Monday, july 6, 2015 binder1

INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

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MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015 Copyright © 2015 The New York Times

Sanctity of Truth

Alex’s indoctrination took place amid a rustic isolation.

Feeling Alone In America, Drawn to ISIS PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA BRUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

By RUKMINI CALLIMACHI

Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement when she told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.

For months, she had been growing closer to a new group of friends online who were teaching her what it meant to be a Muslim. They were telling her about the Islamic State and how the group was building a homeland where the holy could live according to God’s law.

One in particular, Faisal, had become her nearly constant companion, spending hours each day with her on Twitter,

Skype and email.

Alex began leading a double life. She kept teaching at her church, but her truck’s radio was no longer tuned to the Christian hits on K-LOVE. Instead, she hummed along with the ISIS anthems blasting out of her turquoise iPhone.

“I felt like I was betraying God and Christianity,” said Alex, who asked to be identified only by a pseudonym she uses online. “But I also felt excited because I had made a lot of new friends.”

The Islamic State is making a relentless effort to recruit Westerners into its ranks, eager to exploit them for their

“I felt like I was betraying God and Christianity. But I also felt excited because I had made a lot of new friends.” outsize propaganda value.

Through January this year, nearly 4,000 Westerners were thought to have traveled to join jihadists in Syria and Iraq.

The Islamic State’s recruiting effort is carried out by an enormous cadre of operators on social media. The terrorist group maintains a 24-hour online operation, and sympathetic volunteers and fans who pass on its messages and viewpoint make it effective, reeling in potential recruits, analysts say.

Alex’s online circle — involving several dozen accounts, some operated by people who directly identified themselves as members of the Islamic State or whom terrorism analysts believe to be directly linked to the group — collectively spent thousands of hours engaging her over more than six months.

Enticing the Lonely To get to Alex’s house from the nearest town, visitors turn

off at a trailer park and drive for a little over a kilometer past wide, irrigated fields of wheat and alfalfa in rural Washington State.

“It gets lonely here,” Alex said.

She has lived with her grandparents for almost all her life: When she was 11 months old, her mother, struggling with drug addiction, lost custody of her. Her therapist says that

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 26

After Same-Sex Ruling, Evangelicals Face a New Reality

By MICHAEL PAULSON

WEST CHICAGO, Illinois — The tone of the worship service was set at the start. An opening prayer declared it “a dark day.”

The sermon focused on a psalm of lament. In between, a pastor read a statement proclaiming the church’s elders and staff “deeply saddened.”

In Chicago, as in several other cities around the United States, Sunday, June 28, was marked by jubilation, the annual gay pride festivities made more celebratory by the Supreme Court decision two days earlier legalizing same-sex marriage.

But here at Wheaton Bible

INTELLIGENCE

Russia’s cultural clash with the West. PAGE 24

Church, a suburban evangelical congregation that draws 2,600 people to its five weekend worship services, it was a day of sorrow.

“I came in with a great sense of lament, because of what happened on Friday,” the church’s teaching pastor, Lon Allison, told worshipers before reading a statement declaring, “We cannot accept or adhere to any legal, political or cultural redefinition of biblical marriage, nor will we conduct or endorse same-sex ceremonies.”

The dramatic shift in public opinion, and now in United States laws, has left evangelical Protes-

The Reverend Wilfredo De Jesús of New Life Covenant Church said the Christian church has been at odds with the culture for 2,000 years.

tants, who make up about a quarter of the American population, in an uncomfortable position. Out of step with the broader society, and often derided as discriminatory or hateful, many are feeling under siege as they try to live out their understanding of biblical teachings, and worry that a changing legal landscape on gay rights will inevitably lead to constraints on religious freedom.

But the challenges are not only external. To a degree that is rarely acknowledged in the public square, many evangelical churches are also grappling

Con­­tin­­ued on Page 27

JOSHUA LOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

WORLD TRENDS

MONEY & BUSINESS

ARTS & DESIGN

In Argentina, wanting power to last. PAGE 25

Hurdles in India for low-cost airline. PAGE 29

‘Wolfpack’ brothers create new lives. PAGE 34

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

O P I N I O N & C O M M E N TA RY Of all the places where conflict could erupt, space might seem the least likely, except in movies.

But increasingly, it is becoming a contested environment posing new dangers.

The United States sees this as a vital security issue. “Potential adversaries understand our reliance on space and want to take it away from us,” a senior Defense Department official, told Congress in March. And while everything from control of nuclear weapons to weather forecasting to cellphone use could be affected, the United States “is not adequately prepared for a conflict” in space with countries like China and Russia, he said.

The specific concern is the security of thousands of satellites and vehicles, like the international space station, that orbit Earth.

America has long dominated

ED I T O R I A L S O F T H E T I M ES

Preventing a Space War space, but many other nations also have valuable assets in orbit.

Satellites enable the Defense Department to locate enemies on the battlefield, verify arms control treaties and ensure early warning if an adversary targets the country with an intercontinental ballistic missile.

In the Cold War, the United States and Russia engaged in limited testing of antisatellite, or ASAT, weapons. Now China, and to a lesser extent Russia, are actively developing such offensive capabilities, including jammers,

lasers and cyber weapons that could damage satellite operations.

A turning point came in 2007 when China conducted its first successful ASAT test by blowing up one of its own weather satellites. The hit unleashed more than 3,000 pieces of debris into space and fed suspicions about China’s intentions. Suggestions

by Chinese experts that, in a conflict over Taiwan, Beijing might be able to shoot down an American early warning satellite only deepened American concerns.

Preventing conflicts in space will require more diplomacy.

China, which has shown little interest in focusing on the issue, agreed during recent talks in Washington to hold regular discussions on space cooperation and avoiding satellite collisions.

Some concrete progress on these issues would be helpful when President Barack Obama and President Xi Jinping of China hold a summit meeting in the fall.

China and Russia have proposed a legally binding treaty that would ban the use of force

or weapons in space, but most experts consider such a pact unverifiable. A more practical course would be for them to work with the United States and the European Union to establish norms for responsible behavior, including not to test ASAT weapons. A United Nations-convened meeting planned for this month should aim to approve a code of conduct proposed by the Europeans, whether or not Russia and China sign on.

The Obama administration is ready to invest more. Officials say an additional $5 billion will be spent over five years on projects like anti-jamming technologies.

The Defense Department is also looking to build satellites with greater resiliency. All of the major powers have much to lose if the potential for conflicts in space escalates further.

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

Counterrevolutionary Putinism Talloires, France For much of the 20th century Russia was a revolutionary state whose objective was the global spread of communist ideology.

In the 21st century, it has become the pre-eminent counterrevolutionary power.

The escalating conflict between the West and Moscow has been portrayed as political, military and economic. It is in fact deeper than that. It is cultural.

President Vladimir V. Putin has set himself up as the guardian of an absolutist culture against what Russia sees as the predatory and relativist culture of the West.

To listen to pro-Putin Russian intellectuals these days is to be subjected to a litany of complaints about the “revolutionary” West, with its irreligious embrace of same-sex marriage, radical feminism, euthanasia, homosexuality and other manifestations of “decadence.” It is to be told that the West loses no opportunity to globalize these “subversive” values, often under cover of democracy promotion and human rights.

Putin’s Russia, by contrast, is portrayed in these accounts as a proud bulwark against the West’s abandonment of religious values, a nation increasingly devout in its observance of Orthodox Christianity, a country convinced that no civilization Send comments to intelligence@nytimes.com.

ever survived by “relativizing” sacred truths.

Beyond Putin’s annexation of Crimea and stirring-up of a small war in eastern Ukraine (although large enough to leave more than 6,000 dead), it is this decision to adopt cultural defiance of the West that suggests the confrontation with Russia will last decades. Communism was a global ideology; Putinism is less than that. But a war of ideas has begun in which counterrevolution against the godless and insinuating West is a cornerstone of Russian ideology. To some degree, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey shares Putin’s view of the West. China, meanwhile, finds uses in it.

Gone is the post-Cold War illusion of benign convergence through interdependence. Something fundamental has shifted that goes far beyond a quarrel over territory. Putin has decided to define his power in conflict with the West. The only question is whether he has limited or allout conflict in mind.

This Russian decision has strategic implications the West is only beginning to digest. It involves an eastward pivot more substantial than President Barack Obama’s to Asia. Putin is now more interested in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, whose core is China and Russia, than he is in cooperation with the G-8 (from which Russia has been suspended) or the European Union.

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Vladimir V. Putin has set himself up as Russia’s guardian in a culture war. A girl in St. Petersburg posing with a picture of the president displayed among portraits of Olympic athletes.

China reciprocates this interest to some degree because a Moscow hostile to the West is useful for the defense of its own authoritarian political model and because it sees economic opportunity in Russia and former Soviet Central Asian countries.

But China’s fierce modernizing drive cannot be accomplished through backward-looking Russia. There are clear limits to the current Chinese-Russian rapprochement.

As a senior European official attending a conference organized by Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center for International Affairs put it, Russia’s is a “loser’s challenge” to the West, because it has given up on modernization and globalization, whereas China’s is potentially a “winner’s challenge,” because it is betting everything on a hightech, modern economy.

Of course, being irrational and quixotic, losers’ challenges are particularly dangerous. Putin has gobbled a chunk of Ukraine after it pursued a trade pact with the European Union. He has said he’s adding 40 interconti-

Russia’s conflict with the West goes deeper than politics. nental ballistic missiles to Russia’s stockpile. He has increased flights of nuclear-capable bombers. The message is clear: We’re leaning in on nukes.

How should the West respond?

It cannot alter the appeal of its values to the world — witness the hordes of people dying in the attempt to get into the European Union. (Rich Russians have also been pouring into the West in search of the rule of law.) So what Russia sees as Western “subversion” (like the tilt of sane Ukrainians toward Europe) will continue — and it should.

The West must protect the right of peoples in the East-West in-between lands. The citizens of Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia and other states have the right to attain Western prosperity through Western institutions if they so choose. Poland

and the Baltic states, now protected by membership of NATO, are inevitably magnets to them.

This new protection should borrow from the policies behind the Cold War protection of Germany: firmness allied to dialogue. The West, in the words of Tomasz Siemoniak, Poland’s defense minister, has been “excessive” in its caution. Holding NATO exercises in Latvia, creating a new 5,000-strong rapid-reaction NATO “spearhead force,” and moving 250 tanks and other equipment into temporary bases in six East European nations is something. But the permanent and significant deployment of heavy weapons in the region is needed to send a message to Putin, as is greater European defense spending, and a clear commitment to maintain sanctions as long as Ukraine is not made whole with full control of its borders.

In the end, the very Western ideas and institutions Putin demeans will be the West’s greatest strength in the long looming struggle against Russian counterrevolution.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

Sanctity of Truth

25

WORLD TRENDS NEWS ANALYSIS

Refugees have swelled the population of Wau Shilluk, a northern village in South Sudan, to more than 39,000 from 3,000.

A President Who Seems Not Ready to Leave

By JONATHAN GILBERT

BUENOS AIRES — After nearly eight years in office, President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina will step down in December. But even as voters weigh their options for a new leader, their departing president has other plans.

