Joe Biden Just Had a Summit with Vladimir Putin and Nothing Crazy Happened

The circumstances surrounding his meeting with Vladimir Putin were such that Biden could come out of it with the world wondering why he’d bothered at all.

The triumph of Geneva is that it was not Helsinki.

Did Joe Biden finally exorcise the ghost of Helsinki? “I did what I came to do,” he declared on Wednesday, at the end of an afternoon summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Speaking to reporters in brilliant sunshine outside an eighteenth-century villa in Geneva, where the two had concluded several hours of discussion, Biden insisted that he left the meeting with a “genuine prospect” for improved relations with Russia. He also announced further talks, on nuclear arms and cyberwarfare, that may or may not lead to new agreements. Just as newsy as the meeting’s limited concrete outcomes was the image of an American President standing up to Putin in all the ways that Donald Trump—the last American President to meet Putin—never did.

Back in 2018, on a lovely summer day in Helsinki, in a press conference that will long be remembered as a most bizarre sellout of American interests, Trump had alternately praised his Russian counterpart and cowered to him. He said that he accepted Putin’s word over that of his own intelligence agencies about Russia’s election interference in 2016. He blamed the United States for bad relations with Russia. Putin stood smirking alongside him as he said all of these things.

Biden’s summit was carefully orchestrated to send a very different message. Most significantly, given Helsinki, there would be no joint press conference, no side-by-side appearance at which Putin could upstage Biden or provoke or taunt him. Biden would not meet alone with Putin, without a note-taker, as Trump had insisted on doing—who knows why—in 2018. And there would be no chatty lunch or informal socializing, as is often scheduled during such superpower summits.

The timing of the meeting in Geneva—after a round of meetings with Western counterparts in the United Kingdom and Brussels—also underscored Biden’s I’m-not-Trump approach. The President only met with Putin after days of mutual lovefests with Western allies; Trump ended up in Helsinki after a nato summit so contentious that he had forced the group into an emergency session and, at one point, even threatened to blow up the alliance. Biden, in contrast, arrived in Geneva representing a more publicly united front. Unlike Trump. And unlike Putin, for that matter, who has . . . Belarus? China, sort of? At a nato summit on Monday, the alliance released a lengthy communiqué that mentioned Russia sixty-two times, characterizing the country as a “threat” and cataloguing a variety of grievances and concerns about its actions in recent years.

Still, the many days of buildup also risked the summit seeming like a letdown. No matter how low Biden’s advisers sought to set expectations, Putin has engaged in a series of provocations in recent months—from sending more than a hundred thousand troops to the border with Ukraine to jailing Russia’s main opposition leader to unleashing crippling cyberattacks inside the United States—that progress of any kind seemed unlikely. Biden could still come out of it with the world and much of Washington wondering just why had he bothered with the summit in the first place.

As the capstone for Biden’s first overseas trip as President, the Putin meeting began with a photo op in a spectacular book-lined study in the sprawling Villa La Grange, on Lake Geneva. The smallest details were covered as breathless breaking news: What does it mean that Biden called the Russian leader a “worthy adversary” before the meeting? Why did Putin call Biden a “career man,” given that his own two decades in power make him Russia’s longest-serving leader since Josef Stalin? During a long wait for the two leaders to come out and actually say something, reporters pored over the staged photos in search of meaning; one sharp-eyed Mexican journalist even noted that the two delegations each had their own different brand of bottled water.

When Putin emerged to hold the first post-summit debrief with the press, it became clear that the pre-game Kremlinology was pointless. Putin was still the usual Putin, if a bit more restrained than usual. His default play has long been to rebuff all critical questions about Russia with criticism of the United States, and it should be stipulated that Putin remains world class in the art of whataboutism. Pressed by reporters, he answered questions about human rights in Russia by talking about the U.S. prison in Guantánamo, U.S. drone strikes on an Afghan wedding party, and shootings in U.S. streets. Later, he threw in references to Black Lives Matter protests, American support for a “bloodthirsty coup d’état” in Ukraine in 2014, and the U.S.’s withdrawal from various treaties in recent years. In fact, Putin insisted, “everything to do with the deterioration of our mutual relations was initiated not by us but by the U.S.A.” Eventually, and to no one’s surprise, he got around to mentioning the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, offering up a pro-Trump version of events in which protesters were arrested “on what grounds, it’s not clear.”

Beyond that, there was little to be learned from Putin’s press conference. His opening statement was so brief that it suggested he did not want to talk about the meeting at all. True to form, he did not admit to carrying out cyberattacks, never mind agree to cease them. He revealed that the two countries had decided to return their ambassadors to their posts after months of hostilities, acknowledged that Biden had brought up human rights, and offered a sense that “professional,” “constructive” dialogue had taken place. His tone regarding Biden was cordial. It all seemed like the kind of post-summit press conference that might have taken place in a different time.

Biden was more forthcoming in his remarks. He had vowed in advance that he would talk tough to Putin, and he insisted afterward that he had done so. He said he promised “devastating” consequences if the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexey Navalny should die, and serious but unspecified retaliation if Russia continues its cyberattacks inside the United States. Biden said he told Putin that “human rights is going to always be on the table.” It’s “part of the DNA of our country.” Biden did not mention Trump or make explicit any comparison with his predecessor, who cared not at all about human rights; as is often the case, Biden did not have to.

Perhaps the most revealing moment of Biden’s press conference came at the end, as he was walking out. The President got testy at a shouted question from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, about whether this could be called a successful summit given Putin’s obvious recalcitrance. “Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?” she asked. Turning back to confront her, Biden said, “I’m not confident he’ll change his behavior. When did I say I was confident?” The flash of anger, if nothing else, showed what most concerned Biden: that he might be portrayed as falling, once again, into Putin’s trap. Falling for Putin was what Trump had done, and Biden is clearly striving to be the un-Trump. No one was going to portray him as Putin’s dupe. “I’m not confident of anything,” Biden added. “I’m just stating the facts.”

When he got to the airport, Biden seemed a bit chagrined at his own display of temper. “I owe my last questioner an apology. I shouldn’t have been such a wise guy,” he told pool reporters who were waiting to board Air Force One. Donald Trump never would have said that, either.

So did Biden succeed at least in banishing the memory of Trump’s gross betrayal in Helsinki? It may prove easier to convince Putin that America has moved on than Republicans back in Washington, where the bizarre legacy of Trump has distorted the politics of Russia policy more than almost any other issue. For his part, Trump refuses to disavow Putin or anything about their Helsinki summit. Indeed, in a statement he issued before the Geneva meeting, Trump once again reminded the world of it. Helsinki, Trump said, was “great and very productive,” a meeting where he “won . . . the respect of President Putin and Russia.” As for his most shocking claim in Finland—that he would take Putin’s word over that of U.S. intelligence agencies regarding Russia’s interference in the 2016 election—Trump is still clinging to that one, too, presenting it as an easy choice between Putin and the “sleazebags” and “lowlifes” in America’s intelligence community. In April, in an interview with the Fox News host Sean Hannity, Trump practically rhapsodized about his relationship with Putin. “I got along great with President Putin,” Trump said. “I liked him. He liked me.” Trump does not want to move on from Helsinki; he still thinks he did great.

That, of course, did not stop many Republicans this week from attacking Biden about the Putin summit, as if Helsinki had never happened. The Trump confidant Lindsey Graham, the Republican senator from South Carolina, told Hannity that Biden was practicing “appeasement” of Putin. Mike Pompeo, Trump’s former Secretary of State, said on the same show that refusing to hold a joint press conference with Putin—as Trump had—was an admission of “enormous weakness” on Biden’s part. During the summit, three Republican senators—Ted Cruz, John Barrasso, and Ron Johnson—put out a joint statement that said Biden was “sending a message of weakness and appeasement to our adversaries, encouraging and emboldening them.”

Historical revisionism, it seems, is not confined to Trump’s efforts to turn his 2020 defeat into a victory, or the January 6th pro-Trump riot at the Capitol into a peaceful celebration of democracy. If nothing else, the hypocritical bashing of Biden for holding a summit with Putin is a reminder that, as much as Trump sycophancy is the new normal for the Republican Party, the old normal of attacking Democrats as soft on Russia is still around, too. Can they coexist? We live in a choose-your-reality era of politics. For Trump, Helsinki will live forever; for other Republicans, the Cold War never died. There’s an audience for both, I guess. 

