APRIL 25, 2016

You owe

42,998.12

Thats what every American man,

woman and child would need to pay
to erase the $13.9 trillion U.S. debt
Make America Solvent Again
By James Grant

time.com

At Home Above the World

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VOL. 187, NO. 15 | 2016

4 | From the Editor

6 | For the Record

Cover Story

TheBrief

In Debt We Stand

News from the U.S. and

around the world

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7 | Are GOP insiders

giving up on winning
the White House?

By James Grant 28

8 | A bridge that would

have saved Moses a
lot of trouble

WaitNo Woman on the $10 Bill?

9 | Dificult days for

David Cameron

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By Maya Rhodan and David Von Drehle 34

10 | Ian Bremmer on
our automated future
12 | The link between
money and life span

The Billionaire and the Bigots

:KLWH QDWLRQDOLVWV KDYH ODWFKHG RQ WR 'RQDOG 7UXPS
V
FDQGLGDF\DVDUHFUXLWLQJWRRO
By Alex Altman 38

13 | Baltimore, a year
after Freddie Grays
death
14 | The worlds coral
reefs are in crisis

TheView
Ideas, opinion,
innovations

19 | Is Obamacare
contributing to opioid
abuse?
20 | The roots of the
U.S.s love of guns
21 | Betting on a water
bottle that ills itself
21 | A Rust Belt
success story
22 | Next-generation
carpooling
24 | Volunteering
made easy
26 | Rana Foroohar:
Janet Yellen is putting
Main Street first
27 | Joe Klein on what
Bill Clintons crime bill
got right

16 | The heat is on
Brazils Dilma Rousseff

TimeOf
What to watch, read,
see and do

49 | The death of the

pop album?
51 | Whats new on
Broadway
51 | Memoirs of an Iraq
War interrogator

52 | Childrens book It
Aint So Awful, Falafel
54 | TV: The Night
Manager
55 | Quick Talk with
actor Hugh Laurie
55 | Dice comes up
snake eyes

N E PA L : J A M E S N A C H T W E Y F O R T I M E ; M C B R I D E : J AV I E R S I R V E N T F O R T I M E

56 | Movies: The Jungle

Book, Sing Street

Villagers in badly damaged Barpak, Nepal, arent getting much help

Unnatural Disaster
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By Nikhil Kumar / Photographs by James Nachtwey 42

58 | Kristin van Ogtrop

on being the boss at
workand at home
60 | 10 Questions with
writer James McBride

National Book
Award winner
McBride, page 60

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From the Editor

A debt we all
must pay

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G I B B S : P E T E R H A PA K F O R T I M E ; C A N YO N : F R A N K S C H E R S C H E L T H E L I F E P I C T U R E C O L L E C T I O N /G E T T Y I M A G E S

IT IS ALWAYS TEMPTING TO COVER PRESIDENtial campaigns as theater or sport, especially in a

year when the performances have been so lamboyant. But elections have consequences, and
even though candidates positions have a way of
evolving once they are in oice, a campaign is a
chance to assign weight to the challenges America
faces. In recent issues weve done that by exploring the value of free trade and the shifting tension
between privacy and security.
For this issue we invited Jim Grant, editor of
Grants Interest Rate Observer and a wise economic
analyst, to explain one of the most seemingly incomprehensible numbers around: the $13.9 trillion
in debt the U.S. government is carrying on the national credit card. To help put that amount in perspective, we took the unusual step of customizing
our cover for each of our subscribers. (As a result,
weve printed 2,949,767 diferent coverswhich
means that if you are a subscriber, you are holding something of a collectors item.) As we mark
tax day, which this year falls on April 18, its appropriate to remember, as Jim points out, that the
$42,998.12 share of federal debt for each and every
American ultimately represents a form of deferred
tax that must one day be paid.
How far of is the reckoning? There was some
progress last year when the deicit clocked in at
$405 billion, the lowest since 2008. But eight years
on from the inancial meltdown, the cycle that once
provided reassurancein which the U.S. ran up
its debt for wars or crises and then pared it back
during boom timesnow seems to be broken.
With refreshing candor and clarity, Jim lays out the
political and policy decisions that brought
us to this point and what it would take
to chart a path to solvency. The debts
nobodys favorite subject, Jim says.
Its like bad news from your mutual
fund. You can hardly bear to open the
envelope to look at the numbersbut
you somehow feel better after you do
inally confront them.

For the Record

NOBODY IS ABOVE
THE LAW. HOW
MANY
TIMES DO I
HAVE TO
SAY IT?
PRESIDENT OBAMA, vowing that political
considerations will not affect the federal
investigation into Hillary Clintons use of a
private email server while she was Secretary
of State


Price paid at auction for
the chair J.K. Rowling
sat in while writing
Harry Potter

DAVID CAMERON, British Prime Minister,

releasing his tax returns under pressure
following revelations in the so-called Panama
Papers that he once held interests in his late
fathers offshore fund

JENNIFER LAWRENCE, actor, saying the word feminism shouldnt

be controversial because it just means equality

Monogamy
A new study
found married
people are more
likely to survive
cancer

BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN,
GOOD WEEK
BAD WEEK

Distance in miles
traveled by John Kerry
during his tenure as
U.S. Secretary of
State, surpassing
predecessor Hillary
Clintons mark

musician, canceling a
concert in North Carolina to
protest a state law requiring
transgender people to
use the bathrooms that
correspond with their sex
at birth

Polygamy
A federal
court reversed
a ruling that
decriminalized
the practice in
Utah

1,200
1.06
million

C620(
7+,1*6
$5(025(
,03257$17
7+$1$
52&.
6+2:

Number of people who

attached themselves
to a line of mattresses
before all falling down in
Maryland, breaking the
Guinness World Record
for the longest human
mattress domino chain

It is my lack of virtue and I am

unbearably ashamed.
TOSHIFUMI SUZUKI, chairman and CEO of the parent company of convenience-store giant 7-Eleven,

blaming his own shortcomings as he resigned after losing a boardroom battle

S O U R C E : L A W R E N C E : H A R P E R S B A Z A A R

O B A M A , L A W R E N C E , C A M E R O N , S P R I N G S T E E N , R I N G S : G E T T Y I M A G E S; I L L U S T R AT I O N S B Y B R O W N B I R D D E S I G N F O R T I M E

Aspiration
and wealth
creation are
not dirty
words.

I dont know
why that word
is so scary to
people.

WHY DO I WANT TO PAY SOMEBODY IN MICHIGAN A LIVING WAGE WHEN I CAN PAY SLAVE WAGES IN MEXICO OR CHINA? PAGE 10

Count me out, said House Speaker Paul Ryan, discussing the ongoing race for the GOP nomination

CAMPAIGN 2016

The GOPs
plan to look
past the
presidency
and keep
Congress

REUTERS

By Philip Elliott and

Jay Newton-Small

PHOTOGR APH BY YURI GRIPAS

ASK REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS

these days whether they prefer Donald
Trump or Ted Cruz and there is a good
chance they will answer with a third
name: Haley Barbour.
What does the former Republican
National Committee chairman and
power lobbyist who took a turn as Mississippi governor have to do with the
2016 presidential election? Embattled
Senators and Congressmen are holding him up as Example A of how theyd
like to see the 2016 election go, though
that doesnt mean they want him on
the ticket. As RNC chief in 1996, Barbour bucked Bob Doleostensibly the
head of the party as its White House
nomineeand pulled funding from
the presidential contest to funnel it
to down-ballot races. Dole lost to Bill
Clinton, but Republicans ended up

gaining two seats in the Senate and

maintaining a majority in the House.
More than a few senior Republicans who see both Trump and Cruz
as kryptonite in purple states with
tough elections this year would be delighted to settle for such an outcome
again. Its more than O.K., said Tony
Fratto, a top Treasury oicial and
White House aide to President George
W. Bush. No one is happy that Hillary
Clinton is going to be President, but
there are worse things.
The current Republican Party chair,
Reince Priebus, has told both Trump
and Cruz that he will maintain personal control of the $126 million that
donors have given him to spend as he
sees it. Conservative patrons and the
outside groups they fund, meanwhile,
are signaling that they have thrown in
7

TheBrief

TIME April 25, 2016

INFRASTRUCTURE

Bridging borders
TRENDING

HEALTH
The Zika threat to
the U.S. is scarier
than we initially
thought, Dr. Anne
Schuchat, principal
deputy director of the
CDC, said April 11.
Oficials said two days
later there was no
longer any doubt the
mosquito-borne virus
causes the birth defect
microcephaly.

DIPLOMACY
Germany may
prosecute a comedian
who read a satirical
poem about Turkeys
President Recep
Tayyip Erdogan on
live television. Ankara
requested criminal
proceedings against
Jan Bhmermann
(above) under a German
law that forbids insults
to foreign leaders.

King Salman of Saudi Arabia and Egypts

President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi agreed April 8
to build a long-planned bridge across the
Red Sea to connect the two countries. The
$1.7 billion project joins a list of ambitious
attempts to build cross-border bridges.

CHINA AND
RUSSIA
The two countries
plan to build a
bridge by starting
from either side
of the Amur River,
aiming to meet in the
middle and complete
construction within
three years.

RUSSIA AND
THE U.S.
A Russian oligarch
proposed a plan in
2015 for a highway
linking Siberia and
Alaska via a 55-mile
crossing over the
Bering Strait. The
cost was projected to
be in the trillions.

INDIA AND
SRI LANKA
In December, Indias
Transport Minister
announced a 14-mile
sea bridge and
tunnel had received
funding, though Sri
Lankas government
said it wasnt aware
of the plans.

BAHRAIN AND
QATAR
Construction on
the Qatar-Bahrain
Friendship Bridge
was irst proposed in
1999 but, ironically
enough, has been
long delayed by
squabbles between
the neighbors.

DIGITS

TERRORISM
One in five suicide
attacks launched by
Islamist extremist
group Boko Haram
in West Africa was
carried out by children
in 2015, according
to a new report by
UNICEF. About 75% of
the children used as
bombers were female,
some as young as 8.

$250

million
The value of a grant by Silicon Valley
entrepreneur Sean Parker to fund research
into immunotherapy for cancer; TIME explored
the treatmentsand the growing interest in
themin an April 4 cover story

H E A LT H , PA N D A , R H I N O : A P ; D I P L O M A C Y, T E R R O R I S M , C A M E R O N , T I G E R , C O N D O R , W H A L E : G E T T Y I M A G E S; I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y M A R T I N G E E F O R T I M E

the towel on the presidential race and are looking

at other races.
The network of groups backed by billionaires
Charles and David Koch, for example, plans to
spend about $889 million before Election Day,
roughly two-thirds of it on trying to drive how voters cast their ballots. But neither Trump nor Cruz
will see much of that cash. We will not get involved
in a presidential election that descends into mudslinging and personal attacks while ignoring the
critical issues facing our nation, says James Davis, a
spokesman for the Kochs umbrella group. Instead,
that cash is going to help Republicans like Senator Rob Portman of Ohio; Freedom Partners Action
Fund recently spent $2 million on a TV ad for him.
Portman is following national Republicans advice carefully, running a hyperlocal campaign without betting on the nominees coattails. Were running our race, campaign manager Corry Bliss said.
Hoping to be dragged across the inish line is not
a strategy. Similarly, New Hampshire Republican
Senator Kelly Ayotte has been relentless in defending her states military bases and contractors; she
says she wont endorse in this GOP primary cycle
and is likely to skip the convention in Cleveland
altogether. Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson would
not even tell voters whom he supported before his
states primary. Some members of Congress have
even been scrambling to avoid getting named as
convention delegates, while North Carolina Senator Richard Burr plans to join Ayotte in skipping
Cleveland to tend to his race back home.
Even Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan,
who some hoped would emerge as a white knight
from a contested convention, has decided to focus
on keeping his own House in order. Let me be
clear: I do not want, nor will I accept, the nomination for our party, Ryan told reporters on April 12,
ahead of a trip to New York City to meet with some
of the partys most generous donors.
That leaves the GOP down on its luck. Polls
show that Trump remains underwater with key
constituencies in the general election, with 73% of
female voters telling pollsters for CNN that they
have a negative view of him. The same goes for Latinos (85%), African Americans (80%) and young
voters (80%). These groups view Cruz as slightly
better, although he still loses to Hillary Clinton in
most head-to-head surveys.
Democrats are looking down ballot as well, with
seven Senate Republican seats rated as either tossups or leaning Democratic, and at least 14 House
GOP seatsabout half the number Democrats
would need to take the majorityare up for grabs.
If the wave is huge and brings in all of the surfboards, we have the margins, says a House Democratic strategist. But its hard to predict the size of
the November wave when were in April.

DATA

NATURES
COMEBACKS
The global wild
tiger population
has increased to
3,890, according
to the latest
census by WWF
and the Global
Tiger Forum. Here
are other animals
making returns
from endangered
conditions:

California
condor
From 22 in 1982
to hundreds today
MAIDEN OVER Kate Middleton takes part in a charity cricket match with former Indian cricketer Dilip Vengsarkar in
Mumbai on April 10. Prince William and the Duchess of Cambridge toured India and Bhutan in their irst-ever oficial visit
to the region. Photograph by Kunal PatilHindustan Times/Sipa USA

BRITAIN

Hard times for

David Cameron
BRITISH PRIME MINISTER DAVID CAMERON MADE
his tax returns public on April 11, under pressure
from revelations in the Panama Papers about his fathers ofshore investment vehicle. Although he has
not been accused of any wrongdoing, the feud over
his inances adds to the controversies the embattled
PM is facing:
FRACTURED PARTY The referendum on

Britains membership in the E.U. planned

for June 23 has exposed a deep rift in Camerons ruling Conservative Party, with six
members of his Cabinet breaking
with the Prime Minister to lobby for
a Brexit. Former party leader Iain
Duncan Smith resigned from the
front bench in March in a move
widely seen as a challenge to
Camerons leadership.

TAX TROUBLES Cameron unveiled new rules to

tackle tax evasion after the Panama Papers, but

the revelation that his family beneited from an
ofshore fund is embarrassing, as he has long
been a critic of similar tax dodges. The afair has
drawn comparisons to scandals that helped bring
down John Majors Conservative government in
the 1990s.
EUROPEAN DISUNION The sterling took a hit

April 12 after a national poll found that more Brits

wanted to leave the E.U. than remain. While
the Brussels attacks have stoked nativist sentiment, Camerons tax issues have also hurt
his credibility as the nations cheerleader for
the remain camp. If Britain does vote to
leave the E.U. in June, Camerons time
in oice is almost certainly up.
DAN STEWART
Cameron became the irst
British Prime Minister to
publish his tax records

Humpback
whale
Numbers are
rising in Australia

Indian rhino
Conservation has
lifted population
to 3,000

Panda
Wild panda totals
rose 17% in China
over 12 years

TheBrief

THE RISK REPORT

presented by

Trump and Sanders have

tapped into a dangerousand
wronganti-trade sentiment
By Ian Bremmer

DONALD TRUMP AND BERNIE SANDERS HAVE BUILT

their campaigns on opposition to trade. Trump says the
U.S. has lost manufacturing jobs because American trade
negotiators arent smart or tough enough to cut shrewd
deals with China, Mexico and Japan. President Trump, he
promises, will bring those jobs home.
Sanders, on the contrary, says that business elites, their
lobbyists and their willing accomplices within the political establishment know exactly what theyre doing. They
are the one percent, crafting trade terms to enrich themselves at the expense of working people. Why do I want
to pay somebody in Michigan a living wage when I can pay
slave wages in Mexico or China? reasons Corporate America, according to Sanders.
Both candidates caricature reality. Globalizationthe
processes by which ideas, people, money, goods and services cross borders at unprecedented speedhas created
two sets of winners. First, Sanders is right that the worlds
richest have increased their share of global wealth. Today,
the worlds 85 richest people own the same amount of
wealth as the bottom 50% of the global population. There
has been major progresshundreds of millions of people
in developing countries have been lifted out of poverty
into the global middle class as emerging markets ramp up
their industrial production. But between 2001 and 2013,
Americas trade deicit with China cost the U.S. 3.2 million jobs, three-quarters of which were in manufacturing.
Trump is right about that.

