7dvdfv

Is CIA Director a Trump Stooge? / Custom-Fitted Condoms

The

Big

12.01.2017

EARTH'S MOST FRIGHTENING CRISIS:

A WORLD WITHOUT WATER

Crack-Up

DECEMBER 01, 2017 _ VOL.169 _ NO.19

FEATURES THE SOUND AND THE FURRY

ODD ANDERSEN/AFP/GE T T Y

Delegates to the Eurofurence convention pose for a group picture. While many in the furry movement are left-wing, other “alt-furries” hold white supremacist views.

COVER CREDIT

Photograph by The Voorhes for Newsweek

For more headlines, go to NEWSWEEK.COM

18

28

A Dry Place in Hell

The Rise of the Furred Reich

BY PETER SCHWARTZSTEIN

BY WILL HICKS

Jordan could soon become the first country in the world to completely run out of water. It may not be the last.

As America grapples with the racist violence in Charlottesvillle, furries are dealing with their own Nazi problem.

1

EDITOR _ Bob Roe EXECUTIVE EDITOR _

Kenneth Li

CREATIVE DIRECTOR _ Michael Goesele

DECEMBER 01, 2017 _ VOL.169 _ NO.19

NEWS DIRECTOR _ Cristina Silva DEPUTY EDITOR _ R.M. Schneiderman OPINION EDITOR _ Nicholas Wapshott

EDITORIAL Breaking News Editor _ Gersh Kuntzman London Bureau Chief _ Robert Galster Culture Editor _ Mary Kaye Schilling Politics Editor _ Michael Mishak National Editor _ John Seeley Science Editor _ Jessica Wapner News Editors _ Orlando Crowcroft, Nicholas Loffredo Deputy Editors _ Dante Ciampaglia (Culture), Amanda

In Focus 04 Harare, Zimbabwe

Coup de Robert and Grace

THE FUNNY SIDE OF THE MOON

Jim Carrey, left, and director Chris Smith, whose documentary Jim & Andy: the Great Beyond follows Carrey as he preps to play Andy Kaufman in 1999’s Man on the Moon.

06 Haikou, China

Flame Is Fleeting New Delhi No-Fly Ozone Melbourne, Australia Pride and Democracy

P.40

Onion (Science), Jason Silverstein (Breaking News) Associate Editors _ Hannah Osborne (Science), Harriet Sinclair (Breaking News), Maria Vultaggio (Culture) Social Media Editor _ Adam Silvers Senior Editor _ Siobhán Morrin London Sub-Editor _ Hannah Partos Production Editor _ Jeff Perlah Copy Chief _ Elizabeth Rhodes Copy Editors _ Bruce Janicke, Kelly Rush, Joe Westerfield, Amanda Woytus

Periscope

Contributing Editors _ Max Fraser, Owen Matthews,

08 SpyTalk

Executive Editor, TV, Film & Digital _ Teri Wagner Flynn Video Producer _ Jordan Saville Editorial Assistant _ Zola Ray

Pressure Points

12 Disruptive

Hey, Tech Kids!

Get Off My Lawn!

15 Politics

When Cats Fly

Horizons 36 Drugs

The Pain Pushers

40 Innovation

Glove Is a ManySplendored Thing

Culture 42 Movies

The Andy Kaufman Show

46 Art

Came So Far for Beauty

48 Parting Shot

Andy Weir

Claudia Parsons, Matthew Sweet

CREATIVE Director of Photography _ Diane Rice Contributing Art Director _ Mike Bessire Associate Art Director _ Dwayne Bernard Assistant Photo Editor _ Alessandra Amodio Digital Imaging Specialist _ Katy Lyness Production Manager _ Helen J. Russell WRITERS

Tufayel Ahmed, Carlos Ballesteros, Meghan Bartels, Nina Burleigh, Matt Cooper, Anthony Cuthbertson, Teddy Cutler, Melina Delkic, Janissa Delzo, Janine Di Giovanni, Dana Dovey, Kurt Eichenwald, Sean Elder*, Jessica Firger, Joseph Frankel, Zachary Fryer-Biggs, Conor Gaffey, Emily Gaudette, Lauren Gill, Julia Glum, Nicole Goodkind, John Haltiwanger, Michael Hayden, Kristin Hugo, Abigail Jones, Celeste Katz, Max Kutner, Cristina Maza, Jason Le Miere, Graham Lanktree, Josh Lowe, Sofia Lotto Persio, Tim Marcin, Melissa Matthews, Douglas Main*, Kevin Maney*, Jack Moore, Alexander Nazaryan, Tom O’Connor, Callum Paton, Maria Perez, Tom Porter, Bill Powell, Greg Price, Chris Riotta, Tom Roddy, Winston Ross*, Linley Sanders, Josh Saul, Roberto Saviano*, Zach Schonfeld, Damien Sharkov, Kate Sheridan, Marie Solis, Jeff Stein, Robert Valencia, Janice Williams, Stav Ziv (*Contributing) PUBLISHED BY

Newsweek Media Group, Ltd.

Chief Executive Officer _ Dev Pragad President _ Alan Press Chief Content Officer _ Dayan Candappa Chief Operating Officer _ Alvaro Palacios Chief Financial Officer _ Amit Shah Chief Marketing Officer _ James Karklins Chief Technology Officer _ Michael Lukac Director of Communications _ Mark Lappin General Counsel _ Rosie Mckimmie General Manager _ Dave Martin VP, HR Business Partner _ Leiann Kaytmaz Senior VP Global Creative Director _ Robert Lee Executive Producer _ Alfred Joyner ADVERTISING, MARKETING + CIRCULATION

NEWSWEEK (ISSN0028-9604) is published weekly except one week in January, April, August and November.

Newsweek is published by Newsweek LLC, 7 Hanover Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10004. Periodical postage is paid at New York, NY and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send change of address to Newsweek, 7 Hanover Square, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10004. For Article Reprints, Permissions and Licensing www.IBTreprints.com/Newsweek PARS International (212) 221-9595 x210 Newsweek@parsintl.com

2

NEWSWEEK.COM

Commercial Director _ Sam Kumar Global Head of Programmatic + Partnerships _ Jeremy Makin Senior Sales Director _ Chantal Mamboury Director, Newsweek Media Lab _ Pamela Ferrari Group Client Director _ James Byrne Sales Director _ Marta Leja Sales Manager _ Chris Maundrell Head of Subscription Operations _ Samantha Rhodes Newsstand Manager _ Kim Sermon

FROM TO P: AL EX C AO/GE T T Y; MA ARTEN DE BOER /GET T Y

DEPARTMENTS

Treats of the Season Give the timeless gift of silver with the 2017 American Eagle One Ounce Silver Proof Coin. Featuring sculptor Adolph A. Weinman’s iconic Lady Liberty design, each coin is handcrafted with the precision and care that showcase exceptional quality. Available directly from the United States Mint, our signature coin is an American classic and the treasured cornerstone of any collection.

Visit catalog.usmint.gov and use promo code NEWS2017 for free shipping or call 1-800-USA-MINT (872-6468) to order.

www.usmint.gov

In Focus

THE NEWS IN PICTURES

HARARE, ZIMBABWE

Coup de Robert and Grace

A protester waves the Zimbabwean flag during a demonstration against President Robert Mugabe on November 18. The protests came after the longtime leader fired his vice president and tried to detain Zimbabwe’s leading military commander. Many speculated the moves were part of a plan for Mugabe’s wife, Grace, to succeed him, and on November 15, the military put Mugabe under house arrest, and the president’s party later expelled him. It was a coup in everything but name; the 93-year-old is still technically president, as the military has tried to provide him with a graceful exit. As of publication, however, he continued to cling to power. Or at least the illusion of it. → P H I L I M O N B U L AWAYO

4

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

NEWSWEEK.COM

5

RE UTERS/PHILIMON BU LAWAYO

CO UNTERC LO CKWISE FRO M TOP:R EUT ERS/CHINA STR INGE R NET WO RK; S A U M YA K H A N D E LW A L / R E U T E R S ; S C O T T B A R B O U R / G E T T Y

In Focus

6

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

HAIKOU, CHINA

NEW DELHI

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Flame Is Fleeting

No-Fly Ozone

Pride and Democracy

A drone incinerates trash on a power line on November 16 in this island city off the coast of mainland China.

The Hainan Power Grid Corp. is using these unmanned aerial vehicles to burn plastic bags and other garbage that gets stuck in hard to reach places.

Men feed seagulls on the hazy morning of November 17 on the Yamuna River.

Residents in the city are dealing with choking smog that the top elected official there has likened to a “gas chamber,” with the pollution made worse by the burning of crops. Air quality is so bad that Western airlines have canceled flights, and local media reported that foreign embassies may consider the Delhi territory a “hardship posting.”

People celebrate at a rally on November 15 after a national postal survey overwhelmingly endorsed the legalization of same-sex marriage in Australia. All those who want the country’s marriage laws changed will have to wait on lawmakers, as the survey was only a referendum. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull urged Parliament to act on legislation by Christmas.

→ REUTERS

→SAUMYA KHANDELWAL

→ SCOTT BARBOUR

NEWSWEEK.COM

7

Periscope

NEWS, OPINION + ANALYSIS

INSIDE JOB

At Trump’s urging, Pompeo met with a man who has been promoting a disputed theory that the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee was not the work of Russian agents.

8

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

“This administration is sensitive to being attacked for being pro-rich people.” » P.15

SPYTALK

Pressure Points

J IM WATSON/AFP/GE T T Y; TOP RIGHT: ANDREW HARR ER/BLO OMBE RG/GET T Y

Is the CIA director caving to Trump on Russia and Iran?

had met in October with William Binney, an ex– in early november, cynthia storer sat down and started sketching out her next lecNational Security Agency official. Binney had been ture for an online course she’s teaching for Johns promoting a highly disputed theory that the 2016 Hopkins University. The topic: “the politicization of hack of the Democratic National Committee was intelligence.” The ex–CIA senior counterterrorism not the work of Russian agents but an inside job. analyst, one of the famous “sisters” who tracked Pompeo told him that President Donald Trump Osama bin Laden, remembers constant pressure had inspired the invitation to CIA headquarters, from Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush Binney said. The Intercept reported that Pompeo administration officials to find proof that Saddam also offered to set Binney up with other briefings Hussein had ties to Al-Qaeda. at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security.

With White House encouragement, the agency To many agency veterans, the Binney meeting also came up with evidence that Hussein possessed was yet another sign that Pompeo isn’t willing to weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In that sad epideviate from Trump’s political agenda. “I suppose sode, then–CIA Director George Tenet told President the most optimistic view would be that Pompeo is playing to Trump to keep his access, but that George W. Bush he could make a “slam-dunk” case for attacking Iraq. As it turned out, Bush’s sales pitch he’s being more professional, for lack of a better was successful, but the intelligence was a bust: No word, when he’s actually in the job,” John Sipher, a nuclear, chemical or biological weapons were found. former top CIA Russia hand, tells Newsweek.

Perhaps it was only a coincidence, but the timAn agency spokesman denies that his boss is parroting Trump’s lines. “One of CIA’s core mising of Storer’s lecture was ideal, given the lengthensions is to speak truth to whomever ing string of evidence that CIA Direcwe serve.” Pompeo has insisted he tor Mike Pompeo has been bending “pushes back” with the president. the agency to his boss’s will on Russia BY and Iran. On November 7, the Inter“Absolutely. The whole team does,” he cept reported that Pompeo, a former told conservative pundit Hugh Hewitt JEFF STEIN Tea Party Republican from Kansas, @SpyTalker in June. But he added that “it’s great

NEWSWEEK.COM

9

when the president or vice president or secretary of defense scribbles a note to me and says, ‘Hey Mike, I want you to go relook at this. I want your team to do another scrub.’”