So why not?

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Europe ‘nowhere close’ To Reopening For Tourists

It was the sort of development that might catch the eye of anyone weary of lockdowns: The Italian island of Sicily wants to lure back tourists by discounting plane tickets and covering every third night in hotels.

But even as European nations begin to emerge from stay-at-home restrictions, they are nowhere close to reopening as international vacation destinations.

The most optimistic countries - Greece and Portugal among them - hope there's a chance they might be able to pitch themselves as safe options by the second half of summer. Others, including Italy, are looking to regional travel to partially salvage their tourism industries and economies, while they sort out when to reopen borders and whom to let in.

"It is too soon to say whether we can take holidays," President Emmanuel Macron told French citizens on Tuesday. "What I can say is that we will limit major international travel, even during the summer. We will stay among Europeans and, depending on how the epidemic evolves, we might have to reduce that a little more."

Travel has been tightly restricted in Europe since March, when the continent's vaunted open borders closed in quick succession, and the European Union shut its external boundaries to nonessential travel. European leaders credit the combination of those closures and strict social distancing measures with helping them to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus.

Now, as governments seek to get their societies moving again without triggering an unmanageable spike in transmissions, they are counting on continued or even reinforced restrictions at their borders to help maintain some level of control.

The European Union's ban on nonessential travel from countries outside the bloc is set to expire on May 17. But one E.U. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss deliberations, said the ban was highly likely to be extended for another month, at least.

On top of that, some countries are considering mandatory quarantines for international arrivals.

British Transport Secretary Grant Shapps told the BBC last weekend that he was "actively looking at" the possibility of a 14-day quarantine, "so that when we have infection rates within the country under control, we're not importing."

British airline lobbyists objected that a quarantine would be a "blunt tool" that "would effectively kill air travel."

A provision under consideration by the French parliament this week would require 14 days of isolation for new arrivals and up to 30 days for people with symptoms.

The government has clarified that people from the European Union would be exempt, as would, for instance, truck drivers transporting good. But it remains unclear whether the measure would apply to travelers from all other countries, or only those on a French government list of "zones where the virus is circulating." Macron earlier voiced particular concern about the United States being behind Europe on the outbreak curve.

Within Europe, too, the progression of the virus may influence when borders between countries come down.

Thierry Breton, a European commissioner who handles tourism policy for the E.U. bloc, told French radio that it is likely that certain areas of the E.U. would be open to tourists and others not. He said borders could turn on and off between E.U. countries depending on the outbreak.

"It is like this, and it has to be accepted," he said. "The borders of the pandemic do not match geographical borders."

Austria, which has been confident in its virus management and was among the first European countries to relax its lockdown, has broached the idea of a travel bubble with neighboring Germany, which has been similarly credited with its coronavirus response.

German tourism commissioner Thomas Bareiss confirmed to Der Tagesspiegel newspaper that Germany was in talks with its neighbors about permitting summer vacation travel.

"I hope that, given the good numbers, we will be able to relax the restrictions in the next four to eight weeks," he said, adding that destinations "that can be reached by car" would be the most likely possibilities.

Other countries, though, don't appear ready to reopen their borders any time soon.

France has extended its coronvirus-related border controls until the end of October. Denmark, Norway and Sweden have indicated that theirs will continue until at least Nov. 12.

Some officials have expressed hope that coronavirus tracking apps might enable countries to open their borders to fellow Europeans, while retaining the ability to alert people who may have been exposed to the virus. But such apps are in their early stages. There are concerns about whether the voluntary technology will be adopted widely. And the versions France and Britain are pursuing may not be compatible with the rest of Europe.

For the tourism dependent economies of southern Europe, there is widespread resignation that this will be a crushing summer. The European Union is trying to draw up a tourism "Marshall Plan," and countries including Italy, France, Spain, Portugal and Cyprus are asking for specific support for tourism businesses.

Christina Tetradis, the vice president of the Hellenic Chamber of Hotels in Greece, said that 65 percent of member hotels feared they were at risk of bankruptcy.

"Greece has 1 million people working in tourism and tourism related services," she said. "This is a huge issue. It means many of these people may work less, or not at all this summer. They also have little chance of finding other work."

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, in a Sunday interview with CNN, said tourism could resume "only if we agree to very specific protocols, hopefully at the European level." He said the "best-case scenario" is that Greece is "open for business" on July 1.

"Let's assume people get a test before they fly out and then we carefully monitor them, either an antibody test or a [diagnostic] test, and then of course the tourism experience this summer may be slightly different," he said.

Mitsotakis said it depended on whether the global pandemic was on a "downward path."

Italy - which is only just beginning to loosen Europe's longest coronavirus lockdown - will be far more reliant on domestic travel.

For now, Italians are only free to move within their own region for specific reasons, including to visit relatives. Any other travel must be for health or work-related purposes.

In southern Italy, which was spared the worst of the outbreak, there has been resistance to the notion of accepting visitors from the hard-hit north. The normally tourist-friendly region of Puglia in the south continues to impose quarantines on those arriving from northern regions.

But the tourism sector is getting desperate.

"A regional reopening would give us back some oxygen," said Caterina Valente, 55, the owner and manager of a hotel in Rome.

Still, she said, she isn't sure that would be enough. "For the next two to three months, hotels will only live thanks to the internal market. It won't be good. We live thanks to foreign tourists."

Many of the variables have yet to be sorted out, but one of the biggest factors facing travel has to do with the travelers themselves: whether they have the money for vacations, and whether they think boarding a plane or train for another country is too great a risk.

"Optimistically, I feel that by September or October [tourism] could all start anew, but I may be too optimistic," said Giorgia Tozzi, 48, the manager of Hotel Vilòn in Rome, which depends mostly on foreign clients. "Until there's a cure or a vaccine or until people will be certain that by coming to Italy they won't fall sick, or risk it - or that they can then go back home - it'll be difficult for them to make the trip."

Chico Harlan

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Britain is Self-Destructing— And It’s a Warning to the World

James Hawthorne - United Photo Press

What Happens When People Become Too Foolish, Mean, and Backwards for a Democracy to Function?

Something strange, funny, tragic, and grotesque is happening in — or to — Britain. It’s imploding as a modern, functioning society. And that’s a warning to the world. Let me tell you the story.

In Britain, the conservative party (the Tories), will have been in power for fifteen years by the end of their current term. That’s a veritable eternity in modern politics. Take America, for example, where concurrent Presidential terms are limited to eight years.

Around the turn of the century, Britain was the envy of the world — a textbook example of what it meant to be a modern society, with expansive public institutions, rising standards of living, and a prosperous middle and working class.

But fifteen years, it turns out, will be long enough to wreck a society. During that time, the conservative party has made three catastrophic decisions. It botched a bank bailout during the financial crisis of 2007, which launched it to power, which set the stage for the second catastrophic decision, austerity — because all those bad debts had been shifted onto the public. The government, telling people the country was now “poor,” began a vicious program of cuts to basic public institutions. That led to the third catastrophic decision — Brexit. Because as austerity bit, people really did grow massively, suddenly poor — and now a scapegoat had to be found for their woes, which turned out to be, funnily, weirdly, stupidly, Europeans.

Wait, aren’t Brits Europeans, too? I’ll come back to that.

These three catastrophic decisions led to the most disastrous decline of any developed society in modern history. One of the sharpest since the Weimar Republic, one more accurately described as a collapse. British living standards fell off a cliff. Incomes, savings, happiness, trust, mobility, life expectancy — take any socioeconomics indicator you like. All of them have imploded in the last fifteen years. Yes, all of them. British living standards have plummeted across the board, and they’re now approaching American levels.

So the conservative party in Britain has presided over the most ruinous decline in living standards of any developed society in modern history, save perhaps America’s Republicans.

