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      ‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from Obama

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      Interview‘If I’d not got help, I’d probably be dead’: Jason Kander on PTSD, politics and advice from ObamaDavid Smith, Washington bureau chief He was a rising star in the Democratic party and ‘sorta ran for president’ but, as he recounts in his new book, haunted by his experiences in AfghanistanAs luck had it, Jason Kander’s book tour in New York coincided with a family wedding. The star turn was his 95-year-old great-uncle, composer John Kander, who performed Married from Cabaret, the revered musical he wrote with lyricist Fred Ebb.“It was very cool,” smiles Kander, a day after breakfasting with his famous relative. “He’s still writing: he’s got a musical coming out next year. He is my life goal. People who meet him probably figure he’s in his late 70s. He always says if you just keep doing what you love, it will keep you young. There’s something to that.”Twenty years on from 9/11, is US democracy working?Read moreJason Kander is only 41 but already well into his third act. His new, unflinchingly honest memoir tracks his journey from soldiering in Afghanistan to politicking in his native Missouri, from sitting in the Oval Office with Barack Obama to being put on suicide watch in a windowless cell.Invisible Storm: A Soldier’s Memoir of Politics and PTSD tells how Kander endured post-traumatic stress disorder for 11 years – and kept it secret from everyone. The more his political star shone, the darker his hinterland became. He tried to outrun his demons by seeking elected office, including the presidency, until an epiphany led him to finally confront his mental illness.“I went to get help because, if I didn’t go get help, I was probably going to kill myself,” says Kander, wearing a grey “army” T-shirt and speaking via Zoom from a functional New York hotel room.“It’s not like, ‘Oh, man, if I’d hung around, maybe I’d be president!’ If I’d hung around and not got help, I’d probably be dead. Instead I’m really enjoying my life and I wasn’t before. It’s not to say I’ll never run. It’s just to say, I’m glad I didn’t then and, if I ever do choose to run, I’ll be doing it as a person who has dealt with their shit. And maybe we need more of that.”Kander trained as a lawyer but, after the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, felt the compulsion to serve and be tested like his grandfather and other relatives. To his surprise, he loved the military with its sense of order and mission.He spent four months in Afghanistan in 2006-07 and was not involved in firefights or direct combat (later a source of constant guilt that he somehow wasn’t worthy of PTSD). His work as an intelligence officer involved going with an interpreter to meetings in remote locations with people who might be “bad guys” linked to the Taliban, terrorism or corruption. The prospect of being kidnapped and killed was real.“I was 25 years old and it was an exhilarating experience and that’s why they don’t send 41-year-old fathers of two to war,” he reflects. “If I went into those meetings now, I’d be very aware of everything I had to lose but also probably very aware of how much danger I was in.”When he got home to Kansas City, Kander turned to politics in search of the same sense of purpose and belonging to something bigger than himself. Knocking on thousands of doors, he outworked and outcampaigned rivals to win election to the Missouri state house of representatives and, later, as secretary of state.In 2016 he ran for the US Senate against the Republican incumbent, Roy Blunt, and caught national attention with a campaign ad in which he assembled an AR-15 rifle while blindfolded and advocating for background checks on gun buyers. Kander still lost but by a much narrower margin than Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the same state.PTSD trailed him like a shadow, however.There was insomnia and night terrors: bad dreams in which he was back in Afghanistan with someone rushing into a room, taking him captive and lining him up for a beheading video on YouTube. Over time these evolved into fears about home invaders threatening his family.There were nights when Kander patrolled the house with a loaded gun. He had symptoms such as back pain, a twitch in his left eyelid and an aversion to sitting in restaurants with his back to the door. “It’s exhausting to be on alert all the time and then, when you combine that with about 10 years without a good night’s sleep, you just get worn out. When you get worn out enough and have all these other feelings of shame and guilt and then you’re having these symptoms, eventually you get depressed. When you’re depressed long enough, eventually you have suicidal thoughts.”His political career, he assesses now, was a quest for redemption. “I had this idea that I hadn’t done enough for my country, I was an irredeemable piece of shit personally and, while I was achieving all these things politically, people didn’t really know that I was completely undeserving of this praise or adulation.”The Hollywood version of redemption for Kander would have had him winning the presidency and casting PTSD aside on inauguration day. And for a while it seemed possible. When, in his final Oval Office interview, Obama was asked who gave him hope for the future of the country, Kander’s was the first name on his lips. The pair had a private meeting in which Obama gave “mentorship-type advice”.Kander was exalted as the Democrats’ new hope, a veteran from the heartland who could provide the antidote to forces that put Trump in the White House. He made frequent visits to early presidential nominating states; his Twitter bio says he “sorta ran for president”.But after a major speech in New Hampshire, things unravelled.“Like any other addict who is not dealing with their own trauma, their own underlying stuff, I was addicted to the adulation, to the crowds, to performing and to the adrenaline that came with it. The only time I felt truly present was when I was in front of a crowd or doing an interview that really mattered.“Those endorphin highs generally for a long time worked in the sense that they would hold me over until the next one. So when I had this moment that was the zenith of my career as a political performer and it lasted about 12 hours, I realised that was a real problem. This wasn’t working any more.”When someone suggested that he lower his sights and run for mayor of Kansas City instead, Kander grabbed the chance to ease the pressure. He was comfortably ahead in the polls and in fundraising when, on 1 October 2018, he walked into the Kansas City Veterans Affairs medical center and acknowledged suicidal thoughts going back 10 years.He was duly put in a windowless cell with pale-green walls and dressed in dark-green scrubs that were about five sizes too big. “So this was suicide watch,” he writes.Most of the staff instantly recognised him but a young resident psychiatrist did not. For half an hour, Kander bared his soul about the night terrors and his consuming fear of someone hurting himself and his family. Then the psychiatrist asked: “Do you have a particularly stressful job or something?”Kander said he was in politics and explained: “I almost ran for president, but then decided to run for mayor instead, and tomorrow I’m planning on calling that off.”Confused, the psychiatrist said: “You were going to run for president? Of what?”Kander told him: “Of the United States.”The psychiatrist asked: “Who told you that you could run for president?”Now irritated, Kander said: “I don’t know what to tell you, man. I mean, I spent an hour and a half talking it over one on one with Obama in his office, and he seemed to think it was a pretty good idea.”The psychiatrist sat back in his chair and remarked: “Barack Obama told you that you could run for president? So how often would you say you hear voices?”Kander can laugh about the exchange now and includes it in his book.The therapy has worked wonders – “It’s getting a master’s in yourself,” is how his great-uncle John described it – and allowed him to rediscover the joys of marriage (his Ukrainian-born wife, Diana, contributes moving passages in the book), fatherhood (their children are eight and one) and baseball (he coaches a little league team).