Mrs. Kirchner appears to be seeking Cristina to retain influFernández de Kirchner ence.

Argentines vote on August 9 in open primary elections to decide the presidential nominee of each major party or alliance.

To avoid splintering her party, the Front for Victory, Mrs. Kirchner, 62, effectively chose its nominee in June by endorsing Daniel Scioli, the governor of Buenos Aires Province.

Mrs. Kirchner “is trying to continue as leader even though she is leaving government,” said Rosendo Fraga, an Argentine political analyst. Mr. Scioli, 58, needed Mrs. Kirchner’s endorsement to secure the support of the Front for Victory’s voters, who make up about 30 percent of the electorate.

Mr. Scioli has clashed with Mrs. Kirchner’s supporters, who see him as being too close to corporate interests. Just a few months ago, he was promoting business-friendly policies.

The president’s populist political movement, known as Kirchnerismo, has driven the expansion of social benefits, and a string of nationalizations, including pension funds, an oil company and an airline. These and other policies, including heavily taxing agricultural exports and enacting a law to curb media conglomerates, have pitted Mrs. Kirchner’s government against Argentina’s business establishment. She has also refused to pay off foreign hedge funds, which are suing the country over unpaid debts from a default in 2002.

Mrs. Kirchner had expressed support for another candidate, Florencio Randazzo, head of in-

By MIKE IVES

LAO CAI, Vietnam — National flags rustled on both banks of the Red River, but nothing else was moving at this normally bustling border crossing.

One trucker said that seven of a dozen trucks parked bumperto-bumper along a narrow road leading to the crossing had not moved for two months. Another complained it was costing him nearly $7 an hour to keep his cargo of chicken wings refrigerated.

Political ups and downs typically do not have major effects on overall trade ties between Vietnam and China. But they have profound effects on the small traders near Vietnam’s 1,300-kilometer border with China.

terior and transportation.

But that all changed as Mr. Scioli sought Mrs. Kirchner’s support, and apparently acquiesced to her demands. He has called for the government to maintain its central role in the economy and has hinted that he would not be conciliatory to corporations.

“Scioli is going to be completely under the thumb of Cristina,” said Melanie Russo, a 22-yearold university student, using Mrs. Kirchner’s first name, as most Argentines do.

The Argentine Constitution bars Mrs. Kirchner from running for a third consecutive term, although she will be allowed to run in four years.

Before the death of her husband and predecessor, Néstor Kirchner, in 2010 at 60, the couple had expected to stay in power by swapping places.

“The president will continue to be the figurehead of Kirchnerismo, so it’s naturally an option to contemplate,” said Eduardo Jozami, 75, a human rights activist.

Crucially, Mrs. Kirchner’s popularity is on the rise. Her approval rating at the end of May was 40 percent, according to a Buenos Aires polling company, up from 30 percent in February.

“Scioli’s not making the decisions anymore; we have to start looking for something new,” said Luis Ulloa, 32, a municipal government administrative worker.

Mr. Ulloa said he was now placing faith in Mauricio Macri, the leader of Republican Proposal, a center-right party, who is the opposition front-runners.

If Mr. Scioli wins the presidency, Mrs. Kirchner is likely to preserve considerable influence over his government through her loyalists in Congress.

Some of Mrs. Kirchner’s supporters recently gathered at the presidential palace, singing, “The woman boss is not leaving.” For many Argentines, that would be a welcome situation.

“She’s built a stronger state,” said Juan Carlos Giannantonio, 65, a used-book seller who likes Mrs. Kirchner’s focus on lifting Argentines out of poverty. “And now she’s within the centrifuge of power, she can’t step out for a place on the margins.”

TYLER HICKS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

In South Sudan, Even Worse

By MARC SANTORA

MALAKAL, South Sudan — In places where the fighting is fiercest, no one even counts the dead.

Nearly half the population of the world’s newest nation, South Sudan, is in danger of going hungry. New atrocities are reported almost every day. And more than 1.5 million people have fled their homes.

“There is no more country,” said John Khamis, 38, who has spent much of his nation’s existence sheltered in a camp on a United Nations base.

It has been less than two years since a struggle between the nation’s leaders plunged South Sudan into chaos, inflaming ethnic tensions that almost immediately tore this new country apart. Despite repeated attempts at peace, some of the deadliest fighting of the civil war has erupted in the last few months.

“Survivors report that boys have been castrated and left to bleed to death,” said the director of Unicef, Anthony Lake.

“Girls as young as 8 have been gang raped and murdered.”

Even Colonel Phillip Guarang, the spokesman for the military, the South Sudanese Liberation Army, acknowledged that the conflict was pointless.

So many people are seeking refuge that in one village north of the city of Malakal, Wau Shilluk, the population has exploded to more than 39,000 from 3,000. For more than a month, no aid could get there because of the fighting.

International aid groups had

to cancel repeated trips in midJune because of shelling and clashes. Finally, aid workers went despite the risks, but on the way back gunmen shot at one of the boats .

Tens of thousands have sought refuge in United Nations camps, which were never built to house refugees. Here in Malakal, more than 7,000 have arrived in the last two months, swelling the camp’s population to more than 30,000. With families piled on families, much of the camp has become an open sewer. United Nations officials say they face an impossible choice: open their doors to the desperate, or let people die.

This is a far cry from what international officials envisioned when the decades of war between northern and southern Sudan ended and a peace treaty was reached in 2005. In 2011, South Sudan voted to separate from Sudan, and the leaders of the new nation’s two largest ethnic groups — the Dinka and the Nuer — joined in forming a government.

Then, in December 2013, President Salva Kiir, a Dinka, accused his former vice president, Riek Machar, a Nuer, of plotting a coup. The two had a history of hostility dating back decades, and their personal struggle set off a new round of violence. The fighting spread from the capital and has been most intense in regions where there are oil fields.

The majority of the nation’s budget comes from oil.

“They were very close to taking the oil fields,” Colonel Guarang said of the rebel advance.

Feud at Sea Is Felt at Inland Border In May, for example, a 245-kilometer highway from Hanoi was extended to the border in Lao Cai, the provincial capital, and officials from both countries met to discuss plans for creating an economic cooperation zone here.

But just a few days later, Chinese and Vietnamese defense ministers met to discuss border management, and local traders said the result was a clampdown on cross-border trade.

“Traders on the borders don’t care about the national interest,” said Alexander Vuving, a Vietnam expert at the Asia-Pacific

Center for Security Studies in Honolulu. “They may have that sense of ‘We are proud of being independent,’ but their first interest is their business.”

That goes for Nguyen Duy Manh, a trader who says he used to smuggle beef and seafood into China, and fruit, vegetables and cigarettes back into Vietnam.

“If we sell everything we have to China, then Vietnam won’t develop, and that’s very bad,” Mr. Manh said. “But a lot of workers aren’t thinking about politics.

They just think about how much money they can earn.”

The relationship between Vietnam and China hit a low point last year after China moored an oil exploration rig off Vietnam’s central coast. The tension has lingered as Beijing has built islands in parts of the South China Sea claimed by Vietnam and other Southeast Asian nations.

The two nations’ mutual dependence and misgivings go back centuries. China ruled northern Vietnam for more than a millennium, and the China-Vietnam border was closed after a short border war in 1979.

The border reopened in 1991,

To get there, the rebels had to take Malakal. The fighting raged just outside the camp. Villages were torched; hundreds of thousands fled to the bush; and untold numbers of civilians were killed.

Government forces also began an offensive in Unity State, with reports suggesting that they had reached Mr. Machar’s hometown, Leer. “Eyewitness accounts reported targeted rape and killing of civilians, including children,” according to the United Nations.

It has accused all sides of abuses. While exact figures cannot be determined, activists say tens of thousands of people have been killed since 2013.

“For more than 17 months, women, men and children have been senselessly suffering through an entirely man-made catastrophe,” the United Nations high commissioner for human rights, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, said in late May. “And now, over the past few weeks, the opposing parties have actually managed to make a terrible situation much, much worse.”

Dak Ongin, 54, remembers the day peace was declared in South Sudan in 2005. “I was hoping that peace would last forever,” he said, sitting atop a pile of trash at the United Nations compound.

In the distance, beyond the barbed-wire fence, lay his home in Malakal, and an untold number of dead relatives and friends.

Mr. Ongin no longer expects peace. He said, “If the government keeps misbehaving, we will tear down this fence and take back the town ourselves.”

and trade increased economic growth on both sides, Yuk Wah Chan, an associate professor at the City University of Hong Kong, said in an email.

As dawn broke over Lao Cai’s downtown on a recent weekday, Ha Thi Huong, a trader working near the bridge that is a pedestrian crossing to China, was racing to finish selling a shipment of mangoes. She had sold five 50-kilo crates around 3 a.m. to traders who smuggled the fruit into China under cover of darkness, she said.

But now it was almost 7 a.m., and the mangoes in her last two crates were going soft in the heat.

“If people here couldn’t trade with China for a few days, we’d all be out of work,” Ms. Huong said.

26

Sanctity of Truth

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

WORLD TRENDS

A Woman Feeling Alone in America, Drawn to ISIS sense of isolation.

In early February, a number of other Twitter users read Alex’s timeline and recognized the signs of her growing radicalization. They threw her lifelines.

“I know they seem sweet,” wrote @KindLadyAdilah. “They are grooming you. If you went there you would die or worse.”

“Can I just ignore them?” Alex asked, “I swear I have, like since last night, cutting off ties is hard and they gave me stuff.” @KindLadyAdilah advised her to stop accepting their gifts.

Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 fetal alcohol syndrome, which has left Alex with tremors in her hands, has also contributed to a lack of maturity and poor judgment.

After dropping out of college last year, she was babysitting two days a week and teaching Sunday school for children at her church on weekends. At home, she spent hours on social media and streaming movies on Netflix. Her grandmother, 68, who raised eight children and grandchildren, described her as “a lost child.”

Then on August 19, her phone vibrated with a CNN alert.

James Foley, a journalist she had never heard of, had been beheaded by ISIS, a group she knew nothing about. Shocked, she logged on to Twitter to see if she could learn more.

“I was looking for people who agreed with what they were doing, so that I could understand why they were doing it,” she said.

“It was actually really easy to find them.”

She found people who openly identified as belonging to the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, and took the time to politely answer her questions.

“Once they saw that I was sincere in my curiosity, they were very kind,” she said. “They asked questions about my family, about where I was from, about what I wanted to do in life.”

An ISIS fighter named Monzer Hamad, stationed near the Syrian capital, was soon chatting with her for hours every day, their interactions giddy, filled with smiley faces and exclamations of “LOL.” “did you think of what i said aboyt islam,” he asked in one message sprinkled with typos.

What happened next adheres closely to a manual by Al Qaeda in Iraq, the group that became the Islamic State, titled “A Course in the Art of Recruiting.”

A copy was recovered by United States forces in Iraq in 2009.

The pamphlet advises spending as much time as possible with prospective recruits, keeping in regular touch. The recruiter should “listen to his conversation carefully” and “share his joys and sadness” in order to draw closer.