And the plan is to keep going. Remember the NHS? It was the world’s best healthcare system around the turn of the decade. Now it’s been eviscerated — and it’s being sold off to American health insurers. Remember the BBC? It was one of Britain’s crown jewels. Now the BBC News is like a miniature version of Fox News, replete with uncredentialed American pundits, spewing nonsense and hate. The conservatives plan to make Britain a mini-America, a brutal, cruel, stupid place, with no functioning public institutions or social systems.

Now here’s the problem, and it’s a big one. Brits keep voting for the conservative party. Not a little bit. But in massive landslides. To the point that the Labour Party — Britain’s centre left party, it’s Democrats, to Americans — has been wiped out.

Who on earth wants to become America? Who wants to pay “healthcare” bills into the millions? Who wants an education to cost as much as a house? Who wants to live in a dog-eat-dog society where nothing matters, and anything goes? Who’s foolish enough to want all that? The answer to that question is, forebodingly enough: Brits do.

Just this week, Labour’s lost its few remaining strongholds among the working class, in industrial, Rust Belt towns. The only places left that it really has a base are urban centres like London and Brighton — places now openly despised by the rest of the country as “metropolitan elites.” Labour is finished as a party, it seems. And the conservatives, despite destroying Britain with austerity, Brexit, cronyism, corruption, and sleaze, enjoy a tide of support that seems unstoppable — at this point, they’ll easily be in power for the rest of this decade…despite presiding over the most ruinous collapse in living standards in modern history.

What the? What on earth? Even American politics isn’t this perverse. Americans came to their senses, and elected Biden, after four years of Trump. But in Britain, the extremist implosion has gone on for fifteen years — and it shows no signs of stopping, at all.

So what’s going on here? British political scientists — many of whom lean so far to the right they might as well fall off its cliff — explain all this away by saying their people have chosen “sovereignty” over common sense. But nobody took away Britain’s sovereignty. There aren’t invading armies billeted in houses. Britain is and always has been its own country. This is no explanation at all, just foolishness. What really happened is much, much darker.

What happened is that Brits have become dumber than Americans. I don’t mean that as an insult — I mean it in a precise, formal, technical way. Brits, on average, don’t vote for rises in their standards of living anymore. They vote for declines in them. They don’t vote for things that will benefit them. They vote for their own self-destruction. They don’t vote for healthcare, retirement, education, childcare, as public goods and social institutions anymore — they vote against them, and for, well, the bizarre buffoonery and open corruption of the conservatives, for austerity and poverty and ruin, over and over again, as if nothing matters.

Let me explain what I mean by “Brits have become dumber than Americans,” and why it matters, in a more precise way.

British pundits and political scientists blame the Labour Party for this state of affairs. But there is a darker truth to confront. Yes, it’s true the Labour Party is insipid and uninspiring. But Joe Biden is not exactly Barack Obama, either. Anyone — and I mean anyone — is better than the conservatives. At least to anyone with a modicum of thought and common sense. They’ve presided over the fastest, sharpest collapse in living standards of any developed society in modern history, remember?

Mickey Mouse would be better. At least he wouldn’t give sweetheart Covid supplies deals to…the guy that ran his pub, like the Health Secretary did. Wouldn’t make an enemy of his biggest trading partner and closest friend, Europe. And so on. Anyone would be better than the party that has destroyed your society, your chance at a better life, your trust, happiness, income, savings, mobility, possibility.

But Brits do not think that way anymore. They are not thinking at all.

I said something dark and strange has happened here, so now let me come to the point.

What happens when people fail a democracy? Fail at democracy? That is what is really happening in Britain. We’re used to thinking of democracy as infallible — as long as it “represents” people’s preferences accurately, then all will be well — because, by and large, people don’t tend to want their own self-destruction, to be plunged into poverty, despair, chaos, and ruin. But what if they do?

Then democracy fails.

Not in the way we tend to think of it — it’s been manipulated and corroded and so on. It fails in a much, more serious way. The political system is working just fine — but people themselves have become incapable of making sensible decisions.

Let me put that more formally. Democracy relies on some level of rationality. It’s not the strict rationality of homo economicus. Democracy is emphatically not just me voting for what’s best for me. But it is me voting for what’s best for everyone, in some broad, basic sense. Democracy relies on rationality in a cooperative, expansive, sophisticated way. And when that breaks down, democracy, too, can fail. Or more accurately, people can fail at democracy.

That is what is happening in Britain. Britain is a society that is failing at democracy in the most fundamental way. It’s not that the system has been captured by elites — like it is in America. Something even worse than that is happening. The average person appears incapable of thinking democratically — in terms of the basic public interest, in terms of what’s in the best interest of their class, social group, country, society, people — whatsoever. That’s very, very serious. It is the worst kind of democratic failure there is. It’s much more severe than, say, elites capturing a democracy — that can be undone easily enough. But what happens when people themselves vote for their own ruin and self-destruction?

Let me make that visceral. Why would anybody — and I mean anybody — want American style “healthcare?” By now the whole world knows the gruesome stories that come out of America. Think of the young man — just 26 years old — who was left to die because he couldn’t afford insulin. Think of million dollar medical bills. Why would anyone want that? And yet Brits do.

Brits appear have become people who are now incapable of thinking sensibly in the most basic or fundamental ways. They look at the privatisation of the world’s best healthcare system — selling it off to American health insurers — and cheer and vote for it. But when people cannot make sensible decisions about what’s best for all, beginning with themselves, then democracy will only be a lever of self-destruction — not a solution to the problem of managing a society for the common good — and that is what’s happening in Britain. British democracy has become a suicide pact.

How have the conservatives gotten not just Britain’s elites, but its average voters to sign onto this suicide pact? How have they produced the perverse magic trick of getting people to vote for their own self-destruction? Through the age old art of demagoguery. First, conservatives made people poor — through austerity, slashing budgets, shrinking public services, producing a wave of unemployment, that led to falling incomes. Then, they blamed all that on hated others.

And so, presented with scapegoats to demonise, the average Brit did what human beings — flawed and foolish creatures that we are — tend to do. Not admit their mistakes. Instead of saying: “Wow, we were pretty dumb to vote for the conservative party, our living standards have gone down the tubes!” The average Brit now says — parroting the conservative party — “our living standards have gone down the tubes! Why? Immigrants! Foreigners!! Interlopers! Anyone different or strange! Liberals! ‘Metropolitan elites’! Londoners!! Get them!!”

In other words, the conservative party in Britain has played a game of demagoguery, of identity politics, with perfection. It’s made the average Brit believe that xenophobia and hate and aggression and hostility are what will somehow rescue them from collapsing living standards and cratering lives — not the simple act of investing in themselves. And if you think I’m kidding, consider that Britain just sent massive naval gunboats to a protest by French fishermen.

(This culture war has been taken to such an absurd degree that the British government now wants to criminalise being “woke.” But in this case, “woke” just seems to mean any form of modern thinking, like, say care for the environment, or an admission that racism and bigotry still exist, or the idea that minorities matter, too. Say something like “slavery happened, and it was terrible,” as a teacher, journalist, or public figure, and the British government wants that to be illegal, a criminal act.)

What the? You cannot have a democracy if people aren’t capable of a basic level of common sense. If they are going to fall for anything, democracy will only lead a people down the abyss of their own self-inflicted ruin.

The average Brit, sadly, has been foolish enough to fall for exactly this charade, this masquerade. He or she really now believes that having no healthcare system is less dangerous than being “woke.” That hate and xenophobia are worth more than functioning social systems and public goods. That turning a blind eye to corruption and folly are just fine — because the conservatives are “really” British, macho, tough, aggressive, hostile, indifferent, while the Labour Party is effeminate, warm, open, modern, and kind, and those are all things which are weak, suspicious, and despised. That clinging to a fictionalized, romanticizing identity as Brits, rulers of the seas, masters of the world, buccanneering swashbucklers — is this 1750? 1850? — matters more than having a modern society in the 21st century. That hating Europeans and minorities and anyone remotely different is somehow going to solve the problem…of voting time and again for a government…which has driven Brits themselves into the most stunning collapse of living standards in modern history.

