in

crisis

“The status quo is not an

option. It’s not should we
change, it’s how do we change.”
—A. G. SULZBERGER,
Deputy Publisher, The New York Times

p. 50

mar 2017
| press on
 25.03
FE ATURES

78 Scene Stealers
Inside the deeply nerdy,
insanely expensive
world of Hollywood prop
collecting.
BY RENE CHUN

46
The News in Crisis
The Tech That
Could Save The New
York Times
BY GABRIEL SNYDER

Welcome to Macedonia,
Fake News Factory
to the World
BY SAMANTH
SUBRAMANIAN

+ Black News Matters

B Y C A R L B R O O KS J R.

+ Robots Wrote This Story

BY JOE KEOHANE

+ How Edward Snowden

Is Protecting Reporters
BY ANDY GREENBERG

84
The Curse of the
Bahia Emerald
The strange tale of a
huge and (maybe) price-
less gem—and the con-
niving dreamers who
are captive to its allure.
BY ELIZABETH WEIL

This handheld Starfleet

communicator from Star
Trek: The Original Series is
just one of the many relics
available to prop collectors.

MAR 2017 DAN WINTERS 0 0 7

 CONTENTS

25.03 24 GADGET LAB

10 Release Notes
The people behind the issue 33
12 This Issue
From the editor’s desk

16 Comments
Reader rants and raves

Pass the (Legal) Dutchie

A road map to regulated

ALPHA
recreational weed

Fetish
The Flow Table Lamp marries
26 maximum light with minimum
18 desk hogging

34 Gearhead: Car Commute

Chevy’s all-electric Bolt, a hi-def
dashcam, a heads-up display,
and an insulated coffee porter

36 Head-to-Head:
iPad Pro Keyboards
Razer Mechanical Keyboard Case
vs. Logitech Create

Mr. Know-It-All
On parents and their predilection
for leaving embarrassing Facebook
Q&A: Yuval Harari
How Big Data will fuel a new religion
comments
BY JON MOOALLEM FILE: //
BY OLIVIA SOLON

28 WIRED Book Club

20 Now (Re)Playing Choose your own sci-fi adventure 38
The March movie calendar
is a deluge of déjà vu 30 Designing Science
Eleanor Lutz makes sublime visual
mashups
21 Sky Net
31
The hugely ambitious plan to take
down potentially dangerous drones.
BY DOUGLAS STARR

ASK A FLOWCHART
96 Is This a Fake News Story?
BY ROBERT CAPPS

What’s Inside
Tiger Balm Ultra pain balm
Paid to Play
Videogames are the grim ON THE COVER
22 Strong to the Hoop future of work Photographed for W IRE D by James Day.
Hack your March Madness bracket BY CLIVE THOMPSON Grooming by Brynn Doering.

0 0 8 MAR 2017
 RELEASE NOTES

he was still surprised,

while reporting on
the future of The New
York Times (page 50),
to learn how the indus-
try contributed to the
history of innovation.
In the 1930s, Times
publisher Arthur Hays
When writer Eliz- Sulzberger hired Aus-
abeth Weil heard tin G. Cooley, an inven-
about the case of a tor who was working
giant emerald and on sending photos via
the odd cast of char- normal phone lines.
acters contesting “In other words, he
its ownership, she was developing the
knew she had a gem fax machine,” Sny-
of a story. “The idea der says. The Times
that such a huge tested the device
thing could exist and during an airship
it would be unclear disaster on the West
who it belonged to Coast. “It was the first
was mind-blowing,” paper in New York
says Weil, a contrib- to print photos of the
▲
uting writer at The survivors, stunning
New York Times the engineers at AT&T,
Until the inhabitants Magazine and who had long said it
of Veles warmed up to author of No Cheat- would be impossible.”
him, Martin simply ing, No Dying. Trou-
wandered the streets. ble was, nobody
“I made a portrait of the
town,” he says. would talk to her. “I
had all the facts, but
I needed a charac-
ter,” she says. A year
MADE IN into the project, Weil
was ready to bail
MACEDONIA when she got the
call: It was one of the
alleged owners, and
he was ready to talk. That image of a pot
Read her incredible plant on page 24 isn’t
tale on page 84. stock photography: It
was shot at WIRED’s
San Francisco HQ
(Dear corporate over-
lords: Marijuana is
legal in California
THE EVE OF A SNOWSTORM was the perfect moment for photogra- now!) and belongs
PANOS PICTURES (MACEDONIA); GETTY IMAGES (SMOKE)

pher Guy Martin to capture the bleak mood in Veles, Macedonia, a to a staffer we’ll call
Mary Jane. The
city where the loss of industrial jobs has pushed idle teens into the chocolate hashberry
fake-news business (page 68). As locals headed indoors to escape clone, a sativa strain,
subzero temperatures, Martin set out on foot to photograph the fro- Gabriel Snyder has was purchased from
been a staff writer a local dispensary
zen streets. “Everything had just gone from the place,” he says. The for The New York and currently enjoys
Istanbul-based shooter is no stranger to exploring what he calls “the Observer, Variety, 14 hours of artificial
gray areas in the world,” having covered Arab Spring protests, civil and W; a top editor light a day so it can
for Newsweek and grow big and pro-
war in Libya, and the Syrian refugee crisis for the likes of Time and The Atlantic; and edi- duce plenty of buds.
National Geographic. In Veles, Martin found warmth one night in a tor in chief of Gawker It was in the office for
garden shed with a group of local men, drinking homemade brandy and, most recently, purely photographic
the New Republic. purposes, we swear.
and singing old Balkan tunes. As the liquor flowed, so did the Google But despite all those Yo, can you, uh, pass
ad dollars—turns out half the revelers were operating fake-news sites. years in the business, the Cheetos?

0 1 0 GUY MARTIN MAR 2017

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 THIS ISSUE

the truth is, I fell in love with wired early

on, from afar. When you’re a sci-fi nerd with
design and engineering aspirations, it’s hard
not to be swept up in talk of planetary-scale
computing and autonomous flying robots.
For me, this job has been the all-consuming,
always-on, little-sleep kind, and I’ve loved it.
When we were at our best—interviewing a
fugitive Edward Snowden in a Moscow hotel
room, attempting to make sense of three
days of violence captured on social media
last summer, or passing the wired mic to a
president of the United States—we looked
around corners and saw futures that were
amazing and optimistic.
That’s why this farewell isn’t really a good-
bye. Sure, I’m changing my address, moving a
few blocks down the road here in San Francis-
Even on a small screen,
the images and interview co’s SoMa neighborhood. I’m partnering with
with Edward Snowden my friend Patrick Godfrey to join the ranks of
were striking.
the startups wired has so thoughtfully cov-
ered these past two and a half decades. My new
firm will be dedicated to helping leaders and
companies use strategy, exceptional design,
and captivating stories to thrive in a world of
constant transformation—a wired world.
I always hoped to leave wired better and
stronger than it was when I arrived. I think
THE HANDOFF I have, even though the subjects we cover,
Our oral history of
three days of violence and journalism itself, are experiencing rad-
brought together ical economic and philosophical trauma.
multiple media strands.
wired will continue to fulfill its mission, and
MY FIRST COLUMN as editor in chief of wired ran in issue 21.03, exactly I hope you’ll make the new editor, Nicholas
four years ago. I didn’t train as a writer, but I’ve found real creative Thompson, as welcome as you’ve made me
pleasure in these issue notes—though the actual words never come as he continues this critical work.
as easily as I (or my editor) wish they might. This is the hardest one Nick’s lucky—he’s joining a team of the
yet, because it’s my last. ¶ wired is a place designed to find the smartest editors, writers, designers, cre-
future, and my final issue is all about the future of what we do here atives, and thinkers on the planet. They made
every day: the news. We set out, as always, to avoid navel-gazing my years here the most professionally and
clichés and instead to understand what’s actually going to change personally rewarding of my life. I will miss it
in light of 2017’s new challenges and dangers. You’re going to read dearly. It may indeed be true that the future
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON/MAGNUM PHOTOS (OBAMA)

important thinking—Gabriel Snyder on the technology that drives is already here, but even if it’s unevenly dis-
The New York Times, Samanth Subramanian on the Macedonian President Obama tributed, there’s a disproportionate amount
showed us the frontiers
trolls who propagate fake news, and Andy Greenberg on protecting that inspired him. of the stuff in the wired office. I’m taking a
journalists and sources. The world continues to change, and wired little of it with me; the rest stays with you.
continues to cover that change even as it plays a part in it. ¶ I have
never not marveled at the sheer journalistic talent and raw human
genius assembled at this place, which, 25 years after its founding, is
a Silicon Valley institution—older than most of the companies and
many of the people we cover. I started at wired as creative director SCOT T DADICH
in 2006, left to run digital strategy for our parent company, Condé Editor in Chief
Nast, in 2010, and came back 24 months later as editor in chief. But @ S DAD ICH

0 0
1 0
2 JOE PUGLIESE MAR 2017
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 EDITORIAL
DEPUTY EDITOR Adam Rogers FEATURES EDITOR Maria Streshinsky EDITOR AT LARGE Jason Tanz ARTICLES EDITOR Chuck
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 COMMENTS @WIRED / MAIL@WIRED.COM

Re: “Know Your

Enemy: Celebrating
50 Years of the
Forever War,” by
Matt Gallagher
“Shall I use the last
5 percent of my
phone battery
reading Matt Galla-
Re: “Subtext®: It gher’s hilarious fic-
Knows What You’re tion in W IRE D?
Thinking Stop Aw hell yeah!”
Thinking It Knows,” Teresa Fazio
by Charles Yu (@DoctorFaz) on
“I saw myself in this Twitter
story. Geez.”
Raul MacMos on
WIRED.com

Re: “Life on Gar-

bage Island:
There’s a New Fron-
tier in Paradise,” by
Ben Lasman
“This story is so good. Re: “First: A Martian
BRAVE NEW WORLDS My kind of writing. Goes Hunting for the
Comedic, dystopian, Red Planet’s Past—
and on the nose and His Own,”
about where our by John Rogers
After predicting the future for the past 25 years, we were society’s economy “Can’t explain why,
ready to spend some time there. The result is our first-ever and technology are but I just got emo-
sci-fi issue, which features, to our great delight, many off probably headed.” tional in the airport
freshloot on reading John
our favorite authors: Hugo Award winner N. K. Jemisin, WIRED.com Rogers in W IRE D’s
Westworld d writer Charles Yu, and James S. A. Corey, off sci-fi issue.”
the Expanse novels, to name a few. Some of their visions Noah Jodice
(@noahjodice)
of tomorrow—mind-reading devices, solicitous aliens, on Twitter
clones, and perpetual war—are bound to come true. Let’s
just hope it’s the less-apocalyptic ones. Re: “The Evaluators:
To Trade With Aliens,
You Must Adapt.
They Certainly Will.”
by N. K. Jemisin
“Love this. Suspense-
ful, interesting, and
Re: The Sci-Fi Issue
creepy. Classic sci-fi.”

“THIS ISSUE IS ART! LOVE WHAT Sander Philipse

(@sanderphilipse)

YOU ALL ARE DOING. THANKS.”

on Twitter

Jeremy Grant via email
Re: The Sci-Fi Issue
“I’d like to thank all the authors
and W I R E D staff for a truly
delightful issue. As a sci-fi fan,
I loved it. And it’s good to remem-
ber how many of our real-life tech
designs are tied to the inspira-
tional science fiction that pre-
ceded them. Who knows, maybe
some not-too-distant technology
will be inspired by this issue.”
Andrew Davis via email
“I have been a sub-
“I tried to get into the fiction
stories, but it just wasn’t my
thing—maybe a bit too ‘out
there’ for me. Still, I applaud
the daring of doing something
completely different with this
issue. It’s the fresh approach
I’ve come to expect from
W IRE D, and I look forward to
what next month will bring.”
Eric Luedtke via email
Re: The Sci-Fi Issue highest praise. The
concept, layout, and
scriber to W IRE D illustrations comple-
since the first year ment the excellent
of the publication. stories. I read it cover
During those many to cover with joy—a
years there have been first for me with your
issues that had more magazine. I consider
or less merit than oth- it one of the best
ers, but I have kept Christmas presents
my opinions to myself. that I received. Please
However, the January do it again soon or—
issue is such a thing even better—spin off
of beauty that I can- the format to a new
not let the opportu- publication.”
nity pass to offer the Paul Hulker via email

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 WIRED: In your book you pre-
dict the emergence of two
completely new religions.
ALPHA What are they?
HARARI: Techno-humanism aims
to amplify the power of humans,
creating cyborgs and connect-
ing humans to computers, but
it still sees human interests and
Q&A desires as the highest authority

THE GOD COMPLEX

in the universe.
Dataism is a new ethical sys-
tem that says, yes, humans were

HOW BIG DATA WILL

special and important because
up until now they were the most
sophisticated data processing

FUEL A NEW RELIGION

system in the universe, but this
is no longer the case. The tipping
point is when you have an exter-
nal algorithm that understands
you—your feelings, emotions,
BY OLIVIA SOLON
choices, desires—better than you
understand them yourself. That’s
the point when there is the switch
from amplifying humans to mak-
ing them redundant.
How so?
Take Google Maps or Waze. On
the one hand they amplify human
ability—you are able to reach
your destination faster and more
easily. But at the same time you
H are shifting the authority to the
algorithm and losing your ability
to find your own way.
What does this mean for
Homo sapiens?
We become less important, per-
haps irrelevant. In the humanist
HUMANITY HAS HAD astonishing success alleviating famine, disease, age the value of an experience
and war. (It might not always seem that way, but it’s true.) Now, came from within yourself. In a
Homo sapiens is on the brink of an upgrade—sort of. As we become Dataist age, meaning is gener-
increasingly skilled at deploying artificial intelligence, big data, ated by the external data pro-
and algorithms to do everything from easing traffic to diagnosing cessing system. You go to a
cancer, we’ll transform into a new breed of superhuman, says his- Olivia Solon Japanese restaurant and have
torian and best-selling author Yuval Harari in his new book, Homo (@oliviasolon) is a a wonderful dish, and the thing
freelance technology
Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Which is great, except that we journalist based to do is take a picture with your
might also become so dependent on these tools that our species will in San Francisco. phone, put it on Facebook, and
become irrelevant—our value determined only by the data we gen- see how many likes you get. If
erate. wired spoke to Harari about this coming life in the matrix you don’t share your experiences,
just before he left for his annual 45-day tech-free meditation retreat. they don’t become part of the

MAR 2017 LEVON BISS


“WE’RE SHIFTING AUTHORITY
TO ALGORITHMS—AND LOSING THE
ABILITY TO FIND OUR OWN WAY.”
⊳
Eventually, author
Yuval Harari says,
we may be unable
to disconnect from
the internet.
data processing system, and they
have no meaning.
Does the shift toward Data-
ism matter for politics?
In the 20th century, politics was
a battleground between grand
visions about the future of
humankind. The visions were
grounded in the Industrial Rev-
olution and the big question was
what to do with new technologies
like electricity, trains, and radio.
Whatever you say about figures
like Lenin or Hitler, you cannot
accuse them of lacking vision.
Today, nobody in politics has any
kind of vision; technology is mov-
ing too fast, and the political sys-
tem is unable to make sense of it.
Who can make sense of it?
The only place you hear broad
visions about the future of
humankind is in Silicon Valley,
from Elon Musk or Mark Zucker-
berg. Very few other people have
competing visions. The political
system is not doing its job.
So tech companies become
our new rulers, even gods?
When you talk about God and reli-
gion, in the end it’s all a question
of authority. What is the highest
source of authority that you turn
to when you have a problem in
your life? A thousand years ago
you’d turn to the church. Today,
we expect algorithms to provide
us with the answer—who to date,
where to live, how to deal with
an economic problem. So more
and more authority is shifting to
these corporations.
Can we opt out?
The simplest answer is no. It
will become extremely difficult
to unplug, and it has to do with
health care, which will increas-
ingly rely on internet-connected
sensors. People will be willing
to give up privacy in exchange
for medical services that tell you
the first day cancer cells start
spreading in your body. So we
might reach a point when it will
be impossible to disconnect.
What can we be hopeful
about?
There’s a lot to be hopeful about.
In 20 to 30 years the hundreds of
millions of people who have no
health care will have access to AI
doctors on their mobile phones
offering better care than anyone
gets now. Driverless cars won’t
eliminate accidents, but they will
drastically reduce them.
Phew ... so we’re not doomed?
Humanity has proven its ability
to rise to the challenge posed by
dangerous new technologies—in
the 1950s and ’60s many people
expected the Cold War to end
in a nuclear holocaust. That
didn’t happen. After thousands
of years in which war seemed to
be an inevitable part of human
nature, we changed how interna-
tional politics functioned. I hope
we’ll also be able to rise to the
challenge of technologies like AI
and genetic engineering, but we
don’t have any room for error. �
0 1 9

ALPHA
NOW (RE)PLAYING
A LONG-AWAITED Trainspotting follow-up; a live-action redo of
Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast; Hugh Jackman’s
last (they promise) Wolverine outing. The March movie calendar
is a déjà-view jumble of sequels, spinoffs, remakes, reboots,
and rehashes—some more welcome than others. —Mark Yarm
Live-Action
Adaptations: It’s
Hard to Hit
the Sweet Spot
1991
ANIMATION
Slavish Imitation
Beauty and the Beast
The Emma Watson vehicle is a
way-too-faithful remake.
Once upon a time was enough.
2010
GRAPHIC NOVEL
Smart Interpretation
Wilson
Woody Harrelson manages to
make Daniel Clowes’ middle-
aged misanthrope kinda … likable?
1995
ANIME
Gross Appropriation
Ghost in the Shell
We love Ghost in the Shell. We
love ScarJo kicking ass. But
the whitewashing? Not so much.
0 2 0
150'
2017); MARY EVANS/BANDAI VISUAL COMPANY/KODANSHA/MANGA VIDEO/RONALD GRANT/EVERETT COLLECTION ( GHOST IN THE SHELL, 1995); PARAMOUNT PICTURES (GHOST IN THE SHELL, 2017); TIM PALEN/LIONSGATE (POWER RANGERS); SONY PICTURES (TRAINSPOTTING)
ILLUSTRATIONS: PETER GAMLEN; PHOTOGRAPHS: WALT DISNEY COMPANY/ALAMY (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, 1991); LAURIE SPARHAM/DISNEY (BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, 2017); DRAWN & QUARTERLY/DANIEL CLOWES (WILSON, GRAPHIC NOVEL); FOX SEARCHLIGHT PICTURES (WILSON,
The 800-ish-
MOVIES B Pound Gorilla
In Kong: Skull Island,
the ape gets another
makeover—he’s four
times taller than
last time. Tara Stoinski,
head of the Dian
Fossey Gorilla Fund
International, weighs
in on the liberties
auteurs have taken
with Kong’s look and
behavior over time.
A. King Kong (1933),
18 feet tall on Skull Island,
24 in NYC
G “He walks bipedal—
something that gorillas
do infrequently.”
B. King Kong vs. Godzilla
(1962), 148 feet tall
“The way he beats his
chest is very unrealistic.”
C. King Kong Escapes
55
BODY COUNT
(1967), 66 feet tall
50 The Wolverine (2013)
“Again with the large
forehead, which is not
how gorillas look.”
45
D. King Kong (1976),
2017 42 feet tall on Skull Island,
LIVE ACTION 40 C 55 in NYC
“More real in the details,
35 like his black hands.”
E
X-Men: E. King Kong Lives (1986),
30 Apocalypse 60 feet tall
D
(2016) “A step backward. They
25 have him eating a person.
X-Men: The Last Stand (2006) Gorillas are vegetarian.”
20
F. King Kong (2005),
X2: X-Men
D
25 feet tall
15 United X-Men Origins: “The most realistic one.
(2003) Wolverine (2009) He’s got hair and scarring,
10 and he walks on all fours.”
X-Men: Days of
5
X-Men: Future Past (2014)
G. Kong: Skull Island
First Class (2017), 100 feet tall
(2011) X-Men (2000) “They’ve gone back to
0 MINUTES ONSCREEN
bipedal. In terms of
2017 F looks and behavior, I’d say
LIVE ACTION 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 A 2005 is still the best.”
Wolverine’s Final Cut A
After this month’s postapocalyptic Wolverine flick, Logan,
Hugh Jackman will finally hang up his adamantium claws.
That might be a good thing for pacifists, because what he
does best isn’t very nice, bub. Here’s a look at how minutes
onscreen translates to body count over Jackman’s 17 years
as the muttonchopped mutant. 0'
How To Twenty years after the last movie, our 1. _________ are back. Based,
Tell Power of course, on the fantastically popular 2. _________, the 3. _________
2017 Rangers follows a handful of 4. _________ who transform when they draw
LIVE ACTION
From T2 power from 5. _________—but when faced with the specter of cruel
Trainspotting 6. _________, they must band together to overcome. As the would-be
audience, we can’t help but wonder one thing: 7. _________? However,
that’s almost immaterial, because as soon as we hear the familiar call—
“It’s 8. _________ time!”—we’ll transform, this time into our 1990s selves,
hopped up on Crystal Pepsi and 9. _________.
POWER RANGERS / T2 TRAINSPOTTING 1. colorfully suited heroes / heroin-addicted fuckups
2. live-action TV show / Irvine Welsh novel Porno 3. reboot / sequel 4. multiethnic American
teens / pasty middle-aged Scotsmen 5. glowing rock things / lager and designer drugs
6. alien Rita Repulsa / Mistress Time 7. Will this be a total piece of crap / Can they outdo the
“worst toilet in Scotland” scene 8. morphin / morphine 9. Fun Dip / cheap whisky
VS.
ALPHA Camphor Dementholized
Mint Oil
One of the muscle
balm’s two active Though it’s the
ingredients (mean- byproduct of the
ing the FDA recog- menthol extraction
WHAT’S INSIDE nizes its medicinal process, this stuff still
properties), camphor contains menthol—
reduces pain through but it’s cheaper in this
distraction by acti- form. Plus, it’s 26 per-
vating your skin’s cent menthone (men-
temperature sensors thol with two fewer
and tricking you into hydrogen atoms),
feeling cold. There’s which may help the
only so much input other ingredients
the nervous system penetrate the skin.
can handle in one
location, so forcing Cajuput, Cassia,
the body to focus and Clove Oils
on the chills has the
effect of masking the More neurological
underlying pain. tricksters. These oils
are believed to be
Menthol counterirritants like
menthol and cam-
The other active phor, except they can
player, menthol, is simulate heat as well
an alcohol extracted as cold. The FDA isn’t
from mint oil. Like convinced they can
camphor, it triggers relieve pain, but clove
your cold recep- oil is widely used as a
tors, which might natural analgesic.
be why it reduces
blood flow and swell- Paraffin
ing—just like an ice Petrolatum
pack. Because it also
seems to interact The carrier for all the
with opioid recep- other ingredients,
tors, menthol may this is a mixture of a
have painkilling hard wax (paraffin)
effects beyond its and a soft petroleum
powers of distraction jelly, a k a Vaseline.
and inflammation Both are crude oil
reduction. derivatives made up
of chains of carbon
and hydrogen. But
the chains in paraf-
fin tend to be slightly
longer, and the
degree of attraction
between these mol-
ecules is proportional
to the surface area.
So the paraffin mol-
ecules stick together
and stay harder at
room temperature,
while the petrolatum
spreads more easily.
Together they make
a semisolid that soft-
ens at just around
body temperature—
the purrrfect vehicle
for delivering brightly
burning tiger tingles.
—M A L LO RY P I C K E T T

THE VOORHES MAR 2017

 ALPHA MARCH MADNESS
CHARTGEIST
BY JON J. EILENBERG

STRONG TO THE HOOP

HACK YOUR BRACKET
AI Assistants
Aristotle
(like Alexa— Lazy
but for kids!) parents
WITH 147 QUINTILLION possible outcomes, picking the winners of all 67 games
in the annual NCAA basketball tournament is nearly impossible. But Microsoft
is attempting to model an infallible bracket, feeding 15 seasons of statistics
into its Bing Predicts engine and constantly iterating to optimize your chances.
We asked Walter Sun, an architect of the Predicts algorithms, for mathemat-
ically proven tips to help you score office-pool glory. —joseph bien-kahn

“I’m sorry, Timmy, I’m afraid

you can’t do that.”