10

TIME April 25, 2016

ing jobs over the past six

years. Reshoring has
increased the number of
U.S. manufacturing jobs
from about 11.5 million in
2010 to about 12.5 million
today. Trump and Sanders
havent noted that.
BUT THATS NOT the end
of the story. The U.S. remains far below the peak
of 19.5 million manufacturing jobs in 1979, and
the longer-term trend
is toward technological
change that increases eiciency by eliminating jobs
for good. Heres where
the Trump and Sanders
messages are especially
dangerous.
Most of these jobs are
never coming back. Just
as the automobile killed
the horse and buggy, so
the automation of manufacturing will sideline the
factory worker in coming yearsin the U.S., in
China and everywhere.
The winner from globalizations next wave will
not be the Chinese or
American factory worker
but those who proit from
the fast-increasing eiciency of the developed
worlds machines.
Those who claim they

can restore lost jobs and

those who cheer reshoring are missing this, and
they will ignore the urgent need to retrain workers for the (very diferent)
jobs of the 21st century.
Future factory jobs will go
to those who can program,
run and maintain fastevolving high-tech equipment in the age of robotics, and those lexible and
resourceful enough to
succeed in many diferent roles. And there will
always be fewer of these
jobs than there were U.S.
assembly-line workers in
1977 or Chinese factory
workers in 2007.
The broader result will
be a middle-class backlash against trade in both
the developed and developing worlds, and greater
pressure on governments
to restore barriers. This
trend will be much harder
on developing countries
and their more brittle
political systems, but it
will fragment the entire
global marketplace, ignite nationalist passions
and provide a platform for
the next wave of Trump/
Sanders-style populism
in rich and poor countries
alike.

E R I C T H AY E R G E T T Y I M A G E S

THE EARLY LOSERS are those in wealthier countries, like

the U.S., who have fallen from the middle class as factory
jobs have vanished. These are the men and women nodding along with Trump or Sanders. Their living standards
are much higher than those of workers in China or Mexico,
but their prospects arent as bright as they were taught to
expect. They have reason to be angry. The globalized marketplace has beneited workers in China, Brazil, Mexico,
South Korea, Turkey, Malaysia and Nigeria because they
will work for much more modest wages, and because multinational companies have found ways to lower labor costs
by outsourcing their operations.
You might be surprised to learn, however, that manufacturing jobs have been returning to the U.S. for the better part of a decade. The demand for higher wages in
China and other emerging markets, the easy availability
of low-cost energy for U.S. businesses and the advantages
of bringing production closer to wealthier consumers
have together created nearly a million new manufactur-

Sanders has been skeptical about the beneits of free trade

TheBrief

TRENDING

EXECUTIONS
The number of people
put to death worldwide
rose by 54% in 2015,
according to Amnesty
International. The
total of at least 1,634
executions, the highest
since 1989, was
driven by Iran, Pakistan
and Saudi Arabia. In
the U.S., however,
executions were at a
24-year low.

Milestones
WON
The Masters
tournament, by Danny
Willett, who beat
defending champion
Jordan Spieth in one
of the biggest upsets
in the history of golf.
It was Willetts irst
major title and the
irst Masters win for
an Englishman in 20
years.

MONEY MAY NOT BUY HAPPIness (or love), but it might just
buy more time to ind it. In the
most comprehensive look so
far at longevity and income,
researchers report in JAMA that
people with higher incomes tend
to live longerthough there
were some interesting nuances
that the researchers teased out.
Contrary to what some experts
predicted, there was no levelingof point where making more
didnt provide any added years.
Overall, people with the top 1% in
income lived 10 to 15 years longer
than those at the bottom 1%.
At the same time, having a
lower income didnt necessarily
lead to the shortest livesthat
varied greatly based on where
SALT LAKE CITY
Highest-income
people live 88
years, on average

people lived. People making the

least but residing in cities like
New York and San Francisco, for
instance, lived longer than people
in cities like Detroit and Tulsa,
Okla. Experts suspect thats because of public-health eforts,
such as smoking bans and the removal of unhealthy ingredients
like trans fats. Research shows
that people with lower incomes
in cities with such policies tend
to be less obese, smoke less and
have better health behaviors than
people in cities that didnt advocate such health-promoting
behaviors. The researchers say
this data supports the idea that
public-health policies can partly
ofset the efects of inequality.
ALICE PARK

OKLAHOMA CITY
Life expectancy for
lowest-income group
is 78 years

LAS VEGAS
Top earners live four
years less than those
in Salt Lake City

NEW YORK CITY

The lowest-income
group lives to an
average age of 82

GARY, IND.
Here the lowest
earners live to 77,
on average

DIED
Howard Marks, 70,
legendary Oxfordeducated drug smuggler jailed for running
an international hashish and marijuana
ring in the 1970s
and 80s. After his
release he wrote the
best-selling autobiography Mr Nice.
Will Smith, 34,
former star defensive
end for the New
Orleans Saints.
Police say Smith was
fatally shot in New
Orleans by a man
who rear-ended his
car in an apparent
case of road rage.
Ed Snider, 83,
founder of the
Philadelphia Flyers,
the irst expansion
team in hockey to win
the Stanley Cup. He
also formerly owned
the Philadelphia
76ers and a stake
in the Philadelphia
Eagles.

DESIGN

Rise of the plyscrapers

Wood is making a comeback as a building material with the development of engineered timber,
an eco-friendly alternative used in plyscrapers around the world. Tara John
BUSINESS
Five major U.S. banks,
including Wells Fargo,
Bank of America and
JPMorgan Chase, are
still too big to fail,
federal regulators said
April13. The banks
have until Oct.1 to
readjust their living
wills to ensure they
could go bankrupt
without bringing down
the economy.

CANADA
The 96-ft.-high
Wood Innovation
and Design Centre
in British Columbia
(right), built in 2014,
has locally made
engineered wood,
like laminated
veneer lumber, in its
structure.

AUSTRALIA
Forte in Melbourne
is a 105-ft. timber
apartment building
that uses crosslaminated timber
(CLT), which is said
to have the same
structural strength
as concrete and
steel.

BRITAIN
The Toothpick is
what Londoners
are calling plans
for a 984-ft. tower
unveiled on April 8.
The skyscrapers
architects say using
timber will reduce
the weight of the
building.

E X E C U T I O N S , B U S I N E S S : G E T T Y I M A G E S; S O C I E T Y: R E U T E R S ; D E S I G N : E M A P E T E R M I C H A E L G R E E N A R C H I T E C T U R E

SOCIETY
A remote aboriginal
Canadian community
declared a state of
emergency after 11
members attempted
suicide on a single day,
on April 11. Mentalhealth experts visited
the Attawapiskat
First Nation tribe, which
saw more than 100
suicide attempts over
the winter.

HEALTH

How income afects U.S. life spans

TheBrief

After a most violent year, an

ailing city looks for signs of hope

DEVIN ALLEN

By Josh Sanburn/Baltimore

For photos of West Baltimore, visit time.com/sandtown

relationship dubbed the Gray efect.

In his oice with views of the east
and west sides, Davis says the department has PTSD from the unrest and
subsequent indictments of cops, something he believes led to the arrest slowdown. The city was traumatized by
what happened, he says.
After Davis took command, arrests
increased by 20%. Hes emphasized a
targeted approach to crime, including
an efort with ive federal agencies to
focus on 600 of the citys most dangerous criminals. And Davis says hes tried
to improve the departments ties with
the communities it serves. I think that
our relationships, particularly in West
Baltimore, are stronger than they were
last year, he says. But its not
what it needs to be. A change,
however, isnt apparent to
everyone. The people who
didnt trust the police before
feel the same way now, says
Bamba Kane, 43, a West Baltimore resident.

AS THE PEWS FILLED AT NEW SHILOH

tor Catherine Pugh, who is campaigning
Baptist Church on Easter Sunday, the
on improving schools and creating
theme of the Rev. Harold Carter Jr.s
jobs, at the front of the pack with Sheila
sermonIs Jesus Here Now?seemed
Dixon, a popular former mayor who reitting. Here in West Baltimore, where
signed in 2010 as part of a plea deal on
abandoned homes outnumber busiembezzlement charges. To Dixons supnesses and murders are often the only
porters, however, that taint counts for
thing that makes news, the past 12
less than the relatively low crime rate
months have felt more like the devils
during her tenure.
work than that of a higher power. If He
Nationally, the most prominent
is not here, said Carter from the pulname in the race is Black Lives Matpit, it certainly would explain a lot of
ter activist and social-media star
things.
New Shiloh sits at the spiritual nexus of a city awaiting
resurrection. It was less than
a mile away, on April 12, 2015,
that Freddie Gray was thrown
into a police van before dying
of a spinal injury under stillmurky circumstances. It was
BEFORE THE CITY ERUPTED,
here, in the sanctuary, that
Baltimore seemed poised for a
Grays death was mourned
comeback. The city had halted
as the latest evidence that
a decades-long population deblack lives dont matter. And
cline. Murders were creeping
it was four blocks away, at the
downward. And downtowns
Mondawmin Mall, that a conInner Harbor was starting to
frontation between teenagers
evolve from a tourist showand police sparked more than
piece into a real neighborhood.
a week of peaceful protests
New projects like Port Covingand sometimes violent riots.
ton, a multibillion dollar efThe year since has been esfort led by Under Armour CEO
pecially trying. Baltimore had
Kevin Plank that would serve
344 murders in 2015, the most
West Baltimore remains plagued by abandoned homes
as the companys headquarper capita in its history, and
ters while housing a distillery,
is on pace for more than 200
manufacturing space and a
this year. The criminal trials of
publicly accessible waterfront area, aim
the six police oicers charged in Grays
DeRay Mckesson, 30. In the city, howto revive that faded momentum.
death have stalled. The police commisever, hes polling under 1%. Baltimore
The question is whether any of the
sioner was ired and the once popular
is extremely parochial, says Matthew
beneits will reach neighborhoods like
mayor chose not to run for re-election
Crenson, a Johns Hopkins University
those near New Shiloh, which few paid
after the unrest, setting of a crowded
political science professor.
any attention to until the city started
succession derby that will come to a
Which means the election will turn
burning. Toward the end of the Easter
head in the Democratic primary on
on local concerns, not national deservice, Carter ofered an answer to his
April 26which, in this overwhelmbates. And few things here matter more
opening remark: You dont always have
ingly Democratic city, might as well be
than jobs and crime. Responsibility
to see Jesus to know Hes here. The same
the general election.
for the latter falls to Kevin Davis, who
could be said of any of the tensions hangwas named police commissioner in
ing over Baltimore these days, from the
THIRTEEN DEMOCRATS ARE RUNNING
July. He took over at a time when viopending trials in Grays death to the fragto replace Mayor Stephanie Rawlingslent crime was soaring and arrests had
ile peace. Theyre all here, even if you
Blake, all selling their own form of delivplummeteda combination that Johns
dont always see them.

erance for this city. Polls show state sena- Hopkins researchers who studied the
13

TheBrief Earth

TEMPERATURES

How ElNio
heats the globe

Warm water temperatures have bleached coral of the Australian coast

The Great Barrier Reef is under attack

from El Nio and climate change
By Justin Worland

14

TIME April 25, 2016

more than 15% of the worlds coral.

Its not just a matter of aquatic aesthetics. Reefs act as natural barriers
that protect coastal communities from
storms and looding. Marine life depends
on coral reefs as habitats, while coastal
towns depend on them as tourist draws.
But a bigger worry may be what the
bleaching suggests about future climate change. The rapid death of coral
reefs demonstrates that climate change
is irreversibly afecting the world right
now, even as policymakers treat warming as something to be dealt with in the
future. Climate change may be slowcreeping sometimes, but other times it
takes great leaps forward, says Steve
Palumbi, an ocean scientist at Stanford
University. This is one of those leaps.
Local solutionslike reducing ishing and cleaning up pollutioncan help
slow reef loss, but scientists say a global
problem requires a global solution.
Nearly 200 countries agreed last year to
work to keep global temperatures from
rising more than 3.6F by 2100, but that
goal will be tough to reach. And if governments fail, coral reefs will be only
the irst victims.

1.0
0.8
0.6
0.4
0.2
0
0.2
0.4
1880

Difference from
average, in
degrees Celsius

1900

1920

El Nio
exacerbated
global
warming last
year

1940

1960 1980

2000 2015

DROUGHT

1 million
Thats the number of children in Africa
including in hard-hit Ethiopiawithout
steady access to food, largely because
of El Nio. The weather phenomenon
has helped trigger drought in many parts
of the world, leaving millions hungry.
And Africa isnt the only place affected
by El Nioinfluenced drought. In Papua
New Guinea, drought has driven bushires affecting millions. In Bolivia, nearly
a million animals like sheep and llamas
have died as pastureland dries out.
N O A A ; U. N .

C O U R T E S Y X L C AT L I N S E AV I E W S U R V E Y

THE GREAT BARRIER REEF IS MORE

than worthy of its name. Coral of all
shapes, sizes and colors cover more than
130,000 sq. mi. of the coast of Australia, making it the worlds largest reef
system and supporting an astounding
variety of marine life.
But today the Great Barrier Reef is
dying. The temporary warming efect of
a major El Nio eventcombined with
ongoing climate changehas heated
the waters around the reef to nearly unprecedented levels. That warming has
in turn driven a mass bleaching that has
sucked the colorand the lifeout of
the coral. And the Great Barrier Reef
isnt alone. This is the longest bleaching event ever recorded, says David
Kline, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist. Its truly global, and its
looking very severe.
Bleaching occurs when ocean
disruptionswarm water, pollution,
algae overgrowthdrive away the symbiotic organisms that live on the coral
and give it color. Within weeks, the reef
could die, leaving behind a forest of lifeless, bone white coral. Scientists believe
the bleaching now under way may kill

2015 WAS ON AVERAGE THE

warmest year globally since record keeping began nearly 150
years agoand the 2016 average
is shaping up to be even hotter. A
strong El Nio deserves the brunt
of the blame. The unusually warm
Paciic Ocean surface waters that
mark an El Nio event amplify
heat over land. Temperatures
spiked around the globe as El Nio
began last fall, leading to month
after month of record-breaking
heat. Global temperatures this
past February were 2.2F above
the 20th century average, making it the most anomalously hot
month on record. But man-made
global warming is still playing
a lasting role in the record heat.
Thats how we will see the efects
HED_SM
of climate change: the
extremes
TYhis
is text_sans
for
will become more
extreme,
says
position only
Michael Mann, a climate scientist
at Penn State University.

2016 P&G

LightBox

Light the
night
Demonstrators light smoke
during a rally in support of
President Dilma Rousseff in
Rio de Janeiro on April 11,
after a congressional
panel voted to recommend
impeachment proceedings. A
vote by the full lower house to
decide whether she will face
trial is set for April 17.
Photograph by Mario Tama
Getty Images
For more of our best photography,

visit lightbox.time.com

IWitnessBullying.org

YOU HAVE TO MAKE DECISIONS WITHOUT KNOWING ALL THAT YOU WOULD LIKE TO KNOW. THATS PART OF THE JOB. PAGE 26

Some doctors say patient surveys have led them to prescribe potentially dangerous painkillers

CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES

HEALTH

The
Obamacare
quirk that
is fueling
the opioid
epidemic
By Sean Gregory

PHOTO-ILLUSTR ATION BY TIME

NOT LONG AGO, DR. BILL SULLIVAN,

an emergency-room physician in
rural Spring Valley, Ill., treated a type
of patient that has become all too
familiar in hospitals across the country.
Complaining of abdominal pain, the
man asked speciically for Dilaudid, a
potentially habit-forming painkiller.
Noticing that his record showed a
long history of opioid prescriptions,
Sullivan suggested a less potent option.
The patients response, according to
the doctor: Morphine is sh-t.
Sullivan refused to prescribe the
patients drug of choice. By doing so, he
may have put his hospital at inancial
risk. That might seem strange, since
opioid addiction has become a national
epidemic. But the potential economic

hit is a direct, if unintended, result

of reforms put in place under the
Afordable Care Act.
As part of an Obamacare initiative
meant to reward quality care, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) is allocating some $1.5 billion in Medicare payments to hospitals
on the basis of criteria that include
patient-satisfaction surveys. Among
the questions: During this hospital
stay, how often did the hospital staf do
everything they could to help you with
your pain? And: How often was your
pain well controlled?
To many physicians and lawmakers
struggling to contain the nations
opioid crisis, tying a patients feelings
about pain management to a hospitals
19

TheView

bottom line is deeply misguidedif not downright

dangerous. The government is telling us we need
to make sure a patients pain is under control,
says Dr. Nick Sawyer, a health-policy fellow at the
UC Davis department of emergency medicine.
Its hard to make them happy without a narcotic.
This policy is leading to ongoing opioid abuse.
That abuse has led to a full-blown crisis. Since
1999, fatal prescription-opioid overdoses in the
U.S. have quadrupled. According to the CDC, more
than 47,000 Americans died of a drug overdose in
2014, a record high, and more than 60% of those
deaths involved an opioid. U.S. emergency rooms
now treat more than 1,000 people every day for
misusing prescription opioids.
Patient-satisfaction surveys are not the cause
of this crisis, of course. But there is research to
support some doctors contention that theyre
making the problem worse. A 2012 study in the
Archives of Internal Medicine found that the most
satisied patients are more likely to spend more on
prescription drugs and have higher mortality rates.
In a 2014 survey published in Patient Preference
and Adherence, over 48% of doctors reported
prescribing inappropriate narcotic pain medication
because of patient-satisfaction questions. One
doctor wrote that drug seekers are well aware of
the patient satisfaction scores and how they can use
these threats and complaints to obtain narcotics.
CMS, which is part of the Department of Health
and Human Services (HHS), disputes any link
between its surveys, a hospitals reimbursement
money and opioid abuse. In March, agency doctors
wrote in JAMA that the patient-satisfaction
survey accounted for 30% of a hospitals total
performance score in iscal year 2015, with pain
management one of eight equally weighted
dimensions, along with factors like cleanliness and
quietness and nurse communication. (CMS did not
respond to interview requests.)
Still, lawmakers are concerned. Republican
Senator Susan Collins, whose home state of Maine
saw a 27.3% rise in its drug-overdose death rate from
2013 to 2014, has called for HHS to investigate the
connection between the surveys and inappropriate
prescriptions. Health providers are telling me that
these questions are written in a way that makes
them fear a lower reimbursement if patients did
not answer them in the airmative, says Collins.
For a small rural hospital in Maine to lose a certain
percentage of their Medicare reimbursements
is a big deal. In April, four Senatorstwo from
each partysponsored a bill that would untie
reimbursements from pain-management questions.
An earlier measure attracted bipartisan support in
the House. Says West Virginia Representative Alex
Mooney, who introduced the bill: Its a simple ix
that can have signiicant results.