Perhaps, but Pompeo seemed to be following the Republican playbook again this month when he approved the CIA’s release of a second batch of files captured during the 2011 U.S. raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Normally, such a release would be of little interest except to historians and experts on terrorism.

But in this case, the declassification looked political. Ned Price, a former CIA counterterrorism analyst and national security adviser in the Obama White House, says the release wasn’t about transparency, as Pompeo claimed. “A close read of his statements and the CIA’s public rollout of the new documents,” Price wrote for The Atlantic, “suggests, instead, that their release is part of his ongoing campaign to link Al-Qaeda to Tehran,” thus creating another reason to renounce the Obama administration’s nuclear deal with Iran.

Trump campaigned against that deal and continued blasting it after he took office as “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.” When CIA analysts told Pompeo last spring that Iran was complying with the arrangement, he reportedly answered, “Good. But we know they’re cheating anyway—we’re just not seeing it.”

The president eventually decided not to officially disavow the Iran deal; he left it to Congress to decide whether to blow it up and reimpose FRENEMY OF THE STATE

Putin with Iran’s Hassan Rouhani. After speaking with the Russian leader at the Asia-Pacific summit, Trump suggested that he believed his repeated denials of U.S. election interference.

10

NEWSWEEK.COM

SPYTALK

sanctions. But his prior statements have shaken agency veterans. They fear Pompeo—who took a lead role in repeated Republican probes of Hillary Clinton and Benghazi—has forsaken his duty to be an honest broker of intelligence. “I’ve had analysts tell me that he will ask the question, the same question, over and over again about Iran’s compliance with the Iran deal, hoping for a different answer, which has echoes of Cheney and Iraq WMD,” says a former senior national security official, who asked for anonymity in exchange for discussing internal deliberations.

Another worrying sign: Last summer, Pompeo ordered that the CIA unit tracking Russian subversion, the Counterintelligence Mission Center,

“It’s great when the president... scribbles a note to me and says, ‘Hey Mike, I want you to go relook at this.”

report directly to him. That was followed by his erroneous statement in October that the intelligence community had concluded that Russian meddling “did not affect the outcome of the election”—an assessment the agencies never made. (Former National Intelligence Director James Clapper has since concluded that Russian hacking and meddling on social media probably helped get Trump elected.) But conservative media trumpeted Pompeo’s statement, which fit neatly with the president’s dismissal of all the evidence that the Russians helped him. CIA spokesman Dean Boyd later walked back his boss’s statement, saying, “The intelligence assessment with regard to Russian election-meddling has not changed, and the director did not intend to suggest that it had.”

It took only weeks, however, for Trump to create more controversy.

After speaking with Russian President Vladimir Putin at the Asia-Pacific summit in Vietnam, Trump suggested that he believed Putin’s repeated denials of U.S. election interference.

Only after widespread outrage did Trump later add that he was “with our agencies” on the Russia probe, “especially as currently constituted with their leadership.”

CIA intelligence analysts are demoralized by the whipsawing on Russia and Iran, say Price and other agency veterans. “Half of them are ready to drown themselves in the toilet,” another senior former CIA terrorism analyst tells Newsweek.

To some, Pompeo’s record smacks of dolorous chapters in the CIA’s history, when it went along with hard-liners on decisions involving Cuba, Vietnam, the Soviet Union and Iraq. Many longtime and former employees are still shaken over Iraq.

“From what I’ve heard, management

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

CLO CKWISE FROM LEFT: MIKHA IL SVE TLOV/GET T Y; LAR RY BUSACCA/G ET T Y; ADAM BERRY/GET T Y; LUKE FRAZZA/AFP/GET T Y

Periscope

POMPEO AND CIRCUMSTANCE

Bush’s Iraq debacle is why CIA veterans like Storer, left, say their former colleagues must have cringed when they learned about Pompeo’s meeting with Binney, right.

is putting on a happy face and trying to calm the waters, but there’s no degree of glossing over this that will fully calm the troubled waters inside,” Price tells Newsweek.

The Trump administration’s aggressive posture on Iran is particularly troubling. Agency veterans have seen how twisted intelligence and overeager operators can drag the CIA into disastrous projects, like the so-called enhanced interrogation

techniques that a Senate Intelligence Committee investigation found were both far more brutal and ineffective than agency officials had admitted.

Storer says aspiring intelligence analysts need to learn how to recognize and resist attempts by politicos to “cherry-pick” evidence to fit preordained, ideological-driven outcomes.

They have a professional duty, she tells her students, to resist and tell their higher-ups, “If you don’t, and

another Iraq happens, or worse, you will regret it for the rest of your days.”

But what if the highest of the high-ups are on the president’s team? Former agency managers have said that during the internal debates over Iraqi WMD, Tenet and his deputy John McLaughlin ignored warnings by agency managers about the credibility of a key source the White House was relying on to make the case for an invasion.

Code-named Curveball, the source claimed that Iraq possessed mobile biological weapons labs, which turned out to be false. McLaughlin later claimed “no one stepped forward” to warn him about the source, but former CIA operations manager Margaret Henoch tells Newsweek that a McLaughlin underling was “pushing, pushing and pushing” her to revise her doubts about Curveball. (Former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, Tenet’s onetime executive assistant, says the agency didn’t need Bush to push it into faulty judgments on Iraqi WMD. “The analysts truly believed it,” he tells Newsweek in an email.)

Maybe, but the Iraq debacle is why CIA veterans like Price say their former colleagues must have cringed when they learned about Pompeo’s meeting with Binney. It made the agency look like “a bunch of Keystone Cops who are entertaining conspiracy theories,” Price says. “The hope is” that Pompeo will “be gone, sooner rather than later,” he adds, “but the agency is going to have to live with this for a long time, and its reputation both domestically and among its global peers is going to take a huge hit.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

11

Periscope

DISRUPTIVE

Hey, Tech Kids!

Get Off My Lawn!

Possible presidential candidate Mark Cuban fears the U.S. will get trounced in the coming technology war because its leaders are old fuddy-duddies mark cuban is flagrantly flirting with the notion of running for president in 2020, so I asked him if a big driver of his decision might be that the nation desperately needs tech-savvy leadership. “Yes,” the entrepreneur and NBA team BY owner replied via email.

“The current administraKEVIN MANEY tion’s lack of understand@kmaney

ing of technology places our country at risk for unthinkable harm.”

Yikes! And here we’ve been distracted by worries that Little Rocket Man might lob a nuke at Los Angeles and probably hit Bakersfield instead.

Clearly, the techno alarm Cuban raises is something we need to unpack.

First of all, the U.S. suffers from the biggest gap in history between technology and what our nation’s leaders know about technology. Our president is 71 years old and thinks Twitter is miraculous. He doesn’t use a computer and wouldn’t know Slack from Spanx. He’s equated sophisticated hacking with his young son’s ability to crack a home computer parental control password. He’s a climate change denier and would rather save coal jobs than invest in solar energy.

Basically, Donald Trump has done nothing to suggest he’ll ever embrace an innovative technology solution to a pressing global problem.

Congress isn’t much better. The average age of U.S. senators is 61.8, among the oldest in history. Of the 435 House members and 100 senators, just eight have worked as engineers,

MINER COMPLAINT Cuban, top left, says we need politicians who will embrace new technologies, such as Uber’s driverless car, rather than pandering to their base by pretending that reviving the coal industry is going to fix the economy.

12

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

CLO CKWISE FROM BOT TO M LE FT: A NGE LO M ERENDINO/AFP/GET T Y; I MAGE GROUP LA/ABC/GET T Y; D OMINICK REUTER/AFP/GET T Y

six as software executives and three as venture capitalists. None of the other pre-politics career paths would suggest a real understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) or blockchain.

By this count, the Capitol has more former insurance agents (21) than former technologists (17).

At the same time, the U.S.’s 83 million millennials, now ages 17 to 35, are all about technology. They embrace AI-driven chatbots and watch streaming video instead of TV. About 83 percent of them sleep with their cellphones. To this group, technology is as indispensable as underwear, and they are leading us into an epoch of enormous change driven by AI, blockchain, 3-D printing and a host of other emerging inventions. Jobs, war, transportation, money, national identity—technology is changing all of it.

There could be nothing crazier right now than electing another batch of

There could be nothing crazier right now than electing another batch of tech nincompoops to national office. tech nincompoops to national office.

That’s what Cuban is getting at. A lot of people know him as the star of reality-TV show Shark Tank or as the bombastic owner of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. But I first met him in 1999 when he was running one of the first streaming-media companies, Broadcast.com—which he sold to Yahoo that year for $5.7 billion. In the years since, I’ve talked with Cuban about his investments in tech, ranging from the Cyber Dust app that makes texts disappear to Brondell electronic toilet seats. At 59, he’s no millennial, but he

qualifies as a billionaire technologist.

He says our leaders’ most dangerous offense is their inability to recognize the profound importance of AI. “If you look at Russia and China, both are leveraging government and private investment to try to dominate AI,” Cuban says. Both nations, he notes, believe that dominating AI is the path to global superpower status in this century. Yet the Trump administration and Congress have done little to promote or invest in AI research. Instead, Trump spurns science the way kids scorn lima beans.

The U.S., Cuban believes, needs a national mission in AI reminiscent of the space race in the 1960s. “We have to win this battle, or we will no longer be the most powerful nation in the world,” he tells me. “AI is going to be at the base of every war and terror threat we face for the next 50 years at least. We can’t lose this war.” That’s the

NEWSWEEK.COM

13

Periscope

DISRUPTIVE

GENERATION SLACK Millennials know

aforesaid “unthinkable harm.”

On so many other issues, the nation’s leadership is stuck in 20th-century thinking when we need 21st-century innovation. Immigration and terrorism? “The idea of putting up the [Mexican border] wall is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve heard in my entire life,” Cuban said this month at an event called the Edge of Texas. He called the wall “the least technological solution that’s easiest to crack.” More serious security threats will come in through fiber optics and cloud computing—cyberattacks that can damage infrastructure, steal critical data or blast the American public with fake news. “I’m more concerned with bytes than I am with bullets,” Cuban says.

Health care? The battle in Washington is over insurance—Obamacare, Medicare. Insurance is a last-century solution to the problem of rocketing health care costs. Yet the tech industry

14

NEWSWEEK.COM

knows that AI, Big Data, the “internet of things” and genomics could radically lower the cost of health care while making it better and more personal. Exactly zero national leaders are focused on making that the solution.

Transportation over the next decade will go electric in a big way, followed by the arrival of self-driving cars and trucks. It’s hard to imagine how enormous that change will be.

We’ll have to think anew about energy,

“AI is going to be at the base of every war and terror threat we face for the next 50 years at least. We can’t lose this war.”

roads, commuting, parking lots, the right location for every McDonald’s and 7-Eleven. It will be the biggest shift since the 1950s, when the interstate highway system remade the landscape. China’s policymakers seem to be planning for a radically different transportation future. U.S. leaders seem to hope that future will shrivel and die. Trump recently floated a plan to drop tax credits for electric cars. If implemented, it would hobble U.S. automakers’ push to go electric, leaving them behind the rest of the world.

Cuban puts his chances of running for president at just 10 percent, but he has Steve Bannon in his corner.

(Good or bad? Bannon denies climate change but is worried about China’s AI dreams.) But we don’t need Cuban to fix the U.S. leadership void. The tech industry is packed with brilliant, charismatic leaders who could enter politics—people like Apple CEO Tim Cook or Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. Among real politicians, Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, who has been leading congressional questioning of Facebook, Google and Twitter over Russian interference in the 2016 election, made a fortune investing in mobile tech companies before running for office.

The American tech sector has long disdained politics, usually believing it’s easier to change the world with software than with policy. But now, in the Trump era, it better step up, or we’ll wind up as some quaint old nation serving the Chinese AI gods and rooting for the Guangdong Southern Tigers once the Chinese Basketball Association blows past the NBA as the world’s wealthiest basketball league.