Trainspotting Sequel
A movie Viewer
called T2 expectations

“Dammit, I paid for killer

robots from the future!”

Defense wins Small-conference Coaching Miles traveled

championships excellence beats carries the day matter more Snap
major mediocrity than you think
THE RULE Defensive THE RULE You Camera Big eyes/puking
glasses rainbow lens
efficiency is key. THE RULE Strength can base a model THE RULE Tourna-
Bing tracks the num- of schedule weighs entirely on coach ment games may be
ber of points that heavily in the rankings—veterans played on neutral
are scored against NCAA’s ranking tool, Roy Williams and courts, but proximity
a defense per 100 so teams that ruled John Calipari have to home still makes
possessions—the smaller conferences each led multiple a difference. When
lower, the better. are likely to be teams to deep tour- in doubt, bet against
Game pace slows underrated. nament runs. If it’s a the team that has
in the tournament, THE PROOF A surprise toss-up, go with the journeyed the far-
which benefits 2014 win by Ste- established leader. thest and across
D-minded squads. phen F. Austin was THE PROOF Louis- the most time zones.
THE PROOF Hawaii actually predicted ville’s Rick Pitino THE PROOF In the The fundamental elements of
any promising tech IPO
and Stephen F. Aus- by Sun’s model— is 11–1 in the Sweet past two tourna-
tin, two teams with they’d gone 32–3 16, and Michigan ments, teams play-
strong defense, were in a comparatively State’s Tom Izzo is ing in their home
ranked low but smaller conference 21–4 in the second states were 13–2.
pulled off first-round and hadn’t lost game when playing
upsets last year. since Thanksgiving. twice in a weekend.

MAR 2017 PAUL WINDLE

 Use your downtime wisely.

“ You look
just like
your profi
le picture
.”

Swipe through—and share—a nearly limitless supply of New Yorker cartoons.

The New Yorker Today app features a selection of our award-winning writing on
politics and international affairs, culture and entertainment, business and technology.
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Available on iPad
and iPhone
 ALPHA MR. KNOW-IT-ALL
Q:
MY DAD LEAVES INCREDIBLY
EMBARRASSING COMMENTS UNDER
EVERY PHOTO I POST TO FACEBOOK
AND INSTAGRAM. WHAT SHOULD I DO?
by jon mooallem
Let’s face it: Dads are embarrassing. I remember, a cou-
ple of years ago, reading a newspaper story about a boy
A: named Brooklyn who was so distressed by the prospect
of his friends catching sight of his dweeby father that
he insisted his dad drop him off around the corner from school and
stay out of view. Why was this a newspaper story, you ask? Don’t
millions of mortified children do this every day? Yes, and that’s my
point. In this case, however, the dad in question was David Beck-
ham. ¶ See, dad-barrassment is universal—a condition of existence,
like the weather. What matters is how well we endure it: whether
we slough it off or allow it to seep inside us. ¶ Consider another
famous dad: Teddy Roosevelt. Yes, that guy—America’s first pres-
idential man’s man. This is a guy who hunted bears and lions, who
got into bar fights with cowboys, who resigned as assistant secretary
of the Navy to actually fight a war rather than just plan one. Teddy
Roosevelt loved war. War was his jam. As the historian Alexis Coe
told me recently, “He treated everything like a battlefield.” In Octo-
ber 1912, Roosevelt was about to give a campaign speech in Mil-
waukee when a would-be assassin shot him in the chest. The bullet
ripped through the copy of his speech in his pocket. There was a big
bloody wound. Still, Roosevelt spoke for more than an hour, like a
wounded infantryman still bayoneting people on the battlefield.
0 2 6 CHRISTOPH NIEMANN
I’d called Coe after listening to the podcast
Presidents Are People Too!, which she cohosts
with former Daily Show head writer Elliott
Kalan. Their Roosevelt episode suggested
that Teddy’s warmongering machismo was
bound up in his dad. During the Civil War,
Roosevelt had watched his father, Theodore
senior, pay for a surrogate to fight in his place.
For Teddy, Coe says, “this was always a great
source of shame. His celebration of mascu-
linity and war, his romanticization of war
as an experience to all men, is a reaction to
his dad.” And if, to overcompensate for this
excruciating embarrassment, Roosevelt felt
compelled to speechify for over an hour while
his torso hemorrhaged, then that’s his deci-
sion. But it also affected his own parenting.
Roosevelt had four sons, and he wanted
his boys to be the valorous warriors his own
father hadn’t been. When World War I broke
out, the youngest, Quentin, memorized an eye
chart to ensure he’d pass his exam and be able
to serve. He was, in short order, shot down and
killed by the Germans. Roosevelt was crest-
fallen. “To feel that one has inspired a boy to
conduct that has resulted in his death has a
pretty serious side for a father,” he wrote. He
died himself six months later.
But the misery he wrought continued. One
son, Archibald, had his knee ripped apart by
a grenade. Another, Ted Jr., was wounded in
France, then died of a heart attack while serv-
ing in World War II. Kermit, Roosevelt’s sec-
ond son, served in both wars, then ultimately
shot himself in the head on a base in Alaska.
You wrote because you didn’t like some
comments on Instagram and Facebook. I’m
talking about shame and war and death. It’s
hardly fair, you’ll say, and you’re right. But this
story shows, I think, that dad-barrassment is
a powerful and unpredictable force; it warps
the imagination, it pollutes the soul. The per-
petrators are, inevitably, also victims.
By all means, ask your father—gently—if he
wouldn’t mind toning down the comments.
Tell him to text you privately instead, if you’d
prefer. But ultimately the onus is not on your
father to stop embarrassing you, but on you
to reconcile the embarrassment you feel. I
worry you’ve started seeing your father pri-
marily as an engine of embarrassment, not as
a complex human being entitled to express
his wit, his playfulness, his love.
So, stomach it. Take the bullet, carry on. �
MRKNOWITALL@WIRED.COM MAR 2017
 LEXICON

ALPHA TOMORROWLANDS
JARGON
CHOOSE WATCH
YOUR OWN
acoustic prism
n. / -'küs-tik 'pri-z m /
Much as an optical

SCI-FI prism splits light into

a rainbow of colors,

ADVENTURE
this low-tech Swiss
invention—a metal
tube with precisely
placed holes—breaks
SOME SCIENCE FICTION skews local and hopeful. sound into its constit-
uent frequencies, no
Other times it’s doomy and far-out. Two modern electronics required.
masters—Kim Stanley Robinson and John Scalzi— It could be used for
have books coming out this month, and they fall cheap, sturdy sonar.
on each end of that spectrum. Which PhaaS
one’s for you? We read them both to n. / 'fas /
help you decide. —K. M. McFarland Based on software-
as-a-service (SaaS)
business models,
PhaaS packages,
sold on the dark
New York The Collapsing web, provide every-
2140 Empire thing a newbie cyber-
BY KIM STANLEY ROBINSON BY JOHN SCALZI criminal needs to
run a phishing con,
Cli-fi SUBGENRE Space opera including templates
for scams, fake web
New York during the 2142 TIMING
Circa AD 3500 (the Gregorian pages, and access
congressional election calendar is passé by then) to servers. One even
offers tech support
Sea levels rise; supersize DISASTER Space pirates rebel; scurvy and tutorials.
SCENARIO
hurricanes strike outbreak looms (see below)
Vlade, apartment build- Kiva Lagos, daughter of the cellular PC
ing super and former scuba FAVORITE
family controlling the at-risk n. / 'sel-y -l r 'pē-'sē /
diver—convenient!
CHARACTER
intergalactic citrus trade A mobile device that
can run standard
The Cloister Cluster, prime End, the Wild West of the cosmos, desktop software.
BEST LOCATION
real estate on the waterfront constantly on the verge of coup Microsoft coined the
term to tout a cell-
3 (pack extra oxygen and DARING
1 (bring disguises) connected gadget
RESCUES
warm clothes) expected later this
year. The endgame
1 (hedge funders targeting ASSASSINATION 2 (both on the emperox of the may be a smart-
financial analysts) ATTEMPTS Interdependency) phone running full-
“There is no faster-than-light on Office and Photo-
WHOLE BOOK IN
“The sea always won in the end.” ONE LINE travel. But there is the Flow.” shop. Pair it with a
display and kiss your
Waterproof diamond sheet- INVENTIONS WE Interdimensional space high- desktop PC goodbye.
ing; multilevel boat garages LOVE ways; the Memory Room
manthreading
Waterworld survivalists bat- Star Wars politics in the v. / 'man-thred-iŋ /
MOVIE PITCH
tle Wall Street bogeymen key of Firefly A derogatory term
for tweetstorming—
Probably ARE WE
DOOMED?
Definitely you know, expound-
ing ideas (gasp!)
on Twitter by string-
ing together tweets.
Some claim it’s
a male thing and
amounts to digital
“manspreading.”
—J O N AT H O N K E AT S

ZOHAR LAZAR FOLLOW ALONG AT WIRED.COM/BOOK-CLUB MAR 2017

0 2 8
FOR DISCUSSIONS AND AUTHOR INTERVIEWS.
 PROMOTIONS + SPECIAL OFFERS + EVENTS

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 1

GRAPHIC SCIENCE
HOT TRADING CARDS Cut, Burn, Shoot: How Eleanor
Lutz Turns Paper and Fire Into
Gorgeous Infographics
ELEANOR LUTZ is a matchmaker, but not for people. Instead she pairs
knotty scientific topics with sublime visuals and publishes them on 1. 2.
her blog, Tabletop Whale. And these aren’t random setups: She once “The ponderosa “The giant sequoia
illustrated the topography of Mars as a Victorian-era explorer’s map, pine has a thick, took 12 hours to cut
insulating bark that and glue together.
connecting two periods of voyaging and discovery. Ikea assembly can withstand forest It’s a little sad to
guides inspired an infographic on embryonic development. Recently fires. For work like this torch these, but I
she hitched diagrams of viruses to a trading card motif because, like I always check with made them with that
researchers—in this intention. Plus they
baseball players or Pokémon species, each virus has a unique profile.
ILLUSTRATIONS BY ELEANOR LUTZ

case, I asked my dad, look beautiful burnt.”

“There are so many facts and equations and awesome things about an ecology professor.
science,” says Lutz, a graduate student in insect neuroscience at the Then I made paper 3.
sculptures of the plant. “This isn’t a guide for
University of Washington. “I want those cool ideas to be accessible.” Paper comes from the science commu-
For her latest project, she wanted to create a series of cards show- trees, so there’s that nity, so I’m free to use
ing plants that have evolved to coexist with fire. The natural way association. But I also a more artistic style
want to animate these that skips specific
to do this? Build paper sculptures, set a match to them, and photo- somehow. So I set details like exact seed
graph the scorching result. That’s a hot date. —Margaret Rhodes them on fire.” size and leaf length.”

0 3 0 CLAYTON COTTERELL
 ALPHA
PAID TO PLAY
VIDEOGAMES ARE THE
GRIM FUTURE OF WORK
BY CLIVE THOMPSON
LOOK AT ECONOMIC DATA closely and the trends aren’t pretty: People
with elite backgrounds are hoovering up an increasing share of new
income and wealth. Automation is obviating more and more jobs.
In the years to come, we’ll need new forms of employment. Let’s
crystal-ball this: Will there be a new way for the working class of
the future to earn a paycheck? Sure. Playing videogames. ¶ That’s
the bold prediction of Edward Castronova, an academic at Indiana
University who studies the economics of online games. In a white
paper released last fall, he argues that within 20 years, “playing
games for money will come to be seen as a legitimate occupational
choice for those whose skills are not valued by brick-and-mortar
labor markets.” ¶ Sounds nuts, right? But Castronova lays out the
trend lines. First, consider how online games have evolved. Fifteen
years ago you typically paid about $15 a month to play. But in the
past decade, game companies have devised the free-to-play model:
It costs nothing to join the action, but if you want something cool—
specialty armor, a “mount” for traveling faster—you have to buy it.
This model has been wildly profitable. A top-rated free-to-play title,
like Clash Royale, now brings in about $2.1 million a day from such
purchases. ¶ Here’s the thing, though: As with casinos, most of the
revenue comes from “whales,” a tiny percentage of players who spend
thousands annually. A study last spring by Swrve (a firm that helps
MAR 2017
companies market their in-game items) dis-
covered that just 0.2 percent of players are
responsible for 48 percent of all revenue. In
effect, a small population of high-spending
players is subsidizing the masses.
Castronova predicts that economic trends
will force those subsidies to grow. Think
about it: Automation will create huge masses
of unemployed would-be factory workers.
The superrich will number fewer and fewer
and get richer and richer. Which means game
companies will drift toward a virtual-world
New Deal. They’ll have to soak their whales
more and more to stay in business, but keep-
ing them happy will require making sure
their worlds are vibrant communities. So the
game companies need those low-spending,
poorer folks to show up. Rich players don’t
want to play with bots; they crave the social
fellowship of real humans. And they also
enjoy the thrill of lording their socioeco-
nomic status over others. (It’s casino psy-
chology again: “The big shots want to walk
into a crowded casino and go into the high
rollers’ room,” Castronova says, “walking
past a guy like me playing craps.”)
That means the game companies will have
to underwrite poor players. In the next 10
years, they might issue reward cards, spend-
able in the real world. But eventually, 20 years
on, the companies might find they need to
pay to keep the proles alive and in the game.
Let’s be clear. This would not be, as Castro-
nova himself acknowledges, utopia. This
would be game design via Marx’s immiseration
theory. “It’s not a good life,” Castronova says—
not merely because of the likely-skimpy wages,
but because of the isolation. Now, low-skill
gamers with few other work options might be
happy enough at this work; as economist Erik
Hurst has found, when today’s non-college-
educated men drop out of the workforce, they
mostly play games anyway. “This feels like
something that is going to happen,” says Mike
Sellers, a veteran of free-to-play firms and a
professor at Indiana University.
And I have a sinking feeling that Castro-
nova is onto something. Political leaders are
doing little to prepare the US for automation-
propelled job loss. In that absence, the mar-
ket will chart its own path, and that makes
schemes like this all too plausible. When it
comes to the game of real-world economics,
people have no choice but to play. 
ZOHAR LAZAR CLIVE@CLIVETHOMPSON.NET
 The New Quarterly Fashion Magazine

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ANY LAMP can shine a light on your marketing plan. But if your desk goals
stop at functionality, you’re doing it wrong. The Flow Table Lamp doesn’t
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doesn’t evoke water so much as a maximally pared bonsai tree. A flat
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MAR 2017 CHARLIE SCHUCK 0 3 3

 CAR COMMUTE
WORK IT

GEARHEAD
JOYRIDE
Your new gig’s a mega-commute from chez vous,
and self-driving cars are a few years off. Here are
some friends to keep you company. —ALEX DAVIES

0 3 4
 1 2 3 4 5

Chevy Bolt Waylens Horizon Navdy Head-Up Persol PO8649S Miir Insulated
Dashcam Display Sunglasses Pint Cup
You suffer through
your commute, but Don’t just watch Luxury cars have dis- You may hit the road What good is coffee
the planet shouldn’t. replays of your road plays that project before dawn, but if it isn’t hot hot hot?
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 IDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS
FILE://SECURITY
Over five months in late 2015 and early
2016, the FAA reported 582 incidents of a
drone getting close to an aircraft or posing
a risk of collision. The jammed airspace over
New York saw the most danger.

Sky Net
The hugely
ambitious, mostly
illegal plan to take crowd. Maybe it’s a toxic mist.
Maybe it’s a bomb. Whatever it
down potentially is, you’ll never see it coming,
and because there is currently
dangerous drones. no legal way to bring down a
drone with any accuracy or reli-
BY DOUGLAS STARR ability, there’s nothing anyone
can do but wait for it.
In the summer of 2015, Ross
Lamm and Dave Romero watched
just such a scenario unfold from
within a skybox at a large uni-
IMAGINE YOU’RE part versity stadium. The head of
of a great swelling crowd, one security for the college, fear-
of 60,000 people who fill up the ful of the damage drones could
cauldron of noise and chaos that do, had decided to run a simula-
is a sold-out football stadium. tion of a drone attack inside his
For you and everyone around 60,000-capacity football sta-
you, the game is an open-air dium. (The university asked that
gathering place, a chance to identifying details be withheld
steam and scream and worry so as not to share its playbook
about nothing except the other with would-be attackers.) Cam-
team’s menacing D. To the secu- pus officials launched a DJI quad-
rity officials responsible for copter, a midsize, midpriced
your safety, it is a constant drone, and steered it toward
source of worst-case-scenario the bleachers, pretending to
planning. They install metal spread nerve gas on the hun-
detectors; they enlist a ken- dred students gathered below.
nel’s worth of bomb-sniffing As the drone looped lazily over
dogs; they plant concrete pillars the crowd, some of them pre-
developing. Almost immediately
after the drone lifted off, Lamm
and Romero’s radar detected
it. Their AI-powered software
identified it as a drone (and not,
say, a bird), and their tripod-
mounted cameras tracked it as
it made its way over the crowd.
As they heard the ominous buzz-
ing overhead and watched the
college kids pretend to die,
Romero and Lamm allowed
themselves a small measure
of satisfaction—Black Sage’s
tracking system worked, and
in the event of an actual attack
it could give authorities a few
crucial extra minutes to mobi-
lize. Mostly, though, Romero and
Lamm felt alarmed, knowing all
they could do was watch. “Holy
shit,” Romero remembers think-
ing. “We can do everything but
stop this catastrophic incident
from occurring.”
Shaken and stirred, they
returned to Black Sage’s head-
quarters in Boise, Idaho, and
spent a year enhancing their
system so that it can now not
SOURCES: THE RETENTION PEOPLE, ENDEAVOR PARTNERS

around the perimeter to keep
out cars; they train personnel
in the dark art of bag searching;
they even obtain a temporary
flight restriction from the FAA
to keep all aircraft above 3,000
feet for a radius of 3 miles. They
spend millions of dollars and
thousands of hours to keep you
safe, yet they know that none
of it can stop a 3-pound off-
the-shelf drone from flying in
and dropping something on the
tended to vomit convulsively,
some twitched spasmodically,
some staggered like zombies
and then collapsed. Emergency
personnel rushed in, assessing
the pretend damage and carry-
ing pretend victims out to vans
As the Black Sage equipped as medical stations.
cofounders heard the
ominous buzzing Up in a skybox, Lamm and
overhead and watched Romero, cofounders of Black
the kids pretend to
die, they felt a small Sage Technologies, monitored
measure of satisfac- the drone-tracking equipment
tion—their drone-track-
ing system worked. they’ve spent the past few years
only track drones but also
bring them safely to the ground
using radio-frequency-jamming
technology. There is only one
small hitch: Like almost every
drone-interdiction technology
in development, frequency jam-
mers run afoul of several US
laws, most of which were passed
when people hadn’t dreamed of
owning their own unmanned air-
craft. Romero and Lamm’s
solution to the mock ter-