20

TIME April 25, 2016

BOOK IN BRIEF
VERBATIM

I dont
have any
regrets
about how
I identify.
Im still
me, and
nothing
about
that has
changed.
RACHEL DOLEZAL,
announcing that
shes writing a
book about racial
identity; the ex
NAACP leader
has been heavily
criticized for calling
herself black
despite being born
towhite parents

How America got

hooked on guns
IN AMERICA, GUNS ARE OFTEN
discussed as a storied part of a national
identity that grew, over time, from
Revolutionary War militias, the Second
Amendment and rough life on the
frontier. But in her new book, The
Gunning of America, Pamela Haag argues
that this narrative is not as organic as
it appears; rather,
it was crafted by
gun manufacturers
eager to sell more
weapons. Most
early Americans,
she writes, viewed
guns as basic tools;
in the early 1800s
they were necessities
for hunting and
farming. But as fewer
Americans performed those tasks in the
early 20th century, gunmakers had to
up their marketing ante to make people
want gunseven if they didnt really
need them. So began the campaign, she
writes, to make gun use about honor
rather than intoxication, justice rather
than impulsivity, and homicide rather
than suicide. Either way, the results are
remarkable: today, America is home to
an estimated 300 million irearms.
SARAH BEGLEY

CHARTOON

Future headlines

J O H N AT K I N S O N , W R O N G H A N D S

 For more on these ideas, visit time.com/ideas

BIG IDEA

The self-filling
water bottle
It isnt commercially available yet,
but the solar-powered Fontus is
making a splash on crowdfunding
site Indiegogo. Heres how it
works. Julie Shapiro

With the bikemounted version,

the riders speed
causes air to flow
through a ilter, which
pulls out dust and
dirt. (A stationary
version relies on a
fan for airflow.)

The air then travels

through a cooling
chamber, and water
vapor condenses
on a special surface
designed to draw
out moisture.

Water trickles into

the bottle at a rate
of up to half a liter
per hourthough
it varies according
to air humidity, says
Kristof Retezr, the
projects designer.

DATA

LOST IN
TRANSLATION
The look of emojis
varies widely across
platformsand leads
to miscommunication,
per a new study from
the University of
Minnesota. Here, a few
of the most divergent
emojis by (clockwise
from top left) Apple,
Google, Microsoft
and LG.

Fontus aims
to ship its first
$225+ bottles
to investors by
April 2017 after
conducting
more real-world
tests

GRINNING FACE WITH

SMILING EYES
On average, subjects
interpreted Apples icon
as signiicantly more
negative than Googles.

V E R B AT I M : A N N I E K U S T E R ; B I G I D E A : F O N T U S; D ATA : A P P L E (3), G O O G L E (3), M I C R O S O F T (3), L G (3)

QUICK TAKE

Big Business should learn from the Rust Belt

By Antoine van Agtmael and Fred Bakker
LISTEN TO SOME PRESIDENTIAL CANDIdates stump speeches and its easy to believe
the U.S. isnt as competitive as it used to be
that onetime industrial powerhouses such
as Akron, Ohio, and Pittsburgh are unable to
keep up with low-cost alternatives in China.
That is a myth. After years of research, we
found that cities in the Rust Beltthe areas
of the Northeast and Midwest purportedly in
declineare some of the smartest places on
earth, where universities, big businesses and
tiny startups are collaborating closely and
sharing brainpower. While its true, for example, that Akron may have lost jobs in the
tire business, it is now home to hundreds of
polymer companies, part of a massive statewide presence in the polymer and specialtychemical industry. And just outside Albany,

N.Y., whose economy has been written of as

stagnant, the SUNY Poly NanoTech Megaplex
is leading research on semiconductors with
top talent from Intel, IBM and Samsung.
These centers prove that smart is the
new cheap, especially for manufacturing.
And corporate America will do well to mine
such insights and leverage the potential of
the Rust Belt, just as its done with Silicon
Valley. After all, this new wave of American
robots, 3-D printers and more may well make
it cheaperand easierto put made in the
USA back in business.
Van Agtmael and Bakker are the authors
of The Smartest Places on Earth: Why
Rustbelts Are the Emerging Hotspots of
Global Innovation

PERSON RAISING
BOTH HANDS IN
CELEBRATION
Subjects said
Microsofts icon looked
more exciting, while
LGs looked more like
praise hands.

SLEEPING FACE
Descriptions for
Googles version
emphasized sleepy,
whereas Microsofts
looked sad or down.
S.B.

TheView American Genius

42
Hours per year
that rush-hour
commuters lose to
trafic jams

TRANSPORTATION

Can ride apps

really solve
Americas traic
woes?
By Katy Steinmetz/Berkeley
SUSAN SHAHEEN KNOWS CARPOOLS.
For 20 years shes been studying what
transport gurus call shared mobility,
dissecting factors that make it successful, like shorter wait times. Though
you might think choosing how to
get to work is simple, Shaheen
will tell you that especially in
Tons of emissions
a twice-weekly
urban areas, there are countless
carpooler can take
factors in play, from the time
out each year
of day youre on the move to
whether you own a smartphone.
And more than any of the tech executives giving speeches lately about how
we all should rethink our relationship to
our cars, she knows just how revolutionary that could be.
SOURCES: INRIX , TE X AS A&M
Walking the halls of one of the naT R A N S P O R TAT I O N I N S T I T U T E , U. S .
BILLION
E N V I R O N M E N TA L P R O T E C T I O N A G E N C Y
tions oldest departments dedicated to
Annual cost of trafic
congestion from lost
transportation research, at the University
productivity, energy
including the efects of the
gaining? Her inal igures will
of California, Berkeley, the engineering
use and wear
cheaper pooling options
back
up or undercut concluprofessor wonders how our lives would
on vehicles
(Lyft Line and UberPool)
sions that Uber and Lyft have
have turned out if the Model T had been
that the irms have been toutalready come to. We can cut conmarketed as something to be shared, not
ing as solutions to Americas traic
gestion, pollution and parking by getowned home by home. Would our veand idle-asset problems.
ting more people into fewer cars, Uber
hicles still be idle an estimated 95% of
If how we commute is algebra, igCEO Travis Kalanick avowed in Februthe time? Would we still waste collective
uring that out is calculus. Shaheen will
ary. A platform like Lyft can ultimately
billions of dollars and hours every year
have to determine, for instance, how
achieve signiicant impacts in congeswhile sitting in traic, as 76% of workmany cars those companies have put
tion and emissions reduction, says
ers commute alone? Yet Shaheens most
Emily Castor, Lyfts director of transtantalizing questions turn not on the past on the road as theyve attracted drivers
to their platforms, compared with how
portation policy.
but on the present. Are we at a juncture
many theyve inspired riders to leave at
Shaheens analysis remains to be
thats similar to when the automobile
home or not buy in the irst place. Shell seen, and the net efect could change
was being proposed? she asks. And if
survey drivers and passengers in several over time. But those irms are already
the arrival of self-driving cars ofers us a
U.S. cities, weighing cars occupancy
helping to challenge Americas autochance to rewrite the rules, how should
levels and tallying net vehicle-miles
dependency problem in at least one
we do things this time around?
traveled. Among the big questions: Are
Numbers will help determine the
way. These apps are starting to slowly
answers, and so Shaheen and her team
we sharing more? And if so, what are we devolve the perception that getting into
have embarked on a landmark study exa car with somebody you dont know is
amining the latest wave of carpooling
the wrong thing to do, Shaheen says.
in the U.S., one organized not through
And that kind of trust is a prerequibulletin boards over a period of days but
site for widespread carpooling, the
through smartphone apps in real time.
Shaheen is
kind well all be doing if were going to
Armed with the data that ride-app coma pioneer of
shareand not ownautomated vepanies Uber and Lyft have agreed to
carpooling
hicles that swoop by to pick us up at our
provide, Shaheen aims to calculate the
research
drivewayless homes. Which may be the
two companies environmental impact,
commute of the future.

$160

TIME April 25, 2016

A E R I A L : D AV I D M A I S E L I N S T I T U T E ; S U S A N S H A H E E N

22

It takes just as much ingenuity to go to Mars

as it does to make this popcorn.
Timing, precision, consistencyyou expect to focus on these things when youre building a rocket,
but theyre just as important if youre trying to produce 30,000 perfect bags of kettle corn. Thats
why Siemens software is rapidly delivering innovation to every phase of manufacturing, from design
through production. Ingenuity is helping create better, more efficient, more cost-effective products.

CGCB-A10129-00-7600

Siemens, 2016. All Rights Reserved.

usa.siemens.com/ingenuityforlife

TheView

4 APPS TO HELP
YOU GIVE BACK
VOLUNTEERMATCH
aggregates volunteer
opportunities with
organizations across
the U.S., sorted
according to your
location and interests
(like animals or arts
and culture). Listings
include information
about the required time
commitment so you
can ind something that
works for your schedule.
(volunteermatch.org)

Finding time to give back

is often easier than you
think, says Bush Lauren
SPOTLIGHT

Lauren Bush Lauren on

howand whyto give
your time to others
WHILE TRAVELING WITH THE U.N.S WORLD
Food Programme as a college student, philanthropist Lauren Bush Lauren saw irsthand
the reality of poverty in such countries as
Cambodia and Chad. The experience led her
to found a nonproit focused on hunger, called
Feed, in 2007. The company, which initially
sold tote bags and used the proceeds to fund
meals for hungry people, has since expanded.
Feed also hosts 10K races across the country,
charity dinners and more. Giving has long
been part of the entrepreneurs life: she has
worked in soup kitchens, homeless shelters
and underserved hospitals from an early age.
If youve never wielded a ladle or cleaned
a kennel, fear not: Bush Lauren has some
insights for volunteering rookies.

2. BECOME A REGULAR. If youre reading to

children in a hospital or working with senior
24

TIME April 25, 2016

3. THINK ABOUT YOUR TIME CREATIVELY.

Many people assume they dont have the
margin in their lives to volunteer. But if you
reframe how you think about giving back,
youll see that you can work it into your
schedule. Give in easy-to-do incrementsan
hour or two at a time rather than a whole day.
Or lead the charge at work to make giving
back a company priority. Says Bush Lauren:
Most employers want their companies to be
doing their civic duties and want their teams
to be bonding outside of work in that way
but maybe dont have the time to organize it
themselves . . . And that way, youre not taking
of time from your family or taking of time
from your work but are doing it as part of your
work schedule.
Apply the same logic to the home front.
Volunteer with your children so it doesnt
come at the expense of family time. Interacting
with the people youre helping will cultivate
your kids sense of empathyand yours too.
ROBIN HILMANTEL

VOLUNTEERSPOT
helps you organize and
plan volunteer events
think school bake sales
and church rummage
sales. The
free version
helps you
create an
event page,
send email invites and
collect contributions all
in one place.
(volunteerspot.com)
CHARITY MILES
lets you give while
you work out. The app
donates
25 to the
organization
of your
choice
for every mile you walk
or run (or 10 a mile
if you bike). And you
dont paydonations
are made by the apps
corporate sponsors.
(charitymiles.org)
Jessie Van Amburg

BUSH L AUREN: COURTESY F EED

1. GET SPECIFIC. While many volunteers

pick a charitable organization with personal
signiicance, Bush Lauren suggests volunteering according to your strongest aptitude.
If youre an artist, for example, you might
want to teach art classes to children who
wouldnt otherwise have access to them.
When you can marry your speciic skill
set and expertise, not only will you be more
engaged and excited, but your time will be
better spent, says Bush Lauren.

citizens, the impact of your work will be

compounded with every visit. I have friends
who go every week to the same soup kitchen
in their synagogue to volunteer, says Bush
Lauren. Thats extremely rewarding when
people can regularly engage with not only a
single cause but a single community center,
hospital, soup kitchen, wherever it may be.
That way, you truly become a part of their
operations and really get to know the people
theyre serving and can dig in deeper in that
way. It also means youll see some of the fruits
of your donated labor.

GIVEGAB
offers a personalized
search, similar to
VolunteerMatchbut
also lets
you connect
with fellow
volunteers,
set service
goals and keep track of
where youve worked.
(givegab.com)

550
VOLUNTEER PROJECTS PLANNED
THIS MONTH ALONE

78,000
ALLSTATE AGENCY OWNERS
AND EMPLOYEES

1,000,000
VOLUNTEER HOURS
IN THE PAST 5 YEARS

40

YEARS OF
BRINGING OUT
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TheView The Curious Capitalist

Janet Yellen is rebooting the

Fed to focus on Main Street
over Wall Street
By Rana Foroohar
YOU DONT OFTEN HEAR CENTRAL BANKERS SAY, I DONT
know. Thats because monetary wizards, like brain surgeons and rocket scientists, tend to cultivate an aura of omniscience. Their high-powered computers crank out supposedly
precise answers to complex questions about where the global
economy will be in the next ive minutes or the next ive
years. But Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen has never
been allergic to uncertainty.
In a recent interview with TIME, Yellen made it clear there
are plenty of things about the economy both at home and
abroad that the Fednot to mention economists, investors,
politicians and the rest of usdoesnt grasp right now. Unemployment has dropped to precrisis levels, but wages remain
stagnant. The traditional relationship between job creation
and inlation seems to have broken down. More and more
technology has not boosted productivity, as it has in the past.
Asset classes like stocks or bonds no longer move together in
the ways they used to. In short, the global economy is playing
by new rules, rules Yellen and the Fed are trying to puzzle out.
Sometimes you have to make decisions without knowing all
that you would like to know, she says. Thats part of the job.

26

TIME April 25, 2016

JOBS
Unemployment
was 4.9% in
February, the
lowest level in
eight years

DEMAND
Global
demand
remains
sluggish,
one reason
the Fed has
kept interest
rates low

THATS NOT TO SAY that Yellen is ignoring the sort of market distortions that the
past few years of loose monetary policy
have engendered. In a 2014 speech, she
made it clear that higher rates arent the
only way to head of bubbles. Regulation
can also help. Eforts to promote inancial stability through adjustments in interest rates would increase the volatility
of inlation and employment, she says.
As a result, I believe a macro-prudential
approach to supervision and regulation
needs to play the primary role.
Translation: the Fed is stepping up its
game as a inancial regulator. Its a mandate that has gotten a bit dusty over the
past several decades as Fed chairs have
focused more on the other two parts of
the mandate: keeping unemployment
and inlation low. But its one that Yellen would like to bring back. Already
the central bank has issued cautionary
notes about the frothy technology and
commercial real estate sectors. Look
for more such warnings, as Yellen
continues to transform the Fed and
leads the U.S. through its new economic wilderness.