“The difference is now I will frequently choose to sit facing the door but I can sit with my back to the door usually without fidgeting a great deal. I generally don’t get the twitch in my eye. I generally don’t have, most of the time, nightmares.“PTSD treatment is not about getting cured. It’s about getting to the point where the symptoms of PTSD don’t disrupt your life and that’s what I was able to achieve in therapy.”Kander is also better equipped to deal with difficult ruptures such as last year’s chaotic US withdrawal from Afghanistan. He admits: “At first it was quite triggering and then I got very involved in evacuating people I care about from the country. That experience was newly traumatic and I had to go back and see my therapist again but I’m glad I did. It’s not simple but now I have the tools to navigate that.”Kander is the president of national expansion at Veterans Community Project, a non-profit organisation to which he will donate all the book’s royalties, and host of Majority 54, a political podcast. Kander has little time for the perennial moderates v progressives narrative dividing the Democratic party. “Everybody is engaged in this debate about whether the party needs to go further to the left or stay closer to the middle and they’re all completely missing the point. That’s not what’s going on in the part of the country I live in. You don’t get points for being less liberal; you get points for caring about what people are going through.”Kander says he wrote Invisible Storm because it was the book he would have wanted to read 14 years ago. He hopes it will encourage people to confront their own problems and understand that recovery and post-PTSD growth are possible.But given the bottomless cynicism in politics today, there will doubtless be somebody somewhere who theorises that the book is a calculated move towards resurrecting Kander’s career, perhaps even his White House ambitions.He finds that idea absurd.“I wrote this book understanding that if I ever get the desire to run for president again, people are going to say we can’t have a president who could end up stalking the White House at night because he’s worried about intruders,” he says. “If I ever run, it will be on me to be like, ‘I don’t have to do that any more because I got therapy.’“Yeah, that’s probably not the ideal debate to have in a presidential campaign. But I made the decision that if this book turns out to be something that precludes me from ever being able to to run for president but, if it helps a lot of people and saves a lot of lives, that is absolutely a trade I’m willing to make.”TopicsBooksUS politicsDemocratsMental healthinterviewsReuse this content More

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      In the Path of Abraham: selective memoir of Trump’s Israel policy

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      In the Path of Abraham: selective memoir of Trump’s Israel policyJason Greenblatt chronicles his work with Jared Kushner for Middle East peace, leaving out anything bad for his boss Jason Greenblatt was once in-house counsel to the Trump Organization. After the 2016 election, he became Donald Trump’s special representative for international negotiations. With Jared Kushner, he aimed to secure peace between Israel and the Palestinians.Trump’s Peace review: dysfunction and accord in US Israel policyRead moreJust like its predecessors, the Trump administration failed at that task.That cold reality might make some think the subtitle of Greenblatt’s new memoir – How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East and How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It – is at least a bit of an overstatement.On the other hand, Trump did deliver the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. The Trump administration also moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and shredded the Iran nuclear deal. The 45th president left his mark in so many places, in so many ways.As to be expected, Greenblatt’s book is silent about some of Trumpism’s darkest hours, its engagement with the antisemitic far right: Charlottesville, Nazis and tiki torch marches, the January 6 insurrection. Also predictably, he is happy to strafe Barack Obama, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.Greenblatt left the White House in late 2019. He volunteers that Kushner was “the best boss I ever had or will ever have – with the possible exception of his father-in-law”. These days, Greenblatt is engaged as an investor, like Kushner with an eye on the Middle East.Greenblatt’s book is a gentler and more graceful version of Sledgehammer, a memoir written by David Friedman, Trump’s ambassador to Israel. Like Friedman, Greenblatt attacks Biden and blows kisses at Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s once and possibly future prime minister.As was the case with Friedman, Greenblatt keeps mum about Trump saying of Netanyahu, “Fuck him,” as was reported by Barak Ravid in Trump’s Peace. Ravid captured Trump in all his profane and vindictive reality. He reported Trump’s critique of Netanyahu and his praise for Mahmoud Abbas, the ageing Palestinian leader.Trump told Ravid he believed Netanyahu “did not want to make peace. Never did.” As for Abbas, Trump said: “We spent a lot of time together, talking about many things. And it was almost like a father. I mean, he was so nice, couldn’t have been nicer.”Greenblatt skips both issues, choosing to stress Abbas’s hostility toward Israel and his recalcitrance in negotiations.Greenblatt also says he stood removed from politics until Trump launched his candidacy, and first registered as a Republican in 2016. No one would confuse him with Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer who entered a guilty plea and turned on his former boss.Greenblatt does not crave the spotlight but he can be subtly subversive. In the Path of Abraham casts bouquets at three Trump nemeses: Mike Pence, HR McMaster and John Bolton, McMaster’s successor as national security adviser. Trump dumped McMaster in a tweet after clashing over the Iran deal, then sent Bolton packing for his bellicosity.“Pence was, refreshingly, the authentic article,” Greenblatt writes, “… a man who was unflappable and unfailingly helpful, no matter the problem, big or small.”Greenblatt offers no comment about Pence’s plight in the Capitol on January 6, when the mob chanted for him to hang, or Trump’s reported comment that his vice-president deserved it.During his trip to Israel in 2017, Trump excluded McMaster from a meeting with Kushner, Netanyahu and the Israeli national security adviser. According to Israeli reports, Rex Tillerson, then secretary of state, was invited to join the group. But “McMaster sat outside the King David room during the course of the entire meeting”.McMaster suffered in silence. Bolton did not. “I don’t think [Trump’s] fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job,” he told ABC, promoting a book of his own.Mike Pompeo, by then secretary of state, called Bolton a traitor. Peter Navarro, the White House trade hawk who now labors under a contempt indictment, called Bolton’s book “deep swamp revenge porn”.In the Path of Abraham is not that. But as Greenblatt conveys his impressions of the Arab world, he chooses to call the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, “a truly visionary leader”.He writes: “I cannot possibly understand what then-candidate Biden