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BACK PAGE | TRAVEL
PAGE 18 | CULTURE
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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2017
A braggart
tyrannizes
in bombast
China bets
on sensitive
start-ups in
U.S. tech
HONG KONG
Report to Pentagon raises
fear Beijing could advance
its military capabilities
Nicholas Kristof
OPINION
One of President Trump’s rare
strengths has been his ability to
project competence. The Dow Jones
stock index is up an astonishing 2,200
points since his election in part because investors believed Trump could
deliver tax reform and infrastructure
spending.
Think again!
The Trump administration is increasingly showing itself to be breathtakingly incompetent, and that’s the
real lesson of the collapse of the G.O.P.
health care bill. The administration
proved unable to organize its way out
of a paper bag:
After seven
Mr. Trump has years of Republicrafted an
cans’ publicly
administration loathing Obamacare, their
in his own
repeal-replace
image: vain,
bill failed after 18
narcissistic and days.
Politics somedangerous.
times rewards
braggarts, and
Trump is a
world-class boaster. He promised a
health care plan that would be “unbelievable,” “beautiful,” “terrific,” “less
expensive and much better,” “insurance for everybody.” But he’s abysmal
at delivering — because the basic truth
is that he’s an effective politician who’s
utterly incompetent at governing.
It’s sometimes said that politicians
campaign in poetry and govern in
prose. Trump campaigns in braggadocio and governs in bombast.
Whatever one thinks of Trump’s
merits, this competence gap raises
profound questions about our national
direction. If the administration can’t
repeal Obamacare — or manage
friendly relations with allies like Mexico or Australia — how will it possibly
accomplish something complicated like
tax reform?
Failure and weakness also build on
themselves, and the health care debacle will make it more difficult for
Trump to get his way with Congress on
other issues. As people recognize that
the emperor is wearing no clothes, that
perception of weakness will spiral.
One of the underlying problems is
Trump’s penchant for personnel
choices that are bafflingly bad or ethically challenged or both. Mike Flynn
was perhaps the best-known example.
But consider Sebastian Gorka, a
counterterrorism adviser to the president. Gorka, who is of Hungarian
KRISTOF, PAGE 15
BY PAUL MOZUR
AND JANE PERLEZ
BY PENELOPE GREEN
Just before Thanksgiving 2012, Ariel
Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker,
flew to Mongolia to report on that country’s mining boom. She was 38 years old
and five months pregnant, and on her
second night there, she miscarried in
her hotel room, delivering her son in a
torrent of blood that nearly killed her.
Her son would not survive, but Ms. Levy
detailed in a heartbreaking essay a year
later that would win her a National Magazine Award that after she yanked the
placenta from her body, crawled to the
phone and called a local doctor, she took
the boy’s photo.
“I worried that if I didn’t,” she wrote,
“I would never believe he had existed.”
The essay, titled “Thanksgiving in
Mongolia,” was a brutal read. Ms. Levy
wrote of the feeling of her son’s skin,
Y(1J85IC*KKNMKS( +?!z!$!#!%
ICEMAN, PAGE 5
CHINA, PAGE 12
PHOTOGRAPHS BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
A reconstruction of the Iceman in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. He died after he was shot with an arrow in the back, piercing his subclavian artery.
Who killed the Iceman?
BOLZANO, ITALY
Seasoned detective pieces
together a murder mystery
from 5,300 years ago
BY ROD NORDLAND
When the head of a small Italian museum called Detective Inspector Alexander Horn of the Munich Police, she
asked him if he investigated cold cases.
“Yes I do,” Inspector Horn said, recalling their conversation.
“Well, I have the coldest case of all for
you,” said Angelika Fleckinger, director
of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology, in Bolzano, Italy.
The unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi,
has literally been in cold storage in her
museum for a quarter-century. Often
called the Iceman, he is the world’s most
perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper
Age fellow who had been frozen inside a
glacier along the northern Italian border with Austria, until warming global
temperatures melted the ice and two
hikers discovered him in 1991.
The cause of death remained uncertain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of
the mummy pointed to foul play in the
form of a flint arrowhead embedded in
his back, just under his shoulder. But
now, armed with a wealth of new scientific information that researchers have
compiled, Inspector Horn has managed
to piece together a remarkably detailed
picture of what befell the Iceman on that
fateful day around 3300 B.C., near the
crest of the Ötztal Alps.
“When I was first contacted with the
idea, I thought it was too difficult, too
much time has passed,” said Inspector
Horn, a noted profiler. “But actually he’s
in better condition than recent homicide
victims I’ve worked on who have been
found out in the open.”
There are a few mummies in the
world as old as Ötzi, but none so well
preserved. Most were ritually prepared,
which usually meant removal of internal
organs, preservation with chemicals or
exposure to destructive desert conditions.