SUSAN WALSH AP

THIS NEW REALITY is partly the result of the $29 trillion that
central bankers pumped into the global economy over the
past few years. (The Fed alone dumped $4.5 trillion in the
U.S.) Central bankers were forced to take such steps because
gridlocked governments didnt act to put more iscal stimulus
into their economies after the 2008 inancial crisis. They became, as economist Mohamed El-Erian has written, the only
game in town for propping up growth. The downside of the
recovery: distortions in corporate debt and equity markets
and the risk of another crash.
The Fed has frequently been criticized, particularly by Republicans but also by some on the left, for continuing to keep
rates low in such an environment. By many metrics, the American recovery is improving, and easy monetary policies have
been known to encourage risky inancial behaviors of the sort
made infamous in 2008. But Yellen sees herself less as a
wizard who backs into numbers via computer models and
more of a family doctor whos taken an oath to above all do
no harm. We necessarily operate in an environment in
which theres a great deal of uncertainty, she notes, talking about everything from Chinese inancial markets to
the future of European integration. In such an environment, it makes sense to use a risk-management approach
to identify and avoid the big mistakes. Thats one reason

STEADY AS
SHE GOES

I favor a cautious approach. Yellen, in

other words, is not keen to rely only on
old models. Rather, she is sending scouts
out to map the new landscape, measuring and analyzing data. The hope is to
be able to quickly change tacks as necessary, as the global economy continues to
twist and turn and confound.
For Yellen, risk management means
doing everything she can to keep the
U.S. recovery on track, employment especially. Thats one reason rates remain
low. If she had to choose between worrying about inancial bubbles or jobs in the
Midwest, shed choose the latter. Its consistent with her kitchen-table approach
to economicsmore focused on the empirical than the theoretical. Thats a big
shift from past regimes at the Fed, which
have trended toward the academic. We
are focused on Main Street, on supporting economic conditionsplentiful jobs
and stable pricesthat help all Americans, she says.

TheView In the Arena

What todays Democrats can

learn from Bill Clintons crime
and welfare-reform bills
By Joe Klein

G E T T Y I M A G E S (2)

GIVEN THE PESTILENCE THAT IS PASSING FOR A POLICY DEbate on the Republican side this year, its been easy to overlook
the subtler follies of the Democrats. But the party is slipping
into ancient, discredited fantasies about social issues like criminal justice and welfare reform. It took Bill Clinton to speak
some truth unto protest recently, when he was interrupted
by a clutch of young scholars claiming that his 1994 crime bill
had devastated poor neighborhoods. I dont know how
you would characterize the gang leaders who got 13-year-olds
hopped up on crack and sent them out onto the street to murder other African-American children. Maybe you thought they
were good citizens, he said, in a righteous distemper. You are
defending the people who kill the lives you say matter!
Clinton backtracked a bit the next day, saying the manner
of his reproach was inefective. And the political press
skewered him for going of message and hurting his wifes
campaign. But Hillary Clintons campaign could use a strong
dose of politically incorrect truth telling. She had a nice
moment with Black Lives Matter protesters last summer,
when she encouraged them to come up with a positive agenda
to ease the angry dance between some police oicers and some
youths in black communities. That was sort of courageous:
too often the national conversation about race consists of
activists screaming and white people feeling guilty.
Lets stipulate that Black Lives Matter has a point. Too
many police are badly trained; too many act on their worst
fears and think later. Overt racism has declined, but it is
still bred in the American bone. I lived in a predominantly
black neighborhood in the 1980s and saw friends of mine
treated rudely by all sorts of people in authority, especially
local shopkeepers. The frustrations of middle-class African
Americans in my neighborhood were bifurcated: they were
disgusted by the louche and dangerous behavior in the black
underclass, and they were infuriated by white people who
mistook them for criminals or deadbeats simply because of
their skin color. Given the progress of the past 40 years, the
growth of a substantial black middle class, the idiot vestiges
of white racism must be even more infuriating now.
BUT HISTORY AND REALITY must be respected too. The
Clintonian responses to crime and welfare dependency in the
1990s were a reasonable, if imperfect, corrective to an anarchic
situation. There was a clamor for safer streets, which Clinton
helped ease by funding 100,000 more cops.
For decades, Democrats had denied the truth of Daniel
Patrick Moynihans analysis of black family structure: that

ONE LAW,
TWO ERAS

In 1996,
during his
re-election bid,
Bill Clinton
promised
to break
the gangs,
ban those
cop-killer
bullets . . .
and give
our children
something to
say yes to.

In 2015,
following his
wifes speech
asserting
the need for
criminaljustice reform,
Clinton said
the 1994
law had gone
too far: The
way it was
written and
implemented,
we have too
wide a net.

parental irresponsibility was causing a

breakdown in the social orderan analysis that soon crossed racial borders. In
the 10 years before the 1994 bill passed,
crime had tripled among 16-to-24-yearold blacks, a prominent sociologist
told me, but it had also doubled among
16-to-24-year-old whites.
The crime bill was belatedcrime
had already peaked, but no one knew
it at the time. The truly excessive sentencing, especially for drug crimes, had
already been passed on the state level
(most liberals and many conservatives
now agree that prison isnt the place for
nonviolent drug ofenders). The Clinton
bill was as concerned with prevention
programsthere was a big ight over
midnight basketball leaguesas it was
with providing Kevlar and weaponry to
cops; it increased sentences for violent
criminals and egregious drug dealers in
the relatively minuscule federal prison
system. The majority of those in prison
today are violent criminals who belong
there. The streets are much safer now.
Clintons landmark welfare-reform
bill, which is also under ire, reduced the
rolls by 60%. Many recipients were gaming the system while working full-time
jobs in the gray and black markets. Truly
debilitated individuals were moved onto
Social Security disability. According to
Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution, the rolls have remained relatively
stable ever since, rising slightly in the
2001 and 2008 recessions. Theyre actually dropping now, Haskins told me.
BEFORE BILL CLINTON, Democrats had
turned their backs on crime and welfare
dependency. Too many liberals subscribed to the old West Side Story depraved on account of being deprived
theory of indigence: it was societys
fault. But that theory failed to recognize
the good choices made by the vast majority of African Americans who werent
criminals or truants or drug addicts. It is
tragic, and wildly irresponsible, that Bill
Clinton, who brought a measure of sanity to these complicated issues, is being
viliied now.

27

ISSUES + 2016

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This much I have learned about debt after

40years of writing and study: It is better not
to incur it. Once it is incurred, it is better to
pay it off. America, we have a problem.
We owe more than we can easily repay.
We spend too much and borrow too
much. Worse, we promise too much. We
conjure dollar bills by the trillionspull
them right out of thin air. I wont insist
that this cant go on, because it has. I only
say that it will eventually stop.
I dont know the date, but I believe
that I know the reason. It will stop when
the world loses conidence in the dollars
we owe. Come that moment of truth,
the nation will resemble Chicago, a once
prosperous polity now trying to persuade
its once trusting creditors that it is actually solvent.
To understand our inancial ix, put
yourself in the position of the government. Say you earn the typical American
family income, and you spend and borrow as the government does. So assuming, you would earn $54,000 a year, spend
$64,000 a year and charge $10,000 to
your already slightly overburdened credit
card. I say slightly overburdenedyour
outstanding balance is about $223,000.
Of course, MasterCard wouldnt allow
you to run up that kind of tab. At an annual percentage rate of 15%, the cost to
service a $223,000 balance would absorb 62% of your pretax income. But the
government is diferent from you and me
(and Chicago). It has a central bank.
The Federal Reserve is the governments Monopoly-money machine. It
sets some interest rates and inluences
many others. It materializes dollars. It
regulatesnow regimentsthe nations
banks. It pulls levers to make the stock
market go up.
Congress is the source of the Feds
power. The Constitution is the source
of Congresss power. The parchment enjoins Congress to coin money and regulate the value thereof. The founders
viewed money as a scale or yardstick,
Grant is the editor of Grants Interest Rate
Observer. His latest book, The Forgotten
Depression: 1921: The Crash That Cured
Itself, won the 2015 Hayek Prize
30

TIME April 25, 2016

Trillion-dollar
questions
A little guide to that very big number

How long have

we had debt?
The U.S. has
carried debt
virtually since
the American
Revolution, when
the Founding
Fathers
borrowed money
from France and
the Netherlands
to pay for the
ight. Since then,
the country has
been debt-free
just once
under President
Andrew Jackson,
who slashed
spending
and sold off
government
land.

Isnt some
debt good?
Sure, as anyone
who owns a
home thanks
to a mortgage
knows. Infrastructure,
schools and
research are
investments
that can grow
the tax base.
But just like
an individual,
a country can
default when
the sum gets
too high.

How much is too much

debt?
Debt as a percentage of GDP
(a proxy for the tax base) is
a useful guide; some economists believe anything above
90% is in the danger zone.
The U.S., at nearly 74%,
is still below other major
economies, including Japan
and France. The chart at
right shows the debt burden
of the worlds seven largest
economies by GDP.

SOURCE:
CIA WORLD
FACTBOOK

something that measures value. The Fed

views money as a magic wand, something
that creates value.
Dollars arent so much minted these
days. Rather, they issue from the Feds
computers in billowing digital clouds.
The cost of producing them is only the energy expended on tapping the keys. The
Fed emits these electronic greenbacks to
attempt to control the course of economic
events. Its a heaven-sent monetary system for a big-spending government.
You may struggle to pay that midteens
rate on your outstanding credit-card balance. The Treasury gets by paying an average of just 1.8% on that portion of the
debt, held by savers and investors both
here and abroad. Deined in this way, we
owe $13.9 trillion. The $19 trillion igure
ticking upward on the famous National
Debt Clock adds the debts the government owes itself. (How does this pseudo
bookkeeping work? The Social Security
Administration takes intemporarily
more than it pays out. With the surplus it
buys Treasury bonds. The bonds enlarge
the debt clocks debt.) Its not so important that the government pays itself on
time. What is important is that the government pay its public creditors on time.
So cast your eyes on the exact numerical
rendering of that slightly smaller sum:
$13,903,107,629,266. It is unmanageable.
One can assume that the creditors
trust the currency in which they expect
to be repaid. I wonder why, and for how
Japan

227.9%

Debt burden as a percentage of GDP

France

98.2%

U.K.

90.6%

U.S.

73.6%

Germany

71.7%

India

51.7%

China

16.7%

Who lends
to the U.S.?

much longer. The Fed once fought inlation. Now it actually sets out to cause it
about 2% a year is the target. Striving to
inlate, it presses down interest rates and
rustles up new dollars.
From the nations 18th century founding until 1971, the dollar was deined as
a weight of gold or silver. Americans did
business with paper, of course. But these
commercial bills and banknotes were
convertible into monetary bedrock, the
precious metals. The expression sound
as a dollar derives from the ring of a gold
piece when you plunked it on a counter.
Sound money coincided with balanced budgets. Government borrowings climbed in wartime and subsided in
peacetime. The pattern was disarranged
by depression in the 1930s and war in
the 1940s. It was broken by the Johnson Administrations guns and butter
and entitlements programs in the 1960s.
Richard Nixon administered the coup
de grce on Aug. 15, 1971, when he announced that the dollar would derive its
value from the say-so of the government.
The Fed could print as many green bills
as the traic would bear.
Many applauded that sea change,
then and later. Easy money rarely fails to
pleaseat irst. It buoys stocks, bonds
and commercial real estate. House prices
jump, and car sales zoom. (Average autolending rates, now 4%, have been nearly
sawed in half since 2007.) Politicians, noticing how a bull market fattens public
pension funds, ratchet up the beneits
they promise to retirees (a fact that state
and federal pensioners are encouraged to
remember on Election Day).
Periodically, the buzz wears of. What
remains is a hangover of debts and promises. The proliferating dollars facilitate
heavy borrowing. Ultra-low interest rates
mask the cost.
I dont ask that we return to some longlost iscal and monetary Eden. None has
ever existed, even in America. Crises
and business cycles are always with us.
I merely observe that sound money and
a balanced budget were two sides of the
coin of American prosperity.
Then came magical thinking. Maybe
you had a taste of modern economics in
school. If so, you probably learned that the
federal budget neednt be balancedits
nothing like a family budget, the teacher
would sayand that gold is a barbarous

When the
government
needs money, it
sells IOUs in the
form of Treasury
securities like
bonds and
T-bills. Ordinary
people buy them,
as do businesses, banks,
government
agencies and
foreign entities.
This debt totals
$13.9 trillion.
The Federal Reserve holds the
most debt, about
$2.5 trillion, followed by China
and Japan.

Whats the
point of a debt
ceiling?
It was meant to
make borrowing
easier; before
1917, Treasury
needed Congress
to approve bond
offerings. Today
Treasury borrows
as needed to pay
the bills until it
hits the ceiling.
Measures to
raise the cap
trigger political
battles that have
always ended in
approval.

Whats the
difference
between the
decit and
thedebt?
The deicit is the
annual difference
between what the
government takes
in from taxes
and the amount
it spends. Every
years deicit is
added to the
debtand the
government
almost always
spends more
than it takes in.
(In the past 50
years, there have
been only ive of
surplus.)

Should I care
about public
debt?
Yes. The Fed can
print money. But
state and local
governments
cannot, and
must raise taxes
or cut services
to meet pension
obligations
for public
employees.

relic. To manage the business cycle, the

argument went, a government must have
the lexibility to print money, to muscle
around interest rates and to spend more
than it takes inin short, to stimulate.
Oh, we have stimulated. Between the
iscal years 2008 and 2012 alone, federal
deicits totaled $5.6 trillion. The public
debt nearly doubled in the same span of
years, to $11.2 trillion. The Federal Reserve tickled $1.6 trillion in new digital
dollars into existence. True, our Great
Recession proved no Great Depression,
but the post-2008 recovery is the limpest on record.
A thin cheer went up in January when
the deicit (calculated over the 12 preceding months) weighed in at a mere
$405 billion, the lowest over any 12month period since 2008. Only $405 billion. Its not so much, as Washington
strums its calculators.
Let us pause to relect that a billion
is a thousand million, and that a trillion
is a thousand billionor, alternatively,
a million millions. Its a measure of the
ix were in that the billions hardly seem
worth talking about.
Its tomorrows trillionsthe ones
weve grandly promised to pay ourselvesthat lie at the heart of the problem. The granddaddy of far-of commitments was Social Security, which dates
from the 1930s. Medicare and Medicaid
in the 1960s and the Afordable Care Act
in 2010 duly followed. The debt, as big as
it is, is the measure of past spending in excess of tax receipts, a pattern of bad iscal
habits that traces its intellectual roots to
John Maynard Keynes and has its dollarsand-cents origins with Lyndon Johnson
and his Great Society. What awaits us
and our children and their children is
the unpaid tab of the future.

Is that all the debt there is?

No. For this story, we focused
on the per capita federal
debt, but the total burden
skyrockets when you factor in
things like business debt and
the mortgages, credit-card
balances and other elements of
household debt.

Household

$14.22

trillion

Federal government

$13.90

trillion

Business

$12.78 trillion
SOURCES:
TRE ASURY
(FEDER AL
D E B T ); F E D E R A L
RESERVE FLOW
O F F U N D S D ATA ,
M A R C H 2 0 16
( A L L O T H E R S)

State and local

government

$2.98

Total:

$43.89 trillion
$135,726.50
per American

trillion

31

1900

1913
Federal Reserve
is established

$392.41

$243.46

76.1 million

1900s

Candidate math
What the 2016 hopefuls say theyll
doand what it means for debt
Donald Trump has said
he could eliminate all
federal debt in eight
years, but his current tax
and spending plan could
actually set us back an
additional $30 trillion
by 2026, according to
independent analysts.
Hillary Clinton would up
spending by about 2%.
Analysts say her tax hikes
would add $498 billion
in revenue after 10 years
but could reduce GDP
growth by 1%.
Ted Cruz calls for
a balanced-budget
amendment. But his
plan to cut taxes and
boost military spending
could add an estimated
$12.5 trillion to the debt.

If repaid, where would the money come

from? It would come from you, naturally. The debt is ultimately a deferred
tax. You can calculate your pro rata obligation on your smartphone. Just visit the
Treasury website, which posts the debt to
the penny, then the Census Bureaus website, which reports the up-to-the-minute
size of the population. Divide the latter by
the former and you have the scary truth:
$42,998.12 for every man, woman and
child, as I write this.
In the short term, the debt would no
doubt be reinanced, but at which interest rate? At 4.8%, the rate prevailing as recently as 2007, the government would pay
more in interest expense$654 billion
than it does for national defense. At a
blended rate of 6.7%, the average prevailing in the 1990s, the net federal-interest
bill would reach $913 billion, which very
nearly equals this years projected outlay
on Social Security.
We always need protection against
cockeyed economic experimentation.