was trying to accomplish when he said that he planned to make the ‘Saudis pay the price, and make them, in fact, the pariah that they are’.”It had something to do with US intelligence believing the prince ordered the murder, dismemberment and disposal of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi dissident and US resident who wrote for the Washington Post.Then again, with gas topping $5 a gallon, many Americans wish Biden would make nice with the Saudis and stay on script.Greenblatt also offers glowing praise for a leader of the UAE, writing: “Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, colloquially known by his initials as MBZ, is a unique leader. One of the most influential people in the Middle East, he also one of the most humble and thoughtful. Wise and extraordinarily open-minded, he knows the best way to plan for the future is to create it.”Sledgehammer review: David Friedman comes out swinging on Trump and IsraelRead moreIn the same spirit of trans-global high-fiving, Greenblatt has attracted blurbs of praise from Trump, Kushner, Pence, McMaster, Pompeo and a passel of Gulf-state ambassadors. The book could double as a prospectus.As the book lands, Greenblatt finds himself unexpectedly in the news. Last week, the New York Times reported that he made the introduction of Alex Holder to Kushner. Holder is the British documentary film-maker subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot.Fittingly, In the Path of Abraham contains a Yiddish proverb: “Mann Tracht, un Gott Lacht”. Translated: “Man plans and God laughs.” Greenblatt would be hard-pressed to find anyone close to Trump smiling at this moment – whatever their plans may be.
      In the Path of Abraham: How Donald Trump Made Peace in the Middle East – And How to Stop Joe Biden from Unmaking It, is published in the US by Post Hill Press
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      Under the Skin review: US healthcare, racism and a terrible toll taken

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      Under the Skin review: US healthcare, racism and a terrible toll takenLinda Villarosa paints a horrifying picture of embedded inequality and prejudice, yet still finds hope for the future Persistence, intelligence, a fierce devotion to the facts and an easy capacity for outrage. These are the building blocks of great journalism and they are the virtues that have made Linda Villarosa one of our most important activist-journalist-authors for several decades.A Way Out of No Way review: Raphael Warnock, symbol of hope for AmericaRead moreHer latest book, subtitled “The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of our Nation”, is a culmination of her important work going back to 1986, when her story Nobody’s Safe in Essence was the first article about HIV/Aids published in an ethnic magazine.That piece marked the moment Villarosa realized “that these kinds of stories would be my life’s work”. Americans have been benefiting from her persistence and intelligence ever since.Her new book tells a horrifying story about all the reasons Black Americans have been mistreated by doctors for centuries, beginning with the idea propagated under the transatlantic slave trade that Black men had a “primitive psychological organization” that made them “uniquely fitted for bondage”.Dr Samuel Cartwright of New Orleans went so far as to assert that the desire to escape was itself proof of a mental illness.It has been common knowledge for centuries that Black people suffer worse health outcomes than whites in America. But American racism has been so virulent for so long, it took even Villarosa many years to reject the idea that poor choices by Black people were the main reason for their misfortune.She writes: “As recently as 2016, a survey of 22 white medical students and residents … showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between Black people and white people, including that Black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than whites.”When asked to imagine how much pain white or Black people experienced from getting their hands slammed in a car door, the students “insisted that Black people felt less pain, which made the providers less likely to recommend appropriate treatment”.The proven facts are appalling: the racial disparity in infant mortality is “actually greater in the present day than in 1850, when Black women were human chattel”. African Americans aged 18 to 49 “are twice as likely to die from heart disease”. Black infants are more than twice as likely as white babies to die before their first birthday.Like the white medical establishment, Villarosa assumed poverty had to be a key factor in these statistics. But as researchers became more sophisticated, they discovered that “babies of more educated, higher-income Black parents were still more likely to be born small compared to their white counterparts”.In 1997, researchers developed nine questions to determine scientifically how much racism an individual has been subjected to, ranging from “people act as if they think you are not smart” to “people act as if they think you are dishonest”.What the data proved was that while socio-economic status and education are relevant, “the lived experience of being Black in America regardless of income and education, also affects health”.One proof came from a 1997 study comparing the birth weights of children from US-born Black people with the babies of African-born Black people and US-born whites.“The infants of the immigrant women from Africa closely matched in size to the white, not the Black, US-born babies. In other words, despite the disadvantages they experienced by being brought up in poorer countries, “their newborns were larger and more likely to be fuller term than babies born to African American women”.And then, “the grandchildren of the Caribbean and African immigrant women were born smaller than their mothers had been at birth”.As a super high-achiever with access to excellent health, Villarosa was shocked when she herself had a baby with below-average body weight.Some of the most depressing parts of the book are the stories about the persistence of racism at elite American institutions like Stanford University, where a talented Black pre-med female student was routinely dismissed by white classmates who assumed she was only there because of affirmative action.The same student said her four-year residency starting in 2002 was “a toxic mix” of racism and sexism.“If you were a woman who wasn’t traditionally feminine” or “a person of color … the mainly older white men who ran the residency treated you horribly.”And yet Villarosa remains resolutely optimistic. When part of this book was first published in a different version in the New York Times Magazine, under the title Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death Crisis, in 2018, she was thrilled when the then governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, responded with a pilot program to expand Medicaid coverage for birth doulas, “citing the need to target racial disparities in maternal mortality”.And even when the Covid epidemic arrived as she was writing this book, confirming her essential thesis about the inequitable treatment of Black people by the American healthcare system, Villarosa remained hopeful.She writes: “Together, America’s racial reckoning and a pandemic that has exposed long-standing racial health inequality have thrown an accelerant on a slow-burning fire of awareness, forcing America to grapple with issues of race and justice.”Villarosa’s unquenchable faith in the power of journalism makes her a worthy successor to another famous muckraker, Ida B Wells, whose fearless journalism focused a nation’s attention on the horrors of lynching more than a century ago.This book uses the same kind of ferocity to attack the persistent racism that infects the healthcare system in America.