And Brits show no signs of waking up from their comas of stupidity anytime soon. The conservatives seem able to get away with anything, and I mean anything. To a level that makes America look functional. No level of corruption or sleaze or incompetence or malfeasance seems to matter to Brits at all anymore. None.

Here’s a simple example. Brexit was long predicted to be catastrophic by anyone with a working mind. It turned out to be even worse. In plenty of sectors, exports to Europe have simply died. The figures are unbelievable — cheese and dairy, down by 96%, fish and chips now have to be imported, manufacturing, off by 60%, and more. It’s unreal — figures like this have never been seen outside the Weimar Republic. And yet they don’t matter to anyone at all, more or less.

Of course, it was all those farmers and fishermen who voted for Brexit. But as a result of Brexit, they’re now becoming unemployed, going bankrupt, being driven into penury. And yet they still back the conservatives, more and more heavily each year.

Why? If you ask them, they’ll give you some nonsensical answer. The real one is that the Labour Party isn’t nearly nationalistic, xenophobic, ugly, and foolish enough to appeal to these ninnies. It is not giving them the brutality and aggression and rage and hate they want — but the conservatives are. And that is what the average Brit wants — a chest-beating ape as a leader, threatening to tear down the world, even if it means beginning with their own society — because they appear to have lost the ability to reason altogether.

That is why the ugly spectacle of an entire working class now voting for its own self-destruction is now gathering force and fury. If you’re working class, you need the following things: healthcare, retirement, affordable education, childcare, housing, and so on. The British working class began to flip conservative in 2007, and is now solidly ultra conservative. Why is that? Because the conservatives have convinced them that demonizing and scapegoating everyone else — foreigners, immigrants, all those hated “metropolitan elites,” Europeans — for the lack of a functioning society matters more than having a functioning society.

It’s important to call this what it is. Stupidity. Folly. Idiocy. There is no other word for it, and words shouldn’t be minced. Brits are failing at democracy — their democracy is not failing them. You see, I say that because the choices now are few and far between. What should the Labour Party do, to appeal to a country of idiots? Should it go out and demonise and scapegoat vulnerable and powerless groups? Should it become nationalistic and xenophobic? Should it back austerity and hate and poverty and aggression? That is what pundits tell it to do. But they’re wrong. Doing that is self-destruction, too. What’s the point of a centre-left party that isn’t one? Why should the Labour Party become a party of stupidity, ugliness, folly, and hate? Better for it to go down nobly than become everything it shouldn’t be.

The problem isn’t the Labour Party, and it’s not politics at all. It’s people. Brits have become violent, selfish, backwards idiots. You know how the American Idiot is a legendary figure around the world? Welcome to the British Buffoon. He’s a figure that doesn’t care about anything, will accept any level of indignity, any collapse in living standards — as long as he gets to wave the Union Jack, shake a fist at the world, and sing Brittannia Uber Alles.

Maybe he’s a fisherman, who voted for Brexit, now doesn’t have any fish to catch, and instead of understanding that he was lied to, that Europe was just a convenient scapegoat…he still votes ultra conservative. Maybe he’s a farmer, who’s now facing bankruptcy, since exports to Europe basically don’t exist anymore in many farming sectors — and yet he still votes ultra conservative because he’s been taught that xenophobia is worth more than having a living. Maybe she’s a working class single mom, raising a family in public housing — voting against public housing and income because she’s been taught that billionaires will fix everything. Or maybe she’s a middle class professional — who’s savings have been drained after more than a decade of austerity, now paying for college, healthcare, childcare — but still votes conservative because she’s been taught that being “woke” is a threat to her kind, culture, identity, place in the world.

What happens when people fail at democracy like this? Well, it’s pretty simple. Democracy fails. A society becomes a failed state. Not in the way we’re used to thinking of it — there’s a coup, there’s a revolution, the army rolls in, the government collapses. But in a softer, altogether more dangerous way. Consensually. A country commits suicide as a modern, functioning society not with a bang, but with a million whimpers, shrieks of rage, howls of xenophobia, guttural snarls of nationalism. And soon, there’s nothing left but poverty, despair, rage, and hate.

That is what former Prime Minister Gordon Brown has warned is happening. Britain’s becoming a failed state. He’s not wrong. He’s right. In the deadliest way of all. Brits are failing their democracy — their democracy isn’t failing them. They are willing their own society to self-destruction. Americans, coming to their senses, voted, finally, for Joe Biden. But Brits aren’t coming to their senses. They seem to have had the sense beaten out of them. The conservatives will be in power until the end of this decade — that’s a generation. And by then, what will Britain be? A little forgotten island, of fools, drunk on egotism, shouting at the world, shaking their fists in desperate, stupid, impotent rage. “We’re number one!! You fools!! Bow!!” And the world, being the world, will laugh pityingly, and move swiftly on.

Umair Haque

United Photo Press

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Study Finds Artists Become Famous through Their Friends, Not the Originality of Their Work

Steve Schapiro
Andy Warhol, Edie Sedgwick and Entourage, New York Fahey/Klein Gallery

In a 2012 exhibition about the birth of abstraction at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, curators highlighted the way that the artists may have influenced one another. Titled “Inventing Abstraction: 1910–1925,” the show illustrated over 80 artists’ radical departures from the traditions of representational art, and opened with a large diagram depicting their network to show who knew each other (an interactive version of which is online), with the most connected, like Pablo Picasso and Wassily Kandinsky, toward the center.

While working on the show with her colleagues, exhibition curator Leah Dickerman (now MoMA’s director of editorial and content strategy) was influenced in part by a course she had taken with Columbia Business School professor and Chazen Senior Scholar Paul Ingram, which was about how curators can use their professional networks to achieve success. Ingram helped to develop an early iteration of the network of early pioneers of abstraction, and later, he used the same data to embark on a new investigation.

Ingram and his colleague Mitali Banerjee, of HEC Paris, used MoMA’s findings to examine the role that creativity and social networks played for these artists, in relationship to the level of fame they achieved. In a 2018 paper, they relayed their findings—including that for successful artists, making friends may be more important than producing novel art.

The study

Andy Warhol, Photograph of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Bryan Ferry, Julian Schnabel, Jacqueline Beaurang, Paige Powell, and Others at a Party at Julian Schnabel's Apartment, 1985, 1985 Hedges Projects

Ingram and Banerjee started their study by quantifying the fame, creativity, and social network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction.” To determine each artist’s renown, they turned to Google’s database of historical texts in French and English (given that the artists were primarily living in France and the U.S.), and recorded the number of mentions each artist had between 1910 and 1925. They were looking at fame in terms of how well-known the artists were beyond their own social circles, Ingram noted, “and we’re essentially saying [that] how often you show up in the written word is an indicator of that.”

To examine the artists’ social networks, they relied on MoMA’s research, which was based on sources like biographies and artists’ letters to identify relationships. Ingram and Banerjee analyzed the artists’ social circles, which also involved data on each artist’s nationality, gender, age, and location, as well as the media they were using and the schools they attended. (They didn’t look into the artists’ exhibition history or the market for their work, though Banerjee’s future research may include such factors, Ingram said.)

In order to understand the creativity of the artists’ work, they employed two methods. First, they used machine learning to analyze and rate the creativity of thousands of artworks by the relevant artists; the computer program rated how unique works are in comparison to a set of representational artworks from the 19th century. They also asked four art historians to rate artworks by each artist for their creativity, based on factors like originality and innovation. (They found that the scores artists earned from machine learning and art historians were positively correlated.)

What it found

Peer network of the artists in “Inventing Abstraction.” Courtesy of Paul Ingram and Mitali Banerjee.

While past studies have suggested that there is a link between creativity and fame, Ingram and Banerjee found, in contrast, that there was no such correlation for these artists. Rather, artists with a large and diverse network of contacts were most likely to be famous, regardless of how creative their art was.

Specifically, the greatest predictor of fame for an artist was having a network of contacts from various countries. Ingram believes this indicates that the artist was cosmopolitan and had the capacity to reach different markets or develop ideas inspired by foreign cultures. The “linchpin of the network,” he added, was Kandinsky. They also found that famous artists tended to be older, likely because they were already famous as abstraction was emerging, Ingram explained.