Then the recruiter should focus on instilling the basics of Islam, making sure not to mention jihad.

Hamad told Alex to download the “Islamic Hub” app on her iPhone. It sent her a daily “hadith,” or saying by the Prophet Muhammad.

Alex’s iPhone began vibrating all day with status updates, notifications, emoticons and Skype voice mail messages.

“I was on my own a lot, and they were online all the time,” Alex said. She occasionally pushed back, questioning how the jihadists could justify beheadings.

But she had already developed doubts about the Islamic State’s portrayal in the media.

Hamad seemed to know a lot about the Bible. He explained to her that Christ was a man who deserved to be revered as a prophet. But he was not God. The discussion unmoored Al-

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ANDREA BRUCE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

‘‘It gets lonely here,’’ Alex, 23, said of living with her grandparents in rural Washington State.

She found comfort in a group of online friends who guided her to convert to Islam. ex, who went to see her pastor.

She wanted to know whether the idea of the Trinity that Christians believed in meant they were polytheists. The pastor ushered her out after 15 minutes, she said.

The next time she attended service, Alex did not stand when the pastor invited the congregation to take communion. “what you do not know is that i am not inviting you to leave christianity,” Hamad wrote, when she relayed what she had done. “Islam is the correction of christianity.”

Two days later, Alex wrote: “I can agree that Muhammad and Jesus are prophets not God.” He responded: “so what are you waiting for to become a muslim?”

Soon after, though, his Skype icon went gray. Day after day, she looked for him, but he was gone.

By the last week of October, Alex was communicating with more than a dozen people who admired the Islamic State. One of her new Muslim “sisters” sent Alex a $200 gift certificate to IslamicBookstore.com. She and others chose books for Alex and mailed them to her home, including a Quran and a study guide.

Among the people who picked up where Hamad left off was a Twitter user called Voyager.

In November, he asked for her

email address and told her his name was Faisal Mostafa and that he lived in Stockport, near Manchester, England. Soon they began chatting on Skype, cameras turned off in keeping with Muslim rules on modesty.

He typically came online when it was 3 p.m. for Alex, which meant Faisal was chatting with her from around 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. his time.

The conversation remained platonic, she said, ranging from gardening tips (“Try planting purple asparagus”) to dietary advice (“Try bitter melon tea to lower blood glucose”). Other times, though, they discussed the details of an uncompromising Muslim life.

The Conversion As Christmas arrived, Alex asked Faisal what it would take to convert. He explained that all she needed to do was repeat the phrase “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger” in the presence of two Muslims. Faisal said she could post her declaration of faith, known as the Shahada, on Twitter, and two people who read it would count as her witnesses.

The night of Dec. 28, as her family watched television, Alex closed the door. She sat on her bed, a crucifix on a shelf beside

her. For a moment, she thought she might throw up.

She logged on to Twitter.

Faisal acknowledged her declaration right away. So did another online friend, who went by the screen name Hallie Sheikh.

Within hours, Alex had doubled her Twitter following. “I actually have brothers and sisters,” she posted. “I’m crying.”

Months later, the Hallie Sheikh Twitter handle came to public attention: That account had briefly interacted with Elton Simpson, the gunman who opened fire on a contest to draw the Prophet Muhammad in Texas, an attack dedicated to the Islamic State.

Starting in January, packages began arriving on the stoop of Alex’s home, bearing the Royal Mail logo and Faisal’s address in England. Inside were pastel-colored hijabs, a green prayer rug, and books that took her into a stricter interpretation of Islam.

The only person who knew of her conversion was her cousin, who was starting to flirt with the idea herself. Together they went to the Dollar Store and bought two toilet plungers. In a park, they put on their hijabs and used the handles to spar in an imaginary sword fight.

But Alex felt increasingly distressed about lying to her family.

And as her secret grew, so did her

Applying Pressure Alex’s virtual Muslim community began making more demands. They told her she needed to stop following people who were “kuffar,” or infidels.

When a Twitter user who openly supported the Islamic State accused Alex of being a spy, others began blocking her.

She offered to provide her Twitter password to anyone who wanted to examine her messages.

“To whom it may concern,” she wrote. “A bunch of people thought I was a spy and I’m not, honest. I’ve been a Muslim since December 28th and I took the Shahada on Twitter and I’m about 92% sure that being Muslim saved my life.”

Faisal interceded on her behalf. He introduced her to the administrator of the @InviteToIslam account. According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, a Washington-based group that monitors jihadist propaganda, the account belongs to a radical Islamist group based in Birmingham, England, that is in regular contact with ISIS fighters.

The @InviteToIslam administrator arranged for Alex to do “a Skype verification.” After an interrogation about her online contacts and intent, she was cleared.

“Your a nice person with a beautiful character,” Faisal wrote her three days after the ordeal. “In many ways ur much better than many so called born muslims.”

He added: “getting someone 2 marry is no problem Inshallah.”

He later elaborated: “I know someone who will marry you but hes not good looking, 45 bald but nice muslim.”

Their talk increasingly began revolving around her traveling to “a Muslim land” that Alex understood to be Syria.

Faisal suggested she meet him in Austria and offered to buy her the ticket, she said. It was only then that Alex searched his name on Google, she said.

She learned that a man named Faisal Mostafa who ran his own Islamic charity called the Green Crescent, with the same address that the packages to her had come from, was originally from Bangladesh, in his 50s and married with children.

Over the past two decades, Mr. Mostafa has twice been suspected of plotting terrorism in Britain, but got convicted only of firearms possession, receiving a four-year sentence.

On March 25, 2009, he was arrested during a trip back to Bangladesh after the police raided

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WORLD TRENDS the orphanage run by his charity. Investigators determined he had been running a bomb-making factory.

He was repatriated to Britain in 2010 after a nearly one-year detention in Bangladesh.

Family Intervention On a sunny morning in late March, Alex’s grandmother decided to confront the man she believed was trying to recruit Alex to ISIS. The family gathered in the living room, Alex’s computer propped on the coffee table, with a Times reporter and videographer watching. Her grandmother logged in using Alex’s Skype ID. No answer. Many tries and an hour later, he answered: “Salaam aleikum. Can you hear me?”

Alex’s grandmother identified herself. “I can hear you,” she said.

He hung up.

Alex’s grandmother typed out a long Skype message to him.

“You need to know she is very important to us,” she wrote. “Why would you EVER think that we would let her leave us under the circumstances you were asking?”

She added: “What are you thinking? We have raised her 24 years to be a faithful Christian woman. Not to be brain washed by you.”

After a few minutes, he replied: “I understand you may consider us being radical Muslims whatever that maybe? Well please don’t believe everything on fox news!!

“We don’t agree with terrorism AT ALL … You have my word but also the word of her friends IN NO way will we ever try to make her harm others or do anything which is illegal.”

She typed: “Nothing you say explains the offer of a trip to Austria, the free ticket, the offer of a marriage deal with an old, bald man.”

He replied that the marriage offer was “a joke.” Then he promised he would not contact Alex again.

Alex agreed to hand over the passwords to her Twitter and email accounts. Her grandmother changed them to prevent her from using them. Federal Bureau of Investigation agents came to the house and downloaded Alex’s electronic communication history after her family contacted the agency.

After the online showdown with Faisal, Alex and her grandparents left for a vacation, seeking to reconnect.

Alex found she could not stay away from her online friend for long, though. Even though she had come to feel she couldn’t trust him, she still missed his companionship.

Waiting until her grandparents were out clamming on a windy beach on the Washington coast, Alex logged into Skype.

Faisal wrote her right away, and months later they are still exchanging messages.

“I told her I would not communicate with you,” he wrote.

“But I lied.”

The Computer Within Many scientists resist the notion that the brain is a computer, Gary Marcus wrote in The Times, because they don’t see the brain as a “serial, stored-proLENS gram machine.” Computers have programs, or applications loaded into memory, and then employ algorithms, which execute steps to solve a problem.

The skeptics say people don’t download programs and our nerve cells are much slower than the transistors that power modern computers. Then there is the digital-analog divide. But Professor Marcus argues that many digital computer switches have analog components and most early computers were analog. Scientists aren’t sure if our brains are analog or digital, or some mix of the two.

“Neural systems like the amygdala that modulate emotions appear to work in roughly the same way as the rest of the brain does, which is to say For comments, write to nytweekly@nytimes.com.

that they transmit signals and integrate information, and transform inputs into outputs,” he wrote. “As any computer scientist will tell you, that’s pretty much what computers do.”

The workings of the brain may be mysterious but aren’t magic.

“If the heart is a biological pump, and the nose is a biological filter, the brain is a biological computer,” he wrote, “a machine for processing information in lawful, systematic ways.”

There is also new research into how the brain perceives the world, upending the idea that humans have a “stream” of consciousness, Gregory Hickok reported in The Times.

Physiologists discovered brain waves in the 1920s, measuring electrical currents on the surface of the scalp with electroencephalography (EEG). Later research found a spectrum of alpha waves, delta waves and so on that correlated with mental states.

Recently, scientists have begun “exploring the possibility that brain rhythms are not a reflection of mental activity but a cause of it, helping shape perception, movement, memory and even consciousness itself,” Professor Hickok wrote. “What this means is that the brain sam-

MICHAELA REHLE/REUTERS

Electroencephalography shows brain waves, which may cause mental activity. ples the world in rhythmic pulses, perhaps even discrete time chunks, much like the individual frames of a movie.”

It may be those frames from the movie of life that lead to biases when it comes to hiring, a task that many believe requires the human touch, Claire Cain Miller reported in The Times. Making conversation and reading social cues would seem to stymie a machine, but computers have proved useful in the recruiting process.

Employers “make hiring decisions, often unconsciously, based on similarities that have nothing to do with the job requirements — like whether an applicant has a friend in com-

mon, went to the same school or likes the same sports,” Ms. Miller wrote.

A new wave of start-ups say that software can do the job more effectively than people can.

Computer robots are moving into careers that were once thought to be safe from our machine overlords. With emotion-detection software, an “embodied avatar kiosk” (robot) interviews visitors at the United States border and in tests does much better than humans in catching those with invalid documentation, Zeynep Tufekci reported in The Times.

“Yes, the machines are getting smarter, and they’re coming for more and more jobs,” Professor Tufekci wrote. “Not just lowwage jobs, either.”

Computers shift the balance of power in favor of employers.

Workers are encouraged to acquire more skills, or to trust that human intuition will somehow protect them. But new machines have altered that equation.

“We don’t need to reject or blame technology,” Professor Tufekci wrote. “This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another.”

TOM BRADY

Evangelicals Face Reality With Ruling On Gays

‘‘We won’t marry two men,’’ said the Reverend Wilfredo De Jesús of New Life Covenant Church in Chicago.

Sunday services at the church.

Con­­tin­­ued from Page 23 with internal questions. Especially in and around large urban areas, pastors increasingly report that some openly gay and lesbian Christians are opting to worship in evangelical congregations and that heterosexual worshipers are struggling over the church’s posture because friends or relatives are gay.