MAR 2017 ATELIER OLSCHINSKY

 NEW YORK/
SEATTLE: 9 CHICAGO: 8 NEWARK: 47

PHILADELPHIA: 10

ATLANTA: 9

ORLANDO: 15
LOS ANGELES: 24 PHOENIX: 10

SAN DIEGO: 16

DALLAS: 12 HOUSTON: 11 MIAMI: 10

0 0 0
 FILE://SECURITY
ror in the stadium—a solution
that they have shown can reli-
ably counter the threats drones
pose to targets as varied as pris-
ons, airports, and arenas—is ille-
gal here, which leaves the future
of Black Sage’s technology, like
the future of drones themselves,
very much up in the air.
THE TWO INVENTORS
met in 2013 through a mutual
friend in Boise. Romero, 31, grew
up on a 2,200-acre cattle ranch
50 miles south of the city, the
prototypical boy-tinkerer mak-
ing miracles out of scrap metal.
He built lots of dune buggies,
motorcycles, and other contrap-
tions, most of which worked, one
of which burst into flames. He
taught himself computer pro-
gramming on his family’s IBM
386. After graduating from col-
lege in 2007, he started a soft-
ware company called Tsuvo that
performed regression analy-
sis—taking large data sets from
disparate government agen-
cies, some of which involved
thousands of statistics, and dis-
tilling them into clean, color-
coded graphics that even non-
statisticians could under-
stand. This kind of massive data
crunching and predictive anal-
ysis, useful to bureaucracies
both here and abroad, led him
to live for varying amounts of
time in Chile, Palau, and finally,
Thailand. It also introduced
him to the power of machine-
learning algorithms, which
helped make quick work of even
the thorniest data sets.
Douglas Starr
(@douglasstarr) is
codirector of the
graduate program in
science and medical
journalism at Boston
University.
MAR 2017
Where Romero is an adrena- crossed the road, but because machine learning help solve the
line fiend—ask about the moun- the signal would also light up highway problem? “After our
tain bike perched in his office and whenever the wind sent leaves friend introduced us, he hardly
he’ll show you a photo of himself and branches tumbling across got a word in,” Romero says. “We
on the bike, halfway through a the pavement—which was got into this virtuous cycle of
backflip—Lamm, 45, likes noth- often—drivers came to ignore building on each other’s ideas.”
ing more than sailing with his two the warning lights altogether. The pair got to work. Near the
sons on a quiet lake. He is delib- The highway developed one of highway, they set up a Doppler
erate and thoughtful, choosing the highest wildlife crash rates radar (to detect moving objects)
his words carefully, not out of
caution but from an engineer’s
appreciation of what’s precise
and what’s not. While earning
a PhD concentrated on machine
vision in the late ’90s, he devel-
oped an algorithm that enabled
a tractor-mounted camera to
tell the difference between cot-
ton plants and weeds, allowing
farmers to spray herbicide more
accurately. In the aftermath of al
Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole in
2000 (an explosive-laden speed-
boat crashed into the ship, kill-
ing 17 sailors), he helped a US
Navy and Coast Guard contrac-
tor develop a robotic vision sys-
tem that allowed ships to detect
and quickly respond to speedboat
attacks. (With your own vessel
rocking and an enemy boat clos-
ing in fast, it’s surprisingly diffi-
cult to track ships on the water.)
He also took part in constructing
the warning system in Washing-
ton, DC, that locks onto com-
mercial airplanes that drift into
restricted airspace and beams
an unmistakable red-red-green,
red-red-green laser signal into
the cockpit to alert the plane’s
pilots to fly elsewhere. After more
than a decade living and work-
ing in Napa Valley, California,
he relocated to Boise in 2012, in
part so his wife could move her
winery there.
Lamm and Romero f irst
crossed paths when their mutual in the state, and when Romero along with an infrared camera
friend asked for their help land- was home from Thailand for a (for nighttime viewing) and
ing a government contract: The month visiting his family for routed the output to Romero,
state of Idaho wanted to install a Christmas, the friend invited him who had returned to Thailand
new warning system on a high- and Lamm to a brainstorming for a few months to finish some
way to prevent cars from crash- session at a coffee shop. Could work. To train his machine-learn-
ing into animals after dark. The some combination of Lamm’s ing algorithms to distinguish
existing warning system flashed expertise in robotic vision between animals and clutter,
a light whenever a deer or an elk and Romero’s experience with he would spend 45 minutes of

DRONES
his lunchtime each day (perfect
for nocturnal sightings in Idaho)
watching the infrared images and
signaling yes or no as to whether
they were wildlife. The system
accumulated thousands of data
points on the moving objects
that crossed the camera’s field
of view—speed, acceleration,
direction—and once that data
was correlated with Romero’s
yes/no designations, the algo-
rithm learned to recognize what
probably was an animal and what
probably wasn’t.
“It’s a beautiful algorithm
that takes data from radar and
enriches it with close probabili-
ties,” Romero says. Rather than Around the time that Romero
respond to a potential threat and Lamm were focusing on pre-
like a conventional alarm sys- venting accidents on the ground,
tem—a so-called determinis- more and more people started
tic response, where almost any worrying about crashes in the
stimulus sets off a signal—their sky. Once the province of mil-
system would trigger a proba- itary developers, then of rich
bilistic response. They set the folks who could afford the tech-
alarm to flash if it determined nology, drones soared into the
mainstream in 2013 when Chi-
nese drone maker DJI introduced
the Phantom, the first consumer-
priced unmanned aircraft sys-
tem. It jump-started what Marke
Gibson, the FAA’s drone expert
and a former Air Force general,
Detect, calls “the most fundamental
Identify, and
Defeat change in aviation in our life-
Black Sage’s time.” With hundreds of thou-
Doppler radar
detects a target sands of new aircraft navigating
and collects data increasingly crowded airspace,
like speed and
altitude. The soft- Lamm and Romero noticed there
ware factors in were alarmingly few ways to
time to calculate
acceleration, keep track of the errant ones.
velocity, and hun- What’s more, the radar track-
dreds of other
data points. ing systems that did exist could
An algorithm, rarely distinguish between large
“trained” to dis-
tinguish between
birds and drones, a problem sim-
drones and birds, ilar to what they had encoun-
runs the data
tered on the highway in Idaho.
and determines
that the target is Seeing an opportunity to cash in
a drone. on an emerging market, Romero
A hi-def cam-
era is engaged to and Lamm founded Black Sage
track the drone. in July of 2014 to adapt their
The frequency
jammers blast wildlife-detection system to the
radio waves at the new and more urgent problems
drone, blocking
the control signal posed by drones.
and paralyzing the The adaptation wasn’t as
aircraft.
The drone simple as taking their existing
returns home, set- radar and camera equipment
tles to the ground,
or drifts in the air. and pointing it skyward, though:
Romero and Lamm had to write
new software to process the ever-
changing latitude, longitude, and
altitude of an incoming target, all
while taking into account the cur-
vature of the Earth. Lamm wrote
“slew-to-cue” algorithms so that
with a 70 percent probability whenever the radar picked up
that the moving object was an an incoming object, it would
elk or a deer as opposed to, say, engage the camera, which then
tumbleweed. False alarms plum- would track the object at a near-
meted, drivers began to trust continuous 30 times per second.
the new system, and in the three Later he and Romero added an
months that they field-tested it infrared camera to detect the dif-
during the winter of 2014, colli- ferential heat patterns between
sions dropped to zero. drones and the surrounding air.
Existing
radar tracking
systems
could rarely
distinguish
between
large birds and
drones.
They headed to the scrubby hills
above Boise to train the software,
aiming the camera and radar at
drones as well as the birds rid-
ing the thermals and the water-
fowl in the wetlands below. For
the drones and the birds, the
system would measure accel-
eration, speed, heading, cross-
section, surface area, whether
the object had moving wings or
propellers, and hundreds of other
factors. “We didn’t have to know
what makes these differences”
between drones and other fly-
ing objects, Romero says. “The
AI figured it out.”
By the summer of 2015 they
had a system that could reliably
detect an incoming drone about
half a kilometer away, identify
it, and stay locked on it regard-
less of evasive maneuvers. It was
a breakthrough for them and a
potential resource for anyone
interested in keeping tabs on
nearby drones. When the college
security official invited Lamm
and Romero to demo their sys-
tem during the simulated nerve
gas attack, he saw firsthand how
the Black Sage system could
track a drone. He also learned
there was nothing that anyone
could do to stop it.
YOU’D THINK SHOOTING
one down would be the easiest
way to do it. After all, in 2015 a
guy in Kentucky, pissed off that
a drone was hovering over his
property, grabbed his shotgun
and shot the damn thing out
0 4 1
 FILE://SECURITY
of the sky. Simple enough. But
it threw him into a thicket of
legal trouble that he couldn’t
escape for months. Under FAA
rules, drones are considered
aircraft: It’s just as illegal to
shoot at one as it is to shoot at
a Piper Cub, if for no other rea-
son than you can’t control where
(or on what or whom) a falling
drone will land. The govern-
ment has taken steps to prevent
people from doing dumb things
with their drones: Last sum-
mer the FAA released licensing
and registration rules to com-
pel drone buyers to learn how
to fly responsibly. Drone man-
ufacturers have taken actions
too, integrating no-fly zones
into the aircrafts’ GPS systems.
Both measures are easy to get
around, though, which explains
why the FAA receives more than
100 reports per month of drones
flying near aircraft—more than
triple the rate it was seeing in
2014. No one knows what would
happen if a drone got sucked
into a jet engine, although com-
puter simulations at Virginia
Tech suggest that it would rip
apart the engine’s fan blades in
less than 0.005 second.
T h e p ro b l e m go e s w e l l
beyond aircraft. The Penta-
gon, spurred by reports that
ISIS is using drones for sur-
veillance and bomb delivery,
has requested $20 million for
antidrone research. Recently
the Federal Bureau of Prisons
Every prison,
every airport,
every stadium:
Everybody
is now worried
about drones.
MAR 2017
posted a request for informa-
tion on how to equip peniten-
tiaries with antidrone systems
(the better to stop drones from
dropping contraband into
prison yards). “Every prison,
every airport, every facility
with sensitive equipment out-
doors, stadiums, amusement
parks, racetracks … everybody
is now worried about drones,”
says James Williams, an avi-
ation specialist at the inter-
national law firm Dentons. In
short, what used to be a two-
dimensional security problem—
stopping intruders at ground
level—has now become a three-
dimensional one, as security
breaches can come from above.
With US sales expected to
triple over the next three years,
drones are democratizing the
air to an unprecedented degree,
and Black Sage is only one of a
handful of companies trying to
solve the problem. One of the
more promising, if flawed, sys-
tems in the works comes from
British company OpenWorks
Engineering, which has pro-
duced a bazooka-like device
called SkyWall 100 that phys-
ically captures a drone with a
net; the system won a recent
competition for drone defense
in urban areas, but it’s not effec-
tive much beyond 100 meters.
In Holland, police have exper-
imented with using eagles to
attack drones, but they haven’t
figured out how to protect the
birds’ feet from the spinning
blades, and the raptors have
to be trained for months. In
the fall of 2015, in their own
first attempt to counter a
drone, Lamm and Romero
rigged a couple of ultra-high-
powered spotlights to one of
their tripods. When a drone
approached, radar would detect
it, cameras would track it, and
with the touch of a button, 12
million candlepower of light
would blind the drone and dis-
able its video and espionage
capabilities. It worked well at
night, but when they demo’d
the system for a customer in the
Middle East, the desert sun ren-
dered the lights useless against
attacking drones.
Shortly after the high-wattage
experiment, Romero went to
an international security con-
ference in Dubai in early 2016,
where he met the owner of a
company that makes radio jam-
mers to protect armored vehi-
cles in war zones. IEDs are often
triggered by radio waves—via
NET BAZOOKAS AND
ATTACK EAGLES
Black Sage is one of a handful
of companies trying to find
solutions to the problem of errant
drones. Here are some of the
more successful—and problem-
atic—technologies.
Wi-Fi or cell phone—and the
company had produced a device
that, mounted on a Humvee,
broadcasted jamming signals at
a broad range of frequencies in
all directions. This got Romero
and Lamm thinking about how
frequency jamming could apply
to their own efforts: Consumer
drones are controlled through
the public part of the radio spec-
trum (either 2.4 or 5.8 GHz).
Blasting radio waves at those
specific frequencies—jamming
them—makes a drone deaf to its
controller, which would cause
the drone to return home or set-
tle to the ground. A similar out-
come would occur if you jammed
the GPS frequency or what’s
called the low-frequency L-band.
Frequency jamming is an
elegant solution that doesn’t
involve shotguns or trained
animals, but it comes at a
cost. Because these are pub-
lic frequencies, jamming them
disables other common elec-
tronic devices in the area, such
as Wi-Fi, wireless home phones,
SkyTracker
CACI, Arlington,
Virginia
This system cre-
ates an electronic
boundary around
vulnerable areas
that can detect
a drone’s signal
and triangulate
it back to the
source. A security
team can then
direct police to
the transmitter to
shut it down. It
doesn’t violate
antijamming regu-
lations, but it
does run afoul of
antiwiretapping
and computer-
hacking laws.
and even garage door openers.
Jamming GPS signals is even
more dangerous—it can inter-
fere with emergency responders
and airplane-guidance systems.
That is why jamming radio fre-
quencies and GPS signals is
illegal in the US. Still, Romero
and Lamm thought that if they
could jam only those frequency
bands most commonly used in
drone communication—and
if they could limit their jam-
ming to objects at which they
have aimed their system—they
 DRONES

could minimize the disruption business, and you’re ahead of a drone. Instantly the cameras It also depends on the envi-
to surrounding radio and GPS the game if your adversaries locked onto it; and when Lamm ronment. Lamm says he’d be
communications. don’t know that you can counter zoomed in with the hi-def cam- comfortable using his system
Since they couldn’t legally their drone attack. A few times era, we could see the quadcop- at an airport far from the city
experiment near their head- over several months, they called ter’s body and rotors. Lamm and center or a stadium on the out-
quarters in Boise, Romero flew and updated me with their lat- Romero shot commands back skirts of town. Another good
to the Middle East to test out fre- est test results, and with each and forth like a pilot and copilot. example, he says, is what Utah
quency jammers. After two and new dispatch they described “Buzzer on,” Romero hollered. legislators had in mind last year
a half months of trial and error, various improvements and set- Lamm flipped a switch. A jam- when they passed a law that
Romero and Lamm created a new backs. Last summer I finally got mer emitted a storm of radio allows incident commanders at
system that could bring down a chance to see the Black Sage waves, blocking the control wildfires to use frequency jam-
a drone with minimal impact system for myself. On a remote signal and paralyzing the air- ming to neutralize any drones
on surrounding radio and GPS hillside, I sat with Romero and craft. “Buzzer off!” Romero com- interfering with their work. The
operations. Despite knowing Lamm inside a trailer set up as manded, and the drone resumed law is so new that it hasn’t been
that they couldn’t market it in a command center. The drone- the attack. “Buzzer on,” and it tested yet: Legal experts won-
froze again. This time they kept der what the FCC will do when
the jammer engaged, and the an incident occurs, perhaps in
drone settled to the ground. the next fire season. (The FCC
Since then Lamm and Romero wouldn’t comment on Black
have updated their system yet Sage or the issue of frequency
again. A recent version, tested jamming.) Meanwhile, the FAA
for an Asian counterterrorism is hosting biweekly meetings
unit last September, established with the FCC and other three-
SkyWall 100 Mesmer Guard From a zoned system with a series of letter agencies to work out stan-
OpenWorks Department 13, Above potential responses. If a drone dards for what kind of antidrone
Engineering, Columbia, Holland
Riding Mill, Maryland Since 2015 approached within a certain dis- systems can be developed and
England Radio receivers police in Holland tance of a prohibited zone, the under what conditions they can
OpenWorks’ detect a drone’s have been
bazooka-like control signals. training eagles
system would jam its Wi-Fi and be safely deployed. “The major
device shoots The system to intercept sever its connection to its con- issue is not just the technology,
a 1.7-pound bullet analyzes their drones. A squad
at the drone. The structure, then
troller. If the drone kept com- but the application of technol-
of 100 Dutch
projectile releases sends out its police officers ing, that would mean it had been ogy in a civil environment,” says
a net (with a own commands is currently programmed to attack, and at Gibson, the FAA’s drone man.
parachute) that to take control working with the
captures the of the craft. Like birds, which that point the system would “We’ve never been in this posi-
drone and floats SkyTracker, are expected to jam its GPS frequencies. “With tion before; it’s the new frontier.”
it to the ground. there aren’t any go into action
The only hitch is issues with fre- this summer. zero human intervention, our Romero, Lamm, and others in
that it’s not quency jamming, system detected and identified their young industry hope that
effective beyond but Mesmer
100 meters. can run counter the drone and took it down to any new regulations will include
to wiretapping the ground,” Romero says. “At a variance for emergency jam-
and computer-
hacking laws. that point, it was handshakes, ming. “I don’t think this is going
smiles, and a happy customer.” to become real until we experi-
Though the Black Sage jam- ence a catastrophe,” Romero
mer includes a narrow-beam says. Which would sound more
their home country, Romero and tracking gear consisted of two antenna to minimize frequency cynical if he hadn’t witnessed a
Lamm pressed forward. “I know tripods: One held a cluster of disruptions in the surrounding hundred kids pretending to die in
I’m going to regret saying this, eight Doppler radars resem- area, Romero and Lamm concede a football stadium. Everyone then
but our thought process was, who bling white iPads and, above that using the latest version of knew a drone was coming. The
cares about the States?” Lamm them, the hi-def and infrared their system in a crowded urban next time might be different. 
says. “We’ve got a $100 million cameras; the other held the jam- area could cause hundreds of
customer in a hot, sandy place mers—three white cylinders businesses to lose their Wi-Fi for
who doesn’t care about the FCC, the size of paper towel tubes. up to 30 seconds. It’s not some-
and we have a solution they’ll An assistant launched the thing Lamm would use casually,
love—so let’s do it.” quadcopter and flew it beyond even if the FCC allowed it. “It all
Lamm and Romero are under- eyesight, maybe a kilometer depends on the threat level,” he
standably vague about where away. Moments after launch a says. “If you see a drone headed
they test and sell their equip- white dot appeared on the radar- for an airport right now,” it’d be
ment overseas. There’s a spy- connected monitor. A readout worth the risk of knocking out
versus-spy element to the confirmed that the object was the surrounding Wi-Fi.

0 4 3
 PR OMOTI ON

EMERGING
TECH
COUNCIL
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The Emerging Tech Council is a

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looking to future proof their business.

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 FEATURES | 25.03

The News in Crisis 046 | Inside the Insane World of Hollywood Prop Collectors 078 | The Strange Curse of the Bahia Emerald 084

Yuan Wang 0 4 5
The News
Saving The New York Times
p.50

Robot Reporters
p. 6 2

Welcome to Macedonia, Land of Fake News

p.68
s in Crisis
The 24/7 Attention Economy
p. 6 0

Black News Matters Edward Snowden, Defender of the Free Press

p.64 p. 6 6
 Fact:
T h e n e ws m e d i a i s i n t r o u b l e . The advertising-driven business
model is on the brink of collapse. Trust in the press is at an all-time low. And
now those two long-brewing concerns have been joined by an even larger exis-
tential crisis. In a post-fact era of fake news and filter bubbles, in which audi-
ences cherry-pick the information and sources that match their own biases and
dismiss the rest, the news media seems to have lost its power to shape public
opinion. ¶ It’s worth remembering, though, that as recently as 30 years ago,
people worried that the press had entirely too much power. In 1988, Edward
Herman and Noam Chomsky published a book called Manufacturing Consent,
which argued that the US media puts a straitjacket on national discussion. The
news, they argued, was determined by the small handful of media corpora-
tions capable of reaching a mass audience—a huge barrier to entry that kept
smaller, independent voices out of the conversation. The corporations’ busi-
ness model relied on national-brand advertisers, which tended to not support
publications or stories they found controversial or distasteful. And journalists
relied on the cooperation of high-ranking sources, a symbiotic relationship that
prevented the press from publishing anything too oppositional. As a result,
Chomsky and Herman wrote, “the raw material of news must pass through
successive filters, leaving only the cleansed residue fit to print.” The result was
a false national consensus, one that ignored outlying facts, voices, and ideas.
by
Jason Tanz
25.03
In the three decades since Herman and
Chomsky leveled their critique, almost every
aspect of the news industry has changed.
National-brand advertising has given way to
automated exchanges that place ads across
thousands of sites, regardless of their content.
Politicians no longer need to rely on jour-
nalists to reach their audiences but instead
can speak to voters directly on Twitter. In
fact, the ability to reach a national audience
now belongs to everyone. There is nothing
to prevent fringe ideas and arguments from
entering the informational bloodstream—
and nothing to stop them from spreading.
These developments have upended the
business logic that once pushed journalists
toward middle-of-the-road consensus. When
there were only three national news broad-
casts, each competed to attract the broadest
audience and alienate as few potential view-
ers as possible. But with infinite news sources,
audiences follow the outlets that speak most
uniquely to their interests, beliefs, and emo-
tions. Instead of appealing to the broad cen-
ter of American political opinion, more news
outlets are chasing passionate niches. As
media theorist Clay Shirky says, they can’t
rely on captive viewers but always have to
hunt down new ones, “recruiting audiences
rather than inheriting them.”
These trends have been in place since the
dawn of the internet, but they were super-
charged over the past couple of years as
social media—and especially Facebook—
emerged as a major news source. Media pro-
fessionals’ already-eroding power to steer
the national conversation has largely van-
ished. Before social media, a newspaper edi-
tor had the final say as to which stories were
published and where they appeared. Today,
readers have usurped that role. An editor
can publish a story, but if nobody shares it,
it might as well never have been written.
0 4 8
 The News in Crisis

We have gone
from a media
business model
that manufactures
consent to one
that manufactures
dissent.
The
Decline
in News
Jobs
If readers are the new publishers, the best that pumps up conflict and outrage rather The number of
way to get them to share a story is by appeal- than watering it down. Americans whose
job it is to “inform
ing to their feelings—usually not the good This sounds dire. Heck, it is dire. But the the public about
ones. A recent paper in Human Communi- answer is not to pine for the days when a news and events
cation Research found that anger was the handful of publications defined the limits of … for newspapers,
magazines, web-
“key mediating mechanism” determining public discourse. That’s never coming back, sites, television,
whether someone shared information on and we shouldn’t want it to. Instead, smart and radio” has
Facebook; the more partisan and enraged news operations, like the ones profiled in decreased by nearly
10 percent over
someone was, the more likely they were to these pages, are finding new ways to listen the past decade,
share political news online. And the stories and respond to their audiences—rather than according to the
they shared tended to make the people who just telling people what to think. They’re Bureau of Labor
Statistics. The next
read them even more furious. “You need to using technology to create a fuller portrait of 10 years aren’t look-
be radical in order to gain market share,” the world and figuring out how to get people ing any better.
says Sam Lessin, a former vice president of to pay for good work. And the best of them
2004
product management at Facebook. “Reason- are indeed creating really, really good work.
59,640
ableness gets you no points.” As the past 30 years of press history shows,
In other words, we have gone from a busi- everything changes. Great journalism helps 2014
ness model that manufactures consent to us understand how and why things change, 54,400
one that manufactures dissent—a system and we need that now more than ever. 
2024
49,600*