      Under the Skin: the Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and on the Health of Our Nation is published in the US by Doubleday Books
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      Earthly Order: ‘mercurial professor’ with urgent ideas on climate change

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      Earthly Order: ‘mercurial professor’ with urgent ideas on climate changeIn his ambitious new book, distinguished professor Saleem Ali tries to bridge the gap between politics and science to help plan for a safer future Saleem Ali – whose Twitter bio begins “Mercurial Professor” – is not trying to be the new Stephen Hawking.“People buy all these theoretical physics books in droves because they think having them on the shelves will make them look smart,” opines the distinguished professor of energy and the environment at the University of Delaware. “A Brief History of Time is a very difficult book to read.”Poisoned legacy: why the future of power can’t be nuclearRead moreAli believes his own, anecdote-filled book is far more accessible. Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life is an ambitious effort to bridge the gap between politics and science, drawing on his experience as a National Geographic field explorer who has worked in more than 150 countries.Ali has three passports, having been born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, moved to Pakistan aged nine and lived in Australia for several years. In a phone interview from Delaware, he happily ruffles feathers by defending nuclear power, suggesting that democracies can learn lessons from autocracies and attacking the last sacred space on television: the nature documentary.“Some of these nature biodiversity documentaries can, in fact, create a problem because they lead to niche thinking,” he says. “They are good for some things like biodiversity conservation but they are not making the connections often that you need to do.”Indeed, the 48-year-old revels in complexity and loathes dumbing down – even if it means frustrating literary agents. “When I was writing the book, agents would ask me, ‘What’s your one argument?’ I’d say, ‘You know, I’m writing a book about earth systems, I can’t have one argument. I have to approach the issues with nuance.’ This is the problem we have, unfortunately, in terms of communication of environmental issues.”To illustrate the point, Ali cites predictions that Dubai in the United Arab Emirates will soon be so hot that it will be uninhabitable. “That is such a ludicrous statement from the point of view of looking at how humans have interacted with the environment,” he contends.“Most cities in the western world are uninhabitable in winter without infrastructure, including New York City or London – if you didn’t have heating you wouldn’t be able to survive or you could have a very short existence with hypothermia.“We have developed adaptive mechanisms so to say that Dubai would be uninhabitable in summer without air conditioning makes no sense from the point of view of earth systems. But it makes a good headline because people immediately start panicking and they’re like, ‘Oh my goodness, it’s becoming so bad.’”Humanity will have to adapt, he argues, for example through different types of architecture and more subterranean dwellings. He believes this is the pragmatic way forward in responding to some climate crisis thresholds that are now irreversible – while still aggressively reducing dependence on fossil fuels and refusing to surrender to the worst-case scenario.“If we frame the conversation as, look, this is going to be a future which is not ideal, we wish we had not gone that pathway, we wish we had reduced emissions, but now we need to figure out what’s the best way to adapt to this new future, that would be much more constructive and realistic to work through with some of the people who have been climate deniers.“But it wouldn’t mean complacency. You still need a lot of action around it. That’s where I feel as though we’ve been remiss in attacking this issue.”Ali is among the voices who contend that nuclear power, long anathema to many on the left, deserves a second look. It currently provides about a fifth of electricity in the US, accounting for about half the country’s carbon-free energy, and some companies – including one started by the Microsoft founder Bill Gates – are developing smaller, cheaper reactors that could supplement the grid.But the US has no long-term plan for managing or disposing of radioactive waste that can persist in the environment for thousands of years. Nuclear disasters at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, Chernobyl in Ukraine and Fukushima in Japan have cast a long shadow. Although countries such as France are sticking with the technology or planning to build more plants, others, including Germany, are phasing out their reactors.Ali argues: “There has been a completely emotional kneejerk response to Fukushima, especially in Germany, which they are realising now was a mistake. If you look at the actual science in terms of the natural order of how energy is extracted from materials, nuclear energy is the most energy-dense resource.“If you look at the data in terms of the the morbidity and mortality of Fukushima, you had not a single person die of radiation exposure; they died of the tsunami. The International Atomic Energy Agency published a report last year which showed that there were no cancer clusters around there either. And yet you had an entire energy policy recrafted. That is why Germany is in this dependency situation.”Indeed, Ali does not believe that western democracies have all the right answers. He suggests that for decades their leaders have been talking about climate in a fashion that is too narrow, failing to join dots in the public imagination. He is donating all royalties from the book to environmental literacy programmes in developing countries.“There was a strategic mistake made in terms of framing it just as climate change. I always like, with my students, to talk about global environmental change. We’re talking about many aspects of the global system which are changing. When people think of climate change, immediately it is just resonating as, ‘Oh, are we getting more heat or cold?’“That’s not really what’s going on. We’re talking about water scarcity. We’re talking about the ways in which energy is going to be delivered. If we had framed the conversation around global environmental change, it would have been easier to be able to figure out all of these interconnections.”Ali, who has a PhD in environmental planning, continues: “We assume that democratic systems are going to be able to deliver efficient outcomes but the reality is democratic systems are often very short-term-oriented because they are driven by election cycles.“We have the same problem with reference to even business decision making, especially publicly traded companies which are driven by quarterly earnings reports. When you’re talking about long-range impacts, there is definitely a disconnect between both aspects.