Oh. Maybe that’s the harm Cuban finds unthinkable.

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

ROBE RT ALEXA NDE R/GE T T Y

how central tech is to every part of our lives and future, but do their political leaders, who are mostly oldsters?

POLITICS

When Cats Fly

Tax cut crusader Grover Norquist on Trump’s economic plans and why liberals are like children, trying to throw kittens off a building there are few people who would attempt to explain the Democratic Party’s approach to taxation with an allusion to 1960s mass murderer Richard Speck. Even fewer could pull it off without clearing the room. To his credit, Grover Norquist, the founder of Americans for Tax Reform, managed the feat recently—a reminder of why he’s the most influential proponent of tax cuts in Washington, D.C. Ninety percent of Republicans in Congress have signed his pledge, which binds them to the promise of never voting for a net income tax increase. And while some accuse Norquist of a dogmatic approach that kills any chance of compromise, he is a lively defender of his ideas.

BY Newsweek spoke with Norquist about two weeks before Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee released ALEXANDER NAZARYAN its Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. @alexnazaryan

ANDRE W HARR ER /BLO O MBE RG/GET T Y

Steve Bannon recently proposed a 44 percent top tax rate. How does your vision of tax cuts accord with his economic nationalism?

I haven’t talked to Bannon about the comment. My theory is that this administration is sensitive to being attacked for being pro-rich people. I think there’s value to saying, “We’ve cut everyone’s tax rates,” but if you had a couple of wobbly senators and this made them un-wobbly, take it and be back to lower those rates later.

So whatever it takes to get the GOP tax package through Congress?

Yes. As long as it’s dramatically progrowth: a 20 percent or 15 percent business tax rate, yes.

Full business expensing, yes.

Moving to a territorial tax system, yes. Corporate and individual rates down, yes. It will be very progrowth. This is a jobs bill, not just a tax bill. We need to have economic growth, because only then can you do all the other things that you want to do.

Is there any society in the history of Western civilization that achieved the kind of vision that you have?

Over time, Switzerland. They have a federal government with a very light touch. They have less government than in other places.

Do you think liberals are just clueless?

If you have a 5-year-old who threw a kitten off a multistory building and you went and said, “Why did you throw the cat off the building?,” he might say, “I thought it could fly.” You’d explain cats can’t fly. But if, when he was 25, he kept doing this and there was a pile of dead cats outside the building, you would come to think he didn’t like cats. It’s possible that the 5-yearold just didn’t see the cat at the bottom. But the 25-year-old, every time he goes out of the front door, he’s seeing a pile of dead cats—and he keeps at it. I think the 25-year-old liberals know what damage they are doing and they don’t care. And the 5-year-old liberals are just trying to see if the cats will fly.

15

★★★★★

“Journalism I don’t see elsewhere until later, if at all.”

NEWSWEEK.COM /TRY

SAVE 79%

Subscribe F2OM2$1172222222222

HELPIN G YO U NAVIGATE A R APIDLY CHAN GIN G W ORLD ↓

↓

↓

↓

Award-winning journalists and photographers.

Download issues and read offline on any device.

National and global coverage on the issues that matter.

Expert analysis beyond the headlines on a wide range of topics.

★★★★★ “I’vfififififififirfififififififiNewsweekfififififififi1965fifi Newsweekfififififififi1965fifi Newsweek fififififififi1965fifi Ififififififihfififififirfififififififififihfififififififififirfifififififififififififififi Ifififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififififi EASY WAYS TO SUBSCRIBE

Go to Newsweek.com/try or complete and return this form.

→ Select One:

Deliver to:

□ 52 Weeks for $99

NAME

($1.90 PER WEEK) 77% SAVINGS

ADDRESS

□ 104 Weeks for $179 ($1.72 PER WEEK) 79% SAVINGS

BEST OFFER!

CITY

REGION/STATE

ZIP CODE

COUNTRY

□ Visa

□ Mastercard

□ Amex

RETURN TO:

NEWSWEEK SUBSCRIPTIONS DEPARTMENT 7 Hanover Square, Floor 5 New York, NY, 10004

CARD NO. EXP.

CCV CODE

NAME ON CARD SIGNATURE

To receive an email confirmation and other information, please provide your email address: * Percentage savings calculated as a saving on our cover price, as found on the cover of Newsweek. The weekly price is an indication of what you will pay per issue, we will charge you the full price for the term you select.

EMAIL

□ Payment enclosed (checks made payable to Newsweek)

DICKS

by PETER SCHWARTZSTEIN

Photograph by THE VOORHES

18

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

Jordan could soon become the first country in the world to completely run out of water. It may not be the last.

Photog raph by N A M E G O E S H E R E

NEWSWEEK.COM

19

ummer is always scorching in Amman, Jordan, but last July was particularly brutal for Tarek el-Qaisi, a mechanic who lives with his family in the eastern part of the city. A gang of thieves tapped into the power lines across from his home, and the electricity provider cut off the entire street for a fortnight. With no fans or fridges, the treeless, concrete neighborhood felt like a blast furnace. The next day, a nearby sewage pit backed up, enveloping his apartment with a sickening stench. The flies loved it, but all three of el-Qaisi’s school-age children got sick. By the time his boss lowered his salary, citing slow business, the young mechanic thought nothing could faze him. “It’s hell,” he says, “but it’s not like we have a choice.”

The sudden loss of his water supply, however, has left him nearly hopeless. With no municipal water access, el-Qaisi and his neighbors have always relied on private tanks to service their cisterns. But recent construction has severed that lifeline. The whalesize trucks can no longer get close, so residents must now carry water up the steep, uneven roads.

Unable to properly wash their clothes or even clean dishes, they’re slowly reconciling themselves to a world with almost no water. “I come home dirty and sometimes can’t wash,” says el-Qaisi, his arms and face flecked with sweat and motor oil. “It’s humiliating. No one should have to live like this.”

Without drastic action, many Jordanians may share his plight. The Jordan River, the country’s lone

20

NEWSWEEK.COM

waterway, is dirty and depleted, and some of its aquifers have been pumped almost beyond repair. The nation’s annual rainfall is set to slide dramatically due to climate change, even as its population continues to swell. Jordan is too poor to turn to large-scale desalination—or fix its leaky infrastructure. And the country’s population growth shows few signs of slowing, so it can’t fall back on water imports, as some lightly populated Pacific and Caribbean island nations have done. Water shortages have gotten so bad, they’ve already sparked clashes between refugees and native Jordanians, and the officials charged with catering to booming demand with a shrinking supply are beginning to panic. “We have to look outside Jordan,” says Ali Subah, secretary-general for strategic planning at the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. “There are no more water resources here.”

Jordan could be the first country to run out of water, but it likely wouldn’t be the last. Globally, water demand is forecast to rise by roughly 50 percent by 2050.

And the situation is dire on the supply side too: 21 out of the world’s 37 biggest aquifers are already moving past their tipping points, according to NASA, in part due to over-extraction for drinking water and mining. Meanwhile, global warming appears to be reducing rainfall in some places. Two out of every three people will face water shortages by 2025, the World Meteorological Organization says, and hundreds of millions more might grapple with dangerously poor water quality.

Overwhelmed by the challenge of supplying their swelling populations with often shoddy infrastructure, many of the planet’s megacities are particularly at risk. Four billion people currently live in urban areas, a total that’s expected to almost double by the middle of the century. Kenya’s Nairobi almost ran dry this summer, while South Africa’s Cape Town is in the throes of its worst drought in many years. Iran’s Tehran looks set to introduce water rationing soon. And in the U.S., 40 states expect water woes over the next decade. At best, shortages could set the global economy back $500 billion a year, according to the World Bank. At worst, they could lead to war and terrorism. As a 2012 U.S. intelligence report put it: “The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years.”

In the Middle East, that warning is especially worrisome in the aftermath of the TAP OUT 2011 Arab Spring revolts. As in much of the At left, a man washes his hands. region—and the world—most of Jordan’s At right, the Wadi water, at least 65 percent, goes to agriculRum Desert. Jordan ture. And some officials recognize that this has never had much water, but for is unsustainably high. “We can’t tell the most of its history, next generation that we lost all your waits relatively few ter because we grew too many tomatoes,” inhabitants got by. a royal courtier said on the condition of anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the press. In the royal palace, teams of specialists pore over the options. But in a precarious region, policymakers are loath to surrender all food production. “In some ways, this has happened since time immemorial,” says Aaron Wolf, a professor of geography and noted water expert at Oregon State University.

“If you’re rich, you resolve [the crisis]. If you’re poor, you die.”

Jordan has never had much water. But for most of history, its relatively few inhabitants got by. Seventy years of mopping up its

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

FROM LEFT: THO MAS IM O/PHOTOTHE K VIA GE T T Y; WESTEND61/G ET T Y

WAT E R

“We are praying to God for help. Because nothing [else] will help us here.�

WATER

much larger neighbors’ mess changed all that. First, several hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled over the border following Israel’s creation in 1948, two years after Jordan’s founding, almost tripling the new state’s water requirements overnight. Then waves of Lebanese, Iraqis and more Palestinians followed over the subsequent decades, each adding to the burden. Many refugees from war-ravaged Libya and Yemen moved to Amman in recent years. Syria’s civil war worsened in 2013, ultimately saddling Jordan with over a million of its thirsty citizens.

Native Jordanians have played their part in the population growth too. The country has a fertility rate of 3.38, one of the highest in the region. This population boom alone, however, didn’t doom Jordan’s water supply, government strategists say. (Though they insist the Syrian refugees, who come from a less arid land, have little understanding of water conservation practices.) But with much of the growth coming in sudden influxes, authorities have been unable to properly plan from one year to the next.

And so, as Jordan’s population has continued to outpace all projections, besting the 2035 forecast of 9 million as early as 2015, stunned officials have resorted to raiding all water sources in sight—to devastating effect. Ten of the country’s 12 aquifers are now almost depleted, says Maysoon Zoubi, head of the Higher Population Council and a former secretary-general of the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. In some places, water engineers are drilling down over a mile in pursuit of new discoveries. Authorities don’t have a choice, experts say. “The water quality is going down, the water quantity is going down, but you need to provide water for people,” says Raed Nimri, a water expert at Mercy Corps and deputy head of Water Innovations and Technologies, a U.S.-funded water-saving program. “This is a national security issue.”

At 90 cubic meters per person per year, one of the lowest per capita water shares in the world, Jordanians enjoy about 3 percent of Americans’ consumption. But the country is far from blameless regarding its water plight. Perhaps half of all extracted water is lost to leaky pipes; in some otherwise dry districts of Amman, gushing jets of freshwater irrigate the concrete. Because of holes in the distribution network, water station operators have to pump furiously to maintain pressure in the pipes, so more is squandered in transit. In fact, almost 20 percent of Jordan’s electricity goes to pumping and circulating water around the country, according to the Ministry of Water and Irrigation. Despite this massive expense, the flow is often so feeble by the time it reaches residents, many of whom receive municipal water access only every few weeks, they don’t have enough time to fill the rooftop tanks they use to tide themselves over until the next delivery. “The streets are getting the water we need!” says Samir Kukh, a retired civil servant, who lives in the capital’s Bayader neighborhood.

Theft is also exacting a heavy toll. For decades, a wealthy cabal of major families and tribal leaders have exploited Jordan’s water resources. Conscious of the monarchy’s dependence on their WATER(LESS) WORLD

CLO CK W IS E FRO M TO P L E F T: M AX M U M BY/ IN D IG O/G E T T Y; DAVID SI LVE R MA N/GET T Y; JOHN ZADA/ALAMY; MUHAMMAD HAMED/REUTERS

The tumultuous history of Jordan’s neighbors has contributed to the country’s water shortage. Clockwise from top left, King Abdullah II, Bedouins near Jericho in the West Bank, a solarpowered irrigation system in Jordan’s east, a Syrian refugee waits to cross into Jordan.