The Generation Gap

The younger the consumer, the more dramatic the shift
away from traditional news outlets. Here’s the percentage of
each age group who say they often get news from …

RELATED PODCAST
18–29 30–49 50–64 65+
*BLS projection:
“Declining advertising
85% revenue … will
negatively impact the
employment growth.”
72%
On the Media
WNYC’s show takes 50%
a dishy dive into the 48%
45%
stories behind the
news, from the Trump
dossier leak to the 49% 29%
27%
SPOT ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN GEE

unspoken rivalry 23%

between the FBI
and the CIA. 29% 27% 10%
24% 5%
20%
14%

CABLE, WEBSITES, RADIO PRINT

LOCAL, APPS, AND NEWSPAPERS
AND SOCIAL JASON TANZ (@jasontanz) is editor at
NETWORK TV MEDIA
large at wired.
Source: Pew Research Center
Times
25.03

Keeping Up
With the

How the Gray Lady is trying to claw its way

into the digital future.

by

Gabriel Snyder
 The News in Crisis

A. G. Sulzberger, the
deputy publisher of
The New York Times
photographs by Jam es Day and the driving force
behind the company’s
digital reinvention.
 A
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger
doesn’t remember the first time he
visited the family business. He was
young, he says, no older than 6, when
he shuffled through the brass-plated
revolving doors of the old concrete
hulk on 43rd Street and boarded
the elevator up to his father’s and
grandfather’s offices. He often vis-
ited for a few minutes before taking
a trip to the newsroom on the third
floor, all typewriters and moldering
stacks of paper, and then he’d some-
times go down to the subbasement
to take in the oily scents and clank-
ing sounds of the printing press.
This was the early ’80s, when The
New York Times was nothing but
ink on paper and was printed in the
same building where the journalism
was created. His memories are hazy,
perhaps because he’s 36 now and it
was a long time ago, and perhaps
because that building, like the Times,
was always just there, a fact of life.
0 5 2
The Times building is still there, except
it’s not the Times building anymore. It’s been
sold off and sliced up, and the top two floors
are presently occupied by Snapchat, while
the bottom two were bought by Kushner
Companies, the family business of Jared
Kushner, son-in-law extraordinaire of Don-
ald J. Trump. A few blocks—but more like
a century—away from that old building,
Sulzberger sits in his office in the newish
glass-and-steel-lattice-encased headquar-
ters of the Times. He looks the picture of a
young tech executive—close-cropped hair,
tortoiseshell glasses, considered stubble—
and I ask him point-blank if he worries about
whether The New York Times will ever cease
to be a fact of life. “No,” he says, equally
point-blank, which is exactly the party line
one expects to hear from the deputy pub-
lisher of the Times—a recent appointment
that put him next in line to lead the paper
when the current publisher and chair, his
father, retires. But there could be another
reason for his confidence. Sulzberger, like
more than three dozen other executives and
journalists I interviewed and shadowed at
the Times, is working on the biggest stra-
tegic shift in the paper’s 165-year history,
and he believes it will strengthen its bottom
line, enhance the quality of its journalism,
and secure a long and lasting future.
The main goal isn’t simply to maximize
revenue from advertising—the strategy
that keeps the lights on and the content free
at upstarts like the Huffington Post, Buzz-
Feed, and Vox. It’s to transform the Times’
digital subscriptions into the main engine
of a billion-dollar business, one that could
pay to put reporters on the ground in 174
countries even if (OK, when) the printing
presses stop forever. To hit that mark, the
Times is embarking on an ambitious plan
inspired by the strategies of Netflix, Spotify,
25.03
and HBO: invest heavily in a core offering
(which, for the Times, is journalism) while
continuously adding new online services
and features (from personalized fitness
advice and interactive newsbots to virtual
reality films) so that a subscription becomes
indispensable to the lives of its existing
subscribers and more attractive to future
ones. “We think that there are many, many,
many, many people—millions of people all
around the world—who want what The New
York Times offers,” says Dean Baquet, the
Times’ executive editor. “And we believe
that if we get those people, they will pay,
and they will pay greatly.”
How they reach those people, and how they
make them pay, is now the work of hundreds
of journalists, designers, engineers, data
scientists, and product managers. At stake
isn’t just the future of a very old newspaper
that has seen its advertising revenue cut in
half in less than a decade—it’s the still unre-
solved question of whether high-impact,
high-cost journalism can thrive in a radi-
cally changing landscape. Newspaper com-
panies today employ 271,000 fewer people
than they did in 1990—around the popula-
tion of Orlando—and with fewer journalists
working with fewer resources, and more
Americans getting their news on platforms
where the news could very well be fake, the
financial success of the Times isn’t an inci-
dental concern for people who care about
SPOT ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN GEE
GABRIEL SNYDER (@gabrielsnyder) is an
editor and writer living in Brooklyn.
 The News in Crisis
Completed in 2007,
the current home of
The New York Times
is a few blocks (but
more like a century
away) from the old
headquarters.
journalism. It’s existential, especially in
the context of the new American president.
Just days after the election, Trump sug-
gested that the Times—or, per his preferred
Twitter epithet, “the failing @nytimes”—
would be a frequent target of his administra-
tion, calling an article “dishonest” for citing
something he had said on CNN (which was
The financial success of the Times isn’t an
incidental concern for people who care about
journalism. It’s existential, especially in
the context of the new American president.
odd, since he did actually say it, in public,
on video) and adding (also falsely) that the
Times “is losing thousands of subscribers
because of their very poor and highly inac-
curate coverage.” In fact, it’s been the exact
opposite: Four weeks after the election,
Times chief executive Mark Thompson told
an industry conference that subscriptions
had surged at 10 times their usual rate. To
Thompson, the likeliest explanation wasn’t
that the Times did a bang-up job covering
the final days of the election—like everyone
else, they failed to anticipate Trump’s vic-
tory—or that readers were looking to hedge
against fake news. He suggests a simpler
reason: “I think the public anxiety to actu-
ally have professional, consistent, properly
funded newsrooms holding politicians to
account is probably bigger than all of the
other factors put together.” In other words,
the president’s hostility to the press and the
very notion of facts themselves seems to
have reminded people that nothing about
The New York Times—or the kind of jour-
nalism it publishes—is inevitable.
On May 25, 1994, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger
Sr., who had stepped down as publisher of
the Times two years prior but was still the
company’s chair, was delivering a speech in
Kansas City, Missouri, and turned to the bur-
geoning “information highway.” He didn’t
like it much. “Far from resembling a mod-
ern interstate,” he predicted, it “will more
likely approach a roadway in India: chaotic,
crowded, and swarming with cows.”
That same day, back in New York City,
Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who succeeded
his father as publisher (which he remains
to this day), was also giving a speech about
technological change. “If they want it on
CD-ROM, I’ll try to meet that need. The inter-

Sulzberger realized that the BuzzFeed leak
had turned an administrative white paper
into a media rallying cry. “You couldn’t read
the Innovation Report and think that the
status quo was an option. It’s not should we
change, it’s how do we change.”
net? That’s fine with me,” he said. “Hell, if
someone would be kind enough to invent
the technology, I’ll be pleased to beam it
directly into your cortex.” It was a line the
young publisher liked to repeat. “He said
that in my job interview,” says Martin Nisen-
holtz, who was hired in 1995 as the origi-
nal architect of the Times’ digital strategy.
“Arthur’s notion was that these technologies
were principally delivery systems for Times
journalism.” When NYTimes.com launched
on January 22, 1996, it was updated once a
day with stories from the print edition. Like
most everything then, it was free to read for
anyone in the US with a dial-up connection.
Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, who goes by
Arthur but is known as A.G. around the
Times, was 16 at the time, and the bulk of
what happened next in journalism—the
rise of blogs, social media, podcasts, and
mobile; the fall of print circulation, adver-
tising, and prestige—happened while he was
The Business Section
The sources of revenue at the Times have shifted dramatically in the 21st century.
2000
70%
2005
65%
2010
44%
2015
28% 12%
REVENUES: ADVERTISING Print Digital CIRCULATION
learning how to be a journalist. He gradu-
ated from Brown with a degree in politi-
cal science in 2003 and started writing for
The Providence Journal and The Oregon-
ian before joining the Times as a metro
reporter in 2009. The financial crisis that
coincided with his homecoming so damaged
the Times’ advertising revenue that many
started to speculate about when the Times
would go bankrupt. Though digital adver-
tising increased from an asterisk in financial
reports to well over $100 million between
2005 and 2010, it wasn’t nearly enough to
offset the $600 million loss in print adver-
tising over the same period. The Times
managed to survive through savvy finan-
cial maneuvering—taking out a $250 million
loan from Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim in
exchange for what is now a 17 percent stake
in the company; selling its gleaming Renzo
Piano–designed Manhattan headquarters
and leasing it back from the buyer; shed-
1% 23% 6%
1% 27% 7%
10% 39% 7%
42% 12% 6%
Print Digital Subscription OTHER
25.03
ding assets like About.com and a stake in the
Boston Red Sox—but its continued existence
was no longer a foregone conclusion. “The
former Times executive editor Abe Rosen-
thal often said he couldn’t imagine a world
without the Times,” one critic wrote in The
Atlantic. “Perhaps we should start.”
Over the next few years, finding new digi-
tal revenue became the Times’ top business
priority, and in 2014, Sulzberger, by then an
editor on the metro desk, was tasked with
overseeing an internal assessment of the
paper’s digital efforts to date. The result was
a 97-page document known as the Innova-
tion Report, which found that editors too
often said no to programmers and prod-
uct designers from the technology group.
“The newsroom has historically reacted
defensively by watering down or block-
ing changes,” read the report, “prompting
a phrase that echoes almost daily around
the business side: ‘The newsroom would
never allow that.’ ” Initially intended for
only a handful of senior managers, most
Times employees first learned of the report
from a grainy photocopy that was leaked
to BuzzFeed; one employee said they cried
when they first read it because, as Harvard’s
Nieman Lab reported, “it surfaced so many
issues about Times culture that digital types
have been struggling to overcome for years.”
The BuzzFeed leak was devastating for
Sulzberger—“a moment of panic,” he says.
“We had written a pretty frank and candid
document expressly for a small group of
leaders of this organization, and suddenly it
felt like our dirty laundry was being aired.”
Even worse: It was a Sulzberger, of the Sulz-
bergers, doing the airing. Still, he realized
within a few days that the public scrutiny
had turned an administrative white paper
into a media rallying cry. “You couldn’t read
that report and think that the status quo was
0 5 4
 The News in Crisis

1. With its open floor

plan, the third-story
newsroom is home to
much of the Times’ vast
reporting operation.

2. On the ninth floor,

where the Beta Group
works, each new app,
blog, and vertical under
development has its
own conference room
lined with whiteboards,
diagrams, mock-ups,
and Post-it notes.

1.
an option. Once it’s clear that that is not an
option, then the conversation all of a sud-
den becomes much more productive. It’s not
should we change, it’s how do we change.”
The privileging of print journalism over
the web, the sclerotic approach to change,
the lack of coordination between the grow-
ing number of digital disciplines and spe-
cialists—Sulzberger and his team laid it all
bare, lighting a digital-first fuse that still
burns today. “It’s not like I’m the first per-
son who came into this newsroom and said,
‘Social media is something that needs to be
accounted for in our future,’ ” Sulzberger
says. “But it wasn’t until the Innovation
Report that those points really landed.”
The Innovation Report was also the first
time that most people outside of the Times
had ever heard of Sulzberger, though Times
watchers had for several years pitted him
against two of his cousins—David Perpich
and Sam Dolnick, an executive and an editor
at the Times, respectively—as a leading can-
didate for the publisher’s job when Sulzberg-
er’s father eventually retired. Public scrutiny
has been, by all appearances, uncomfortable
for Sulzberger. He started his career at a
time when snarky newsroom chatter found
a public outlet on blogs and social media,
and his reaction to that unwanted attention
was to recoil from many of the digital plat-
forms that are second nature to his peers.
He has no public presence on Facebook
or Twitter, which Sulzberger can get a little
defensive about—he was promoted to man-
agement in 2015 to help implement the rec-
ommendations of the Innovation Report,
2.
and he knows there’s an easy joke to be made
about how the person charged with leading
the Times into a digital future has never liked,
tweeted, or snapped. When I ask him how
he knows what he knows about these new
platforms, he says, “I’m not active on social
 25.03

High-
lights
From
the New
New York
Times

media; I am a student of it,” and waves an DJ training school called Scratch Academy. Five recent stand-
arm at a wall of his office covered in dozens He went on to Harvard Business School for outs from the
Times’ multimedia
of color printouts of pie charts, tables, line an MBA and landed at Booz & Company as expansion.
graphs full of digital metrics—proprietary a management consultant. When he joined
information that he asked remain off the the family business in 2010 as an executive NYT POLITICS BOT
An AI-powered
record. “I spend a lot of time thinking about director for paid products, he and his team chatbot deployed
the trends that are reshaping our industry. oversaw the rollout of the paywall that for for the 2016 elec-
I spend a lot of time talking to people on the the first time required people to shell out tion. Subscribers
could type in ques-
front line of those trends,” he tells me, “and cash for full and regular access to NYTimes tions and the bot
a big part of my job is making sense of that.” .com. The project has become the Times’ big- would offer up-to-
gest business success of late. Five years on, the-minute polling
data and analysis.
more than 1.5 million people pay more than
$200 million every year for a subscription. STILL
Even with the success of the paywall, PROCESSING
A weekly podcast

T
though, “it’s a very, very steep uphill battle from Wesley Morris
to simply sell people on the idea of buying and (WIRED alum)
one more news story,” Kinsey Wilson, the Jenna Wortham
about the intersec-
Times’ executive vice president for product tion of pop culture
and technology, admitted at a conference and public policy.
last year. He later told me: “I believe that the
THE FIGHT FOR
The Times is a big organization, with only way you create value is if you’re able to FALLUJA
about 1,300 journalists, and management bundle various services together.” Which is An 11-minute
has created a number of task forces to work- where the members of the Beta Group come VR film from the
Pulitzer Prize–
shop new approaches to reporting and story- in. They’re tasked with developing a new winning video jour-
telling. One committee, the 2020 Group, suite of editorial products (apps, blogs, ver- nalist Ben Solomon.
studied the newsroom for a year, and its ticals) that, in the way of expensive origi- Viewers “embed”
with Iraqi soldiers
report, published in January, detailed how nal programming on HBO and Netflix, keep battling to retake
Times journalism should evolve over the next existing subscribers coming back and new the city from ISIS.
three years. (Among the recommendations: subscribers coming in. Central to Perpich’s
PUZZLE MANIA
Greater emphasis on visuals, greater variety original vision was having Beta’s product A special print-
of formats and voices. They also announced people work alongside designers, develop- only section in
that the Times would be introducing an ers, and—most radically for the Times—edi- the Sunday Times
last December.
alternative metric to pageviews that would tors. No one on Beta has an office; instead, It contained the
“measure an article’s value to attracting and each product is assigned its own conference “MegaPuzzle,” a
retaining subscribers.”) Another division, room lined with whiteboards covered in col- 728-clue cross-
word that was the
Story[X], was created last spring to experi- orful diagrams, design mock-ups, and Post-it largest ever cre-
ment with emerging technology like machine notes where members of the team immerse ated for the Times.
learning and translation. And then there is themselves in what they are trying to build.
RACE/RELATED
the Beta Group, which has become a hub for In addition to Cooking and Crossword— A weekly email
most of the Times’ digital initiatives. Beta two of the original Beta apps—the group newsletter with fea-
was launched by Sulzberger’s 39-year-old is now working on Real Estate, an app for tures and essays on
race and ethnicity
cousin, Perpich, who, after working at two home listings; Well, a health and fitness blog in America.
tech startups out of college, helped launch a the group wants to turn into a suite of per-
 The News in Crisis
sonalized training and advice services; and
Watching, a vertical dedicated to TV and
movie recommendations. The newest addi-
tion to Beta was an acquisition: In October,
The New York Times paid $30 million for The
Wirecutter, a gadget review site. (In a show
of confidence in the deal, Perpich stepped
back from the Beta Group earlier this year to
become general manager of The Wirecutter.)
“Working hour by hour, day by day, with
software developers and designers and
product managers—to me that was a real
revolution, a kind of epiphany,” says Clifford
PHOTOGRAPHS: RYAN PFLUGER FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES (STILL PROCESSING); COURTESY OF THE NEW YORK TIMES (PUZZLE MANIA, FALLUJA)
Levy, who won two Pulitzers at the Times
before being promoted to the assistant man-
aging editor overseeing digital platforms.
“This is standard operating procedure in
Silicon Valley, but it was radical here.”
And the radical shift was felt, and heard,
throughout the newsroom. “It is not incor-
rect for me to say that I had no idea what
people were talking about in my first couple
months,” says Sam Sifton, the Times’ food
editor, who started working with the Beta
Group to launch the Cooking app back in 2013.
“‘We can iterate on that.’ What? We spoke
different languages, different cultures.” Still,
Sifton has embraced his new digital mission,
agreeing this past November to host a text
message experiment called “Turkey Talk” to
help cooks with their Thanksgiving dinners.
This shift toward personality-driven per-
sonal service echoes an earlier chapter in
Times history, when, in the 1970s, the paper
rolled out an array of advertiser-friendly
sections like Weekend, Home, and Living.
The goal, according to then-executive-editor
Abe Rosenthal, was to figure out “ways that
would get more revenue, more readers.”
Just as those new sections were greeted
with howls of derision both inside and out-
side the paper—James Reston, a Times
elder statesman, said, “It goes against my
original concept of what the Times ought
to be”—today’s emphasis on news-you-
can-use (“What We Know and Don’t Know
About the Trump-Russia Dossier,” “15 Ways
to Be a Better Person”) has provoked accusa-
tions of clickbait. To Jill Abramson, who ran
the newsroom between 2011 and 2014 (and
whose firing was, as firings go, public and
acrimonious), the choice between publish-
ing quality journalism and clickbait is a false
one. “In my years, I used to laugh that every-
thing you agreed to in terms of lighter or
more advertising-friendly content would be
RELATED PODCAST
The Run-Up
Times reporter
Michael Barbaro, who
also just launched a
daily audio briefing,
provides insider
commentary for
political junkies.
because we needed that advertising revenue
to support the Baghdad Bureau,” she says.
“So if a certain audience wants lighter con-
tent, they can click on it. If others don’t want
it, there’s still plenty of great international
or investigative reporting at the Times.”
In the 2020 Report, the authors
announced that management would be ded-
icating an additional $5 million every year
to its presidential coverage. They also wrote
that service journalism like “15 Ways to Be
a Better Person” is essential to attracting
new online readers. For the Times to grow,
they argued, there must be room for both.
T
“There’s this fashion for media com-
panies to call themselves technology com-
panies,” says Jake Silverstein, editor of The
New York Times Magazine. “Our job isn’t to
make technology. Our job is to figure out how
to use technologies.” Or, as Sam Dolnick puts
it: “We’re not going to create augmented
reality. We’re going to figure out how to use
that in a journalistic way.”
Which is to say, a “Timesian” way, a short-
hand you frequently hear for what the Times
can and cannot do in the interest of pro-
tecting its exalted status (and nowhere is it
more exalted than within the Times itself).
What Timesian means or doesn’t mean often
depends on who’s defining it, but it’s typi-
cally in the same general neighborhood as
authoritative, or maybe stuffy. Editors are
infamous for their lengthy divinations on
0 5 7
 25.03

1. David Perpich, 3. Meredith Kopit

former head of the Beta Levien, chief revenue
Group, is now general officer, is managing
manager of gadget site the ongoing transition
The Wirecutter. from an advertising-

2. Alex MacCallum
driven business model
to subscription-first. How Do
oversees the Times’
video strategy (includ- 4. Sam Dolnick, an You Take
ing its Facebook Live
experiments).
associate editor,
spearheads innovation Your
in the newsroom, from
AI bots to VR films. News?

1. 3.

The Pew Research

Center recently
asked Americans
whether they pre-
fer to watch, read,
or listen to the
news. Here’s what
they said.

WATCH IT
46%
READ IT
35%
HEAR IT
17%
WHAT’S NEWS?*
2%

*Actual answer:
“No answer.”