“We threw the baby out with the bathwater when we started to lobby against planning. ‘Planning’ had these connotations that it was going back to somehow centrally planned economies but you need a certain bureaucracy to continue the planning programmes and we needed to have planning independent of the political apparatus. That’s been another reason why, unfortunately, we have ended up in this current impasse with climate change.”Do autocracies, which Joe Biden warns are locked in a global struggle with democracies, do it better? Ali, whose book draws a contrast between China and India, says: “China is going to have problems in terms of their dependence on coal but there is definitely a much more technically oriented approach to decision making in China. Even if you take out the part about the central planning, the Confucian approach has been much more around let’s bring technocracy to the mix.”Public transport in a classic example, he believes, with China deciding to switch from planes to trains as the dominant mode between major cities and getting it done within a decade. “Here in the US we’re stuck with Amtrak, which they have still not been able to change because there isn’t this sense of let’s work through all of the technical details and make it happen based on those decisions.“That’s also linked to the fact we have a very litigious culture that makes it very challenging to be able to develop new projects. Unfortunately, in current democracies the actual process of getting feedback and stakeholder engagement and litigation becomes an end in itself. There is just no point at which you draw the line and say, OK, now we have to move forward.”This, he continues, is one of the reasons that the outsider businessman Donald Trump was an attractive proposition to millions of frustrated voters in the 2016 presidential election. “People saw that at least there was this willingness to make a decision. Much as I lament many aspects of his policies – building the wall – there was a decision.“In environmental discourse, we often talk about the precautionary principle, that you have to be careful about things, but if you go to the extreme, it becomes paralysis because you can’t make any kind of forward movement. That’s the main problem we have had.”But no, Ali is not calling for dictatorship in America, as he insists: “Democracies can correct that. I don’t see this as being something that only autocracies can do. We just need democracies to be made more efficient and form processes where decisions are based on technical knowledge and, after a certain point, that technical knowledge should trump – for want of a better word – negotiations.”By Ali’s lights, environmental awareness is no longer enough; environmental literacy is critical to the survival of the planet. Or as he puts it: “Depth in understanding of complexity is essential for functional order on Earth.”
      Earthly Order: How Natural Laws Define Human Life is out on 15 July
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      If We Break review: Hunter Biden as horror husband and political problem

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      If We Break review: Hunter Biden as horror husband and political problemKathleen Buhle’s memoir in answer to a similar confessional from the president’s son makes uncomfortable reading Hunter Biden was a nasty husband. On top of his penchant for addiction and excess, verbal abuse littered his marriage to Kathleen Buhle. In her memoir, If We Break, Buhle recounts how the 46th president’s surviving son regularly taunted her for supposed intellectual shortcomings.Fox News’ Sean Hannity pitched Trump on Hunter Biden pardon – reportRead moreAmid booze-soaked benders and drug-fueled rages, Biden called his wife “goddam dumb”, the “dumbest person” he had met. “Get away from me, you idiot,” he purportedly thundered.Buhle discovered text messages that showed she wasn’t alone in suffering such tirades.“He was mean at times, and strangely tender, with dozens of women,” Buhle writes. “I was struck by the number of them who clearly thought they could save him.”Buhle attended a Catholic high school then graduated from St Mary’s University in San Antonio with a degree in psychology. Biden pocketed degrees from Georgetown University and Harvard Law School, but declined to look too deeply into the mirror. Socio-economic disadvantage is not to blame for his penchant for crack, prostitutes and self-pity. Buhle writes that she once told him: “Hunt … a kid from a middle-class family does not have a ballroom.” He also had a “tuxedo hanging in his closet – a tuxedo he used fairly regularly”.The conservative muckraker Peter Schweizer has shredded the Bidens for their business dealings. Yearning for catharsis as much as for score-settling, Buhle says she knows nothing of her former husband’s financial escapades.“I liked the nice things,” she admits. “I didn’t want to think about the cost at which they were coming.Otherwise, she has plenty to share. Subtitled “A Memoir of Marriage, Addiction and Healing”, her book is a dagger.The couple met in 1992, as members of the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. They married the next year and had three daughters. For Hunter, alcoholism and tax problems surfaced in the early 2000s. Later, the US navy expelled him for using cocaine. In 2017, he and Buhle divorced.If We Break is easy reading, published in time for Father’s Day. It leaves you wondering how and why Joe Biden pursued the presidency in 2020 when all this family drama was percolating away. Hunter’s laptop, a computer he once owned that Republicans claim is full of incriminating material, debuted before election day. It is still producing stories. If We Break may shock but it does not surprise.Buhle demonstrates better judgment than her ex-husband, who published his own memoir last year. She knew when to walk away. He had difficulty letting go. More important, she understood that not that all broken things can be repaired.Buhle possesses an awareness of self and circumstances her ex-husband evidently lacks. For example, in 2015, just minutes after Beau Biden, his brother, was buried, Hunter contemplated running for elected office as Beau once did, becoming attorney general of Delaware. Buhle’s reaction was short and to the point.“What are you talking about? You’ve only been sober a few days … This is insane. Please don’t mention anything to the girls.”Hunter did blab – in Beautiful Things, his self-reverential confessional.“I underestimated how much the wreckage of my past and all that I put my family through still weighed on Kathleen,” he wrote.Think self-absolution and exhibitionism, rather than contrition, in an episode that preceded a fling with his late brother’s wife.“He said it was his duty to take care of Hallie and her kids,” Buhle writes. When she learned of their affair, all she could muster was: “Oh my God.” She says she didn’t cry. At that moment, she writes, she “knew in some way that he couldn’t hurt [her] any more”.For what it’s worth, the Old Testament obligates the brother of a childless man to marry the widow. But Beau had two kids and anyway, religious duty was most likely not on Hunter’s mind. In 2018, according to emails harvested from that laptop, Hunter insisted Hallie test for HIV.Joe Biden makes only rare appearances in If We Break. Buhle depicts him as a loving father and kind father-in-law. He greeted her when they first met by putting “his hands on [her] cheeks and look[ing] me in the eyes, his nose almost touching my own”. Then a senator, Biden told her: “Honey, my boy tells me he loves you, so that means I love you too. Understand? I love you.”Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyRead moreAt the time, she was pregnant. Buhle also writes that Biden introduced her “as his daughter everywhere we went” and that the family saw the future president as “the sun around which we all revolved”.A lot revolves around Hunter. A federal criminal investigation proceeds. Taxes are only part of his worries.For his father, in terms of political pressures, inflation is on the rampage, approval numbers circle the drain. Democratic cognoscenti harbor serious doubts about the president’s capacity to govern. David Axelrod, Barack Obama’s senior strategist, casts Biden’s age as a major liability. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez declines to say if she will back a reelection bid.Yet Biden was the only Democrat capable of unseating Trump. The bench is neither wide nor deep.Count Katherine Buhle’s memoir as another addition to the canon of opposition research on the Bidens, should Joe Biden run for re-election. Buhle shouldn’t expect a thank you note from Kevin McCarthy or Mitch McConnell, but she has earned one.