“There is a growing desire on the part of some, even within the church, to combine their Christian faith with the acceptance of homosexual practice,” the Wheaton Bible statement acknowledged.

The result has been a change in tone and emphasis — but not teaching or policy — at many churches. Almost all evangelical churches oppose same-sex marriage, and many do not allow gays and lesbians to serve in leadership positions unless they are celibate.

Some pastors, however, now either minimize their preaching on the subject or speak of homosexuality in carefully contextualized sermons emphasizing that everyone is a sinner and that Christians should love and welcome all.

“Evangelicals are coming to the realization that they hold a minority view in the culture, and that on this issue, they have lost

JOSHUA LOTT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

the home-field advantage,” said Ed Stetzer, the executive director of LifeWay Research, which surveys evangelicals.

A handful of evangelical churches have changed their positions. City Church in San Francisco, for example, has dropped its rule that gays and lesbians commit to celibacy to become members, and GracePointe Church in Tennessee has said gays and lesbians can serve in leadership roles and receive the sacrament of marriage.

But in an era when most Americans, including a majority of Catholics and white mainline Protestants, support same-sex marriage, among white evangelicals just 27 percent are in favor while 70 percent are opposed, according to the Pew Research Center.

“Just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s ethical,” said the Reverend Wilfredo De Jesús, the senior pastor of New Life Covenant Church, an Assemblies of God megachurch with nearly 20,000

members in the Chicago area.

“We won’t marry two men,” he said. “That goes against our beliefs.”

He, like others interviewed, noted that over 2,000 years of Christian history, the church has often been at odds with the culture.

“We’re prepared to go to prison, or whatever occurs, but the church cannot change,” he said.

Fa’Darryl Brown, 34, a gay man who worships at a New Life affiliate in Chicago, said his local pastor had described homosexuality as a sin, but “I just see the subject of sexuality as one that we may have to agree to disagree on. It doesn’t mean that I can’t sit under his ministry.”

At The Chapel in Libertyville, Illinois, which draws about 6,000 worshipers each weekend across eight campuses, the pastor, Scott Chapman, said he did not support same-sex marriage but “we have a substantial number of folks in our church in that lifestyle.”

“We want to be a place that

loves everybody and is open to everybody,” he added.

After The Chapel’s Saturday evening worship, Kevin Woodside, 51, a member, said he felt uncomfortable watching news coverage of the Supreme Court decision and seeing the angry signs held by some opponents. “It’s hard to look at that as a Christian response to this,” he said.

At Wheaton Bible, Mr. Allison said that when he was delivering the statement at that Sunday service reiterating his church’s opposition to same-sex marriage, he guessed that 5 percent to 10 percent of those present disagreed.

“It’s not a sad day,” said one church member, who asked not to be quoted by name while disagreeing with a church leader preaching in the next room. “It’s a happy day.”

Claudia Velazquez, 21, said, “I don’t agree with legalization, but I do respect the human beings.”

And, she added, “At the end they’re a creation of God, too.”

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WORLD TRENDS

Cousteau’s Famed Ship Lies Derelict in a French Port

By ALISSA J. RUBIN

CONCARNEAU, France — In its day, the Calypso was more than an oceanographic research vessel. It was the constant companion of the famed French explorer Jacques Cousteau, as the ship and its captain sailed from the Red Sea and the Amazon to Antarctica and the Indian Ocean.

Now, all that can be seen of it is a skeletal frame, extending outside a warehouse in this small port town on the coast of Brittany in western France. It is difficult to recognize it as the same boat that starred in award-winning films and televised adventures from the mid-1950s to the 1980s.

Over those years, the Calypso and Mr. Cousteau turned into icons of a vibrant ecology movement as they pursued sharks, sea sponges and shipwrecks across the globe.

Today, the Calypso rots in the warehouse where it was brought to be repaired in 2007.

Weeds curling among the wooden beams of its frame, the ship is now a symbol of how Mr. CousAurelien Breeden contributed reporting.

teau has faded in the collective memory and how neither the French government nor his heirs have found a solution for its restoration.

Mr. Cousteau was as much showman as scientist, and he astutely recognized that to get funding, scientific research had to appeal to a popular audience.

By refining underwater filming, he did just that, creating a wealth of documentation of life beneath the oceans’ waves. But he left little clear direction about what should become of the vessel when he died at 87 at his home in Paris in 1997.

Still in use in 1996, the Calypso was in the Singapore harbor when a barge accidentally rammed into it, sinking the boat.

It took days to bring it to the surface and much longer to bring it back to France.

Although the Cousteau Society, a nonprofit environmental organization founded by the explorer, set out to restore it after Mr. Cousteau’s death, there have been lawsuits and disputes that have left the boat’s wooden frame weathering and its famous false nose with an underwater chamber rusting away.

The neglect is hardly surprising, said Gérard D’Aboville, the captain of PlanetSolar, a solar-powered research vessel. The government has never shown much enthusiasm for preserving the country’s ships, he said.

The register of historic monuments lists 43,000 buildings and 1,400 pipe organs, but just 133 boats.

The Calypso’s chances for government sponsorship have also diminished as its fame recedes into memory. “If you ask the younger generation in France, they don’t know about it at all,” Mr. D’Aboville said.

The practice of chopping a boat into bits for recycling strikes many as an insult to a boat like the Calypso that has such an illustrious history. No one was talking about such a dire option when the boat arrived in Concarneau for a complete restoration in 2007, and crowds thronged the quays to see it towed into port. The Cousteau Society handed out red caps in memory of those worn by Mr. Cousteau.

“When we learned that the workshop had succeeded in obtaining the order for the renovation of the Calypso, it was greet-

DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

ed with great joy and pride,” recalled Bruno Quillivic, the deputy mayor for ports in Concarneau, referring to the workshop of Piriou Naval Services, one of the largest employers here and one of France’s biggest shipbuilders.

All went well, initially. But by the beginning of 2009, the Cousteau Society decided the renovations were inadequate and stopped payment. Piriou stopped working on the boat and a series of court actions ensued.

A judge ruled in favor of Piriou, saying the Cousteau Society needed to pay the shipbuilder 273,000 euros, about $300,000, and to remove the boat from the Concarneau warehouse. Piriou said that if the Cousteau Society

failed to remove the boat by midMarch, it would take steps to auction off the Calypso.

That date has come and gone and no sale has taken place.

No city or country has offered the boat a home. And the Cousteau Society has said only that it is in discussions with Monaco, where Mr. Cousteau had directed the Oceanographic Museum.

On the docks at Concarneau, in the shipyards, and among the fisherman, there is little dispute about the right way to pay respect to the Calpyso: It should be sent to the ocean floor.

Jacques Scavennec, a 70-year old sailor, spoke firmly: “It must be sunk 3,000 meters deep and not spoken of anymore.”

TV Show Sympathetic To Jews Stuns Egyptians

GANGI JOURNAL

(Kind of) Giving Away Houses

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

By ELISABETTA POVOLEDO

GANGI, Sicily — Looking for a home? One Sicilian town has an offer that is hard to refuse: It is giving away houses.

But there is a requirement.

The properties in Gangi, a picturesque central town that straddles the Madonie Mountains, are generally dilapidated, some abandoned generations ago. Anyone who acquires one of the properties has just four years to restore it and make it livable. But the offer has already lured dozens of holiday home hunters, and brought fresh opportunities to local builders and tradesmen while energizing tourism.

“For our Sicilian mentality, Gangi was considered to be too far from the sea” to be attractive for tourism, said Giuseppe Ferrarello, the mayor of the town, which lies between Palermo and Catania.

The initiative, he said, “set in motion a mechanism that was previously unthinkable for a city in the center of Sicily,” where towns have shrunk in tandem with the region’s dwindling economic prospects.

Gangi had a population of about 16,000 in the 1950s, the mayor said. Today it is home to about 7,000. Periodic waves of emigration from Gangi began at the end of the 19th century, driven by agents for trans-Atlantic ocean liners selling the prospects of a better life in

Jacques Cousteau’s research vessel, the Calypso, was brought back to France to be repaired in 2007, but a legal dispute has left it to rot in a warehouse.

GIANNI CIPRIANO FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A land promotion is spurring Gangi’s building industry.

America, said Marcello Saija, the director of a network of emigration museums in Sicily.

Ellis Island records show that about 1,700 Gangi residents landed in New York between 1892 and 1924, he said.

Starting in the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina became the preferred destination.

Many family homes left behind were the so-called pagglialore typical of this town. The squat, tower-like structures housed donkeys on the ground floor with the paglia, or straw.

Chickens and goats were kept on the middle floor. The farmer’s family lived on top.

These are among the houses that the city has made available, with the local government acting as broker of sorts. “The bureaucracy is what worries people most, but we don’t sell a house and leave people alone,” said Alessandro Cilibrasi, a real estate agent who assists the municipality in the initiative.

More than 100 houses have been given away or sold for less than market prices. Gangi has avoided some regulations on

pricing by not buying any of the homes outright, acting only as a mediator between owners and buyers.

About half of the new owners are Sicilians looking for weekend homes, like Michele Di Marco, a Palermo entrepreneur who was attracted by the town’s relaxed rhythms. “I am a lover of these towns that personify what was best about Sicily in days gone by,” he said.

The others are primarily Italian, though there are also buyers from several European countries, and one from Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates.

There is a sizable waiting list for the remaining 200 houses.

Priority is given to those who want to start an economic enterprise, Mr. Ferrarello said, citing Wendhers S.R.L., a Florence-based firm that received two free houses and bought another seven to create a 22-suite hotel in the historic center.

“We did this for our children, because we love our territory,” he said. “And we want our children to stay here and not leave.”

CAIRO — The scene is Cairo’s Jewish Quarter in 1948, and Laila Haroun has news for her parents.

Her brother, Moussa, has left to settle in the new state of Israel in spite of the war with Egypt and its Arab allies. “Your son is a traitor!” Laila shouts. “You gave birth to him as an Egyptian Jew, not an Israeli Jew.” Her revelation sets up the central conflict in the Egyptian television series “The Jewish Quarter,” which has astonished Egyptians with its sympathetic treatment of Egypt’s Jews and its depiction of their fierce anti-Zionism. The villains are the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Laila’s love interest is a Muslim military officer viewed as a hero in the Jewish community.

The military’s real-life role in expelling Egypt’s Jews under President Gamal Abdel Nasser is omitted completely.

The series is a stark turn from the overt anti-Semitism that has dominated Egyptian television for decades. And the series is stirring fierce debate here about Egyptian identity.

Some have praised “The Jewish Quarter” for celebrating the more pluralistic ethos that prevailed under the British-backed monarchy, seeing the Egyptian Jews in the series as personifications of a more liberal culture destroyed by Nasser’s 1952 coup.

Others have assailed the series in frankly anti-Semitic terms, for “making the Jews look better Merna Thomas contributed reporting.

than the Egyptians,” as one viewer complained on the Facebook page of the filmmakers.

Islamists and others have argued that the broadcast of the series reflects President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s tacit alliance with Israel against the forces of political Islam since his ouster of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood two years ago.