2. 4.
0 5 8
 The News in Crisis
Even as Sulzberger boasts, “We employ
more journalists who can write code than
any other news organization,” there are
5. Kinsey Wilson, exec-
utive VP for product some inside the Times—usually those
and technology, over-
sees the hundreds of who can’t write code—who chafe at the
developers and engi-
neers behind the Times’ endless waves of experimentation.
digital expansion.
6. Dean Baquet,
executive editor, has
led the newsroom
since 2014.
5.
whether new headline styles are sufficiently
Timesian, and, per the Innovation Report,
nothing slowed down a new initiative more
than when management deliberated on just
how Timesian it was or wasn’t.
It’s been Dolnick’s mission to drum up
enthusiasm in the newsroom for testing out
new applications, from VR to livestream-
ing, without worrying too much about the
Timesian thing. After stints at the Staten
Island Advance and the Associated Press,
Dolnick started at the Times in 2009 as a
metro reporter—the same year as his cousin
A.G.—and wrote a prizewinning series on
halfway houses before becoming a senior
editor for mobile and then an associate edi-
tor. Inside the Times these days, he is known
for the regular companywide email news-
letter “Digital Highlights.”
One such highlight: At the Olympics last
summer, deputy sports editor Sam Manches-
ter sent short, frequently humorous text mes-
sages to the 20,000 readers who had signed
up for the service. One, which sparked a viral
meme, was a photo of a lifeguard watching
swimmers practice, with a caption: “You
know who has the most useless job in Rio?
She does. That’s right, they have lifeguards in
case Olympic swimmers need saving.”
“A generation ago, or even five years
ago,” says Dolnick, “there’d be a lot of this
Timesian stuff, ‘Oh, The New York Times
doesn’t do that. We don’t make jokes in
text messages.’ ” The audience responded,
though, and Manchester buckled under the
thousands of questions that readers texted
him. That explains why, for its next engage-
ment experiment with readers, the Times
turned to artificial intelligence. Running
up to the election, they created a Face-
book Messenger chatbot that offered daily
updates on the race in the voice of politi-
cal reporter Nick Confessore. Running the
6.
backend was a tool created by Chatfuel that
combined natural language parsing (so it
could understand the questions posed to
Confessore) with a conversation tree (so
that the bot could respond to readers’ que-
ries using prewritten answers).
One of the biggest initiatives Dolnick
has been involved in is virtual reality. He
says it started with an email he sent to Sil-
verstein last year: “Hey man, want to see
something cool?” Dolnick had just visited
a VR production company called Vrse (since
renamed Within) and brought one of their
films, Clouds Over Sidra, into his office. The
Times has since jumped into VR, partner-
ing with Google to send its Cardboard VR
viewers to all of its 1.1 million Sunday print-
edition subscribers, creating an NYT VR app
that’s been downloaded more than 1 million
times, and producing 16 (and counting) orig-
inal films about topics as varied as displaced
refugees (The Displaced), floating movie
stars (Take Flight), and battling ISIS in Iraq
(The Fight for Falluja). It remains a work-
ing experiment. The floating movie stars,
for example: “People liked it, it got pretty
good views,” Silverstein says. “But it didn’t
feel like we were advancing the ball. It had
a little whiff of ‘Look at us. We have VR.’”
Even as Sulzberger boasts, “We employ
more journalists who can write code than
any other news organization,” there are some
at the Times—usually those who can’t write
code—who chafe at these endless waves of
experimentation. “When we’re told this is the
new best practice, everyone marches in lock-
step,” says one editor who asked to remain
anonymous. “Facebook Live? Yep! Video? On
it! The New York Times isn’t a place where
people say no, and we’re flat-out exhausted.”
In March of 2016, Alex MacCallum, the
Times’ senior vice president for video (and
at the beginning CONTINUED ON PAGE 094
 Attention
25.03

SOURCES: ALL TV RATINGS FROM NIELSEN; ALL WEB TRAFFIC FROM COMSCORE; ALL NEWSPAPER AND MAGAZINE CIRCULATION FROM ALLIANCE FOR AUDITED MEDIA (EXCEPT FOR MOTHER JONES AND
NEWSWEEK , BOTH OF WHICH MADE THEIR CIRCULATIONS AVAILABLE THROUGH THEIR MEDIA KITS). ALL NUMBERS FROM LATE 2016 AND/OR EACH ORGANIZATION’S MOST RECENT PUBLIC DISCLOSURES.
Is Our Business
The news is a relentless 24/7 battle to grab eyeballs and achieve total domination. Here’s who’s winning.

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 Robots
Wrote This Story
What The Washington Post’s journalism-generating software means for the future of news.
When Republican Steve King beat back Democratic challenger Kim
Weaver in the race for Iowa’s 4th congressional district seat in November, The
Washington Post snapped into action, covering both the win and the wider elec-
toral trend. “Republicans retained control of the House and lost only a handful
of seats from their commanding majority,” the article read, “a stunning rever-
sal of fortune after many GOP leaders feared double-digit losses.” The dispatch
came with the clarity and verve for which Post reporters are known, with one
key difference: It was generated by Heliograf, a bot that made its debut on the
Post’s website last year and marked the most sophisticated use of artificial
intelligence in journalism to date. ¶ When Jeff Bezos bought the Post back in
2013, AI-powered journalism was in its infancy. A handful of companies with
automated content-generating systems, like Narrative Science and Automated
Insights, were capable of producing the bare-bones, data-heavy news items
familiar to sports fans and stock analysts. But strategists at the Post saw the
potential for an AI system that could generate explanatory, insightful articles.
by
Joe Keohane
25.03
What’s more, they wanted a system that
could foster “a seamless interaction”
between human and machine, says Jeremy
Gilbert, who joined the Post as director of
strategic initiatives in 2014. “What we were
interested in doing is looking at whether
we can evolve stories over time,” he says.
After a few months of development, Helio-
graf debuted last year. An early version auto-
published stories on the Rio Olympics; a
more advanced version, with a stronger edi-
torial voice, was soon introduced to cover
the election. It works like this: Editors create
narrative templates for the stories, includ-
ing key phrases that account for a variety
of potential outcomes (from “Republicans
retained control of the House” to “Demo-
crats regained control of the House”), and
then they hook Heliograf up to any source
of structured data—in the case of the elec-
tion, the data clearinghouse VoteSmart.org.
0 6 2
 The News in Crisis

Rise e
of th s-
New
bots
more
Three
identifies the rele-
The Heliograf software AI-powered tools
res pon d-
vant data, ma tch es it wit h the cor for journalists.
in the tem pla te, me rge s them, —G REG BA RB ER
ing phrases
nt versio ns acr oss
and then publishes differe WIBBITZ
tfo rm s. Th e system can also USA Today has
different pla
ers via Sla ck of any ano malies it used this AI-driven
alert report production soft-
tance, wid er ma r-
finds in the data—for ins ware to create short
dic ted —s o the y can investi- videos. It can con-
gins than pre
jus t one mo re wa y to get a tip” dense news articles
gate. “It’s into a script, string
bert say s.
on a potential scoop, Gil together a selection
t’s in goa l wit h the project at of images or video
The Pos ma
is two fol d. Fir st: Gro w its audi- footage, and even
this point add narration with a
ing a big aud ien ce
ence. Instead of target synthesized news-
all nu mb er of lab or- intens ive caster voice.
wit h a sm
itte n sto rie s, He liog raf can tar-
human-wr NEWS TRACER
with a huge num-
get many small audiences Reuters’ algorith-
ate d sto ries abo ut nic he or local mic prediction tool
ber of autom -
ere ma y not be a wid e audience helps journalists
topics. Th gauge the integrity
e for the Iow a 4th ,
for stories about the rac of a tweet. The tech time election results from reporters’ plates,
is som e aud ien ce, and , with local scores emerging
but there Heliograf frees them up to focus on the sto-
s flou nde rin g, the Post can tap stories on the basis
news out let ries that actually require human thought. “If
Eve ryt hin g of “credibility” and
t of the
it. “It’s the Bezos concep “newsworthiness” we took someone like Dan Balz, who’s been
Sha iles h Pra kas h, CIO and VP by evaluating who’s
Store,” say s covering politics for the Post for more than
duc t dev elo pm ent at the Post. tweeting about it,
of digital pro 30 years, and had him write a story that a
a ma chine to how it’s spread-
need
“But growing is where you ing across the net- template could write, that’s a crime,” Gil-
bec aus e we can ’t hav e that many work, and if nearby
help you, bert says. “It’s a huge waste of his time.”
’d go ban kru pt. ” users have taken to
humans. We
Twitter to confirm
So far, response from the Post newsroom
e pai ns to str ess
Prakash and Gilbert tak or deny breaking has been positive. “We’re naturally wary
tem is not her e to ush er report- developments.
that the sys about any technology that could replace
sce nce . An d tha t brings them
ers into obs ole
BUZZBOT
human beings,” says Fredrick Kunkle, a Post
of Heliograf: Make
to the second objective Originally reporter and cochair of the Washington-
ILLUSTRATIONS: 520 DESIGN (TOP), MARTIN GEE (BOTTOM)

cient. By removing designed to crowd-

the newsroom more effi Baltimore News Guild, which represents
l covera ge and rea l- source reporting
tasks like incessant pol from the Republi- the Post’s newsroom. “But this technology
can and Democratic seems to have taken over only some of the
National Conven- grunt work.” Consider the election returns:
tions, BuzzFeed’s
software collects
In November 2012, it took four employees
information from 25 hours to compile and post just a fraction
on-the-ground of the election results manually. In Novem-
sources at news
events. BuzzBot
ber 2016, Heliograf created more than 500
has since been articles, with little human intervention, that
open-sourced, drew more than 500,000 clicks. (A drop in
portending a wave
JOE KEO HA NE is a
(hu man) writer living of bot-aided report-
the bucket for the Post’s 1.1 billion pageviews
ing tools. that month, but it’s early days.)
in New York City.
 25.03
REL ATE D POD CAS T

Note to Self
Whether analyzing
the debate over Apple’s
security or assessing a
new device used by cops
to see if motorists have
been texting, this WNYC
series offers a timely
look at the tech industry.

Gilbert says the next ste

p is to use Helio-
graf to keep the data in
both machine- and
hu ma n-w rit ten sto rie
s up -to -da te. For
ins tan ce, if som eon e
sha res a Tu esd ay
story on Thursday, and
the facts change
in the meantime, Heliog
raf will automati-
cally update the story wit
h the most recent
facts. Gilbert sees Heliog
raf developing the
potential to function like
a rewrite desk, in
which “the reporters wh
o gather informa-
tion write more discre
te chunks—here’s
some facts, here’s som
e analysis—and let
the system assemble the
m.”
With the rapid advanc
es in AI technol-
ogy dri ven by che ap
com pu tin g po we r,
Prakash sees Heliograf

News Matters
moving beyond mere
grunt work. In time, he
believes, it could do
things like search the we
b to see what peo-
ple are talking about, che
ck the Post to see
if that story is being cov
ered, and, if not, Behind the scenes at a media outlet
alert editors or just wr
ite the piece itself. for millennials of color.
Of course, that’s where
things could get RELATED PODCAST
sticky—when Facebo
ok fired the human
editors of its Trending
module last year and
let an algorithm curate When Morgan DeBaun was a student at Washing-
the news, the world
soon learned (falsely) ton University in St. Louis during the early Obama years,
that Megyn Kelly
had been fired from Fox she and a handful of friends often found themselves at
News. “Will there Code Switch
be controversy when the this one lunch table in a campus cafeteria. It was big and
bot thinks this is Five minority
important, and humans journalists confront round, whereas the other tables in the cafeteria were long
say this is import- thorny, occasionally
ant, and they’re the exa and rectangular, and it was perfect for the hours the group
ct opposite thing?” uncomfortable
Prakash asks. “It’s going issues of race and spent talking about what shows they were watching, what
to get interesting.” identity in NPR’s
The Post, like every oth cathartic weekly show. music they were listening to, and whatever was happening
er major news in the news or around campus. They were among the very
organization, is lookin
g to tap new reve-
nue streams, and it’s rep few black students at the predominately white university,
ortedly in talks to
license out its CMS to and the table became a place of both sanctuary and cele-
clients like Tronc, a
consortium that includ bration. Over time, other black students would drift into
es the Chicago Tri-
bune, the Los Angeles Tim their orbit and join the conversation. It almost felt like
es, and dozens of
other regional papers. gravity—or what DeBaun came to think of as black gravity.
As those newsrooms
struggle with dwindling
resources, it’s not
hard to imagine a future
in which AI plays a
larger and larger role in
creating journalism.
Whether that’s good new
s for journalists
by
and readers is another
story. 
Carl Brooks Jr.
0 6 4
 The News in Crisis

Diversity
in the
Press
CARL BROOKS JR. is a writer in Los Angeles.

The percentage of
nonwhite journal-
ists in a few of the
country’s biggest
newsrooms.

Miami Herald
41%
Los Angeles Times
34%
The Washington Post
31%
The New York Times
22%
San Francisco
Chronicle
21%
The Boston Globe
17%
The Philadelphia
Inquirer
14%
The Denver Post
12%

Source: American
Society of News
The LA headquarters of three-year-old Editors
media and tech company Blavity.

That was six years ago, and today DeBaun is the CEO and cofounder
of Blavity, a three-year-old media and tech company that’s been
described as “BuzzFeed for black millennials.” With 17 full-time
staffers in its LA offices, Blavity publishes articles with titles like
“From Trayvon Martin to Alton Sterling: Tears That Never Dry” and
“Why Atlanta Is the Most Authentically Modern Black Experience
on TV Right Now.” At the core of the site is the sense of commu-
nity DeBaun found at the round table. “Our audience likes to talk
to each other,” she says. “You can’t just say, ‘Beyoncé released an
album.’ They want to talk and argue about it. So how do we facili-
SPOT ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN GEE
says. “With Blavity we built a platform to showcase that creativity.”
When a series of racist texts were sent to black students at the Uni-
versity of Pennsylvania after Donald Trump’s election victory, Blavity
didn’t link to or rely on reporting from, say, The Philadelphia Inquirer
(with its 86 percent white newsroom); it published “Reflecting on
Racism at UPenn: A Call to Action From the Front Lines,” written
by the director of the college’s Black Cultural Center and featuring
on-the-ground, in-the-room-where-it-happened details about the
incident and its aftermath. “Black people are being attacked at an
institutional level,” DeBaun says. “Blavity having scale, and being able

tate that engagement?”
Part of her strategy is a reliance on user-generated content. Roughly
60 percent of the articles and videos on the site are submitted by
readers, then edited by Blavity’s staff. To DeBaun, this isn’t just free
content that invites readers into the editorial process—it’s journal-
ism created by and for her target audience. “The people who make
the best content on Instagram and Twitter are usually black,” she
to distribute their stories, will be really powerful, especially now.”
With the launch this past November of Afrotech, a summit in San
Francisco for black people in tech, Blavity is expanding its reach
into another community where, as in journalism, people of color
remain painfully underrepresented. DeBaun and her growing team
at Blavity have another future in mind. 
photograph by A ng ie Smith
 25.03

Need Edward Snowden

America’s most wanted whistle-blower is helping to protect journalists from government snoops.

When Edward Snowden leaked the biggest collection of classified Since early last year, Snowden has qui-
National Security Agency documents in history, he wasn’t just revealing etly served as president of a small San
the inner workings of a global surveillance machine. He was also scram- Francisco–based nonprofit called the
bling to evade it. To communicate with the journalists who would publish Freedom of the Press Foundation. Its mis-
his secrets, he had to route all his messages over the anonymity software Tor, sion: to equip the media to do its job at a
teach reporters to use the encryption tool PGP by creating a YouTube tutorial time when state-sponsored hackers and
that disguised his voice, and eventually ditch his comfortable life (and smart- government surveillance threaten inves-
phone) in Hawaii to set up a cloak-and-dagger data handoff halfway around tigative reporting in ways Woodward and
the world. ¶ Now, nearly four years later, Snowden has focused the next phase Bernstein never imagined. “Newsrooms
of his career on solving that very specific instance of the panopticon prob- don’t have the budget, the sophistica-
lem: how to protect reporters and the people who feed them information in tion, or the skills to defend themselves in
an era of eroding privacy—without requiring them to have an NSA analyst’s the current environment,” says Snowden,
expertise in encryption or to exile themselves to Moscow. “Watch the jour- who spoke to w i r e d via encrypted
nalists and you’ll find their sources,” Snowden says. “So how do we preserve video-chat from his home in Moscow. “We’re
that confidentiality in this new world, when it’s more important than ever?” trying to provide a few niche tools to make
the game a little more fair.”
The group’s 10 staffers and a handful of
contract coders, with Snowden’s remote
by guidance, are working to develop an armory

Andy Greenberg of security upgrades for reporters. Snowden

and renowned hacker Bunnie Huang have

0 6 6
 The News in Crisis

How to
ANDY GREENBERG (@a_greenberg)
wrote about Google subsidiary Jigsaw
Leak (and
in issue 24.10. Not Get
Caught)
A brief guide to
becoming an
anonymous source.

partnered to develop a hardware modifi- ald Trump called on Congress to investigate WEB
cation for the iPhone, designed to detect if a leak to NBC news—one that gave the net- The anonymity net-
work Tor obscures
malware on the device is secretly transmit- work a sneak peek at an intelligence report on your identity by
ting a reporter’s data, including location. Russia’s role in influencing the US election. In routing your online
They’ve recruited Fred Jacobs, one of the the months since Trump’s victory, the Free- traffic through
computers world-
coders for the popular encryption app Sig- dom of the Press Foundation’s phones “have wide. Access it via
nal, to help build a piece of software called been ringing off the hook” with requests from the web-based Tor
Sunder; the tool would allow journalists to newsrooms for training sessions, says Trevor Browser to visit
any site related to
encrypt a trove of secrets and then retrieve Timm, the foundation’s executive director. your planned con-
them only if several newsroom colleagues Snowden is quick to note it was the tact with the press.
combine their passwords to access the data. administration of President Obama, not Find a directory of
the 35 or so news
And the foundation’s coders are building a Trump, that indicted him and at least seven organizations that
plug-and-play version of Jitsi, the encrypted others under the Espionage Act for leaking maintain Secure-
video-chat software Snowden himself uses information to journalists. That’s more such Drop portals—Tor-
enabled inboxes for
for daily communication. They want news- indictments than all other presidents in his- anonymous tips.
rooms to be able to install it on their own tory combined have issued. But Snowden Then choose an out-
servers with a few clicks. “The idea is to make and Timm worry that Trump, with his deep- let and leak away.
this all paint-by-numbers instead of teach- seated disdain for the media and the full PHONE
ing yourself to be Picasso,” Snowden says. powers of the US Justice Department at his Buy a burner—
But the foundation’s biggest coup has fingertips, will be only too happy to carry a cheap, prepaid
Android phone—
been SecureDrop, a Tor-based system for forward and expand that precedent. with cash from a
WikiLeaks-style uploads of leaked materials All of that makes the media’s technical nonchain store in an
and news tips. The system has now been protections from spying more important area you’ve never
been to before.
adopted by dozens of outlets, including The than ever. “We can’t fix the surveillance prob- Don’t carry your
Guardian, The New York Times, and The lem overnight,” Snowden says. “But maybe regular phone and
Washington Post. “It works. I know,” hinted we can build a shield that will protect the burner at the
same time, and
a tweet from Washington Post reporter anyone who’s standing behind it.” never turn on the
David Fahrenthold the day after he pub- If the group succeeds, perhaps burner at home
lished a leaked video of Donald Trump brag- the next Snowden will be or work. Create a
Gmail and Google
ging about sexual assault. able to take refuge not Play account from
Snowden’s own leaks have shown the in Moscow but in the the burner, then
ILLUSTRATIONS: 520 DESIGN (BOTTOM). MARTIN GEE (TOP)

dire need for the foundation’s work: In early encrypted cor- install the encrypted
calling and texting
2015 he revealed that British spies had col- ners of the app Signal. When
lected emails from practically every major internet. you’re done,
newspaper and wire service. Other signs of  destroy the burner
and ditch its corpse
encroaching state surveillance have also far from home.
put journalists on guard. Late last year it
emerged that Montreal police had tracked SNAIL MAIL
Pick a distant mail-
the phone calls and texts of a reporter box, don’t carry
in order to identify sources criti- your phone on the
cal of the department. And in trip, and—duh—
don’t include a real
early January, before he had return address.
even taken office, Don-
 25.03

by

Samanth Subramanian
 The News in Crisis

Welcome
to Veles,
Macedonia,

News Factory
photographs by Guy M artin
to the World.
 T
The first article about Don-
ald Trump that Boris ever published
described how, during a campaign
rally in North Carolina, the candi-
date slapped a man in the audience
for disagreeing with him. This never
happened, of course. Boris had found
the article somewhere online, and
he needed to feed his website, Daily
Interesting Things, so he appropri-
ated the text, down to its last mis-
begotten comma. He posted the link
on Facebook, seeding it within various
groups devoted to American politics;
to his astonishment, it was shared
around 800 times. That month—Feb-
ruary 2016—Boris made more than
$150 off the Google ads on his web-
site. Considering this to be the best
possible use of his time, he stopped
going to high school. ¶ Boris isn’t
his real name. He prefers the ano-
nymity because he doesn’t want to
break ranks with the other people
in his town of Veles, in the Balkan
nation of Macedonia. Nobody here
wants to dwell on Trump anymore.
0 7 0
Veles has the feel of a small community
clamming up out of a suspicion that it’s
being talked about for all the wrong reasons.
In the final weeks of the US presidential
election, Veles attained a weird infamy in
the most powerful nation on earth; stories
in The Guardian and on BuzzFeed revealed
that the Macedonian town of 55,000 was the
registered home of at least 100 pro-Trump
websites, many of them filled with sensa-
tionalist, utterly fake news. (The imminent
criminal indictment of Hillary Clinton was
a popular theme; another was the pope’s
approval of Trump.) The sites’ ample traf-
fic was rewarded handsomely by automated
advertising engines, like Google’s AdSense.
An article in The New Yorker described how
President Barack Obama himself spent a day
in the final week of the campaign talking
“almost obsessively” about Veles and its
“digital gold rush.”
Within Veles itself, the young entrepre-
neurs behind these websites became subjects
of tantalizing intrigue. Between August and
November, Boris earned nearly $16,000 off
his two pro-Trump websites. The average
monthly salary in Macedonia is $371.
Boris is 18 years old, a lean, slouching
youth with gray eyes, hair mowed close
to his skull, and the rudiments of a beard.
When he isn’t smoking a cigarette, he’s light-
ing one. He listens to a lot of gangsta rap:
the Notorious B.I.G., Puff Daddy, Wu-Tang
Clan; after watching Notorious, the 2009
biopic of B.I.G., he decided he would like to
visit Brooklyn, a New York City borough he
imagines overrun more by gangsters than
hipsters. He is an affable raconteur, with a
droll sense of humor and a clear-eyed view
of himself and his town. Someday he wants
to leave Veles, because of how little there
is to do. You can live with your parents and
have them pay for your evenings in a bar, or
25.03
you can bus tables in a café. If you’re a gym
rat, you might work security. A few factories
on the outskirts of town still offer regular
employment, but nothing lavish. “We can’t
make money here with a real job,” Boris says.
“This Google AdSense work is not a real job.”
At best, Boris’ English is halting and frac-
tured—certainly not good enough to turn out
five to 10 articles about Trump and Clinton
every day for weeks on end. Fortunately for
him, the election summoned forth the ener-
gies of countless alt-right websites in the
US, which manufactured white-label false-
hoods disguised as news on an industrial
scale. Across the spectrum of right-wing
media—from Trump’s own concise lies on
Twitter to the organized prevarication of
Breitbart News and NationalReport.net—
ideology beat back the truth. What Veles
produced, though, was something more
extreme still: an enterprise of cool, pure
amorality, free not only of ideology but of any
concern or feeling about the substance of the
election. These Macedonians on Facebook
didn’t care if Trump won or lost the White
House. They only wanted pocket money to
pay for things—a car, watches, better cell
phones, more drinks at the bar. This is the
arrhythmic, disturbing heart of the affair:
that the internet made it so simple for these
young men to finance their material whims
and that their actions helped deliver such
PANOS PICTURES; SPOT ILLUSTRATION: MARTIN GEE
momentous consequences.
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN (@samanth_s)
is a Dublin correspondent for The National.
 The News in Crisis
A moribund brick
factory on the outskirts
of Veles, Macedonia.
V
Veles lies plumb in the center of Mace-
donia, on either side of the Vardar River, and
its red-shingle-roofed buildings appear to be
climbing the slopes of low knuckled hills. It
was once a town of modest glory, turning
out revolutionaries and intellectuals and
alive with industry. One of its largest fac-
Veles was once a town of modest glory,
alive with industry. Its residents recall with
perverse pride that, for a time, Veles was
the second-most polluted town in the
former Yugoslavia.
tories, a ceramic works named Porcelanka,
employed 4,000 people. For a time, its resi-
dents recall with perverse pride, Veles was
the second-most polluted town in the for-
mer Yugoslavia.
After Macedonia became independent in
1991, though, Veles began to decline. The
factories closed; the jobs evaporated. The
local soccer team, FK Borec, won so infre-
quently that it was dropped from the first
division to the third. The town’s only movie
theater folded a decade and a half ago. Its
downtown withered. Briefly, in the mid-
2000s, the economy shook itself awake
when a few men splashed around money
they’d made selling heroin in Germany and
Austria, but the police soon broke up that
drug ring and Veles returned to its state of
morose dilapidation.
For Boris, growing up here, Veles didn’t
have much to offer. His father worked for
the town as a plumber. Like other kids, Boris
wandered around up near the old Ottoman
clock tower or down by the river, loitering in
one coffee bar after another. He played soccer
but later discovered that he was more profi-
cient at the videogame version of the sport.
He joined a Counter-Strike club: nine or 10
teenagers gathered in a room, sitting behind
their laptops and shooting each other up.
One day a couple of summers ago, Boris
was walking to school when he saw a BMW 4