      If We Break: A Memoir of Marriage Addiction and Healing is published in the US by Crown Publishing
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      A Way Out of No Way review: Raphael Warnock, symbol of hope for America

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      A Way Out of No Way review: Raphael Warnock, symbol of hope for America The Democratic Georgia senator has delivered an inspiring memoir, well-timed as the US tears itself apart We live in an age of miracles but we spend very little time noticing that. After four years of Donald Trump, two years of Covid and four months of vicious war in Ukraine, it’s hardly surprising many feel overwhelmed by seemingly relentless bad news.Seen and Unseen review: George Floyd, Black Twitter and the fight for racial justiceRead moreRaphael Warnock’s inspiring memoir arrives just in time to remind us that even in our darkest days, America offers at least as much hope as despair.Warnock was at the center of the most recent set of miracles, which came about in large part because of the registration and activism of Black voters in key states in 2020. In Georgia it began when a former state house minority leader, Stacey Abrams, identified 800,000 eligible but unregistered voters and formed the New Georgia Project to get as many on the rolls as possible.Warnock joined Abrams’ campaign. Despite the outrageous efforts of then secretary of state (now governor) Brian Kemp, who falsely accused them of voter fraud, by 2019 they had registered 500,000 voters. That made three miracles possible: Joe Biden became the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia in 28 years and Warnock and Jon Ossoff became the first Black and Jewish senators elected from the state, miraculously giving Democrats (tenuous) control of the Senate.Nothing is more filled with hope than the trajectory of Warnock’s life. He was the 11th of 12 children. His father made his living collecting scrap metal and preaching while his mother was a homemaker until she became the preacher in the family.Warnock’s life is proof that the federal government has done important things to level the playing field in crucial ways. Warnock got his first leg-up through Head Start, one of the greatest legacies of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Then he got enrolled in Upward Bound, a federally financed summer college preparatory program that strengthened his confidence “and provided the path for the pursuit of my dreams”. For a kid growing up in a neighborhood where no one had a bachelor’s degree, this “demystified the idea of college and gave me a clear vision of what was possible”.But the advantages he started with were even more important, especially a mom who is “a preacher with a God-given sense of spiritual discernment”, who “could read people and situations better than anyone I’ve ever known”. Warnock grew up in a housing project devastated by crack and Aids, “but in a place where there were too many missing fathers, I had two devoted parents at home, and they kept church at the center of our lives”.His parents never let him forget that while we live in a nation “in need of moral surgery”, with “hope, hard work, and the people by our side anything is possible”.The college he chose was Morehouse, a vital Black institution with alumni justly famous for “world-changing accomplishments” including the former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, civil rights leader Julian Bond, Spike Lee, theologian Howard Thurman and of course Martin Luther King Jr.Although Warnock was born a year after King’s assassination, “more than anybody or anything else” it was King who “recruited” him to Morehouse.Warnock is particularly proud that he can trace his own development directly to the greatest American civil rights leader of the 20th century. During college he interned at Sixth Avenue Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was mentored by the Rev John Thomas Porter, who had been a pulpit assistant to Martin Luther King Jr and his father.The civil rights pioneer Jesse Jackson was another role model, one of many “courageous souls” who laid “the groundwork for candidates of color and women to run and win high political offices presumed out of reach”. These pioneers showed Warnock “that to be effective, you have to be willing to put your body in the game – show up, give what you have (your time, your money, your skills), and do what you’re asking of others”.Morehouse was the beginning of Warnock’s introduction to the elite Black establishment nourished by historically Black colleges and universities and Black churches. While greedy, racist born-again Christians get most of our attention, this book reminds us there is another religious network which has been hugely important to America’s progress, strengthening and nurturing the Black community.A brilliant natural preacher who gave his first sermon at 11, a sincere servant of God, Warlock had a meteoritic rise, going from Morehouse to Union theological seminary in New York and then to Manhattan’s most famous Black house of worship, the Abyssinian Baptist church, where he quickly became an intern minister. There he had another crucial mentor, the Rev Dr Calvin O Butts III, an alumnus of both schools Warnock attended.Race at the Top: white and Asian Americans and the push for equity in educationRead moreAt 31, Warnock became senior pastor at Douglas Memorial Community church in Baltimore, where he demonstrated remarkable courage by starting with an attack on church homophobia. He built his installation ceremony around activities designed to heighten HIV/Aids awareness, “to signal to my church … the kind of ministry we would build together”.Just a couple of years later, in 2005, he got the greatest honor of all when King’s Ebenezer Baptist church elected him senior pastor, by the vote of 90% of the congregation. Sixteen years later, he was a United States senator.May Warnock’s unlikely success and irrepressible optimism be enough to remind all of us that the only thing needed to rescue our beleaguered democracy is a genuine willingness by the enlightened citizens who are still a majority to put our bodies back in the game. If the rest of us can be half as courageous as Warnock is, he reminds us, we can still “build a future that honors the sacrifices of those who came before us and is worthy of the promise that lives in all our children”.