In terms of creativity, they found that neither the computational evaluations nor the art historians’ expert opinions were strong indicators of an artist’s renown. In other words, if an artist had high creativity scores, they were not necessarily famous.

“An important implication of the paper is to show that diverse networks matter not only as a source of creativity…but could mean other benefits,” Ingram said. “That even aside from creativity…the artists benefit from the cosmopolitan identity.”

What it means

Wassily Kandinsky with a group of artists from the Blue Rider. Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images.

Given the modern imperative to meet new people and network across professional industries in order to open oneself up to career opportunities and advancement, Ingram and Banerjee’s findings aren’t surprising. However, they do offer important reminders—that we won’t become famous in a vacuum and should seek to diversify our social circles.

By way of illustrating the findings, the researchers pointed to the example of two artists among the group, Vanessa Bell and Suzanne Duchamp. While neither artist is a household name, they shared similar backgrounds had very famous siblings (Virginia Woolf and Marcel Duchamp, respectively), and had similar creativity scores—but Bell was more famous.

“Both artists were part of influential artists’ groups—Suzanne Duchamp was part of the Dada circle while Vanessa Bell was part of the Bloomsbury group,” the authors wrote. “Yet Duchamp’s social circle was confined to the Dada artists; in fact, even within this circle, her closest friends were her brother Marcel, her husband Jean Crotti and the artist Francis Picabia, a family friend. In contrast, Vanessa Bell’s social world encompassed the Bloomsbury group, a broad swathe of artists who were part of the London Group, collectors and patrons located outside England such as Gertrude Stein as well as theatre producers and artists associated with Sergei Diaghilev’s Les Ballet Russes.” Ultimately, Bell’s more diverse circle correlates with her greater fame.

“What we know from different kinds of research is that diversity in networks feeds creativity, which is an important thing for artists, as well,” Ingram explained. Having such a network, he added, meant that “you could kind of be positioned in a market, and may be more interesting and worthy of attention, if you are connected to a diverse set of others.” And even though the study focused on a specific, century-old context, he predicts that the findings ring true for artists today.

Casey Lesser is Artsy’s Lead Editor, Contemporary Art and Creativity.

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The Problem Is Poverty, However We Label It

The prefixes ‘food’, ‘child’ or ‘fuel’ make life for 14 million poor Britons seem easily fixable. In truth, radical action is needed.

How ingenious are the British! Like the legendary Inuit people who coined 57 words for snow, we have devised a long list of clever aliases for the stuff that dominates everyday life. Know the ones I mean? Try food poverty. Fuel poverty. Child poverty. Clothing poverty. Transport poverty. Period poverty.

These are phrases mouthed in Westminster and plastered across newspapers (which, this week, are discussing “digital poverty”). They help shape the UK in the 21st century. But this ever-growing jungle of subcategories obscures the one true problem they have in common. It is poverty: the condition of not having enough money to live your life.

If your only choice of an evening is between skipping dinner or going to sleep in the cold before waking up in the cold, then you are not carefully selecting between food poverty and fuel poverty, like some expense-account diner havering over the French reds on a wine list. You are simply impoverished.

If you are using a sock as a sanitary towel, the problem lies not in the time of the month but in your lack of income – which doubtless means you’re also not getting enough food or heating. Gas bills might jump or petrol prices soar, but if those things tip you into all-out crisis, that’s because you were already poor.

Poverty cannot be shelved tidily under different classifications, like books in a library. It jabs its tentacles into all parts of your life, distorting and defining everything from how you feel about yourself to whether you live or die in this pandemic.

“Want” was how William Beveridge referred to poverty in his landmark report of 1942. For him it was the first of five “giant evils” that had to be slain in order to rebuild a bombed-out Britain. Today, however, it is the evil that dare not speak its name. It must instead be broken down into discrete categories, all the better to tuck into Whitehall documents or charity campaign strategies. In that fake neatness lies both great political hypocrisy and huge social danger.

Cabinet ministers hate using words as simple and shaming as poverty. It’s why the welfare secretary, Thérèse Coffey, brightly refers to those forced to live on donated tins as food bank “customers”. No, far more congenial to qualify and to narrow. Oh, it’s about “cashflow problems”, as the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, so delightfully put it. Or schoolkids not having an internet dongle.

Smaller messes take less time and money to tidy away. Whereas, according to horrified allies of Rishi Sunak this week, keeping an extra £20 on universal credit amid a historic jobs crisis would cost £6bn a year, or 1p on income tax and 5p on fuel duty. Remember, in his first budget speech last March, Sunak admitted that Tory chancellors freezing fuel duty for nine years had cost the exchequer £110bn – and then froze it for another year.

Because anything is better than admitting that this all stems from one deep structural problem: that, going into the pandemic, more than 14 million Britons – more than one in five of us – did not have enough money to live on. Far more agreeable to dole out food parcels for a week here or there, to cut VAT on tampons, or to brief a couple of warning headlines aimed at the big energy firms.

Much better to wave around vouchers and an outsourced half-pepper than give money and power to people who have none. Because who knows what the poor might do if they were to – whisper it – choose for themselves? This is why Coffey’s predecessor, Iain Duncan Smith, blamed the problem of child poverty not on his colleagues slashing benefits – so as to teach mums and dad that “children cost money” – but on the parents themselves being drunks and smack addicts.

In IDS’s world, the undeserving poor are always with us. The undeserving rich, such as he, on the other hand, get to marry the daughter of a baron, live in a £2m mansion owned by an obliging father-in-law, and deliver speeches to moneymen at £5,000 a time.

Such are the deep prejudices faced by campaigners down the ages. The Child Poverty Action Group was formed 56 years ago, but at the outset its activists had no special interest in child poverty. The charity’s official history states: “‘Child poverty’ was not mentioned in the minutes of meetings. As the committee members saw it, poor children lived in poor families.” But just weeks before launch: “‘Child Poverty Action Group’ was adopted as the name … as likely to win more public sympathy than ‘family poverty’, which risked inciting rightwing tabloid rants about ‘scroungers.’”

This was in 1965, several years before George Osborne was even conceived. What giant strides this country has made.

Even so, those founders were spot on. In my years of reporting on poverty and inequality, one reliable rule of thumb is that the kids are last to go without. First to starve are the mums. They’re the ones who live on hot water and toast to keep the family in meals. But the terminally prejudiced cannot bear too much reality, and it is they who set the tone of the debate.

In his recent book The New Poverty, the journalist Stephen Armstrong recounts how the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, travelled in 2015 to Folkestone in Kent, where he met Graham and Lisa Sopp. The couple had moved there after Graham had lost his job as a security guard and Lisa was promised cleaning work. Then their new flat fell through, Lisa’s employer was taken over, and one of IDS’s benefits offices kept messing them about. Suddenly, they were sleeping in a tent on the cliffs, and Graham got very ill. They took to walking the clifftops, identifying the perfect spot from which to jump.

On meeting them, Welby observed: “There is no system in the world that will stop people having problems, but we must have a structure of support for people that meets not merely their financial needs but also their need to be treated as distinct human beings of infinite value.” That view doesn’t fit with a system where poor people queue for bags of surplus food, collect donated clothes for their babies and beg for help with their fuel bills and housing.

The new language of poverty, so managerial and sophisticated, conceals a vast and growing baseness. However highly evolved its jargon, however lauded its campaigning footballers, Britain in 2021 treats poor people not as people – not as our family, friends, neighbours. Instead, it views them as a ragbag of different physical needs to be met by a patchwork of largely volunteer organisations. And in doing so, we deny both their essential humanity – and ours.

Aditya Chakrabortty

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Another Monsanto Roundup Case Likely to Settle as Bayer Works Through Tens of Thousands of Cancer Claims

Bayer has lost three trials to date — juries in each of the trials found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides do cause cancer and that Monsanto spent decades hiding the risks.

Seven months after Bayer AG announced plans for a sweeping settlement of U.S. Roundup cancer litigation, the German owner of Monsanto Co. continues to work to settle tens of thousands of claims brought by people suffering from cancer they say was caused by Monsanto’s weed killing products.