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

political support, they’ve grabbed torrents of free water without fear of reproach. “There’s political interference because some of the big families have their farms,” says Zoubi. At least 30 million cubic meters are lost to illegal wells every year, the Ministry of Water and Irrigation says, though independent experts suspect the total might be much higher.

So at the same time as severe water shortages pitch Syrian refugees and Jordanians into conflict with each other, particularly around Ramtha in the north, these powerful landowners are guzzling ground-water. “In a country that might run out of water,” says Mohammed Atiyeh, a farmer in the southern Jordan Valley, “there is regulation only for the weak and poor.”

Located in the valley, with its famously fertile soil, several hundred meters below sea level, Atiyeh’s farm ought to be blooming. But with a water supply that’s one-fifth as salty as seawater, he can’t grow anything but sickly looking palm trees.

And with his neighbor, a scion of one of the area’s leading families, hoarding what’s left of the fresh-water to irrigate his banana trees, Atiyeh worries he might soon be unable to grow anything at all.

Others face a far direr situation. Several miles to the south, along the Dead Sea, sinkholes have already consumed some fields. With next to no Jordan River water now reaching the lake, the lowest place on Earth, surface levels are falling by around a meter a year, taking everything from roads to rice crops with them. At some spas on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea, operators now rely on tractor-drawn trailers to ferry guests over half a mile to the beach.

“In a country that might run out of water, there is regulation only for the weak and poor.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

23

WAT E R

FROM LEFT: BORIS ST REU BEL/FIFA/GE T T Y; JOE RG BO ETHL ING/ALA MY

“I come home dirty and sometimes can’t wash. It’s humiliating.

24

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

No one should have to live like this.”

DRY SPELL

At left, the Roman amphitheater in Amman. Above, one of the city’s water canals.

Wealthy families have exploited Jordan’s water resources for decades.

Because of climate change, Jordan’s water shortage could soon get dramatically worse. The little rain the country receives is projected to drop 30 percent by the end of the century, according to Stanford University’s Jordan Water Project. Soil will dry out, reducing yields. As supply hits new lows and demand soars—particularly in agriculture, as much higher temperatures lead to more evaporation and thirstier crops—even royals are bracing themselves for trouble. “Although Jordan contributed very little to the imminent impact of climate change, it is nevertheless expected to suffer on a much higher level compared to other countries,” says Prince El Hassan bin Talal, the king’s uncle and former chairman of the U.N. Secretary-General’s Advisory Board on Water and Sanitation. Even with present levels of precipitation, Jordan has never filled more than 60 percent of its dam and reservoir network.

And then there’s the continued fallout from the kingdom’s unfortunate topography. Downstream of Syria and Israel, and with its biggest aquifers spanning the Saudi and Syrian borders, Jordan has always been at the mercy of its neighbors’ water policies.

Since the 1950s, dam construction and agricultural expansion in Syria have cut the volume of the Yarmouk, the Jordan River’s principal tributary, by at least 60 percent. The Wehda Dam, Jordan’s big barrage on the Yarmouk, has rarely been more than a quarter full. But authorities in Amman haven’t seen anything yet, Stanford researchers say. Regionwide drought and upstream population growth could shrink Jordan’s share of the Yarmouk up to 75 percent by 2050, while likely further cutting its groundwater access. With less rain, little river water, more people and already ailing aquifers, the numbers are no longer adding up. “We are praying to God for help,” says Sobhi al-Abadi, one of an estimated 30,000 water tank drivers who service unconnected homes and businesses across the capital area. “Because nothing [else] will help us here.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

25

WATER

Every morning, starting at 4 a.m., he and dozens of other truckers wait up to five hours to fill their tanks at Sharat, a well just south of Amman. From there, they spread out across the city, waiting for their phones to ring. Most neighborhoods have at least five or six wait stations, where the drivers can pull up and doze. But each year, business gets more challenging, al-Abadi and his colleagues say. Gas prices have gone up, raising their costs, at the same time as the “big families” with their private wells undercut the market.

It’s seemingly only the brutal summer heat, which boosts demand, that enables them to break even. “We thought this was a safe job because if someone runs out of water, they’re going to do everything they can to buy more,” Abadi says. “We’re not so sure anymore.”

Jordan does have a few earthly options. The state is getting more serious about tackling the causes of its crisis—from launching family-planning campaigns to raising water prices and cracking down on bigwig water barons. “Some people will still be above the law, but there has been a drive to reduce their number and hopefully their impact,” says Samer Talozi, a professor at the Jordan University of Science and Technology and member of the Stanford Water Project. Residential water prices have already gone up threefold over the past few

26

NEWSWEEK.COM

years, from around $8 to $25 per quarter, though the World Bank says water is still underpriced. Aid and development organizations, like Mercy Corps, have even enlisted imams to encourage water conservation in their Friday sermons.

There are signs the state is finally recognizing the need to reform its agricultural sector. About a quarter of farms operate off treated wastewater; plans call for doubling that figure.

Moving from conventional crop cultivation toward hydroponics and other water-saving farming techniques, as most experts believe the kingdom must eventually H2 NO Jordan do, will be politically complicated, but has always been Jordan has the necessary top-down at the mercy of its system to pull it off. “If the king supneighbors’ water policies. At left, ports something, that means the Cabthe Wadi Araba inet supports something,” says Subah, Desert outside of the water and irrigation official.

Petra. At right, a view of the Red Sea: In a rocky, windswept portion of Workers fit a water the southern Jordanian desert, the meter in Mafraq Sahara Forest Project, a Norwegian and pump water in Amman. At bottom, venture, offers something of a temJordan’s Prince El plate for how Jordan might maintain Hassan bin Talal. some food production despite its water shortage. Its model, one of the first of its kind in the world, involves piping water from the nearby Red Sea, desalinating it with solar-powered technology and then recycling it among greenhouses. With no ground, rain or surface water, they envisage growing an initial 130 tons of vegetables a year.

These reforms are necessary, but in the long term, none will be sufficient to make up for Jordan’s water deficit, particularly if Syrian refugees don’t go home. Jordan’s current water budget is a little under a billion cubic meters, but by 2025, it’s forecast to hit at least 1.4 billion. Only large-scale desalination, it seems, will give the kingdom a chance to satisfy its needs. “At one point, it has to happen,” says Nimri of Mercy Corps. “If you want to come to a point where you don’t run out of water, it has to happen.”

One of the most ambitious schemes, known as the Red to Dead project, involves taking water from the Red Sea, desalinating it and dumping the brine into the Dead Sea to slow its disappearance. But for grand plans to work, Jordan is going to need a lot more outside help. The U.S. Agency for International Development has spent over $800 million on water projects in Jordan since 2000.

The government is more or less broke, while the country’s layout—a short coastline that’s downhill and a long way from the main population centers—is uniquely ill-suited to cost-effective desalination. “The massive investment required to act...exceeds Jordan’s resources by far,” says Prince Hassan. “The help of the international community is essential to overcome the water problems.”

Still, the kingdom has displayed remarkable survival instincts as its neighbors have wobbled. Even when faced with its greatest challenge, there’s reason for hope. “We’re a country of refugees,” says el-Qaisi, the water-deprived mechanic, showing off a modified shopping cart with which he and his neighbors plan to ferry large tanks of water up their hill. “And refugees,” he adds, “are survivors.”

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

CLO CKWISE FROM LEFT: BUL ENT D ORUK/ANAD OLU AGENCY/GET T Y; ADAM PRET T Y/GET T Y; THOMAS KOEHLER/PHOTOTHEK/GET T Y; KHALIL MAZRA AWI/AFP/GET T Y; AT TI LA K I SBENED EK /AF P/G ET T Y

“We can’t tell the next generation that we lost all your water because we grew too many tomatoes.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

27

The Rise of the Furred Reich DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

FUR BALL

Thousands attend the Midwest FurFest in Rosemont, Illinois.

Furries, people who identify with—and often dress up like— their favorite animals, say they’re all about being inclusive.

AS AMERICA GRAPPLES WITH THE FALLOUT FROM RACIST VIOLENCE IN CHARLOTTESVILLE, FURRIES ACROSS THE LAND ARE DEALING WITH J IM YOUNG/R EUTERS

THEIR OWN NAZI PROBLEM. >>>> by Will Hicks

NEWSWEEK.COM

29

unius, a horse in his early 20s, is handing out stickers at a Hilton DoubleTree in suburban Philadelphia. It’s August, a week after the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that roiled the country, and he’s set up a booth that has attracted an assortment of animals—from fennec foxes to Munchkin cats—all waiting in line for his merch.

Junius isn’t actually an equine. And his customers walk on two legs. They’re all furries, people who identify with—and often dress up like—their favorite animals, a fantasy that may include various forms of sex but not bestiality. These hirsute hobbyists are in town for Furrydelphia, the area’s first convention for furries. Many are queer and very left-wing, so it’s no surprise that the stickers—a swastika inside a paw print with a red slash through it—hold special appeal.

Many of these people grew up as outcasts and were bullied at school, and though they’re often mocked as horny fetishists, the furries insist they stand for much more than their sexual proclivities. They say they’re all about being inclusive and have welcomed people with niche gender identities and odd social quirks into their fold. But there are limits to that tolerance, and since the 2016 election, Junius and other furries have been confronting their version of the right-wing extremists who descended on Charlottesville. These “alt-furries,” as they’re known, hold similar views as the so-called altright, a white nationalist, anti-globalist movement that largely supports President Donald Trump.

The alt-furries started as a joke on Twitter, as right-leaning furries used the #AltFurries hashtag to share pro-Trump, furry-themed memes and promote satirical policies, like a ban on “species mixing.” But as the popularity of the hashtag grew, it attracted people who critics say are racist.

Today, most alt-furries interact only online, but some have taken their ideas into the real world.

This past summer, one man came to Anthrocon, the world’s largest furry convention, in a Confederate flag “fursuit,” holding a Trump sign, and some people distributed alt-furry pamphlets at an Orlando, Florida, furry convention. Others have started wearing armbands strikingly similar to those worn by Nazis. To many furries, what started as an online joke isn’t funny anymore.

Before Junius arrived in Philly, alt-furries had

J

30

NEWSWEEK.COM

threatened him online for slamming them on social media, calling them bigots and fascists; some said they wanted to “break his neck.” One forum group attempted to find his personal information and release it online. The threats don’t frighten him— but he is worried that a growing number of furries are vulnerable to recruitment by white supremacists.

“Nazis are looking for these same types of alienated white dudes,” he says. (Like most furries Newsweek spoke to, he didn’t want his real name used in print.)

“These people just want to hurt and incite—and are beginning to take their trolling offline.”

Who’s Afraid of the Big, Bad (Nazi) Wolf?

it’s the first day of the convention in philly, and outside the Hilton, a group of furries stand in a circle, smoking cigarettes. Most are dressed in some sort of animal attire: There are bears, wolves and even dragons. It’s hot outside, so not everyone is wearing a full-body fursuit; those are poorly ventilated, and many furries say they’re too expensive (they can cost more than $3,000). Some simply wear animal heads or just ears. The only requirement for being a furry, attendees tell me, is saying you are a furry. These furries want a judgment-free environment, one that allows them to be themselves—hairballs and all. “We’re trying to create the world we want to live in,” says a Canadian marbled fox named Xiao Mei. “Like the Stonewall of the ’70s.”