      A Way Out of No Way: A Memoir of Truth, Transformation and the New American Story is published in the US by Penguin
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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and family

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      Rough Draft review: Katy Tur’s fascinating – and flawed – story of news and familyThe MSNBC anchor follows her Trump bestseller with a compelling memoir but her press criticism falls flat Katy Tur spent 500 days covering Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, wrote a bestselling book called Unbelievable, and now hosts a show on MSNBC. She was planning to pitch a memoir about the 2020 election but changed her mind during the Covid pandemic, after a heavy package arrived from her mother.Because Our Fathers Lied review: Robert McNamara, Vietnam and a partial healingRead moreThe package contained a hard drive, which contained every minute of tape her parents, Bob Tur and Marika Gerrard, had taken as sole proprietors of the Los Angeles News Service. The drive contained all the footage shot from helicopters piloted by her father, Bob: from Madonna giving her parents the finger on the day she married Sean Penn to the famous chase of OJ Simpson as he sped through the streets of LA in a white Ford Bronco.As a child, Katy was often a passenger as her mother leaned far out of the cockpit to catch the best possible shot. Her daredevil father once got so close to a forest fire, he was cited for fanning its flames. Sometimes Katy felt the heat on her shins from a blaze barely 500ft below.That hard drive convinced Tur to switch subject. Her second book therefore tells a story she had spent her adult life avoiding: the story of her childhood. The switch was the right choice because even a particularly hard-fought campaign could not compete with the drama of her upbringing.Bob Tur was the kind of journalist who would do anything to get the story, “an oracle” to Katy. When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power to half of Los Angeles, her father used a forklift to rip open a hangar door so he could drag the chopper out and take off.He had such good sources in the fire department that he and his wife once scooped KABC-Los Angeles when its own 11pm anchor was shot outside the station. The Turs then sold the tape to KABC. A few hours later, Katy was born.Years later, she fondly recalled a childhood that “smelled like eucalyptus trees, the Pacific ocean and jet fuel”. But she was resolutely silent about all the ghastly things she experienced.Her father was the son of a gambler who would take him to the racetrack, give him the rent money to keep it from his own father, then beat his own son to get it back. Bob Tur’s “nose was broken by his father’s fist”, his “hand stabbed with his father’s fork”, his “face slashed by his father’s key”. He was “missing a piece of his ear because his father sliced it off”. In his mid-teens, Bob ran away.But according to Katy Tur, her father was unable to unlearn the worst lessons of his childhood and repeated the pattern of violence in his adult life, striking his wife, whipping Katy and her brother, punching holes in the living room walls.When Tur was covering the Boston Marathon bombing, she got the most startling call of her life. Her father told her he had “decided to become a woman. It’s why I’ve been so angry.”After the transition, Zoey Tur attacked Katy Tur for allegedly being transphobic. She insists she has always been supportive of such a courageous decision. But what she could not forgive was Zoey’s refusal to discuss or acknowledge the violence Bob Tur inflicted on his family, because the man who committed it no longer existed.Tur writes: “It felt like my dad was playing a get-out-of-gender-free card I didn’t know existed … I was dumbfounded by the idea that a person could change their gender … and think that in the process the deeds of the past would no longer be relevant.”It was “like a bank robber pleading not guilty on account of gender misalignment. But that’s how my father saw it.”“Bob Tur is dead,” Zoey Tur said. But, Katy Tur replied, “The stuff Bob Tur did isn’t dead.”The family story gives Katy Tur’s book its spine and its power. But interspersed with personal history are occasional attempts at press criticism which reveal uneven judgement.On the one hand, Tur acknowledges that her parents’ hugely successful focus on sensationalism is often blamed for the downfall of local TV news, and “some would say the downfall of national TV news too”.“They don’t dispute it,” she writes. “Neither do I.”But when she complains that too many people bemoan the decline of her profession in the decades since Walter Cronkite practiced it, she goes completely off the rails.Quoting a biography of Cronkite by Douglas Brinkley, another pundit of uneven judgement, she endorses the absurd idea that CBS Evening News covered the civil rights movement of the 1960s too sympathetically – citing as evidence the fact that bigoted southern affiliates derided their New York parent as the “Colored Broadcasting Station.”Tur also thinks it was wrong for the CBS Evening News to devote two thirds of its broadcast to Watergate two days before the 1972 election, when the New York Times and every major organization except the Washington Post was ignoring the scandal.The Great Stewardess Rebellion review: stirring study of what Roe v Wade helped vanquishRead moreShe disputes Cronkite’s 1968 description of Chicago police under Mayor Richard Daley as a “bunch of thugs”, a description delivered when the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff was accurately accusing Daley of using “Gestapo tactics” against leftwing protesters.Tur even questions Cronkite’s single finest moment, also in ’68, when he accurately identified Vietnam as a “stalemate” after the Tet offensive.Tur is a better than average network news correspondent. I admired her work when she covered Trump. But judgements like the ones she passes on Cronkite are the very reason so many long for the days when networks employed correspondents of the caliber of Roger Mudd, Richard Threlkeld, Charles Kuralt, Elie Abel, Bob Simon, Charles Collingwood, Ed Bradley, Edwin Newman, Jim Wooten and more – all of whom were vastly superior to their current counterparts.
