THE CONCIERGE
‘JULIETA’
NEW ROLE IN AN
ANOTHER WOMAN
INTERNET WORLD ON THE VERGE
SYDNEY-TO-HOBART RACE
RECALLING THE THRILL OF
A TUMULTUOUS VICTORY
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PAGES 8-9 | SPECIAL REPORT
PAGE 15 | CULTURE
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INTERNATIONAL EDITION | MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2016
Trump
may hinder
Israel’s plan
of diplomacy
Varieties
of religious
experience
NEWS ANALYSIS
JERUSALEM
Nation trying to move past
Palestinian conflict and
improve regional relations
Ross Douthat
OPINION
BY PETER BAKER
It’s the Christmas season; indulge me.
One of my hobbies is collecting what
you might call nonconversion stories —
stories about secular moderns who
have supernatural-seeming experiences without being propelled into any
specific religious faith. In some ways
these stories are more intriguing than
mystical experiences that confirm or
inspire strong religious belief, because
they come to us unmediated by any
theological apparatus. They are more
like raw data, raw material, the stuff
that shows how spiritual experiences
would continue if every institutional
faith disappeared
tomorrow.
When
Here are some
unbelievers
public cases.
encounter the
Three decades
ago A. J. Ayer, the
supernatural.
British logical
positivist and
scourge of all
religion, died and was resuscitated at
the age of 77. Afterward, he reported a
near-death encounter that included
repeated attempts to cross a river and
“a red light, exceedingly bright, and
also very painful . . . responsible for the
government of the universe.” Ayer
retained his atheism, but declared that
the experience had “slightly weakened” his conviction that death “will be
the end of me.”
As a young man in the 1960s, the
filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, of “RoboCop” and “Showgirls” fame, wandered
into a Pentecostal church and suddenly
felt “the Holy Ghost descending . . . as if
a laser beam was cutting through my
head and my heart was on fire.” He was
in the midst of dealing with his thengirlfriend’s unexpected pregnancy;
after they procured an abortion, he had
a terrifying, avenging-angel vision
during a screening of “King Kong.”
The combined experience actively
propelled him away from anything
metaphysical; the raw carnality of his
most famous films, he suggested later,
was an attempt to keep the numinous
and destabilizing at bay.
Barbara Ehrenreich, the left-wing
essayist and atheist, had shocking,
unlooked-for experiences of spiritual
rapture as a teenager, which she wrote
about in 2014’s don’t-call-it-religious
memoir, “Living With a Wild God.” The
“wild” part is key: Ehrenreich rejects
the God of monotheism because the
Being she encountered seemed stranger, less benign and more amoral than
the God she thinks that most religions
DOUTHAT, PAGE 13
PHOTOGRAPHS BY MERIDITH KOHUT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES
Yamilet Lugo, left, in September visiting the grave of her son Kevin Lara Lugo, who died in July on his 16th birthday, in Maturín, Venezuela. The family had gone three days without food.
To live and die in Venezuela
MATURÍN, VENEZUELA
No food or medicine
when a starving boy fell
ill on his 16th birthday
BY NICHOLAS CASEY
His name was Kevin Lara Lugo, and he
died on his 16th birthday.
He spent the day before foraging for
food in an empty lot, because there was
nothing to eat at home. Then in a hospital because what he found made him
gravely ill.
Hours later, he was dead on a gurney,
which doctors rolled by his mother as
she watched helplessly. She said the
hospital had lacked the simplest supplies needed to save him.
“I have a tradition that in the morning
of their birthdays, I wake up my children
and sing to them,” his mother, Yamilet
Lugo, said. “How could I do that when
my son was dead?”
Venezuela has suffered from so many
ailments this year. Inflation has driven
office workers to abandon the cities and
head to illegal pit mines in the jungle,
willing to subject themselves to armed
gangs and multiple bouts of malaria for
the chance to earn a living.
Doctors have prepared to operate on
bloody tables because they did not have
enough water to clean them. Psychiatric
patients have had to be tied to chairs in
mental hospitals because there was no
medication left to treat their delusions.
Hunger has driven some people to
riot — and others into rickety fishing
boats, fleeing Venezuela on reckless
journeys by sea.
But it was the story of a boy with no
food, who had gone searching for wild
roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself instead, that seemed to embody everything that had gone wrong in Venezuela.
The country’s economic crisis had
spent months encircling his family, only
to snatch away its second-born son.
His neighborhood, on the edge of
what was once a prosperous oil boom
town, had long been running out of basics like corn flour and bread.
The cutlery factory where Ms. Lugo
had worked shut down in May because it
could no longer obtain the materials to
make plastic, joining many across the
country that have gone idle. That left the
family unable to buy what food was left.
At the hospital, Ms. Lugo said, there
was no respite. Like so many clinics
throughout the country, the one in
Maturín ran out of basic supplies like
Kevin’s school uniform, laid out on his bed by his mother. With no food, he had gone
searching for wild roots to eat but ended up poisoning himself with what he found.