On Wednesday, one more case appeared to find closure, though the plaintiff did not live to see it.

Lawyers for Jaime Alvarez Calderon, agreed earlier this week to a settlement offered by Bayer after U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria on Jan. 11 denied summary judgment in favor of Monsanto, allowing the case to move closer to a trial.

The settlement will go to Alvarez’s four sons because their 65-year-old father, a longtime winery worker in Napa County, California, died just over a year ago from non-Hodgkin lymphoma he blamed on his work spraying Roundup around winery property for years.

In a hearing held in federal court Wednesday, Alvarez family lawyer David Diamond told Judge Chhabria that the settlement would close out the case.

After the hearing, Diamond said Alvarez had worked in the wineries for 33 years, using a backpack sprayer to apply Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides to sprawling acreage for the Sutter Home group of wineries. He would often go home in the evenings with clothing wet with herbicide due to leaks in the equipment and weed killer that drifted in the wind. He was diagnosed in 2014 with non-Hodgkin lymphoma, undergoing multiple rounds of chemotherapy and other treatments before dying in December 2019.

Diamond said he was happy to settle the case but has “400 plus” more Roundup cases still unresolved.

He is not alone. At least half a dozen other U.S. law firms have Roundup plaintiffs they are seeking trial settings for in 2021 and beyond.

Since buying Monsanto in 2018, Bayer has been struggling to figure out how to put an end to the litigation that includes more than 100,000 plaintiffs in the U.S. The company lost all three trials held to date and has lost the early rounds of appeals seeking to overturn the trial losses. Juries in each of the trials found that Monsanto’s glyphosate-based herbicides do cause cancer and that Monsanto spent decades hiding the risks.

In addition to efforts to resolve claims currently pending, Bayer also hopes to create a mechanism for resolving potential claims that it could face from Roundup users who develop non-Hodgkin lymphoma in the future. Its initial plan for handling future litigation was rejected by Judge Chhabria and the company has yet to announce a new plan.

Carey Gillam

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2021 The Year of Hope for Change

The old year, which will remain in our memories as the worst of our lives, was 'fired' with pomp and circumstance, with brilliance, colors and bang. The year that disappointed us so much already belongs to history. There follows another one with the same or perhaps bigger challenges. But hope and change, as in times of celebration, are all of us and forever.

Hope and Change is a word that I like a lot and that I use regularly in my conversations. "Ho-pe and Chan-ge" has an incredible sound. Perhaps the fact that I value the sounds of each word, the way they are pronounced, the diction and the intensity of the vowels has remained in my childhood. Hope and change is all we need for 2021, which now begins. The vaccine is now the simplest translation of these two words worldwide.

Portugal from today will be ahead of the destinations of the 27 countries in the first six months of this year and will help the economies to recover.

The Brexit theme also deserves a deep reflection, thanks to the British ambassador in Portugal, Chris Sainty. The United Kingdom has been an ally of Portugal for some 600 years and the concerns of this future relationship are great, especially for sectors that depend on exports to lands of her majesty, such as Port wine.

In terms of foreign policy, on the other side of the Atlantic we have strong hopes and changes in our European relationship with the United States, which as of the 20th has a new leadership, that of Joe Biden. The policy of multilateralism should return to the stage as well as the capacity for dialogue - without extremism, racism or Trump complexes -, which will certainly and positively mark a new way of building bridges between all continents.

We will all want to believe that leaders will finally have the ability to break with the dogmas of the past, and I am not just referring to the United States. In Europe, three women stand out for their courage, boldness and strategic vision. At the head, Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, also Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank (ECB), and Angela Merkel, chancellor of Germany. These three women today occupy the places that are making a difference in the management of the pandemic and in the congregation of Europe in favor of a greater good: placing above all the strength of the European people, be they frugal or Latin, to win one of the worst crises of recent history. Well, there are those who, in their reality and context, become an example to follow, as well as all men in similar contexts.

Better days will come. 

I take this opportunity to announce the launch of our second book for the celebration of the UPP's 30th anniversary, "UNITED PHOTO PRESS 30 YEARS OF CREATIVE PROJECTS IN BLACK AND WHITE", already available for purchase on our website from this January 1st and the continuation of the exhibitions + book around the world, the first scheduled on April 2, 2021 at the Casa da Cultura in Setúbal with the support of ARTISET. 

With the votes that 2021 will close in a big way, here are a video record by our fellow member of United Photo Press, João Sá e Sousa of the great and well-deserved 2020 farewell in Funchal on the Madeira Islands.

Thanks to all the members of United Photo Press for your effort and dedication in 2020, all together in 2021 we will be even stronger ...!

Carlos Alves de Sousa

President of United Photo Press

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LABORATORY GREECE - The Movie

A great movie-documentary for both its rarity of the subject and its quality from first minute to last one. 

The accurate title, underlines a unique experiment against greek sociaty that started may 2010, lots of people say. Another acknowledgement of that brutal process is, for example, the article published by one of worlds tops in Political Economy, Paul Craig Roberts, 2018 : Genocide of the Greek Nation. 

Another great example is the candidate for the International Award Albert Camus, Kazakis Dimitris, whos profound long term work and effort to analyze, underline and propose political solutions has been extraordinary. 

Great Work and Highly Recommended Movie!!

LABORATORY GREECE” is a journey through Greece and Europe’s past and recent history: from the Second World War to the current crisis. It is a historical documentary, a look into many stories. 

Website www.labgreece.org 

Press Office mail info@labgreece.org

www.facebook.com/labgreece/

A Vox Populi.xyz nonprofit Collective production, Italy 2019 

LABORATORY GREECE - LABORATORIO GRECIA 

Written and directed by Jacopo Brogi, United Photo Press member

Documentary research: Jacopo Brogi 

Editing and original animations by: David Mitrani Arenal 

Script adaptation-translation-subtitles: Nicoletta Fatsea 

Interviews by: Jacopo Brogi, Ruggero Arenella, Umberto Del Noce, Riccardo Donat – Cattin 

Athens editorial board: Nicoletta Fatsea 

Graphic Design: Laura Gineprini 

Original Design: Elena Carrea 

Music: Dance with Invisible Partners 

Running time/format: 165 minutes – HD, col. 

Release: 2019

You Tube https://youtu.be/nsBGniPF3ZQ

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Mussenden Temple

Mussenden Temple is a small circular building located on cliffs near Castlerock in County Londonderry, high above the Atlantic Ocean on the north-western coast of Northern Ireland.

History

Perched on the cliffs overlooking Downhill Strand, it was once possible to drive a carriage around the temple: however, coastal erosion has brought it closer to the edge. The temple was built in 1785 and forms part of the Downhill Demesne. The demesne was formerly part of the estate of Frederick, 4th Earl of Bristol, who served as the Church of Ireland Lord Bishop of Derry from 1768 until 1803. It was Lord Bristol – popularly known as "the Earl-Bishop" – who had the "temple" built. Constructed as a library and modelled from the Temple of Vesta in the Forum Romanum in Rome, it is dedicated to the memory of Bishop Lord Bristol's cousin Frideswide Mussenden.

Over the years the erosion of the cliff face at Downhill has brought Mussenden Temple ever closer to the edge, and in 1997 The National Trust carried out cliff stabilisation work to prevent the loss of the building.

The inscription around the building reads:

"Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis

e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem."

"Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore

The troubled sailor, and hear the tempests roar."

- The quotation is from Lucretius, De Rerum Natura, 2.1–2.

Named in honour of his cousin Mrs. Frideswide Mussenden, whose beauty he greatly admired, this was the Bishop's library. Its walls were once lined with bookcases. A fire was kept burning constantly in the basement. This and its enclosed flue meant that, even in this very exposed location, the books never got damp.

"I intend to build a Grecian temple in Frideswide's honour...I intend to build it on the edge of a cliff. It will give employment to the poor, to the district and employment." The Earl Bishop was clearly heart broken when Frideswide died. His notes on the building state that it was based on Bramante's Tempietto on Rome's Janiculum hill, which itself based on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli near Rome. The building was probably the work of Micheal Shanahan who accompanied the Earl Bishop on one of his many visits to Italy.