The glacier not only froze Ötzi where
he had died, but the high humidity of the
ice also kept his organs and skin largely
intact. “Imagine, we know the stomach
contents of a person 5,000 years ago,”
Inspector Horn said. “In a lot of cases we
are not able to do that even now.”
Those contents, as it turned out, were
critical in determining with surprising
precision what happened to Ötzi and
even helped shed light on the possible
The Iceman mummy on display at the museum. He was found frozen in a glacier, and its
high humidity kept him remarkably well preserved, with his organs intact.
motive of his killer.
The more scientists learn, the more
recognizable the Iceman becomes. He
was 5 feet 5 inches tall (about average
height for his time), weighed 110 pounds,
had brown eyes and shoulder-length,
dark brown hair, and a size 7½ foot. He
was about 45, give or take six years, re-
To have and have not
Ariel Levy’s new memoir
reflects her loss after a
miscarriage and divorce
spectably old for the late Neolithic age
— but still in his prime.
Ötzi had the physique of a man who
did a lot of strenuous walking but little
upper-body work; there was hardly any
fat on his body. He had all of his teeth,
and between his two upper front teeth
A little-known start-up called Neurala
helped the United States Air Force make
military robots more perceptive and
NASA make its rovers autonomous.
But when Neurala needed money, it
got little response from the American
military.
So Neurala turned to China, landing
an undisclosed sum from an investment
firm backed by a state-run Chinese company.
Chinese firms have become significant investors in American start-ups
working on cutting-edge technologies
with potential military applications. The
start-ups include companies that make
rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors
for autonomous navy ships and printers
that make flexible screens that could be
used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of
the Chinese firms are owned by stateowned companies or have connections
to Chinese leaders.
The deals are ringing alarm bells in
Washington. According to a new white
paper commissioned by the Department of Defense, Beijing is encouraging
Chinese companies with close government ties to invest in American startups specializing in critical technologies
like artificial intelligence and robots to
advance China’s military capacity, as
well as its economy.
The white paper, which was distributed to the senior levels of the Trump administration last week, concludes that
United States government controls that
are supposed to protect potentially critical technologies are falling short, according to three people knowledgeable
about its contents, who spoke on the
condition of anonymity.
“What drives a lot of the concern is
that China is a military competitor,” said
James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who is familiar with the report.
“How do you deal with a military competitor playing in your most innovative
market?”
The Chinese deals can pose a number
of issues. Investors could push start-ups
to strike partnerships or make licensing
or hiring decisions that could expose intellectual property. They can also get an
inside glimpse of how technology is being developed and could have access to
a start-up’s offices or computers.
Trump administration officials and
lawmakers are raising broad questions
about China’s economic relationship
with the United States. While the report
was commissioned before President
“like a silky frog’s on my mouth,” and of
the image of a white bath mat someone
had thrown over a bloodstain next to her
bed that would slowly darken as her
blood seeped through it during the five
days that she spent holed up in her hotel
room. Back home, she wrote, she
sobbed, bled and lactated in an awful
storm of hormones and grief.
Before the miscarriage, she had considered herself lucky: buoyed by the
gains of third-wave feminism, successful at her chosen career, legally married
to a woman and carrying a baby made
by a friend’s donated sperm. Afterward,
as she wrote, she felt buffeted by a different kind of fate, something more
Shakespearean or biblical, “the 10 or 20
minutes I was somebody’s mother were
black magic; there is no adventure I
would have traded them for.”
And yet. Not only did she lose her
child, but her marriage also fell apart.
This felt like a karmic smackdown, and
Ms. Levy wanted to interrogate her own
responsibility for such a sequence of
grim events. That is the intellectual
backbone, anyway, of “The Rules Do
NATHAN BAJAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ariel Levy at home in Manhattan, a bright
one-bedroom walk-up that she bought
when she was married.
Not Apply”: her memoir that lays the
groundwork for what happened in Mongolia and picks up where the essay left
off, raising, once again, that hoary conceit, the one about women and “having it
all.”
“I felt like this very fortunate beneficiary of the women’s movement,” she
said during a recent interview in her
bright, one-bedroom walk-up in
Chelsea. “I got to have all these choices,
and the rules” — biological, historical —
“did not apply. So it was a very shocking
experience to find myself, childless and
alone at 38. I felt like a complete failure,
on the deepest level.
“Some of it was like someone in a Jane
Austen novel, getting her comeuppance,
but some of it, most of it, was feeling like
a mother, but where’s the baby? There is
no child. Then you’ve got a little identity
crisis on your hands.”
Ms. Levy bought the apartment during her marriage, when she and her former spouse, now a recovering alcoholic,
separated for a time. She lives there
alone, attended by two amiable, rotund
ARIEL, PAGE 2
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Issue Number
No. 41,691