "I fell in love with the river, but then I discovered the horrors of Carmelita."

 He asked Emshwiller what he should do. "She wanted me to shoot all the men in the town," McAfee says. It occurred to him that she might be using him to exact revenge on people who had wronged her, so he asked the denizens of Lover's for more information. They told him stories of killings, torture, and gang wars in the area. For McAfee, the town began to take on mythic proportions. "Carmelita was literally the Wild West," he says. "I didn't realize that 2 miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet."

 He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multibillion-dollar company. Even though he had lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, he was still wealthy. Maybe he couldn't maintain multiple estates around the world, but surely he could clean up one village.

 He started by solving some obvious problems. Carmelita had no police station, so McAfee bought a small cement house and hired workers to install floor-to-ceiling iron bars. Then he told the national cops responsible for the area to start arresting people. The police protested that they were ill-equipped for the job, so McAfee furnished them with imported M16s, boots, pepper spray, stun guns, and batons. Eventually he started paying officers to patrol during their off-hours. The police, in essence, became McAfee's private army, and he began issuing orders. "What I'd like you to do is go into Carmelita and start getting information for me," he told the officers on his payroll. "Who's dealing drugs, and where are the drugs coming from?"

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 When a 22-year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside Emshwiller's house in November 2011, McAfee decided he couldn't rely on others to get the work done; he needed to take action himself. An eyewitness told him that Burger had shot at a motorcycle—it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Burger's sister said that he was firing at stray dogs that attacked him. Either way, McAfee was incensed. He drove his gray Dodge pickup to the family's wooden shack near the river and strode into the muddy yard with Emshwiller as his backup (she was carrying a matte-black air rifle with a large scope). Burger wasn't there, but his mother, sister, and brother-in-law were. "I'm giving you a last chance here," McAfee said, holding his Smith & Wesson. "Your brother will be a dead man if he doesn't turn in that gun. It doesn't matter where he goes."

 "It was like he thought he was in a movie," says Amelia Allen, the shooter's sister. But she wasn't going to argue with McAfee. Her mother pulled the gun out of a bush and handed it to him.

 Soon, McAfee was everywhere. He pulled over a suspicious car on the road only to discover that it was filled with elderly people and children. He offered a new flatscreen TV to a small-time marijuana peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing (the guy accepted, though the TV soon broke). "It was like John Wayne came to town," says Elvis Reynolds, former chair of the village council.

 When I visited the village, Reynolds and others admitted that there were fights and petty theft but insisted that Carmelita was simply an impoverished little village, not a major transit point for international narco-traffickers, as McAfee alleges. The village leaders, for their part, were dumbfounded. Many were unfamiliar with antivirus software and had never heard of John McAfee. "I thought he would come by, introduce himself, and explain what he was doing here, but he never did," says Feliciano Salam, a soft-spoken resident who has served on the village council for two years. "He just showed up and started telling us what to do."

 The fact that he was running a laboratory on his property only added to the mystery. Adonizio was continuing to research botanical compounds, but McAfee didn't want to tell the locals anything about it. In part he was worried about corporate espionage. He had seen white men in suits standing beside their cars on the heavily trafficked toll bridge near his property and was sure they were spies. "Do you realize that Glaxo, Bayer, every single drug company in the world sent people out there?" McAfee says. "I was working on a project that had some paradigm-shifting impact on the drug world. It would be insanity to talk about it."

 McAfee became convinced that he was being watched at all hours. Across the river, he saw people lurking in the forest and would surveil them with binoculars. When Emshwiller visited, she never noticed anybody but repeatedly told McAfee to be careful. She heard rumors that gang members were out to "jack" him—rob and kill him. On one occasion, she recorded a village councilman discussing how to dispatch McAfee with a grenade. McAfee was wowed by her street smarts—"She is brilliant beyond description," he says—and relished the fact that she had come full circle and was now defending him. "He got himself into a very entangled, dysfunctional situation," says Katrina Ancona, the wife of McAfee's partner in the water taxi business. "We kept telling him to get out."

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 Adonizio was also worried about McAfee's behavior. He had initially told her that the area was perfectly safe, but now she was surrounded by armed men. When she went to talk to McAfee in his bungalow, she noticed garbage bags filled with cash and blister packs of pharmaceuticals, including Viagra. She lived just outside of Carmelita and had never had any problems. If there was any danger, she felt that it was coming from McAfee. "He turned into a very scary person," she says. She wasn't comfortable living there anymore and left the country.

 George Lovell, CEO of the Ministry of National Security, was also concerned that McAfee was buying guns and hiring guards. "When I see people doing this, my question is, what are you trying to protect?" Lovell says. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred. "We got information to suggest that there may have been a meth laboratory at his location," he wrote in an email. "Given the intelligence on McAfee, there was no scope for making efforts to resolve the matter." He proposed a raid, and his superiors approved it.

 When members of the GSU swept into McAfee's compound on April 30, 2012, they found no meth. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They did confiscate 10 weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition. Three of McAfee's security guards were operating without a security guard license, and charges were filed against them. McAfee was accused of possessing an unlicensed firearm and spent a night in the Queen Street jail, aka the Pisshouse.

 But the next morning, the charges were dropped and McAfee was released. He was convinced, however, that his war on drugs had made him some powerful enemies.

 He had reason to worry. According to Vidal, McAfee was still a "person of interest," primarily because the authorities still couldn't explain what he was up to. "The GSU makes no apologies for deeming a person in control of a laboratory, with no approval for manufacturing any substance, having gang connections and heavily armed security guards, as a person of interest," Vidal wrote.

 Vidal's suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.ru, a drug discussion forum. He explained that he had started to experiment with MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, a class of designer drugs that have effects similar to amphetamines and cocaine. "When I first started doing this I accidently got a few drops on my fingers while handling a used flask and didn't sleep for four days," McAfee posted. "I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life."

 McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the drug's risks and claimed to have produced 50 pounds of MDPV in 2010. "I have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country," he wrote. But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced 50 pounds without anyone noticing?

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 McAfee has a simple explanation: The whole thing was an elaborate prank aimed at tricking drug users into trying a notoriously noxious drug. "It was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world," he says, and denies ever taking the substance. "If I'm gonna do drugs, I'm gonna do something that I know is good," he says. "I'm gonna grab some mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine.

 "But anybody who knows me knows I would never do drugs," he says.

 In August, McAfee and I meet for a final in-person interview at his villa on Ambergris Caye. He greets me wearing a pistol strapped across his bare chest. Guards patrol the beach in front of us. He tells me that he's now living with five women who appear to be between the ages of 17 and 20; each has her own bungalow on the property. Emshwiller is here, though McAfee's attention is focused on the other women.

 He has barely left the property since he came out of hiding in April. He says he spends his days shuttling from bungalow to bungalow, trying to mediate among the women. I ask why he doesn't leave the country, given that the Belizean government has returned his passport. "I would be perceived as running away," McAfee says. "Within three days, all of Carmelita would return to no-man's-land, and it would be the staging post for every illegal activity in northern Belize."

 As McAfee tells it, he is all that stands between Carmelita and rampant criminality. The police raided him, he says, because he had run the local drug dealers out of town. These dealers had political connections and had successfully lobbied to have the police attack him. They wanted him gone. He says he also refused to make political contributions to a local politician, further antagonizing the ruling party. If he gives in, he argues, it will send a message that Belize's corrupt government can control anybody, even a rich American.

 As McAfee talks, we walk across the white sand beach and into his bungalow. In many ways, his life has devolved into a complex web of contradictions. He says he's battling drugs in Carmelita, but at the same time he's trying to trick people online into taking drugs. He professes to care about laws—and castigates the police for violating his rights—but he moved to Belize in part to subvert the US legal system in the event he lost a civil case. The police suggest he's a drug kingpin; I can't help but wonder if he has lost track of reality. Maybe he imagines that he can fix himself by fixing Carmelita.

 His bungalow is sparsely furnished. The small open kitchen is strewn with dishes, rotting vegetables, half-drunk bottles of Coke, and boxes of Rice Krispies and Cheerios. A dog is licking a stick of butter off the counter. A bandolier of shotgun shells hangs from a chair. He pops open a plastic bottle of Lucas Pelucas, a tamarind-flavored Mexican candy, and depresses the plunger, extruding the gooey liquid through small holes in the top. "I fucking love these things," he says.

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 * 

 I tell him that while I was in Carmelita, the villagers described the place as quiet and slow-moving. There is crime, most admitted, but it is limited to stolen bicycles and drunken fights. It did not seem like a particularly dangerous place to me.

 "Ninety-nine percent of all crimes are never, ever reported to the police," he says. "Because if the gang kills your sister and you report it, the gang will come back and kill you. Nobody says anything."

 When I tell him that the locals I spoke with can remember only two murders in the past three years, he argues that I'm not asking the right questions. To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol.

 "Let's do this one more time," he says, and puts it to his head. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. "It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber," he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I'm missing something.

 The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I'm not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. "You thought you were creating your reality," he says. "You were not. I was."

 He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It's still warm.

 Eight weeks later, my phone rings at 4:30 in the morning. I'm back in the US and groggily pick up. "I'm sorry to wake you up at this hour, sir, but the GSU had me surrounded all night," McAfee says in a breathless rush. He explains that he's staying at Captain Morgan's Retreat, a resort on Ambergris Caye, and he decided to go for a walk at dusk. As he strolled along the beach, he heard the sound of approaching gas-powered golf carts. "You can tell the GSU vehicles because they have this low roar," he says, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. "I think they put special mufflers on them to scare people."

 He dashed onto the porch of a nearby hotel room and hid behind the bushes. Then he heard someone cough on the balcony above him. "As soon as I heard that, my heart sank," he says. "They were fucking everywhere."

 McAfee spends the next 25 minutes describing to me how the GSU silently surrounded him in the darkness. "Two of them were less than 3 feet away," he says "They stood unmoving. No one said a word all night long. They just surround you and stand still. Think about it. It's freaky shit, sir."

 He sat there all night, he tells me, terrified that the shadowy figures he was seeing would kill him if he moved. Around 4 o'clock in the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared.

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 * 

 McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He thought he could see Marco Vidal, head of the GSU, motoring away in a boat. He screamed Vidal's name. (Vidal denies any GSU encounters with McAfee after the April 30 raid.)

 A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. "After a while my heart was beating so fast it was like one big hum," he says. "I was bursting with perspiration."

 I suggest he get some rest. He sounds frantic and scared.

 "They're coming back," he says suddenly. "This is too fucking much. I'm hanging up. I'm going."

 The line goes dead.

 A week later, McAfee calls me from the Belizean-Mexican border. He tells me he's had enough of Belize. A day ago, he was walking down the beach on Ambergris Caye when several GSU "frogmen" walked out of the water. Later, he says, a troop of GSU officers crowded into his room but didn't say or do anything. "I have just escaped from hell," he says.

 The next day he's in an $800-a-night suite at the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. "It has a sushi restaurant," he says. "Do you realize I haven't had sushi in years?" He sounds refreshed and says he's feeling better.

 Six days pass, and McAfee calls again. "Good morning, John," I say.

 "Good evening, I think it is," McAfee says.

 I explain that it's 9:41 am.

 "You're kidding me," he says. "I haven't slept for a couple nights. It felt like evening to me."

 "What's going on?" I ask.

 "I am back from Mexico, thank God," he says, explaining that he was robbed and beaten outside of Cancun. Now he's on Ambergris Caye. "Here it's clear that they're not going to harm me, they're just trying to scare me," he says. "They have to up the ante if they're going to continue scaring me."

 I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him. He hires William Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the fact that he's married to a Belizean woman.

 On Friday, November 9, 2012, I receive an email from McAfee telling me that "a contingent of black-suited thugs" disembarked on the dock next to his property at 10:30 pm. The men dispersed on the beach. "A half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned," he writes. "Mellow, Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. I had to call Amy and tell her about Mellow. She is hysterical."

 The next morning, November 10, 2012, McAfee calls to tell me that his dogs died horrific deaths. They were vomiting blood and convulsing on the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. "It was an ugly thing," he says.

 "How is Amy doing?" I ask.

 "I've tried calling her twice," he says. "She's not answering. She's not doing well."

 I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August. She was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a chill, I remember her reaction: "Mess with my dog, you're gonna get it, man," she'd said.

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 * 

 In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly committed to McAfee. "If he asked me to blow someone's fucking brains out, I would," she said.

 Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is surrounded by boot prints—"military-style boot prints," he says—and cites this as evidence that the police were involved. "I'm a paranoid person," he says. "I really am. But the whole thing is looking really weird to me."

 I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the beach, asked one of McAfee's guards to do something to control the 11 dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence to corral them.

 Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee's mutts. Faull was a big man—5'11", around 220 pounds—who owned a sports bars in Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee's dogs created. They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the beach.

 Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. According to McAfee, Faull once threatened to shoot them, but McAfee didn't believe he'd do it. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull's house when she first moved to Belize in 2010, says there was bad blood between the two men back then. "McAfee hated his guts," she wrote in an email to me.

 Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the dogs with the mayor's office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent poisoning of the animals. "They're still dog lovers," he says. "And I talked to them this morning. No one here would ever poison the dogs."

 He speaks specifically about Faull. "This is not something he would ever do," McAfee says. "I mean, he's an angry sort of guy, but he would never hurt a dog."

 On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying faceup in a pool of blood. He's been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A 9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say.

 That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee's property to question him about Faull's death. McAfee sees them coming and is sure the authorities are intent on tormenting him again. He quickly digs a shallow trench in the sand and buries himself, pulling a cardboard box over his head. He stays there for hours.

 "It was extraordinarily uncomfortable," he says.

 The police confiscate all the weapons on the property and take Mulligan in for questioning. When they leave, Cassian Chavarria, McAfee's groundskeeper, tells him that Faull has been killed. According to McAfee, that was the first he heard of the murder. His initial reaction, he says, is that it was the GSU trying to kill McAfee himself. "I thought maybe they were coming for me," he says. "They mistook him for me. They got the wrong house. He's dead. They killed him. It spooked me out."

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 * 

 McAfee decides to go on the run and begins calling me at all hours. I ask him if he shot Faull. "No sir, no sir," he says. "That's not even funny." (Emshwiller also denies any involvement in Faull's death.)

 All McAfee knew about the murder, he says, was that the police were after him, and he believed that if they caught him, he would be tortured or killed. "Once they collect me, it's the end of me," he says.

 Over the next 48 hours, McAfee bounces from place to place around Belize, aided by a network of "people who can't be followed," he tells me. "It's complicated, and there are a lot of risks, and people could turn south at any minute." Samantha Vanegas, one of his girlfriends, is with him, and he says that they've been subsisting on Oreo Cakester cookies and cigarettes. On Tuesday morning, he says, the police raided the house next door, but they evaded capture, eventually landing in a house with no hot water and a broken toilet. There is, however, a working TV.

 "We watched Swiss Family Robinson," he says. "It's about castaways. That's why we got into it. It was like, wow, we could do that. We could get bamboo and build something like that."

 The movie had a happy ending. McAfee liked that.

 When this article was published, John McAfee was still in hiding and in communication with the author. For updates on his case, visit Wired.com.

 Contributing editor Joshua Davis (@JoshuaDavisNow) has traveled the world reporting for Wired (Colombia, China, Nepal, South Korea, Iraq, Israel, Russia). His writing is anthologized in the 2012 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he is the author of The Underdog, an account of his adventures as a sumo wrestler, matador, and backward runner.