GE T T Y IM AGES (5)

Nobody knows anything, screenwriter William Goldman wisely observed about the accuracy of Hollywood
box-oice forecasts. The economists, in
general, are no better than the studio
executives.
You cant blame people for not paying
attention. America has forever deied the
doomsdayers. The very language of government debt is calculated to tranquilize the critical mind. We speak of the
Department of the Treasury rather than
the Department of the Debt. (Theres no
net treasure in the Treasury.) We say entitlement instead of taxing Peter to pay
Paul and Social Security trust fund when
we mean just another ordinary government account at the Department of Debt.
(There is no trust fund because there is
no division of assets, no accounts containing funds earmarked for you, the citizen, who so faithfully contributed your
payroll taxes.)
Todays miniature interest rates constitute another form of public sedation.
Youd suppose the doubling of the debt
would jack up the cost of servicing the
debt. Nothing of the kind. As the debt has
doubled, the rate of interest has halved.
In 2007, we owed $5 trillion and paid
an average interest rate of 4.8%. Net interest expense: $237 billion. In 2016 well
owe $14.1 trillion and pay the average interest rate I already mentioned: 1.8%.
Net interest expense: $240 billion. Its a
wonder we didnt think of this inancial
perpetual-motion machine about a thousand years ago.
Debt per se is neither good nor bad,
though less is usually better than more.
How its priced and how its used are
what tips the scales. If chocolate cake cost
a penny a slice, the best of us would be
tempted to break our diets. Well, government debt is priced at less than 2%, and
Washington fell of the wagon years ago.
The public debt will fall due someday.
(Some of it falls due just about every day.)
It will have to be repaid or reinanced.

1945
End of World War II

$19,810.31
Bernie Sanders would
levy $15.3 trillion in new
taxes. But the cost of his
new health plan could still
add $2 trillion to $15 trillion to the debt and slow
GDP growth by 9.5%,
some estimates say.

139.9 million

1957
Baby boom
peaks at
4.3million births

John Kasich says hed

balance the budget in
eight years. Experts say
they dont have enough
detail on whether his tax
reforms and spending
cuts would add up.

$8,861.57
172.0 million

D EB T I M PAC T EST I M AT ES: C O M M I T T EE F O R A R ES P O N S I B L E

F ED ER A L B U D G E T ( T RU M P, C RUZ, S A N D ERS, K A S I CH); TA X
F O U N DAT I O N (C L I N TO N, S A N D ERS); TA X P O L I CY C E N T ER (S A N D ERS)
N OT E S: D E B T P E R C A P I TA I S B A S E D O N G OV E R N M E N T D E B T
H E L D BY T H E P U B L I C, A DJ U S T E D TO 2 016 D O L L A R S
G R A P H I C S BY L I LY C H O W F O R T I M E

1918
End of
World War I

1929
The Great
Depression starts

$2,578.29

$1,457.78

103.2 million

121.8 million

97.2 million

1910s

1920s

1930s

1940s

1950s

April 2016

All 2016 figures are

current as of the printing
of this magazine

$42,998.12
323.3 million

Once a national consensus on money

and debt furnished this protective armor.
Money was gold and debt was bad, Americans assumed. Most credentialed economists today will smile at these ancient
prejudices. Allow me to suggest that our
forebears knew something.
Keynes himself would recoil at 0%
bank-deposit rates, chronically low economic growth and the towering trillions
that we have so generously pledged to one
another. (All we have to do now is earn the
money to pay them.)
How do we escape from our selfconstructed iscal jail? According to the
Government Accountability Oice, unpaid taxes add up to more than $450 billion a year. Even so, according to the Tax
Foundation, Americans spend 6.1 billion
hours and $233.8 billion each tax season
complying with a federal tax code that
runs to 10 million words. Are we quite
sure we want no part of the lat-tax idea?
An identical low rate on most incomes.
No deductions, no H&R Block. Impractical? So is the debt.
So is the spending (and the promises
to spend more down the road). We need
to stop the squandermania. How? By resuming the principled ight that Vivien
Kellems waged against the IRS during
the Truman Administration. It enraged
Kellems, a doughty Connecticut entrepreneur, that she was forced to withhold
federal taxes from her employees wages.
She called it involuntary servitude, and
she itched to make her constitutional
argument in court. She never got that

1971
Nixon removes
gold standard

chance, but she published her plan for a

peaceful revolution.
She asked her readersI ask mineto
really examine the stub of their paycheck.
Observe how much your employer pays
you and how much less you take home.
Notice the dollars withheld for Medicare,
Social Security and so forth. If you are
like most of us, you stopped looking long
ago. You dont miss the income that you
never get to touch.
Picking up where Kellems left of, I
propose a slight alteration in payday policy. Let each wage-earning citizen hold
the whole of his or her untaxed earnings
actually touch them. Then let the government pluck its taxes.
Such a payroll policy, wrote Kellems
in her memoir, Taxes, Toil and Trouble, is
entirely legal and if it were universally adopted, in six months we would have either
a tax revolution or a startling contraction
of the budget!
Black ink, sound money and the spirit
of Vivien Kellems are the way forward.
Make America solvent again is my credo
and battle cry. You can it it on a cap.

2009
Great
Recession ends



$28,153.20
306.8 million

2007
Great Recession
starts



$19,499.07
301.2 million

2001
Clinton records
fourth year of
budget surplus

$15,944.70
285.0 million

1990
Gulf War buildup



$16,802.56
249.5 million

1981
Reagan takes
office, implements
Reaganomics

$8,348.23
229.5 million

$7,160.67



207.7 million

U.S.
debt burden
per American
(adjusted
for inflation)

1960s

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

America
rallied
around
putting a
woman
on the $10
bill. But
what if
Hamilton
fans stick
her on
the back?
By Maya Rhodan
and DavidVon Drehle

PHOTO-ILLUSTR ATION BY TIME

WHITE MEN ON GREEN PAPER. From the

days of ancient Rome, when Julius Caesar
and his successors illed the empire with
coins bearing their likenesses, rulers and
nations have used their moneyboth coins
and the folding stufto deine themselves.
The unity of the U.K. is summed up in the
face of the Queen. France, before the euro,
decorated its currency with artists and philosophers. In the U.S., for more than a century, the pantheon of faces featured on paper
bills has been limited to a small number of
Caucasian guys: Presidents, plus a pair of
founders.
That monotony appeared to give way
last year when the Obama Administration
announced plans to put a woman on the $10
bill, with a design to be unveiled in 2020,
just in time for the 100th anniversary of
the 19th Amendment, which granted voting rights to women. More than a century
after Martha Washingtons limited appearance on a silver certiicate, the boys club of
George, Abe, Al, Andy, Ulysses and Benjamin
was going co-ed.
But hang on. Nothing is simple in Washington. With the Treasury Department
poised to announce details of the plan, a
battle has broken out over who, when and
where. And what seemed like a sure thing no
longer looks likely. Surging support for the

current $10-bill occupant and Broadway hotshot,

Alexander Hamilton, has collided with the slow
and secretive process for designing counterfeitresistant money. And the Treasury Secretary, who
sent a memo to the President in early 2015 suggesting a womans portrait on the $10 bill, has since
begun publicly emphasizing redesigns for the back
of the note, where a woman might be featured. In
an interview with TIME, a Treasury Department
oicial admits that some thinking has changed
but wont say what exactly. Many advocates fear
that the deal is already done: no female portrait
on the front of the $10 bill. And since Abe Lincoln
will never be displaced from the $5 bill, no woman
may arrive on the front of any currency until the
Treasury sends redesigned $20 bills to the banks,
which may not happen until 2030.
At the center of the pileup is Secretary of the
Treasury Jack Lew. Pressured by a powerful crew
of Hamiltonians and beseeched by feminists,
Lews hopes of pleasing everyone are sinking
fast. The Secretary has been urging audiences to
think beyond the one square inchas he puts
itof front-and-center portraiture on each U.S.
bill. Dont get hung up on that symbolism, he says,
when Uncle Sams greenbacks have room for so
many images: slogans and buildings, seals and signatures, eagles and eyeballs. Instead of calling for
a womans portrait, as he did last year, Lew now
emphasizes that Hamilton is one of my heroes.

36

TIME April 25, 2016

Americans have debated

the pick for 10 months

Eleanor
Roosevelt
The First Lady
topped a 2015 poll
to choose a woman
for the $10 bill.

Harriet
Tubman
Democratic Senators
have voiced support
for the famous
abolitionist.

Susan B.
Anthony
The sufragist has
appeared on a stamp
and a $1 coin.

THERE HAVE BEEN DOZENS OF MEN ON VARIOUS

banknotes in the nations history, with forgotten
names like Silas Wright and William Windom.
But the current roster of guys on the front of our
legal tender is pretty formidable. On the dollar
is the Father of His Country, George Washington, for whom the capital is named. Hes not losing his spot anytime soon. The $5 and $50 bills
belong to the two men most responsible for saving the Union when the U.S. appeared doomed
to implode: Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses Grant.

G E T T Y I M A G E S ( 5 ) ; J A C K S O N : N AT I O N A L N U M I S M AT I C C O L L E C T I O N AT T H E S M I T H S O N I A N I N S T I T U T I O N

THE THING IS, SYMBOLS MATTER, AS DOES

their placement. To some leaders of the campaign
for a womans portrait, a scene on the back of the
bill is symbolic of second-class status. Our irst
representation in over 100 years, and this is going
to be our representation? Its akin to being on the
back of the bus, says Barbara Ortiz Howard, the
activist who got a viral public conversation going
in 2015 by pushing for a woman on the $20 bill.
In fact, when it comes to cash, symbolism is the
whole point. Bills are essentially worthless scraps
of paperexcept that they symbolize a store of
value to back them up. A Benjamin brings $100 of
purchasing power, but take away a zero by decree
and the same slip of paper would buy 90% less.
Put the correct combination of paper scraps in the
hands of a cashier and they might respond with
food, shelter, a lat-screen TV or a Fitbit.
This symbolic potency may even be increasing as money becomes more abstract. When you
can buy a house with a pen stroke, a car with your
smartphone, a lifesaving surgery with the swipe of
a plastic card, the symbol known as cash takes on
the added heft of something tangible. Cash isnt
realask inlation-racked Venezuelansbut at
least you can put it in your pocket.
So of course there is a ight over that square

SOME WOMEN
IN THE RUNNING

inch on the front of one bill. Its a ight that appeared to be won early by the likes of Rosie Rios,
whose title is Treasurer of the United States, and
whose signature appears on every bill printed
during her tenure. A ierce advocate for putting a
woman on the currency, Rios began pushing for
the change soon after she joined the Obama Administration in 2009. Her presentation to then
Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner went so well,
she told CNN afterward, that she left the room
convinced the cause was sailing forward.
And in a way it was. The Advanced Counterfeit
Deterrence Steering Committeea multiagency
team that operates in secret to recommend and
oversee currency redesignsindicated which bill
was next in line for an update. The $10 note had
proved most vulnerable to high-tech counterfeiters and desperately needed up-to-date security
features such as three-dimensional security ribbons, multiple watermarks and color-changing
inks. It became the chosen vehicle for an overhaul not for any slight against Hamilton but because his bills time was up.
Meanwhile, support for women on U.S. currency was growing. President Obama himself
joined the debate in 2014 after reading a handwritten inquiry from a 9-year-old girl named
Soia in Massachusetts, who suggested a number
of candidates for the honor, including Obamas
wife Michelle. Lews announcement in the summer of 2015 that the $10 bill would be the irst
bill in more than a century to feature the portrait
of a woman seemed to seal the deal.
But then the story got complicated, thanks to
the intrusion of a couple of ghosts, a hip-hop genius and former Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke. Hamiltons demotion is intended to make
room to honor a deserving woman on the face of
our currency. Thats a ine idea, but it shouldnt
come at Hamiltons expense, Bernanke wrote
in a June op-ed. To the nations inancial leaders,
Hamilton was not just any old white guy; he was
the most important, inluential and visionary of
the white guys. Asking a Treasury Secretary to demote Hamilton turned out to be a bit like asking a
bird watcher to bury John James Audubon.

Either one would be hard to knock of. On the

$100 bill is Benjamin Franklin, who has been
called the original Americana prototype of
the self-made, entrepreneurial, clever and publicspirited man. The brilliant yet idiosyncratic
Thomas Jeferson gets a token nod on the littleused $2 bill, and other Presidents make footnote
appearances on various high-denomination bills
that are never seen in circulation.
That leaves the $10 and $20 bills and the two
hugely inluential and polarizing men whose unquiet ghosts have never stopped battling for the
American mind. Alexander Hamilton and Andrew
Jackson, one an immigrant genius who basically
invented the U.S. economy, the other a charismatic President who largely created the Democratic Party. The man of Wall Street and the man
of Main Street. The reputations of both men have
oscillated wildly since their deaths in 1804 and
1845, respectively.
But it just so happens that Hamiltons stock has
jumped to an all-time high at precisely the moment when hes faced with losing his, well, face.
His vision of the U.S. as a continent-spanning,
industry-based global inancial power has been
vindicated by history. And at the same time, his
singular biography (with its decidedly sexy undertones) captured the imagination of the hottest
young artist on Broadway, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Just when the bureaucracy seemed ready to take
the wigged capitalist down a peg, Mirandas multiethnic hip-hop musical Hamilton burst out as New
York Citys hottest ticket in decades.
Lew went to see the production in August and
soon after dropped hints that changing the face of
the $10 bill might not be as simple as one face or
even one bill. The Secretary hosted the musicals
star at the department in March, where he told
Miranda he would be very happy with the new
note. There are multiple bills that are going to
be redesigned, the Treasury Secretary told CBS.
One of the things thats come out of this conversation is that very few people know whats on the
back of any of our bills.
Lews talk of the back side was the beginning of
his public backslide. The notion that they might
have shared real estate has struck a lot of scholars
and a lot of cultural critics as disingenuous, says
historian and author Catherine Clinton, one of a
group of scholars who met with Lew and Rios to
discuss the matter. In that meeting, she sarcastically asked if a woman might appear on 80% of the
bills to represent the pay gap women have historically faced in the U.S.
Harvard historian Jane Kamensky attended the
same meeting. Youre not going to ix gender inequality by putting a woman on the face of the
$10, but boy will you emphasize gender inequal-

THE HISTORY OF
THE $10 BILL
Change is rare in U.S.
currency design

1914
President Andrew
Jackson appeared on
the face of the irst
$10 bill; he is now on
the $20.

1929
The bill was reissued
with the face of
Treasury Secretary
Alexander Hamilton.

2006
The last redesign
includes symbols
of freedom, like
the torch from the
Statue of Liberty.

ity by putting women on the back, she says. Senator Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire who drafted a bill to put a woman on the $20
note, agrees. Whomever is chosen shouldnt have
to share the honor, she says of the $10 bill.
To this, Hamiltons defenders have pointed to
a solution: Andrew Jackson, whose stock is trading at a steep discount these days, thanks to his
slave-trading rsum and his record as a persecutor of Native Americans. No President has
fewer friends at Treasury: Jacksons ierce crusade against national banking guaranteed that.
In fact, he so loathed the very concept of central
banknotes that, if he came back from the dead,
he might lead the charge to have his face removed
from the $20 bill.
Deciding on the right woman for the $10 bill,
either front or back, has been a struggle all its own.
Formidable igures from Harriet Tubman and Eleanor Roosevelt to Susan B. Anthony and Rosa
Parks have all been suggested, with public polls
showing a nation divided. Complicating matters
further (if that is possible) is the fact that among
the women who care about this, there are surprising fault lines. Hillary Clinton and her replacement in the Senate, New Yorks Kirsten Gillibrand,
have lined up for keeping Hamilton on the $10 bill
and putting someone like Tubman on the $20 bill.
Exchanging a slave trader for an emancipationist
heroine could send exactly the right message. But
even if there were agreement on which woman
might get stamped on the $20 bill, the problem
is timing.
While Lew could announce his decision any
day now, the new design of the $10 bill is scheduled for unveiling in 2020, with the bills hitting
pocketbooks by 2026. The Advanced Counterfeit Deterrence Steering Committee has not made
any recommendations regarding the $5 bill or the
$20 bill, said a senior government oicial familiar with the process. That means, under a normal
schedule, the U.S. would be left waiting until at
least 2030 to see a Tubman $20 bill at the bank.
(A Treasury oicial took issue with that timeline,
saying advancements in technology as well as new
and emerging threats could speed up the process.)
To many proponents of a change, any additional delay for a woman front and center is too
long. And no proponent may have a louder voice
in this ight than young Soia of Massachusetts,
who turns 11 in April. She was the one, after all,
whose winsome, clear-eyed letter caught the
Presidents eye in 2014. Asked by TIME about the
current ight over the $10 note, she did not hold
back. I think that putting a woman on the back
of the bill would make women seem less important, she said. You dont pay a lot of attention to
the back of the bill.