But when it comes to the alt-right, the furries are definitely passing judgment. Just ask a goat named Dionysius, who announced his arrival in Philadelphia with a cryptic post on Gab, a social media site for people banned from Twitter. “Made it to Philly, funny how a fifth of Jack Daniels makes the drive go faster. Always happy to meet new friends who hate commies like I do.” He knew he’d have to do most of that meeting outside the convention because he— and some of his friends—were banned from it for threatening furries. Before the convention, he spent $105 to commission artwork of his “fursona,” or furry alter ego, throwing Junius and two other furries out of a helicopter—a nod to a right-wing meme about how an Argentine junta killed dissidents during the 1970s. (Fan art is popular among furries, who pay artists to draw their fursonas.) Dionysius had planned to commission a new drawing, showing him running over another furry in a truck (someone leaked the plans on Twitter). He’s also part of the

FROM TOP: ALBIN LOHR­JONES/PACIFIC PRESS/LIGHTRO CKET/GET T Y; JAK E WARG A/G ET T Y

FUR R I E S

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

HEART­PELT Many furries are queer and very left-wing, so they were appalled to learn that some of their cohorts hold views similar to those of the right-wing extremist who descended on Charlottsville in August.

Furry Raiders, a Colorado-based group that wears the allegedly Nazi-inspired armbands.

Junius doesn’t think Dionysius would throw him out of a helicopter, and when he learned of the artwork, he thought it was silly. “These people hate me and other folks enough to invest their time, energy or money on lavish hate fan art,” he says. But the imagery was threatening enough that he and others felt Dionysius and the alt-furries shouldn’t be allowed to join in the flocculent festivities. On Twitter, Junius posted an old photo of Dionysius—a squat, bearded man in a Carolina Panthers jersey—leaning on a massive blue truck. “For public safety’s sake,” he posted, “if you see this truck or this man, report to staff.”

Drayne the Wolf, the convention’s chairman, agreed. “We did not set out to make a political statement,” he says of the ban. “But we had to make sure the attendees felt safe.”

Dionysius thinks his banishment was an overreaction—and one typical of what he calls “social justice warriors.” He says he commissioned the artwork in response to left-wing furries threatening to punch “Nazi furs” (they didn’t actually punch them). “No one has ever brought a helicopter to any furry convention that I know of,” he says. “I chose that setting, as well as the cartoony style, precisely because I did not want to make it a threat.”

The alt-furries believe their group is misunderstood. Len Gilbert, a prominent alt-furry, says they are not Nazis, and most of the members are not white supremacists either. Gilbert’s name is a pseudonym, one he used to pen a furry erotic novel, The Furred Reich, about a young Nazi officer’s

NEWSWEEK.COM

31

WHITE RAGE

The alt-furries deny they are violent racists.

But there are connections between them and white supremacists—and even the mayhem last August in Virginia.

encounter with an anthropomorphic female snow leopard. He keeps his fursona a secret to allow him to attend furry conventions without getting banned.

He was not surprised members of his movement were barred from Furrydelphia. “Many conventions are run by social justice warriors,” he said. “Several venues talked about banning armbands or other attire, as if that somehow applies to us. We don’t wear armbands or uniforms. We show up in fursuits like everyone else, so I’m not sure how they’d even enforce those bans.” (Like Gilbert, most alt-furries conceal their real identities, and Furrydelphia enforced the ban informally, promising to kick out anyone accused of making threats against another attendee.)

The alt-furries have disrupted events. In June, a group of them, posing as cops and journalists, claimed a panel at a small convention in Pomona, California, was promoting pedophilia and animal abuse. The topic: “babyfurs,” furries who “age play” as baby animals. (Most babyfurs are benign, though there is some obscene artwork in dark corners of the internet.) The hotel canceled the panel and charged organizers $24,000 for off-duty police protection.

But does this prank mean the alt-furries are Nazis and white supremacists? Dionysius says he’s

32

NEWSWEEK.COM

can’t be either because he’s Jewish. Foxler Nightfire, the head of the Furry Raiders, once tried to join a neo-Nazi group but was kicked out for being gay, half-Asian—and a furry. Another prominent alt-furry, a rat named Chairman Squeek, claims to be a “cross-dressing, communist Gypsy.” (Newsweek could not verify their ethnic backgrounds.)

Outside the Philadelphia convention, Babalu, a burly, bull-bear hybrid who works for the Defense Department, is equally confused. He’s debating politics and checking out fursuits with the other smokers. For most furries, he explains, their fursonas are whimsical performances or earnest representations of what type of animal they believe they personify.

“That’s what makes this Nazi shit so difficult to wrap your head around,” he says. “Are they just performing, or is this what they legitimately believe?”

Moles and Rabbit Holes

deo the tasmanian devil thinks she knows the answer. She was featured in Dionysius’s fictional helicopter ride. A self-described communist, she was also at the center of another alt-furry controversy.

In response to news that dozens of Furry Raiders were planning to attend Denver’s Rocky Mountain

FURRIES

THERE WAS EVEN A FORMER FURRY—A GOLDEN RETRIEVER NAMED GOLDEN ZOLTAN— HOLDING A TIKI TORCH AMONG THE RACIST PROTESTERS IN

FROM TO P: SAM UEL CORU M/ANA D OLU AGE NCY/GET T Y; A DA M BER RY/GET T Y; JAKE WARGA/GET T Y

CHARLOTTESVILLE.

Fur Con in April, she tweeted, “Can’t wait to punch Nazis.” An anonymous furry commented, “Watching you get shot by someone defending themselves from unprovoked assault will be far more entertaining.”

These threats prompted Deo to contact the Denver police, who found them credible. The probe led the Marriott Tech Center to charge the convention an additional $22,000 in security fees for off-duty officers. These increased security fees, along with tax problems (the organizers didn’t file their nonprofit paperwork on time) and an uproar over news that one of the people behind the event had been convicted of criminal sexual contact with a minor in the 1990s, eventually sunk the convention. In response, the organizers sent a cease-and-desist letter to Deo’s home, threatening a class-action lawsuit that accused her of making false statements to police.

As a result of the incident, Deo says she and her family received a barrage of threatening messages. “I will rape you to death nigger bitch,” someone wrote to her. “One less kike!” another said after her grandfather died. She reported these threats to the police, but they were unable to track down her harasser, so she says she bought a gun to protect herself.

Deo did not attend Furrydelphia, but she did lobby for its alt-furry ban. She does not think her harassers are being ironic or just trolling. For months, Deo was a mole in the alt-furry chat group on Discord, a private messaging service popular with gamers. The group had hundreds of members with varying rates of activity. After Charlottesville, Deo leaked the contents—about a month of conversations. Many of the comments were racist, but more disturbing to Deo: One of the alt-furry members suggested hiring a hitman to kill her. Deo gave this information to her local police. “My family’s Jewish,” Deo says. “I’m not using the term Nazi without knowing the full weight of what it means.”

Gilbert, the Furred Reich author, was the head of the alt-furry Discord server. He says the group was not a meetinghouse of Nazis. “I’ve always considered ‘alt-furry’ a big-tent movement on the right of the fandom,” he tells Newsweek. He didn’t want to ban anyone because some might consider their views bigoted or unsavory.

The day after Deo leaked the chat, someone also leaked a left-wing private furry chat. Deo was also a member of that group, although a fairly inactive one. This chat also had mole (who was actually a

NEWSWEEK.COM

33

raven). And its logs contained multiple calls for violence. Some members discussed making bombs; one even proposed poisoning Foxler, the leader of the Furry Raiders, with polonium. “They’re dumb, and they shouldn’t have said that shit,” Deo says about the chat. “I’ve been telling them for months to stop saying that kind of cringey stuff.”

The alt-furries, however, say they take those chat logs seriously. The anonymous raven says the chat was used to indoctrinate leftist furries into communism. “Ninety-five percent of the furries who proudly proclaim they want to ‘punch Nazis’ are in there.”

Perhaps, but there are real connections between alt-furries, white supremacists and even the mayhem last August in Charlottesville. In the Discord leak, Dionysius said he had sent his helicopter comic to Christopher Cantwell to “get some airtime” on Cantwell’s YouTube show. Cantwell, one of the more prominent alt-right leaders in Charlottesville, was charged with three felonies as a result of the violence at the event. One former furry, a golden retriever named Golden Zoltan, was holding a tiki torch among the alt-right in Charlottesville.

The most damning link between white supremacists and alt-furries is Nathan Gate, a young altright neo-Nazi. He does not consider himself a furry, but he helped create and moderate the alt-furry Discord channel. (He also set up the AltRight.com server for the news and commentary website run by alt-right leader Richard Spencer).

Gate even organized the campaign against the Califur convention in Pomona, posing as a local reporter and calling the hotel, while mobilizing alt-furries to do the same on Discord. At the rally in Charlottesville, Gate recorded a two-and-a-half hour live stream of the day’s chaotic events. In the stream, he is surrounded by neo-Nazis in white polos, armed militiamen and even David Duke, one of the country’s most prominent white supremacists.

Despite these credentials, his ties to the furries have upset his prejudiced pals. “I consider furries degenerates and only worked with them to accomplish common goals, like getting CaliFur shut down,” Gate says. “The association is causing problems for me.”

And then there’s Gate’s 18-year-old girlfriend, KKKutie. She offers anecdotal evidence that furries are being recruited by Nazis. Gate and KKKutie have been dating for over a year, but she stopped

34

NEWSWEEK.COM

DIONYSIUS COMMISSIONED ARTWORK OF HIS “FURSONA,” OR FURRY ALTER EGO, THROWING JUNIUS AND TWO OTHER FURRIES OUT OF A HELICOPTER.

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

FROM LEFT: CARSTEN KOALL/GET T Y; JAKE WARG A/G ET T Y; COURTESY OF D I ONYSI US

FURRIES

being a furry only a few months ago. She was perhaps one of the most virulent posters on the alt-furry Discord, and the one who talked about hiring a hitman to kill Deo. “I think alt-furry ends up being kind of an exodus for many furries,” she says. “As they are dragged further right... they start to mature in mind and in body and in turn grow out of the whole furry thing and leave it behind for real political activism. I’ve experienced this firsthand as well as witnessing several of my friends do the same.”

KKKutie says she was truly radicalized into white supremacy by the alt-right, but the altfurries were her gateway out of the shaggy subculture. In the leaked chat logs, you can see her contempt for furries grow as she discusses making money doing fan art for her flocculent friends. “If I draw furry porn for them,” she wrote, “they gib [sic] me money, they go broke, they starve, killing commies and degeneracy at the same time.”

KKKutie’s words, Deo claims, prove her point about the racism of the alt-furries. “They [white supremacists] use these nerd groups because it’s prime picking grounds,” she says. “They’re full of bitter, sad, lonely people.”

Hell Hath No Furry

back at furrydelphia, junius is packing up his wares in the convention’s merch room. The anti-Nazi stickers sold quickly—donations are going to a Charlottesville relief fund, he says—and they appeared far more popular than the alt-furries.

Dionysius stayed holed up in his hotel room, not wanting to attract the attention of Furrydelphia attendees on the lookout for him and his cohorts. He says he spent the weekend visiting friends in the area and never entered the convention space, which was in a separate wing of the hotel.

While most of the people at Furrydelphia considered the event a success, the controversy around the alt-furries is still swirling. Recently, some furries threatened to boycott this year’s FurryCon in upstate New York after one of the organizers said on Twitter that Black Lives Matter was a hate group like the KKK. Fur Affinity, the furry equivalent of Facebook, also banned Nazi images and iconography, leading one alt-furry to threaten a lawsuit. And both sides of the conflict are keeping tabs on each other on social media, blocking their critics then following them on alternative accounts. Apparently, they’ve really gotten under each other’s fur.

FUR WILL FLY

Fan art is popular among furries, who pay artists to draw their “fursonas.”

But this piece, showing Dionysius throwing left-wing furries out of a helicopter, got him barred from the flocculent festivities in Philly. The drawing is a nod to a right-wing meme about how an Argentine junta killed dissidents during the 1970s.