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On November 12, 2012, Belizean police announced that they were seeking John McAfee for questioning in connection with the murder of his neighbor. Six months earlier, I began an in-depth investigation into McAfee's life. This is the chronicle of that investigation. Twelve weeks before the murder, John McAfee flicks open the cylinder of his Smith &amp; Wesson revolver and empties the bullets, letting them clatter onto the table between us. A few tumble to the floor. McAfee is 66, lean and fit, with veins bulging out of his forearms. His hair is bleached blond in patches, like a cheetah, and tattoos wrap around his arms and shoulders. More than 25 years ago, he formed McAfee Associates, a maker of antivirus software that went on to become immensely popular and was acquired by Intel in 2010 for $7.68 billion. Now he's holed up in a bungalow on his island estate, about 15 miles off the coast of mainland Belize. The shades are drawn so I can see only a sliver of the white sand beach and turquoise water outside. The table is piled with boxes of ammunition, fake IDs bearing his photo, Frontiersman bear deterrent, and a single blue baby pacifier. McAfee picks a bullet off the floor and fixes me with a wide-eyed, manic intensity. "This is a bullet, right?" he says in the congenial Southern accent that has stuck with him since his boyhood in Virginia. "Let's put the gun back," I tell him. I'd come here to try to understand why the government of Belize was accusing him of assembling a private army and entering the drug trade. It seemed implausible that a wildly successful tech entrepreneur would disappear into the Central American jungle and become a narco-trafficker. Now I'm not so sure. But he explains that the accusations are a fabrication. "Maybe what happened didn't actually happen," he says, staring hard at me. "Can I do a demonstration?" He loads the bullet into the gleaming silver revolver, spins the cylinder. "This scares you, right?" he says. Then he puts the gun to his head. My heart rate kicks up; it takes me a second to respond. "Yeah, I'm scared," I admit. "We don't have to do this." "I know we don't," he says, the muzzle pressed against his temple. And then he pulls the trigger. Nothing happens. He pulls it three more times in rapid succession. There are only five chambers. "Reholster the gun," I demand. He keeps his eyes fixed on me and pulls the trigger a fifth time. Still nothing. With the gun still to his head, he starts pulling the trigger incessantly. "I can do this all day long," he says to the sound of the hammer clicking. "I can do this a thousand times. Ten thousand times. Nothing will ever happen. Why? Because you have missed something. You are operating on an assumption about reality that is wrong." It's the same thing, he argues, with the government's accusations. They were a smoke screen—an attempt to distort reality—but there's one thing everybody agrees on: The trouble really got rolling in the humid predawn murk of April 30, 2012.    It was a Monday, about 4:50 am. A television flickered in the guard station of McAfee's newly built, 2.5-acre jungle outpost on the Belizean mainland. At the far end of the property, a muddy river flowed slowly past. Crocodiles lurked on the opposite bank, and howler monkeys screeched. In the guard station, a drunk night watchman gaped at Blond Ambition, a Madonna concert DVD. The guard heard the trucks first. Then boots hitting the ground and the gate rattling as the lock was snapped with bolt cutters. He stood up and looked outside. Dozens of men in green camouflage were streaming into the compound. Many were members of Belize's Gang Suppression Unit, an elite force trained in part by the FBI and armed with Taurus MT-9 submachine guns. Formed in 2010, their mission was to dismantle criminal organizations. The guard observed the scene silently for a moment and then sat back down. After all, the Madonna concert wasn't over yet. Outside, flashlight beams streaked across the property. "This is the police," a voice blared over a bullhorn. "Everyone out!" Deep in the compound, McAfee burst out of a thatched-roof bungalow that stood on stilts 20 feet off the ground. He was naked and held a revolver. Things had changed since his days as a high-flying software tycoon. By 2009 he had sold almost everything he owned—estates in Hawaii, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas as well as his 10-passenger plane—and moved into the jungle. He announced that he was searching for natural antibiotics in the rain forest and constructed a mysterious laboratory on his property. Now his jungle stronghold was under attack. The commandos were converging on him. There were 31 of them; he was outgunned and outmanned. McAfee walked back inside to the 17-year-old in his bed. She was sitting up, naked, her long frizzy hair falling around her shoulders and framing the stars tattooed on her chest. She was terrified. As the GSU stormed up the stairs, he put on some shorts, laid down his gun, and walked out with his hands up. The commandos collided with McAfee at the top of the stairs, slammed him against the wall, and handcuffed him. "You're being detained on suspicion of producing methamphetamine," one of the cops said. McAfee twisted to look at his accuser. "That's a startling hypothesis, sir," he responded. "Because I haven't sold drugs since 1983."  BRIAN FINKE     Nineteen eighty-three was a pivotal year for McAfee. He was 38 and director of engineering at Omex, a company that built information storage systems in Santa Clara, California. He was also selling cocaine to his subordinates and snorting massive amounts himself. When he got too high to focus, he'd take a quaalude. If he started to fall asleep at his desk, he'd snort some more coke to wake up. McAfee had trouble making it through the day and spent his afternoons drinking scotch to even out the tumult in his head. He'd been a mess for a long time. He grew up in Roanoke, Virginia, where his father was a road surveyor and his mother a bank teller. His father, McAfee recalls, was a heavy drinker and "a very unhappy man" who McAfee says beat him and his mother severely. When McAfee was 15, his father shot himself. "Every day I wake up with him," McAfee says. "Every relationship I have, he's by my side; every mistrust, he is the negotiator of that mistrust. So my life is fucked." McAfee started drinking heavily his first year at Roanoke College and supported himself by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door. He would knock and announce that the lucky resident had won an absolutely free subscription; all they had to do was pay a small shipping and handling fee. "So, in fact, I am explaining to them why it's not free and why they are going to pay for it. But the ruse worked," McAfee recalls. He learned that confidence was all that mattered. He smiled, fixed them with his penetrating blue-eyed gaze, and hit them with a nonstop stream of patter. "I made a fortune," he says. He spent his money on booze but managed to graduate and start a PhD in mathematics at Northeast Louisiana State College in 1968. He got kicked out for sleeping with one of his undergraduate students (whom he later married) and ended up coding old-school punch-card programs for Univac in Bristol, Tennessee. That didn't last long, either. He was arrested for buying marijuana, and though his lawyer got him off without a conviction, he was summarily fired. Still, he had learned enough to gin up an impressive, totally fake résumé and used it to get a job at Missouri Pacific Railroad in St. Louis. It was 1969 and the company was attempting to use an IBM computer to schedule trains. After six months, McAfee's system began to churn out optimized train-routing patterns. Unfortunately, he had also discovered LSD. He would drop acid in the morning, go to work, and route trains all day. One morning he decided to experiment with another psychedelic called DMT. He did a line, felt nothing, and decided to snort a whole bag of the orangish powder. "Within an hour my mind was shattered," McAfee says. People asked him questions, but he didn't understand what they were saying. The computer was spitting out train schedules to the moon; he couldn't make sense of it. He ended up behind a garbage can in downtown St. Louis, hearing voices and desperately hoping that nobody would look at him. He never went back to Missouri Pacific. Part of him believes he's still on that trip, that everything since has been one giant hallucination and that one day he'll snap out of it and find himself back on his couch in St. Louis, listening to Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon.   From then on he felt like he was always one step away from a total breakdown, which finally came at Omex in 1983. He was snorting lines of coke off his desk most mornings, polishing off a bottle of scotch every day, and living in constant fear that he would run out of drugs. His wife had left him, he'd given away his dog, and in the wake of what he calls a mutual agreement, he left Omex. He ended up shuttered in his house, with no friends, doing drugs alone for days on end and wondering whether he should kill himself just as his father had. "My life was total hell," he says. Finally he went to a therapist, who suggested he go to Alcoholics Anonymous. He attended a meeting and started sobbing. Someone gave him a hug and told him he wasn't alone. "That's when life really began for me," he says. He says he's been sober ever since.  When the Madonna concert ended, McAfee's drunken guard finally emerged from his station and strolled over to find out what was going on. The police quickly surrounded him. They knew who he was: Austin "Tino" Allen had been convicted 28 times for crimes ranging from robbery to assault, and he had spent most of his life in and out of prison. The police lined everybody up against a rock wall as the sun rose. A low, heavy heat filled the jungle. Everybody began to sweat when the police fanned out to search the property. As an officer headed toward an outlying building, one of McAfee's dogs cut him off, growled, and, according to police, went in for an attack. The cop immediately shot the dog through the rib cage. "What the fuck!" McAfee screamed. "That's my dog." The police ignored him. They left the dead dog in the dirt while they rummaged through the compound. They found shotguns, pistols, a huge cache of ammunition, and hundreds of bottles of chemicals they couldn't identify. McAfee and the others were left in the sun for hours. (GSU commander Marco Vidal claims they were under the shade of a large tree.) By the time the police announced that they were taking several of them to jail, McAfee says his face was turning pink with sunburn. He and Allen were loaded into the back of a pickup. The truck tore off, heading southeast toward Belize City at 80 miles per hour. McAfee tried to stay calm, but he had to admit that this was a bad situation. He had walked away from a luxurious life—mansions on multiple continents, sports cars, a private plane—only to end up in the back of a pickup cuffed to a notoriously violent man. Allen pulled McAfee close so he could be heard over the roar of the wind. McAfee tensed. "Boss, I just want to say that it's an honor to be here with you," Allen shouted. "You must be a really important person for them to send all these men to get you."  In 1986 two brothers in Pakistan coded the first known computer virus aimed at PCs. They weren't trying to destroy anything; it was simple curiosity. They wanted to see how far their creation would travel, so they included their names, addresses, and telephone numbers in the code of the virus. They named it Brain after their computer services shop in Lahore. Within a year the phone at the shop was ringing: Brain had infected computers around the world. At the time, McAfee had been sober for four years and gotten a security clearance to work on a classified voice-recognition program at Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California. But then he came across an article in the San Jose Mercury News about the spread of the Pakistani Brain virus in the US.   He found the idea terrifying. Nobody knew for sure at the time why these intrusions were occurring. It reminded him of his childhood, when his father would hit him for no reason. "I didn't know why he did it," McAfee says. "I just knew a beating could happen any time." As a boy, he wasn't able to fight back. Now, faced with a new form of attack that was hard to rationalize, he decided to do something. He started McAfee Associates out of his 700-square-foot home in Santa Clara. His business plan: Create an antivirus program and give it away on electronic bulletin boards. McAfee didn't expect users to pay. His real aim was to get them to think the software was so necessary that they would install it on their computers at work. They did. Within five years, half of the Fortune 100 companies were running it, and they felt compelled to pay a license fee. By 1990, McAfee was making $5 million a year with very little overhead or investment. His success was due in part to his ability to spread his own paranoia, the fear that there was always somebody about to attack. Soon after launching his company, he bought a 27-foot Winnebago, loaded it with computers, and announced that he had formed the first "antivirus paramedic unit." When he got a call from someone experiencing computer problems in the San Jose area, he drove to the site and searched for "virus residue." Like a good door-to-door salesman, there was a kernel of truth to his pitch, but he amplified and embellished the facts to sell his product. The RV therefore was not just an RV; it was "the first specially customized unit to wage effective, on-the-spot counterattacks in the virus war." It was great publicity, executed with drama and sly wit. By the end of 1988, he was on The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour telling the country that viruses were causing so much damage, some companies were "near collapse from financial loss." He underscored the danger with his 1989 book, Computer Viruses, Worms, Data Diddlers, Killer Programs, and Other Threats to Your System. "The reality is so alarming that it would be very difficult to exaggerate," he wrote. "Even if no new viruses are ever created, there are already enough circulating to cause a growing problem as they reproduce. A major disaster seems inevitable." In 1992 McAfee told almost every major news network and newspaper that the recently discovered Michelangelo virus was a huge threat; he believed it could destroy as many as 5 million computers around the world. Sales of his software spiked, but in the end only tens of thousands of infections were reported. Though McAfee was roundly criticized for his proclamation, the criticism worked in his favor, as he explained in an email in 2000 to a computer-security blogger: "My business increased tenfold in the two months following the stories and six months later our revenues were 50 times greater and we had captured the lion's share of the anti-virus market."   This ability to infect others with his own paranoia made McAfee a wealthy man. In October 1992 his company debuted on Nasdaq, and his shares were suddenly worth $80 million.  The jail cell was about 10 feet by 10 feet. The concrete floor was bare and cold, the smell of urine overpowering. A plastic milk container in the corner had been hacked open and was serving as a toilet. The detention center was located in the Queen Street police station, but everybody in Belize City called it the Pisshouse. In the shadows of his cell, McAfee could see the other inmates staring at him. No charges had been filed yet, though the police had confiscated what they said were two unlicensed firearms on McAfee's property; they still couldn't identify the chemicals they had found. McAfee said he had licenses for all his firearms and explained that the chemicals were part of his antibiotic research. The police weren't buying it. McAfee pulled 20 Belizean dollars out of his shoe and passed it through the bars to a guard. "You got a cigarette?" he asked. McAfee hadn't smoked for 10 years, but this seemed like a good time to start again. The guard handed him a book of matches and a pack of Benson &amp; Hedges. McAfee lit one and took a deep drag. He was supposed to be living out a peaceful retirement in a tropical paradise. Now he was standing in jail, holding up his pants with one hand because the police had confiscated his belt. "Use this," Allen said, offering him a dirty plastic bag. McAfee looked confused. "You tie your pants," Allen explained. McAfee fed the bag through two of his belt loops, cinched it tight, and tied a knot. It worked. "Welcome to the Pisshouse," Allen said, smiling.  McAfee lived in Silicon Valley for nearly 20 years. Outwardly he seemed to lead a traditional life with his second wife, Judy. He was a seasoned businessman whom startups turned to for advice. Stanford Graduate School of Business wrote two case studies highlighting his strategies. He was regularly invited to lecture at the school, and he was awarded an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, Roanoke College. In 2000 he started a yoga institute near his 10,000-square-foot mansion in the Colorado Rockies and wrote four books about spirituality. Even after his marriage fell apart in 2002, he was a respectable citizen who donated computers to schools and took out newspaper ads discouraging drug use. But as he neared retirement age in the late 2000s, he started to feel like he was deluding himself. His properties, cars, and planes had become a burden, and he realized that he didn't want the traditional rich man's life anymore. Maintaining so many possessions was a constant distraction; it was time, he felt, to try to live more rustically. "John has always been searching for something," says Jennifer Irwin, McAfee's girlfriend at the time. She remembers him telling her once that he was trying to reach "the expansive horizon."   He was also hurting financially. The economic collapse in 2008 hit him hard, and he couldn't afford to maintain his lifestyle. By 2009 he'd auctioned off almost everything he owned, including more than 1,000 acres of land in Hawaii and the private airport he'd built in New Mexico. He was trying in part to deter people from suing him on the assumption that he had deep pockets. He was already facing a suit from a man who had tripped on his property in New Mexico. Another suit alleged that he was responsible for the death of someone who crashed during a lesson at a flight school McAfee had founded. He figured that if he were out of the country, he'd be less of a target. And he knew that, should he lose a case, it would be harder for the plaintiffs to collect money if he lived overseas. In early 2008 McAfee started searching for property in the Caribbean. His criteria were pretty basic: He was looking for an English-speaking country near the US with beautiful beaches. He quickly came across a villa on Ambergris Caye in Belize. In the early '90s he had visited the nation of 189,000 people and loved it. (Today the population is around 356,000.) He looked at the property on Google Earth, decided it was perfect, and bought it. The first time he saw it in person was in April 2008, when he moved in. Soon after his arrival, McAfee began to explore the country. He was particularly fascinated by stories of a majestic Mayan city in the jungle and hired a guide to go see it. Boating up a river that snaked into the northern jungle, they stopped at a makeshift dock that jutted from the dense vegetation. McAfee jumped ashore, pushed through the vines, and caught sight of a towering, crumbling temple. Trees had grown up through the ancient buildings, encasing them in roots. Giant stone faces glared out through the foliage, mouths agape. As the men walked up the steps of the temple, the guide described how the Mayans sacrificed their prisoners, sending torrents of blood down the very stairs he and McAfee were now climbing. McAfee was spellbound. "Belize is so raw and so clear and so in-your-face. There's an opportunity to see something about human nature that you can't really see in a politer society, because the purpose of society is to mask ourselves from each other," McAfee says. The jungle, in other words, would give him the chance to find out exactly who he was, and that opportunity was irresistible. So in February 2010 he bought two and a half acres of swampy land along the New River, 10 miles upriver from the Mayan ruins. Over the next year, he spent more than a million dollars filling in the swamp and constructing an array of thatched-roofed bungalows. While his girlfriend, Irwin, stayed on Ambergris Caye, McAfee outfitted the place like Kublai Khan's sumptuous house of pleasure. He imported ancient Tibetan art and shipped in a baby grand piano even though he had never taken lessons. There was no Internet. At night, when the construction stopped, there was just the sound of the river flowing quietly past. He sat at the piano and played exuberant odes of his own creation. "It was magical," he says.   He didn't like the idea of getting old, though, so he injected testosterone into his buttocks every other week. He felt that it gave him youthful energy and kept him lean. Plus, he wasn't looking for a quiet retirement. He started a cigar manufacturing business, a coffee distribution company, and a water taxi service that connected parts of Ambergris Caye. He continued to build more bungalows on his property even though he had no pressing need for them. In 2010 McAfee visited a beachfront resort for lunch and met Allison Adonizio, a 31-year-old microbiologist who was on vacation. In the resort's dining room, Adonizio explained that she was doing postgrad research at Harvard on how plants combat bacteria. She was particularly interested in plant compounds that appeared to prevent bacteria from causing infections by interfering with the way the microbes communicated. Eventually, Adonizio explained, the work might also lead to an entire new class of antibiotics. McAfee was thrilled by the idea. He had fought off digital contagions, and now he could fight organic ones. It was perfect. He immediately proposed they start a business to commercialize her research. Within minutes McAfee was talking in rapid-fire bursts about how this would transform the pharmaceutical industry and the entire world. They would save millions of lives and reinvent whole industries. Adonizio was astounded. "He offered me my dream job," she says. "My own lab, assistants. It was incredible." Adonizio said yes on the spot, quit her research position in Boston, sold the house she had just bought, and moved to Belize. McAfee soon built a laboratory on his property and stocked it with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of equipment. Adonizio went to work trying to isolate new plant compounds that might be effective medicines, while McAfee touted the business to the international press. But the methodical pace of Adonizio's scientific research couldn't keep up with McAfee's enthusiasm, and his attention seemed to wander. He began spending more time in Orange Walk, a town of about 13,000 people that was 5 miles from his compound. McAfee described it in an email to friends as "the asshole of the world—dirty, hot, gray, dilapidated." He liked to walk the town's poorly paved streets and take pictures of the residents. "I gravitate to the world's outcasts," he explained in another email. "Prostitutes, thieves, the handicapped ... For some reason I have always been fascinated by these subcultures." Though he says he never drank alcohol, he became a regular at a saloon called Lover's Bar. The proprietor, McAfee wrote to his friends, was partial to "shatteringly bad Mexican karaoke music to which voices beyond description add a disharmony that reaches diabolic proportions." McAfee quickly noticed that the place doubled as a whorehouse, servicing, as he put it, "cane field workers, street vendors, fishermen, farmers—anyone who has managed to save up $15 for a good time." This was the real world he was looking for, in all its horror. The bar girls were given one Belize dollar for every beer a patron bought them. To increase their earnings, some of the women would chug beers, vomit in the restroom, and return to chug more. One reported drinking 50 beers in one day. "Ninety-nine percent of people would run because they'd fear for their safety or sanity," McAfee says. "I couldn't do that. I couldn't walk away."   McAfee started spending most mornings at Lover's. After six months, he sent out another update to his friends: "My fragile connection with the world of polite society has, without a doubt, been severed," he wrote. "My attire would rank me among the worst-dressed Tijuana panhandlers. My hygiene is no better. Yesterday, for the first time, I urinated in public, in broad daylight." McAfee knew he had entered a dangerous world. "I have no illusions," he noted in another dispatch. "We are tainted by everything we touch."  Evaristo "Paz" Novelo, the obese Belizean proprietor of Lover's, liked to sit at a corner table and squint at his customers through perpetually puffy eyes. He admits to a long history of operating brothels and prides himself on his ability to figure out exactly what will please his patrons. Early on, he asked whether McAfee was looking for a woman. When McAfee said no, Novelo asked whether he wanted a boy. McAfee declined again. Then Novelo showed up at McAfee's compound with a 16-year-old girl named Amy Emshwiller. Emshwiller had a brassy toughness that belied her girlishness. In a matter-of-fact tone, she told McAfee that she had been abused as a child and said that her mother had forced her to sleep with dozens of men for money. "I don't fall in love," she told him. "That's not my job." She carried a gun, wore aviator sunglasses, and had on a low-cut shirt that framed her ample cleavage. McAfee felt a swirl of emotions: lust, compassion, pity. "I am the male version of Amy," he says. "I resonated with her story because I lived it." Emshwiller, however, felt nothing for him. "I know how to control men," she says. "I told him my story because I wanted him to feel sorry for me, and it worked." All Emshwiller saw was an easy mark. "A millionaire in freaking Belize, where people work all day just to make a dime?" she says. "Who wouldn't want to rob him?" McAfee soon realized that Emshwiller was dangerous and unstable, but that was part of her attractiveness. "She can pretend sanity better than any woman I have ever known," he says. "And she can be alluring, she can be very beautiful, she can be butchlike. She's a chameleon." Within a month they were sleeping together, and McAfee started building a new bungalow on his property for her. Visiting from Ambergris Caye, McAfee's girlfriend, Jennifer Irwin, was flabbergasted. She asked him to tell the girl to leave, and when McAfee refused, Irwin left the country. McAfee hardly blames her. "What I basically did was can a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman," he says. "But I honestly fell in love." One night Emshwiller decided to make her move. She slipped out of bed and pulled McAfee's Smith &amp; Wesson out of a holster hanging from an ancient Tibetan gong in his bedroom. Her plan, if it could be called that, was to kill him and make off with as much cash as she could scrounge up. She crept to the foot of the bed, aimed, and started to pull the trigger. But at the last moment she closed her eyes, and the bullet went wide, ripping through a pillow. "I guess I didn't want to kill the bastard," she admits.   McAfee leaped out of bed and grabbed the gun before she could fire again. She ran to the bathroom, locked herself in, and asked if he was going to shoot her. He couldn't hear out of his left ear and was trying to get his bearings. Finally he told her he was going to take away her phone and TV for a month. She was furious. “I basically canned a solid 12-year relationship for a stark-raving madwoman,” McAfee says. “But I fell in love.” "But I didn't even kill you!" she shouted.  McAfee decided it was better for Emshwiller to have her own place about a mile down the road in the village of Carmelita. So in early 2011 he built her a house in the village. Many of the homes are made of stripped tree trunks and topped with sheets of corrugated iron; 10 percent have no electricity. The village has a handful of dirt roads populated with colonies of biting ants and a grassy soccer field surrounded by palm trees and stray dogs. The town's biggest source of income: sand from a pit by the river that locals sell to construction companies. Emshwiller, who had grown up in the area, warned McAfee that the village was not what it appeared to be. She told him that the tiny, impoverished town of 1,600 was in fact a major shipment site for drugs moving overland into Mexico, 35 miles to the north. As Emshwiller described it, this village in McAfee's backyard was crawling with narco-traffickers. It was a revelation perfectly tailored to feed into McAfee's latent paranoia. "I was massively disturbed," he says. "I fell in love with the river, but then I discovered the horrors of Carmelita." He asked Emshwiller what he should do. "She wanted me to shoot all the men in the town," McAfee says. It occurred to him that she might be using him to exact revenge on people who had wronged her, so he asked the denizens of Lover's for more information. They told him stories of killings, torture, and gang wars in the area. For McAfee, the town began to take on mythic proportions. "Carmelita was literally the Wild West," he says. "I didn't realize that 2 miles away was the most corrupt village on the planet." He decided to go on the offensive. After all, he was a smart Silicon Valley entrepreneur who had launched a multibillion-dollar company. Even though he had lost a lot of money in the financial crisis, he was still wealthy. Maybe he couldn't maintain multiple estates around the world, but surely he could clean up one village. He started by solving some obvious problems. Carmelita had no police station, so McAfee bought a small cement house and hired workers to install floor-to-ceiling iron bars. Then he told the national cops responsible for the area to start arresting people. The police protested that they were ill-equipped for the job, so McAfee furnished them with imported M16s, boots, pepper spray, stun guns, and batons. Eventually he started paying officers to patrol during their off-hours. The police, in essence, became McAfee's private army, and he began issuing orders. "What I'd like you to do is go into Carmelita and start getting information for me," he told the officers on his payroll. "Who's dealing drugs, and where are the drugs coming from?"   When a 22-year-old villager nicknamed Burger fired a gun outside Emshwiller's house in November 2011, McAfee decided he couldn't rely on others to get the work done; he needed to take action himself. An eyewitness told him that Burger had shot at a motorcycle—it looked like a drug deal gone bad. Burger's sister said that he was firing at stray dogs that attacked him. Either way, McAfee was incensed. He drove his gray Dodge pickup to the family's wooden shack near the river and strode into the muddy yard with Emshwiller as his backup (she was carrying a matte-black air rifle with a large scope). Burger wasn't there, but his mother, sister, and brother-in-law were. "I'm giving you a last chance here," McAfee said, holding his Smith &amp; Wesson. "Your brother will be a dead man if he doesn't turn in that gun. It doesn't matter where he goes." "It was like he thought he was in a movie," says Amelia Allen, the shooter's sister. But she wasn't going to argue with McAfee. Her mother pulled the gun out of a bush and handed it to him. Soon, McAfee was everywhere. He pulled over a suspicious car on the road only to discover that it was filled with elderly people and children. He offered a new flatscreen TV to a small-time marijuana peddler on the condition that the man stop dealing (the guy accepted, though the TV soon broke). "It was like John Wayne came to town," says Elvis Reynolds, former chair of the village council. When I visited the village, Reynolds and others admitted that there were fights and petty theft but insisted that Carmelita was simply an impoverished little village, not a major transit point for international narco-traffickers, as McAfee alleges. The village leaders, for their part, were dumbfounded. Many were unfamiliar with antivirus software and had never heard of John McAfee. "I thought he would come by, introduce himself, and explain what he was doing here, but he never did," says Feliciano Salam, a soft-spoken resident who has served on the village council for two years. "He just showed up and started telling us what to do." The fact that he was running a laboratory on his property only added to the mystery. Adonizio was continuing to research botanical compounds, but McAfee didn't want to tell the locals anything about it. In part he was worried about corporate espionage. He had seen white men in suits standing beside their cars on the heavily trafficked toll bridge near his property and was sure they were spies. "Do you realize that Glaxo, Bayer, every single drug company in the world sent people out there?" McAfee says. "I was working on a project that had some paradigm-shifting impact on the drug world. It would be insanity to talk about it." McAfee became convinced that he was being watched at all hours. Across the river, he saw people lurking in the forest and would surveil them with binoculars. When Emshwiller visited, she never noticed anybody but repeatedly told McAfee to be careful. She heard rumors that gang members were out to "jack" him—rob and kill him. On one occasion, she recorded a village councilman discussing how to dispatch McAfee with a grenade. McAfee was wowed by her street smarts—"She is brilliant beyond description," he says—and relished the fact that she had come full circle and was now defending him. "He got himself into a very entangled, dysfunctional situation," says Katrina Ancona, the wife of McAfee's partner in the water taxi business. "We kept telling him to get out."   Adonizio was also worried about McAfee's behavior. He had initially told her that the area was perfectly safe, but now she was surrounded by armed men. When she went to talk to McAfee in his bungalow, she noticed garbage bags filled with cash and blister packs of pharmaceuticals, including Viagra. She lived just outside of Carmelita and had never had any problems. If there was any danger, she felt that it was coming from McAfee. "He turned into a very scary person," she says. She wasn't comfortable living there anymore and left the country. George Lovell, CEO of the Ministry of National Security, was also concerned that McAfee was buying guns and hiring guards. "When I see people doing this, my question is, what are you trying to protect?" Lovell says. Marco Vidal, head of the Gang Suppression Unit, concurred. "We got information to suggest that there may have been a meth laboratory at his location," he wrote in an email. "Given the intelligence on McAfee, there was no scope for making efforts to resolve the matter." He proposed a raid, and his superiors approved it. When members of the GSU swept into McAfee's compound on April 30, 2012, they found no meth. They found no illegal drugs of any kind. They did confiscate 10 weapons and 320 rounds of ammunition. Three of McAfee's security guards were operating without a security guard license, and charges were filed against them. McAfee was accused of possessing an unlicensed firearm and spent a night in the Queen Street jail, aka the Pisshouse. But the next morning, the charges were dropped and McAfee was released. He was convinced, however, that his war on drugs had made him some powerful enemies. He had reason to worry. According to Vidal, McAfee was still a "person of interest," primarily because the authorities still couldn't explain what he was up to. "The GSU makes no apologies for deeming a person in control of a laboratory, with no approval for manufacturing any substance, having gang connections and heavily armed security guards, as a person of interest," Vidal wrote. Vidal's suspicions may not have been far off. Two years after moving to Belize, McAfee began posting dozens of queries on Bluelight.ru, a drug discussion forum. He explained that he had started to experiment with MDPV, a psychoactive stimulant found in bath salts, a class of designer drugs that have effects similar to amphetamines and cocaine. "When I first started doing this I accidently got a few drops on my fingers while handling a used flask and didn't sleep for four days," McAfee posted. "I had visual and auditory hallucinations and the worst paranoia of my life." McAfee indicated, though, that the heightened sexuality justified the drug's risks and claimed to have produced 50 pounds of MDPV in 2010. "I have distributed over 3,000 doses exclusively in this country," he wrote. But neither Emshwiller, Adonizio, nor anyone else I spoke with observed him making the stuff. So how could he have produced 50 pounds without anyone noticing?   McAfee has a simple explanation: The whole thing was an elaborate prank aimed at tricking drug users into trying a notoriously noxious drug. "It was the most tongue-in-cheek thing in the fucking world," he says, and denies ever taking the substance. "If I'm gonna do drugs, I'm gonna do something that I know is good," he says. "I'm gonna grab some mushrooms, number one, and maybe get some really fine cocaine. "But anybody who knows me knows I would never do drugs," he says.  In August, McAfee and I meet for a final in-person interview at his villa on Ambergris Caye. He greets me wearing a pistol strapped across his bare chest. Guards patrol the beach in front of us. He tells me that he's now living with five women who appear to be between the ages of 17 and 20; each has her own bungalow on the property. Emshwiller is here, though McAfee's attention is focused on the other women. He has barely left the property since he came out of hiding in April. He says he spends his days shuttling from bungalow to bungalow, trying to mediate among the women. I ask why he doesn't leave the country, given that the Belizean government has returned his passport. "I would be perceived as running away," McAfee says. "Within three days, all of Carmelita would return to no-man's-land, and it would be the staging post for every illegal activity in northern Belize." As McAfee tells it, he is all that stands between Carmelita and rampant criminality. The police raided him, he says, because he had run the local drug dealers out of town. These dealers had political connections and had successfully lobbied to have the police attack him. They wanted him gone. He says he also refused to make political contributions to a local politician, further antagonizing the ruling party. If he gives in, he argues, it will send a message that Belize's corrupt government can control anybody, even a rich American. As McAfee talks, we walk across the white sand beach and into his bungalow. In many ways, his life has devolved into a complex web of contradictions. He says he's battling drugs in Carmelita, but at the same time he's trying to trick people online into taking drugs. He professes to care about laws—and castigates the police for violating his rights—but he moved to Belize in part to subvert the US legal system in the event he lost a civil case. The police suggest he's a drug kingpin; I can't help but wonder if he has lost track of reality. Maybe he imagines that he can fix himself by fixing Carmelita. His bungalow is sparsely furnished. The small open kitchen is strewn with dishes, rotting vegetables, half-drunk bottles of Coke, and boxes of Rice Krispies and Cheerios. A dog is licking a stick of butter off the counter. A bandolier of shotgun shells hangs from a chair. He pops open a plastic bottle of Lucas Pelucas, a tamarind-flavored Mexican candy, and depresses the plunger, extruding the gooey liquid through small holes in the top. "I fucking love these things," he says.   I tell him that while I was in Carmelita, the villagers described the place as quiet and slow-moving. There is crime, most admitted, but it is limited to stolen bicycles and drunken fights. It did not seem like a particularly dangerous place to me. "Ninety-nine percent of all crimes are never, ever reported to the police," he says. "Because if the gang kills your sister and you report it, the gang will come back and kill you. Nobody says anything." When I tell him that the locals I spoke with can remember only two murders in the past three years, he argues that I'm not asking the right questions. To illustrate his point, he takes out his pistol. "Let's do this one more time," he says, and puts it to his head. Another round of Russian roulette. Just as before, he pulls the trigger repeatedly, the cylinder rotates, the hammer comes down, and nothing happens. "It is a real gun. It has a real bullet in one chamber," he says. And yet, he points out, my assumptions have somehow proven faulty. I'm missing something. The same is true, he argues, with Carmelita. I'm not seeing the world as he sees it. He opens the door to the bungalow, aims the gun at the sand outside, and pulls the trigger. This time, a gunshot punctures the sound of the wind and waves. "You thought you were creating your reality," he says. "You were not. I was." He pulls the spent cartridge out of the chamber and hands it to me. It's still warm.  Eight weeks later, my phone rings at 4:30 in the morning. I'm back in the US and groggily pick up. "I'm sorry to wake you up at this hour, sir, but the GSU had me surrounded all night," McAfee says in a breathless rush. He explains that he's staying at Captain Morgan's Retreat, a resort on Ambergris Caye, and he decided to go for a walk at dusk. As he strolled along the beach, he heard the sound of approaching gas-powered golf carts. "You can tell the GSU vehicles because they have this low roar," he says, a hint of panic creeping into his voice. "I think they put special mufflers on them to scare people." He dashed onto the porch of a nearby hotel room and hid behind the bushes. Then he heard someone cough on the balcony above him. "As soon as I heard that, my heart sank," he says. "They were fucking everywhere." McAfee spends the next 25 minutes describing to me how the GSU silently surrounded him in the darkness. "Two of them were less than 3 feet away," he says "They stood unmoving. No one said a word all night long. They just surround you and stand still. Think about it. It's freaky shit, sir." He sat there all night, he tells me, terrified that the shadowy figures he was seeing would kill him if he moved. Around 4 o'clock in the morning, he says, they retreated quietly and disappeared.   McAfee then walked onto the darkened beach. He thought he could see Marco Vidal, head of the GSU, motoring away in a boat. He screamed Vidal's name. (Vidal denies any GSU encounters with McAfee after the April 30 raid.) A security guard approached and asked if he was OK. "After a while my heart was beating so fast it was like one big hum," he says. "I was bursting with perspiration." I suggest he get some rest. He sounds frantic and scared. "They're coming back," he says suddenly. "This is too fucking much. I'm hanging up. I'm going." The line goes dead. A week later, McAfee calls me from the Belizean-Mexican border. He tells me he's had enough of Belize. A day ago, he was walking down the beach on Ambergris Caye when several GSU "frogmen" walked out of the water. Later, he says, a troop of GSU officers crowded into his room but didn't say or do anything. "I have just escaped from hell," he says. The next day he's in an $800-a-night suite at the Royal in Playa Del Carmen, Mexico. "It has a sushi restaurant," he says. "Do you realize I haven't had sushi in years?" He sounds refreshed and says he's feeling better. Six days pass, and McAfee calls again. "Good morning, John," I say. "Good evening, I think it is," McAfee says. I explain that it's 9:41 am. "You're kidding me," he says. "I haven't slept for a couple nights. It felt like evening to me." "What's going on?" I ask. "I am back from Mexico, thank God," he says, explaining that he was robbed and beaten outside of Cancun. Now he's on Ambergris Caye. "Here it's clear that they're not going to harm me, they're just trying to scare me," he says. "They have to up the ante if they're going to continue scaring me." I talk to him repeatedly over the next week. He fires all of his bodyguards because he thinks they are informing on him. He hires William Mulligan, a British national, to take their place. McAfee figures Mulligan will have fewer connections to the authorities, despite the fact that he's married to a Belizean woman. On Friday, November 9, 2012, I receive an email from McAfee telling me that "a contingent of black-suited thugs" disembarked on the dock next to his property at 10:30 pm. The men dispersed on the beach. "A half hour later all of my dogs had been poisoned," he writes. "Mellow, Lucky, Dipsy, and Guerrero have already died. I had to call Amy and tell her about Mellow. She is hysterical." The next morning, November 10, 2012, McAfee calls to tell me that his dogs died horrific deaths. They were vomiting blood and convulsing on the ground. McAfee shot them to end their suffering. "It was an ugly thing," he says. "How is Amy doing?" I ask. "I've tried calling her twice," he says. "She's not answering. She's not doing well." I suddenly recall a conversation I had with Emshwiller in August. She was describing someone in Carmelita who tortured dogs and, with a chill, I remember her reaction: "Mess with my dog, you're gonna get it, man," she'd said.   In another conversation, she also said she had become profoundly committed to McAfee. "If he asked me to blow someone's fucking brains out, I would," she said. Still on the phone with me, McAfee is searching for clues to explain the dead dogs and has noticed that the fence around his property is surrounded by boot prints—"military-style boot prints," he says—and cites this as evidence that the police were involved. "I'm a paranoid person," he says. "I really am. But the whole thing is looking really weird to me." I point out that his neighbors had been complaining about the barking. In August, Vivian Yu, operator of a bar and restaurant up the beach, asked one of McAfee's guards to do something to control the 11 dogs that roamed his property. McAfee hired a carpenter to build a fence to corral them. Greg Faull, a neighbor two houses to the south on Ambergris Caye, was particularly incensed by the racket and aggression of McAfee's mutts. Faull was a big man—5'11", around 220 pounds—who owned a sports bars in Orlando, Florida, and spent part of the year in Belize. It was a tropical paradise to him, except for the nuisance McAfee's dogs created. They growled and barked incessantly at anybody who walked by on the beach. Faull had confronted McAfee about the animals in the past. According to McAfee, Faull once threatened to shoot them, but McAfee didn't believe he'd do it. Allison Adonizio, who had stayed at Greg Faull's house when she first moved to Belize in 2010, says there was bad blood between the two men back then. "McAfee hated his guts," she wrote in an email to me. Earlier in the week, Faull had filed a formal complaint about the dogs with the mayor's office in the nearby town of San Pedro. Now, as I try to catch up on the latest details, McAfee dismisses the suggestion that any of his neighbors could have been involved in the apparent poisoning of the animals. "They're still dog lovers," he says. "And I talked to them this morning. No one here would ever poison the dogs." He speaks specifically about Faull. "This is not something he would ever do," McAfee says. "I mean, he's an angry sort of guy, but he would never hurt a dog." On Sunday morning, Faull is found lying faceup in a pool of blood. He's been shot once through the back of the head, execution-style. A 9-mm Luger casing lies on the ground nearby. There are no signs of forced entry. A laptop and an iPhone are missing, police say. That afternoon, Belizean police arrive at McAfee's property to question him about Faull's death. McAfee sees them coming and is sure the authorities are intent on tormenting him again. He quickly digs a shallow trench in the sand and buries himself, pulling a cardboard box over his head. He stays there for hours. "It was extraordinarily uncomfortable," he says. The police confiscate all the weapons on the property and take Mulligan in for questioning. When they leave, Cassian Chavarria, McAfee's groundskeeper, tells him that Faull has been killed. According to McAfee, that was the first he heard of the murder. His initial reaction, he says, is that it was the GSU trying to kill McAfee himself. "I thought maybe they were coming for me," he says. "They mistook him for me. They got the wrong house. He's dead. They killed him. It spooked me out."   McAfee decides to go on the run and begins calling me at all hours. I ask him if he shot Faull. "No sir, no sir," he says. "That's not even funny." (Emshwiller also denies any involvement in Faull's death.) All McAfee knew about the murder, he says, was that the police were after him, and he believed that if they caught him, he would be tortured or killed. "Once they collect me, it's the end of me," he says. Over the next 48 hours, McAfee bounces from place to place around Belize, aided by a network of "people who can't be followed," he tells me. "It's complicated, and there are a lot of risks, and people could turn south at any minute." Samantha Vanegas, one of his girlfriends, is with him, and he says that they've been subsisting on Oreo Cakester cookies and cigarettes. On Tuesday morning, he says, the police raided the house next door, but they evaded capture, eventually landing in a house with no hot water and a broken toilet. There is, however, a working TV. "We watched Swiss Family Robinson," he says. "It's about castaways. That's why we got into it. It was like, wow, we could do that. We could get bamboo and build something like that." The movie had a happy ending. McAfee liked that.  When this article was published, John McAfee was still in hiding and in communication with the author. For updates on his case, visit  Wired.com  .    Contributing editor Joshua Davis (@JoshuaDavisNow) has traveled the world reporting for Wired (Colombia, China, Nepal, South Korea, Iraq, Israel, Russia). His writing is anthologized in the 2012 edition of The Best American Science and Nature Writing, and he is the author of The Underdog, an account of his adventures as a sumo wrestler, matador, and backward runner.
John McAfee Fled to Belize, But He Couldn't Escape Himself
https://www.wired.com/2012/12/ff-john-mcafees-last-stand/
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
2012-08-07
Condé Nast; Mat Honan
<div><div><div><p>In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.</p><p>In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.</p><p>Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn't have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.</p><p>Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.</p><p>But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple's and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information – a partial credit card number – that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.</p><p>This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.</p><p>‬The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.‪‬Moreover, if your computers aren't already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms – which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered – no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.</p><p>I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.</p></div><div><p>It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.</p><p>I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.</p><p>I didn’t have a four-digit PIN.</p><p>By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged my router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half.</p><p>It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn't bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily – it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself.</p><p>At 4:33 p.m., according to Apple’s tech support records, someone called AppleCare claiming to be me. Apple says the caller reported that he couldn't get into his Me.com e-mail – which, of course was my Me.com e-mail.</p><p>In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover.</p><p>At 4:50 p.m., a password reset confirmation arrived in my inbox. I don’t really use my me.com e-mail, and rarely check it. But even if I did, I might not have noticed the message because the hackers immediately sent it to the trash. They then were able to follow the link in that e-mail to permanently reset my AppleID password.</p><p>At 4:52 p.m., a Gmail password recovery e-mail arrived in my me.com mailbox. Two minutes later, another e-mail arrived notifying me that my Google account password had changed.</p><p>At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers <a href="https://twitter.com/mat/status/231543036159602688">posted a message to my account on Twitter</a> taking credit for the hack.</p></div><div><p>By wiping my MacBook and deleting my Google account, they now not only had the ability to control my account, but were able to prevent me from regaining access. And crazily, in ways that I don’t and never will understand, those deletions were just collateral damage. My MacBook data – including those irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child’s first year and relatives who have now passed from this life – weren’t the target. Nor were the eight years of messages in my Gmail account. The target was always Twitter. My MacBook data was torched simply to prevent me from getting back in.</p><p>Lulz.</p><p>I spent an hour and a half talking to AppleCare. One of the reasons it took me so long to get anything resolved with Apple during my initial phone call was because I couldn't answer the security questions it had on file for me. It turned out there’s a good reason for that. Perhaps an hour or so into the call, the Apple representative on the line said “Mr. Herman, I....”</p><p>“Wait. What did you call me?”</p><p>“Mr. Herman?”</p><p>“My name is Honan.”</p><p>Apple had been looking at the wrong account all along. Because of that, I couldn’t answer my security questions. And because of that, it asked me an alternate set of questions that it said would let tech support let me into my me.com account: a billing address and the last four digits of my credit card. (Of course, when I gave them those, it was no use, because tech support had misheard my last name.)</p><p>It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud.</p><p>Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.</p><p>We talked to Apple directly about its security policy, and company spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Wired, "Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer's data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers' data is protected."</p><p>On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers' access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them.</p></div><div><figure><p><p>By exploiting the customer service procedures employed by Apple and Amazon, hackers were able to get into iCloud and take over all of Mat Honan's digital devices – and data. <em>Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired</em> <a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/"></a></p>
</p></figure><p>On the night of the hack, I tried to make sense of the ruin that was my digital life. My Google account was nuked, my Twitter account was suspended, my phone was in a useless state of restore, and (for obvious reasons) I was highly paranoid about using my Apple email account for communication.</p><p>I decided to set up a new Twitter account until my old one could be restored, just to let people know what was happening. I logged into Tumblr and posted an account of how I thought the takedown occurred. At this point, I was assuming that my seven-digit alphanumeric AppleID password had been hacked by brute force. In the comments (<a href="http://www.emptyage.com/post/28679875595/yes-i-was-hacked-hard">and, oh, the comments</a>) others guessed that hackers had used some sort of keystroke logger. At the end of the post, I linked to my new Twitter account.</p><p>And then, one of my hackers @ messaged me. He would later identify himself as Phobia. I followed him. He followed me back.</p><p>We started a dialogue via Twitter direct messaging that later continued via e-mail and AIM. Phobia was able to reveal enough detail about the hack and my compromised accounts that it became clear he was, at the very least, a party to how it went down. I agreed not to press charges, and in return he laid out exactly how the hack worked. But first, he wanted to clear something up:</p><p>“didnt guess ur password or use bruteforce. i have my own guide on how to secure emails.”</p><p>I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to <a href="https://clanvv3.com/2012/08/03/gizmodo-i-guess/">Gizmodo’s Twitter account</a>? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.</p></div><div><p>“I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before” he told me via Twitter Direct Message.</p><p>After coming across my account, the hackers did some background research. My Twitter account linked to my personal website, where they found my Gmail address. Guessing that this was also the e-mail address I used for Twitter, Phobia went to Google’s account recovery page. He didn’t even have to actually attempt a recovery. This was just a recon mission.</p><p>Because I didn’t have Google's two-factor authentication turned on, when Phobia entered my Gmail address, he could view the alternate e-mail I had set up for account recovery. Google partially obscures that information, starring out many characters, but there were enough characters available, m••••n@me.com. Jackpot.</p><p>This was how the hack progressed. If I had some other account aside from an Apple e-mail address, or had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here. But using that Apple-run me.com e-mail account as a backup meant told the hacker I had an AppleID account, which meant I was vulnerable to being hacked.</p><figure><p><p>Be careful with your Amazon account – or someone might buy merchandise on your credit card, but send it to their home.</p>
Photo: <a href="https://secure.flickr.com/photos/luxuryluke/2789374419/">luxuryluke</a>/Flickr</p></figure><p>“You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it's work, that seems to be largely true.</p><p>Since he already had the e-mail, all he needed was my billing address and the last four digits of my credit card number to have Apple's tech support issue him the keys to my account.</p><p>So how did he get this vital information? He began with the easy one. He got the billing address by doing a whois search on my personal web domain. If someone doesn’t have a domain, you can also look up his or her information on Spokeo, WhitePages, and PeopleSmart.</p><p>Getting a credit card number is tricker, but it also relies on taking advantage of a company’s back-end systems. Phobia says that a partner performed this part of the hack, but described the technique to us, which we were able to verify via our own tech support phone calls. It’s remarkably easy – so easy that Wired was able to duplicate the exploit twice in minutes.</p></div><div><p>First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry's published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.</p><p>Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you've lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account – not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn't have anything to share by press time.</p><p>And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn't have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.</p><p>And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate.</p><p>They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking, or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people, and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too.</p><p>Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling.</p><p>I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do.</p><p>I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn't have daisy-chained two such vital accounts – my Google and my iCloud account – together. I shouldn't have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts – mhonan@gmail.com, mhonan@me.com, and mhonan@wired.com. And I should have had a recovery address that's only used for recovery without being tied to core services.</p><p>But, mostly, I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac. Find My iPhone has been a brilliant Apple service. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, the service lets you see where it is on a map. <em>The New York Times</em>’ David Pogue <a href="http://gizmodo.com/5931258/david-pogue-has-lost-his-iphone">recovered his lost iPhone</a> just last week thanks to the service. And so, when Apple introduced Find My Mac in the update to its Lion operating system last year, I added that to my iCloud options too.</p></div><div><p>After all, as a reporter, often on the go, my laptop is my most important tool.</p><p>But as a friend pointed out to me, while that service makes sense for phones (which are quite likely to be lost) it makes less sense for computers. You are almost certainly more likely to have your computer accessed remotely than physically. And even worse is the way Find My Mac is implemented.</p><p>When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe – someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means – there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.</p><p>A better way to have this set up would be to require a second method of authentication when Find My Mac is initially set up. If this were the case, someone who was able to get into an iCloud account wouldn't be able to remotely wipe devices with malicious intent. It would also mean that you could potentially have a way to stop a remote wipe in progress.</p><p>But that’s not how it works. And Apple would not comment as to whether stronger authentification is being considered.</p><p>As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren't followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case – that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes – then the problem is widespread.</p><p>I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it's the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known.</p><p>“yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers”</p><p>I asked specifically about the photos of my little girl, which are, to me, the greatest tragedy in all this. Unless I can recover those photos via data recovery services, they are gone forever. On AIM, I asked him if he was sorry for doing that. Phobia replied, “even though i wasnt the one that did it i feel sorry about that. Thats alot of memories im only 19 but if my parents lost and the footage of me and pics i would be beyond sad and im sure they would be too.”</p><p>But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he <em>did</em> it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.</p><p>But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I've placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I'm angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there's Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can't put a price on.</p><p><em>Additional reporting by Roberto Baldwin and Christina Bonnington. Portions of this story originally appeared on Mat Honan’s Tumblr.</em></p><p><strong>Continued: <a href="https://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/08/mat-honan-data-recovery/">How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking</a>.</strong></p></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Meet Mat Honan. He just had his digital life dissolved by hackers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired. Illustration: Ross Patton/Wired