Series parked by the side of the road. “What
the fuck?” he thought. “My favorite car is
in this town?”
He asked around, but no one seemed to
know who owned the BMW. Later, in a café,
he met a Counter-Strike acquaintance named
Aleksandar Velkovski. “Aleksandar, I saw this
BMW 4,” Boris told him. Velkovski revealed
that the car was his. He’d bought it, he said,
with the money he made off his website.
In Veles, Aleksandar and Borce Velkovski
are so renowned for the health food web-
site they started that they’re known as the
Healthy Brothers. HealthyFoodHouse.com is
a jumble of diet and beauty advice, natural
remedies, and other nostrums. It gorges on
advertising as it counsels readers to put a
bar of soap under their bedsheets to relieve
nightly leg cramps or to improve their red-
blood-cell count with homemade beet syrup.
Somehow the website’s Facebook page has
drawn 2 million followers; more than 10 mil-
lion unique visitors come to HealthyFood-
House.com every month.
After seeing the BMW, Boris decided to
start some websites of his own. He already
knew there was money to be made off the
Reputable Sources
Percentage of Americans who trust the information they get from …
LOCAL
NEWS
FRIENDS
AND FAMILY
NATIONAL
NEWS
SOCIAL
MEDIA
For a week in July,
Boris experimented
with fake news
extolling Bernie
Sanders. “Bernie
Sanders supporters
are among the
smartest people
I’ve seen,” he says.
“They don’t
believe anything.”
internet; for a while, when he was 17, he’d
been one of the many peons around the world
laboring online for MicroWorkers.com, earn-
ing something like a tenth of a cent for lik-
ing a YouTube video or leaving a comment.
Now he bought a succession of domains from
GoDaddy—GossipKnowledge.com, then Daily
InterestingThings.com—built basic Word-
Press sites, and stuffed them with sports,
celebrity, health, and political news, the arti-
cles all pilfered from elsewhere. (Boris pulls
out his phone and logs into WordPress to
show that he does, in fact, own the sites he
mentions.) When the piece about Trump
slapping a man turned briefly white-hot,
he sensed the intrinsic viral potential in the
American election and founded NewYork-
TimesPolitics.com, a website that resem-
bled The New York Times homepage and
carried plagiarized articles on American
politics. The Times sent Boris a cease-and-
desist order; Boris received the email when
82%
77%
76%
34%
Source: Pew Research Center
25.03
he was out somewhere, and he was so terri-
fied that he took down the website right away,
from his phone. In August, Boris set up Poli-
ticsHall.com, and a couple of months later, he
added USAPolitics.co to his portfolio. That
was when the money really began to roll in.
Boris developed a routine. Several times a
day he dredged the internet for pro-Trump
articles and copied them into one of his two
websites; if JavaScript prevented an easy
copy-paste, he opened a Notepad file and
typed the articles out. After publishing a
piece, he shared the link in Facebook groups
with names like My America, My Home; the
Deplorables; and Friends Who Support Presi-
dent Donald J. Trump. Trump groups seemed
to have hundreds of thousands more mem-
bers than Clinton groups, which made it sim-
pler to propel an article into virality. (For a
week in July, he experimented with fake news
extolling Bernie Sanders. “Bernie Sanders
supporters are among the smartest people
I’ve seen,” he says. “They don’t believe any-
thing. The post must have proof for them to
believe it.”) He posted under his own name
but also under the guise of one of 200 or so
bogus Facebook profiles that he’d purchased
for this purpose. (A fake profile with a Rus-
sian name cost about 10 cents; for an Amer-
ican name, the price went up to 50 cents.)
The most shares one of his posts ever aggre-
gated, across various Facebook groups, was
1,200; Boris dimly recalls only that the post
had something to do with Trump’s proposed
wall on the Mexican border. Boris learned
tricks to better monetize his websites: big
ads breaking the text up, for instance, so
that one in five visitors to a page would end
up clicking on an ad. His RPM—revenue per
1,000 impressions—hovered around $15,
he says. He fed the beast with diligence. “At
night I would make four or five posts to share
the next day. When I woke up, I shared them.
0 7 2
 The News in Crisis
RELATED PODCAST

Trumpcast
1. The Central Psychiatrists,
Market in Veles. The historians, and
town’s economy business experts weigh
declined throughout in on our unpredictable
the 1990s after tweeter-in-chief in
Macedonia gained its Slate’s quasi-daily,
independence. somewhat snarky
series.

1.

2. An office at a local
TV station, which
broadcasts basketball
and handball games.

2.
25.03
The News in Crisis

Boris fed the beast with diligence. “At night

I would make four or five posts to share the
next day. When I woke up, I shared them. I
went to drink coffee, came back home, found
new articles, posted those articles on the
website, and shared them.”

0 7 5
 25.03

Ceselkoski built seven or eight websites—all

oriented toward the American reader. This 1. Men gather in
made sense. In web-advertising terms, an a garden shed for
moonshine and winter
American click is roughly three times more caroling. Holding the
mic is a resident who
valuable than a non-American click. profited from political
websites.

2. The same man

shows the ad revenue
he earns from his
websites, which churn
out (sometimes fake)
content.

1.
I went to drink coffee, came back home, found
new articles, posted those articles on the
website, and shared them. Then I went out
with friends, came back home, found articles,
and shared them to Facebook.”
When his ad engines started to pay out,
Boris bought himself things: new clothes,
an Acer laptop to replace his old Toshiba, a
vacation at a resort on Lake Ohrid. His phone
carries a photographic record of the life he
could briefly afford. “It was like: ‘Buy! Buy!
Buy!’” At one point, practically all of Boris’
friends had set up similar websites, and they
all had money to blow. As a posse, they’d go
to one of Veles’ three nightclubs—Tarantino
or Club Avangard or Club Drama—and order
$100 bottles of Moët to shake and spray.
“I don’t drink champagne,” Boris says. “I
bought it for spraying. All eyes on me!” It
was nothing but the best for Boris. “Moët!
Moët! Roberto Cavalli! Jack Daniel’s!” he
says, making a gesture with his hand as if
hailing a bartender. “It’s part of life. You
must live once.”
Boris still goes to the clubs, but he says
he has lost his taste for expensive things. “It
isn’t interesting anymore.” Which is just as
well, because on November 24, after an erup­
tion of concern about the malign effects of
fake news, Google suspended the ads from
his websites. The last item Boris posted to
USAPolitics.co was a poll that inquired: “Do
you support immediate deportation of all
criminal illegals?” In one of the Facebook
groups where Boris shared the link, the post
received 292 shares and 361 responses. It
2.

Making Fake Here’s how advertisers

follow you around the
BRANDS used to
designate exactly where
advertising—a system
that matches ads to
News Pay web—and how their
money flows to fake news
they wanted their
ads to appear. Now
anonymized profiles of
consumers, based on
sites. —Davey alba they increasingly data like what they have
rely on automated searched for.
0 7 6
 The News in Crisis
looked like another blockbuster from their websites. A full third of the syllabus is
USAPolitics.co. But then the Google ads van­ dedicated to the mastery of Facebook. The
ished, so Boris lost interest and consigned his Healthy Brothers once took Ceselkoski’s
websites to the deep oblivion of the internet. course. So did, in early 2016, a few members
of the Veles squad who went on to operate
pro­Trump sites. They surprised him. “I
never instructed my students to write fake
stories,” he says. “Maybe they discovered
they could get away with this kind of prac­
I tice and increase their virality.” He sounded
like a delighted physics professor talking
about how a pupil had stumbled upon a
brand­new law of thermodynamics. After
the election some of Ceselkoski’s students
In Macedonia, wringing money out of called him, panicking because Google had
web advertising is a game that long predates yanked its advertising without paying them
Trump’s bid for the presidency—and will all the money they had already earned. One
probably outlast it as well, despite Face­ young man, Ceselkoski says, believed he was
book’s and Google’s postelection efforts to owed more than $60,000.
crack down. Mirko Ceselkoski began to play Ceselkoski was visiting Las Vegas around
in the early 2000s. He built seven or eight the time of the election, and Trump’s victory
websites—about muscle cars or celebri­ stunned him. He thought about the website
ties or superyachts, all oriented toward operators in Veles. “It’s possible, maybe, they
the American reader, because an American changed a few percentages.”
reader is roughly three times more valu­ Boris will have none of that. The so­called
able than a non­American one. For five or news he and his colleagues were filching
six hours of daily toil, Ceselkoski says, you was already on American websites, heating
can earn approximately $1,000 a month. up the American bloodstream. How could
Many Macedonians can spare the time; the their duplications of these articles, on their
unemployment rate is around 24 percent. rinky­dink websites, upset the election of
Ceselkoski turned to coaching in 2011— such a powerful country? “If Americans
first with a six­week classroom course in wanted Hillary Clinton to win, Hillary Clin­
the Macedonian capital of Skopje, where he ton would have won. They voted for Donald
lives, and now online, in dense three­week Trump. Donald Trump won.” But now that
modules. For around $425, his students everything has come to pass, Boris finds it
learn how to prepare, populate, and promote difficult not to care about the result. “Some
AD TECH COMPANIES WEBSITES that traffic in are often fair game. Which
track consumers as they hardcore violence, hate is why even sites publish-
browse the internet, serv- speech, or pornography ing fake news can profit by
ing ads on any site they tend to get blacklisted, but hosting ads based on your
visit—provided it hasn’t sites with content that is browsing history.
been blacklisted. less clearly objectionable
crazy man has won the election. Maybe the
guy will start World War III.”
He sits in a coffee bar on a December
afternoon, two days after a parliamentary
election in Macedonia. Here too a minor
pestilence of fake news swept through the
campaigns. Websites run out of Serbia and
Croatia alleged that the leftist opposition
leader, Zoran Zaev, wanted to divide the
country between Macedonians and ethnic
Albanians. Voters got taken in; Zaev’s coali­
tion lost, narrowly. Boris feels disenchanted
with the whole process. There is too much
politics in life, he thinks. “People are fight­
ing each other. One brother is for one party,
the other brother is for the other party, they
argue.” He shakes his head. “The media is
washing our brains, and the people are fol­
lowing like sheep.”
Boris’ days are now consummately unoc­
cupied. Mostly, he and his friends convene
in this coffee bar or in one of the others clus­
tered on the same street. They always pick
a table on the veranda, despite the cold, so
that they can smoke and smoke. They fiddle
with their phones for about the same propor­
tion of time that they spend talking to one
another. Boris hasn’t yet considered return­
ing to school, but he thinks, vaguely, that he
wants to study coding and go on to work at
a company like Microsoft or Apple. First,
though, he wants to construct more web­
sites. Facebook and Google have unveiled
new systems for screening out misinforma­
tion, but they’re not built for catching every
low­level fib circulating around the internet.
Boris won’t focus on political fake news,
in all probability—but there are plenty of
other topics of interest, plenty of websites
from which to swipe content, and plenty
of potential readers around the world who
may click in sufficient numbers to finally buy
him his BMW. �
BY
SCENE
RENE
CHUN
STEALERS
INSIDE
THE
DEEPLY
NERDY—AND
INSANELY
EXPENSIVE—
“Previous generations bought Renoirs and
Cézannes,” Dan Lanigan says. “We’re buying storm-
trooper helmets and Ghostbusters proton packs.”
WORLD
The burly TV producer is referring to his obsessive
(and costly) pursuit of prop collecting. “This is the
fine art of my generation.” ¶ It used to be an under-
OF
ground hobby. People did it, but nobody talked
about it—not only because it was embarrassing to
admit that you coveted Charlton Heston’s slave col-
HOLLYWOOD
lar from Planet of the Apes but also because, since
such things were studio property, it was illegal to
own them. Shady studio insiders and a cabal of
PROP
collectors struck deals in private. That all changed
in 1970, when MGM cleared some clutter from its
soundstages with a three-day auction. Among the
C O L L E C T I N G.
frayed costumes and antique furniture that hit the
block were two of the most important sci-fi props
ever made: the protosteampunk contraption from
the 1960 film adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The Time
Machine and the miniature model of the United
Planets Cruiser C-57D, better known as the Forbid-
den Planet flying saucer. The time machine sold for
almost $10,000, and while there’s no record of what
the silver saucer went for then, it changed hands
eight years ago for $76,700. Since MGM’s auction,
prices for the best sci-fi props have routinely hit
six figures. In October 2015 the miniature Rebel
blockade-runner ship from Star Wars: Episode IV
pulled down $450,000. ¶ This very expensive hobby
is about more than snatching up the coolest speci-
mens. It’s about lost youth, self-identification, pre-
serving the past, and—though most collectors won’t
admit it—hero worship and secret cosplay. There
are some things in life more thrilling than watch-
ing your favorite movie late at night while clutch-
ing a screen-used prop from the same flick in your
trembling, sweaty palms, but it’s a very short list.
PHOTOGRAPHS
BY
DAN WINTERS
FILM: BLADE RUNNER (1982) | PROP: Rick Deckard’s PKD blaster | DESIGNERS: Terry Lewis
and Ridley Scott | MATERIALS: .222-caliber Steyr-Mannlicher SL rifle, Charter Arms Bulldog .44
Special, and six LEDs (four red, two green) | MOST RECENT SELLING PRICE: $270,000

When the Blade Runner gun surfaced, it was a big deal for the sci-fi-prop community. After 24 years
without a sighting, enthusiasts had resigned themselves to the idea that Rick Deckard’s hand cannon
was lost forever, like tears in rain. Then suddenly there it was, displayed under glass at the 2006
Worldcon. Not only was this an authentic BR gun, it was the authentic BR hero blaster—hero being prop
lingo for the detailed model used for close-ups. Three years later, Deckard’s PKD (a sly nod to Philip K.
Dick, the author of Blade Runner’s source material) sold at auction for $270,000. The winning bidder was
Dan Lanigan, a collector known for bidding up lots that pass the “mom test,” props so indelibly iconic that
even your mother would recognize them. Unlike so many sci-fi heaters, this blaster looks and feels like
a real gun. That’s because it’s made with real gun parts. The steel slab atop the barrel and the magazine
below are from a .222-caliber Steyr-Mannlicher SL bolt-action target rifle. Other donor organs were
pulled from a Charter Arms Bulldog .44 Special. It’s dystopian sci-fi mixed with pure gumshoe noir.
 W HO
W OU LD
W AN T

exhaust vents and radiators—was necessary so the stop-motion and live-action footage would match up
perfectly in postproduction. It’s not just the history that gets collectors excited. “ED is a badass Corvette
One of only two fully articulating ED-209 miniatures made, this 8-inch-tall maquette is an exact dupe
purchased his ED-209 model directly from RoboCop’s VFX supervisor, Phil Tippett, in a private sale.
the mean streets of Detroit, but the dysfunctional, homicidal ED-209 really steals the show. Lanigan

scenes. An obsessive attention to detail—from the four hydraulic “rams” controlling each leg to the
of the full-size (7-foot-tall, 300-pound) but mostly static fiberglass ED-209 used for the live-action
The protagonist of Paul Verhoeven’s low-budget hit is the titular cyborg tasked with cleaning up
T HE IR

FILM: ROBOCOP (1987) | PROP: ED-209 VFX miniature | DESIGNER: Craig Hayes

with legs,” Lanigan says. “He’s a villain but also likable, because he’s such a comical idiot.”
O WN P
T AB LE

MATERIALS: Resin, wire, rubber, and foam over a metal armature

U NL IC
N UC LE

MOST RECENT SELLING PRICE: Unknown

A CC EL
T OR ?

SHOW: STAR TREK (1966–69)

PROP: Phaser
DESIGNER: Wah Chang
MATERIALS: Resin, metal, popsicle sticks
VALUE: $200,000

There are plenty of bogus Star Trek props

in circulation, but there’s nothing fake
about this phaser from “TOS,” as true fans
call the original series. The provenance is
stellar: purchased by a prop artist directly
from Paramount in the 1970s. It’s a screen-
used hero constructed mostly of aluminum,
fiberglass, and cast resin. The handle is a
hand-painted brass tube embellished with
popsicle sticks. (Yes, really. Look closely.)
There were other phasers made, including
midgrade fiberglass models used for longer
shots and the VacuForm plastic ones used
for stunt work—the kind of piece Kirk would
brandish whenever he needed to pistol-whip
a Klingon. But this detailed, intricate variant
was employed for close-ups. Only two hero
phasers were built, so an original specimen
like this is worth a bundle—at least $200,000.
The anonymous owner isn’t selling, though.
His screen-used phaser is part of a massive
sci-fi-prop collection that includes classics
like a prized space suit from 2001. If you must
have a TOS phaser of your own, you’re going
to need very deep pockets.
 ,
N T

OR-

ENSED
AR
ERA-

FILM: GHOSTBUSTERS (1984) | PROP: Proton pack | DESIGNERS: Stephen Dane and Ivan Reitman
MATERIALS: Fiberglass, aluminum, lights, rubber tubing, and computer parts | MOST RECENT SELLING PRICE: $169,900

Now more than three decades old, the original Ghostbusters still resonates like a giant tuning fork—which goes a long way toward explaining why the
proton pack is so revered by prop collectors. After all, who wouldn’t want their own portable unlicensed nuclear accelerator? Inspired by a military-issue
flamethrower, hardware consultant Stephen Dane purchased a backpack frame from an Army surplus store in Hollywood and made a rough prototype.
Director Ivan Reitman then added his tweaks. The molded fiberglass shell was attached to an aluminum backplate, which was then bolted to a
US Army–spec backpack frame. Dane added paint, aluminum warning labels (danger: high voltage 1 kv), flashing lights, crank knobs, and enough
electronic parts to make the thing pop onscreen: Sage and Dale resistors, Clippard pneumatic tubing, Arcolectric indicators, and Legris banjo bolts (on
the neutrona wand). It’s as heavy as it looks—with the battery, a hero weighs over 30 pounds. Four years ago Lanigan added this screen-used hero proton
pack to his collection. Price: $169,900. Congrats, Dan, but remember: Don’t cross the streams. It would be bad.
 0 8 2

TH
T-
DE
ST
WI
MO
LI
PA
HO
LO

FILM: 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY (1968) | PROP: Aries 1B translunar shuttle | DESIGNERS: Harry Lange, Fred Ordway, and others
MATERIALS: Wood, plexiglass, acrylic, steel, brass, aluminum, and plastic | MOST RECENT SELLING PRICE: $344,000

Stanley Kubrick’s masterful tale of human evolution catapulted the humble sci-fi genre from B-movie fodder to serious art, thanks largely to the
groundbreaking visuals pioneered by the auteur and his f/x master, Douglas Trumbull. Most of the original miniature models used in the film’s eerily realistic
space travel scenes were destroyed, but one of the 2001 miniatures survived: the screen-used Aries shuttle that transports Dr. Heywood R. Floyd from
the space station to the Clavius excavation site on the moon. When the prop was eventually consigned to auction in 2015, the final paddle price greatly
exceeded the expected high mark of $100,000. The winning bidder, at $344,000, was the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The prop will
be restored before being displayed at the new Renzo Piano–designed Academy Museum, which opens in 2018. The hulking Aries model—it weighs 100
pounds and measures 94 inches in circumference—is finished with plastic bits cherry-picked from off-the-shelf scale-model kits. Look closely and you’ll
also see wires, tubing, flexible metal foils, decals (battery location point here), and plenty of heat-formed plastic cladding.

RENE CHUN is a frequent wired contributor.

 FILM: RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)
PROP: Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber
DESIGNERS: Norman Harrison and
Norank Engineering
MATERIAL: Resin casting of original
VALUE: $30,000

In the world of vintage collectibles, there’s always a

marquee brand that demands insane prices. In the sci-
fi-prop world, that brand is Star Wars. The prices for
production artifacts with a Lucasfilm provenance make
a mockery of presale estimates. A TIE fighter miniature
from Star Wars: A New Hope sold for $402,500, nearly
twice the expected price. More impressive, back in
2005, a lightsaber used by Mark Hamill in the same
film sold for $200,600, three times its estimate. That
first-generation weapon (the one lost along with most
of Luke’s forearm in the showdown with Vader in Cloud
City) was fashioned by set decorator Roger Christian
out of an old flashgun handle for a Graflex camera,
along with other doodads. This one, Luke’s green-
bladed Excalibur, was a new design crafted for Jedi by
Norman Harrison and Norank Engineering at England’s
Elstree Film Studios. But this saber wasn’t built piece
by piece—it’s a casting. In this process, a plaster mold
is made of the original prop, then that mold is used
to produce identical copies in hard rubber, resin, and

E even metal. Castings are often used in place of hero

props in stunt scenes; they’re lighter, and the original
doesn’t get damaged. This resin casting was used in
the Sarlacc sequence at the Great Pit of Carkoon.