37

THE BILLION
HE MEN EASED PAST THE PICKETers and police barricades, through
a security-studded lobby and up to
the eighth loor of a federal building
named for Ronald Reagan. Inside
an airy rotunda, guests in jackets and ties mingled
over pork sliders and seafood tacos served by black
waiters in tuxedos. There were celebratory speeches
during dinner, crme brle for dessert. Apart from
the racial epithets wafting around the room, the
Saturday-night banquet seemed more like a wedding reception than a meeting of white nationalists.
The event was sponsored by the National Policy
Institute (NPI), a tiny think tank based in Arlington, Va., dedicated to the advancement of people of European descent. NPI publishes pseudoscientiic tracts with titles like Race Diferences
in Intelligence, runs a blog called Radix Journal
(sample post: My Hate Group Is Diferent Than
Your Hate Group) and holds conferences on topics like immigration and identity politics. This
time it had gathered a group of 150 sympathizers in downtown Washington to discuss what the

rise of Donald Trump has meant for the far right.

Since the start of the 2016 campaign, Trump has
built a broad coalition of supporters, attracting voters
with his forceful personality and his willingness to
challenge party doctrine. And while the vast majority are driven by reasons other than race, Trump has
also emerged as a hero to white nationalists. Trump
has energized us, says Richard Spencer, president
of NPI. For the irst time since George Wallace in
1968, far-right activists in the U.S. are migrating toward mainstream electoral politics, stepping out of
the shadows to attend rallies, ofer endorsements and
serve as volunteers. Its bound to happen, Spencer
says of white nationalists running for oice one day.
Not as conservatives but as Trump Republicans.
Extremists have latched on to Trump as a
rallying cry and recruiting tool. Attendance at NPI
events has jumped 75% over the past year, Spencer
says. The white-supremacist website Stormfront
reportedly had to upgrade its servers to handle
a Trump-driven traic spike. William Johnson,
chairman of the racist American Freedom Party,
paid for pro-Trump robocalls in six primary and

AND
Protesters last July outside a
Trump hotel under construction
in Washington

38

TIME April 25, 2016

AIRE
caucus states. Trump was the spark we needed,
he says, citing a surge in membership.
This is a story line that could shape more than
the 2016 election. Trumps success with disafected
whites is a sign that the forces of xenophobia and
nationalism, which fueled the rise of far-right populist parties across Europe, are gathering strength
in the U.S. as well. At a moment of rising racial tensions, Trumps rhetoric of resentment has redrawn
the boundaries of political speech in new and troubling ways. This is a phenomenon that we havent
really seen before, says Marilyn Mayo, a co-director
of the Center on Extremism at the Anti-Defamation
League. White supremacists and others on the extreme right have felt like theyre kept in the distance
during election cycles. They dont feel that way with
Trump. Theyre right in the conversation.

T H E A LT R I G H T
A BILLIONAIRE MOGUL FROM MULTICULTURAL
Manhattan makes an unlikely tribune for a whitegrievance movement. But in more than a dozen interviews, extremists described why they feel galva-

nized by Trumps candidacy. They love his calls for

walling of the southern border and barring Muslim
immigration. They ind his salvos against political
correctness refreshing. And they interpret his laments of national decline as a dog whistle about demographic change.
Now theyre hoping a powerful and ubiquitous
messenger can spread their ideas. It used to be
that nobody would say these things, says Richard,
a Maryland resident in his 20s wearing a wispy beard
and a black knit tie. Trump has opened the door to
nationalism in this countrynot American nationalism but the white race. Once that door has fully
swung open, you cant close it.
Trumps ascendancy comes at a moment of
reinvention for the far right. A new generation of
leaders like NPIs Spencer are trying to recast white
nationalism as a 21st century movement steeped
in social media. The NPI meeting was dominated
by young men under 30, many of whom said they
were part of an online network known as the Alt (for
Alternative) Right. Originally rooted in antipathy
to mainstream conservatism, the Alt Right has

THE BIGOTS
How Donald Trumps campaign brought white
nationalists out of the shadows
By Alex Altman

morphed over the past year into a virtual

pro-Trump army. Its a loose collection
of furies who range from provocative
Twitter trolls to white-rights activists,
garden-variety anti-Semites, protofascists and overt neo-Nazis.
Like any other movement that peddles
belonging to the alienated, the Alt Right
has developed its own lexicon. The protesters holding antiracist signs on the
sidewalk below were classic SJWs (a derisive acronym for social-justice warriors).
Establishment Republicans are known as
cuckservatives, a term designed to connote emasculation. Both groups fall into
the category of people whom members of
the Alt Right refer to on Twitter and in
blogs like the Right Stuf as ovenworthy.
Though they often disagree on tone
and tactics, members of the Alt Right are
bound by a few core beliefs. They regard
most Republican politicians as Zionist
puppets, captive to corporations seeking
cheap labor. They tend to be protectionist
on trade, isolationist on foreign policy and
unmoved by cornerstone conservative issues like free markets or the Constitution.
They reject the beneits of diversity and
view demographic trends as an existential threat.
Over $10 cocktails at the NPI event,
white nationalists described U.S. population dynamics with a sense of dread. In
a democracy, the majority rules, said
Jefrey, a 27-year-old soap entrepreneur
from Louisiana. If we become a minority
in our own country, we will be stripped
of our power. Others suggested that they
could face systemic persecution if white
birthrates remain low and immigration
isnt curtailed.
Diversity brings diferences, and
sometimes those diferences are so irreconcilable, they cause conlict, said Nathan Damigo, a 29-year-old student from
Oakdale, Calif., who blogs about incidents
of alleged antiwhite bias. To Damigo, a
former Marine who fought on the sectarian battleields of Iraq, the rise of a candidate like Trump was inevitable. This
is what happens in all multiracial, multireligious, multiethnic societies, he said.
Identity politics trumps everything else.

#WHITEGENOCIDE
THE MIGRATION OF EXTREMISTS FROM
Internet message boards to the campaign
trail has produced ugly scenes. Racial
40

TIME April 25, 2016

Identity
politics
trumps
everything
else.
NATHAN DAMIGO,
A EUROPEAN-RIGHTS ACTIVIST FROM
CALIFORNIA WHO BLOGS ABOUT
INCIDENTS OF ALLEGED ANTIWHITE BIAS

slurs have tainted Trump rallies from Alabama to Nevada. In Ohio and Missouri,
his supporters urged protesters to go
back to Africa and go to Auschwitz,
respectively. At the same time, Trumps
events have been tainted by episodes of
racially charged violence. At an event in
Kentucky, a prominent white supremacist shoved and shouted at a young black
woman. Melees between Black Lives
Matter activists and Trumps backers
forced the cancellation of a rally in Chicago. At an event in Fayetteville, N.C., a
Trump fan named John McGraw, 78, was
charged with assault for sucker punching
a black protester. The next time we see
him, said McGraw later, we might have
to kill him.
How much blame Trump deserves for
this is a complicated question. He has
never endorsed the tenets of white supremacy or espoused explicit racism on
the campaign trail. Even when promoting a ban on Muslims or linking Mexican
immigrants with rape and violence, he
heaps praise on both groups as a whole.
Right-wing extremists dont think Trump
shares their views. Donald Trump is not
a white nationalist. I dont think hes a racist, says John Friend, a Holocaust denier

from Southern California who argues that

the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were a Jewish
plot. But hes pushed the political discourse in our direction.
Trump has done more than tap into the
anxieties of his supporters. Hes turned
campaign rallies into tribal warfare. When
bad behavior lares up, he has been slow
or unwilling to repudiate it. He promised
to pay the legal bills of backers who scufle with protesters and snarls orders for
dissidents removal like a stereotypical
Southern sherif. When he suggested that
riots might erupt at the GOP convention if
the nomination eludes his grasp, it struck
many who have witnessed the chaos at his
events as a credible threat.
White nationalists believe Trump has
courted their support through a series of
subtle signals. To his 7.5 million followers on Twitter, Trump has retweeted racist fans, including accounts that promote
#WhiteGenocidethe idea that the bipartisan push for diversity is designed to
subjugate whites. (The tweets themselves
did not contain racist content.) Some of
his stafers follow popular Alt Right igures whose tweets are littered with racist
remarks. Trump has retweeted debunked
statistics that posit an epidemic of blackon-white crime.
On the campaign trail, Trump has
touted an Eisenhower-era deportation
program known as Operation Wetback.
Hes pointed to the deaths of Kathryn
Steinle, a young white woman murdered
in San Francisco, and Jamiel Shaw, a black
high school football star killed in Los Angeles, as examples of the threat posed by
undocumented immigrants. Were being
attacked, Trump said last August. People are coming through the border that
are really bad hombres. His campaign issued press credentials to James Edwards,
a white-supremacist radio host who interviewed one of Trumps sons. In some
interviews, Trump declined to repudiate
racist supporters like former Ku Klux Klan
grand wizard David Duke.
Trump spokeswoman Hope Hicks
says he has no knowledge of or ailiation
with his far-right fan club. Trump, who
composes his tweets on a Samsung smartphone, doesnt always vet the proiles of
the supporters he retweets, says Hicks,
who notes the campaign was unaware of
Edwards political views. He has been
very strong in his disavowal of all groups

P R E V I O U S PA G E S : P R O T E S T: C H I P S O M O D E V I L L A G E T T Y I M A G E S; T R U M P : C H A D B AT K A
T H E N E W YO R K T I M E S/ R E D U X ; T H I S PA G E : M AT T E I C H F O R T I M E

that espouse hatred, she tells TIME.

White nationalists still think Trump
is winking at them. It would be diicult for all this to be an accident, says
Andrew Anglin, editor of the Daily
Stormer, a website with sections on the
Jewish problem and race war. To Anglin, Trump represents a bridge to a new,
pro-white populism. Something has
changed, says the 31-year-old neo-Nazi
from Columbus, Ohio. Hes proven the
Republican Party can no longer push an
agenda thats against white Americans
for the beneit of the special interests
they represent.

T H E W H I T E E T H N O S TAT E
RICHARD SPENCER IS READY TO SEIZE
the moment. Spencer, 37, has devoted
much of his adult life to forging a new
path for white nationalism. We need to
present ourselves as serious and attractive, he explains. The type of people
who can rule a country one day.
Spencer is clean-cut, polite and solicitous. He spends his days on Twitter and
Slack and peppers his paragraphs with
academic jargon picked up during postgraduate studies at Duke and the University of Chicago. At the NPI meeting,

Richard Spencer is among the

many white nationalists who
have rallied behind Trump
where the tables were decorated with images of Trumps golden mane, he wore a
dark suit, a purple vest over a pink dress
shirt and a distinctive haircutshaved on
the sides, longish on topthat has been
widely mimicked by white nationalists.
Spencer strives to soften the edges of
his ideology. He says he rejects white supremacy and considers slavery abhorrent. He calls himself an identitarian,
a belief system that emphasizes racial
identity and has much more in common
with European far-right movements than
anything cooked up by William F. Buckley
and his cohort. But the preppy demeanor
belies a radical vision: the establishment
of a whites-only ethnostate.
Its still just a fantasy, Spencer admits. But hes not wrong to suggest that
the rise of Trump, coupled with demographic trends and social crosscurrents,
has imbued this cause with new momentum. The Black Lives Matter movement
that took root in Ferguson, Mo., has fed
a broader white-persecution complex.
About 4 in 10 Americansand nearly 75%

of Trump supporterssay discrimination

against whites is now as big a problem as
discrimination against blacks, according
to a November study by the Public Religion Research Institute. Attempts to stile
free speech on college campuseswhere
students seek out safe spaces and complain that chalking Trump 2016 on the
quad is an act of intimidationseem to
validate the candidates jeremiads against
political correctness. Meanwhile, the
GOPs perpetual pursuit of policies like
free trade, entitlement cuts and lower
taxes for the wealthy has widened the gulf
between party bosses and the base. Conservatism is committing suicide, Spencer
says. We want to ill that space.
In the age of Trump, the emergence
of a new nationalist third party no longer seems impossible. The GOP front
runner has shattered so many taboos,
smashed so many conservative idols,
that to Spencer it feels as if a movement
rooted in race and identity, rather than
the Constitution and capitalism, is gathering steam. It may take years of itful
progress, he predicts, capped by some
seismic shocka sudden war, a stockmarket crash. Or maybe just the arrival
of a candidate like Donald Trump.

41

World

MAN-MADE DISASTER
A YEAR AFTER DEVASTATING QUAKES, POLITICS HAS KEPT NEPAL IN RUINS | TEXT BY NIKHIL KUMAR
PHOTOGRAPHS BY JAMES NACHTWEY FOR TIME

The Himalayan
mountain village
of Barpak was at
the epicenter of
the quakes

43

IT WAS A YEAR AGO THAT RAM GIRIS

home imploded. The earthquakes that
killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal in
April and May 2015 twisted the brick
walls of the two-room structure, spilling
the exterior into what had been the
familys living space. To keep whats
left stable, Giri spent his savings on
wooden trusses to hold up the walls. It
can collapse at any moment, he says,
gazing over his village in the countrys
Sindhupalchok district, still strewn with
debris from the 7.8- and 7.3-magnitude
quakes. All around him, desperate
villagers remain stuck in shaky tarpaulin
tents and small tin sheds that seem
barely strong enough to withstand the
monsoon rainstorms due this summer,
let alone another temblor in this
earthquake-prone nation.
It wasnt meant to be this way. With
the damage from the quakes estimated
at about $7 billion, international donors stepped up to aid Nepal, pledging
$4.1 billion in assistance for the desperately poor country. But the money for
rebuilding homes has yet to reach victims like Giri. Instead of focusing on reconstruction, Nepal became consumed
with a protracted political battle over a
new constitution that had been in the
works since the monarchy was abolished
in 2008. This was a moment to focus
on rebuilding the country, but the priorities were all wrong, says C.K. Lal, a
prominent Kathmandu-based political
commentator.
The departure of Nepals royal rulers
had been preceded, two years earlier, by
the end of a decadelong insurgency by
Maoist rebels that claimed more than
10,000 lives. In the years since, two separate eforts to write a new constitution
became mired in political squabbles over
the structure of the infant Federal Republic of Nepal. With the earthquakes,
the countrys major political parties decided to fast-track the constitutional
process to clear the way for reconstruction. But the opposite happened, as ethnic groups living along Nepals border
with India protested that their interests
had been sidelined in a new constitution
that was hurriedly approved in September. More than 50 people were killed as
anger about the new document spread in
southern Nepal.
Known as Madhesis, with close
44

TIME April 25, 2016

Clockwise from top left: Residents rebuild in Barpak a year after the quakes; people live in tents in
Kathmandu; progress has been slow in Barpak; a woman carries a child through ruins

language and cultural ties to neighboring India, these communities have long
felt marginalized by the Nepalese state.
As they protested, the border was blocked
for up to 135 days, leaving trucks carrying badly needed fuel and food stranded
in India, which surrounds Nepal on three
sides. Amid the political bickering
Nepal blamed India for fanning the unrest; New Delhi denied the charge
reconstruction was derailed. Its politics,
not rebuilding, that has dominated over
the past year, says Prashant Jha, author
of Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal.
The fallout is clear to see in the troubled record of Nepals National Reconstruction Authority (NRA), the state
agency responsible for the rebuilding
efort. First proposed in June, it wasnt
until December that the NRA was inally given legal backing. It took until
mid-March for the irst rebuilding
funds to be distributed to quake victims
in a section of the countrys hard-hit
Dolakha district. Nepals Prime Minister
K.P. Oli acknowledged the problems on
March 29, when he said that the reconstruction work is not going to end even
in decades at this pace, according to the
Kathmandu Post.
Meanwhile, there are fears of renewed violence. The borders reopened
after politicians in Kathmandu amended
the constitution this year to placate the
protesters. But as analysts warned this
month, the changes dont fully address
the Madhesi demands, leaving the door
open to further turmoil.
Its a prospect that ills Giri with
dread. Before the earthquake, he earned
close to $200 a month as a driver for a
local businessman. His wife worked
part time at a farm. But the quake devastated farming, and Giri lost his job when
protests blocked the supply of diesel to
Nepal. Though supplies have resumed,
fuel remains scarce. Giri says he is lucky
if he drives more than one or two days a
week. He spends the rest of the month
working as a laborer. At the end of the
month, we now have $30, maybe $40,
for a family of four, he says. Our home
has been destroyed. Who knows when
the government will rebuild it? They
say they will give us money to rebuild it.
When? Next year? With reporting by
KAI SCHULTZ/KATHMANDU