 Mat Honan

 Gear
 Aug 6, 2012 8:01 PM

 How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking

 In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. Here's the story of exactly how my hackers created havoc by exploiting Apple and Amazon security flaws.
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 In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook.

 In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz.

 Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn't have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location.

 Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them.

 But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple's and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information – a partial credit card number – that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

 This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group.

 ‬The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.‪‬Moreover, if your computers aren't already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms – which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered – no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing.

 I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.

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 It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed.

 I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN.

 I didn’t have a four-digit PIN.

 By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged my router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half.

 It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn't bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily – it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself.

 At 4:33 p.m., according to Apple’s tech support records, someone called AppleCare claiming to be me. Apple says the caller reported that he couldn't get into his Me.com e-mail – which, of course was my Me.com e-mail.

 In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover.

 At 4:50 p.m., a password reset confirmation arrived in my inbox. I don’t really use my me.com e-mail, and rarely check it. But even if I did, I might not have noticed the message because the hackers immediately sent it to the trash. They then were able to follow the link in that e-mail to permanently reset my AppleID password.

 At 4:52 p.m., a Gmail password recovery e-mail arrived in my me.com mailbox. Two minutes later, another e-mail arrived notifying me that my Google account password had changed.

 At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack.

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 * 

 By wiping my MacBook and deleting my Google account, they now not only had the ability to control my account, but were able to prevent me from regaining access. And crazily, in ways that I don’t and never will understand, those deletions were just collateral damage. My MacBook data – including those irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child’s first year and relatives who have now passed from this life – weren’t the target. Nor were the eight years of messages in my Gmail account. The target was always Twitter. My MacBook data was torched simply to prevent me from getting back in.

 Lulz.

 I spent an hour and a half talking to AppleCare. One of the reasons it took me so long to get anything resolved with Apple during my initial phone call was because I couldn't answer the security questions it had on file for me. It turned out there’s a good reason for that. Perhaps an hour or so into the call, the Apple representative on the line said “Mr. Herman, I....”

 “Wait. What did you call me?”

 “Mr. Herman?”

 “My name is Honan.”

 Apple had been looking at the wrong account all along. Because of that, I couldn’t answer my security questions. And because of that, it asked me an alternate set of questions that it said would let tech support let me into my me.com account: a billing address and the last four digits of my credit card. (Of course, when I gave them those, it was no use, because tech support had misheard my last name.)

 It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud.

 Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.

 We talked to Apple directly about its security policy, and company spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Wired, "Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer's data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers' data is protected."

 On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers' access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them.

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 * 

 By exploiting the customer service procedures employed by Apple and Amazon, hackers were able to get into iCloud and take over all of Mat Honan's digital devices – and data. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

 On the night of the hack, I tried to make sense of the ruin that was my digital life. My Google account was nuked, my Twitter account was suspended, my phone was in a useless state of restore, and (for obvious reasons) I was highly paranoid about using my Apple email account for communication.

 I decided to set up a new Twitter account until my old one could be restored, just to let people know what was happening. I logged into Tumblr and posted an account of how I thought the takedown occurred. At this point, I was assuming that my seven-digit alphanumeric AppleID password had been hacked by brute force. In the comments (and, oh, the comments) others guessed that hackers had used some sort of keystroke logger. At the end of the post, I linked to my new Twitter account.

 And then, one of my hackers @ messaged me. He would later identify himself as Phobia. I followed him. He followed me back.

 We started a dialogue via Twitter direct messaging that later continued via e-mail and AIM. Phobia was able to reveal enough detail about the hack and my compromised accounts that it became clear he was, at the very least, a party to how it went down. I agreed not to press charges, and in return he laid out exactly how the hack worked. But first, he wanted to clear something up:

 “didnt guess ur password or use bruteforce. i have my own guide on how to secure emails.”

 I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to Gizmodo’s Twitter account? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.

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 * 

 “I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before” he told me via Twitter Direct Message.

 After coming across my account, the hackers did some background research. My Twitter account linked to my personal website, where they found my Gmail address. Guessing that this was also the e-mail address I used for Twitter, Phobia went to Google’s account recovery page. He didn’t even have to actually attempt a recovery. This was just a recon mission.

 Because I didn’t have Google's two-factor authentication turned on, when Phobia entered my Gmail address, he could view the alternate e-mail I had set up for account recovery. Google partially obscures that information, starring out many characters, but there were enough characters available, m••••n@me.com. Jackpot.

 This was how the hack progressed. If I had some other account aside from an Apple e-mail address, or had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here. But using that Apple-run me.com e-mail account as a backup meant told the hacker I had an AppleID account, which meant I was vulnerable to being hacked.

 Be careful with your Amazon account – or someone might buy merchandise on your credit card, but send it to their home.

 Photo: luxuryluke /Flickr

 “You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it's work, that seems to be largely true.

 Since he already had the e-mail, all he needed was my billing address and the last four digits of my credit card number to have Apple's tech support issue him the keys to my account.

 So how did he get this vital information? He began with the easy one. He got the billing address by doing a whois search on my personal web domain. If someone doesn’t have a domain, you can also look up his or her information on Spokeo, WhitePages, and PeopleSmart.

 Getting a credit card number is tricker, but it also relies on taking advantage of a company’s back-end systems. Phobia says that a partner performed this part of the hack, but described the technique to us, which we were able to verify via our own tech support phone calls. It’s remarkably easy – so easy that Wired was able to duplicate the exploit twice in minutes.

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 * 

 First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry's published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up.

 Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you've lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account – not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn't have anything to share by press time.

 And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn't have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life.

 And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate.

 They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking, or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people, and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too.

 Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling.

 I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do.

 I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn't have daisy-chained two such vital accounts – my Google and my iCloud account – together. I shouldn't have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts – mhonan@gmail.com, mhonan@me.com, and mhonan@wired.com. And I should have had a recovery address that's only used for recovery without being tied to core services.

 But, mostly, I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac. Find My iPhone has been a brilliant Apple service. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, the service lets you see where it is on a map. The New York Times’ David Pogue recovered his lost iPhone just last week thanks to the service. And so, when Apple introduced Find My Mac in the update to its Lion operating system last year, I added that to my iCloud options too.

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 After all, as a reporter, often on the go, my laptop is my most important tool.

 But as a friend pointed out to me, while that service makes sense for phones (which are quite likely to be lost) it makes less sense for computers. You are almost certainly more likely to have your computer accessed remotely than physically. And even worse is the way Find My Mac is implemented.

 When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe – someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means – there’s no way for you to enter that PIN.

 A better way to have this set up would be to require a second method of authentication when Find My Mac is initially set up. If this were the case, someone who was able to get into an iCloud account wouldn't be able to remotely wipe devices with malicious intent. It would also mean that you could potentially have a way to stop a remote wipe in progress.

 But that’s not how it works. And Apple would not comment as to whether stronger authentification is being considered.

 As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren't followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case – that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes – then the problem is widespread.

 I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it's the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known.

 “yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers”

 I asked specifically about the photos of my little girl, which are, to me, the greatest tragedy in all this. Unless I can recover those photos via data recovery services, they are gone forever. On AIM, I asked him if he was sorry for doing that. Phobia replied, “even though i wasnt the one that did it i feel sorry about that. Thats alot of memories im only 19 but if my parents lost and the footage of me and pics i would be beyond sad and im sure they would be too.”

 But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss.

 But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I've placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I'm angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there's Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can't put a price on.

 Additional reporting by Roberto Baldwin and Christina Bonnington. Portions of this story originally appeared on Mat Honan’s Tumblr.

 Continued: How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking.