Fewer than a dozen Egyptian Jews remain in Cairo, and the leader of their community, Magda Haroun, faulted the first episodes for omitting a Torah from the synagogue and for overstating the wealth of the Jewish community of the 1940s .

Leftists gripe that the series falsely labels their communist predecessors as secret Zionists.

Historians say that the Nasserite, pro-military nationalists of that era and the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood leapt together to the forefront of the fight against the new state of Israel.

But the series omits the role of such nationalists in persecuting and ultimately pushing out many of Cairo’s Jews. Instead, it blames the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood almost exclusively.

Lucette Lagnado, an Egyptian-born Jew whose memoir, “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit,” describes her family’s forced flight from Cairo, said the popularity of the series reflected a desire to return to the more harmonious ethos of that earlier era.

But as for omitting Nasser’s role, she said, “That is a problem, isn’t it, for those of us who suffered directly under Nasser?”

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MONEY & BUSINESS

Iceland Faces a Final Test as It Lifts Capital Controls

By JENNY ANDERSON and CHAD BRAY

REYKJAVIK, Iceland — After Iceland imposed capital controls during the global financial crisis, the move helped stabilize the country’s banking system, putting the economy on a path to recovery.

As Iceland now unwinds those controls nearly seven years later, the government is trying to prevent a mass exodus of money and keep the country from backsliding.

It is a pivotal moment for a country that came to symbolize the financial crisis, after its three main banks imploded in 2008.

While some economists point to Iceland as a case study of how to manage tumult, its ability to successfully lift capital controls will test that strategy.

Capital controls have worked for Iceland, perhaps in part because of its size. A tiny island nation with just 320,000 people, it was crushed spectacularly in the crisis but also bounced back fast.

Its economy has recovered nicely, although problems remain.

Iceland’s economy is expected to grow 2.7 percent this year. Unemployment is 3.1 percent, lower than in both the European Union and the United States.

These results stand in stark contrast to Greece and other countries in southern Europe, which use the euro and do not have their own currency to manage. As Greece still scrambles to deal with its debt problems, concerns are rising that the country will have to exit the currency union.

It is rare to have capital controls imposed for such a long time. In 2013, Cyprus expected to institute them for a little while, as it faced a run on its banks during

MATT CARDY/GETTY IMAGES

Iceland is trying to prevent a mass exodus of its currency as it lifts its emergency measures. Reykjavik, the capital. the sovereign debt crisis. It just unwound them this year. In Iceland, they were meant to last six months. Instead, they have lasted almost seven years.

“They are more adhesive than anyone expects them to be,” said Lee C. Buchheit, an adviser to the Icelandic government who works at the law firm, Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton. “They are their own self-justification.”

Although the government is trying to ensure an orderly return to normalcy, its plan is untested.

In 2008, the country’s three main banks failed in a matter of days, sending the economy and the Icelandic krona into a down-

ward spiral. The combined assets of the banks were in excess of $185 billion, or 14 times the size of Iceland’s economic output.

The market capitalization of the stock market fell by 90 percent.

When Kaupthing Bank, Glitnir Bank and LBI collapsed under $85 billion of debt, insolvency proceedings began in late 2008.

But the creditors held such a large stock of Icelandic kronur that completing the proceedings would risk severely devaluing the currency.

The capital controls, imposed that year, were put in place to prohibit money from leaving the country and exacerbating the already severe crisis. While

they have worked broadly, the restrictions have had painful side effects, discouraging new investment and increased the cost for companies to borrow money.

To prevent a large capital flight, the government has given a large group of creditors an ultimatum. Creditors can cut a deal with boards overseeing the estates of the failed banks by the end of the year and give up a portion of the money owed. Otherwise, they will face a one-off tax of 39 percent.

Iceland is essentially asking creditors to give up 900 billion kronur, or about $6.8 billion, in claims against the bank estates and Icelandic residents. After-

Airline Encounters Obstacles And Competition in India

By MAX BEARAK

DELHI — When the fast-growing Malaysian carrier AirAsia wanted to expand, India looked like the ideal frontier.

The country had hundreds of millions of potential fliers, many in second- and third-tier cities that have just a few flights a day.

With one-way airfares as low as $20, AirAsia aimed to capture chunks of tourism and holiday traffic from India’s slow trains.

Then, AirAsia discovered the difficulties of doing business in India. It has contended with red tape and regulations for new entrants that have added significant cost and complexity to its operations. Competition has proved fierce, and persistent price wars cut deeply into profits.

After its first year in operation, AirAsia India has just 1 percent of the country’s domestic passenger market. While initially focusing mainly on smaller, underserved cities in south India, the airline has started flying routes from the country’s largest, Delhi. “We realized that we need to be more

AirAsia encounters high taxes on fuel and price wars. visible, both to fliers and to policy makers,” said Mittu Chandilya, chief executive of AirAsia India.

AirAsia has focused on keeping costs low and wringing out extra revenues by selling inflight meals and entertainment and charging fees for checked bags and seats with extra legroom.

AirAsia exported the model from its home in Malaysia to the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia, trying to capitalize on the fast-growing economies in the region. Among Southeast Asia’s budget carriers, it accounts for more than a third of all seat capacity, studies show.

The expansion has faced setbacks. AirAsia left Japan in 2013 after an impasse with its joint

SAMI SIVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

After one year, AirAsia India has only 1 percent of the domestic passenger market. Mittu Chandilya, the chief executive. venture partner All Nippon Airways. Late last year, the carrier faced its first major crisis, when a plane carrying 162 people crashed into the ocean off the Indonesian shore.

Mr. Chandilya acknowledges that he misjudged India’s stringent regulatory environment.

Taxes on aviation turbines are higher than almost anywhere in the world. Every airline is required to fly to remote regions, where flights often run half full.

And new entrants are prohibited

from flying lucrative international routes until they are five years old and have at least 20 aircraft, the so-called 5/20 rule.

AirAsia has also had to go head-to-head with IndiGo, which commands almost 40 percent of the market, according to government statistics. On each new route opened by AirAsia India, IndiGo has followed, setting off a price war.

Mr. Chandilya has been pushing for reforms, like lowering the tax on aviation turbine fuel. Each

ward, those creditors will be able to move any money recovered out of Iceland.

Another group of overseas creditors, who hold about 300 billion kronur in short-term debt and other assets, will have the option to participate in currency auctions or to exchange their debt for longer-term government bonds denominated in kronur or euros.

“It is a well-thought-out and credible plan to get rid of the capital controls as quickly as possible,” said Jon Danielsson, a professor at the London School of Economics. “It puts the interests of the economy first while being fair to foreign creditors.”

Indian state controls its own taxes on aviation turbine fuel, and in many places it is kept as high as 30 percent. More than half of AirAsia India’s operating costs are fuel-related.

High taxes extend to maintenance and Indian airlines often take their aircraft to nearby countries for work. AirAsia India plans to send its planes to Malaysia or Singapore for servicing.

“I talk to ministers and policy makers about how they can help the industry and promote growth, but it is very difficult to get them to understand that reducing these taxes will probably boost their states’ economies,” he said.

The Ministry of Civil Aviation has put forward a proposal to ease the 5/20 rule.

To inaugurate the Delhi hub in May, government officials and investors were flown over northern India before circling over the Taj Mahal, and then returning to Delhi. The flight also represented the entry of AirAsia India’s fourth plane into its fleet.

“When our first plane landed there, I made sure we could park it right between two of IndiGo’s planes,” Mr. Chandilya said. “I wanted their passengers to see us. We’re taking on the big dog.

We’re now inside IndiGo’s fort.”

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MONEY & BUSINESS

Marketers Chase Millennial Crowd

By HILARY STOUT

The makers of Tic Tacs had a problem. After 18 months of internal study, they had concluded that the all-important millennial generation might not be content with a mere mint.

So a new and more amusing Tic Tac is arriving at store shelves — the Tic Tac Mixer, which changes headed — out from the younger flavors as it melts on the tongue. part of their life stage to where From cherry to cola, for example, they’re in their first profession, or from peach to lemonade. they’re getting married, having It’s yet another play in the milchildren and influencing more spending,” said Christine Barton lennial mania that is overtaking of the Boston Consulting Group. all manner of businesses. Not But Ravi Dhar of the Yale since the baby boomers, those School of Management said the born between 1946 and 1964, attributes that businesses were came of age has a generation ascribing to millennials — inbeen the target of such fixation.

But this has a 21st-century cluding a dependence on technolstyle of urgency — with constant ogy — applied to the population micropandering, psychographic as a whole. “How people shop and analysis, a high-priced shadconsume information, that’s realow industry of consultants and ly changing beyond the millennistudy after study. als,” he said.

All cater to a generation viewed The research firm Forrester as people born from about 1980 to recently issued a report titled: 2000, whose youngest members “The Kids Are Overrated: Don’t aren’t even out of their teenage Worry About the Millennials.” years.

It noted that baby boomers Goldman Sachs is researching were more affluent and bigger what millennials are naming their spenders, unhip though they babies. GameStop, a maker of vidmay be. “ W h i le some eo games, promotes businesses must its “insider knowltarget millennials edge” of the generbecause of the naation. Even coffee — an industry that ture of their prodwould seem to have ucts, most do not a hold on the generneed to,” the report said. “When such ation — is working companies do pine up strategy. for twenty-some“The reality is that Gen M-ers things, they resemdrink more speble the desperation of a nerdy teenager cialty coffee than who, smitten with any other generaa prom queen, fortion,” wrote Heather Ward, a research lornly asks, ‘Why analyst. “As spedoesn’t she love me Tic Tac added more back?’ ” cialty coffee profesflavors to its line of Brittany Nicole sionals, how do we Miller celebrated make sure we are candy to appeal to her 29th birthday giving them the atyoung people. in May. Her age tention they need?” makes her the tarshe continued in a paper prepared for the Specialty get of much of the corporate afCoffee Association of America. fection, a fact that she says she But some analysts and conhas experienced “ad nauseam.”

Ms. Miller is divorced and sumers have begun to ask, what works as a massage therapist about the rest of us? After all, the and a model. She lives with two millennial generation has less male roommates (who are not wealth and more debt than otha couple) in a rented townhome er generations did at the same in Danville, California, and she age, thanks to student loans and likes to buy vintage clothes. In the lingering effects of the deep some ways, she is a stereotypical recession. Though millennials millennial; in others, she is not. are hailed as the first generation “It can be a little overboard, the of “digital natives,” the over-40 generalizing,” she said. (and 50 and 60) sets have become Jason Dorsey, who at 36 considpretty adept when it comes to smartphones and other devices. ers himself among the older milStill, this most coveted genlennials, founded the Center for Generational Kinetics in Austin, eration is huge — about 80 milTexas, five years ago and is often lion strong in the United States invited to speak about his generalone, larger than any other demographic group. And it reation at conferences and events.