BY PENELOPE GREEN
As soothing as a video of a basket of
baby sloths, and borne on a raft of lifestyle books, hygge is headed for your living room.
Hygge (pronounced HOO-gah, like a
football cheer in a Scandinavian accent)
is the Danish word for cozy. It is also a
national manifesto, nay, an obsession
expressed in the constant pursuit of
homespun pleasures involving candlelight, fires, fuzzy knitted socks, porridge, coffee, cake and other people. But
no strangers, as the Danes, apparently,
are rather shy. Hygge is already such a
thing in Britain that the Collins Dictionary proclaimed it one of the top 10
words of 2016, along with Brexit and
Trumpism.
Denmark frequently tops lists of the
happiest countries in the world, in sur-
MARC ROSENTHAL
veys conducted by the United Nations,
among other organizations, consistently beating its Scandinavian cousins,
Sweden and Norway — as well as the
United States, which hovers around 13th
place. While all three Nordic countries
share happiness boosters like small
populations and the attendant boons of a
welfare state (free education, subsidized child care and other generous so-
cial supports), what distinguishes Denmark is its quest for hygge.
At least, that is the conclusion of Meik
Wiking, the founder and chief executive
of the Happiness Institute, a think tank
based in Copenhagen dedicated to exploring why some societies are happier
than others.
“We talk about it constantly,” Mr. Wiking said. “I’ll invite you over for dinner
and during the week we’ll talk about
how hyggelig it’s going to be, and then
during the dinner we’ll talk about how
hyggelig it is, and then during the week
afterwards, you’ll remind me about how
hyggelig Saturday was.” (The adjectival
form of the word is pronounced HOOgah-lee.)
“Danes see hygge as a part of our culture,” he said, “the same way you see
freedom as inherently American.”
When we spoke, Mr. Wiking — pronounced Viking — was home in Copenhagen for a few days after a multicity
tour. He has written “The Little Book of
Hygge,” which is already a best seller in
Britain and will be out next month in the
HYGGE, PAGE 2
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ISRAEL, PAGE 5
OBAMA AND NETANYAHU CLASH TO THE END
intravenous solutions, leaving the family to search the city and haggle with
black-market sellers in the hours before
Kevin died.
“This boy dies this way for no reason
at all,” said Lilibeth Díaz, his aunt, looking at Kevin’s grave, his name etched in
wet concrete by a friend’s fingertip.
Danish comfort during dark winters
Hygge extols cuddling,
knitted socks and other
wholesome, cozy notions
On the wall of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu’s office is a giant floor-toceiling map with Israel at its center. Mr.
Netanyahu likes staring at the map. He
regales visitors with stories about how
Israel has made friends with so many of
the countries shown, some nearby, others far away.
His point is that Israel has moved beyond the days when its conflict with the
Palestinians defined its relations with
the world. But even as he celebrates the
ascension of President-elect Donald J.
Trump as a steadfast ally, Mr. Netanyahu may find that it complicates management of his own conservative coalition
and undercuts the very diplomatic outreach that has been his central priority.
The 14-to-0 vote by the United Nations
Security Council condemning Israeli
settlements, permitted on Friday by
President Obama, who ordered an
American abstention, served as a reminder that the Palestinian issue remains a powder keg. Instead of counting
new friends, Mr. Netanyahu was left to
tally up old enemies, and in a speech on
Saturday night he lashed out, vowing to
exact a “diplomatic and economic price”
from countries that in his view try to
hurt Israel.
He announced that he was cutting off
$8 million in contributions to the United
Nations and reviewing whether to continue allowing its personnel to enter Israel, in addition to recalling ambassadors and canceling visits from some
countries that supported the measure.
He accused the departing Obama administration of carrying out a “disgraceful anti-Israel maneuver.”
“The resolution that was passed by
the U.N. yesterday is part of the swan
song of the old world that is biased
against Israel,” Mr. Netanyahu said at a
Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony
honoring wounded soldiers and terrorism victims. “But, my friends, we are entering a new era and, as President-elect
Trump said yesterday, that is going to
happen a lot faster than people think.”
Indeed, in Mr. Trump, Mr. Netanyahu
will have a far more supportive ally in
the White House than Mr. Obama, who
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Issue Number
No. 41,612
Kevin is the baby in the overalls in the
picture on his mother’s wall, the one who
earned the perfect attendance awards.
They still hang on the walls, too.
The markers in the kitchen wall
ticked off his growth. By 12, he was about
4 feet 11 inches; by 14, he was four inches
VENEZUELA, PAGE 4
Grievances are laid bare as the United
States chooses not to block a United
Nations condemnation of Israel. PAGE 5
TRUMPS RUSH TO RESOLVE BUSINESS TIES
The president-elect and his family try
to fix potential conflicts of interest,
including closing a charity. PAGE 6