National Trust

Now part of The National Trust property of Mussenden Temple and Downhill Demesne, the grounds encompassing Mussenden Temple, and its manor house (Downhill Castle) are open to the public all year, from dawn to dusk. The "Temple" offers views westwards over Downhill Strand towards Magilligan Point and on across to Inishowen in County Donegal; and to the east, Castlerock beach towards Portstewart, Portrush and Fair Head.

The temple obtained a licence to hold civil wedding ceremonies in 2007.

The nearest station is Castlerock railway station.

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How Munich Turned Its Coronavirus Outbreak Into a Scientific Study

On a bright morning in May, Isabel Klugherz, a medical student at Ludwig-Maximilians University, in Munich, arrived at the geographical center of the city’s Milbertshofen district. Over the previous month, as Munich’s streets emptied under lockdown orders, an exception had been granted for roving medical students in mint-green scrubs and face masks. The university’s department for infectious diseases was screening for the seroprevalence of SARS-CoV-2—antibody testing—by sending police-escorted teams on the winding pattern of a predetermined algorithm, otherwise known as a random walk. Start in the center of an electoral district, continue past a few houses, cross to the other side of the street, select the third house, and knock. In the past month, Klugherz had knocked on nearly a thousand doors, and residents had been overwhelmingly enthusiastic about participating; one man had pronounced it more important than his Sunday celebration of the Holy Mass. That morning, the algorithm led Klugherz into a quiet road of whitewashed modernist buildings. The day before, she had texted a friend who lived nearby to let him know that she would be in the area. Now, unexpectedly, the algorithm led her to his door. She rang the bell. When her friend answered, and found Klugherz standing outside, he was still in his pajamas

In late March, the government of the state of Bavaria, which includes Munich, was trying to decide how to respond to what appeared to be an accelerating community spread of COVID-19. Michael Hoelscher, the director of the Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine at L.M.U., was involved in official debates about whether to impose a citywide lockdown. That, to him, was a foregone conclusion. Considering the disease’s rate of transmission, under the most extreme scenarios, it could take about two and a half years to reach herd immunity in Germany. “Not an option,” Hoelscher said. What was less clear was how the city could effectively track the disease’s spread. Because so many cases of COVID-19 appeared asymptomatic, as Hoelscher had first noted in a paper published in January, diagnostic testing alone would only provide a partial measurement. “So I said, ‘O.K., we need something,’ he told me. The only way to get an accurate measurement of the epidemic, he reasoned, was to implement wide-scale antibody testing. Within six hours, just before the lockdown was announced, on March 21st, he received a million euros from the government.

Hoelscher is tall, with a wave of blond hair that he keeps brushed back cleanly from his face; on the day we met, he was dressed in slim-fitting jeans and a normcore sweater layered over a blue Oxford shirt. Like many infectious-disease researchers of his generation, Hoelscher began his career working on H.I.V. and AIDS. In the early two-thousands, he ran a study on sex workers and bar workers in Tanzania to learn whether it was possible to be infected with H.I.V. more than once. (Deborah Birx, the coördinator of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, was one of his collaborators.) “Take H.I.V.,” Hoelscher said. “You have the disease, you produce an immune response, and that immune response, No. 1, is not able to kill the virus itself. But it can also not protect you from getting a second H.I.V. infection.” The H.I.V. virus, his team discovered, was able to “hide” itself in the immune response, transcribing its genome into the cells. “So that’s an example where the antibody doesn’t help against it,” he said. “In history so far, we only have been able to produce or manufacture a vaccine if the natural immune response would be able to prevent a secondary infection.”

Michael Hoelscher, the director of Ludwig-Maximilians University’s Department of Infectious Diseases and Tropical Medicine, has studied H.I.V. and AIDS.

SARS-CoV-2 is obviously different. But it is also exhibiting unusual features. “It can affect multiple organs,” Hoelscher said. “Not only the lower respiratory tract. It can replicate in the upper respiratory tract, it can most likely replicate in different organs.” The course of the disease, the time that it remains in the body, is long, and in some cases, his team found, the immune response does not develop until nearly two months after an infection. “Absolutely surprising or frightening,” Hoelscher said, “is that there might be really some reason to believe that you cannot eliminate it from your body.”

Not far from Hoelscher’s office, L.M.U. had set up a testing tent near the poplar trees of Leopoldstrasse, an imperious boulevard that runs through town. Test subjects who preferred to have their blood drawn outside of their home could come here instead. Outside the tent’s entrance, I met Michael Pritsch, a young infectious-disease doctor who works in Hoelscher’s lab. Pritsch is helping to run the study, but he had come to the tent to get tested himself. In late April, medical students he’d trained had followed the algorithm and ended up at his front door. “My home was my castle,” Pritsch told me. “When I came home after sixteen hours of work, I had my five minutes of free time.” And then they rang his bell. “Even at home, I’m not without this coronavirus thing,” he said. Two students in scrubs and masks welcomed him into the tent and offered him a new mask. He signed a consent form, which he’d helped write, and then pushed up his sleeve as one of the students knotted a rubber tourniquet around his upper arm. Pritsch suggested, wryly, that he would probably check his own data. (“Don’t write that!” he said.

The blood samples are delivered to a laboratory that Andreas Wieser, the study’s head virologist, set up in late March. When I met Wieser in the first room of his lab, crowded with two large deep freezers, a big refrigerator, and a bio-safety cabinet, he held out a vial for me to see. The material had separated into a lower, dark-reddish “dense part,” that contains the cellular material, and an upper, putrid-yellow “liquid” section, containing, potentially, the antibodies. In an adjoining room were two separate antibody-testing machines, one manufactured by Roche, which resembled a giant photocopier, and another by Euroimmun, which looked more like a bulky plastic printer. The Roche and Euroimmun tests check for different immune responses to the virus, so that they can do a kind of “cross-sectional” examination to correct for some of the statistical unreliability still inherent in the antibody tests; by doubling up, Wieser gets a more accurate result. “Mixing tests which have a different target protein on the virus gives you superior information,” he told me. “We take the best of both worlds.”

Locally run antibody studies, coördinated by the Robert Koch Institute, the German counterpart to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are being carried out across Germany in an orchestrated effort to construct an over-all picture of the disease’s penetration in the country. Hoelscher’s department is one of the best-resourced, in one of the wealthiest regions, in Germany. It processed the country’s first COVID-19 cases, in January, and produced widely cited studies on asymptomatic transmission in Europe. Since then, Hoelscher’s department has worked to track, record, observe, and quantify the disease, aiding the German government in efforts to at once study and contain SARS-CoV-2. “We feel that there is an enormous number of questions that will only come after” the initial outbreak, Hoelscher told me: 

Do antibodies provide immunity? If so, for how long? Can people who’ve been infected become reinfected?

Germany’s first COVID-19 cluster emerged just outside Munich on the morning of Monday, January 27th. The C.E.O. of Webasto, an auto-parts manufacturer, received an e-mail from a manager in Shanghai: an employee who had visited the Munich office the previous week had become feverish during the return flight to China and tested positive upon landing. A German employee who’d sat next to her during a presentation had felt sick over the weekend, and went to Hoelscher’s lab to be tested. Within hours, he had his results: positive for SARS-CoV-2. As soon as Webasto’s C.E.O. found out, on Monday afternoon, he called the local public-health authorities at the Bavarian Health and Food Safety Authority. “It was a bit of luck for Germany that the first case was in Bavaria,” Merle Böhmer, an epidemiologist who works on a seven-person task force in the Bavaria office, told me.

According to Böhmer, Bavaria, with thirteen million inhabitants, is the only federal state in Germany with such a rapid-response task force; it was put in place in 2014, during the Ebola epidemic. Two days after the country confirmed its first case of COVID-19, Böhmer’s team sent a group of doctors to Webasto to swab employees—fifteen more tested positive. Every high-risk contact at the company, which ended up being more than two hundred people, was placed into a strict two-week quarantine. “We were able to contain this outbreak,” Böhmer told me. “And that granted Germany, I think, two to three weeks of time for preparation.” Munich did not go into lockdown until nearly two months later. By that time, residents had seen the virus’s potential in northern Italy, about a hundred miles away. They were easily persuaded to stay at home.