The center, which advises corpocently crossed a milestone: As of March, there are more millenrate clients in many industries, focuses its research efforts on nials in the American work force “generational context,” he said, than Generation Xers or baby “not generational silos.” boomers, according to the Pew Really, he and others say, milResearch Center. The consulting firm Accenture estimates that lennials are probably just a leadmillennials will spend $1.4 triling indicator of where life is headlion annually by 2020, and they ed for everyone. are expected to inherit about $30 “Definitely we want to be inclubillion in the coming years. sive of millennials,” he said, “but “Why you’re seeing the fervor we don’t want to forget the people now is just where millennials are who brought us to the dance.”

With less cash to spend, the young still get attention.

YANA PASKOVA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Gap is closing stores as rivals like H&M and Zara lure customers. A Gap in Manhattan.

Foreign Brands Become Dominant

By HIROKO TABUCHI and HILARY STOUT

At 8:50 on a Wednesday morning, more than 20 shoppers hovered in front of H&M’s new global flagship store in Manhattan, eager to get inside.

Directly across the street, a Gap store was also preparing to open. A lone woman stood in front, handing out fliers for a Cuban restaurant.

One by one, Gap, J. Crew, American Apparel and Abercrombie & Fitch have reported slumping sales, while chic and cheap foreign fast-fashion brands like H&M, Uniqlo and Zara are opening bustling stores.

American midmarket fashion has lost its way. Gap — once so cool that the actress Sharon Stone wore one of its turtlenecks, with a Valentino skirt, to the 1996 Oscars — is closing a quarter of its 675 North American stores over the next few years.

But the closures represent the latest in a decade of stumbles for a brand that Gap was was. In 1998, its “Khaki Swing” television commercial, all smiles and American optimism, aired to 76 million viewers during the final episode of “Seinfeld.” The brand also became seared in popular consciousness that year as the maker of Monica Lewinsky’s infamous stained blue dress.

“We had our moments of glory, but they’re not followed with consistent moments of glory,” Art Peck, Gap’s chief executive, told investors at Gap’s corporate headquarters in San Francisco. “None of us are happy with our performance now.”

Once the master of casual clothing, the company is finding that its American customer base has splintered. Luxury is booming; at the other end of the market, discount retailers like T. J. Maxx and Burlington Stores are seeing robust gains.

Gap, Abercrombie and their peers are stuck in the middle.

The legions of teenagers Vanessa Friedman contributed reporting.

and young adults now turn to juggernauts like H&M, based in Sweden, and Zara, owned by the Spanish company Inditex, which turn out cheaper versions of runway trends in weeks. H&M’s 368 stores in the United States, set to grow by 65 this year, get a fresh shipment of styles daily. Uniqlo, owned by the Japanese giant Fast Retailing, markets basics at low price points, in tens of colors in high-tech fabrics, and offers midprice collections by designers and celebrities.

“Back in the ’80s and ’90s, there wasn’t real access to higher-level fashion,” said Kate Davidson Hudson, chief executive of Editorialist, an online fashion magazine. “It was the heyday of business casual, and stores did well selling core staples. But now, everybody sees what’s on the runways on social media

Old formulas and a dying mall culture weigh on retailers. and on blogs, and everybody’s a critic, and shoppers want it as soon as they see it. Brands like Gap just feel very dated.”

Sales at Gap stores open for at least a year have fallen for 13 straight months. Gap’s upmarket brand, Banana Republic, has also stumbled, though Gap’s cheaper Old Navy label has done well. At Abercrombie & Fitch, comparable sales have fallen for three straight years, and the brand is in the midst of an overhaul.

American brands are also saddled with the remnants of a shopping mall culture that is fast vanishing. Many of Gap’s coming store closures are expected to be at malls that have suffered from declining foot traffic.

By contrast, overseas retailers, from the start, are used to operating all of their loca-

tions as high-grossing flagship stores.

“The mall doesn’t really exist abroad as it does here,” said William Susman, managing director at Threadstone Partners, a New York consumer and retail advisory firm.

A shopper at a Uniqlo in Manhattan, Dhushyanthy Tharan, said she found the selection better than at the Gap. “I love their materials, the cotton and linen, and their style,” she said.

Mr. Peck and his team seemed to suggest to investors that Gap’s brands will be trying to get new styles into stores more quickly. But it will be difficult for Gap and other American brands to catch up to the likes of Zara and other fast-fashion retailers, some of whom have been coming under scrutiny lately for their heavy reliance on low-wage factory workers working in grueling conditions, as well as for the environmental toll of throwaway fashion.

Most pressing for declining American brands, retail specialists say, is bringing inspiration to their clothing lines.

“There’s no creative direction, there’s no creative identity, and the shopper can perceive that,” Ms. Davidson Hudson said. “Gap needs to say: Here are the two silhouettes that we think are important this season.

These are the two we’re standing behind. Here’s your perfect pair.”

Daniel Kulle, president of H&M in the United States, had this advice for his American rivals: He said that H&M still saw “a huge opportunity to grow, for the next couple of years,” in the United States.

“If you don’t keep constantly updating your fleet, if you don’t have the right trends and collections season after season, your customers are just going to go somewhere else,” Mr. Kulle said in an interview.

“You have to keep your customers curious,” he said. “Then they have to keep coming into your stores to see what’s new today.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

Sanctity of Truth

31

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Lifesaving Stents Get a Closer Look

By GINA KOLATA

Millions of patients have had stents — small wire cages — inserted in their coronary arteries to prop them open. And many are convinced the devices are protecting them from heart attacks.

After all, a partly blocked artery is now cleared, and the pain in a heart muscle starved of blood often vanishes once the artery is open again.

But while stents unquestionably save lives of patients in the throes of a heart attack or a threatened heart attack, there is no convincing evidence that stents reduce heart attack risk for people suffering from the chest pains known as stable angina. These are people who feel tightness or discomfort walking up a hill, for example, because a partly blocked coronary artery is depriving their heart of blood.

A test is underway to establish the best way to treat angina.

And there is a reasonable argument that drugs — cholesterol-lowering statins in particular — might be just as good at reducing such pain.

Now, the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute is trying to find out whether stents do in fact prevent heart attacks. The answer could change the standard of care for patients who receive a new diagnosis of heart disease.

The typical treatment for angina is to thread a narrow catheter up from a blood vessel in the groin to the heart, squirt in a dye that allows a cardiologist to see blockages in arteries on X-rays, and then insert a stent in the blocked areas. Stents are safe but expensive; in the United States, they generally cost more than $10,000. And stents are not always a permanent solution to chest pain.

Stents were introduced in the

1990s, and because they relieved pain and were far less invasive than bypass surgery, they became the treatment of choice.

Doctors and patients started to believe they also saved lives in stable patients.

“The thought was, better to go in and open it up,” said Dr. Harmony R. Reynolds, a cardiologist at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York and a principal investigator in the study. “But now meds have gotten so good that it is not clear surgery adds anything for stable patients.”

Researchers tried to get an answer with a big study in 2007.

But many cardiologists did not believe its conclusion that stents failed to prevent heart attacks and deaths. Skeptics said most patients in the study were at such low risk that it did not matter which treatment they received.

They were certain to do well, so the study proved nothing about whether stents worked.

Because of the doubts about that study and ingrained habits, medical practice was largely unchanged by its findings. A recent study, which analyzed recorded conversations between cardiologists and patients with stable angina, found that 75 percent of the cardiologists recommended stents and when they did, their patients almost always complied. And, the study found, on the rare occasions when the cardiologists presented both stents and medical treatment as options, none of the patients chose stenting.

The new study aims to avoid the methodological flaw in the 2007 study. Patients are not given angiograms, the test in which dye is injected into the coronary arteries, before being assigned a treatment. Instead, they are accepted on the basis of noninvasive tests that indicate blocked arteries and high risk of a heart attack. Their doctors know only that an artery is blocked — not which one or how much — so they are not able to pluck out patients they believe need stents and prevent them from entering the trial.

Underlying the debate about

MARK MAKELA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES; BELOW, PETER EARL McCOLLOUGH FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The blocked arteries, above, of a patient who had a catheterization procedure, and left, a coronary stent.

the utility of stents is an uncertainty about how and why heart attacks occur. For years, the common notion was they were caused by a plumbing problem.

In this view, plaque — pimplelike lumps — partly blocked a coronary artery and grew until no blood could get through, and a stent was needed to open an artery before it closed completely.

But a leading hypothesis says there is no predicting where a heart attack will originate. It could start anywhere there is plaque, even if the plaque is not obstructing the flow of blood in an artery. Unpredictably, a piece of plaque can burst open.

Blood starts to clot on the area.

Soon, the blood clot clogs the artery. The result is a heart attack.

Certain plaques, with thin walls and bursting with fat-filled white blood cells, are prone to rupture.

A study published in 2011 found only a third of heart attacks originated in plaques blocking

at least half of an artery, as seen on an angiogram. The rest began with the rupture of plaques that appeared to be no problem.

According to this view of how and why heart attacks happen, stenting would not be protective because people with atherosclerosis have arteries studded with plaque. The partly blocked area visible in an angiogram is no more likely to be the site of a heart attack than any other with plaque. But statins could work because they change the nature of plaques, making them less likely to rupture.

Although stents relieve chest pain, medical therapy can, too, though it may take weeks or months.

But proving whether stents make a difference is turning out to be harder than expected.

Many doctors and patients have such strong opinions about the value of stenting that recruitment for the new study has been

difficult. Stents have become part of the fabric of heart disease care.

“Cardiologists think this is a very important study intellectually,” said Dr. David J. Maron of Stanford University in California who is one of the study’s authors.

“But when it comes to their own patients, some cardiologists balk, even though they know we don’t have the answer.”

The issue potentially affects many heart patients. “Half the people over 65 have blockages,” said Dr. Gregg W. Stone of Columbia University in New York.

And once a stress test or an angiogram reveals a blockage, it can be hard to ignore it.

“People believe that if they have a blockage, they have to fix it mechanically,” said Dr. Judith S. Hochman, a cardiologist at NYU Langone and chairwoman of the study. “It seems logical, but in medicine, many things that seem logical are not true.”

When the Mind’s Eye Is Blind, It’s Hard to Picture an Image

By CARL ZIMMER

In 2005, a 65-year-old retired building inspector paid a visit to the neurologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter Medical School in England. After a minor surgical procedure, the man — whom Dr. Zeman and his colleagues refer to as MX — had suddenly realized he could not conjure images in his mind.

Dr. Zeman could not find the condition in medical literature.

He was intrigued. For decades, scientists had debated how the mind’s eye works, and how much we rely on it to store memories and to make plans for the future.

MX agreed to a series of exams. He proved to have a good memory for a man of his age,

and he performed well on problem-solving tests. His only unusual mental feature was an inability to form mental images.

Dr. Zeman then scanned MX’s brain as he performed certain tasks. First, MX looked at faces of famous people and named them.

The scientists found that certain regions of his brain became active, the same ones that become active in other people who look at faces.

Then the scientists showed names to MX and asked him to picture their faces. In normal brains, some of those face-recognition regions again become active. In MX’s brain, none did.

Yet MX could answer questions that would seem to require

Some people’s imaginations are missing the images. a working mind’s eye. He could tell the scientists the color of Tony Blair’s eyes, for example, and name the letters of the alphabet that have low-hanging tails, like g and j. These tests suggested his brain used some alternate strategy to solve visual problems.