NEWSWEEK.COM

35

SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY + HEALTH

DRUGS

The Pain Pushers Investigators are closing in on Big Pharma, claiming that shady tactics fueled the opioid crisis

36

NEWSWEEK.COM

many say the opioid crisis that has killed more than 183,000 Americans since 1999 has been driven by drug companies that have done just about everything, legal or otherwise, to convince the public that these painkillers are safe. Even President Donald Trump, who recently declared the epidemic a public health emergency, said companies that make the highly addictive painkillers are responsible for the surge in deaths.

Fentanyl is one of the most dangerous opioids, 50 times more potent than heroin. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that overdoses on this synthetic opioid have increased 540 percent in the past three years, and many say the drug is responsible for the epidemic.

Insys Therapeutics produces Subsys, a powerful fentanyl-based liquid that earned approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2012 specifically for use by cancer patients with pain that doesn’t respond to other painkillers—what’s known as “breakthrough cancer pain.” Subsys is a fastacting spray used under the tongue, so the medication is absorbed directly into the bloodstream without needing to go through your digestive system. This delivery method is highly effective, but it means overdosing on Subsys is far too easy—and possibly just a few accidental sprays away.

Ongoing federal investigations suggest Insys ran an elaborate scheme to push the drug on non-cancer patients—what’s called “off-label use”—despite the fact that the company has not proved Subsys is safe and effective to manage pain not related to cancer.

Multiple Insys executives—including its founder, John Kapoor—were arrested on conspiracy charges in late October. Attorneys general in New Jersey, Arizona, Oregon, Illinois and Massachusetts have filed lawsuits claiming the company plotted to illegally boost sales of its drugs. In all of the lawsuits, Insys is charged with lying to insurance companies, fabricating information about patients and providing incentives to physicians to BY prescribe the drug. Massachusetts charged Kapoor JESSICA FIRGER @jessfirger with “leading a nationwide

FROM LEFT: JA MEL TOPPIN/THE FOR BES COLL ECTION/CO NTOUR /CONTOUR BY GET T Y; DWIGHT ESCHLIMAN/GET T Y

Horizons

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

PAIN MISMANAGEMENT

InSys CEO and founder Kapoor, left, is accused of “leading a nationwide conspiracy to profit using bribes and fraud” to boost sales of a fentanyl spray.

Overdoses on fentanyl have increased 540 percent in the past three years.

conspiracy to profit by using bribes and fraud to cause the illegal distribution of a fentanyl spray.” The charges include racketeering, as well as mail and wire fraud. Kapoor has resigned from the company’s board of directors but said in a statement, “I am confident that I have committed no crimes and believe I will be fully vindicated.” (He pleaded not guilty at his arraignment on November 16.)

Many details of how Insys pushed its drug came to light through a congressional investigation led by Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, a ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

In response to the opioid crisis, the committee issued requests for documents from five companies that produce the majority of the supply of opioid prescription painkillers in the U.S.—Purdue Pharma, Janssen Pharmaceuticals Inc., Insys, Depomed and Mylan. In September, the committee published the first of what her staff says will likely be several reports on the unethical sales and marketing practices of companies that produce opioid drugs. It laid out how Insys created a department to convince insurance companies to sign off on coverage of the drug for patients not authorized to take it. Employees posed as representatives from the doctors’ offices of patients who were prescribed the medication.

McCaskill says Insys mimicked the unethical marketing and sales practices developed in the 1990s by Purdue, which told physicians that pain is undertreated in the U.S., that opioids were the best way to treat them and that the drugs aren’t addictive. “As it

NEWSWEEK.COM

37

Horizons

turns out, these messages were exaggerations at best and outright lies at worst,” she said in September.

All of those companies have settled lawsuits about such practices or have lawsuits pending. Purdue Pharmaceuticals—maker of OxyContin— reached unprecedented settlements, including one in 2007 that involved 26 states. Since then, the lawsuits against opioid manufacturers have piled up in almost every state, prompting many experts to suggest that this legal battle is starting to look a lot like the late 1990s fight against Big Tobacco.

Some reports suggest 80 Insys employees engaged in schemes to get the medication into the hands of more patients who didn’t need them.

Sarah Fuller was one of those patients, says her mother, Deborah.

The 32-year-old died of a Subsys overdose in March 2016, even though she never had cancer. She suffered from fibromyalgia and chronic pain related to two automobile accidents.

Her family is now suing Insys.

Deborah barely knew anything about fentanyl until after her daughter’s death, when she began going through Sarah’s belongings. That’s where she found the pharmaceutical pamphlet Sarah had been given during one of the many visits to the doctor who wrote her Subsys prescription. Deborah read the pamphlet cover-to-cover and recalls that when she finished reading she was mostly confused, since it was made clear in the information that the drug was only for patients with cancer.

Though it would be months before the family received the results of Sarah’s toxicology report, Deborah felt she already knew the drug had killed her daughter. “When I got into what it really is and the dangers of the drug, I thought, Why in the name of God would they prescribe that to her?” she

38

NEWSWEEK.COM

DRUGS

tells Newsweek. “She was so not at all a candidate for the drug.”

She believes Sarah was, however, an ideal target for doctors to push offlabel use of Subsys. Like most of the 100 million Americans who suffer from debilitating, chronic pain, Sarah desperately wanted to make it stop.

“She would call me and say, ‘I hurt all over,’” says Deborah. While the pamphlet Deborah found listed the risks of the drug, the language was hard to understand and not written for patients, especially ones like Sarah who, her mother says, had suffered with lifelong learning disabilities and was prepared to try almost anything to get through the day without hurting.

Deborah says her daughter was also eager to stop taking Lyrica, which another doctor had prescribed for her fibromyalgia. The drug is known to cause significant weight gain; Sarah added 100 pounds to her 5-foot-3-inch frame while taking it. Her mother says her daughter longed to lose weight in time for her wedding, which would have been this past August.

Sarah had initially sought out a new doctor to find a way to treat her pain without medication. Her mother said she had a history of prescription painkiller use that had landed her in the hospital, so she wanted to manage her pain without any prescriptions— possibly with physical therapy or even

Insys is charged with lying to insurance companies, fabricating information about patients and providing incentives to physicians to prescribe the drug.

surgery. But the new doctor began prescribing opioids anyway. Before putting Sarah on Subsys, her doctor prescribed other painkillers, including OxyContin and Percocet. This would show the insurance company that Sarah had tried the less potent and cheaper options—called “step therapy”—but was still experiencing pain. Investigations into Insys show this was a standard protocol of doctors who needed to give the impression to an insurance company that the other prescription painkillers weren’t working for the patient. For a doctor to receive kickbacks from Insys, insurance companies would need to approve prescription requests for Subsys, which costs thousands of dollars per month. In Sarah’s case, Medicare paid as much as $24,000 per month for her Subsys prescription, according to documents collected by the family’s lawyer after her death.

The drug is far more expensive than other popular painkillers. According to the family attorney’s records, a prescription for OxyContin at a CVS pharmacy costs a little more than $250 per month. Her patient records from every visit to the doctor didn’t document any changes in her pain, even when she was taking Subsys.

Sarah’s fiancé says Subsys initially “seemed like a miracle drug.”

But soon he noticed changes in her; she became more withdrawn and lethargic. She complained of sleepiness, dizziness and weakness, all side effects of the medication.

Over a period of more than a year, Sarah began spending an increasing amount of time at home, says Deborah. She stayed in her bed with shades drawn so her bedroom was pitch black. Unless Sarah had to work or was going out for dinner with her fiancé, she was at home in her pajamas, most likely sleeping. “Two weeks

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

PAIN AFTER PAIN

CLO CKWISE FROM TOP: ANDR EW HARR ER /BLO OMBERG/GET T Y; C OURTESY OF D ONALD BROWN III [ 2]

McCaskill, top, is investigating several companies that produce opioids; Deborah Fuller is suing InSys over the overdose death of her daughter, Sarah, below with her boyfriend.

before she died [from the overdose] she kept saying, ‘I feel like I’m dying,’” says her mother. “And I said, ‘You need to get off of this stuff. All of it.’”

Months later, Sarah’s toxicology report revealed she had higherthan-lethal levels of fentanyl in her blood, suggesting she had been prescribed a higher dose than she should be taking. The family’s attorney says Sarah’s doctor continued to increase the Subsys dose over time. The toxicology report also suggested the Subsys had interacted with Xanax, another medication prescribed by the same doctor to help her sleep.

Using both drugs together can be deadly. (The Fuller family recently

reached a confidential settlement with Sarah’s doctor, according to their attorney.)

The family’s attorney obtained an audio recording of a call between an Insys employee and a representative from Sarah’s insurance company’s pharmaceutical service to get prior authorization for her Subsys prescription. The Insys employee said she worked “with” Sarah’s doctor.

She also misrepresented Sarah’s condition, claiming she suffered from breakthrough cancer pain. The Insys representative also said other drugs, like OxyContin, had “an inadequate analgesic effect” and the “patient is opioid tolerant” and therefore needed

Subsys. The family attorney said there were no notes in her medical records to document changes in her pain.

“They lied so they could make their money,” Deborah says of the call.

After Sarah’s death, Deborah learned the doctor’s office had arranged an in-person meeting for Sarah with an Insys pharmaceutical representative to “educate” her about the drug. At the meeting, the representative showed Sarah how to use Subsys.

Pharma reps don’t typically meet with patients, a practice that is established to be unethical, at best.

Many details from Sarah’s case appeared to be common practice for Insys. Over the summer, for example, Anthem filed a lawsuit against the company, claiming that half of the patients on its health insurance plan using Subsys were never diagnosed with cancer.

Insys declined to comment on Sarah’s case, which is still pending, but it released a statement in September in response to ongoing accusations, insisting it has changed its business practices, and that employees are no longer communicating directly with insurance companies.

But Insys denies its product is in any way responsible for the uptick of overdose deaths from fentanyl. “It’s inaccurate and misleading to suggest that Subsys has contributed to the abuse of illicit synthetic fentanyl,” according to the statement, which added that the opioid crisis began more than 15 years ago, while Subsys has only been available since 2012.

While it’s true that Insys isn’t the only company producing fentanylbased painkillers, the indictment of so many top executives is unprecedented in this case. Paying fines for causing addiction and death is no longer enough. There’s clearly more pain coming for everyone in this business.

NEWSWEEK.COM

39

Horizons

I N N O VATION

Glove Is a ManySplendored Thing

a woman brings her date back to her place. Things get steamy. Clothes come off…but, you know, gotta be safe. She takes out her phone, scans her guy’s nether regions, then hits Print. The 3-D printer in her backroom whips up a custom-size hydrogel condom that fits the guy like vacuum wrap on a package of hot dogs. Good times ensue, and nobody had to run out to the drugstore.

That’s not a scrapped scene from Blade Runner 2049—it could happen before your Bumble membership expires. Several technologies are swirling together to bring serious innovation to condoms for the first time since the Youngs Rubber Co. started making latex Trojans in the 1920s. All this innovation is pushing hard against regulatory agencies that can’t keep up with the science, but it is coming. The emerging rubbers revolution fits into the grand scheme of how technology is radically changing the global economy. Cloud computing, mobile phones, artificial intelligence and 3-D printing are driving a trend that venture capitalist Hemant Taneja and I call “unscaling” in our book, Unscaled, due out next March.

In the 20th century, mass-production technology ruled, and businesses sought economies of scale by getting big and making the same thing for as many people as possible. In this century, technology is allowing for mass customization. Businesses will

40

NEWSWEEK.COM

increasingly seek to make a highly customized thing for every single person—the opposite of a mass-produced product for a mass market.

Where economies of scale used to win, in years to come, these “economies of unscale” will reign.

You can see an early outcome of this trend in a company called One, which recently started selling the MyOne condom in 60 sizes based on length and girth measurements.

As the company website notes: Pants come in a variety of measurements, so why shouldn’t condoms? Yet until now, condoms have come in just a couple of sizes—regular and large. (Who’s going to buy a condom labeled “small”?) We’ve had limited choice because the economics work better if a single manufacturing line churns out millions of the same item. On top of that, condoms are considered to be medical devices, which leads to regulators creating standards and testing processes that can’t easily be changed.