 Mat Honan was a senior staff writer with WIRED.
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In the space of one hour, my entire digital life was destroyed. First my Google account was taken over, then deleted. Next my Twitter account was compromised, and used as a platform to broadcast racist and homophobic messages. And worst of all, my AppleID account was broken into, and my hackers used it to remotely erase all of the data on my iPhone, iPad, and MacBook. In many ways, this was all my fault. My accounts were daisy-chained together. Getting into Amazon let my hackers get into my Apple ID account, which helped them get into Gmail, which gave them access to Twitter. Had I used two-factor authentication for my Google account, it’s possible that none of this would have happened, because their ultimate goal was always to take over my Twitter account and wreak havoc. Lulz. Had I been regularly backing up the data on my MacBook, I wouldn't have had to worry about losing more than a year’s worth of photos, covering the entire lifespan of my daughter, or documents and e-mails that I had stored in no other location. Those security lapses are my fault, and I deeply, deeply regret them. But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple's and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information – a partial credit card number – that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices. This isn’t just my problem. Since Friday, Aug. 3, when hackers broke into my accounts, I’ve heard from other users who were compromised in the same way, at least one of whom was targeted by the same group. ‬The very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the Web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.‪‬Moreover, if your computers aren't already cloud-connected devices, they will be soon. Apple is working hard to get all of its customers to use iCloud. Google’s entire operating system is cloud-based. And Windows 8, the most cloud-centric operating system yet, will hit desktops by the tens of millions in the coming year. My experience leads me to believe that cloud-based systems need fundamentally different security measures. Password-based security mechanisms – which can be cracked, reset, and socially engineered – no longer suffice in the era of cloud computing. I realized something was wrong at about 5 p.m. on Friday. I was playing with my daughter when my iPhone suddenly powered down. I was expecting a call, so I went to plug it back in.   It then rebooted to the setup screen. This was irritating, but I wasn’t concerned. I assumed it was a software glitch. And, my phone automatically backs up every night. I just assumed it would be a pain in the ass, and nothing more. I entered my iCloud login to restore, and it wasn’t accepted. Again, I was irritated, but not alarmed. I went to connect the iPhone to my computer and restore from that backup — which I had just happened to do the other day. When I opened my laptop, an iCal message popped up telling me that my Gmail account information was wrong. Then the screen went gray, and asked for a four-digit PIN. I didn’t have a four-digit PIN. By now, I knew something was very, very wrong. For the first time it occurred to me that I was being hacked. Unsure of exactly what was happening, I unplugged my router and cable modem, turned off the Mac Mini we use as an entertainment center, grabbed my wife’s phone, and called AppleCare, the company’s tech support service, and spoke with a rep for the next hour and a half. It wasn’t the first call they had had that day about my account. In fact, I later found out that a call had been placed just a little more than a half an hour before my own. But the Apple rep didn't bother to tell me about the first call concerning my account, despite the 90 minutes I spent on the phone with tech support. Nor would Apple tech support ever tell me about the first call voluntarily – it only shared this information after I asked about it. And I only knew about the first call because a hacker told me he had made the call himself. At 4:33 p.m., according to Apple’s tech support records, someone called AppleCare claiming to be me. Apple says the caller reported that he couldn't get into his Me.com e-mail – which, of course was my Me.com e-mail. In response, Apple issued a temporary password. It did this despite the caller’s inability to answer security questions I had set up. And it did this after the hacker supplied only two pieces of information that anyone with an internet connection and a phone can discover. At 4:50 p.m., a password reset confirmation arrived in my inbox. I don’t really use my me.com e-mail, and rarely check it. But even if I did, I might not have noticed the message because the hackers immediately sent it to the trash. They then were able to follow the link in that e-mail to permanently reset my AppleID password. At 4:52 p.m., a Gmail password recovery e-mail arrived in my me.com mailbox. Two minutes later, another e-mail arrived notifying me that my Google account password had changed. At 5:02 p.m., they reset my Twitter password. At 5:00 they used iCloud’s “Find My” tool to remotely wipe my iPhone. At 5:01 they remotely wiped my iPad. At 5:05 they remotely wiped my MacBook. Around this same time, they deleted my Google account. At 5:10, I placed the call to AppleCare. At 5:12 the attackers posted a message to my account on Twitter taking credit for the hack.   By wiping my MacBook and deleting my Google account, they now not only had the ability to control my account, but were able to prevent me from regaining access. And crazily, in ways that I don’t and never will understand, those deletions were just collateral damage. My MacBook data – including those irreplaceable pictures of my family, of my child’s first year and relatives who have now passed from this life – weren’t the target. Nor were the eight years of messages in my Gmail account. The target was always Twitter. My MacBook data was torched simply to prevent me from getting back in. Lulz. I spent an hour and a half talking to AppleCare. One of the reasons it took me so long to get anything resolved with Apple during my initial phone call was because I couldn't answer the security questions it had on file for me. It turned out there’s a good reason for that. Perhaps an hour or so into the call, the Apple representative on the line said “Mr. Herman, I....” “Wait. What did you call me?” “Mr. Herman?” “My name is Honan.” Apple had been looking at the wrong account all along. Because of that, I couldn’t answer my security questions. And because of that, it asked me an alternate set of questions that it said would let tech support let me into my me.com account: a billing address and the last four digits of my credit card. (Of course, when I gave them those, it was no use, because tech support had misheard my last name.) It turns out, a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card number are the only two pieces of information anyone needs to get into your iCloud account. Once supplied, Apple will issue a temporary password, and that password grants access to iCloud. Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, a credit card number, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said. We talked to Apple directly about its security policy, and company spokesperson Natalie Kerris told Wired, "Apple takes customer privacy seriously and requires multiple forms of verification before resetting an Apple ID password. In this particular case, the customer's data was compromised by a person who had acquired personal information about the customer. In addition, we found that our own internal policies were not followed completely. We are reviewing all of our processes for resetting account passwords to ensure our customers' data is protected." On Monday, Wired tried to verify the hackers' access technique by performing it on a different account. We were successful. This means, ultimately, all you need in addition to someone’s e-mail address are those two easily acquired pieces of information: a billing address and the last four digits of a credit card on file. Here’s the story of how the hackers got them.     By exploiting the customer service procedures employed by Apple and Amazon, hackers were able to get into iCloud and take over all of Mat Honan's digital devices – and data. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired   
  On the night of the hack, I tried to make sense of the ruin that was my digital life. My Google account was nuked, my Twitter account was suspended, my phone was in a useless state of restore, and (for obvious reasons) I was highly paranoid about using my Apple email account for communication. I decided to set up a new Twitter account until my old one could be restored, just to let people know what was happening. I logged into Tumblr and posted an account of how I thought the takedown occurred. At this point, I was assuming that my seven-digit alphanumeric AppleID password had been hacked by brute force. In the comments (and, oh, the comments) others guessed that hackers had used some sort of keystroke logger. At the end of the post, I linked to my new Twitter account. And then, one of my hackers @ messaged me. He would later identify himself as Phobia. I followed him. He followed me back. We started a dialogue via Twitter direct messaging that later continued via e-mail and AIM. Phobia was able to reveal enough detail about the hack and my compromised accounts that it became clear he was, at the very least, a party to how it went down. I agreed not to press charges, and in return he laid out exactly how the hack worked. But first, he wanted to clear something up: “didnt guess ur password or use bruteforce. i have my own guide on how to secure emails.” I asked him why. Was I targeted specifically? Was this just to get to Gizmodo’s Twitter account? No, Phobia said they hadn’t even been aware that my account was linked to Gizmodo’s, that the Gizmodo linkage was just gravy. He said the hack was simply a grab for my three-character Twitter handle. That’s all they wanted. They just wanted to take it, and fuck shit up, and watch it burn. It wasn’t personal.   “I honestly didn’t have any heat towards you before this. i just liked your username like I said before” he told me via Twitter Direct Message. After coming across my account, the hackers did some background research. My Twitter account linked to my personal website, where they found my Gmail address. Guessing that this was also the e-mail address I used for Twitter, Phobia went to Google’s account recovery page. He didn’t even have to actually attempt a recovery. This was just a recon mission. Because I didn’t have Google's two-factor authentication turned on, when Phobia entered my Gmail address, he could view the alternate e-mail I had set up for account recovery. Google partially obscures that information, starring out many characters, but there were enough characters available, m••••n@me.com. Jackpot. This was how the hack progressed. If I had some other account aside from an Apple e-mail address, or had used two-factor authentication for Gmail, everything would have stopped here. But using that Apple-run me.com e-mail account as a backup meant told the hacker I had an AppleID account, which meant I was vulnerable to being hacked.   Be careful with your Amazon account – or someone might buy merchandise on your credit card, but send it to their home.
Photo: luxuryluke/Flickr  “You honestly can get into any email associated with apple,” Phobia claimed in an e-mail. And while it's work, that seems to be largely true. Since he already had the e-mail, all he needed was my billing address and the last four digits of my credit card number to have Apple's tech support issue him the keys to my account. So how did he get this vital information? He began with the easy one. He got the billing address by doing a whois search on my personal web domain. If someone doesn’t have a domain, you can also look up his or her information on Spokeo, WhitePages, and PeopleSmart. Getting a credit card number is tricker, but it also relies on taking advantage of a company’s back-end systems. Phobia says that a partner performed this part of the hack, but described the technique to us, which we were able to verify via our own tech support phone calls. It’s remarkably easy – so easy that Wired was able to duplicate the exploit twice in minutes.   First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Amazon then allows you to input a new credit card. (Wired used a bogus credit card number from a website that generates fake card numbers that conform with the industry's published self-check algorithm.) Then you hang up. Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you've lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account. From here, you go to the Amazon website, and send a password reset to the new e-mail account. This allows you to see all the credit cards on file for the account – not the complete numbers, just the last four digits. But, as we know, Apple only needs those last four digits. We asked Amazon to comment on its security policy, but didn't have anything to share by press time. And it’s also worth noting that one wouldn't have to call Amazon to pull this off. Your pizza guy could do the same thing, for example. If you have an AppleID, every time you call Pizza Hut, you’ve giving the 16-year-old on the other end of the line all he needs to take over your entire digital life. And so, with my name, address, and the last four digits of my credit card number in hand, Phobia called AppleCare, and my digital life was laid waste. Yet still I was actually quite fortunate. They could have used my e-mail accounts to gain access to my online banking, or financial services. They could have used them to contact other people, and socially engineer them as well. As Ed Bott pointed out on TWiT.tv, my years as a technology journalist have put some very influential people in my address book. They could have been victimized too. Instead, the hackers just wanted to embarrass me, have some fun at my expense, and enrage my followers on Twitter by trolling. I had done some pretty stupid things. Things you shouldn’t do. I should have been regularly backing up my MacBook. Because I wasn’t doing that, if all the photos from the first year and a half of my daughter’s life are ultimately lost, I will have only myself to blame. I shouldn't have daisy-chained two such vital accounts – my Google and my iCloud account – together. I shouldn't have used the same e-mail prefix across multiple accounts – mhonan@gmail.com, mhonan@me.com, and mhonan@wired.com. And I should have had a recovery address that's only used for recovery without being tied to core services. But, mostly, I shouldn’t have used Find My Mac. Find My iPhone has been a brilliant Apple service. If you lose your iPhone, or have it stolen, the service lets you see where it is on a map. The New York Times’ David Pogue recovered his lost iPhone just last week thanks to the service. And so, when Apple introduced Find My Mac in the update to its Lion operating system last year, I added that to my iCloud options too.   After all, as a reporter, often on the go, my laptop is my most important tool. But as a friend pointed out to me, while that service makes sense for phones (which are quite likely to be lost) it makes less sense for computers. You are almost certainly more likely to have your computer accessed remotely than physically. And even worse is the way Find My Mac is implemented. When you perform a remote hard drive wipe on Find my Mac, the system asks you to create a four-digit PIN so that the process can be reversed. But here’s the thing: If someone else performs that wipe – someone who gained access to your iCloud account through malicious means – there’s no way for you to enter that PIN. A better way to have this set up would be to require a second method of authentication when Find My Mac is initially set up. If this were the case, someone who was able to get into an iCloud account wouldn't be able to remotely wipe devices with malicious intent. It would also mean that you could potentially have a way to stop a remote wipe in progress. But that’s not how it works. And Apple would not comment as to whether stronger authentification is being considered. As of Monday, both of these exploits used by the hackers were still functioning. Wired was able to duplicate them. Apple says its internal tech support processes weren't followed, and this is how my account was compromised. However, this contradicts what AppleCare told me twice that weekend. If that is, in fact, the case – that I was the victim of Apple not following its own internal processes – then the problem is widespread. I asked Phobia why he did this to me. His answer wasn’t satisfying. He says he likes to publicize security exploits, so companies will fix them. He says it's the same reason he told me how it was done. He claims his partner in the attack was the person who wiped my MacBook. Phobia expressed remorse for this, and says he would have stopped it had he known. “yea i really am a nice guy idk why i do some of the things i do,” he told me via AIM. “idk my goal is to get it out there to other people so eventually every1 can over come hackers” I asked specifically about the photos of my little girl, which are, to me, the greatest tragedy in all this. Unless I can recover those photos via data recovery services, they are gone forever. On AIM, I asked him if he was sorry for doing that. Phobia replied, “even though i wasnt the one that did it i feel sorry about that. Thats alot of memories im only 19 but if my parents lost and the footage of me and pics i would be beyond sad and im sure they would be too.” But let’s say he did know, and failed to stop it. Hell, for the sake of argument, let’s say he did it. Let’s say he pulled the trigger. The weird thing is, I’m not even especially angry at Phobia, or his partner in the attack. I’m mostly mad at myself. I’m mad as hell for not backing up my data. I’m sad, and shocked, and feel that I am ultimately to blame for that loss. But I’m also upset that this ecosystem that I've placed so much of my trust in has let me down so thoroughly. I'm angry that Amazon makes it so remarkably easy to allow someone into your account, which has obvious financial consequences. And then there's Apple. I bought into the Apple account system originally to buy songs at 99 cents a pop, and over the years that same ID has evolved into a single point of entry that controls my phones, tablets, computers and data-driven life. With this AppleID, someone can make thousands of dollars of purchases in an instant, or do damage at a cost that you can't put a price on.  Additional reporting by Roberto Baldwin and Christina Bonnington. Portions of this story originally appeared on Mat Honan’s Tumblr.   Continued: How I Resurrected My Digital Life After an Epic Hacking.
How Apple and Amazon Security Flaws Led to My Epic Hacking
https://www.wired.com/2012/08/apple-amazon-mat-honan-hacking/
https://www.army.mil/article/103842/army_releases_2012_net_zero_progress_report
Army releases 2012 Net Zero Progress Report
2013-05-23
None
<div><div>
<div>
<figure>
<figcaption>
</figcaption>
</figure>
</div>
<p>WASHINGTON (May 22, 2013) -- The Army has released the Net Zero Pilot Installation Initiative Progress Report for 2012, containing information useful to implementing Net Zero. The Army now plans to issue a policy this year that will expand the Net Zero Initiative to all permanent Army installations. </p>
<p>The Army's Net Zero Initiative is a holistic strategy that builds upon long-standing sustainable practices and incorporates emerging best practices in building an Army-wide community to manage energy, water, and waste at Army installations. </p>
<p>The Net Zero Initiative is recognized as a force multiplier enabling the Army to appropriately steward available resources, manage costs, and provide Soldiers, families and civilians with a sustainable future. </p>
<p>The report details the new Net Zero hierarchies and implementation strategies. It also contains information about installation collaboration, outreach and behavior and awareness campaigns that are being conducted. Specific pilot installation activities are detailed to assist with technology solution development and implementation. For instance, energy efficient upgrade projects at specific installations are provided including funding sources and expected outcomes. </p>
<p>The report details many of the Pilot installation renewable energy efforts such as the 10 kilo-watt wind turbine system installed at West Point and a 20 mega-watt photovoltaic system in development at Fort Bliss, Texas. Best practices are detailed for each area such as the use of xeriscaping, leak detection, recycling, purple pipe installation and alternate sources for water. Key actions related to waste include Material Flow Analyses, installation surveys, and characterization studies. </p>
<p>The report concludes with the Army's plans for the Net Zero Initiative for fiscal year 2013 and beyond. </p>
<p>Activities to institutionalize Net Zero will include working with commands, Direct Reporting Units to effectively implement Net Zero Army-wide and a comprehensive gap analysis to determine appropriate insertion points for Net Zero into existing Army policy and guidance. </p>
<p>The Army is fostering a Net Zero ethic by creating a culture in which installations recognize the limits of natural resources and where sustainability is embraced and re-energized to support the Army's mission. </p>
<p>Since April 2011, the Army has provided technical assistance to 17 pilot installations and one state-wide Army National Guard energy pilot, striving towards Net Zero Energy, Water, Waste or all three. </p>
<p>These pilots are serving as test beds to institutionalized Net Zero across the Army enterprise and this report provides a summary of the progress to date, identifies best practices, and discusses the Army's plans for Instituting Net Zero Army-wide.</p>
<h2>Related Documents:</h2>
<p><a href="https://api.army.mil/e2/c/downloads/296777.pdf">Army Net Zero Progress Report (2012)</a> [PDF]</p>
<h2>Related Links:</h2>
<p><a href="http://eko.usace.army.mil/public/fa/netzero/">Net Zero</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/article/103577/">Fort Bliss unveils Army's first microgrid</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/article/97637/">Net Zero progress report due by end of 2013</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/asaiee">Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/news/energy">Army.mil: Energy News</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/news/environment">Army.mil: Environment News</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/2009/10/06/">STAND-TO!: Army Energy Security</a></p>
<p><a href="http://www.army.mil/standto/archive/issue.php?issue=2012-08-15">STAND-TO!: Net Zero Strategy</a></p>
<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/pages/Assistant-Secretary-of-the-United-States-Army-IEE/166739060035912">Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment on Facebook</a></p>
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 Search news, photos and videos on Army.mil

 Army releases 2012 Net Zero Progress Report

 By Caroline Harrover, ASA (IE&E) May 23, 2013

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 The Net Zero 2012 report details the existing Net Zero implementation strategy refinement into subordinate hierarchies and describes the interrelated steps needed to be integrated into the installation's long-term planning efforts in order to achieve... (Photo Credit: U.S. Army) VIEW ORIGINAL

 WASHINGTON (May 22, 2013) -- The Army has released the Net Zero Pilot Installation Initiative Progress Report for 2012, containing information useful to implementing Net Zero. The Army now plans to issue a policy this year that will expand the Net Zero Initiative to all permanent Army installations.

 The Army's Net Zero Initiative is a holistic strategy that builds upon long-standing sustainable practices and incorporates emerging best practices in building an Army-wide community to manage energy, water, and waste at Army installations.

 The Net Zero Initiative is recognized as a force multiplier enabling the Army to appropriately steward available resources, manage costs, and provide Soldiers, families and civilians with a sustainable future.

 The report details the new Net Zero hierarchies and implementation strategies. It also contains information about installation collaboration, outreach and behavior and awareness campaigns that are being conducted. Specific pilot installation activities are detailed to assist with technology solution development and implementation. For instance, energy efficient upgrade projects at specific installations are provided including funding sources and expected outcomes.

 The report details many of the Pilot installation renewable energy efforts such as the 10 kilo-watt wind turbine system installed at West Point and a 20 mega-watt photovoltaic system in development at Fort Bliss, Texas. Best practices are detailed for each area such as the use of xeriscaping, leak detection, recycling, purple pipe installation and alternate sources for water. Key actions related to waste include Material Flow Analyses, installation surveys, and characterization studies.

 The report concludes with the Army's plans for the Net Zero Initiative for fiscal year 2013 and beyond.

 Activities to institutionalize Net Zero will include working with commands, Direct Reporting Units to effectively implement Net Zero Army-wide and a comprehensive gap analysis to determine appropriate insertion points for Net Zero into existing Army policy and guidance.

 The Army is fostering a Net Zero ethic by creating a culture in which installations recognize the limits of natural resources and where sustainability is embraced and re-energized to support the Army's mission.

 Since April 2011, the Army has provided technical assistance to 17 pilot installations and one state-wide Army National Guard energy pilot, striving towards Net Zero Energy, Water, Waste or all three.

 These pilots are serving as test beds to institutionalized Net Zero across the Army enterprise and this report provides a summary of the progress to date, identifies best practices, and discusses the Army's plans for Instituting Net Zero Army-wide.

 Related Documents:

 Army Net Zero Progress Report (2012) [PDF]

 Related Links:

 Net Zero

 Fort Bliss unveils Army's first microgrid

 Net Zero progress report due by end of 2013

 Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment

 Army.mil: Energy News

 Army.mil: Environment News

 STAND-TO!: Army Energy Security

 STAND-TO!: Net Zero Strategy

 Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment on Facebook

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WASHINGTON (May 22, 2013) -- The Army has released the Net Zero Pilot Installation Initiative Progress Report for 2012, containing information useful to implementing Net Zero. The Army now plans to issue a policy this year that will expand the Net Zero Initiative to all permanent Army installations. 
The Army's Net Zero Initiative is a holistic strategy that builds upon long-standing sustainable practices and incorporates emerging best practices in building an Army-wide community to manage energy, water, and waste at Army installations. 
The Net Zero Initiative is recognized as a force multiplier enabling the Army to appropriately steward available resources, manage costs, and provide Soldiers, families and civilians with a sustainable future. 
The report details the new Net Zero hierarchies and implementation strategies. It also contains information about installation collaboration, outreach and behavior and awareness campaigns that are being conducted. Specific pilot installation activities are detailed to assist with technology solution development and implementation. For instance, energy efficient upgrade projects at specific installations are provided including funding sources and expected outcomes. 
The report details many of the Pilot installation renewable energy efforts such as the 10 kilo-watt wind turbine system installed at West Point and a 20 mega-watt photovoltaic system in development at Fort Bliss, Texas. Best practices are detailed for each area such as the use of xeriscaping, leak detection, recycling, purple pipe installation and alternate sources for water. Key actions related to waste include Material Flow Analyses, installation surveys, and characterization studies. 
The report concludes with the Army's plans for the Net Zero Initiative for fiscal year 2013 and beyond. 
Activities to institutionalize Net Zero will include working with commands, Direct Reporting Units to effectively implement Net Zero Army-wide and a comprehensive gap analysis to determine appropriate insertion points for Net Zero into existing Army policy and guidance. 
The Army is fostering a Net Zero ethic by creating a culture in which installations recognize the limits of natural resources and where sustainability is embraced and re-energized to support the Army's mission. 
Since April 2011, the Army has provided technical assistance to 17 pilot installations and one state-wide Army National Guard energy pilot, striving towards Net Zero Energy, Water, Waste or all three. 
These pilots are serving as test beds to institutionalized Net Zero across the Army enterprise and this report provides a summary of the progress to date, identifies best practices, and discusses the Army's plans for Instituting Net Zero Army-wide.
Related Documents:
 Army Net Zero Progress Report (2012) [PDF]
Related Links:
 Net Zero 
 Fort Bliss unveils Army's first microgrid 
 Net Zero progress report due by end of 2013 
 Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment 
 Army.mil: Energy News 
 Army.mil: Environment News 
 STAND-TO!: Army Energy Security 
 STAND-TO!: Net Zero Strategy 
 Assistant Secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment on Facebook
Army releases 2012 Net Zero Progress Report
https://www.army.mil/article/103842/army_releases_2012_net_zero_progress_report
https://www.livescience.com/37426-2012-natural-disasters-second-costliest.html
2012 Second Costliest Year for Natural Disasters
2013-06-13
Megan Gannon
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This map shows the 11 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that hit the United States in 2012.
(Image credit: NCDC)
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<p>Hurricane Sandy and an extensive drought made 2012 the United States' second costliest year for natural disasters since 1980, federal officials said today (June 13).</p><p>Weather and climate disasters racked up $110 billion in damages across the country last year, according to a report released today by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC).</p><p>There were 11 events in 2012 that each incurred at least $1 billion in damages, including spring tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and Texas, a <a href="https://www.livescience.com/37386-derecho-facts.html">derecho</a> that plowed from the Plains to the Northeast, and the yearlong drought and its associated heatwaves and wildfires that burned more than 9.2 million acres, mostly in the West.</p><p>All told, more than 300 people were killed in these 11 extreme weather events — 159 of those lives were claimed by Sandy.</p><p><a href="https://www.livescience.com/24380-hurricane-sandy-status-data.html">Sandy</a> by far was the most costly event of the year, with $65 billion in damages. The gigantic storm, which at one point had tropical storm-force winds extending almost 500 miles (800 kilometers) from its center, made landfall on the Jersey Shore on Oct. 29. It caused a record storm surge, historic flooding and widespread power outages along a huge stretch of the East Coast.</p><p>Last year's severe, yearlong drought, meanwhile, was estimated to have cost about $30 billion in damages, much of it due to widespread harvest failure. For most of 2012, more than half the country was affected by the drought, which covered the largest area of any drought since the 1930s, according to the NCDC's report.</p><p>The costliest year on record for natural disasters was 2005 — the year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf — with $160 billion in damages. According to the NCDC, 2012 also ranks second for number of <a href="https://www.livescience.com/climate-change.html">billion-dollar disasters</a>, just behind 2011, which saw 14 such events.</p><p> <em>Follow LiveScience on Twitter </em><a href="http://twitter.com/#!/LiveScience"><em>@livescience</em></a><em>. We're also on </em><a href="http://www.facebook.com/livescience"><em>Facebook</em></a><em> &amp; </em><a href="https://plus.google.com/101164570444913213957/posts"><em>Google+</em></a><em>. </em></p>
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<div><p>Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.</p></div>
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 2012 Second Costliest Year for Natural Disasters

 By Megan Gannon
 published 13 June 2013

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 This map shows the 11 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that hit the United States in 2012. (Image credit: NCDC)

 Hurricane Sandy and an extensive drought made 2012 the United States' second costliest year for natural disasters since 1980, federal officials said today (June 13).

 Weather and climate disasters racked up $110 billion in damages across the country last year, according to a report released today by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC).

 There were 11 events in 2012 that each incurred at least $1 billion in damages, including spring tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and Texas, a derecho that plowed from the Plains to the Northeast, and the yearlong drought and its associated heatwaves and wildfires that burned more than 9.2 million acres, mostly in the West.

 All told, more than 300 people were killed in these 11 extreme weather events — 159 of those lives were claimed by Sandy.

 Sandy by far was the most costly event of the year, with $65 billion in damages. The gigantic storm, which at one point had tropical storm-force winds extending almost 500 miles (800 kilometers) from its center, made landfall on the Jersey Shore on Oct. 29. It caused a record storm surge, historic flooding and widespread power outages along a huge stretch of the East Coast.

 Last year's severe, yearlong drought, meanwhile, was estimated to have cost about $30 billion in damages, much of it due to widespread harvest failure. For most of 2012, more than half the country was affected by the drought, which covered the largest area of any drought since the 1930s, according to the NCDC's report.

 The costliest year on record for natural disasters was 2005 — the year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf — with $160 billion in damages. According to the NCDC, 2012 also ranks second for number of billion-dollar disasters, just behind 2011, which saw 14 such events.

 Follow LiveScience on Twitter @livescience. We're also on Facebook & Google+.