Since then, scientists have surveyed other people who say they cannot summon mental images — as if their mind’s eye

were blind. Many of the survey respondents differed from MX in an important way. While he originally had a mind’s eye, they never did.

Reported in the journal Cortex, the condition has received a name: aphantasia, based on the Greek word phantasia, which Aristotle used to describe the power that presents imagery to our minds.

If aphantasia is real, it is possible that injury causes some cases while others begin at birth.

Thomas Ebeyer, a 25-year-old Canadian student, discovered his condition four years ago while talking with a girlfriend. He was shocked that she could remember what a friend had been wear-

ing a year before. She replied that she could see a picture of it in her mind.

“I had no idea what she was talking about,” he said. He was then surprised to discover that everyone he knew could summon images to their minds.

Like many other survey subjects, he could count his windows without picturing his house.

“It’s weird and hard to explain,” he said. “I know the facts.

I know where the windows are.”

Dr. Zeman is trying to ascertain how common aphantasia is.

He has sent the questionnaire to thousands of people and wants to hear from more. He can be reached at a.zeman@exeter. ac.uk.

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Sanctity of Truth

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

Good Hygiene Counts for Animals in the Wild

By NATALIE ANGIER

Northern flickers have a poor division of domestic labor.

Among these tawny, 30-centimeter woodpeckers with downcurving bills, the male flickers are more industrious housekeepers than their mates, according to a new report on their sanitation habits in the journal Animal Behavior.

Researchers already knew that flickers, like many woodpeckers, are a sex role reversed species. The fathers spend more time incubating the eggs and feeding the young than do the mothers. Now scientists have found that the males’ parental zeal also extends to nest hygiene: When a chick makes waste, Dad is the one who usually picks up the unwanted presentation and disposes of it far from home.

“It takes away microbes, removes smells that might alert predators, and makes the whole nest much cleaner,” said Elizabeth Gow, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and an author on the new report. “It’s an important aspect of parental care that we often forget about.”

The new work reflects a growing interest in what might be called animal sanitation studies — the exploration of how, why and under what conditions different species will seek to stay clean, stave off decay and formally dispose of the excreted and expired. Nature may be wild, but that doesn’t mean anything goes anywhere, and many animals follow strict rules for separating metabolic ingress and egress, and avoiding contamination.

Researchers have identified honeybee undertakers that specialize in removing corpses from the hive, and they have located dedicated underground toilet chambers of African mole rats.

Among chimpanzees, hygiene often serves as a major driver of

cultural evolution, and primatologists have found that different populations of the ape are marked by distinctive grooming styles. The chimpanzees in the Tai Forest of Ivory Coast will pick a tick or other parasite from a companion’s fur and then squash it against their forearms.

Chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest of Uganda prefer to daintily place the fruits of grooming on a leaf for inspection, to decide whether the dislodged bloodsuckers are safe to eat, or should be smashed and tossed. Budongo males, those fastidious charmers, will also use leaves as “napkins,” to wipe their penises clean after sex.

Serious sanitation work can be time-consuming and dangerous, as the new study of flickers revealed. Baby woodpeckers deposit their waste in fecal sacs, the mess contained in a gelatinous outer coating “like a water balloon,” Dr. Gow said. “It makes for easier removal from the nest.”

The little birds can be prodigious sac factories. Where human parents may change 50 to 80 diapers a week, flicker parents remove the same number of fecal sacs a day, each time venturing some 90 meters from the nest and risking exposure to predators like hawks.

Dr. Gow determined that father flickers performed about 60 percent of the sanitation runs, spent up to an hour a day on the task and, in the event of the untimely death of a mate, were happy to let the sacs stack up. “When they’re really strained,” Dr. Gow said, “and the options are remove fecal sacs or feed the kids, they’ll feed the kids.”

Good hygiene is a matter of context. Luigi Pontieri of the Centre for Social Evolution at Copenhagen University and his colleagues study the pharaoh ant.

Unlike most ants, pharaoh ants don’t build structured nests or defend territory. “They’ll live

ANDREW RAE

wherever they can, in places other ants avoid,” Dr. Pontieri said.

“They’ll live in trash, in layers of old food, in electric plugs, between the pages of books. You can even find a colony inside a mealworm, which they ate their way into.”

Sometimes, Dr. Pontieri said, “it can be really disgusting to work with these ants.”

Delving into the secrets of the ants’ capacity to stay healthy no matter where they roam, the researchers discovered that the insects seemed to resist disease

in part through a kind of vaccination program. As the researchers reported in the journal PLOS One, when the ants were given a choice between nesting in clean soil or soil littered with the corpses of pharaoh ants killed by fungal disease, the living ants chose to nest with the fouled fallen.

Uninfected cadavers didn’t hold the same appeal; the pharaoh ants wanted dead comrades with spores.

“We think the ants were actively seeking small doses of the pathogen,” Dr. Pontieri said. “It

Plumbing Reality’s Debt To a Cosmic Lucky Draw

By GEORGE JOHNSON

The Large Hadron Collider sprung back to life in June, smashing subatomic particles with nearly double the energy used to discover the Higgs boson, a landmark in understanding the makeup of the physical world.

With the Higgs out of the way, researchers are setting their sights on more exotic fare: signs of a new physics that not only describes the universe but explains why it is the way it is.

Four fundamental forces rule reality, but why is the number not three or five or 17?

Matter is built from a grab bag of particles whose masses differ so wildly that they appear to have been handed out by a punchdrunk God. The proton weighs 0.9986 as much as the neutron, and each is more than 1,835 times as massive as the electron.

These values, like all the others making up the spec sheet of the universe, seem so arbitrary. Yet if they had been slightly different, theorists tell us, the universe would not have given rise to intelligent life.

Rejecting the possibility that this was nothing more than a lucky accident, physicists have been looking for some underlying principle — a compelling explanation for why everything could only have unfolded in this particular way.

That is not how we ordinarily think of human history. With every event, forking paths of possibilities branch out into the future. Pick one of the multitude that didn’t become real, and we might be living in a very different world.

But physics isn’t played that way: If a number called alpha,

JON KRAUSE

which governs the strength of electromagnetism, were infinitesimally larger or smaller, stars could not have formed, leaving a lifeless void.

Alpha’s value seems no more predictable than digits randomly spit out by a lottery machine: 0.0072973525698. One of the greatest mysteries of physics, the physicist Richard Feynman called it, “a magic number that comes to us with no understanding by man.”

Other values, like the mass of the Higgs boson, or the strength of the force that binds together the cores of atoms, appear to be

just as finely tuned. Bump the dials just barely, and nothing like our universe could exist.

String theory was so mesmerizing when it rose to prominence three decades ago, w ­ ith its extra dimensions and pretzel geometries, that it seemed almost certain to be true — a tightly woven description, when ultimately deciphered, of a universe just like our own.

Instead, string theory spiraled off in another direction, predicting a whole multitude of other universes, each with a different physics and each unobservable except for our own.

might be a way of getting immunized against a disease that could kill them.”

African mole rats build lavatories. When one toilet chamber is too full, said Chris G. Faulkes of Queen Mary University of London, the workers will “backfill it, seal it up and make a new one.”

Like its human equivalent, a mole rat toilet chamber is also a place to primp, and a freshly relieved animal will mark its recent visit with a touch of anogenital fluid daubed on the bathroom floor.

Maybe some of the other universes have spawned different kinds of conscious beings, made from something other than atoms and just as puzzled (in some unfathomable equivalent of puzzlement) as we are.

Or maybe the whole multiverse thing is an elaborate way of saying that there are endless ways that this Universe (singular and with a capital U) might have unfolded.

For years now theorists have been torn between those who reject the multiverse as “a copout of infinite proportions,” as Natalie Wolchover and Peter Byrne wrote last year in Quanta, and those who insist the idea is too powerful to be wrong, even if there is no way to verify that any of the other universes exist.

Plenty of multiverse skeptics remain open to some version of string theory, one that doesn’t require redefining what counts as real. Maybe, lurking still hidden in the thicket, is a magic equation, showing that this universe is, after all, the only one that can be.

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

33

AMERICANA

Black Churches Are Still Targets of Racial Hatred Mourners at an African Methodist Episcopal church in Washington prayed for the Charleston, South Carolina, shooting victims.

By RACHEL L. SWARNS and CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

In Atlanta, former slaves sang their hallelujahs in an abandoned railroad boxcar. In Lincoln County, North Carolina, they called out to Jesus in a building made of old pine poles. Near Cartersville, Georgia, they raised their voices to the heavens from a roofless barrel shop.

After the Civil War, African-Americans abandoned the white congregations where they had prayed as slaves and created their own centers of worship.

What emerged after Emancipation is what the African-American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois and others have described as the “first social institution fully controlled by black men in America.” Black churches ran schools, offered burial assistance and served as clearinghouses for information about jobs, social happenings and politics. They also embodied their communities’ political aspirations.

And before long, they became targets.

In 1870, as the Ku Klux Klan battled to return African-Americans to subservience, nearly every black church in Tuskegee, Alabama, was engulfed in flames. Ninety-three years later, during the civil rights movement, a bomb killed four young girls in a black church in Birmingham, Alabama.

So when the Reverend Henry A. Belin III heard about the recent mass shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he was not surprised.

“You attack the center, whatever you think is going to hit at the heart,” said Mr. Belin, the pastor of the Bethel First A. M. E. Church in New York.

“The black church has been the heart.”

Even at a time of waning atKate Pastor and Jada F. Smith contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy contributed research.

WIN MCNAMEE/GETTY IMAGES

tendance, the church remains an important institution for African-Americans. In 2014, 79 percent of African-Americans identified themselves as Christian, a rate that has dipped in recent years but remains higher than other ethnic groups, according to the Pew Research Center.

The churches have always extended their mission beyond Sunday services.

In the 19th century, they became vital community engines.

More than 100 of the first black men to be elected to legislative office in the United States were ministers, according to Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University in New York.

During segregation, churches became places where black men and women found leadership opportunities denied to them elsewhere. Some became springboards for politicians and head-

Places of worship also serve as hubs of hope and leadership. quarters for protest movements, most recently in connection with the issue of police brutality.

The deacons of small clapboard churches that dot the Southern countryside have become soldiers in the fight to improve public health, organizing walking clubs and healthy potlucks in places ravaged by heart disease and diabetes. And churches still serve as efficient communications hubs, as evident from the political figures who shuffle in and out of pews at election time. In New Orleans, black churches became

channels to share information when residents were scattered and their homes destroyed by the floodwaters after Hurricane Katrina.

“It’s not just African, it’s not just American, it’s not your runof-the-mill religious experience,” said the Reverend Dwight Webster, of the Christian Unity Baptist Church in New Orleans. “It’s what was needed to help a people survive.”

Heidi Beirich, director of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center, said hate groups remained aware of the church’s significance.

“It’s a symbol of the black community,” she said. “If you want to harm black folks, it’s an obvious easy target.”