Germany, like the U.S., is a hub of global travel, and the supply lines for its auto-manufacturing industry are intimately connected to China. It’s also a federal system, designed in the postwar era to prevent the concentration of power in Berlin. When I initially e-mailed the Robert Koch Institute for information about how contact tracing had worked in Munich, they referred me to the local department. “RKI does support local health authorities when it is asked to,” an R.K.I. rep wrote to me, “but the local health authorities are always the ones in charge here.” With the biggest pharmaceutical industry in Europe (and a medical technology industry second only to the U.S.), Germany had developed its first diagnostic test in mid-January, and scaled up to a robust testing infrastructure by the end of February. But when it comes to containment, testing is only as good as the ability to follow up with swift tracing measures. This method was successful in Japan, for example, which, with its teams of contact-tracing “cluster busters,” has managed one of the lowest death rates in the world without resorting to draconian restrictions. “It’s crucial in such a situation to talk to other experts, to exchange information very quickly and to get other opinions,” Böhmer told me. “You have a globally spreading disease which was not known until December last year. You have to be open-minded and get experts in and combine all the expertise.”

Much speculation about the factors behind Germany’s relatively low death rate has pointed to high public-health spending. As a recent Deutsche Bank report observed, in many cases, the underlying and pre-existing conditions that, elsewhere, have led to bad outcomes with COVID-19 are often diagnosed early and well treated in Germany. But robust access to health care can’t fully account for how little of the country’s I.C.U.-bed capacity, in the end, proved necessary. Wolfgang Greiner, a health-care economist at the University of Bielefeld, told me, “It’s not so much that we cared for so many patients, because, at the end of the day, we haven’t had so many as we expected.”

The government made a broad effort to encourage sick patients to first contact their primary-care doctors and to avoid overloading the hospitals. A friend who worked in the intensive-care unit at a Berlin hospital told me that, because the facility remained well under capacity, its doctors were able to spend several hours each day carefully tracking and calibrating the respiratory treatments of each individual patient. A number of German cities came up with other innovative interventions—a program in Heidelberg, which became known as the Corona Taxis, sent teams of doctors to visit patients in their homes, monitoring the advance of pneumonia and treating them with oxygen to prevent the need for hospitalization. These were all small, local efforts. But, with a disease that is highly localized, they amounted to an effective means of keeping Germany’s death rate well below those of some neighboring countries. Many experts I spoke with speculated that the early containment efforts in Munich, and other cities, allowed Germany to stay in front of the virus’s spread rather than having to play catch-up. Lockdown came at the right moment.

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, who has a Ph.D. in quantum chemistry, has been praised, both inside and outside Germany, for her focussed, apolitical, data-driven management of the pandemic. Even as regional leaders across Germany bickered over shutdown procedures, with some of them vying for national attention in the face of upcoming elections, Merkel effectively held them in line. She has also urged exacting regulations as the country gradually reopened, which it began to do only when infections were below seven hundred and fifty on average per day: all passengers on flights entering Germany must fill out a form stating which seat they occupied, and where they will be staying; restaurants in Berlin, which have moved most of their dining outside, have been strongly encouraged to take down the names and telephone numbers of all patrons, and note where each of them sits. If more than fifty out of every hundred thousand test results in a region come back positive, localized “emergency brakes” will re-impose social restrictions, which has already happened in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where an outbreak sent seven thousand workers at a meatpacking plant into quarantine. (The state’s Higher Administrative Court cut the renewed quarantine period short in response to a legal objection.) A video of Merkel stoically explaining the “R-naught” went viral.

People going about their business in downtown Munich, in late May.


Merkel’s performance, however, hardly excuses shortcomings elsewhere. “There was an entire narrative of ‘America could never do this because we are so independent-minded,’ ” Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, told me. “And I’m like, ‘I know a lot of Germans—they’re pretty independent-minded.’ ” Laura Olbrich, another doctor on Hoelscher’s team, is originally from Duisburg, a struggling post-industrial town in northern Germany. She speculated that scientists knocking on doors wouldn’t work so easily there, especially if they were accompanied by police officers. Even in Munich, careful precautions have been taken to establish public trust: after the initial knock, the team members explained who they were and what they would be doing. Residents don’t have to immediately agree to participate, as a separate team would return to take the first blood samples. The study also attracted a great deal of press attention, so residents often already knew about it. “There was a woman that actually screamed, ‘I was hoping so much that you guys would come to my door!’ ” Olbrich told me. “ ‘This is really funny, like winning the lottery.’ ”

The study in Munich is, among other things, testing for genetic indications that may help explain why some people get extremely sick from COVID-19, and others have only a mild disease course. (Already, scientists have found that there is some evidence that certain blood types may play a role.) “We see that there’s a correlation between whether you have symptoms and your level of antibodies,” Hoelscher said. “If people have COVID—very mild, asymptomatic or whatever—some of them seem to have less antibodies than those who are severely sick.” Many people who’d had the virus but only a mild case, in other words, appeared to have a comparably weak immune response. So far, no one could say exactly what that meant. But, in either case, the antibodies appeared not to last, which suggests a second infection could be possible. “That’s a bad sign for a vaccine,” Hoelscher told me.

At the very least, to provide ongoing protection, an inoculation that relies on the antibody response would need to be routinely readministered, perhaps every two years or so. The cellular immune response to COVID—so-called natural-killer cells—which can reduce the severity of a disease course, lasts longer, but it does not appear to provide protection against infection. Eventually, an effective vaccine, Hoelscher thinks, might try to combine both immune responses. “The optimal outcome would be that we have something that is protective,” Hoelscher said. “But most researchers do not believe that we will get a sterilizing immunity. So having immunity that prevents a severe case of disease is already something quite good.”

The day after I visited Hoelscher’s lab, I met Jakob Reich and Lara Schneider on a deserted street lined with slatted wooden fences and carefully angled hedges. This was where, a few weeks earlier, Isabel Klugherz had completed her random walk and wound up at her friend’s door. Reich and Schneider, both in green scrubs and droplet-filtering masks, carried a large yellow plastic bin and a folding chair. In the entryway of the building, one of the participants suggested that, since the weather was nice, they set up in the back yard. The open air would reduce any unnecessary risks.

The protocol for the home visits is, unsurprisingly, strict. The priority is to prevent researchers from bringing anything in or taking anything out. They are instructed not to touch anything. One researcher reads aloud all the information requiring consent, while the other pulls on a gown and gloves. After the participants have signed off, the gloved researcher retrieves the papers and slips them into a plastic sleeve held out by the non-gloved researcher. The gloved researcher sets up the folding chair and lays out a protective sheet on top of the best surface available.

Some of the medical equipment that is used in home visits.

The tenants, four grad students, had a picnic table stored in a shed behind the building, and they unfolded it in the middle of the yard. A European Union flag was draped across the back door, concealing stacks of books and empty beer bottles inside. Next door, two children bounced on a trampoline as they watched the scene unfolding at their neighbors’ house. Reich inserted a cannula into the crook of the first subject’s elbow, and then followed up with a finger prick. (The team hopes that participants will eventually be able to collect their own samples with a finger prick at home.) Feeling a little woozy, one of the students, a master’s candidate in physics, lay on his back, knees in the air, in the shade on the other side of the bench.

I asked the study’s newest participants what their reaction had been to masked medical students showing up at their door; they shrugged nonchalantly. It was exciting to be a part of this massive community effort, they said, and it was also a kind of free civic service, delivered right to your home. Reich and Schneider told me they were frequently approached while walking through Munich by people wanting to be included in the study. Each of them had felt, more or less, a similar sense of enthusiasm. Early on in the pandemic response, both of them, though not yet accredited doctors, had volunteered to work in the hospitals. In the end, they weren’t needed. But travelling through the city, visiting people in their homes, collecting data on the patterns of the disease had offered them another way to contribute. “In this situation you can’t keep your ears shut,” Schneider said. “It’s strange to see history happening.”

Elisabeth Zerofsky

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