 Megan Gannon
 Live Science Contributor
 Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.
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This map shows the 11 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters that hit the United States in 2012.
(Image credit: NCDC)
Hurricane Sandy and an extensive drought made 2012 the United States' second costliest year for natural disasters since 1980, federal officials said today (June 13). Weather and climate disasters racked up $110 billion in damages across the country last year, according to a report released today by the National Climate Data Center (NCDC). There were 11 events in 2012 that each incurred at least $1 billion in damages, including spring tornado outbreaks in the Midwest and Texas, a derecho that plowed from the Plains to the Northeast, and the yearlong drought and its associated heatwaves and wildfires that burned more than 9.2 million acres, mostly in the West. All told, more than 300 people were killed in these 11 extreme weather events — 159 of those lives were claimed by Sandy.  Sandy by far was the most costly event of the year, with $65 billion in damages. The gigantic storm, which at one point had tropical storm-force winds extending almost 500 miles (800 kilometers) from its center, made landfall on the Jersey Shore on Oct. 29. It caused a record storm surge, historic flooding and widespread power outages along a huge stretch of the East Coast. Last year's severe, yearlong drought, meanwhile, was estimated to have cost about $30 billion in damages, much of it due to widespread harvest failure. For most of 2012, more than half the country was affected by the drought, which covered the largest area of any drought since the 1930s, according to the NCDC's report. The costliest year on record for natural disasters was 2005 — the year Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf — with $160 billion in damages. According to the NCDC, 2012 also ranks second for number of billion-dollar disasters, just behind 2011, which saw 14 such events.  Follow LiveScience on Twitter   @livescience  . We're also on   Facebook   &amp;   Google+  .  
 Megan has been writing for Live Science and Space.com since 2012. Her interests range from archaeology to space exploration, and she has a bachelor's degree in English and art history from New York University. Megan spent two years as a reporter on the national desk at NewsCore. She has watched dinosaur auctions, witnessed rocket launches, licked ancient pottery sherds in Cyprus and flown in zero gravity. Follow her on Twitter and Google+.
2012 Second Costliest Year for Natural Disasters
https://www.livescience.com/37426-2012-natural-disasters-second-costliest.html
https://www.eurosport.com/football/la-liga/2011-2012/nilmar-set-for-qatar-move_sto3345254/story.shtml
Nilmar set for Qatar move - Eurosport
2012-07-12
None
<div><div><p>The former Internacional forward, who was a member of the Brazil squad at the last World Cup, turns 28 years old on Saturday, and has attracted interest from clubs both in Europe and back in his homeland.</p></div><div><p>Should he move to the club which finished third in the 12-team Qatari league last season, he will add to a Brazilian contingent that already includes former Middlesbrough striker Afonso Alves and ex-Besiktas midfielder Rodrigo Tabata.</p></div></div>||||I|||| HomeOlympics
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 FootballLiga

 Nilmar set for Qatar move

 By Eurosport

 Updated 12/07/2012 at 15:01 GMT

 Nilmar is on the verge of leaving Villarreal and joining Al-Rayyan, the Qatari club has claimed.

 Nilmar

 Image credit: Eurosport

 A statement on Al-Rayyan's website said: "Nilmar of the club Villarreal is coming to Doha to completed negotiations... He will be a great addition to the attack."
 Nilmar was always likely to leave El Madrigal this summer following the club's relegation from the top flight in Spain at the end of a season in which injury restricted him to just 13 league starts.
 However, a potential move to the Middle East is a surprising one.

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 23/06/2015 at 21:29

 The former Internacional forward, who was a member of the Brazil squad at the last World Cup, turns 28 years old on Saturday, and has attracted interest from clubs both in Europe and back in his homeland.
 Should he move to the club which finished third in the 12-team Qatari league last season, he will add to a Brazilian contingent that already includes former Middlesbrough striker Afonso Alves and ex-Besiktas midfielder Rodrigo Tabata.

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The former Internacional forward, who was a member of the Brazil squad at the last World Cup, turns 28 years old on Saturday, and has attracted interest from clubs both in Europe and back in his homeland.   Should he move to the club which finished third in the 12-team Qatari league last season, he will add to a Brazilian contingent that already includes former Middlesbrough striker Afonso Alves and ex-Besiktas midfielder Rodrigo Tabata.
Nilmar set for Qatar move - Eurosport
https://www.eurosport.com/football/la-liga/2011-2012/nilmar-set-for-qatar-move_sto3345254/story.shtml
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/may-2013/the-top-40-physics-hits-of-2012
The top 40 physics hits of 2012
2013-12-05
Glenn Roberts Jr
<div><div><p>Think of it as a particle physics version of pop radio's “top 40” countdown: INSPIRE, a database of particle-physics publications, has released its <a href="https://inspirehep.net/info/hep/stats/topcites/2012/annual.html">annual list</a> of most-cited articles.</p>
<p>Topping the charts in 2012 are articles about the Higgs boson, which made up about 20 percent of the list.  </p>
<p>But the most-cited publication of 2012 is a <a href="https://inspirehep.net/record/712925">583-page manual</a> about PYTHIA, a program for simulating particle collisions and their byproducts. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Fermilab in the United States published the manual in 2006. The PYTHIA manual, which was cited in an estimated 1225 scientific articles in 2012, also ranked very high in INSPIRE's top-cited lists for <a href="http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/stats/topcites/2011/annual.html">2011</a> and <a href="http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/stats/topcites/2010/annual.html">2010</a>.</p>
<p>INSPIRE, built and operated by a <a href="http://www.projecthepinspire.net/">collaboration</a> that includes CERN, the German laboratory DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, provides access to all high-energy physics papers and literature. Its predecessor, <a href="http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0007040">SPIRES-HEP</a>, was a <a href="http://www.slac.stanford.edu/cgi-wrap/getdoc/slac-pub-7757.pdf">key driver</a> in the early development and launch of the World Wide Web.</p>
<p>Heath O'Connell, a Fermilab information resources manager who helps oversee INSPIRE, says he’s not surprised that the Higgs boson is one of the hottest topics on this year’s list, appearing in both experimental and theoretical papers.</p>
<p>Based on the continuing attention to the Higgs discovery and the related ongoing research within the physics community, "certainly Higgs boson papers are going to rank very high up,” he says. “They are [also] well within reach of the top position for the 2013 list."</p>
<p>Papers about neutrinos and antineutrinos, supernovae, dark matter and dark energy, as well as other particle simulation programs, also grabbed top spots on the INSPIRE list. (The word cloud above shows common words in the titles of the 2012 top 40 papers.)</p>
<p>One about GEANT4, a set of tools for simulating particle interactions with matter, ranked fourth with an estimated 716 citations. A <a href="https://inspirehep.net/record/912611">2011 article</a> about another particle physics code, MadGraph5, was the 17th most-cited article of 2012, and a <a href="http://iopscience.iop.org/1126-6708/2007/09/028/">2007 article</a> about an earlier version of the tool ranked 25th. These tools are widely used in experiments.</p>
<p>Not every paper in the INSPIRE database is considered for the top 40 list. The 1,528-page "<a href="http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v86/i1/e010001">Review of Particle Physics</a>," published in July 2012, actually drew the highest citation count for 2012. But the annual publication "always gets the most citations because it is a directory of all the particle properties, taken from experimental results," O’Connell says. It isn't ranked because it's in a class of its own.</p>
<p>O'Connell and Bernard Hecker, head of the INSPIRE project at SLAC, note the diversity of topics and collaborators in the latest group of most-cited articles.</p>
<p>"The list is a lot like INSPIRE itself, a truly global enterprise," Hecker says.  </p>
<h4>A growing list</h4>
<p>The INSPIRE database, from which the top 40 list is determined, reached a major milestone in its development in late April when it <a href="http://blog.inspirehep.net/2013/04/a-million.html">surpassed</a> 1 million total records. In 2012 alone, INSPIRE added over 60,000 records.</p>
<p>Noting how fast INSPIRE has grown from its predecessor database, which launched with 74,000 papers in 1974, Hecker says, "I am immediately struck by this long list of people who have contributed over the years: Each generation, each cohort moving it forward a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and always as an important resource for the field.</p>
<p>"It continues to be absolutely essential" for researchers to tap into INSPIRE, he says. "It is the consistent effort of those people and those institutions over time that got it to a million. Now, it's an amazing resource.”  And growth isn’t just in records. “We’re adding important new features at an accelerating pace, like <a href="http://blog.inspirehep.net/2012/11/author-profile-pages-updated.html">author disambiguation</a> and providing <a href="http://blog.inspirehep.net/2012/10/hepdata-comes-to-inspire.html">access to data</a>," he notes.</p>
<p>A historic list of annual and all-time top-cited papers, dating back to 1974, can be found on the <a href="http://inspirehep.net/info/hep/stats/topcites/index">INSPIRE website</a>. </p>
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 A joint Fermilab/SLAC publication

 The top 40 physics hits of 2012

 05/12/13
 By Glenn Roberts Jr.

 The Higgs boson is a popular subject among the most-cited physics papers of 2012, but a particle simulation manual takes the top spot.

 Think of it as a particle physics version of pop radio's “top 40” countdown: INSPIRE, a database of particle-physics publications, has released its annual list of most-cited articles.

 Topping the charts in 2012 are articles about the Higgs boson, which made up about 20 percent of the list.

 But the most-cited publication of 2012 is a 583-page manual about PYTHIA, a program for simulating particle collisions and their byproducts. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Fermilab in the United States published the manual in 2006. The PYTHIA manual, which was cited in an estimated 1225 scientific articles in 2012, also ranked very high in INSPIRE's top-cited lists for 2011 and 2010.

 INSPIRE, built and operated by a collaboration that includes CERN, the German laboratory DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, provides access to all high-energy physics papers and literature. Its predecessor, SPIRES-HEP, was a key driver in the early development and launch of the World Wide Web.

 Heath O'Connell, a Fermilab information resources manager who helps oversee INSPIRE, says he’s not surprised that the Higgs boson is one of the hottest topics on this year’s list, appearing in both experimental and theoretical papers.

 Based on the continuing attention to the Higgs discovery and the related ongoing research within the physics community, "certainly Higgs boson papers are going to rank very high up,” he says. “They are [also] well within reach of the top position for the 2013 list."

 Papers about neutrinos and antineutrinos, supernovae, dark matter and dark energy, as well as other particle simulation programs, also grabbed top spots on the INSPIRE list. (The word cloud above shows common words in the titles of the 2012 top 40 papers.)

 One about GEANT4, a set of tools for simulating particle interactions with matter, ranked fourth with an estimated 716 citations. A 2011 article about another particle physics code, MadGraph5, was the 17th most-cited article of 2012, and a 2007 article about an earlier version of the tool ranked 25th. These tools are widely used in experiments.

 Not every paper in the INSPIRE database is considered for the top 40 list. The 1,528-page "Review of Particle Physics," published in July 2012, actually drew the highest citation count for 2012. But the annual publication "always gets the most citations because it is a directory of all the particle properties, taken from experimental results," O’Connell says. It isn't ranked because it's in a class of its own.

 O'Connell and Bernard Hecker, head of the INSPIRE project at SLAC, note the diversity of topics and collaborators in the latest group of most-cited articles.

 "The list is a lot like INSPIRE itself, a truly global enterprise," Hecker says.

 A growing list

 The INSPIRE database, from which the top 40 list is determined, reached a major milestone in its development in late April when it surpassed 1 million total records. In 2012 alone, INSPIRE added over 60,000 records.

 Noting how fast INSPIRE has grown from its predecessor database, which launched with 74,000 papers in 1974, Hecker says, "I am immediately struck by this long list of people who have contributed over the years: Each generation, each cohort moving it forward a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and always as an important resource for the field.

 "It continues to be absolutely essential" for researchers to tap into INSPIRE, he says. "It is the consistent effort of those people and those institutions over time that got it to a million. Now, it's an amazing resource.” And growth isn’t just in records. “We’re adding important new features at an accelerating pace, like author disambiguation and providing access to data," he notes.

 A historic list of annual and all-time top-cited papers, dating back to 1974, can be found on the INSPIRE website.

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Think of it as a particle physics version of pop radio's “top 40” countdown: INSPIRE, a database of particle-physics publications, has released its annual list of most-cited articles.
Topping the charts in 2012 are articles about the Higgs boson, which made up about 20 percent of the list.  
But the most-cited publication of 2012 is a 583-page manual about PYTHIA, a program for simulating particle collisions and their byproducts. Researchers at Lund University in Sweden and Fermilab in the United States published the manual in 2006. The PYTHIA manual, which was cited in an estimated 1225 scientific articles in 2012, also ranked very high in INSPIRE's top-cited lists for 2011 and 2010.
INSPIRE, built and operated by a collaboration that includes CERN, the German laboratory DESY, Fermilab and SLAC, provides access to all high-energy physics papers and literature. Its predecessor, SPIRES-HEP, was a key driver in the early development and launch of the World Wide Web.
Heath O'Connell, a Fermilab information resources manager who helps oversee INSPIRE, says he’s not surprised that the Higgs boson is one of the hottest topics on this year’s list, appearing in both experimental and theoretical papers.
Based on the continuing attention to the Higgs discovery and the related ongoing research within the physics community, "certainly Higgs boson papers are going to rank very high up,” he says. “They are [also] well within reach of the top position for the 2013 list."
Papers about neutrinos and antineutrinos, supernovae, dark matter and dark energy, as well as other particle simulation programs, also grabbed top spots on the INSPIRE list. (The word cloud above shows common words in the titles of the 2012 top 40 papers.)
One about GEANT4, a set of tools for simulating particle interactions with matter, ranked fourth with an estimated 716 citations. A 2011 article about another particle physics code, MadGraph5, was the 17th most-cited article of 2012, and a 2007 article about an earlier version of the tool ranked 25th. These tools are widely used in experiments.
Not every paper in the INSPIRE database is considered for the top 40 list. The 1,528-page "Review of Particle Physics," published in July 2012, actually drew the highest citation count for 2012. But the annual publication "always gets the most citations because it is a directory of all the particle properties, taken from experimental results," O’Connell says. It isn't ranked because it's in a class of its own.
O'Connell and Bernard Hecker, head of the INSPIRE project at SLAC, note the diversity of topics and collaborators in the latest group of most-cited articles.
"The list is a lot like INSPIRE itself, a truly global enterprise," Hecker says.  
A growing list
The INSPIRE database, from which the top 40 list is determined, reached a major milestone in its development in late April when it surpassed 1 million total records. In 2012 alone, INSPIRE added over 60,000 records.
Noting how fast INSPIRE has grown from its predecessor database, which launched with 74,000 papers in 1974, Hecker says, "I am immediately struck by this long list of people who have contributed over the years: Each generation, each cohort moving it forward a little bit farther, a little bit farther, and always as an important resource for the field.
"It continues to be absolutely essential" for researchers to tap into INSPIRE, he says. "It is the consistent effort of those people and those institutions over time that got it to a million. Now, it's an amazing resource.”  And growth isn’t just in records. “We’re adding important new features at an accelerating pace, like author disambiguation and providing access to data," he notes.
A historic list of annual and all-time top-cited papers, dating back to 1974, can be found on the INSPIRE website.
The top 40 physics hits of 2012
https://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/may-2013/the-top-40-physics-hits-of-2012
https://www.wired.com/2013/03/spacex-thruster-problem/
Thruster Problem Forces SpaceX to Reschedule ISS Docking
2013-03-01
Condé Nast; Jason Paur
<div><div><div><p><em>Update 3/3/13 9:00 a.m. EST - SpaceX demonstrated Dragon's thrusters were functioning properly during maneuvers Saturday and began the approach to the International Space Station. Early Sunday morning, astronauts aboard the station used the robotic arm to capture the Dragon at 5:31 a.m. EST, about an hour earlier than anticipated. Dragon was then pulled in using the robotic arm and was berthed to the station at 5</em>*:56 a.m. EST. Astronauts will begin unpacking the cargo aboard the spacecraft early this week. *</p><p>An anomaly with the thrusters aboard its Dragon spacecraft caused SpaceX to miss a scheduled burn to adjust the capsule orbit on Friday, causing SpaceX to delay by at least 24 hours Saturday's planned rendezvous with the International Space Station.</p><p>SpaceX engineers have been working full-throttle to resolve the thruster issue, which followed a picture-perfect launch atop the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and NASA officials said they are confident Musk's engineers will resolve the problem quickly and could have Dragon on track for a rendezvous Sunday.</p><p>Engineers at <a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/the-rocket-factory-spacex-builds-them-from-top-to-bottom/?pid=1998">SpaceX mission control in southern California</a> saw the first signs of trouble <a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2013/03/spacex-third-successful-launch-iss/">shortly after Dragon reached orbit</a>.</p><p>“It was a little frightening there,” Musk told reporters in a post-flight press conference. “We noticed after separation that only one of the four thruster quads was ready to engage. We saw that the oxidizer pressure in three of the four tanks was low.”</p><p><a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/10/spacex-texas-rocket-test/?pid=2382">Dragon has four thruster quads</a>, used to maneuver the spacecraft in orbit. They are essential to the docking procedure and three of them are required by NASA to be working flawlessly in order to make the final approach to the International Space Station. Two of the "quads" are comprised of four small Draco thrusters while the other two actually have five thrusters apiece. The Dracos are initially used to adjust Dragon's orbit to begin its rendezvous with the station. Once Dragon has used them to achieve general proximity with the ISS, they are used to make the small adjustments needed for docking.</p><p>An initial investigation by SpaceX points to a possible blockage in a line that leads from a helium tank to an oxidizer tank that provides the oxygen needed for combustion. Inert helium is used to pressurize the four oxidizer tanks. There are four corresponding hydrazine fuel tanks for the thrusters as well.</p><p>Musk called the problem, “a glitch of some kind, and not a serious thing.” He says the best guess is a piece of “frozen oxidizer” got stuck in the line. The oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide, and Musk says he believes it eventually warmed up enough that the liquid could resume flowing.</p><p>“We’ve been able to free that up by cycling the valves,” he said, referring to the control valves between the helium and oxidizer tanks.</p><p>As the day wore on, Musk said the four oxidizer tanks and the thruster quads were operating nominally. A successful co-elliptical burn happened late in the afternoon to raise Dragon from an altitude of 200 kilometers to something between 250 and 300 kilometers. This procedure was essential, Musk said, because Dragon's orbit would have decayed within days at the lower altitude, forcing an unwanted re-entry.</p></div><div><p>With only one of the thruster quads ready to go shortly after launch, there was a delay in deploying Dragon's power-generating solar arrays because engineers want two functioning thrusters so they can maneuver the capsule prior to the deployment. Engineers later decided to proceed with deployment with a single thruster after temperatures continued dropping on the array’s actuators. Deploying the arrays provides Dragon with power beyond the on-board batteries.</p><p>Because SpaceX missed the initial burn required to begin the rendezvous with the space station, Dragon will miss Saturday morning's planned docking with the ISS. Once engineers have confirmed all four thruster quads are working properly, they'll begin the planned burns and maneuvers needed to approach the station. NASA officials said those maneuvers will allow them to see if the thrusters are working properly and provide the confidence needed to proceed with docking.</p><p>In order to <a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/spacex-performs-flyby-of-iss/">operate inside of a safe ellipsoid</a> around the ISS, Dragon must have at least three working thruster quads. Once inside the ellipsoid, there are several contingency plans that allow for aborting the approach. The final safety zone around the station is known by the acronym KOS -- the Keep Out Sphere, an area 200 meters around the space station. The <a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/04/spacex-space-station/">final decision to enter KOS</a> will be made only if everything is functioning properly.</p><p>NASA officials said the next likely chance for docking will be Sunday and there are several windows of opportunity during the next week, but both NASA and SpaceX said they must wait until they know Dragon is working as planned. There is no rush, everyone said, and Musk said that, in a worst-case scenario, SpaceX “would keep [Dragon] up there for at least a month” to troubleshoot the problem. The only blackout days are on and around March 15, when three of the six astronauts aboard the station are slated to come home aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.</p><p>This isn't the first time SpaceX has had problems during flight. During the demonstration flight to the space station in May, <a href="https://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/05/spacex-nitrogen-purge-valve-abort/">a stuck nitrogen purge valve</a> led to an automatic engine shutdown that aborted the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket.</p></div></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Image: NASA Image: NASA

 Jason Paur

 Gear
 Mar 1, 2013 6:25 PM

 Thruster Problem Forces SpaceX to Reschedule ISS Docking

 SpaceX will miss its planned rendezvous with the International Space Station tomorrow. An anomaly with the thrusters on the Dragon spacecraft caused the vehicle to miss a scheduled burn this afternoon to adjust its orbit, forcing at least a 24 hour delay in the mission.
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 
 * 

 Update 3/3/13 9:00 a.m. EST - SpaceX demonstrated Dragon's thrusters were functioning properly during maneuvers Saturday and began the approach to the International Space Station. Early Sunday morning, astronauts aboard the station used the robotic arm to capture the Dragon at 5:31 a.m. EST, about an hour earlier than anticipated. Dragon was then pulled in using the robotic arm and was berthed to the station at 5*:56 a.m. EST. Astronauts will begin unpacking the cargo aboard the spacecraft early this week. *

 An anomaly with the thrusters aboard its Dragon spacecraft caused SpaceX to miss a scheduled burn to adjust the capsule orbit on Friday, causing SpaceX to delay by at least 24 hours Saturday's planned rendezvous with the International Space Station.

 SpaceX engineers have been working full-throttle to resolve the thruster issue, which followed a picture-perfect launch atop the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and NASA officials said they are confident Musk's engineers will resolve the problem quickly and could have Dragon on track for a rendezvous Sunday.

 Engineers at SpaceX mission control in southern California saw the first signs of trouble shortly after Dragon reached orbit.

 “It was a little frightening there,” Musk told reporters in a post-flight press conference. “We noticed after separation that only one of the four thruster quads was ready to engage. We saw that the oxidizer pressure in three of the four tanks was low.”

 Dragon has four thruster quads, used to maneuver the spacecraft in orbit. They are essential to the docking procedure and three of them are required by NASA to be working flawlessly in order to make the final approach to the International Space Station. Two of the "quads" are comprised of four small Draco thrusters while the other two actually have five thrusters apiece. The Dracos are initially used to adjust Dragon's orbit to begin its rendezvous with the station. Once Dragon has used them to achieve general proximity with the ISS, they are used to make the small adjustments needed for docking.

 An initial investigation by SpaceX points to a possible blockage in a line that leads from a helium tank to an oxidizer tank that provides the oxygen needed for combustion. Inert helium is used to pressurize the four oxidizer tanks. There are four corresponding hydrazine fuel tanks for the thrusters as well.

 Musk called the problem, “a glitch of some kind, and not a serious thing.” He says the best guess is a piece of “frozen oxidizer” got stuck in the line. The oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide, and Musk says he believes it eventually warmed up enough that the liquid could resume flowing.

 “We’ve been able to free that up by cycling the valves,” he said, referring to the control valves between the helium and oxidizer tanks.

 As the day wore on, Musk said the four oxidizer tanks and the thruster quads were operating nominally. A successful co-elliptical burn happened late in the afternoon to raise Dragon from an altitude of 200 kilometers to something between 250 and 300 kilometers. This procedure was essential, Musk said, because Dragon's orbit would have decayed within days at the lower altitude, forcing an unwanted re-entry.

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 With only one of the thruster quads ready to go shortly after launch, there was a delay in deploying Dragon's power-generating solar arrays because engineers want two functioning thrusters so they can maneuver the capsule prior to the deployment. Engineers later decided to proceed with deployment with a single thruster after temperatures continued dropping on the array’s actuators. Deploying the arrays provides Dragon with power beyond the on-board batteries.

 Because SpaceX missed the initial burn required to begin the rendezvous with the space station, Dragon will miss Saturday morning's planned docking with the ISS. Once engineers have confirmed all four thruster quads are working properly, they'll begin the planned burns and maneuvers needed to approach the station. NASA officials said those maneuvers will allow them to see if the thrusters are working properly and provide the confidence needed to proceed with docking.

 In order to operate inside of a safe ellipsoid around the ISS, Dragon must have at least three working thruster quads. Once inside the ellipsoid, there are several contingency plans that allow for aborting the approach. The final safety zone around the station is known by the acronym KOS -- the Keep Out Sphere, an area 200 meters around the space station. The final decision to enter KOS will be made only if everything is functioning properly.

 NASA officials said the next likely chance for docking will be Sunday and there are several windows of opportunity during the next week, but both NASA and SpaceX said they must wait until they know Dragon is working as planned. There is no rush, everyone said, and Musk said that, in a worst-case scenario, SpaceX “would keep [Dragon] up there for at least a month” to troubleshoot the problem. The only blackout days are on and around March 15, when three of the six astronauts aboard the station are slated to come home aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule.

 This isn't the first time SpaceX has had problems during flight. During the demonstration flight to the space station in May, a stuck nitrogen purge valve led to an automatic engine shutdown that aborted the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket.