“There are testing labs all over the world that have invested in expensive equipment,” Davin Wedel, CEO of One, tells me. One of the tests fills a condom with a specific volume of water to see if it leaks, but a smaller, flawless condom would burst because it can’t BY hold that much water.

Wedel worked with KEVIN MANEY the U.S. Food and Drug @kmaney

Administration for years to devise more useful tests for a variety of sizes.

“That had been the thing that kept us from getting to market,” he says.

In the meantime, One invented highly automated new machines that can make the many condom sizes. Just as important, the internet and cloud gave the company a way to reach consumers. Wedel explains it would be impossible to convince retail stores to carry 60 sizes of condoms on their limited shelf space. It would also be a challenge to give men a way to measure themselves while

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

ANDRE W PATERSON/GE T T Y

Custom-fit condoms are coming to a 3-D printer near you, thanks to the unscaled economy

GOTTA RUBBER RIGHT

The technology that’s about to blow up the condom business is being hampered by antiquated regulations regarding quality control in the industry.

standing in a Walmart aisle. The One website includes instructions to help men to find their fit that can be carried out in private. (“Here’s where a great magazine, movie, or helpful friend can come in handy,” the instructions note.)

It’s a baby step toward unscaling last century’s condom industry, and technology is likely to do much more.

3-D printing has been slow to develop, and practical home printers still seem like science fiction. But the next big leap will be in small-batch manufacturing. Instead of building

an assembly line, imagine a company like One filling a factory floor with 3-D printers, each able to quickly make any size condom on demand. Once that happens, a company could wait to get your order, then print and ship custom-size condoms to you. Since 3-D

Who’s going to buy a condom labeled “small”?

printers don’t take up much space, a company might put small-scale condom factories in every city. If drone delivery becomes real, your condom order might be made and dropped in your yard in a couple of hours.

For that to happen, materials have to change. No 3-D printer is likely to be able to work with latex. But scientists all over the world are designing hydrogel condoms. Hydrogel is the kind of squishy material found in soft contact lenses. Other groups, like one at the University of Manchester in England, are working on condoms made from graphene, a carbon-based nanomaterial. There’s a chance 3-D printers could use hydrogels or graphene to churn out flawless, reliable condoms.

In October, Sony released its Xperia XZ1 smartphone, which includes one of the most advanced 3-D scanners yet. Move it around any object, and the software creates a fully rendered 3-D image that can be animated to put into video games. With a few snippets of code, technology like that could be made to measure and create an actual-size 3-D image of any sort of organ. This will cause some trouble if it winds up in the hands of mad sexters like Anthony Weiner, but it could send perfect measurements to a 3-D printer to customize a condom.

Though it may take a decade, effective 3-D printers will find their way into homes. If the FDA can figure out how to deal with regulations, we’ll see the birth of the just-in-time condom.

Unscaling, in other words, means you’ll be able to have a condom for every conceivable occasion.

NEWSWEEK.COM

41

Culture

HIGH, LOW + EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN

ROPE A DOPE

Kaufman took performance art to extremes, disappearing into characters like the “Inter-Gender Wrestling Champion of the World.”

MOVIES

The Andy Kaufman Show

Jim Carrey has a new documentary about playing the performance artist.

I watched it with Kaufman’s brother and sister. It was surreal

42

NEWSWEEK.COM

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

THE L IFE P ICTUR E COLL ECTION/GET T Y; TOP RIGHT: MICHAEL PUTLAND/GET T Y

HALLELUJAH! A fitting tribute to Leonard Cohen » P. 46

it’s hard to describe the experience Carrey—by 1999 one of Hollywood’s highof talking to your dead brother through est-paid stars—seems to have borrowed Kaufman’s Jim Carrey’s body. Carol Kaufman-Kerman tries extreme method for disappearing into character. He anyway. It was 1998. She had flown to Los Angeles, remained “Andy” throughout the filming of Man on where filmmaker Milos Forman was shooting a the Moon, despite Forman’s occasional exasperation. biopic about her famous big brother. The movie was (When the director referred to Andy in the third person, Carrey would gripe, “You talk like I’m not Man on the Moon. The deceased brother was Andy Kaufman, the enigmatic performance artist who even here.”) A film crew captured Carrey’s behindhad died from cancer in 1984. And the star who the-scenes madness, and the long-unseen footage greeted her was Carrey—or was it Andy? His ghost? forms the basis of the new Netflix documentary Jim Those lines seemed blurred: Carrey was spend& Andy: The Great Beyond—Featuring a Very Special, ing the entire film shoot in character. Or, rather, in Contractually Obligated Mention of Tony Clifton. characters, since he vacillated between Kaufman and Carrey’s transformation was compelling—at once creepy and hard to resist. “Let’s say HollyKaufman’s favorite alter egos, including the obnoxwood came along and said, ‘We’re going to reious lounge singer Tony Clifton. When he spotted the star’s real-life sister, he greeted her jovially, the create your sister, mother, whatever it is,” Carol says. way Kaufman might have: “Hey, Carol! Over here!”

“And you miss them so much, you so badly want to Carrey-as-Kaufman asked if she wanted a milkshake. play along. And the person that was willing to do it It was eerie. This was her brother. wasn’t so bad—they were trying their “I think that Jim Carrey was a veshardest, so they had their heart in it.” sel,” Carol says, discussing the expeBut when Man on the Moon came out, BY rience two decades later. She and her in late 1999, Carol and Michael were brother Michael Kaufman have met crushed. Mention the film’s name and ZACH SCHONFELD me in a café in Brooklyn, New York. @zzzzaaaacccchhh they let out a noise like a balloon deflat“This may sound a little wooo-hooo”— ing. “You didn’t find out who Andy was,” she mimics a cuckoo bird—“but I do believe he Michael says. “They copped out, saying there is no allowed Andy to come through him. When he Andy Kaufman.” For Carol, it betrayed her brother’s looked at me, I’m not kidding, [it was like] speakaffectionate spirit, making him seem erratic and ing to Andy from the great beyond.” unhinged, as though his wacky stage behavior was all Kaufman, with his childlike grin and surrealistic he ever was. “There wasn’t anything that was warm repertoire of impressions and oddball characters and nurturing and anchoring.”

Andy’s siblings have stumbled upon a frustrating (including Foreign Man, who morphed into Latka on the hit sitcom Taxi), specialized in the rare art paradox: They resent that their brother is rememof pushing every gag to the limit. He chafed at bered as bewildering and inexplicable, but to parathe term comedian: Kaufman did not tell jokes or phrase the late film critic Roger Ebert, if he had been occupy any pre-existing category of entertainer. He explicable, he would not be worth remembering. did impressions, bombed on purpose, lip-synced And yet, despite Andy’s abrasive stunts and predito Mighty Mouse, played the conga drums, found lection for wrestling women, those who knew him ways to prank his crowds (he once had an elderly say he had a sweet, gentle-hearted nature. “Anyone woman feign a heart attack onstage, then “revived” who saw Andy live knows that he considered himher with a Native American–style dance). The man self a children’s entertainer above all,” Elayne Boosler, was more concerned with challenging and conthe performer’s ex-girlfriend, told me in 2016 (for an founding his audience than provoking laughter, interview about Kaufman). “At the end of every show, and a generation of eccentrics eagerly joined his the audience was indeed let in on it all, and left feelcult. Among them was Canadian teenager Jim Caring happy and satisfied that the up-and-down ride rey, gifted with his own brand of comic lunacy. was all in fun and they were ‘safe’ the whole time.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

43

Culture

MOVIES

Carol tried rewatching Man on the Moon with friends last August. She had to leave. “I found it to be the most, ugh, sappy…” she trails off. “I mean, so sad.”

“Sad, meaningless life,” Michael says of the film’s representation of Andy. The siblings had shared family stories with the screenwriters; none made it into the film. “When I first read the script,” says Michael, “and Andy dies, I said, ‘Who cares?’ Based on this script, he was a jerk.” i was surprised when michael Kaufman agreed to travel 1,400 miles to New York City from Louisiana to spend an hour and a half watching a movie with me. Then Carol, who lives in Chicago, decided to fly in too.

I had interviewed Michael by telephone for that 2016 article, but we had never met. He is a retired accountant and has an excitable energy when he speaks. He has Andy’s blue eyes and looks a bit like his older brother might have looked at 66. Carol, younger by five years (she was seven years younger than Andy), describes her occupation as storyteller—she delivers folktales to schools and community centers—and has a warm, animated manner.

“There’s an Andy spirit to this whole thing,” Michael exclaims when we meet (a neat compliment—like Yoko Ono describing your music as “Lennon-esque”). “Plus,” Carol adds, “Michael and I don’t get to see each other often. So this is really nice.”

That, too, reflected Andy’s spirit: Both insist he loved family. Kaufman didn’t wear a sweatshirt emblazoned with the words “I love grandma” onstage as a goof. He did it so his grandmother would see it on TV. Michael is fiercely protective of Andy’s legacy—particularly from those who might exploit his name for personal gain. (The biggest offender: Andy’s collaborator Bob Zmuda, who

44

NEWSWEEK.COM

Losing a famous sibling who is constantly theorized to have faked his own death? Good luck finding a support group for that. published a book several years ago, claiming, with minimal evidence, that Andy’s death was a prank and he’d be revealing himself any day now.) He’s also leery of Jim & Andy. Michael did not like the trailer, which showed Carrey’s hyped-up Tony Clifton ramming his car into a wall (more of a Carrey move than a Kaufman move, he felt).

Michael resented that he was denied permission to see the film, and was even less thrilled to see on IMDb that “The Kaufman Family” was thanked in the end credits. What if The Kaufman Family hated the movie?

The Kaufman Family was about to find out.

w e wa t c h j i m & a n dy o n a projector screen in a Brooklyn bar’s backroom. The documentary has the feel of a really good DVD bonus feature. As soon as it starts, with Carrey’s bearded, 55-year-old face filling the screen (the footage from 1999 is interspersed with a probing present-day interview), Andy’s siblings grow quiet, watch studiously, occasionally scribbling notes on scraps of paper.

Every once in a while, Michael shouts corrections at the screen; when Carrey mentions that Andy would book shows and not show up, Michael interjects: “He would show up! He just wouldn’t perform.” And he bristles whenever the real-life Zmuda appears, chatting with Carrey on the set, boasting that Andy would have been “creatively bankrupt” without his contributions. (This clip is shrewdly paired with an interview in which Carrey observes that “everybody wants to be the most important person” in Andy’s orbit. “So true,” Carol blurts out.) When Carrey does his Tony Clifton impression, Michael

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

FROM LEFT: HE RB BAL L/NBCU PHOTO BANK/GET T Y; UNIVE RSAL STUDIOS/GET T Y; ZACH SCHONFELD

MAN OVERBOARD Far left, Kaufman doing his “Foreign Man” character on SNL in 1975 and, near left, Carrey doing the same in Man on the Moon. Below, Carol Kaufman-Kerman and Michael Kaufman.

says, “Jim is more influenced by Zmuda than Andy in his Tony”—an esoteric observation that might be comprehensible only to the die-hard Andy disciple. Michael would know, though: On rare occasions, Andy had him play Clifton. It was liberating to become such a belligerent blowhard.

“I say every therapist should have in their bag of medicine ‘Be Tony Clifton for a day,’” Michael says, laughing.

In the documentary, Carrey tries to describe the freedom he felt while embodying Clifton, and Andy’s siblings recall that aspect of Andy’s work. There was no fear of bombing when you were with him, Carol says.

“When he would say, ‘Hey, Carol, come onstage! Hey, Carol, you want to sing?’—when you were under Andy’s wing, you felt such liberation.”