46

TIME April 25, 2016

Much of the reconstruction work in Barpak

is done communally; here, villagers rebuild
houses and a Buddhist stupa

WHY NOT USE TECHNOLOGY TO MAKE ANIMALS TALK, A NOBLE PURSUIT IF EVER THERE WAS ONE? PAGE 56

Lamar, West, Rihanna, Beyonc and Cyrus have all experimented with surprise releases

MUSIC

Pops biggest
stars are
reviving the
album by
reinventing it

GE T T Y IM AGES (5); L P: AL A M Y

By Nolan Feeney

ON FEB. 11, KANYE WEST THREW

himself a party at Madison Square
Garden, partly to hype the new
season of his Yeezy clothing line but
also to unveil The Life of Pablo, the
album hed been dangling in front
of fans since 2014. While models
stood still in the center of the arena,
dressed in clothes that looked ripped
from a postapocalyptic thriller, West
played new songs of a laptop like
he was deejaying New Yorks biggest
house party.
West had long been tinkering with
his new music, changing the title from
So Help Me God to Swish and then
Waves. Hed also been amending the
track list, which began with 10 songs,
and sharing it on social media. When
he debuted the music in front of thousands at the Gardenplus 20 million

or so watching the live streamfans

thought they had inally heard what
The Life of Pablo was all about.
Kanye had other ideas.
One day later, he tweeted that he
was adding more songs. Two days
later, he performed on Saturday Night
Live. On the third day, Pablo rose
again, appearing in the wee hours on
the streaming service Tidal, which
West co-owns. Now it had 18 tracks,
and in the next 10 days it would be
played 250 million times, Tidal said.
But Kanye wasnt done yet.
That afternoon, he tweeted, Ima ix
wolves and over the next few weeks
he proceeded to change mixes, lyrics
and even the guest list. When he irst
premiered the track in 2015, Wolves
showcased pop diva Sia and the rapper
Vic Mensa; at the Garden, Wolves
49

TimeOf Reviews

featured R&B singer Frank Ocean; now

the irst version had been restored.
Some might call this rollout a mess;
West calls it innovation. On April 1, his
label announced that The Life of Pablo
now at 19 tracksis a living album
with new iterations due in coming
months. It was added to Spotify and
Apple Music, and as a result it is now
the irst album to reach No. 1 on the
Billboard 200 from streaming70% of
its sales units were actually streams.
Industry pundits have long foretold
the death of the album as ile sharing
and the digital-music revolution drove
a 57% drop in sales and licensing
revenue from 1999 to 2009. (Adele,
who sold 3.38 million copies of her
album 25 in its irst week, knows those
proclamations are slightly premature.)
But West isnt alone in dismantling
conventions about how a major artist
releases an albumor what makes an
album in the irst place. While his peers
explore the opportunities allowed by
digital distribution, West has zeroed
in on what streaming ofers that other
formats cant: that the album you love
today wont be the same tomorrow.

Pulling a Beyonc
quickly became
the term for any
album rollout with a
surprise element

50

TIME April 25, 2016

TIME
PICKS

MOVIES
The lively comedy
Elvis & Nixon (April 22)
imagines the meeting
that took place when
the King (played by
Michael Shannon)
sat down with the
37th President (Kevin
Spacey) in 1970.

MUSIC
Sturgill Simpsons third
album, A Sailors Guide
to Earth (April 15), is a
letter to his new son,
infusing his already
nontraditional take on
country with inflections
of 1960s soul.
BOOKS
My Struggle: Book
Five (April 19),
the penultimate
installment of Karl Ove
Knausgaards lauded
autobiographical
series, covers the trials
of his writers block and
his fathers death.

TELEVISION
In Season 2 of Netflixs
Unbreakable Kimmy
Schmidt (April 15),
Ellie Kempers
wholesome kidnapping
survivor reunites
with her mom and
pursues new romantic
opportunities.
U N B R E A K A B L E K I M M Y S C H M I D T: N E T F L I X

THE ALBUM AS WE KNOW IT is

old enough to retire. Back in 1948,
Columbia Records released the irst
successful 12-in., 33-r.p.m. vinyl
record, nearly quintupling the amount
of audio per side to around 22 minutes.
(Before that, an album referred to
a bundle of 10-in., 78-r.p.m. discs
packaged together in paper sleeves.)
Over the next few decades, the industry
shifted focus from singles to albums,
with artists following a rigorous
pattern: record an album, promote it
with a single, tour after release, repeat.
In recent years, a few high-proile
artists have tried to break that cycle.
Radiohead announced its 2007 album
In Rainbows 10 days ahead of its release
and let fans pay what they wanted.
In 2010, Swedish pop star Robyn put
out three minialbums so she could

record and tour simultaneously before

compiling the best tracks for her album
Body Talk. Then Beyonc unwound
everything when she chucked 14 songs
with matching music videos onto iTunes
with no warning in December 2013.
Pulling a Beyonc quickly became
the term for any album rollout with
a surprise element. One of the most
successful artists to borrow from her
playbook is the rapper Drake, who
released If Youre Reading This Its Too
Late with little fanfare in February
2015only to watch it become the irst
million-selling album released that year.
Not every surprise is about
converting Internet buzz into dollars.
Last year Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz,
a set of home recordings, was posted
to the singers website; she announced
it in the inal seconds of her hosting
duties at the MTV Video Music Awards.
Rihanna released Anti in late January,
partly to cut her losses amid mounting
expectations and bad press following
three scrapped singles. Rapper Kendrick
Lamar used the tactic to issue material
that may not have otherwise been
commercially viable: last months
untitled unmastered. features rough
outtakes from his Grammy-winning
To Pimp a Butterly. (It managed to top
the Billboard 200 albums chart anyway.)
Some critics predict that fans and
artists willif they havent alreadytire
of the surprise strategy. But the woman
who inspired the trend ofers clues
about its future.
The week before West unveiled
The Life of Pablo, Beyonc surprisereleased the politically charged single
Formation, with a music video
referencing Hurricane Katrina and
police brutality. She performed the
song at the Super Bowl and used the
next commercial break to announce
a world tour that sold $100 million
in tickets in two weeksall without
a new album, which would be less
lucrative. (She is, however, rumored
to be working on one.) It was a smart
move, using the countrys biggest TV
event as free advertising. But it was
also a glimpse at what the future might
hold. Perhaps the next big change to
the album isnt how much notice artists
give us or how much they tinkerits
whether they release one at all.

THEATER

The biggest new

sounds on Broadway

BASED
ON A 1921
SHOW

BASED
ON THE
MOVIE

BASED
ON THE
BOOK

BASED
ON THE
BOOK

REVIVAL
OF A
CLASSIC

BY STEVE
MARTIN
AND EDIE
BRICKELL

THE BROADWAY SEASON HAS BEEN

fairly quiet since the smash opening of
Hamilton last summer. But things are
about to heat up with a burst of highly
anticipated new musicals. Along with
the recently opened Bright StarSteve
Martin and Edie Brickells tuneful if
rather lumbering bluegrass showthey
represent the most eclectic slate of new
musicals to jam into one season in years.
The most buzzed-about is Shule
Along, or, The Making of the Musical
Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed
(opening April 28), partly a revivalof
a landmark black musical revue with
songs by Eubie Blakeand partly a
backstage drama about the shows
troubled history. George C. Wolfes new
production could become a landmark
itself, with choreography by Savion
Glover and a stellar cast headed by sixtime Tony winner Audra McDonald.
Also on the menu is Waitress
(April 24), based on the 2007 indie ilm
about a small-town hash slinger stuck in
a loveless marriage, with a score by pop
singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles. Those
with a taste for darker fare can whet
their appetite with American Psycho
(April 21), an unlikely musicalization of
Bret Easton Ellis slasher novel about a
Wall Street yuppie whos a serial killer
on the side; Duncan Sheik (Spring
Awakening) wrote the music. And for
something more whimsical, theres Tuck
Everlasting (April 26), based on the
childrens novel about a little girl who
encounters a family that has found the
secret to immortality.
All thats missing is the usual big
revival of an old Broadway classic.
Instead, a more modest revival of one
of the lesser lights of the golden age will
serve quite well. A new production of
She Loves Me, the 1963 musical about a
pair of feuding co-workers in a Budapest
parfumerie who dont realize theyve
been writing anonymous love letters to
each other, boasts a lovely score by Jerry
Bock and Sheldon Harnick, a cast thats
close to perfection and one of the most
charming love stories ever put on stage.
A little jewel, polished up for the ages.
RICHARD ZOGLIN

BOOKS

A battlefield
memoir from
an interrogator
THE VAST DISTANCE BEtween war and war stories is
typically illed, in books as
in life, by the sort of bluster
that gets people pushed onto
battleields in the irst place.
Accounts true to the experience line a short shelf that
includes E.B. Sledges With
the Old Breed, Paul Fussells
Doing Battle and Neil McCallums Journey With a Pistol.
And now Eric Fairs
Consequence: A Memoir. Fair
saw no ighting in his war,
yet his book has the stiled
anger and hollow feeling of
remembered combat. Having
left the Army before 9/11, he
arrived in Iraq as a private
contractor. He knew Arabic
and had a yearning to be part
of things. He interrogated
Iraqis in plywood booths,
the walls of which shook
from the impact of thrown
bodies. He declined work in
the worst part of Abu Ghraib.
But he posed beside a device
that caused prisoners to pass
out and soil themselves.
Consequence is Fairs
attempt to confront what he
did, and failed to do. It reads
like a compulsion, a barebones Dragnet narrative, if
Detective Joe Friday were
trying to ind out why a man
who once took refuge in
church inds himself playing
a Roman. KARL VICK
51

TimeOf Reviews

CHILDRENS BOOKS

Are you
there, Allah?
Its me, Cindy

MORE FOR MIDDLE

SCHOOLERS
Three new books about
big transitions

By Sarah Begley
TWO YEARS AGO, THERE
was an uproar in the usually
quiet childrens-book world:
frustrated by the overwhelming whiteness of kids books,
readers took to social media
to protest with the hashtag
#WeNeedDiverseBooks.
Publishers took note. In
2013, childrens books featuring black, Latino, Asian
or Native American characters accounted for only 8%
of those released in the U.S.,
according to the Cooperative
Childrens Book Center at
the University of Wisconsin
Madison. In 2015, that number rose to 15%. Theres still
a long way to go.
One group that could
perhaps especially use some
ictional representation these
days: Muslim-American
kids. As fear about ISIS has
stoked hostile rhetoric in
certain quarters, these kids
have felt the efects. MuslimAmerican parents have reported a spike in schoolyard
bullying in recent months,
with kids getting taunted
for having terrorist names.
According to the Associated
Press and the Chicago Tribune, some have wondered
if theyd be deported if a socalled Muslim ban were put
into efect. Who can be these
kids ictional hero? Enter
Zomorod Cindy Yousefzadeh, the lovable protagonist
of It Aint So Awful, Falafel.
Iranian-American author
Firoozeh Dumas previously
wrote about her life experiences in the best-selling
memoir Funny in Farsi, and
shes applied some of those
biographical details here,
52

TIME April 25, 2016

The Wild Robot

by Peter Brown
Robot Roz boots up on
a wild island after being
shipwrecked in a storm;
now she must learn how
to survive in nature

for younger readers. Falafel

opens in 1978, when sixthgrader Cindy (her chosen
name) and her parents move
to Newport Beach, Calif.,
straight outta Compton,
where her dad was previously assigned on an oil
project, and before that,
straight outta Abadan, Iran.
She faces certain expected
struggles in her irst year in
a new school and neighborhood: teachers cant pronounce her name, kids ask

Zomorod is not
a good name
here...whose
name starts with
a Z? Nobody on
this planet who
counts.
FROM IT AINT SO AWFUL,
FALAFEL

if she rides a camel, and

neighbors think her moms
cooking looks like mud. But
when the Iran hostage crisis
begins, the Yousefzadeh family encounters a new level of
nasty incidents, from a dead
hamster left on their doorstep to a visit from a plumber
whose T-shirt says WANTED:
IRANIANS FOR TARGET
PRACTICE.
Yep, history will repeat
itself. But Dumas depicts
each hurdle with compassion
and laugh-out-loud humor.
She has created an endearingly plucky characterany
kid whos felt like an outsider could relate to Cindy.
Through it all, the young
girl keeps in mind advice
from her father: Kindness
is our religion and if we treat
everybody the way we would
like to be treated, the world
would be a better place.

Wolf Hollow
by Lauren Wolk
When the bully of
Annabelles hometown
goes missing, she stands
up for the loner WW I
vet everyone thinks is
responsible

Booked
by Kwame Alexander
The Newbery-winning
author of The Crossover
returns with another book
in verse about a soccer
player who learns to love
reading

THE LOVE OF READING

TimeOf Television

REVIEW

Thrill of secrecy,
agony of deceit in
The Night Manager
By Daniel DAddario

54

TIME April 25, 2016

Hiddleston and Laurie spin an exhilarating web of lies

a staged kidnapping of Ropers son
near the family compound in telegenic
Majorca, Spain.
Does it make sense that a man as
canny as Roper would fall for Jonathans
game? Aided by his paranoid consigliere
Corky (a simmering Tom Hollander),
Roper should have been more on the ball.
But the show needs his self-regarding
arrogance in order to work, and Laurie
satisfyingly leshes out a superbly detestable villain. Roper isnt a supervillain
like Bonds Ernst Stavro Blofeld; hes an
indolent fellow who loves wealth more
than people. Hed rather lounge by the
pool in his parrot-colored robe than peddle artillerybut the latter inances the
former, so there it is.
The Night Manager applies the
pleasing fundamentals of pulp spycraft
to the banal world of corporate evil. Its
takes on the Arab Spring or Western
power grabs in emerging economies are

Becoming a man is
realizing that its
all rotten. Realizing
how to celebrate that
rottennessnow
thatsfreedom.
HUGH LAURIE, as Richard Roper

entirely surface-level, but going deeper

is the sort of task Homeland takes care of.
The gratiications here derive from the
trappings of glamoura lavish opening
sequence, an overwrought score, the
striking Elizabeth Debicki as a trophy
girlfriend on the verge of shattering
and from Ropers reassuring lack of
imagination. Unlike many great screen
villains, he has nothing sympathetic
about him; hes all boor.
The avaricious Roper has accumulated plenty of resources, but Jonathan, hardened by military service and
service-industry service, is resourceful.
Youll be in so deep, youll worry that
youll never get out of it, Angela warns
as she indoctrinates him into her world.
Theres not a scrap of you that wont
get used. Theres not an hour that will
go by that you wont be scared.
Indeed, the further Jonathan burrows
into his subterfuge, the more his personality seems to evaporate. All the better to
carry out his missions, or to carry a quintessential spy series without distracting from its delightsthe wake left by a
speedboat in the Mediterranean, customcut suits, the deadly sheen of a tense moment suspended in the air between two
stars having the time of their lives.
THE NIGHT MANAGER airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m.
E.T. on AMC

T H E N I G H T M A N A G E R : A M C ; L A U R I E : G E T T Y I M A G E S; D I C E : B R I A N B O W E N S M I T H S H O W T I M E

IN THE YEARS SINCE THE DAFFILY

self-assured Alias left the air, television
spies have engaged in increasingly grim
business. Assignments on Homeland
rely on the real-world ramiications
of terrorism and are carried out by
agents whove sacriiced their lives to
miserable service, gray suits and grayer
rooms. The Americans, currently airing
a superlative season on FX, is even less
glamorous. Blame the suburban 1980s
setting, Keri Russells ierce commitment
to Mother Russia and how exhausting
it looks to swap out wigs multiple times
a dayits probably the most realistic
depiction of espionage on TV.
On AMCs The Night Manager, at
last, the sheer fun of tradecraft is back.
Based on John le Carrs irst post
Cold War novel, the six-episode miniseries (launching April 19) traverses a
complicated world. But its most explosive moments stem from the interplay
between a spook and an arms dealer.
Tom Hiddleston, a villain in Marvel
movies like Thor and The Avengers, is
the good guy here. Managing a hotel
in Cairo during the 2011 fall of Hosni
Mubarak, his Jonathan falls for Sophie
(Aure Atika), who warns him about
the worst man in the world, a fellow
whos planning to supply weapons,
including napalm, to be used against
the Egyptian people. She quickly makes
a violent exit from the series, but not
before the two fall into bed together.
I want one of your many selves to sleep
with me tonight, she tells Jonathan.
You can choose which one. The line is
indefensible as anything but spy-genre
pastichewhich is, conveniently, what
The Night Manager does best.
The self Jonathan puts forward is bent
on revenge, and he eventually inds his
way there. Recruited by Angela, a British
intelligence oicer (Olivia Colman,
exuding strength), he penetrates the
inner circle of self-styled philanthropist
and weapons broker Richard Roper
(Hugh Laurie) by appearing to thwart

QUICK TALK

Hugh Laurie

ON HIS
RETURN TO
VEEP
If the writers
had put parts of
the current
American
election in the
script, HBO
would have said,
Nobodys going
to believe that.
So often life
overtakes art.