 Topics Air Travel NASA Open Space space Spacecraft SpaceX
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Update 3/3/13 9:00 a.m. EST - SpaceX demonstrated Dragon's thrusters were functioning properly during maneuvers Saturday and began the approach to the International Space Station. Early Sunday morning, astronauts aboard the station used the robotic arm to capture the Dragon at 5:31 a.m. EST, about an hour earlier than anticipated. Dragon was then pulled in using the robotic arm and was berthed to the station at 5*:56 a.m. EST. Astronauts will begin unpacking the cargo aboard the spacecraft early this week. * An anomaly with the thrusters aboard its Dragon spacecraft caused SpaceX to miss a scheduled burn to adjust the capsule orbit on Friday, causing SpaceX to delay by at least 24 hours Saturday's planned rendezvous with the International Space Station. SpaceX engineers have been working full-throttle to resolve the thruster issue, which followed a picture-perfect launch atop the Falcon 9 rocket. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk and NASA officials said they are confident Musk's engineers will resolve the problem quickly and could have Dragon on track for a rendezvous Sunday. Engineers at SpaceX mission control in southern California saw the first signs of trouble shortly after Dragon reached orbit. “It was a little frightening there,” Musk told reporters in a post-flight press conference. “We noticed after separation that only one of the four thruster quads was ready to engage. We saw that the oxidizer pressure in three of the four tanks was low.”  Dragon has four thruster quads, used to maneuver the spacecraft in orbit. They are essential to the docking procedure and three of them are required by NASA to be working flawlessly in order to make the final approach to the International Space Station. Two of the "quads" are comprised of four small Draco thrusters while the other two actually have five thrusters apiece. The Dracos are initially used to adjust Dragon's orbit to begin its rendezvous with the station. Once Dragon has used them to achieve general proximity with the ISS, they are used to make the small adjustments needed for docking. An initial investigation by SpaceX points to a possible blockage in a line that leads from a helium tank to an oxidizer tank that provides the oxygen needed for combustion. Inert helium is used to pressurize the four oxidizer tanks. There are four corresponding hydrazine fuel tanks for the thrusters as well. Musk called the problem, “a glitch of some kind, and not a serious thing.” He says the best guess is a piece of “frozen oxidizer” got stuck in the line. The oxidizer is nitrogen tetroxide, and Musk says he believes it eventually warmed up enough that the liquid could resume flowing. “We’ve been able to free that up by cycling the valves,” he said, referring to the control valves between the helium and oxidizer tanks. As the day wore on, Musk said the four oxidizer tanks and the thruster quads were operating nominally. A successful co-elliptical burn happened late in the afternoon to raise Dragon from an altitude of 200 kilometers to something between 250 and 300 kilometers. This procedure was essential, Musk said, because Dragon's orbit would have decayed within days at the lower altitude, forcing an unwanted re-entry.   With only one of the thruster quads ready to go shortly after launch, there was a delay in deploying Dragon's power-generating solar arrays because engineers want two functioning thrusters so they can maneuver the capsule prior to the deployment. Engineers later decided to proceed with deployment with a single thruster after temperatures continued dropping on the array’s actuators. Deploying the arrays provides Dragon with power beyond the on-board batteries. Because SpaceX missed the initial burn required to begin the rendezvous with the space station, Dragon will miss Saturday morning's planned docking with the ISS. Once engineers have confirmed all four thruster quads are working properly, they'll begin the planned burns and maneuvers needed to approach the station. NASA officials said those maneuvers will allow them to see if the thrusters are working properly and provide the confidence needed to proceed with docking. In order to operate inside of a safe ellipsoid around the ISS, Dragon must have at least three working thruster quads. Once inside the ellipsoid, there are several contingency plans that allow for aborting the approach. The final safety zone around the station is known by the acronym KOS -- the Keep Out Sphere, an area 200 meters around the space station. The final decision to enter KOS will be made only if everything is functioning properly. NASA officials said the next likely chance for docking will be Sunday and there are several windows of opportunity during the next week, but both NASA and SpaceX said they must wait until they know Dragon is working as planned. There is no rush, everyone said, and Musk said that, in a worst-case scenario, SpaceX “would keep [Dragon] up there for at least a month” to troubleshoot the problem. The only blackout days are on and around March 15, when three of the six astronauts aboard the station are slated to come home aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule. This isn't the first time SpaceX has had problems during flight. During the demonstration flight to the space station in May, a stuck nitrogen purge valve led to an automatic engine shutdown that aborted the launch of the Falcon 9 rocket.
Thruster Problem Forces SpaceX to Reschedule ISS Docking
https://www.wired.com/2013/03/spacex-thruster-problem/
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-is-tanking-2013-10
Tesla Issues Statement On Fiery Car Crash That Caused The Stock To Tank
2013-10-02
Mamta Badkar
<div><div> 
 
 
 
 
 
 <section>
 <article>
 
 
 
 
 
 
 </article>
 </section>
 
 <div>
 <figure>
 
 
 
 <p>
 </p>
 
 
 
 
 
 Aj Gill via YouTube
 
 
 
 </figure><p>
 
 Tesla's stock was down over 7% to a low of $175.40 today, but pared some of its losses to close down 6.24% at$180.95.</p>
 
 <p>It appears that shares began to tumble in the last half hour on reports that a <a href="https://jalopnik.com/this-is-what-fiery-tesla-model-s-death-looks-like-1440143525">Tesla Model S car caught fire</a> on Washington State Route 167.</p><p>Some speculated that the video highlights <a href="https://stocktwits.com/bbolan1/message/16225454?utm_source=twitter&amp;utm_medium=community&amp;utm_campaign=">problems with the car's battery.</a> Though others rushed to point out that the battery is located in the back of the car.</p><p>Here is Tesla's response to the <a href="https://jalopnik.com/this-is-what-fiery-tesla-model-s-death-looks-like-1440143525?utm_campaign=socialflow_jalopnik_twitter&amp;utm_source=jalopnik_twitter&amp;utm_medium=socialflow">accident via Jalopnik:</a></p><p>"Yesterday, a Model S collided with a large metallic object in the middle of the road, causing significant damage to the vehicle. The car’s alert system signaled a problem and instructed the driver to pull over safely, which he did. No one was injured, and the sole occupant had sufficient time to exit the vehicle safely and call the authorities. Subsequently, a fire caused by the substantial damage sustained during the collision was contained to the front of the vehicle thanks to the design and construction of the vehicle and battery pack. All indications are that the fire never entered the interior cabin of the car. It was extinguished on-site by the fire department."</p>
 
 <p><a href="https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000119312513212354/d511008d10q.htm%23toc">In its 10-Q Tesla noted:</a></p><p>"Our vehicles make use of lithium-ion battery cells, which have been observed to catch fire or vent smoke and flame, and such events have raised concerns, and future events may lead to additional concerns, about the batteries used in automotive applications.</p><p>"The battery pack in the Tesla Roadster and Model S makes use of lithium-ion cells. We also currently intend to make use of lithium-ion cells in battery packs that we sell to Toyota and Daimler as well as any future vehicles we may produce. On rare occasions, lithium-ion cells can rapidly release the energy they contain by venting smoke and flames in a manner that can ignite nearby materials as well as other lithium-ion cells. Highly publicized incidents of laptop computers and cell phones bursting into flames have focused consumer attention on the safety of these cells. More recently, multiple Chevrolet Volt battery pack fires, followed by a government investigation into the cause of such fires focused considerable public attention, as well as the attention of NHTSA, on the safety of electric vehicles.</p><p>"These events have raised concerns about the batteries used in automotive applications. To address these questions and concerns, a number of cell manufacturers are pursuing alternative lithium-ion battery cell chemistries to improve safety. We have designed the battery pack to passively contain any single cell’s release of energy without spreading to neighboring cells and we are not aware of any such incident in our customers’ vehicles. However, we have delivered only a limited number of Tesla Roadsters and Model S sedans to customers and have limited field experience with our vehicles, especially Model S. We have also only delivered a limited number of battery packs to Toyota and Daimler. Accordingly, there can be no assurance that a field or testing failure of our Model S or other battery packs that we produce will not occur, which could damage the vehicle or lead to personal injury or death and may subject us to lawsuits. We may have to recall our vehicles or participate in a recall of a vehicle that contains our battery packs, and redesign our battery packs, which would be time consuming and expensive. Also, negative public perceptions regarding the suitability of lithium-ion cells for automotive applications or any future incident involving lithium-ion cells such as a vehicle or other fire, even if such incident does not involve us, could seriously harm our business."</p>
 
 <p>Earlier today, Baird analyst Ben Kallo downgraded Tesla to neutral, from outperform based on valuation.</p><p>"Since our initiation, TSLA has significantly outperformed the market through solid execution, technology validation, and brand creation. Although we continue to be bullish on TSLA’s long-term prospects, we think the stock appreciation reflects its technological leadership and several milestones that could contain execution risk. We would look to become more constructive on execution related pullbacks or significant advances in battery technology."</p><p>The stock is still up 434% year-to-date.</p><figure>
 
 
 
 <p>
 </p>
 
 
 
 
 
 Google Finance
 
 
 
 </figure><p>Here's the video that's being passed around:</p><p></p>
 </div>
 
 
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Tesla Issues Statement On Fiery Car Crash That Caused The Stock To Tank

 Mamta Badkar
 2013-10-02T19:45:00Z
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 Aj Gill via YouTube

 Tesla's stock was down over 7% to a low of $175.40 today, but pared some of its losses to close down 6.24% at$180.95.

 It appears that shares began to tumble in the last half hour on reports that a Tesla Model S car caught fire on Washington State Route 167.

 Some speculated that the video highlights problems with the car's battery. Though others rushed to point out that the battery is located in the back of the car.

 Here is Tesla's response to the accident via Jalopnik:

 "Yesterday, a Model S collided with a large metallic object in the middle of the road, causing significant damage to the vehicle. The car’s alert system signaled a problem and instructed the driver to pull over safely, which he did. No one was injured, and the sole occupant had sufficient time to exit the vehicle safely and call the authorities. Subsequently, a fire caused by the substantial damage sustained during the collision was contained to the front of the vehicle thanks to the design and construction of the vehicle and battery pack. All indications are that the fire never entered the interior cabin of the car. It was extinguished on-site by the fire department."

 In its 10-Q Tesla noted:

 "Our vehicles make use of lithium-ion battery cells, which have been observed to catch fire or vent smoke and flame, and such events have raised concerns, and future events may lead to additional concerns, about the batteries used in automotive applications.

 "The battery pack in the Tesla Roadster and Model S makes use of lithium-ion cells. We also currently intend to make use of lithium-ion cells in battery packs that we sell to Toyota and Daimler as well as any future vehicles we may produce. On rare occasions, lithium-ion cells can rapidly release the energy they contain by venting smoke and flames in a manner that can ignite nearby materials as well as other lithium-ion cells. Highly publicized incidents of laptop computers and cell phones bursting into flames have focused consumer attention on the safety of these cells. More recently, multiple Chevrolet Volt battery pack fires, followed by a government investigation into the cause of such fires focused considerable public attention, as well as the attention of NHTSA, on the safety of electric vehicles.

 "These events have raised concerns about the batteries used in automotive applications. To address these questions and concerns, a number of cell manufacturers are pursuing alternative lithium-ion battery cell chemistries to improve safety. We have designed the battery pack to passively contain any single cell’s release of energy without spreading to neighboring cells and we are not aware of any such incident in our customers’ vehicles. However, we have delivered only a limited number of Tesla Roadsters and Model S sedans to customers and have limited field experience with our vehicles, especially Model S. We have also only delivered a limited number of battery packs to Toyota and Daimler. Accordingly, there can be no assurance that a field or testing failure of our Model S or other battery packs that we produce will not occur, which could damage the vehicle or lead to personal injury or death and may subject us to lawsuits. We may have to recall our vehicles or participate in a recall of a vehicle that contains our battery packs, and redesign our battery packs, which would be time consuming and expensive. Also, negative public perceptions regarding the suitability of lithium-ion cells for automotive applications or any future incident involving lithium-ion cells such as a vehicle or other fire, even if such incident does not involve us, could seriously harm our business."

 Earlier today, Baird analyst Ben Kallo downgraded Tesla to neutral, from outperform based on valuation.

 "Since our initiation, TSLA has significantly outperformed the market through solid execution, technology validation, and brand creation. Although we continue to be bullish on TSLA’s long-term prospects, we think the stock appreciation reflects its technological leadership and several milestones that could contain execution risk. We would look to become more constructive on execution related pullbacks or significant advances in battery technology."

 The stock is still up 434% year-to-date.

 Google Finance

 Here's the video that's being passed around:

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Aj Gill via YouTube
 
 
 
  
 
 Tesla's stock was down over 7% to a low of $175.40 today, but pared some of its losses to close down 6.24% at$180.95.
 
 It appears that shares began to tumble in the last half hour on reports that a Tesla Model S car caught fire on Washington State Route 167. Some speculated that the video highlights problems with the car's battery. Though others rushed to point out that the battery is located in the back of the car. Here is Tesla's response to the accident via Jalopnik:  "Yesterday, a Model S collided with a large metallic object in the middle of the road, causing significant damage to the vehicle. The car’s alert system signaled a problem and instructed the driver to pull over safely, which he did. No one was injured, and the sole occupant had sufficient time to exit the vehicle safely and call the authorities. Subsequently, a fire caused by the substantial damage sustained during the collision was contained to the front of the vehicle thanks to the design and construction of the vehicle and battery pack. All indications are that the fire never entered the interior cabin of the car. It was extinguished on-site by the fire department."
 
  In its 10-Q Tesla noted:  "Our vehicles make use of lithium-ion battery cells, which have been observed to catch fire or vent smoke and flame, and such events have raised concerns, and future events may lead to additional concerns, about the batteries used in automotive applications. "The battery pack in the Tesla Roadster and Model S makes use of lithium-ion cells. We also currently intend to make use of lithium-ion cells in battery packs that we sell to Toyota and Daimler as well as any future vehicles we may produce. On rare occasions, lithium-ion cells can rapidly release the energy they contain by venting smoke and flames in a manner that can ignite nearby materials as well as other lithium-ion cells. Highly publicized incidents of laptop computers and cell phones bursting into flames have focused consumer attention on the safety of these cells. More recently, multiple Chevrolet Volt battery pack fires, followed by a government investigation into the cause of such fires focused considerable public attention, as well as the attention of NHTSA, on the safety of electric vehicles. "These events have raised concerns about the batteries used in automotive applications. To address these questions and concerns, a number of cell manufacturers are pursuing alternative lithium-ion battery cell chemistries to improve safety. We have designed the battery pack to passively contain any single cell’s release of energy without spreading to neighboring cells and we are not aware of any such incident in our customers’ vehicles. However, we have delivered only a limited number of Tesla Roadsters and Model S sedans to customers and have limited field experience with our vehicles, especially Model S. We have also only delivered a limited number of battery packs to Toyota and Daimler. Accordingly, there can be no assurance that a field or testing failure of our Model S or other battery packs that we produce will not occur, which could damage the vehicle or lead to personal injury or death and may subject us to lawsuits. We may have to recall our vehicles or participate in a recall of a vehicle that contains our battery packs, and redesign our battery packs, which would be time consuming and expensive. Also, negative public perceptions regarding the suitability of lithium-ion cells for automotive applications or any future incident involving lithium-ion cells such as a vehicle or other fire, even if such incident does not involve us, could seriously harm our business."
 
 Earlier today, Baird analyst Ben Kallo downgraded Tesla to neutral, from outperform based on valuation. "Since our initiation, TSLA has significantly outperformed the market through solid execution, technology validation, and brand creation. Although we continue to be bullish on TSLA’s long-term prospects, we think the stock appreciation reflects its technological leadership and several milestones that could contain execution risk. We would look to become more constructive on execution related pullbacks or significant advances in battery technology." The stock is still up 434% year-to-date. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Google Finance
 
 
 
  Here's the video that's being passed around:
Tesla Issues Statement On Fiery Car Crash That Caused The Stock To Tank
https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-is-tanking-2013-10
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
Blood, Simpler
2014-12-15
Condé Nast; Ken Auletta
<div><div><p>Holmes counters that Theranos is only trying to protect itself from competitors while it tries to do something unique. “There isn’t a company that does what we do,” she told me. “We’re creating a new space. We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.”</p><p>The day after her <em>TEDMED</em> talk, I met with Holmes in a conference room at the Theranos headquarters, a single-story building two blocks from the Stanford campus. (In November, Theranos moved its main offices to a larger space a few miles away.) Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.</p><p>Growing up, Holmes was in constant motion. Her father, Chris, worked for government agencies, including, for much of his career, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, often travelling abroad, overseeing relief and disease-eradication efforts in developing nations; today, he is the global water coördinator for U.S.A.I.D. Her mother, Noel, worked for nearly a decade as a foreign-policy and defense aide on Capitol Hill, until Elizabeth and her brother Christian, two years younger, were born. The family moved several times, which meant there was little opportunity to develop lasting friendships. Holmes describes herself as a happy loner, collecting insects and fishing with her father.</p><p>“I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”</p><p>Chris Holmes’s great-grandfather Christian Holmes emigrated from Denmark, studied engineering, settled in Cincinnati, and became a physician. When Elizabeth was eight, she was given a tour of the local hospital where he worked and which was named in his honor. He had married the daughter of a patient, Charles Fleischmann, who pioneered packaged yeast and built a baking empire around it. (A nephew, Raoul Fleischmann, started this magazine in 1925, with Harold Ross.) Not all of Fleischmann’s children shared his entrepreneurial drive, and this was a common subject of conversation in the Holmes household. “I grew up with those stories about greatness,” she said, “and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on character and quality of life.”</p><p>In 1993, when Elizabeth was nine, her father took a job in Houston, as executive assistant to the C.E.O. of Tenneco, which was then a manufacturing and energy conglomerate. She knew that her father felt guilty for uprooting the family, so she wrote a letter to console him: “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” She reassured him that Texas suited her, because “it’s big on science.”</p><p>For several years in the nineteen-eighties, Chris Holmes spent two weeks a month in China, helping American companies invest in large-scale development projects. Soon after the family moved to Houston, Elizabeth started studying Mandarin; by the summer following her sophomore year of high school, she was intent on taking summer classes in Mandarin at Stanford. She repeatedly called the admissions office for information, only to be told, each time, that the program did not enroll high-school students. One day, her father recalls, the head of the program became so annoyed that he grabbed the phone from the employee who was talking to Holmes. “You’ve been calling constantly,” he told her. “I just can’t take it anymore. I’m going to give you the test right now!” He asked questions in Mandarin; she answered fluently, and he accepted her on the spot. She completed three years of college Mandarin while still in high school.</p><figure><p><div><a href="https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a18752"></a><p>“O.K., one last big rhubarb score. But then I’m out of the pie game for good.”</p></div></p></figure><p>In 2001, in her senior year, Holmes applied to Stanford, was accepted, and then was named a President’s Scholar, which came with a small stipend to select her own research project. Her parents sent her off with a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” her father said, “to convey to her: Live a purposeful life.” Holmes elected to study chemical engineering. She was drawn to the work of Channing Robertson, the chemical engineer and, at the time, a dean at the engineering school. Robertson is seventy-one and fit, with thinning hair and a relaxed smile; I visited him in his home on campus. Holmes’s first class with him was a seminar on devices designed to control the release of drugs into the human body. One day, in her freshman year, Robertson said, she came to his office to ask if she could work in his lab with the Ph.D. students. He hesitated, but she persisted and he gave in. At the end of the spring term, she told him that she planned to spend the summer working at the Genome Institute, in Singapore. He warned her that prospective students had to speak Mandarin.</p><p>“I’m fluent in Mandarin,” she said.</p><p>“I’m thinking, What’s next? She’s already coming into the research group meetings at the end of her freshman year with my Ph.D. students. I find myself listening to her more than to them about the next experiments to be done and the progress that’s been made. I realized she’s different.”</p><p>That summer, at the Genome Institute, Holmes worked on testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or <em>SARS</em>, an often fatal virus that had broken out in China. Testing was done in the traditional manner, by collecting blood samples with syringes and mucus with nasal swabs. These methods could detect who was infected, but a separate system was needed to dispense medication, and still another system to monitor results. Holmes questioned the approach. At Stanford, she had been exploring what has become known as lab-on-a-chip technology, which allows multiple measurements to be taken from tiny amounts of liquid on a single microchip. “With the type of engineering work and systems I had been focussing on at Stanford, it was quite clear that there were much better ways to do it,” she said.</p><p>Before returning to Stanford, Holmes conceived of a way to perform multiple tests at once, using the same drop of blood, and to wirelessly deliver the resulting information to a doctor. That summer, she filed a patent for the idea; it was ultimately approved, in November of 2007. Once back on campus, she went to see Robertson in his office and announced that she wanted to start a company. Robertson was impressed by the idea but urged her to at least consider finishing her degree first.</p><p>“Why?” she responded. “I know what I want to do.”</p><p>Holmes was consumed by the idea of developing a company. “I got to a point where I was enrolled in all these courses, and my parents were spending all this money, and I wasn’t going to any of them,” she said. “I was doing this full time.” Her parents allowed her to take the money they had set aside for tuition and use it to seed her company. In March, 2004, she dropped out of Stanford; one month later, she incorporated Theranos (the name is a combination of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). She persuaded Robertson to spend one day a week as a technical adviser to the company and to serve as her first board member. Eventually, he retired from his tenured position, and began working at Theranos full time.</p><p>Robertson introduced Holmes to several venture capitalists. She insisted that they abide by her terms, which included an understanding that she would retain control and pour the profits back into the company. By December of 2004, she had raised six million dollars from an assortment of investors. As she and the chemists and engineers dug deeper, she became convinced that they could accomplish five objectives: extract blood without syringes, make a diagnosis from a few drops of blood, automate the tests to minimize human error, do the test and get the results more quickly, and do this more economically.</p><p>A key to the company’s success was the hiring of Sunny Balwani, a software engineer, now forty-nine, whom Holmes had met in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school. At the time, he was getting an M.B.A. from Berkeley. He had worked at Lotus and at Microsoft and been a successful entrepreneur, and in 2004 he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford. He and Holmes spoke often, and they shared a belief that software, not just chemistry or biology, mattered. If Theranos was going to be able to analyze a few drops of blood, engineers would have to develop the software to do it. In 2009, Balwani joined as C.O.O. and president. “Our platform is about automation,” he says. “We have automated the process from start to finish.”</p><p>Theranos has managed to keep its technology a secret for much of its decade of existence in part because it occupies a regulatory gray area. Most other diagnostic labs, including Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America, perform blood tests on equipment that they buy from outside manufacturers, like Siemens and Roche Diagnostics. Before those devices can be sold, they must be approved by the F.D.A., a process that makes their tests’ performances more visible to the public. But, since Theranos manufactures its own testing equipment, the F.D.A. doesn’t need to approve it, as long as the company doesn’t sell it or move it out of its labs. Holmes said that the company has long resisted discussing how its technology works or how it makes money in order to avoid tipping off potential competitors.</p><p>The company employs seven hundred people and, in addition to its headquarters, has a two-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand-square-foot facility, in Newark, California, that manufactures the blood-testing devices. Holmes says that Theranos has a positive cash flow; it is clearly expanding. For many years, it has earned income from large pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which use its tests when they are conducting clinical trials on new drugs. It also earns revenue from the “wellness centers” that it has set up in Walgreens stores, its hospital work, and the U.S. military, although Holmes would not discuss the company’s arrangments with the latter.</p><p>In 2013, Theranos announced a “long-term partnership” with Walgreens that will eventually establish its wellness centers in most of the eighty-two hundred Walgreens stores. The Walgreens in Palo Alto has one, as do forty Walgreens pharmacies in Phoenix. Holmes envisages wellness centers in most Walgreens and Duane Reade stores, which would put Theranos “within five miles of every American.” Theranos also could sign up the rival drugstore chain CVS, which has seventy-eight hundred outlets.</p><p>One morning, I went to the Palo Alto Walgreens to get my blood tested. A trained phlebotomist wrapped my finger in a warming sleeve to help the blood flow and then swabbed it with alcohol. Then, with a slight pinch from a small, square lancet containing a pricking pin, she drew two drops of blood, which she siphoned into a dime-size container. This took about two minutes. The container, marked with a bar code, was placed in a refrigerated box to be picked up and delivered to a Theranos lab a couple of miles away; the box pickup and return takes place three times a day.</p><p>The lab is a large, labyrinthine place bustling with chemists and technicians, and housing rows of machines, each easy for a single person to lift, in which the containers of blood are placed. What exactly happens in the machines is treated as a state secret, and Holmes’s description of the process was comically vague: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.” She added that, thanks to “miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples.”</p><p>Theranos owes its success in part to its high-powered board, which Holmes corralled with the help of George Shultz, a Palo Alto resident, who, in his long career, has held four Cabinet positions, including Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Shultz is ninety-three and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Holmes first met him in 2011. “It was one of those scheduled ten-minute meetings that turn into a two-hour meeting,” she said.</p></div>||||I|||| Skip to main content
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 Annals of Innovation
 December 15, 2014 Issue

 Blood, Simpler

 One woman’s drive to upend medical testing.

 By Ken Auletta

 December 8, 2014
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 Elizabeth Holmes says that her test can help detect ailments from just a few drops of blood. Photograph by Jenny Hueston

 One afternoon in early September, Elizabeth Holmes took the stage at TEDMED, at the Palace of Fine Arts, in San Francisco, to talk about blood. TEDMED, a part of the Technology, Entertainment, and Design enterprise, is an annual conference devoted to health care; its speakers span a range of inquiry from Craig Venter, the genomic scientist, discussing synthetic life, to Ozzy Osbourne discussing his decision to get his entire genome sequenced. The phrases “disruptive technology” and “the future of medicine” come up a lot.

 Holmes, who is thirty, is the C.E.O. of Theranos, a Silicon Valley company that is working to upend the lucrative business of blood testing. Blood analysis is integral to medicine. When your physician wants to check some aspect of your health, such as your cholesterol or glucose levels, or look for indications of kidney or liver problems, a blood test is often required. This typically involves a long needle and several blood-filled vials, which are sent to a lab for analysis. Altogether, diagnostic lab testing, including testing done by the two dominant lab companies, Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America, generates seventy-five billion dollars a year in revenue.