Even as the church has evolved, racial violence has been a perennial companion. The killing of the four girls in Birming-

Grifters, Killer Gators and ‘Florida Man’

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

MIAMI — Dangling into the sea like America’s last-ditch lifeline, the state of Florida beckons. Hustlers and fugitives, million-dollar hucksters and harebrained thieves, all FLORIDA scheme and Miami revel in the Sunshine State. It’s easy to get in, get out or get lost.

This cast of characters has provided a diffuse, luckless counternarrative to the sun-kissed state that tourists see from their beach towels. But recently there arrived a digital-era prototype, @_FloridaMan, a composite of Florida’s nuttiness unspooled, tweet by tweet, to the world.

With pithy headlines and links to real news stories, @_FloridaMan offers up the “real-life sto-

A place in the sun that draws hustlers and tourists alike. ries of the world’s worst super hero,” as his Twitter bio proclaims.

His more than 1,600 tweets — equal parts ode and derision — are a favorite for weird-news aficionados. Yet, two years since his 2013 debut, the man behind the Twitter feed remains beguilingly anonymous. (The one false note is his avatar: The mug shot belongs to an Indiana Man.) His style is deceptively simple.

Nearly every Twitter message begins “Florida Man.” What follows, though, is almost always a pile of trouble. Some examples: n Florida Man Tries to Walk Out of Store With Chainsaw

Stuffed Down His Pants. n Florida Man Impersonates Police Officer, Accidentally Pulls Over Real Police Officer.

The number of @_FloridaMan’s followers is about 300,000.

“Weird stories happen everywhere, but they usually come to a logical conclusion” the Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen said of the character of the state. “It’s not just shooting fish in a barrel,” said Mr. Hiaasen, who writes novels full of Florida Men, “but shooting mutated, deranged, slow-moving fish.”

Mr. Hiassen cited the car thief who had been caught by the police in the parking lot of a casino by the Everglades. The thief had the bad sense to try to escape by plunging into a pond behind the casino. “As soon as he hits the water, he gets eaten by an alligator,” Mr. Hiaasen said. “This is the way things must be here.”

In fairness, there is also

ham was only one of more than 300 such church bombings in the 1960s, according to “Black Church Arson in the United States 1989-1996,” which appeared in The Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1999.

The violence continued. From 1989 to 1996, more than 200 black and multiracial churches in the country were burned, according to a congressional hearing held in 1997, the article said.

The shooting in Charleston has resurrected fears. Pastors said they were thinking of hiring security guards.

“In churches all over the country people are asking, ‘Do we need someone at the door, someone who is a little bit more questioning?’ ” said Barbara D. Savage, author of “Your Spirits Walk Beside Us: The Politics of Black Religion.” “This is an example of how terrorism works.”

A Twitter account that offers up ‘‘reallife stories of the world’s worst super hero.’’

@_Flor1daWoman, the only person @_FloridaMan follows. And while far less prolific, she is no less wacky: n Florida Woman Arrested For Tying Boyfriend Up With Cellophane. n Florida Woman Tells Police She Knew Truck Was Stolen, But She Didn’t Know It Was “That Stolen.”

Roy Black, a lawyer who has represented his fair share of Florida Men and Women — the

kind loaded with money — said he had put some thought into why Florida breeds its own brand of crimina ls. He said it is partly the polarized nature of the state — very poor to very rich, very liberal to very conservative. It is partly the state’s partying culture — spring break, half-naked people.

And it is partly the legions of immigrants from Cuba, South America, Central America and Haiti who sometimes import their old-country vendettas.

“Where else do you get retired torturers from Argentina?” Mr. Black asked.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL WEEKLY

Sanctity of Truth

MONDAY, JULY 6, 2015

ARTS & DESIGN

Early Digital Flotsam Finds New Life as Art

By ALEX WILLIAMS

In Noah Baumbach’s recent movie, “While We’re Young,” Josh and Cornelia, aging Generation X Brooklynites (played

by Ben Stiller and Naomi Watts) who are desperately trying to reclaim their youth, are struck by what passes for home décor in the loft of their new on-trend young friends Jamie and Darby (Adam Driver and Amanda Seyfried).

The young couple proudly displays a library of movies on VHS tapes, along with music cassettes. “It’s like their apartment is full of everything we once threw out,” Cornelia says with wonder.

The tech detritus of the 1980s and ’90s is finding a second life as a new generation of artists, designers and nostalgists is repurposing the early-digital-era flotsam of its youth as art, home décor and jewelry, along with plenty of iro-

Designers give high-tech detritus a second life as art. ny-laced kitsch.

“We’re just to the point where we can look back at the VHS tape and realize how cool it was,” said Erika Iris Simmons, a 31-year-old Chicago artist who works under the name Iri5, fashioning portraits of luminaries like Jimi Hendrix and Marilyn Monroe not with a brush, but with swirls of tape from old audio and VHS cassettes.

To Ms. Simmons, cassette tape recalls a more tactile association that children of the ’80s and ’90s once had with their gadgets.

Chris McCullough, 40, a Los Angeles architectural designer who creates art for his spaces, renders portraits of cultural icons like James Brown using audiocassettes like mosaic tiles. Not only are cassettes inexpensive and abundant, he said, but they resonate with audiences his age.

“Cassettes represented the

ABOVE, EMILY BERL FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

A portrait of Jimi Hendrix, with swirls of cassette tape,

by Erika Iris Simmons; and a Sony PlayStation lamp,

by Jeff Farber.

first popular portable music medium you could share and personalize yourself,” Mr. McCullough said, before services like Spotify made music “ever disposable.”

Old Nintendo peripherals themselves can also function as art, or at least eye-catching home décor. Jeff Farber, 36, of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, sells pop-art-style desk and floor lamps fashioned from vintage PlayStations and Nintendo 64s on his Etsy shop Woody6Switch, which are intended to celebrate an era when gadgets, even cheap plastic ones, had a certain staying power.

“When I was a kid, technology advanced much more slowly than it does today,” Mr. Farber said. “Like a beloved pet, you took care of it and it gave you joy and entertainment for many, many years.”

By contrast, he added, “today’s technology advances and upgrades are so fast that a device you buy today can become virtually obsolete in a matter of months, so there is no real time to fall in love with it the way you could in those golden years of video game infancy.”

There is certainly no shortage of the stuff. As the life cycle of the electronic gadget shrinks to a virtual eye blink, the mountains of electronic trash continue to rise, expected to surpass 70 million metric tons this year, from about 19 million in 1990.

An art installation set to open at the Brookyln Museum, which has been shown in London and Miami, comprises 14 vintage game cabinets painted in collaged imagery and Day-Glo patterns, and reprogrammed with smirky, interactive games that satirize gentrification and pollution. But there is an undeniable element of Gen X nostalgia at work, too.

“It celebrates and builds on the loss of these somewhat sacred spaces we found growing up going to arcades at the mall,” said Patrick Miller, 39, who helped create the installation. “You could be a hero or a villain in these spaces and be transformed in the games before walking back out into the normal, and sometimes boring teenage, world.”

CHRISTIAN HANSEN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Angulo brothers, from left, Mukunda, Bhagavan, Govinda, Narayana, Jagadisa (now Eddie) and Krsna (now Glenn), who were confined in an apartment, are the subject of ‘‘The Wolfpack.’’

Clan ‘Breaking Out’ in Film

By CARA BUCKLEY

Much has changed in the Angulo family since Crystal Moselle finished filming her documentary, “The Wolfpack.”

After being locked up in their Manhattan apartment by their domineering father for most of their lives, all six Angulo brothers freely journey outside. They have friends, jobs and Facebook pages. They traveled to the Sundance Film Festival, where the film won the grand jury prize; visited their mother’s family in Michigan; and filmed an art movie. One has moved out, another has a girlfriend. Four have lopped off their long hair. The youngest two have changed their names.

Yet for all these bright spots, the film raises questions about their past. “Of course I feel nothing good about it,” said Narayana Angulo, 22. “What I can say is, I do not wish that for any family in the world.”

Ms. Moselle, 34, spotted the six brothers, then ages 11 to 18, wandering in the East Village five years ago. She asked if they were brothers. Shyly, they replied that they were, adding, “We’re not supposed to talk to strangers.”

But curiosity overcame them after they learned that Ms. Moselle was involved in film. She began filming them as they re-enacted scenes from their favorite movies, like “Reservoir Dogs” and “The Dark Knight.” She found their creativity astounding: They used construction paper, cereal boxes, paint and even yoga mats to create elaborate costumes and sets.

Half a year later, Ms. Moselle learned why the brothers were such avid film fans: They had spent most of their lives cloistered in a four-bedroom, 16th-floor apartment in a public housing complex. Since moving into the apartment with his wife, Susanne, and their brood in the mid-90s, their father, Oscar, fearful of drugs and crime, had forbidden his family from venturing out. People were ill-intentioned

Mukunda in his homemade Batman costume.

Govinda, Narayana, Mu k u n d a , Krsna and Jagadisa.

It was Mukunda who defied his fat her’s orders in April 2010, and sl ipped outside wearing a mask modeled on the one worn by Michael Myers in “HallowMAGNOLIA PICTURES een.” Discomfited shopkeepers called the police, and dangerous, Oscar told them. who picked Mukunda up and, afThey lived on welfare, with only Oscar going out for food. ter he would not respond to their “When you’re young, you don’t questions, took him to Bellevue know why things are the way Hospital Center, believing him to they are,” said Govinda Angulo, be mentally ill. He was returned who is 22 and Narayana’s fraterhome a week later.

Mukunda’s escape was a nal twin. “You just accept it.” turning point for the family and Susanne, who home-schooled prompted the other brothers, and the children, said she felt powereventually their mother, to follow less against her husband’s dicsuit. The siblings refer to this tums. “I felt like I didn’t have contime as their “breaking out.” trol over my choices,” she said.

Govinda has moved to an Yet Oscar liberally supplied his apartment in Brooklyn. The rest family with movies — classics, of the family, Oscar included, still live together, yet, save for Bhagavan, none of the boys talk to their father anymore. “I want to move forward, and I don’t want to move back,” said Mukunda, 20, who is a freelance production assistant.

“I feel if we start going back to the old way of talking, I won’t be able to move forward with my life.”

The brothers seem to be thrivblockbusters and independent ing. Bhagavan teaches Jivamukfilms — which became the boys’ ti yoga and is a dancer at the window onto the world.

Hip-Hop Dance Conservatory.

The singular path of the AnGovinda works as a freelance camera assistant and director of gulos began in the late ’80s, photography. Narayana works when Susanne Reisenbichler, at the New York Public Interest a free spirit from the Midwest, Research Group. met Oscar, an aspiring PeruviNone of them seemed to have an musician. They fell in love, major qualms about having exand their firstborn was Visnu, a developmentally challenged posed their lives to the world.. girl, followed by the six boys.

“You know, we still have a long Hare Krishna devotees, the way to go,” Narayana said. “But parents gave the brothers SanI am more hopeful than ever that we’ll all be able to make it out of skrit names, and from oldest to where we’ve been.” youngest they are Bhagavan,

Breaking free of a domineering father to create new lives.