800 IS
SIGNER
AN
,
NSTON S
endoskeleton sold at auction in 2007. Bidding started at $80,000 and topped out at $488,750, crushing

NA
Judgment Day, cemented the reputation of the crimson-eyed grim reapers. An original full-scale T-800

preauction estimates. Why so much for a shiny puppet? Because it was a screen-used T-800. Also, the
bogeyman to the silver screen (and VHS): the T-800. Seven years later the film’s sequel, Terminator 2:

lore (Jurassic Park III, Aliens, Predator), and one of his four Oscars was thanks to this 6' 2" animatronic
skeleton. This T-800 is made mostly of plastic that’s been sprayed with a high-particulate, conductive
Every generation has its childhood demons. The release of The Terminator in 1984 introduced a new

T-800 happens to be Stan Winston’s Mona Lisa. The late designer’s f/x wizardry is part of Hollywood

,
SA—IT S
FILM: TERMINATOR 2 (1991) | PROP: T-800 | DESIGNER: Stan Winston

RT OF
copper paint, then submerged in an electroplating bath; first nickel, then chrome.
MATERIALS: Plastic, copper paint, and nickel and chrome electroplating

LLYWOO D
RE.
VALUE: $488,750

He wrote about the SFMOMA redesign in issue 24.05.

 The Curse
of the
Bahia Emerald
BY ELI Z AB ETH WEI L

0 8 4 It’s a one-of-a-kind geological artifact. What’s it

worth? Maybe $100 million, maybe nothing.
But those who’ve pursued it—investors, schemers,
dreamers—have definitely paid a price.

ILLUSTRATIO NS BY TIM MCD O NAG H

Right
when it does, the resulting crystals, or beryls,
as they’re known, are not uniform. Almost
all emeralds include cracks and inclusions,
aka impurities. On the Mohs scale of hard-
ness, emeralds score 7.5 to 8 out of 10. If you

now,
cut along a crack or inclusion, they shatter.
Diamonds, by contrast, are simple: pure
carbon. The chemical formula for a diamond
is C. Diamonds score a 10 on the Mohs scale.
The trade is controlled by a few large play-
ers. There’s also a weekly international price
sheet, the Rapaport Diamond Price List, that
sets value based on the four c’s: carat, clar-
ity, cut, and color. Diamond price is further
stabilized by cartels that determine the
quantity of gemstones released to market.
Meanwhile, the emerald trade is controlled
by hundreds of tiny players. The price is, to
put it generously, flexible. An emerald costs
what someone will pay. Period. The idea that
diamonds are more romantic than emeralds
is preposterous, a marketing ploy. Diamonds
are a product like gold or crude oil: rational,
conservative. Emeralds are Turkish rugs.
When you buy one you believe that you’ve
in a vault controlled by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, there sits found a secret treasure and finagled a good
a 752-pound emerald with no rightful owner. This gem is the size of a minifridge. deal. Then—weeks, months, years later—the
It weighs as much as two sumo wrestlers. Estimates of its worth range from a truth comes out: You’ve been had. Time to
hundred bucks to $925 million. grip up and face your wounded ego and foist
Eight years ago the emerald was logged into evidence by detectives Scott the emerald upon the next guy.
Miller and Mark Gayman of the Sheriff’s Major Crimes Bureau. The two men The market is especially shifty for
are longtime veterans: 30 years for Miller, 28 for Gayman. They dress as the so-called specimen emeralds—those that
Hollywood versions of themselves, in wraparound sunglasses, badges dangling are big and weird, destined for curio cases
off long chains. Among Gayman’s career highlights is the time he busted Joe and natural history museums. The emerald
Pesci’s ex-wife for the hit she put out on her new lover. One thing they both hate in the Sheriff’s Department vault is called
is the emerald case. It’s a whack-a-mole of schemers. Detangling all the rackets the Bahia emerald and it is the consummate
and lies is, Miller says, “a puzzle from hell.” specimen: huge, strange, and composed of
Emeralds invite stories—many of them dubious. At various points in history such low-quality crystals that, were those
people have believed that emeralds were capable of protecting humans against crystals broken down into smaller rocks,
cholera, infidelity, and evil spirits, and that an emerald placed under the tongue gemologists would call them “fish tank
could transform a person into a truth-teller. This 752-pound emerald doesn’t emeralds.” The Bahia emerald, it must also
quite fit under the tongue, and it appears to have had zero positive effects. Miller be said, is not pretty. It’s a conglomerate, a
and Gayman got sucked into its orbit on October 8, 2008, when their sergeant geologic chimera—a bunch of large emerald
forwarded a call. A man with a squeaky voice named Larry Biegler had phoned crystals lodged at odd angles in a matrix of
the cops in a little suburban California town called Temple City, just southeast black schist. Imagine a petrified Jello mold
of Pasadena. He told the officer on duty that his “840-pound” emerald (a lot of made by Wilma Flintstone for a dinosaur.
people say the emerald weighs 840 pounds, but it doesn’t) had been stolen and Over the past 10 years, four lawsuits have
that he’d been abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. So the detectives been filed over the Bahia emerald. Fourteen
climbed into what Miller calls his “mobile office” (a Chevy Blazer), drove 15 miles individuals or entities, plus the nation of
out to Temple City, and spent the day in the local police station parsing the emer- Brazil, have claimed the rock is theirs. A
ald dossier. The case “was fun,” Miller told me, “at the beginning.” house burned down. Three people filed for
A thing you should know is that emeralds are complicated. The chemical for- bankruptcy. One man alleges having been
mula for an emerald is Be3Al2(Si6018). For the green crystals to form, beryllium kidnapped and held hostage. Many of the
must be heated to over 750 degrees Fahrenheit, under 7.5 to 21.75 tons of pressure men involved say that the emerald is hell-
per square inch, in the presence of chromium or vanadium. Given that beryllium spawn but they also can’t let it go. As Brian
0 8 6 exists only in tiny quantities near Earth’s crust, this seldom happens, and even Brazeal, an anthropologist at California State

University Chico, wrote in a paper entitled
The Fetish and the Stone: A Moral Economy
of Charlatans and Thieves, “Emeralds can
take over the lives of well-meaning devotees
and lead them down the road to perdition.”
I too took a bad spin in the emerald’s
orbit, pouring endless time into reporting
this story, only, for a while at least, to become
more confused rather than less. I read thou-
sands of pages of court documents, includ-
ing legal depositions that read like episodes
of Drunk History. Larry Biegler hung up on
me. The cops canceled the night before I was
supposed to fly to go see them in LA. Then
one day last summer my phone rang. “Hello!
This is Jerry Ferrara!” a voice bellowed. Fer-
rara was one of the many people who claim
the emerald ruined his life. He had declined
to talk to me once before, but now he said he
wanted to set the record straight. So he sent
me a copy of his unpublished memoir, spent
a few hours answering my initial questions,
and invited me to visit him in Florida.
j
ERRY FERRARA IS 50 YEARS OLD, BIG, HAIRY, HALF-SICILIAN,
and huggable. He’s been gripped by the Bahia emerald for
nine of the 16 years it’s been aboveground. The day I arrived
in Tampa, he asked me to meet him at a Dunkin’ Donuts
near Bottoms Down Weight Loss and signs advertising
$1 med days and find your treasures at peaches
and pearls boutique. He wore dad jeans, white sneak-
ers, and a gray golf shirt. He sat down looking nervous, a lit-
tle enraged, but also clean-shaven and earnest, like he was
going to a job interview.
“The Brazilians are making my life difficult,” he said, referring to his ongoing
emerald struggles. “But do I regret it? I don’t regret it.” He folded his hands on
the table between us. They looked strong. “I lost my identity. I looked in the
mirror and I didn’t recognize the guy staring back at me anymore.”
Ferrara brought along a skinny woman named Chrystal (in the movie version
of all this, she’d be played by Uma Thurman), whom he introduced as a “pro-
filer,” meaning that she judges character. “I call her a bullshit caller,” he said.
They told me there are 14 different personalities. When I asked Chrystal about
Jerry’s type, he answered before she could. “She’s going to say I’m an asshole.”
A few minutes later, Ferrara excused himself to get cof-
fee. I asked Chrystal, who had a tasteful purple streak in
When we met, Ferrara brought
her hair and wore an emerald necklace, what she really along a “profiler” named Chrystal.
did think about Ferrara’s character. “I call her a bullshit caller,” he said.
 She glanced at the older woman doing a crossword puzzle next to us as she
searched for words. “I’m trying to do this in a way that doesn’t make him look
Cast
Char
bad,” she said. “Sometimes he’s had to do bad things to protect himself and
the people he cares for.”
Ferrara first heard about the Bahia emerald in a low moment. It was Novem-
ber 2007. He was sleeping in his car, scamming free continental breakfasts at
hotels for his two daughters, who were sleeping on their aunt’s floor. For the prior
seven years he’d been supporting his family through his business, Honest Father
Buys Houses, which purchased and resold homes and commercial properties.
But then the bottom fell out of the real estate market. Ferrara lost everything,
and he started working to right the ship of his life, he says, by selling foreclosed
real estate portfolios for Lehman Brothers. When those deals fell through too,
Ferrara, frantic, called every broker and every investor he could dial. Eventually,
he says, he wound up on the phone with a man named Larry Biegler. (Remember
him, of the phone call to the Temple City cops?) Biegler wasn’t really interested
in foreclosed property. But he needed someone to help sell a giant emerald. going to buy a big boat, a tri-hull that will
do 50 knots—“I won’t be hors d’oeuvres for

t
a shark!” He’s then going to sail that boat up
the Adriatic coast and move into the castle
HE ROCK HAD ALREADY BEEN THROUGH A LOT. THE BAHIA he once saw in Dubrovnik. When his tough-
emerald was unearthed in early 2001 from the Carnaiba guy veneer falls, Conetto is very poignant.
mine of the Brazilian state of Bahia. Then, according to He has an adult daughter, Kendall, whom he
some (apocryphal) tellings of the emerald’s history, the named after himself; he hasn’t seen her since
mule team dragging it through the rain forest was attacked she was 3. “I wasn’t ready to get married,” he
by panthers—or some other animal—and the miners told me of his early life failings. “I just stayed
themselves had to carry the 752-pound emerald the rest away.” He thinks the Bahia emerald is gar-
of the way to civilization. From town it was trucked south bage. “That thing is a stinking sack of Sibe-
to São Paulo and placed under a tarp in a carport at one of rian seal shit.” Every time I visited Conetto
the mine owners’ homes. Those miners, it turned out, had a friend and business I left feeling sad.
associate in San Jose, California. His name was Ken Conetto. Back in 2000, during the first internet
A word about Conetto: Like Ferrara, he’s half-Sicilian and has spent his life boom, Conetto knew an affable guy named
looking for deals. He once held the titles to some silica mines in Nevada but never Tony Thomas who’d sunk a lot of money
struck it rich. In fact, for the past 11 years, he has lived in a trailer with his mother, into a startup that now needed a whole
Gertrude, who is now 99. Strewn about are half a dozen pairs of eyeglasses, 10 lot more money if Thomas ever wanted to
dog leashes, six La-Z-Boy chairs, more pillboxes than I could count, a giant box get his initial investment back. Accord-
of Wheaties with Steph Curry on the front, four bicycles, 10 fleece blankets, three ing to Thomas’ account in court docu-
television sets (two on). When I visited he offered me coffee cake, oranges, and ments, Conetto offered a convoluted plan
bottled water and told me to come back whenever I wanted, a kindness unpar- to help. Thomas and Conetto would fly to
alleled by many people I call friends. His mind drifts when he talks. The plots Brazil. With these miners Conetto knew,
0 8 8 he spins can be hard to follow. If he ever comes into real money, he told me, he’s they’d secure $25 million worth of emer-
alds (meaning emeralds they could sell for
$25 million, though Conetto and Thomas
would pay much less). They’d use the emer-
alds as collateral on a loan, the money from
which they’d invest with a so-called high-
yield fund that guaranteed huge returns

Ken Conetto thinks through the International Chamber of

Commerce. Thus Thomas’ startup would

the Bahia emerald have the money it needed to stay afloat and
Thomas would become a very wealthy man.

is garbage. “That thing In September of 2001, Thomas and

Conetto flew to Brazil. In São Paulo, Conet-

is a stinking sack to’s miner friends arranged for them to look

at $25 million worth of cut and polished

of Siberian seal shit.” emeralds. That meeting was a disaster—the

lapidary shop was dilapidated, and the men
of
acters
(in alphabetical order)
who were supposed to finance the transac-
tion failed to show. The miners then tried
to make up for it by taking Thomas and
Conetto to one of their homes to see a real
treasure: the 752-pound emerald in the car-
port. According to Conetto, a white cat was
peeing on the huge stone when they arrived,
but still Thomas fell in love. He looked “like
he’d found the treasure of Ali Baba,” one of
the miners later recalled in court. Thomas,
of course, wanted the stone. The miners,
records say, set the price at $60,000.
Nearly everybody involved has a differ-
ent version of what happened next. Thomas
said he flew home and wired the money to
São Paulo. Then he set out to determine the
emerald’s true value. He reached out to for-
mer business associates and received amaz-
ing news. The most comparable stone was
at the British Museum: a slightly smaller
emerald worth $792 million. According to
testimony, Thomas passed this informa-
tion to an appraiser he met in Brazil. On
November 5, 2001, the appraiser—suppos-
edly having seen the Bahia—wrote: “Such a
rare specimen has never been seen, not even
at an international auction house such as
Sotheby’s … The stone in this report I esti-
mate is worth $925 million.”
A shocking amount of bullshit happens
with big, rare stones. The Gem of Tanzania,
a 10,000-carat ruby, was once valued at 11
million British pounds, but that appraisal
turned out to be a forgery. The Life and
Pride of America, a 1,905-carat sapphire
purchased for $10, for a while was valued at
$2.28 million. Then a curator at the National
Gem and Mineral Collection at the Smithso-
nian Institution examined the rock, declared
the color “awful—it’s just kind of muddy
gray,” and now that sapphire is a paper-
_>
Larry Biegler Ken Conetto
A plumber from An against-all-odds
Northern California, lovable guy from
with bad Yelp San Jose, California; lives
reviews; the one who in a trailer with his
called the cops. 99-year-old mother.
weight. Recently, in January 2016, newspapers reported the discovery of the
world’s largest blue-star sapphire, the Star of Adam, in Sri Lanka. Its anony-
mous owner told the BBC that the stone is worth $175 million. We shall see.
During the time the Bahia emerald was bouncing around, out of the mine
but not yet in the sheriff’s safe, an emerald billed as the world’s largest was
floating about, too. This one was named Teodora. It weighed about 25 pounds
and was said to be worth $1.15 million. A Canadian gem merchant named
Regan Reaney put it up for auction in January 2012—then he was arrested on
(possibly unrelated) fraud charges. Teodora, sadly, included a bunch of white
beryl, dyed forest green.
As for the Bahia emerald, as Thomas told the court, in November 2001,
Conetto told him he’d ship the stone home to Thomas in the US. He waited and
waited, but the emerald never arrived. So a few months later he asked Conetto
to return to Brazil and investigate what happened, only to learn the very worst:
The emerald had been stolen en route to California. Sorry, inside job among the
exporters, Conetto said. What can you do?
Conetto has a different story. He claims that Thomas never purchased the stone
and that he, Conetto, never promised to mail it home for Thomas. Whatever the
case, for the next four years Conetto and his miner friends leveraged the emer-
ald’s appraised value, hatching plans to take out loans against its insurance policy.
They did rope in one sucker, but still the miners bickered constantly. So, in 2005,
Conetto shipped the emerald, for real this time, to San Jose, California. On the
packing slip he wrote, “rocha: rochedo—rock” and listed the value at $100.
a
T T HE DU NKIN’ DONU TS IN TAM PA, F E R R AR A INVITED ME
to go with him on what he described as that day’s job. As
far as I know, he isn’t a licensed PI, but the job was a stake-
out. First we needed to secure what Ferrara called “a low-
profile vehicle,” so from the Dunkin’ Donuts we stopped
by a U-Haul store, where Ferrara rented a white pickup
with an extended cab and excellent air- conditioning.
In it, Ferrara, Chrystal, and I then drove to see the cli-
ent who commissioned the stakeout, a 53-year-old woman who lived in one
of Tampa’s endless and endlessly depressing gated communities, each with
their own empty roads and swampy lagoons. “It’s almost unbelievable. She
lost millions to her husband,” Ferrara told me as we pulled up to the wom-
an’s house. “She’s still got some Kinkade paintings inside.” Ferrara’s job on
this case, he said, was “to locate and uncover money and assets” and maybe
scare the husband straight. “I do it for the adrenaline,” he said. “There are

Jerry Ferrara
A SpongeBob lover from
outside Tampa, Florida;
dabbles in diamonds and real
estate; has some pre-
Columbian artifacts for sale.
Mark Gayman
Detective with the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department; Miller’s
partner; loves his job;
hates the emerald case.
Scott Miller
Detective with the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s
Department; Gayman’s
partner; loves his job;
hates the emerald case.
_>
Kit Morrison
A Mormon from Eagle, Idaho;
baby-faced, well-dressed;
presents as a family man; tried
to buy diamonds and ended
up with a giant emerald.

0 9 0 a lot of sides of me. In a lot of ways I have a very calm Disneyland mentality.
Then there’s a side of me that’s very Mafia, wicked mean, cold.”
From there we headed to the stakeout proper, which consisted of sitting in the
U-Haul outside a parking structure near Port Tampa Bay. “That’s part of stake-
outs,” Ferrara said, several minutes into our boredom. “Sometimes you’ve got
to wait it out.” Finally he left the relative nirvana of the air-conditioned truck
to try to figure out if the woman’s husband had purchased an expensive car. He
a MONG THE MOST
amazing qualities of
the Bahia emerald is
that its charms seem
to work every time.
One person falls out
of its thrall and the
walked into the garage and texted Chrystal, “I’m in.” (The garage was open to the next floats right in.
public.) In the cab, Chrystal opened her laptop and showed me Ferrara’s web- In 2007, the person who floated in was my
site, for a company called Global Quest. It featured pictures of pre-Columbian Florida host, Jerry Ferrara. As he tells it,
masks and ancient gold jewelry. “Most of the artifacts come from high individ- Biegler approached Ferrara and told him
uals. These people don’t want to be known,” Chrystal said. Ferrara discovered that he, Ferrara, seemed like just the guy
these items, or maybe he was just brokering these items—it wasn’t entirely to sell the stone. At the time Ferrara was
clear. He returned to the U-Haul with pictures of cars and we left. That night, desperate and quasi-homeless, and this
over dinner, he told me that for a while he had a guitar owned by Elvis. He also was exactly what he wanted to hear. “It
once had opportunity to sell a Leonardo da Vinci painting. But no art histori- was just incredible,” Ferrara says. “Biegler
ans would authenticate the work because it was on canvas and da Vinci didn’t showed up with a manila envelope and
paint on canvas. (Ferrara found this position pinched and ridiculous, arguing, signed ownership of the world’s largest
“There were sails then, right?”) emerald over to me. He said he was look-
It was all so disorienting—the stakeout, the da Vinci painting, the Bahia ing for somebody like me.”
emerald most of all. Because unlike the pre-Columbian masks and the paint- Soon Ferrara was tangled up in yet
ing, I knew the 752-pound gemstone really did exist. How it got to a Los Angeles another Biegler operation, trying to sell
Sheriff’s Department vault is complicated, but as best as I could piece together diamonds to a Mormon guy from Idaho
from court documents (and also the obsessive research of a fellow journalist), named Kit Morrison. Ferrara describes
what happened was this: After Conetto imported the stone to San Jose, he made Morrison as “aloof, very secretive. Lik-
a deal with Larry Biegler, the man with the squeaky voice. Biegler presented able—no. He wore handmade Italian suits,
himself as polished and rich. Like Thomas, he fell instantly in love with the handmade Italian leather shoes.” Morrison
emerald, certain that he could sell it to a wealthy sucker. So Biegler made a deal sent Ferrara $1.3 million, supposedly for
with Conetto. Conetto would sign over to Biegler the rights to sell the emerald. diamonds, which he’d receive in the future.
If Biegler sold the stone, they would split the proceeds 50-50. In return, Ferrara says, he put the Bahia
This was one of the great many moments that tripped me up while reporting emerald up as collateral. Then that deal
this story. Who says to a random business associate, “Hey, you want 50 percent of fell through—Ferrara did not have any dia-
my $925 million emerald?” But Brazeal, the emerald expert, set me straight: There monds. So the emerald went to Morrison.
just aren’t that many buyers for a giant gemstone. Fifty percent of $925 million This should have made them enemies
is $462.5 million, whereas 100 percent of zero is nothing. Thus, after Biegler took but now they had a common interest: turn-
possession of the emerald, he made a similar move. He told a gem merchant in ing the giant rock into money. Thus they
New York that he, the gem merchant, could have 10 percent of the sale price if he became partners, if not friends. “It’s like we
could sell the rock for more than $25 million. That merchant posted the emerald
on eBay (yes). The minimum bid was $19 million and the “buy now” price was ELIZABETH WEIL (@lizweil) lives in San
$75 million. The listing drew one offer—for $19 million—but Biegler refused Francisco and is a contributor for The
to let the gem dealer sell. He claimed to have a $75 million deal in the works. New York Times Magazine and Outside.
_>
Tony Thomas
A collector; his house
burned down in a
mysterious fire; has been
in a legal fight with
Conetto for years.
had a wagon full of gold,” Ferrara explained.
“We’re both sleeping by the campfire, one
eye open, one hand on your gun under the
pillow.” At this point the emerald was in a
storage unit, the Commonwealth Interna-
tional depository, in South El Monte, Cali-
fornia. Ferrara and Biegler were supposedly
the only ones with access to it (although
in court, Ferrara and Morrison said Morrison also had access). Ferrara told
me that only people who could prove they had the means to buy the emerald
could go view it. Sheikhs came to look. Conetto insists that even Bernie Madoff
flew out in “his little putt-putt” and planned to buy the emerald for “$91 mil-
lion in diamonds, $21 million in cash, and three watches worth $15 million.”
But sadly, Madoff was arrested two days before that alleged deal could close.
In June of 2008, Biegler disappeared. He had staged his own supposed
kidnapping by a Brazilian warlord, sending word to Ferrara that he needed
a ransom paid for his release. This sent Ferrara’s mind spinning back to all
the times over the past year Biegler had asked Ferrara to send him money,
requests Ferrara obliged because he did not want to blow his chance to make
millions in an emerald sale. Eventually, Ferrara pieced together the truth: He
learned that Biegler was not nearly as polished and rich as he pretended to be.
In fact, he was really the proprietor of a business called B & B Plumbing in Cit-
rus Heights, California. “I got taken by a damn plumber! Can you believe that?”
Ferrara told me. B & B Plumbing even had lousy Yelp reviews. (“Hired Larry
to install a dishwasher. He took my $125 and left …” “NO SHOW!!” One star.)
Furious and betrayed, Ferrara says he managed to get the secretary at Com-
monwealth International to let him and Morrison remove the emerald from the
vault without Biegler present. They loaded the stone into
a Cadillac Escalade SUV and headed east, toward Vegas.
Tony Thomas and Ken Conetto
Biegler, Ferrara says, arrived at Commonwealth Interna- went to Brazil with a plan to buy
tional less than 24 hours later to find the emerald gone. $25 million worth of emeralds.
 t
HE DAY AFTER I WENT ON THE STAKEOUT WITH FERRARA, him up. In 2004 his sister asked to bor-
we drove the U-Haul pickup to his friend Kris Rotonda’s row money. Ferrara told me that he gave
home. Among Ferrara’s current ventures is working with her a few thousand dollars. Then she died
Rotonda to launch My Pet Shopping Network, which, if of an overdose. Among the more fantasti-
all goes according to plan, will be a media behemoth like cal family tales he told me was that he had
Home Shopping Network but for pet products. We sat in an uncle who owned a junkyard in Edison,
Rotonda’s living room where his three dogs ran in circles New Jersey, and when developers bought
and skidded out on his tile floor, and Rotonda’s young the land and cleaned it up, they found 79
daughter kept toddling in, followed by Rotonda’s wife. skeletons buried in the soil.
The scene was warm, totally regular, and unslick, and in it Ferrara seemed to “Let’s just say I like my soda flat and my
relax for the first time since I arrived. Rotonda cued up their Pet Shopping Net- cereal soggy,” Ferrara said. This seems to
work sizzle reel. On it, he makes a pitch for a product called the Pooch Selfie that sum up his outlook on life.
includes a tennis ball you clip onto a smartphone so your dog will stare at it and I asked if he liked pets and he said, “No!
you can take a great selfie of you and your best friend looking into the camera. I hate them all! What an asshole!” (He later
“Great, right?” Ferrara said, when the reel finished. It wasn’t half bad. Then said he was kidding.)
Ferrara came down to earth for a bit. “Most of the networks are so busy mak- He doesn’t drink because, he said, “I’m
ing dead ends that they don’t have time to meet with us.” in the limelight,” and alcohol makes him
Ferrara’s life story is filled with pain. He told me his mother walked out even more of a jerk.
when he was 4 and he didn’t see her again until he was 15. His younger sis- “I hate sports too!”
ter died in childhood. His stepmother made him sleep with only sheets, not Ferrara’s lone outlets are smoking
blankets, in the New Jersey winter. One day when he was walking home from Marlboro Blacks and watching Sponge-
an after-school job on a day that was –4 degrees, she drove by but didn’t pick Bob SquarePants. “SpongeBob has a per-