The House star returns to television as the

charming villain of The Night Manager.
You wanted to adapt this John
leCarr novel for years. When the
book came out in 1993, I tried to option
it. I was far too late, and the great Sydney Pollack had it. The world turns, and
20-odd years later it comes back to life,
by which point of course Im far too old
and creaky and bald to play [the hero]
Jonathan Pine, but we have to resign
ourselves to these processes.
What attracted you to the story?
After the Cold War, Iand Im sure
many othersworried that not only
would spies be out of work but so would
spy writers. Le Carr, being the genius
he is, found something even more
compelling: the world of arms dealing
and the skulduggery that is even now
being revealed by the Panama Papers.
How did you prepare to play the
worst man in the world? Its
the responsibility of every actor to
love the characters they play, and
Roper has charm. The devil always
does because if he had DEVIL
tattooed on his head, wed
give him a wide berth. And
when youre the third worst
man in the world, its not
that much of a stretch.
His morality is inconsistent. Theres a temptation
to paint characters a single
color, but humans dont work
that way. Hitler couldnt bear
cruelty to animals, as bizarre as
that is. I must confess to your
readers that Im smoking a cigarette at the moment, and yet later
in the day I might go for a run.
One critic said you should be the
next James Bond. I am not familiar with the mental health of this
person, but thats the craziest thing
Ive ever heard. I cant climb stairs
without my knees popping. Im not
the guy to be hurling myself out of
helicopters, if indeed I ever was.
ELIANA DOCKTERMAN

Clay had small roles in Woody Allens Blue Jasmine

and on HBOs Vinyl; as the main event he craps out
REVIEW

The Diceman cometh.

When will he leave?
THE COMEDIAN ANDREW DICE CLAY, ALWAYS
ofending perceived political correctness, is one of the
1990s more exhausting products. Comedians have
always needled pieties, but only in placid peacetime
could crudeness for its own sake be seen as a virtue.
Clays new sitcom Dice looks like Curb Your Enthusiasm
or Episodesa series showing us the unglamorized life
of a star. Living in Las Vegas after a career slowdown,
this ictionalized Dice attends a same-sex wedding,
gambles, bickers with his girlfriend (Natasha Leggero)
and drenches Kobe beef in A1 at a steak house. What
we dont see is any motivation.
His successesselling out Madison Square Garden,
igniting controversy as a Saturday Night Live host
are rsum lines, not character traits. They dont make
him interesting. Dice is unwilling to give Clay qualities
beyond abrasiveness and unequipped to craft for him
an insightful line. Leggero, co-creator of Comedy Centrals terriic Another Period, is wasted, while cameos by
Adrien Brody and Wayne Newton go nowhere.
These cameos hint at what Dice thinks its doing:
depicting rebellion, upending safe sitcom tropes and
being so irreverent that it even dares to joke about gay
people. But really its all about preserving Clays status.
Sure, hes shown struggling to ind work, but everyone
he meets is eager to be ofended. For all Dices trappings,
it never really takes us backstage. And against all reason,
the Diceman wont step out of the spotlight. D.D.
DICE airs Sundays at 9:30 p.m. E.T. on Showtime; subscribers
canstream it in its entirety

55

TimeOf Movies

REVIEW

Sing Street
honors the
DIY spirit

When CGI panther Bagheera speaks, Ben Kingsleys voice comes out
REVIEW

Jon Favreaus Jungle Book is

a wild tale for a digital age

56

TIME April 25, 2016

JUNGLE BEAT
The new Jungle Book
features several songs
from the 1967 animated
version, including I Wanna
Be Like You and The
Bare Necessities

Duran Duran-imals
and Adam Ant-alikes

F R O M L E F T: D I S N E Y, E V E R E T T, T H E W E I N S T E I N C O.

FILMMAKERS CAN DO SO MANY TERRIBLE AND EXCESSIVE

things with technology today. Why not use it to make animals
talk, a noble pursuit if ever there was one? In director Jon
Favreaus spirited, lush adaptation of The Jungle Bookbased
loosely on Rudyard Kiplings stalwart fables, with dashes of the
1967 Disney version tossed incomputer-generated animals
talk, sing, saunter, slink and slither around a live-action boy,
Mowgli (Neel Sethi). This man cub has been raised by
wolves, which are apparently a lot like 70s Berkeley types
when it comes to parenting: brimming with questions and
quips, Mowgli is a precocious hippie child in red underpants.
Hes not totally carefree, though. The meanest cat in the
jungle, Shere Khan (Idris Elba supplies his velvety, malevolent
purr), has vowed to kill him. The allies who gather round include the wise panther Bagheera (Ben Kingsley, in full masterthespian mode) and lover-of-life sloth bear Baloo (a fabulous
Bill Murrayhis voice sounds the way lannel pjs feel).
If it all sounds a little too calculatedit is. Yet somehow
this Jungle Book works, because Favreau has both a sense of
humor and a sense of spectacle. Even in 3-D, the colorsa
riot of jades, cobalts and singing-canary yellowsare vibrant.
And where else can you see an obsessive-compulsive porcupine counting every stone he passes or a silky she-snake
with a vocabulary of seductive, sinister sibilants (voiced by
Scarlett Johansson, using every s in her name, and more)?
Shes Eve and the devil rolled into one. The Jungle Book, the
movies credits tell us, was made entirely in downtown Los
Angeles. It may be an urban product, but theres still wildness
in its heart. STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

FROM THE MINUTE SOME

enterprising soul irst
plugged a guitar into an amp,
bored kids everywhere have
been making three-chord
symphonies out of their
crummy lives. Thats the
spirit John Carney (Once,
Begin Again) captures in
Sing Street, set in 1985
Dublin. Fourteen-year-old
Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo)
has been moved from his
posh school to a terrible new
one, and his parents, broke
and unhappy, are splitting up.
With the spiritual guidance
of his stoner older brother
Brendan (sleepy-sexy Jack
Reynor), he forms a band.
What else is there to do?
Before long, Conor and his
mates have come up with a
handful of pure pop confections, with some cheerfully
rough-around-the-edges
music videos to match. He
also earns the afection of
a winsome aspiring model
(Lucy Boynton). Youve seen
every element of Sing Street
hundreds of times before
its Carneys knack for assembling them that makes the
diference. In his hands, this
isnt just a nostalgia trip. Its
an homage to teenage kicks
and the urgency of getting
them any way you can.S.Z.

TimeOf PopChart

Tokyo is getting its very

own hedgehog caf,
where customers can pay
to cuddle with the prickly
creatures.

Three men stranded

on a remote Paciic
island were rescued
after writing the word
HELP in palm fronds
on the sand, which
was spotted by a
military plane.

As part of an installation in Puglia, Italy, artist

Edoardo Tresoldi built a new version of an ancient
church using nothing but wire mesh.

After more than a century,

the National Weather Service
promised to cease using
all capital letters in its
announcements:

After a recent
meal in New York
Citys Meatpacking
District, Jim Carrey
reportedly left
a $225 tip on a
$151 bill.

C H U R C H : B L I N D E Y E F A C T O R Y; H E L P S I G N , $ 5 B I L L : T W I T T E R ; W A R H O L : A P ; B U R G E R K I N G : YO U T U B E ; T E S L A ; H E D G E H O G , T E A C U P, R E C E I P T, B A L L O T
B O X : A L A M Y; C A R R E Y, M C C A R T H Y, S O O K I E , I VA N K A T R U M P, E R I C T R U M P, S TA R B U C K S : G E T T Y I M A G E S

[WE] WILL
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TIMES WEEKLY TAKE ON

LOVE IT
LEAVE IT

WHAT POPPED IN CULTURE

Eric and Ivanka Trump wont be able

to vote for their dad in New Yorks April
19 primary because they missed the
deadline to register as Republicans.

Several prints from Andy

Warhols Campbells Soup Cans
collection were stolen from an
art museum in Springield, Mo.
Starbucks faced
backlash over
a change to its
loyalty program
that could make
it harder to earn
free drinks.

Tesla had to
recall 2,700 of its
Model X vehicles
because of a safety
issue with its thirdrow seat back.

By Nolan Feeney and Megan McCluskey

Melissa McCarthy
revealed that she
will be involved in
Netflixs upcoming
Gilmore Girls
reboot, despite
earlier reports to
the contrary.

The color
scheme of
Australias
new $5 bill has
been likened
to vomit on
social media.
A prank caller
tricked Burger King
employees in Coon
Rapids, Minn.,
into smashing the
eaterys windows
by telling them there
was a gas leak.

57

Essay The Amateur

Things get messy when Boss

Lady takes her act home
By Kristin van Ogtrop
ONE OF THE MOST MORTIFYING MOMENTS IN MY LIFE AS A
working mother was the day I went to my eldest childs elementary school to talk about my job and the teacher asked him
what I did for a living. My sons answer? She ires people.
A more accurate response would have been She goes to
meetings, but I couldnt really blame the kid for skipping the
mundane parts. Back then, in a (clearly misguided) attempt
to help my children understand what I did during our time
apart, I had taken a friends advice to make my job seem
really dramatic! Full of extreme highs and lows! To hold their
interest! Which I did, until I realized that if my children were
asked to describe my workplace, it would have sounded like
an acid trip starring the Big Fat Liar, the Woman Who Always
Cries and the Most Boring Man in the World. And reigning
over this little nonsensical kingdom: Dear Old Mom, otherwise
known as the Boss.

58

TIME April 25, 2016

SINCE SEEING THE BOSS, Ive been racking my brain to

come up with a movie that accurately relects the triumphs and struggles of working motherhood, and bizarrely my mind keeps going back to Boyhood. In which
the Patricia Arquette character ends up, apparently by
choice, alone. Is she sad, or is she liberated? Yes.
This morning my husband and I were talking
about a problem I am having with one of our children.
In an attempt to be helpful and take the long view, my
husband said, Hes not an employee, and you cant
ire him. Which is true, and healthy, and as it should
be. But, oh man, even though I dearly love that child
of mine, sometimes I really wish I could.
Van Ogtrop is the editor of Real Simple

I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y L U C I G U T I R R E Z F O R T I M E

ACCORDING TO HOLLYWOOD, being a woman in charge

is a pretty straightforward business. Ive just seen the new
Melissa McCarthy movie, The Boss, in which she plays
a scared, scarred self-made mogul who cant handle the
messiness and intimacy of a personal life. She inds herself in
a desperate situation that forces her to rely on the kindness
of her long-sufering assistant and learns that there are
more important things in life than making money because
its people that really matter yada yada yada. While I am an
enormous fan of McCarthys and might even pay money to
see her read the phone book, as I watched I thought: Havent
I seen this plot before? Once again movies are neither the
mirror nor the lamp but, well, an acid trip in which a woman
can be great at having a career or great at having a personal
life but seldom great at both.
In the real world, whether they like it or not, many women
are in charge at work and at home. (Imagine!) The other day
I asked my 9-year-old if I was the family boss, to which he
replied, Yes, which is kind of annoying.
Why? I asked.
I wish a boy could be a boss, he said.
Why?
More fairness. Boys let people do more stuf. No ofense,
Mom.
But this is progress, right? No more waiting by the front
door with a martini in your hand for the big guy to get home
and count out your spending money. Progress!
I suppose. Over the course of my career Ive had the great
fortune of working for many women who balanced, sometimes
gracefully, sometimes not, atop the three-legged stool of

career, motherhood and marital success. There are

two beliefs I have held on to as I have risen through the
ranks in corporate America. The irst is that if an idea
is really hard to explain, then its probably not a very
good idea. The second is that its nearly impossible
to simultaneously triumph in career, motherhood
and marriage. All too often, one of the three will be
sacriiced for the beneit of the other two. Not exactly
selective eliminationmore like survival of the ittest.
Years ago I had a conversation with a working friend
who said she wouldnt let her babysitter do the grocery
shopping while the kids were in school because she
would buy the wrong kind of lettuce. While I regarded
this as something of a management failure, I knew exactly what my friend meant. When I cant ind my sons
gloves for a weekend lacrosse game because he came
home with his babysitter from practice on Thursday
afternoon and put them God knows where, my anger
and frustration is not really about missing gloves.
Its about my own failure as a mother and a working
woman just trying to keep it all together. And the feeling that one of the three legs of the stool is breaking.

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10 Questions

James McBride The National Book Award winner

andmusician talks stupidity, soul and Kill Em and Leave,
his new biography of James Brown
You write that most James Brown
biographers arent stupid enough
to try to present a complete picture
of his life. Why did you want to try?
The American cultural landscape is
skewed toward who can scream the
loudest. In his time, James Brown
could screambut theres a deeper
level of his cultural importance, which
I felt wasnt really addressed by other
books. And I look at him also from the
perspective of being a black musician
as well as a writer, so he was very
important to me.
The subtitle is Searching for James
Brown and the American Soul. How
do you define soul? I dont think soul
is necessarily a black thing. Dolly Parton
has soul. Willie Nelson is loaded with
soul. Jonathan Demme has soul. Soul is
really the American way of spreading
love and also [conveying] information
about people who have less. Thats my
deinition of soul. And in that regard
James Brown was the king.
Is soul something you can develop?
No, no. Soul is in you. Either you have it
or you dont.
Did you learn anything about James
Brown that surprised you? That he
was disappointed in the evolution of
African-American life. The business of
people by the thousands, or the hundreds of thousands, who didnt work.
He wasnt a fan of welfare.

60

TIME April 25, 2016

Those masks also come up in your

novel The Good Lord Bird. What
attracts you to the idea? We have a
hard time talking to each other in America. We just cant seem to get past this
business of race. Which, by the way, Im
exhausted talking about.
Youre working on an HBO miniseries about Martin Luther King Jr.
with Taylor Branch, David Simon
and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Whats that
writers room like? David Simon is
like Duke Ellington. Ellington had this
big band of great soloists, and hed
just turn em loose and let each play
their solos.
Brown and King are such monumental figures to tackle. Where do
you even start? You go to the corners.
Everybody knows about James Brown,
but very few people know about Fred
Wesley and Pee Wee Ellis, who helped
create his sound. In the case of the
[HBO show], were not writing about
Martin Luther King very much. Were
writing about the sharecroppers and the
college students in Mississippi who got
their heads beat in, and the poor folks
who went to town to register to vote
and got their heads knocked in, and the
white Southerners who tried to change
and sufered the brutal rebuke of their
own neighbors. You go to the toe irst
and work your way to the eyeball, not
the other way around.
Its been 20 years since you wrote
The Color of Water. How does life
compare with your expectations
back then? When I wrote it I was a
diferent person. I was seeking a kind
of peace in terms of my identity. I have
that peace now. LILY ROTHMAN

J AV I E R S I R V E N T F O R T I M E

Youre pretty tough on the biopic

GetOn Up, calling it out as inaccurate
for making him look more wacko
than he was. Is that your journalism background showing? Part of the
problem is that James Browns life was
ictionalized by James Brown himself.
He felt white people didnt really care
where he came from. He was just a poor
black guy. He could say anything he
wanted; the Horatio Alger story sells
well. But as a journalist, when you go
down to try to ferret out the facts, you
ind out a lot of diferent things.

How do you do that while telling the

story of someone who wanted to
keep those secrets? We all wear masks
to hide the deeper part of ourselves.
I had to push beyond that in order to
understand how he became such a
great artist.

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