      Rough Draft: Motherhood and Journalism in a World Gone Mad is published in the US by Atria/One Signal
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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts

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      Here’s the Deal review: Kellyanne Conway on Trump – with plenty of alternative facts The former White House counselor’s memoir is tart, readable and thoroughly selective when it comes to inconvenient truthsKellyanne Conway joined Donald Trump’s orbit after Ted Cruz’s presidential bid collapsed and Paul Manafort wore out his welcome. The Trump White House was a snake pit. Like most Trump memoirs, Conway’s book revels in selective recall as well as settling scores. After all, this is the woman who coined the term “alternative facts”.A Sacred Oath review: Mark Esper on Trump, missiles for Mexico and more Read moreConway strafes Steve Bannon, Jared Kushner and Mark Meadows, Trump’s last chief of staff. Her disdain is unvarnished, her language tart. Her book? Readable.Conway labels Bannon a “leaking dirigible” and an “unpaternal, paternalistic bore of a boor”. She dings his aesthetics and questions his stability. Confronted with the possibility Bannon might receive a presidential pardon, Conway says, she told him Trump didn’t owe him anything.“You were a leaker,” she remembers saying. “You were terrible to [Trump] in the press … You were the only source for at least two books riddled with lies.”He got the pardon anyway.Some who feel Conway’s sting are very close to home. She sticks a knife in her own husband, George, for trashing Trump and embarrassing her. Between the two men, Conway posits that Trump was the one who remained loyal. She may wish to reconsider. Her book has kindled Trump’s wrath.“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway writes, about the 2020 defeat Trump has refused to admit. But Trump denies she said any such thing.“If she had I wouldn’t have dealt with her any longer – she would have been wrong – could go back to her crazy husband,” he “truthed” on Thursday on his own ersatz Twitter, Truth Social.But Trump can’t say he wasn’t warned. The Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s 2016 campaign exposé, captures Conway both badmouthing Trump’s chances and playing the sycophant.In 2019, Cliff Sims, once a junior White House staffer, framed things this way in his memoir, Team of Vipers: “Kellyanne stood in a class of own in terms of her machinations – I had to admire her sheer gall.”In Here’s the Deal, Kellyanne soft-pedals Green but is far less charitable to Sims. She rehashes his departure from the White House, dismisses him as a lightweight and gloats over Trump targeting him with a “brutal” takedown on Twitter.Left unsaid is that Sims played a significant role at the 2020 Republican convention, drafting speeches for two Trump children. And whatever his sins, he came to be re-embraced by senior Trump staff even after he challenged a Trump-induced non-disclosure agreement in court.On a matter of greater importance, Conway lauds Bob Mercer and his daughter Rebekah, the conservative mega-donors who invested in Cambridge Analytica, the now-defunct psychographic profiling company which was linked to Bannon.Rebekah Mercer allegedly provided connective tissue for the January 6 insurrection, via Parler. Conway omits such details. Not surprisingly, she also ignores Bob Mercer’s tax woes. In 2021, with his business partners, Mercer reportedly entered into a $7bn settlement with the IRS.Like many in Trumpworld, Conway hits Facebook for its role in the 2020 election. But she omits the nexus between Mark Zuckerberg’s social media giant and Cambridge Analytica, in 2016 and beyond. The two businesses shared more than a passing acquaintance.Cambridge Analytica illegally harvested personal data from Facebook. Conway takes Bannon to task for profiting from his investment in Cambridge Analytica but stays mum about the Mercers’ ownership.In 2016, the Cruz campaign spent more than $5.8m on Cambridge Analytica services. That same year, the unseen hand of the company put it sticky fingers on the scales of Brexit. This past week, the attorney general for the District of Columbia launched a lawsuit against Facebook in connection with the Cambridge Analytica data breach.Here’s the Deal also contains its fair share of semi-veiled ethnic reductionism. Conway writes of how she “made her bones” – a term with mafia origins – in Trump’s 2016 campaign. Elsewhere, she deploys “clever”, “shrewd” and “calculating” to describe Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law who is Jewish. At the same time, she shares a desire to keep things “classy”.Some realities cut too close to the bone. Despite acknowledging Trump’s loss in 2020, Conway is silent on his infamous post-election call with Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, in which he sought to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, that you’ve recalculated.”The only thing missing was the president telling Raffensperger he was receiving an offer he couldn’t refuse. Unsurprisingly, Conway has few kind words for Biden. She recounts the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan and rightly tags his administration for inflation. But she also blames the president for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and for Iran threatening nuclear breakout.This Will Not Pass review: Trump-Biden blockbuster is dire reading for DemocratsRead moreHello, alternative facts. In February, Trump praised Vladimir Putin as smart and denigrated Nato. These days, Putin is under siege and Nato is the club to join. This somehow escapes Conway’s attention.As for Tehran, Axios reports that senior Israeli military officials now view Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal as having “brought Iran closer to a nuclear weapon and created a worse situation”. An attempt to placate Trump’s base had a cost.Conway remains in the arena. Here’s the Deal doubles as an audition for a campaign slot in 2024. In Trumpworld, few are ever permanently banished. Conway should ask Steve Bannon. He could tell her some things.
      Here’s the Deal is published in the US by Simon & Schuster
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