A Regular Gem
of a Hoax Shiny rocks are hard to resist. But
upon closer inspection, high-dollar
stones often prove to be … not so
precious. Here are a few examples.
—J E N N I F E R C H AU S S E E

The Gem of Tanzania
When David Unwin bought
a massive ruby in 2006, it
was valued at $375,000. A
year later, when his com-
pany was going through
bankruptcy, the gem reap-
peared on his books as a
$14 million asset. That doc-
ument, though, was forged.
Eventually the gem sold for
about $10,000.
The Life and Pride
of America
One day in Tucson, Arizona,
a gem dealer bought a 1,905-
carat sapphire for $10 from a
bin at a gem show. Then an
appraisal deemed it worth
about $2.28 million. Gemol-
ogists disagreed. Today the
Life and Pride is a beautiful
blue paperweight.
The “Shipwreck”
In 2011 scuba divers said they
discovered treasure near
the famous Nuestra Señora
de Atocha, which wrecked
off the coast of Florida in
1622. The divers said the
gems were rare Colombian
emeralds, but they were
just cheap emeralds treated
with epoxy—and had been
sitting on the ocean floor.
Teodora
In 2012 a Canadian gem
merchant announced to the
world that his 57,500-carat
emerald was worth $1.15 
million. He called it Teodora
and put it up for auction.
Turns out Teodora included
a bunch of white beryl, dyed
forest green.
 sonality that cares about everybody, he
sees the positive in everybody. He tries to
make people laugh,” Ferrara explained. His
favorite episode is “Band Geeks,” in which
Squidward is set up to fail, yet again. He
lies and promises that his nonexistent band
will play a huge gig at the Bubble Bowl, the
Super Bowl in Bikini Bottom. He scrambles
ERNST & YOUNG/AP IMAGES (TANZANIA); SHELLY KATZ/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES (LIFE AND PRIDE); REUTERS/ANDY CLARK/ALAMY (TEODORA); JAN SOCHOR/GETTY IMAGES (EMERALDS); GETTY IMAGES (HOAX)
to pull together a band but, Ferrara said,
“nobody he knows has talent.” He’s going to
humiliate himself. “The show starts. Squid-
ward’s sweating,” Ferrara said. “But then
it rocks.” Behind the scenes, SpongeBob
steps in and saves him, turning Squidward’s
friends into great musicians. Squidward
succeeds beyond his wildest dreams.
“People in my family think it’s creepy,”
Ferrara said, wrapping up his exegesis,
“but my life is extremely hard, anxiety-
ridden. SpongeBob gives me relief. Don’t
put a horror flick in front of me, don’t put a
Mafia movie in front of me. That’s my life.”
The Diamond Hoax of 1872
Cousins from Kentucky
led Charles Tiffany of Tiffany
& Co. and others to believe
there was an amazing
gem field on the Colorado
border. The investors
handed over more than
$500,000. Alas, the cousins
had simply strewn cheap
diamonds, rubies, and emer-
alds in the dirt.
Ferrara’s lone outlets
are smoking Marlboro
Blacks and watching
SpongeBob SquarePants.
a
FTER LARRY BIEGLER REALIZED THE EMERALD WAS GONE 0 9 3
from the Commonwealth International storage unit,
he called the Temple City police and told the officer on
duty that his emerald had been stolen and that he’d been
abducted and released by the Brazilian Mafia. This trig-
gered the arrival of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Depart-
ment detectives Miller and Gayman. Soon, Ferrara and
Morrison became suspects. The detectives took a few
weeks to track them down, but by December 15, 2008, Miller and Gayman were
in Eagle, Idaho, in the Boise foothills, staking out Morrison’s house. They set a
perimeter and shivered in their rental car for two days.
On the third day they knocked on Morrison’s door. His wife answered and said
Morrison wasn’t home. As the detectives were talking to her, they saw a man
walking around the side of the property and, figuring it was Morrison, tackled
him. He turned out to be a cable repairman. Morrison’s wife got Morrison on the
phone and he cut a deal with Miller and Gayman. He would meet the detectives
in Las Vegas, where he and Ferrara had stored the emerald, and they’d turn the
stone over to the Sheriff’s Department on the condition that neither Ferrara nor
Morrison would be arrested. So Miller and Gayman flew home to Burbank and
assembled a small army, including a dozen officers with assault rifles, and cara-
vanned overnight out I-15 East. When they arrived at the depository at 7 am, the
Las Vegas Metro Police Department was already onsite with a SWAT team and
helicopter cover. Morrison showed up in a sport coat and slacks, and within the
hour Miller and Gayman were wheeling a piano dolly topped with a gargantuan
emerald into the desert sun. Everybody took a lot of selfies. Then the detectives
loaded the Bahia emerald into a police van, drove it back over the San Gabriel
Mountains, and logged it into evidence. 
As promised, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department threw the question of who
owned the Bahia emerald over to the Los Angeles Superior Court. From 2007
to 2015, people began endless legal battles: Conetto sued Morrison, Thomas
went after Conetto, the New York gem dealer sued Biegler. Ferrara spent a lot
of days in settlement hearings and a lot of nights sleeping in hidden corners of
hotel lobbies so he didn’t have to pay for rooms. Only once did he lunge across
the conference table and threaten to beat the shit out of somebody.
During the legal proceedings, Biegler disappeared. Conetto got distracted by
a friend’s new business that turned manure into electricity. The detectives came
to believe that the emerald belonged to Thomas. After all, courts found he was
the only litigant who’d ever paid anything for the stone. But Thomas fared poorly
at his trial. Several key facts were not on his side. One, he never called FedEx
to see what happened to his $925 million package. Two, he claimed his house
burned down in 2006 and incinerated his bill of sale. CONTINUED ON PAGE 095

Keeping Up With the Times
CON TIN UED FR OM PAGE 059
of her career, one of the first three hires at the
Huffington Post), went to Baquet with a prop-
osition from Facebook: If the Times would
commit to producing dozens of livestreams
a month for Facebook Live, its new video
platform, the social media giant would pay
the Times $3 million a year. Like most major
media companies, the Times has a compli-
cated relationship with Facebook—a 2015
deal to publish Times journalism directly on
Facebook Instant led some in the newsroom
to worry about cannibalizing subscriptions
and losing control of their content—but fol-
lowing the Innovation Report, the pull of
a new social platform was hard to resist.
Baquet gave the green light. “We spun up
a team and started producing within two
weeks, which is like a land speed record in
this organization,” MacCallum says.
Over the next few months, the Live team
recruited more than 300 Times journalists
to livestream anything and everything: press
conferences, protests, political conventions.
It was too much for some, and the public edi-
tor of the Times, Liz Spayd, said as much in a
column headlined “Facebook Live: Too Much,
Too Soon.” Spayd complained that some of
the videos were “plagued by technical mal-
functions, feel contrived, drone on too long
… or are simply boring.” She urged editors to
slow down, regroup, and wait until the Times
could stay true to its past model of “innovat-
ing at a thoughtful, measured pace, but with
quality worthy of its name.” (Timesian!)
MacCallum concedes that some of the
early efforts may have fallen short, but today
she puts them in the perspective more com-
mon in tech circles than media organiza-
tions. “I disagree that it’s possible to have
every single thing be up to the standard.
Otherwise you can’t take any risks.” What’s
more, Baquet says, the project helped train
hundreds in his newsroom in how to frame
a shot, speak on camera, and all the other
skills necessary to produce journalism in the
0 0
9 0
4
years to come. “If you buy that our future is
the phone, and you buy that that means our
future is going to be more visual than it’s
been in the past, then New York Times jour-
nalists have to be comfortable with video.”
The alternative is stark. For most of the
last year, the Times offered buyouts to
employees, in part to make room for new,
digitally focused journalists. As one editor
(fearful of being quoted by name) put it: “The
dinosaurs are being culled.”
O
One of the anxieties I heard through-
out the Times is that they can get the journal-
ism absolutely right, execute the technology
perfectly, and still not find the hundreds of
millions it costs every year to line the walls
with Pulitzers. While other media companies
collapse or implode—witness the once-proud
Tribune Company’s devolution into national
punch line “Tronc”—there is unease over
the possibility that when (or if) the Times
emerges from its digital rebirth, it might
be scarcely recognizable. Even Sulzberger
admits to long-term doubts for the industry,
though, he says, “We feel like we’re closer to
cracking the code than anyone else.”
In 2010 the Times was making about
$200 million in digital revenue, almost
entirely from advertising; by 2016 that
number had more than doubled, to nearly
$500 million, with almost all of the gains
coming from digital subscriptions. The
internal Times goal for total digital reve-
nue is $800 million by 2020—which, accord-
ing to senior management, would be enough
to fund the Times’ global news-gathering
operation with or without a print edition.
To find that additional $300-plus mil-
lion, they need to sign up new subscribers
across all its different platforms. The site’s
metered paywall remains its most powerful
incentive to subscribe, which is why most
new subscribers sign up once they’ve maxed
out their monthly allowance on NYTimes
.com. (Subscriptions through mobile and
social media continue to lag behind desktop.)
They also needs five straight years of 13 per-
cent growth in digital revenue, which would
seem more doable if, in the first three quar-
ters of 2016 (before the postelection bump),
growth hadn’t been tracking at only 8 per-
cent. “Look, nobody said this was going to be
a straight line,” CEO Mark Thompson says.
Still: credit where credit is due. The Times
has had more success at building its digital
subscriber base than any other publication.
Its nearly $500 million in digital revenue not
only dwarfs what any print publication has
managed online, it also far exceeds lead-
ing digital-only publishers. At The Wash­
ington Post, which has invested heavily in
digital growth since it was acquired by Ama-
zon founder Jeff Bezos, digital revenue was
reported in 2016 to be in the neighborhood
of $60 million. In 2015, BuzzFeed brought
in a reported $170 million, while the Huff-
ington Post’s 2014 revenue, the most recent
reported figure, was $146 million. “Today
we have the largest and most successful pay
model for journalism in the world,” says Mer-
edith Kopit Levien, the Times’ chief revenue
officer. “Our digital subscriber number is a
tiny fraction of Netflix’s or Spotify’s num-
bers, so it still has to be proven that it can
be done around news. I think it can.” None
of that even accounts for the revenue that
comes in from the print edition, which Sulz-
berger says isn’t going anywhere any time
soon. “It is profitable on subscription reve-
nue alone, and we can make the economics
work, I suspect, for a long time.”
As long as he’s there, anyway. Family con-
trol is one of the competitive advantages
of The New York Times—there is no plan B
for Sulzberger or his family. Bezos’ support
brought fresh hope to The Washington Post
after he bought it from the Graham family
for $250 million in 2013; two years later, it
surpassed the Times in unique visitors for
the first time. But there is no reason why
Bezos can’t wake up tomorrow and decide
to dedicate all of his personal fortune to col-
onizing Mars instead of saving journalism.
Chris Hughes, one of the founders of Face-
book, bought The New Republic in 2012 with
the goal of revolutionizing the century-old
periodical for the digital age, spending mil-
lions of his own money in the process. Four
years later, when I was editor in chief, he
sold it and walked away.
Sulzberger can’t just walk away. Much
of the family’s fortune is tied up in Times
stock, for starters, but there is also a pro-
nounced, and profound, sense of obligation
among him and his cousins to The New York
Times as both a business and a public good.
They have to figure this out. Whether or
not they succeed, and whether Bezos is in
the journalism game for the long haul, is
the stuff of tomorrow’s headlines. Today’s
news is all we know for sure, and today
the Post has a billionaire behind it, and
the Times has hundreds of thousands of
subscribers it didn’t have six months ago,
and the president of the United States has
a Twitter account. The journalists have
plenty of work ahead. �

The Bahia Emerald
CON TIN UED F ROM PAGE 093
(The court found his claim awfully conve-
nient.) It also turned out, though this was
not revealed at trial, that there was no large
emerald at the British Museum in London at
all. The entire backstory of the $792 million
comp was made up.
The court had great difficulty pinning down
who owned the emerald or how much it was
worth—or, really, any facts at all, because so
many men contradicted one another under
oath. This led an observer to the possibility that
the stone was really a MacGuffin, in the clas-
sic Hitchcockian sense—an object that every-
one’s chasing but that doesn’t really matter.
Still, in 2011, the judge rejected Thomas’
claim of ownership. Then the judge got a new
job, and Thomas asked for a mistrial—which
the courts granted. In 2013, a second judge
heard all this insanity again. But by that point
Ferrara, Morrison, and another guy had gath-
ered into a sort of consortium, under the name
FM Holdings. That way someone, any one of
them, could reclaim possession of the emer-
ald, sell it, and divide the proceeds.
The LA Superior Court awarded the Bahia
emerald to FM Holdings on June 23, 2015.
But perhaps the emerald really is cursed.
Before the Sheriff’s Department received the
order to release the emerald to FM Hold-
ings, the District Court of DC granted an
injunction filed by the Department of Jus-
tice on behalf of the country of Brazil. Brazil
claimed that the Bahia emerald had been ille-
gally exported and really belonged to them.
“I’ll be honest,” says John Nadolenco, the
primary lawyer on the case for Brazil. “When
I first got the letter”—from Brazil, asking
for help repatriating the Bahia emerald—“I
thought it was a total hoax. I thought it was
one of those Nigerian prince things where
they’re going to want us to send a couple mil-
lion dollars to some bank account and they’re
going to take all of our money.” But Nadolen-
co’s partner asked him to pursue the client.
Nadolenco wrote back to the Brazilians with
a real proposal, though he couldn’t resist
including the jokey promise that his friend
Indiana Jones could help reclaim the emer-
ald if his own efforts failed. He got the gig.
So today the Los Angeles County Sher-
iff’s Department is still—still—holding the
emerald, now as evidence for a criminal case
they’re building. The limbo is uncomfortable
for Ferrara. He’s a big man with big, tenacious,
preposterous dreams stuck in a life that feels
too banal, empty, and small. My last day in
Florida we met up at Cracker Barrel. Ferrara
likes the tchotchkes there. During a lull in the
conversation, Chrystal told me she worries
what will happen if Ferrara loses the emer-
ald for good. “It would devastate him,” she
whispered. “It’s his whole life.”
Ferrara and I talked for hours and hours
and hours, from the retiree breakfast rush
past lunch, through every last detail of the
saga. At one point, he placed the salt and
pepper shakers in the middle of the table.
He slid them a few inches apart and set his
phone on top, like the flat roof of a house.
“This is our foundation in life—your mother,
your father, friends, teachers, the people
that mean something to you.” (He meant
the shakers to represent the people and the
phone to be your life.)
He slid the shakers out from under the
phone. “As these people fail you, these go
away, one by one.” The phone, your life, falls.
Before I headed to the airport, we returned
the truck to U-Haul and revisited Dunkin’
Donuts for some more iced coffees. We sat
outside, in the horrible humid air, so Ferrara
could smoke his Marlboros. He mentioned
that, along with SpongeBob, he connected
with Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate
Events, or at least the title. “Like I wrote one
time, ‘We entered a world that was inhabited
by dark shadows, the nights would never end,
the mornings would never come,’ ” he said. He
didn’t quite get the quote from his own prose
correct. But he made his point: Life is tough.
People betray you and die. We all need escapes.
I drove to the airport. I boarded my flight.
Even before my plane touched down, Ferrara
had left me a voicemail. “Call me!” he bel-
lowed, optimistic as ever. “You will never
guess what transpired today. As you left,
the winds of change blew in.”
I called him back the next morning. He
told me a story about the emerald, which I
understood less the longer he talked. He also
mentioned that he’d been approached about
hosting a TV show, a reality treasure-hunter
series. He would be the star. It was nice to
hear his voice. �
Additional reporting by BRENDAN BORRELL.
COLOPHON
WRONG THEORIES THAT
HELPED GET THIS ISSUE OUT:
Ramen is a health food; Two Weeks Notice
is a superior film to Notting Hill; no one
wins in a tiebreaker in my new board game
Inis; deadlines are just a social construct;
the Law of Optical Volumes; Japan’s disas-
trously accurate highway signs; wine is
definitely a healthy juice drink, chocolate
is medicinal, and the warmth emanating
from my phone is just love, not danger;
he’ll stop tweeting so much now; we don’t
need a Bluetooth-enabled patio umbrella;
playing Gauntlet on my Nintendo emulator
will ultimately make me more productive;
purposefully hiking the redwoods in a
downpour; “I’m sure the writer has sourc-
ing for this …”; Wrong Theory; the drought’s
gotta be over by now; Sudafed by day,
codeine by night; I bet I can eat just one;
the walrus was Scott.
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 BY ROBERT CAPPS

ASK A FLOWCHART
IS THIS A FAKE NEWS STORY?
WHERE IS IT
COMING FROM?

YEAH, THEREAL
IS IT OPINION, FASHION LIKE “ARTISANAL LIBERTY
THE NEW
FASHION & STYLE, & STYLE MICROSQUATTING” IS A KLAXON.ORG
YORK TIMES
OR THE FRONT PAGE? REAL TREND …

ISN’T IT
LOL! LOOK CLOSELY. FAKE
ALL NEWS? OH, THAT’S REAL.
OPINION

BREITBART
YUP—REAL
FRONT PAGE MACEDONIAN!
UM, THAT’S JUST
AN OPINION. SERIOUSLY?

IS IT ABOUT
HOW THE NEWS
ON BREITBART ISN’T IT’S SUPPOSED TO WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
FAKE? BUT IT’S IN A
SPUR YOUR OWN CRITICAL
NEWSPAPER!
THINKING.
FACEBOOK

YEAH. BUT IT’S

A REAL STORY, PUPPIES
RIGHT? REAL
WHAT?! NEVER!

DONALD
TRUMP’S
TWITTER
ACCOUNT
MIGHT BE. OR
IT MIGHT BE A FAKE CUTE!
SO … REAL?
STORY TO FAKE OUT THE POLITICS
REAL CRITICS.

HMM. DOES IT
SAY “UNFAIR” OR “SAD”
ANYWHERE?

CABLE NEWS
NOPE! FAKE AWW!

DUNNO, A NEWS- OF COURSE!

PERSON! THEIR
WHO’S SAYING IT? SAD
TEETH ARE
REALLY WHITE. GOOD POINT.

WELL, IS IT AN BUT IT SAYS

ACTUAL REPORTER, OR NEWS “REAL” RIGHT
NETWORKS PROBABLY NOT SO
IS IT A “CONSULTANT” WHO’S PAID THERE IN
STILL HAVE TRUE, THEN.
TO PARROT A PARTISAN HIS TWITTER
POSITION? REPORTERS? HANDLE!

0 9 6 MAR 2017