At one point in Jim & Andy, Carrey describes Andy’s father, Stanley, as a guy who “expected the all-American kid” and instead got “some effeminate, kooky, creative insane person.”

Accurate? Carol nods cautiously.

“Andy was the firstborn,” she says.

“I think he learned to be tolerant through Andy.” But when Carrey’s Andy is shown bickering with his fictionalized father in a dressing room, Michael says, “Andy wouldn’t have yelled at him like that.” Carol agrees: “And Dad wouldn’t have walked out.”

We watch Carrey disappear into the role like a rabbit burrowing into a hole. “When the movie was over,” the actor admits, “I couldn’t remember who I was anymore.” Carol even mistakes Carrey for Andy when she sees him sparring with wrestler Jerry Lawler on Letterman: “That was Jim?” She gets choked up watching Carrey, bald and sickly, portraying her brother’s battle with cancer. During his final weeks, Andy traveled to the Philippines in search of psychic treatments. Melancholy becomes palpable in our screening room.

“I have to say, I liked it,” Carol says when the credits roll. Did it capture the real Andy? “I think it got closer to the real Jim.” In Moon, the actor was just a vessel for Andy. But in Jim & Andy, Carrey’s manic comic energy vanishes at times, and he is an intriguing character himself, a guy prone to disarmingly philosophical musings on life, fate and celebrity.

Michael favors the documentary

over Moon too, but he nitpicks: Andy didn’t smoke; Andy didn’t say the F-word. “Who was Andy after seeing this?” he asks me. “Well,” I say, “he was someone who took joy in messing with people, who was erratic...”

“For that reason, I can’t say I loved it,” Michael says. Then he concedes: “It’s not their job to set the world straight on what a wonderful human Andy was. So why am I being so harsh?” Carol looks at him and says, “Because you’re his brother.”

Losing a sibling is its own weird, misunderstood category of grief.

Losing a famous sibling presents new complications. And losing a famous sibling who is constantly theorized to have faked his own death, and whose legacy attracts thousands of internet weirdos eager to tell you that your deceased loved one is still alive and hiding from you? Good luck finding a support group for that.

The reality is that Carol and Michael were in the room when their brother passed away. “I saw him take his last breaths,” she says. Still, in 2013, when a 24-year-old woman materialized, claiming to be Andy’s daughter, professing to know secrets only Andy would know, Michael took the bait.

He introduced her at a comedy club, reading a supposed letter from Andy.

Days later, he appeared on CNN to say he’d been duped. Did he believe it? “I was hoping,” Michael admits. “I don’t get sucked in anymore.”

Didn’t Andy want to feign death, though? Carol laughs. “He also wanted to drain the Atlantic Ocean.”

Jim & Andy brought back some good memories, like the delirious wonder of spending time with Andy through Carrey on the Moon set.

“Jim wasn’t being shticky when he was being Andy with us,” Carol says.

“He was almost trying to give us a gift. He was giving us a gift.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

45

ART

Came So Far for Beauty

A new exhibition devoted to Leonard Cohen, in his hometown of Montreal, demands a pilgrimage 46

NEWSWEEK.COM

other, resembling the Star of David), which he designed for the cover of his 1984 poetry collection, The Book of Mercy. It’s a symbol that is all over Montreal this month, as the 375-yearold city fêtes the late singer-songwriter on the first anniversary of his death, at 82, just weeks after he released his final album, You Want It Darker.

Adam Cohen, Leonard’s son, returned to the Cohen family home, at 6 Rue Vallieres, in the Le PlateauMont-Royal neighborhood, to help with the festivities (including a starstuffed November 6 tribute concert at the city’s Bell Centre). “I’m looking at my father’s guitar on a green velvet chair that belonged to his father.

I’m literally sleeping in my father’s room, on his mother’s carpet,” says Cohen, a singer-songwriter himself.

“There’s this familiarity, romance and bittersweetness of all the heirlooms and family objects.”

Adam grew up hearing about “the magic” of Montreal. “There was a lot of propaganda about this beloved city we Cohens were all born in but didn’t spend a lot of time in,” he says.

“Like anybody in the diaspora, we romanticize and hold our traditional values in a much more concentrated fashion than the people who actually his grave sits within the live here, and almost uphold the traCohen family plot, near the ditions more fastidiously.” front gate of the Congregation Shaar As often happens, Cohen’s early desire to escape his birthplace softHashomayim Cemetery at the slope of Montreal’s Mount Royal. The headened as he aged. “I feel at home when stone—near that of his great-grandI’m in Montreal—in a way that I don’t father Lazarus, buried here a century feel anywhere else,” Cohen said in ago, in 1917—is surrounded by flow2006. “I don’t know what it is, but the feeling gets stronger as I get older.” ers, fan art and yahrzeit candles.

But even without that makeshift The artist began writing poetry in shrine, you would recthe early ’50s, only turnognize Cohen’s marker, ing to music in the ’60s, engraved with his Uniwhen he was in his ’30s, BY fied Heart (two hearts, and poems, like “The one upside down and Best,” reflect the poiJUSTIN JOFFE superimposed over the @joffaloff gnant tug of the city:

DE C E M BE R 01, 2017

CLO CKWISE FROM LEFT: MICHAE L PU TL AND; C OU RT ESY OF THE NATI ONAL FILM BOARD; COURTESY OF SÉBASTIEN ROY; COURTESY OF GO ODMAN GALLERY, KAUFMANN REPET TO + KOW

Culture

I died when I left Montreal I met women I didn’t understand I pretended to get interested in food But it was all The Fear of Snow It was all the Will of G-d It was all The Heart swallowing The Other Organs You can hear the poem read by Leonard Cohen—with that sonorous, rumbly, meditative voice—in a piece called “The Poetry Machine,”

by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, featuring recordings of much of his work. It is one of 20 works in “Leonard Cohen: Une brèche en toute chose/A Crack in Everything,” at Musée d’Art Contemporain de

Montréal, which runs through April 9, 2018. Six of MAC’s galleries are devoted to the exhibition, a massive undertaking incorporating music, video, writings, virtual reality and performance to re-create Cohen’s work through 40 artists from 10 countries. Planning began three years ago, well before the artist’s death on November 7 last year.

Cohen’s diaspora is reflected in the Sanchez Brothers’ “I Think I Will Follow You Very Soon,” a re-creation of the Los Angeles room where Leonard spent the final years of his life.

Elsewhere, Michael Rakowitz’s “I’m Good at Love, I’m Good at Hate, It’s in Between I Freeze” presents a film

HELLO DARKNESS

Clockwise from left: At MAC, Kara Blake’s “The Offerings,” a montage of Cohen’s creative process; Cardiff and Miller’s “The Poetry Machine”; and Candace Breitz’s “I’m Your Man,” in which elderly Cohen fans sing the album You Want It Darker straight through.

about Cohen’s time in Israel during the Yom Kippur War in the ’70s, a moment of internal crisis for him, putting his strong sense of Jewish identity and his love of pacifism at odds.

Other works include a loop of 18 musicians (the National, Moby and Feist among them) covering classics like “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” And performance artist Clara Furey, daughter of celebrated Montreal composer and filmmaker Lewis Furey (who collaborated with Cohen on the screenplay for the 1985 film Night Magic), has a work inspired by Cohen’s poem “When Even The.” Wearing only a pair of jeans, she performs a slow-moving, intimate meditation on sensuality and death, two themes that informed much of Cohen’s work.

The exhibition’s variety of mediums and moods reflects Cohen’s interdisciplinary oeuvre, managing to capture his singular mix of sorrow and hope, spirituality and sensuality. It also neatly sidesteps the trite and fawning.

“This was never a sycophantic exercise,” says MAC Director and Chief Curator John Zeppetelli. “We weren’t interested in presenting Leonard’s beautifully cut suits or his fedoras.”

Adam Cohen, who, with his sister, Lorca, has given his blessing to the show, describes it as an immersive testament to his father’s lifelong irreverence—as critical to his art as romance and humor. “He was trying to avoid the categorization of either his writing or his music,” he says. “He was never interested in genres, neither political nor ethereal nor astral—nothing.”

Leonard Cohen’s disdain for orthodoxy makes him seem particularly apt right now, as well as prescient. He died the day before the 2016 U.S. presidential election. “My father called it all, man,” says Cohen. “He’d been postulating about the breakdown in social order since the ’70s.”

NEWSWEEK.COM

47

Culture

Illustration by B R I T T S P E N C E R

P A R T ING SHOT

Andy Weir writer andy weir describes himself as a sci-fi dork “since day one.” He was working as a software engineer in Silicon Valley when his first published book, The Martian, became a stunning success (more than 3 million copies sold to date). What had begun as serialized chapters posted on his blog turned into a book deal, followed by movie rights, followed by an Oscarnominated adaptation starring Matt Damon that earned $630 million worldwide.

Weir abandoned his former cubicle at a technology company somewhat reluctantly. “I liked computer programming a lot,” he tells Newsweek. “I was a happy little cubicle dweller. A lot of people use the expression ‘You’re just a cog in the machine.’ I’m like, Yeah, but if you take the cog out of the machine, the machine doesn’t work.”

Now writing full time, Weir has just released his second book, Artemis, in which he imagines a futuristic frontier town on the moon. Despite a bestseller, he admits, “I have a lot to learn about writing.”

“When I’m writing, I don’t really see the characters; they’re just blobs.”

48

NEWSWEEK.COM

Your lead character, Jazz, is a woman. How are female readers responding to her?

There’s always going to be a demographic that will automatically hate the book because it’s a man writing about a woman. I kind of ignore them, because there’s nothing I could have done right.

More reasonable reviews say, OK, she’s a 26-year-old woman but she talks like a 15-year-old boy.... A lot of female readers found Jazz grating; I think I made her too abrasive.

The audience has to root for your main character. [But] I’m glad I did what I did, because I’m trying to get better as a writer, to make deeper and more compelling characters.

Artemis has already been optioned for a film.

Any thoughts on casting?

When I’m writing, I don’t really see the characters; they’re just blobs. It’s all very conceptual.

When I finished The Martian, I couldn’t have told you what color [main character] Mark Watney’s hair was! I do have one wild casting fantasy for Artemis. It would be cool if Rudy, a Mountie cop, was played by the Rock. In the book, I explicitly say he’s a tall, blond, white guy, but Rudy has the personality of characters played by the Rock. And if they aged her 40 years, Queen Latifah would make a good Fidelis Ngugi, the leader of the city.

—Stav Ziv

DE C E M BE R 01 , 2017

Have we finally solved mankind’s greatest mystery?

M L PEARSON/AL AMY

SHELL R.

ORBIS/VCG/G ARY OF CONGRESS/C ALPERT/LIBR

ETTY IMAGES

Four brightly appear glowing UFOs parking over a in the sky setts, Massachu g to lot in Salem, 1952. Accordin on July 15, UFO Reporting the National reports of Center, 1,959 in occurred UFOs have setts Massachu since 1953.

The front page of the Roswell Daily Record reports on what is known UFO circles in as the Roswell Incident.

On July 4, 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, discovere d strange debris—the origins of which remain in dispute.

REMO NASSI/AP

IMAGES

Residents of Rome small, gather to watch across bright lights moving 1954.

12, the sky, November earlier, Just a few weeks object appeared an egg-shaped stadium in above a soccer the Florence, causing to game to come a standstill.

On Sale Now!

Find it on newsstands nationwide or at OnNewsstandsNow.com

LET’S CONQUER CANCER

EVERY TYPE EVERYWHERE

“My calling is to give patients every opportunity to fight their cancer with the best treatments.”

- Dr. Christopher Lieu, Conquer Cancer Foundation Grant Recipient

The Conquer Cancer Foundation funds the brightest minds in cancer research working on big breakthroughs. With your support, we can improve outcomes for every cancer patient, everywhere.

Watch our video at: CONQUER.ORG/EVERYWHERE