 Holmes told the audience that blood testing can be done more quickly, conveniently, and inexpensively, and that lives can be saved as a consequence. She was wearing her daily uniform—a black suit and a black cotton turtleneck, reminiscent of Steve Jobs—and had pinned her hair into an unruly bun. As she spoke, she paced slowly, her eyes rarely blinking, her hands clasped at her waist. Holmes started Theranos in 2003, when she was nineteen; she dropped out of Stanford the following year. Since then, she told the audience, the company has developed blood tests that can help detect dozens of medical conditions, from high cholesterol to cancer, based on a drop or two of blood drawn with a pinprick from your finger. Theranos is working to make its testing available to several hospital systems and is in advanced discussions with the Cleveland Clinic. It has also opened centers in forty-one Walgreens pharmacies, with plans to open thousands more. If you show the pharmacist your I.D., your insurance card, and a doctor’s note, you can have your blood drawn right there. (The sample is then sent to a Theranos lab.) From that one sample, Holmes said, several tests can be run—all less expensive than standard blood tests, sometimes as much as ninety per cent below the rates that Medicare sets. A typical lab test for cholesterol can cost fifty dollars or more; the Theranos test at Walgreens costs two dollars and ninety-nine cents.

 In conversation, Holmes speaks in a near-whisper; onstage, her voice drops an octave and takes on a formal instructional cadence. The TEDMED crowd listened intently as she spelled out what she sees as the shortcomings of the existing blood-testing business. The tests are too costly, are available at inconvenient times or places, and involve unpleasant syringes. Holmes has an aversion to needles, and her mother and her grandmother fainted at the sight of them and at the sight of blood. Recently, she told me, “I really believe that if we were from a foreign planet and we were sitting here and said, ‘O.K., let’s brainstorm on torture experiments,’ the concept of sticking a needle into someone and sucking blood out slowly, while the person watches, probably qualifies.”

 Holmes thinks that getting a blood test should instead be a “wonderful” experience, and the aim of Theranos is to lower the barriers. She told the crowd that between forty and sixty per cent of people who are ordered by their doctor to get a blood test do not. Diabetes, sexually transmitted diseases, and other common medical conditions could be diagnosed and treated earlier if the tests were less onerous and more accessible, she said. “We see a world in which no one ever has to say, ‘If only I’d known sooner.’ A world in which no one ever has to say goodbye too soon.”

 Theranos, which is privately held, is both a hardware company and a medical company, and for many years it has operated with a stealth common to many Silicon Valley startups. “For a long time, I couldn’t even tell my wife what I was working on,” Channing Robertson, a chemical-engineering professor at Stanford and the company’s first board member, told me. In recent months, Holmes has been giving similar versions of her TEDMED presentation in talks and interviews around the country. Investors have valued the company at more than nine billion dollars, comparable to the two major diagnostic labs. Holmes owns more than fifty per cent of the company; she was profiled last spring in Fortune and subsequently featured in Forbes as “the youngest self-made female billionaire in the world.” The board of her company is stocked with prominent former government officials, including George P. Shultz, Henry Kissinger, Sam Nunn, and William H. Foege, the former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Delos M. Cosgrove, the C.E.O. and president of the Cleveland Clinic, is an avid supporter. “I think it’s potentially a breakthrough company,” he told me. “It represents a major change in how we deliver health care.”

 The company’s rise comes at a time when consumers are increasingly eager for access to their personal data. The plummeting costs of DNA-sequencing technology have made it possible for companies such as 23andme to provide individuals with their genetic information directly, rather than through doctors, empowering nerdy customers and self-motivated patients. Smartphone apps let users track their heart rates, their sleep cycles, and the number of steps they’ve taken, and share the data with a doctor or with friends. In her talk, Holmes said, “My own life’s work in building Theranos is to redefine the paradigm of diagnosis away from one in which people have to present with a symptom in order to get access to information about their bodies to one in which every person, no matter how much money they have or where they live, has access to actionable health information at the time it matters.” Cosgrove predicts that blood tests for many common health issues, including high cholesterol and diabetes, will be initiated by patients as well as by doctors. “The CVSs and the Walgreens and the Walmarts of the world are going to be taking a lot of things that currently go to primary-care physicians,” he said. “The impact of that on our industry will be enormous.”

 But unfiltered medical data aren’t a pure virtue. Last year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration barred 23andme from disseminating some information out of concern that consumers might misunderstand or misuse it. Some observers are troubled by Theranos’s secrecy; its blood tests may well turn out to be groundbreaking, but the company has published little data in peer-reviewed journals describing how its devices work or attesting to the quality of the results. “It’s trying to apply the Steve Jobs way of keeping everything secret until the iPhone was released,” Lakshman Ramamurthy, a molecular biologist and a former associate director at the F.D.A., told me. “But a health test is more consequential than a consumer product. It needs to be clinically valid and provide useful information.”

 Holmes counters that Theranos is only trying to protect itself from competitors while it tries to do something unique. “There isn’t a company that does what we do,” she told me. “We’re creating a new space. We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.”

 The day after her TEDMED talk, I met with Holmes in a conference room at the Theranos headquarters, a single-story building two blocks from the Stanford campus. (In November, Theranos moved its main offices to a larger space a few miles away.) Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery.

 Growing up, Holmes was in constant motion. Her father, Chris, worked for government agencies, including, for much of his career, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, often travelling abroad, overseeing relief and disease-eradication efforts in developing nations; today, he is the global water coördinator for U.S.A.I.D. Her mother, Noel, worked for nearly a decade as a foreign-policy and defense aide on Capitol Hill, until Elizabeth and her brother Christian, two years younger, were born. The family moved several times, which meant there was little opportunity to develop lasting friendships. Holmes describes herself as a happy loner, collecting insects and fishing with her father.

 “I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.”

 Chris Holmes’s great-grandfather Christian Holmes emigrated from Denmark, studied engineering, settled in Cincinnati, and became a physician. When Elizabeth was eight, she was given a tour of the local hospital where he worked and which was named in his honor. He had married the daughter of a patient, Charles Fleischmann, who pioneered packaged yeast and built a baking empire around it. (A nephew, Raoul Fleischmann, started this magazine in 1925, with Harold Ross.) Not all of Fleischmann’s children shared his entrepreneurial drive, and this was a common subject of conversation in the Holmes household. “I grew up with those stories about greatness,” she said, “and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on character and quality of life.”

 In 1993, when Elizabeth was nine, her father took a job in Houston, as executive assistant to the C.E.O. of Tenneco, which was then a manufacturing and energy conglomerate. She knew that her father felt guilty for uprooting the family, so she wrote a letter to console him: “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” She reassured him that Texas suited her, because “it’s big on science.”

 For several years in the nineteen-eighties, Chris Holmes spent two weeks a month in China, helping American companies invest in large-scale development projects. Soon after the family moved to Houston, Elizabeth started studying Mandarin; by the summer following her sophomore year of high school, she was intent on taking summer classes in Mandarin at Stanford. She repeatedly called the admissions office for information, only to be told, each time, that the program did not enroll high-school students. One day, her father recalls, the head of the program became so annoyed that he grabbed the phone from the employee who was talking to Holmes. “You’ve been calling constantly,” he told her. “I just can’t take it anymore. I’m going to give you the test right now!” He asked questions in Mandarin; she answered fluently, and he accepted her on the spot. She completed three years of college Mandarin while still in high school.

 “O.K., one last big rhubarb score. But then I’m out of the pie game for good.”
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 In 2001, in her senior year, Holmes applied to Stanford, was accepted, and then was named a President’s Scholar, which came with a small stipend to select her own research project. Her parents sent her off with a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” her father said, “to convey to her: Live a purposeful life.” Holmes elected to study chemical engineering. She was drawn to the work of Channing Robertson, the chemical engineer and, at the time, a dean at the engineering school. Robertson is seventy-one and fit, with thinning hair and a relaxed smile; I visited him in his home on campus. Holmes’s first class with him was a seminar on devices designed to control the release of drugs into the human body. One day, in her freshman year, Robertson said, she came to his office to ask if she could work in his lab with the Ph.D. students. He hesitated, but she persisted and he gave in. At the end of the spring term, she told him that she planned to spend the summer working at the Genome Institute, in Singapore. He warned her that prospective students had to speak Mandarin.

 “I’m fluent in Mandarin,” she said.

 “I’m thinking, What’s next? She’s already coming into the research group meetings at the end of her freshman year with my Ph.D. students. I find myself listening to her more than to them about the next experiments to be done and the progress that’s been made. I realized she’s different.”

 That summer, at the Genome Institute, Holmes worked on testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, an often fatal virus that had broken out in China. Testing was done in the traditional manner, by collecting blood samples with syringes and mucus with nasal swabs. These methods could detect who was infected, but a separate system was needed to dispense medication, and still another system to monitor results. Holmes questioned the approach. At Stanford, she had been exploring what has become known as lab-on-a-chip technology, which allows multiple measurements to be taken from tiny amounts of liquid on a single microchip. “With the type of engineering work and systems I had been focussing on at Stanford, it was quite clear that there were much better ways to do it,” she said.

 Before returning to Stanford, Holmes conceived of a way to perform multiple tests at once, using the same drop of blood, and to wirelessly deliver the resulting information to a doctor. That summer, she filed a patent for the idea; it was ultimately approved, in November of 2007. Once back on campus, she went to see Robertson in his office and announced that she wanted to start a company. Robertson was impressed by the idea but urged her to at least consider finishing her degree first.

 “Why?” she responded. “I know what I want to do.”

 Holmes was consumed by the idea of developing a company. “I got to a point where I was enrolled in all these courses, and my parents were spending all this money, and I wasn’t going to any of them,” she said. “I was doing this full time.” Her parents allowed her to take the money they had set aside for tuition and use it to seed her company. In March, 2004, she dropped out of Stanford; one month later, she incorporated Theranos (the name is a combination of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). She persuaded Robertson to spend one day a week as a technical adviser to the company and to serve as her first board member. Eventually, he retired from his tenured position, and began working at Theranos full time.

 Robertson introduced Holmes to several venture capitalists. She insisted that they abide by her terms, which included an understanding that she would retain control and pour the profits back into the company. By December of 2004, she had raised six million dollars from an assortment of investors. As she and the chemists and engineers dug deeper, she became convinced that they could accomplish five objectives: extract blood without syringes, make a diagnosis from a few drops of blood, automate the tests to minimize human error, do the test and get the results more quickly, and do this more economically.

 A key to the company’s success was the hiring of Sunny Balwani, a software engineer, now forty-nine, whom Holmes had met in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school. At the time, he was getting an M.B.A. from Berkeley. He had worked at Lotus and at Microsoft and been a successful entrepreneur, and in 2004 he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford. He and Holmes spoke often, and they shared a belief that software, not just chemistry or biology, mattered. If Theranos was going to be able to analyze a few drops of blood, engineers would have to develop the software to do it. In 2009, Balwani joined as C.O.O. and president. “Our platform is about automation,” he says. “We have automated the process from start to finish.”

 Theranos has managed to keep its technology a secret for much of its decade of existence in part because it occupies a regulatory gray area. Most other diagnostic labs, including Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America, perform blood tests on equipment that they buy from outside manufacturers, like Siemens and Roche Diagnostics. Before those devices can be sold, they must be approved by the F.D.A., a process that makes their tests’ performances more visible to the public. But, since Theranos manufactures its own testing equipment, the F.D.A. doesn’t need to approve it, as long as the company doesn’t sell it or move it out of its labs. Holmes said that the company has long resisted discussing how its technology works or how it makes money in order to avoid tipping off potential competitors.

 The company employs seven hundred people and, in addition to its headquarters, has a two-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand-square-foot facility, in Newark, California, that manufactures the blood-testing devices. Holmes says that Theranos has a positive cash flow; it is clearly expanding. For many years, it has earned income from large pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which use its tests when they are conducting clinical trials on new drugs. It also earns revenue from the “wellness centers” that it has set up in Walgreens stores, its hospital work, and the U.S. military, although Holmes would not discuss the company’s arrangments with the latter.

 In 2013, Theranos announced a “long-term partnership” with Walgreens that will eventually establish its wellness centers in most of the eighty-two hundred Walgreens stores. The Walgreens in Palo Alto has one, as do forty Walgreens pharmacies in Phoenix. Holmes envisages wellness centers in most Walgreens and Duane Reade stores, which would put Theranos “within five miles of every American.” Theranos also could sign up the rival drugstore chain CVS, which has seventy-eight hundred outlets.

 One morning, I went to the Palo Alto Walgreens to get my blood tested. A trained phlebotomist wrapped my finger in a warming sleeve to help the blood flow and then swabbed it with alcohol. Then, with a slight pinch from a small, square lancet containing a pricking pin, she drew two drops of blood, which she siphoned into a dime-size container. This took about two minutes. The container, marked with a bar code, was placed in a refrigerated box to be picked up and delivered to a Theranos lab a couple of miles away; the box pickup and return takes place three times a day.

 The lab is a large, labyrinthine place bustling with chemists and technicians, and housing rows of machines, each easy for a single person to lift, in which the containers of blood are placed. What exactly happens in the machines is treated as a state secret, and Holmes’s description of the process was comically vague: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.” She added that, thanks to “miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples.”

 Theranos owes its success in part to its high-powered board, which Holmes corralled with the help of George Shultz, a Palo Alto resident, who, in his long career, has held four Cabinet positions, including Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Shultz is ninety-three and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Holmes first met him in 2011. “It was one of those scheduled ten-minute meetings that turn into a two-hour meeting,” she said.

 Shultz agreed to join the board, and he meets with Holmes weekly. He introduced her to several other current board members: Bill Frist, a trained cardiac surgeon and former Senate Republican Majority Leader; Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State; Sam Nunn, a former Democratic senator and chairman of the Armed Services Committee; William J. Perry, the former Defense Secretary; and Richard Kovacevich, a former C.E.O. and chairman of Wells Fargo. All receive stock options from the company, among other forms of compensation. Kissinger, who is ninety-one, told me that Holmes “has a sort of ethereal quality—that is to say, she looks like nineteen. And you say to yourself, ‘How is she ever going to run this?’ ” She does so, he said, “by intellectual dominance; she knows the subject.”

 Board members are clearly charmed by Holmes. She is a careful listener, and she is unnervingly serene; employees say that they can’t remember an instance when she raised her voice. “She has sometimes been called another Steve Jobs, but I think that’s an inadequate comparison,” Perry, who knew Jobs, said. “She has a social consciousness that Steve never had. He was a genius; she’s one with a big heart.”

 Holmes said that she had looked for “different kinds of people” for her twelve-member board. I pointed out that the membership includes no women. “Hopefully, I qualify,” she said. Equally notable is the fact that eight members are former elected, federal, or military officials. Aside from Frist, the one other board member with a medical license is William Foege, the former C.D.C. director. Holmes has established a medical task force, chaired by her and Dr. David Helfet, the director of the orthopaedic trauma service at New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery and New York-Presbyterian Hospital. I asked Holmes if the board was designed to attract government contracts.

 “We don’t have any government contracts,” she said. “I’ve never applied for one, and I don’t plan to.” Theranos has conceded that it does earn revenue from the military, which Holmes calls “a really important area in terms of potential” for saving lives. But she said that the company’s policy has been to make its testing available “for far less than the government is willing to pay us.” She added that it would be “insulting” to suggest that her board members function as lobbyists. She views them as partners who are helping her to chart strategy. Kovacevich said that he brings business experience to the board. “I know most of the major retail-company C.E.O.s,” he told me, including Gregory D. Wasson, the C.E.O. of Walgreens. Kissinger advised Holmes to concentrate on building up Theranos in the U.S. before launching it in developing nations, he said, so that “it would not look like we were experimenting on them.”

 Holmes and her board members like to emphasize how technologically advanced Theranos is; the implicit comparison is with the existing diagnostic behemoths such as Quest Diagnostics. The blood-test business is “dictated by the people who make the big machines,” Frist said, and they “obviously have a vested interest in keeping their technology out there.” He added, “You don’t need four tubes of blood” for a range of tests, or “this 1940 technology.”

 Nigel Clarke, Quest’s senior scientific director for mass spectrometry, immunology, and automation, disagreed. I met Clarke in late September during a visit to Quest’s main lab center, near Teterboro Airport, in New Jersey. Quest runs about thirty full-service laboratories around the country; it performs six hundred million tests of all kinds annually—Theranos’s aim is to hit one million blood tests in 2015—and owns four thousand vehicles for picking up samples. The samples are delivered to an assembly line of machines, some larger than an S.U.V., that process vials of blood as they move along on conveyor belts. Instruments on the machines then identify the amount and the characteristics of chemicals present in a blood sample, using a technique called mass spectrometry. Clarke maintains that these blood tests are as comparable to those of 1940 as a Lamborghini is to the Model T. He says that, over the past decade or so, the amount of blood needed has been reduced from two full vials to one-fifth of one vial.

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 The process is more automated than Frist suggests, but it is labor-intensive. Samples from hospitals and doctors’ offices are labelled and packed in sealed plastic bags by phlebotomists. The samples are then picked up and delivered by drivers to a central lab, where they are manually sorted into various bins and then placed on the conveyor belts by hand. Holmes says that Theranos’s operation is more automated, but it doesn’t run itself. The partnership with pharmacies and hospitals will entail opening labs within easy distance of participating centers. The blood samples are much smaller than what Quest requires and are labelled digitally, but they still need to be picked up, and delivered, and handled by a technician—no small logistical task, and not free of the potential for human error.

 Quest takes issue with several other of Theranos’s claims. Holmes has argued that people want their blood tests to be more convenient; as evidence, she often states that between forty and sixty per cent of patients who are asked to get blood tests fail to do so. Theranos has developed these numbers internally, in part, Holmes said, through consumer surveys. Dermot V. Shorten, Quest’s vice-president of strategy and ventures, told me the figure is lower. “The number is thirty per cent,” he said, citing Quest’s own figures. He added, “It is a huge number.” He also said, less plausibly, “I don’t think we’ve ever heard that fear of needles was a reason.”

 Clarke argues that finger-stick blood tests aren’t reliable for clinical diagnostic tests; because the blood isn’t drawn from a vein, the sample can be contaminated by lanced capillaries or damaged tissue. Holmes strongly disagrees: “We have data that show you can get a perfect correlation between a finger stick and a venipuncture for every test that we run.” When I asked for evidence, I was sent a document by Daniel P. Edlin, Theranos’s senior product manager, titled “Select Data.” It purported to show favorable results from numerous comparison tests. I asked Edlin if the tests had been conducted by an independent third party. He replied by e-mail: “The clinical tests were conducted by a combination of Theranos and external labs,” but he wouldn’t say which ones.

 When I asked Holmes for evidence that her tests were independently audited, she said that there have been “tens” of audits and “external third-party comparisons” of Theranos’s tests, including those done by the hospital groups that are adopting its finger-prick tests and the pharmaceutical companies that have contracted with Theranos for testing their products. Holmes says that Theranos is certified in forty-eight states, with two more applications pending, under the federal Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments of 1988. Under the amendments, laboratories like hers must be certified before they can perform tests for the general public, and their performance is evaluated three times a year by the College of American Pathologists. Holmes also pointed me to a pilot study published by Hematology Reports, an online-only peer-reviewed journal; she is listed as a co-author. The report, released in April, concluded that Theranos tests “correlated highly with values obtained” from standard lab tests.

 The company’s reluctance to share its results or display its devices has prompted wariness among some physicians and medical officials. Lakshman Ramamurthy, the former associate director at the F.D.A., is concerned. “The technology should have peer review,” he said. To claim, as Theranos does, “that with a finger stick you can do hundreds of tests, your technology has to be different.” He added, “Does that not need some peer review?”

 Technically, it doesn’t. “Typically, laboratories are not required to disclose data on how their tests work,” Alberto Gutierrez, the director of the F.D.A.’s office of in-vitro diagnostics and radiological health, told me. The F.D.A. imposes rigorous standards on companies seeking approval to sell new drugs. But most blood tests aren’t monitored by the F.D.A. and don’t receive the same level of pre-approval scrutiny. The labs are effectively left to police themselves. Gutierrez said that the F.D.A. is in the process of developing new guidelines for oversight of tests that labs develop for their own use in-house.

 Holmes says that she welcomes government monitoring. She says that Theranos has submitted all its lab-developed tests for F.D.A. approval—a step that isn’t required and that no other diagnostic company has taken. “We believe that to realize our vision we must operate at the highest levels of excellence,” she told me. “And the F.D.A.’s stamp of approval is seen as an indicator of the quality of a product.” However, it’s unclear whether the F.D.A. has a mechanism for responding to the company’s request. The agency did not indicate if or when any kind of approval might be granted.

 “When Theranos tells the story about what the technology is, that will be a welcome thing in the medical community,” Eric Topol, a cardiologist and geneticist and the director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, in La Jolla, California, said. “Until it does that, it can have the big labs saying Theranos is not real, or is not a threat. I tend to believe that Theranos is a threat. But if I saw data in a journal, head to head, I would feel a lot more comfortable.”

 Theranos has raised more than four hundred million dollars from numerous investors, including the founder of Oracle, Larry Ellison. Holmes believes that the seventy-five-billion-dollar testing marketplace could grow to two hundred billion dollars, as more people take it upon themselves to go to a pharmacy and request blood tests for pregnancy, high cholesterol, and other common medical issues. At the moment, most such blood tests require a doctor’s note; Holmes says that this would have to change, and could. “There are states in the U.S. where citizens can order tests directly,” she said. “The fact that in some states it’s illegal for someone to be able to get basic data about their body—for example, you’re pregnant or you’re not, you have an allergy or you don’t. Not a lot of sophistication has to go into the interpretation of that test.”

 For all of her practice at presentation, Holmes still sometimes has an engineer’s difficulty in clearly articulating how Theranos will advance the cause of preventive medicine. At TEDMED, she noted that diabetes, which is a major source of health-care costs, can be reversed through changes in life style. “Yet today there are eighty million Americans who are pre-diabetic,” she told the crowd, “and ninety per cent of them don’t know that they are.” Holmes figures that pre-diabetics aren’t gaining this knowledge either because they don’t visit the doctor or because they avoid the blood test, or both. Instead, she assumes that Theranos will make getting a blood test so simple and painless that it will become something that we do before visiting the doctor, or that we think to do on our own; the results would be forwarded to the physician, as a basis for further discussion.

 Holmes insists that Theranos would be serving doctors, not replacing them. “If a test is abnormal, most people will want to have some type of treatment,” she told me. “People say, ‘What does Theranos mean?’ The simplest way to explain it is detection at the onset of disease in time for therapy to be effective. The detection piece”—Theranos’s role—“is half of the equation. The therapy piece is the other half.”

 Prescriptionless blood tests raise a host of questions. “Will insurance be willing to pay for patient-ordered blood tests?” Bruce Deitchman, a dermatologist and pathologist, said. Deitchman has served as an alternate member of the American Medical Association’s expert panel that recommends reimbursement rates to Medicare. “Will Theranos insist that test results be sent to physicians, and will patients want their doctors to know?” He noted that doctors are legally obligated to follow up and address abnormal blood tests with patients. In the absence of a doctor, will Theranos be held to that standard? Still, Deitchman added, getting patients involved in their own care “can lead to better health outcomes.”

 Some experts see the changes to health care such as those envisaged by Theranos as inevitable, and mostly for the good. “Regardless of how doctors or anyone else may feel about it, this type of innovation is going to happen, and probably needs to happen,” Andy Ellner, a physician and the co-director of the Harvard Medical School Center for Primary Care, said. “There is going to be a big shift in power, control, and authority of health data from doctors to patients.” But Ellner added that there is “very little evidence” that paying more attention to blood tests, or doing more tests over all, will have an impact on people’s health. Of diabetes, in particular, he said that there is only “modest evidence that screening for it in particular populations helps us intervene earlier in a way that benefits people. The main value of knowing that someone is pre-diabetic is that it confirms what we already know: that people should be eating a better diet and exercising more.”

 Holmes faces a number of challenges as she pursues her vision for Theranos. One is logistical. Holmes’s brother, Christian, a Duke graduate and former management consultant who joined the company three years ago and is now the director of product management, says, “You’ve got to be able to scale this. If we can’t, we’ll get killed.” Another challenge is the competition. As miniaturization becomes the standard, researchers are finding ways to bring medical tests directly to patients. Many companies are exploring a range of tests that don’t require needles, relying instead on lasers, oximetry, biosensors, and medical imaging, such as MRIs.

 Holmes says she is acutely aware that technology could disrupt Theranos. “We focus all the time on disrupting ourselves, and that’s one of the core tenets in the way we operate,” she said. “Silicon Valley is a great symbol of disruptive technology being able to, one, change the world, and, two, obsolete itself.”

 Late one afternoon in September, Holmes was driven from Palo Alto to the San Francisco airport, where she boarded a seven-seat Gulfstream 150 for a flight to Chicago. She would be speaking at a panel; from there she would fly to Cleveland to attend meetings at the Cleveland Clinic. She was travelling alone. Members of the Theranos board sometimes worry about Holmes. “My wife and I feel that one of our jobs is to bring her out,” George Shultz told me. They invite her to the theatre, and this year threw her a thirtieth-birthday party at their home, which was attended by her parents, her brother, Balwani, Robertson, and several members of the board and their spouses. Henry Kissinger and his wife, Nancy, have tried, without success, to fix her up on dates. Her mother told me, “As a parent, I do hope that at some point she will have time for herself.”

 This concern is lost on Holmes. The plane had reached cruising altitude, far above a bank of clouds, and another green vegetable drink had materialized in her hand. “I have done something, and we have done something, that has changed people’s lives,” she told me. “I would much rather live a life of purpose than one in which I might have other things but not that.” Also, she said, with a smile, “I think I’m very young. Still.” ♦

 Published in the print edition of the December 15, 2014, issue.
 Ken Auletta began contributing to The New Yorker in 1977. His thirteenth book, “Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence,” will be published in July.
 More: Chief Executive Officers (C.E.O.s) Elizabeth Holmes Entrepreneurs Patents Silicon Valley Stanford University TED Talks Theranos

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Holmes counters that Theranos is only trying to protect itself from competitors while it tries to do something unique. “There isn’t a company that does what we do,” she told me. “We’re creating a new space. We’re in a market for people who don’t like having a needle stuck in their arm.” The day after her TEDMED talk, I met with Holmes in a conference room at the Theranos headquarters, a single-story building two blocks from the Stanford campus. (In November, Theranos moved its main offices to a larger space a few miles away.) Her home is a two-bedroom condo in Palo Alto, and she lives an austere life. Although she can quote Jane Austen by heart, she no longer devotes time to novels or friends, doesn’t date, doesn’t own a television, and hasn’t taken a vacation in ten years. Her refrigerator is all but empty, as she eats most of her meals at the office. She is a vegan, and several times a day she drinks a pulverized concoction of cucumber, parsley, kale, spinach, romaine lettuce, and celery. Growing up, Holmes was in constant motion. Her father, Chris, worked for government agencies, including, for much of his career, the U.S. Agency for International Development and the State Department, often travelling abroad, overseeing relief and disease-eradication efforts in developing nations; today, he is the global water coördinator for U.S.A.I.D. Her mother, Noel, worked for nearly a decade as a foreign-policy and defense aide on Capitol Hill, until Elizabeth and her brother Christian, two years younger, were born. The family moved several times, which meant there was little opportunity to develop lasting friendships. Holmes describes herself as a happy loner, collecting insects and fishing with her father. “I was probably, definitely, not normal,” she said. “I was reading ‘Moby-Dick’ from start to finish when I was about nine. I read a ton of books. I still have a notebook with a complete design for a time machine that I designed when I must have been, like, seven. The wonderful thing about the way I was raised is that no one ever told me that I couldn’t do those things.” Chris Holmes’s great-grandfather Christian Holmes emigrated from Denmark, studied engineering, settled in Cincinnati, and became a physician. When Elizabeth was eight, she was given a tour of the local hospital where he worked and which was named in his honor. He had married the daughter of a patient, Charles Fleischmann, who pioneered packaged yeast and built a baking empire around it. (A nephew, Raoul Fleischmann, started this magazine in 1925, with Harold Ross.) Not all of Fleischmann’s children shared his entrepreneurial drive, and this was a common subject of conversation in the Holmes household. “I grew up with those stories about greatness,” she said, “and about people deciding not to spend their lives on something purposeful, and what happens to them when they make that choice—the impact on character and quality of life.” In 1993, when Elizabeth was nine, her father took a job in Houston, as executive assistant to the C.E.O. of Tenneco, which was then a manufacturing and energy conglomerate. She knew that her father felt guilty for uprooting the family, so she wrote a letter to console him: “What I really want out of life is to discover something new, something that mankind didn’t know was possible to do.” She reassured him that Texas suited her, because “it’s big on science.” For several years in the nineteen-eighties, Chris Holmes spent two weeks a month in China, helping American companies invest in large-scale development projects. Soon after the family moved to Houston, Elizabeth started studying Mandarin; by the summer following her sophomore year of high school, she was intent on taking summer classes in Mandarin at Stanford. She repeatedly called the admissions office for information, only to be told, each time, that the program did not enroll high-school students. One day, her father recalls, the head of the program became so annoyed that he grabbed the phone from the employee who was talking to Holmes. “You’ve been calling constantly,” he told her. “I just can’t take it anymore. I’m going to give you the test right now!” He asked questions in Mandarin; she answered fluently, and he accepted her on the spot. She completed three years of college Mandarin while still in high school.      “O.K., one last big rhubarb score. But then I’m out of the pie game for good.”    In 2001, in her senior year, Holmes applied to Stanford, was accepted, and then was named a President’s Scholar, which came with a small stipend to select her own research project. Her parents sent her off with a copy of Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations,” her father said, “to convey to her: Live a purposeful life.” Holmes elected to study chemical engineering. She was drawn to the work of Channing Robertson, the chemical engineer and, at the time, a dean at the engineering school. Robertson is seventy-one and fit, with thinning hair and a relaxed smile; I visited him in his home on campus. Holmes’s first class with him was a seminar on devices designed to control the release of drugs into the human body. One day, in her freshman year, Robertson said, she came to his office to ask if she could work in his lab with the Ph.D. students. He hesitated, but she persisted and he gave in. At the end of the spring term, she told him that she planned to spend the summer working at the Genome Institute, in Singapore. He warned her that prospective students had to speak Mandarin. “I’m fluent in Mandarin,” she said. “I’m thinking, What’s next? She’s already coming into the research group meetings at the end of her freshman year with my Ph.D. students. I find myself listening to her more than to them about the next experiments to be done and the progress that’s been made. I realized she’s different.” That summer, at the Genome Institute, Holmes worked on testing for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, an often fatal virus that had broken out in China. Testing was done in the traditional manner, by collecting blood samples with syringes and mucus with nasal swabs. These methods could detect who was infected, but a separate system was needed to dispense medication, and still another system to monitor results. Holmes questioned the approach. At Stanford, she had been exploring what has become known as lab-on-a-chip technology, which allows multiple measurements to be taken from tiny amounts of liquid on a single microchip. “With the type of engineering work and systems I had been focussing on at Stanford, it was quite clear that there were much better ways to do it,” she said. Before returning to Stanford, Holmes conceived of a way to perform multiple tests at once, using the same drop of blood, and to wirelessly deliver the resulting information to a doctor. That summer, she filed a patent for the idea; it was ultimately approved, in November of 2007. Once back on campus, she went to see Robertson in his office and announced that she wanted to start a company. Robertson was impressed by the idea but urged her to at least consider finishing her degree first. “Why?” she responded. “I know what I want to do.” Holmes was consumed by the idea of developing a company. “I got to a point where I was enrolled in all these courses, and my parents were spending all this money, and I wasn’t going to any of them,” she said. “I was doing this full time.” Her parents allowed her to take the money they had set aside for tuition and use it to seed her company. In March, 2004, she dropped out of Stanford; one month later, she incorporated Theranos (the name is a combination of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). She persuaded Robertson to spend one day a week as a technical adviser to the company and to serve as her first board member. Eventually, he retired from his tenured position, and began working at Theranos full time. Robertson introduced Holmes to several venture capitalists. She insisted that they abide by her terms, which included an understanding that she would retain control and pour the profits back into the company. By December of 2004, she had raised six million dollars from an assortment of investors. As she and the chemists and engineers dug deeper, she became convinced that they could accomplish five objectives: extract blood without syringes, make a diagnosis from a few drops of blood, automate the tests to minimize human error, do the test and get the results more quickly, and do this more economically. A key to the company’s success was the hiring of Sunny Balwani, a software engineer, now forty-nine, whom Holmes had met in Beijing the summer after her senior year of high school. At the time, he was getting an M.B.A. from Berkeley. He had worked at Lotus and at Microsoft and been a successful entrepreneur, and in 2004 he began graduate studies in computer science at Stanford. He and Holmes spoke often, and they shared a belief that software, not just chemistry or biology, mattered. If Theranos was going to be able to analyze a few drops of blood, engineers would have to develop the software to do it. In 2009, Balwani joined as C.O.O. and president. “Our platform is about automation,” he says. “We have automated the process from start to finish.” Theranos has managed to keep its technology a secret for much of its decade of existence in part because it occupies a regulatory gray area. Most other diagnostic labs, including Quest and Laboratory Corporation of America, perform blood tests on equipment that they buy from outside manufacturers, like Siemens and Roche Diagnostics. Before those devices can be sold, they must be approved by the F.D.A., a process that makes their tests’ performances more visible to the public. But, since Theranos manufactures its own testing equipment, the F.D.A. doesn’t need to approve it, as long as the company doesn’t sell it or move it out of its labs. Holmes said that the company has long resisted discussing how its technology works or how it makes money in order to avoid tipping off potential competitors. The company employs seven hundred people and, in addition to its headquarters, has a two-hundred-and-sixty-five-thousand-square-foot facility, in Newark, California, that manufactures the blood-testing devices. Holmes says that Theranos has a positive cash flow; it is clearly expanding. For many years, it has earned income from large pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer and GlaxoSmithKline, which use its tests when they are conducting clinical trials on new drugs. It also earns revenue from the “wellness centers” that it has set up in Walgreens stores, its hospital work, and the U.S. military, although Holmes would not discuss the company’s arrangments with the latter. In 2013, Theranos announced a “long-term partnership” with Walgreens that will eventually establish its wellness centers in most of the eighty-two hundred Walgreens stores. The Walgreens in Palo Alto has one, as do forty Walgreens pharmacies in Phoenix. Holmes envisages wellness centers in most Walgreens and Duane Reade stores, which would put Theranos “within five miles of every American.” Theranos also could sign up the rival drugstore chain CVS, which has seventy-eight hundred outlets. One morning, I went to the Palo Alto Walgreens to get my blood tested. A trained phlebotomist wrapped my finger in a warming sleeve to help the blood flow and then swabbed it with alcohol. Then, with a slight pinch from a small, square lancet containing a pricking pin, she drew two drops of blood, which she siphoned into a dime-size container. This took about two minutes. The container, marked with a bar code, was placed in a refrigerated box to be picked up and delivered to a Theranos lab a couple of miles away; the box pickup and return takes place three times a day. The lab is a large, labyrinthine place bustling with chemists and technicians, and housing rows of machines, each easy for a single person to lift, in which the containers of blood are placed. What exactly happens in the machines is treated as a state secret, and Holmes’s description of the process was comically vague: “A chemistry is performed so that a chemical reaction occurs and generates a signal from the chemical interaction with the sample, which is translated into a result, which is then reviewed by certified laboratory personnel.” She added that, thanks to “miniaturization and automation, we are able to handle these tiny samples.” Theranos owes its success in part to its high-powered board, which Holmes corralled with the help of George Shultz, a Palo Alto resident, who, in his long career, has held four Cabinet positions, including Secretary of the Treasury and Secretary of State. Shultz is ninety-three and a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution; Holmes first met him in 2011. “It was one of those scheduled ten-minute meetings that turn into a two-hour meeting,” she said.
Blood, Simpler
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/12/15/blood-simpler
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/01/27/381954047/koch-brothers-put-price-tag-on-2016-889-million
Koch Brothers Put Price Tag On 2016: $889 Million
2015-01-27
Peter Overby
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 Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013.
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 <p>Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013.</p>
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 <p>The political network led by industrialists Charles and David Koch plans to spend $889 million for the 2016 elections. In modern politics, it's more than just a ton of money.</p> <p>It's about as much as the entire national Republican Party spent in the last presidential election cycle, four years ago. And as Sheila Krumholz — director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks politicians and donors — pointed out in an interview, it's double what the Koch brothers and their network spent in 2012.</p> <p>Krumholz summed it up: "It is staggering."</p> <p>But not just staggering — it's also mostly secret. The Republican and Democratic political parties have to disclose their donors. The Koch network consists almost entirely of groups that don't register under the campaign finance laws and so don't publicly identify their donors.</p> <p>"So much of their funding and operations are conducted in secret that we really don't know who else is behind this," Krumholz said.</p> <p>The Koch organization unveiled the $889 million budget to several hundred donors at a private conference in Palm Springs, Calif., which concluded Monday. Donors were asked to pledge.</p> 
 <p>The conference featured Republican senators who were elected last fall with help from the Koch network, and their success stories colored the event.</p> <p>No other outside money operation matches the Koch network in funding or organizational breadth. Various components of the network run TV ads, do grass-roots work and phone banking, develop voter data files, and reach out to veterans, women, Hispanic voters and young voters.</p> <p>"Essentially we've created a new party. It's the party of conservative, rich activists," said political scientist Darrell West, author of <em>Billionaires,</em> a book about wealthy donors in politics. While the Republican and Democratic parties have big donor bases, West said, with the Koch donors, "you're talking about an incredibly tiny slice of Americans."</p> <p>Before the pledging session at the Palm Springs conference, donors watched three likely GOP presidential candidates in a debate. Moderator Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, asked the three about the influence of wealthy donors.</p> <p>Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said the real political corruption involves government contracts: "I haven't met one person since I've been here or as I travel around the country who's come up to me saying, 'Oh, I want a contract.' They simply wanna be left alone."</p> <p>Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the real corruption was about special access, which wasn't happening with these donors. "I don't know a single person in this room who's ever been to my office, and I haven't seen everyone here today, but a single one who's been to my office asking from government any special access."</p> 
 <p>But it was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who gave a full-throated endorsement of his hosts.</p> <p>"Let me very clear. I admire Charles and David Koch," he said. "They are businessmen who have created hundreds of thousands of jobs."</p> <p>Cruz paused for the audience to clap. "And they have stood up for free market principles and endured vilification, with equanimity and grace."</p> <p>There's no word yet on whether the donors were dazzled. But the Koch network is showing interest in jumping into the presidential primary fight, something it's never done before.</p>
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 Koch Brothers Put Price Tag On 2016: $889 Million : It's All Politics The political network led by industrialists Charles and David Koch plans to spend about as much money as the entire national Republican Party spent in the last presidential election cycle.

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 Koch Brothers Put Price Tag On 2016: $889 Million

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 January 27, 2015 6:28 PM ET

 Peter Overby

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 Enlarge this image

 Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013. Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP hide caption

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 Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

 Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013.

 Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP

 The political network led by industrialists Charles and David Koch plans to spend $889 million for the 2016 elections. In modern politics, it's more than just a ton of money.

 It's about as much as the entire national Republican Party spent in the last presidential election cycle, four years ago. And as Sheila Krumholz — director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks politicians and donors — pointed out in an interview, it's double what the Koch brothers and their network spent in 2012.

 Krumholz summed it up: "It is staggering."

 But not just staggering — it's also mostly secret. The Republican and Democratic political parties have to disclose their donors. The Koch network consists almost entirely of groups that don't register under the campaign finance laws and so don't publicly identify their donors.

 "So much of their funding and operations are conducted in secret that we really don't know who else is behind this," Krumholz said.

 The Koch organization unveiled the $889 million budget to several hundred donors at a private conference in Palm Springs, Calif., which concluded Monday. Donors were asked to pledge.

 The conference featured Republican senators who were elected last fall with help from the Koch network, and their success stories colored the event.

 No other outside money operation matches the Koch network in funding or organizational breadth. Various components of the network run TV ads, do grass-roots work and phone banking, develop voter data files, and reach out to veterans, women, Hispanic voters and young voters.

 "Essentially we've created a new party. It's the party of conservative, rich activists," said political scientist Darrell West, author of Billionaires, a book about wealthy donors in politics. While the Republican and Democratic parties have big donor bases, West said, with the Koch donors, "you're talking about an incredibly tiny slice of Americans."

 Before the pledging session at the Palm Springs conference, donors watched three likely GOP presidential candidates in a debate. Moderator Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, asked the three about the influence of wealthy donors.

 Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said the real political corruption involves government contracts: "I haven't met one person since I've been here or as I travel around the country who's come up to me saying, 'Oh, I want a contract.' They simply wanna be left alone."

 Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the real corruption was about special access, which wasn't happening with these donors. "I don't know a single person in this room who's ever been to my office, and I haven't seen everyone here today, but a single one who's been to my office asking from government any special access."

 But it was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who gave a full-throated endorsement of his hosts.

 "Let me very clear. I admire Charles and David Koch," he said. "They are businessmen who have created hundreds of thousands of jobs."

 Cruz paused for the audience to clap. "And they have stood up for free market principles and endured vilification, with equanimity and grace."

 There's no word yet on whether the donors were dazzled. But the Koch network is showing interest in jumping into the presidential primary fight, something it's never done before.

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Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013.
 
 
 Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP
 
 
  hide caption 
 
   toggle caption 
  
 
 
 Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Americans for Prosperity Foundation Chairman David Koch speaks in Orlando, Fla., in August 2013.
 
 
 Phelan M. Ebenhack/AP
 
 
  
 
 The political network led by industrialists Charles and David Koch plans to spend $889 million for the 2016 elections. In modern politics, it's more than just a ton of money. It's about as much as the entire national Republican Party spent in the last presidential election cycle, four years ago. And as Sheila Krumholz — director of the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks politicians and donors — pointed out in an interview, it's double what the Koch brothers and their network spent in 2012. Krumholz summed it up: "It is staggering." But not just staggering — it's also mostly secret. The Republican and Democratic political parties have to disclose their donors. The Koch network consists almost entirely of groups that don't register under the campaign finance laws and so don't publicly identify their donors. "So much of their funding and operations are conducted in secret that we really don't know who else is behind this," Krumholz said. The Koch organization unveiled the $889 million budget to several hundred donors at a private conference in Palm Springs, Calif., which concluded Monday. Donors were asked to pledge. 
 The conference featured Republican senators who were elected last fall with help from the Koch network, and their success stories colored the event. No other outside money operation matches the Koch network in funding or organizational breadth. Various components of the network run TV ads, do grass-roots work and phone banking, develop voter data files, and reach out to veterans, women, Hispanic voters and young voters. "Essentially we've created a new party. It's the party of conservative, rich activists," said political scientist Darrell West, author of Billionaires, a book about wealthy donors in politics. While the Republican and Democratic parties have big donor bases, West said, with the Koch donors, "you're talking about an incredibly tiny slice of Americans." Before the pledging session at the Palm Springs conference, donors watched three likely GOP presidential candidates in a debate. Moderator Jonathan Karl, of ABC News, asked the three about the influence of wealthy donors. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul said the real political corruption involves government contracts: "I haven't met one person since I've been here or as I travel around the country who's come up to me saying, 'Oh, I want a contract.' They simply wanna be left alone." Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said the real corruption was about special access, which wasn't happening with these donors. "I don't know a single person in this room who's ever been to my office, and I haven't seen everyone here today, but a single one who's been to my office asking from government any special access." 
 But it was Texas Sen. Ted Cruz who gave a full-throated endorsement of his hosts. "Let me very clear. I admire Charles and David Koch," he said. "They are businessmen who have created hundreds of thousands of jobs." Cruz paused for the audience to clap. "And they have stood up for free market principles and endured vilification, with equanimity and grace." There's no word yet on whether the donors were dazzled. But the Koch network is showing interest in jumping into the presidential primary fight, something it's never done before.
Koch Brothers Put Price Tag On 2016: $889 Million
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/01/27/381954047/koch-brothers-put-price-tag-on-2016-889-million
https://www.denverpost.com/2011/11/24/gun-rights-are-tough-politics-for-obama/
Gun rights are tough politics for Obama
2011-11-24
The Associated Press; Migration
<div><div><main> <article>
<header>
<section>
<article>
</article>
<a href="#"></a>
</section>
</header><div><p>WASHINGTON — They are fuzzy about some issues, but the Republican presidential candidates leave little doubt about where they stand on gun rights.</p>
<p>Rick Perry and Rick Santorum go pheasant hunting and give interviews before heading out. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain speak to the National Rifle Association convention.</p>
<p>Michele Bachmann tells People magazine she wants to teach her daughters how to shoot because women need to be able to protect themselves. Mitt Romney, after backing some gun-control measures in Massachusetts, now presents himself as a strong Second Amendment supporter.</p>
<p>President Barack Obama, on the other hand, is virtually silent on the issue.</p>
<p>He has hardly addressed it since a couple months after the January assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, when he promised to develop new steps on gun safety in response. He has failed to do so, even as Tucson survivors came to Capitol Hill last week to push for action to close loopholes in the background-check system.</p>
<p>Democrats have learned the hard way that embracing gun control can be terrible politics, and the 2012 presidential election is shaping up to underscore just how delicate the issue can be. With the election likely to be decided largely by states where hunting is a popular pastime, such as Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania, candidates of both parties want to win over gun owners, not alienate them.</p>
<p>For Republicans, that means emphasizing their pro-gun credentials. But for Obama and the Democrats, the approach is trickier.</p>
<p>Obama’s history in support of strict gun-control measures prior to becoming president makes it difficult for him to claim he is a Second Amendment champion, even though he signed a bill allowing people to take loaded guns into national parks. At the same time, he has apparently decided that his record backing gun safety is nothing to boast of, either, perhaps because of the power of the gun lobby and its opposition to anything smacking of gun control.</p>
<p>The result is that while Republicans are more than happy to talk up their support for gun rights, Obama might barely be heard from on the issue at all.</p>
<p>“Gun control is a fight that the administration is not willing to pick. They’re not likely to win it,” said Harry Wilson, author of a book on gun politics and director of the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College in Virginia. “They certainly would not win it in Congress, and it’s not likely to be a winner at the polls. . . . It comes down to one pretty simple word: politics.”</p>
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 Gun rights are tough politics for Obama

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 Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry expressed his gun-rights stance by going pheasant hunting last month near Merrill, Iowa.

 By The Associated Press | The Associated Press
 PUBLISHED: November 24, 2011 at 10:45 a.m. | UPDATED: May 2, 2016 at 4:17 a.m.

 WASHINGTON — They are fuzzy about some issues, but the Republican presidential candidates leave little doubt about where they stand on gun rights.

 Rick Perry and Rick Santorum go pheasant hunting and give interviews before heading out. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain speak to the National Rifle Association convention.

 Michele Bachmann tells People magazine she wants to teach her daughters how to shoot because women need to be able to protect themselves. Mitt Romney, after backing some gun-control measures in Massachusetts, now presents himself as a strong Second Amendment supporter.

 President Barack Obama, on the other hand, is virtually silent on the issue.

 He has hardly addressed it since a couple months after the January assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, when he promised to develop new steps on gun safety in response. He has failed to do so, even as Tucson survivors came to Capitol Hill last week to push for action to close loopholes in the background-check system.

 Democrats have learned the hard way that embracing gun control can be terrible politics, and the 2012 presidential election is shaping up to underscore just how delicate the issue can be. With the election likely to be decided largely by states where hunting is a popular pastime, such as Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania, candidates of both parties want to win over gun owners, not alienate them.

 For Republicans, that means emphasizing their pro-gun credentials. But for Obama and the Democrats, the approach is trickier.

 Obama’s history in support of strict gun-control measures prior to becoming president makes it difficult for him to claim he is a Second Amendment champion, even though he signed a bill allowing people to take loaded guns into national parks. At the same time, he has apparently decided that his record backing gun safety is nothing to boast of, either, perhaps because of the power of the gun lobby and its opposition to anything smacking of gun control.

 The result is that while Republicans are more than happy to talk up their support for gun rights, Obama might barely be heard from on the issue at all.

 “Gun control is a fight that the administration is not willing to pick. They’re not likely to win it,” said Harry Wilson, author of a book on gun politics and director of the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College in Virginia. “They certainly would not win it in Congress, and it’s not likely to be a winner at the polls. . . . It comes down to one pretty simple word: politics.”

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WASHINGTON — They are fuzzy about some issues, but the Republican presidential candidates leave little doubt about where they stand on gun rights.
Rick Perry and Rick Santorum go pheasant hunting and give interviews before heading out. Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain speak to the National Rifle Association convention.
Michele Bachmann tells People magazine she wants to teach her daughters how to shoot because women need to be able to protect themselves. Mitt Romney, after backing some gun-control measures in Massachusetts, now presents himself as a strong Second Amendment supporter.
President Barack Obama, on the other hand, is virtually silent on the issue.
He has hardly addressed it since a couple months after the January assassination attempt on Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson, when he promised to develop new steps on gun safety in response. He has failed to do so, even as Tucson survivors came to Capitol Hill last week to push for action to close loopholes in the background-check system.
Democrats have learned the hard way that embracing gun control can be terrible politics, and the 2012 presidential election is shaping up to underscore just how delicate the issue can be. With the election likely to be decided largely by states where hunting is a popular pastime, such as Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania, candidates of both parties want to win over gun owners, not alienate them.
For Republicans, that means emphasizing their pro-gun credentials. But for Obama and the Democrats, the approach is trickier.
Obama’s history in support of strict gun-control measures prior to becoming president makes it difficult for him to claim he is a Second Amendment champion, even though he signed a bill allowing people to take loaded guns into national parks. At the same time, he has apparently decided that his record backing gun safety is nothing to boast of, either, perhaps because of the power of the gun lobby and its opposition to anything smacking of gun control.
The result is that while Republicans are more than happy to talk up their support for gun rights, Obama might barely be heard from on the issue at all.
“Gun control is a fight that the administration is not willing to pick. They’re not likely to win it,” said Harry Wilson, author of a book on gun politics and director of the Institute for Policy and Opinion Research at Roanoke College in Virginia. “They certainly would not win it in Congress, and it’s not likely to be a winner at the polls. . . . It comes down to one pretty simple word: politics.”
Gun rights are tough politics for Obama
https://www.denverpost.com/2011/11/24/gun-rights-are-tough-politics-for-obama/