What “Isle of Dogs” gets right about Japan

A week ago, I saw Wes Anderson’s “Isle of Dogs,” or “Inu-ga-shima.” I saw it as someone who, upon hearing that name, is forcibly reminded of Oni-ga-shima, the isle of demons where Peach Boy, a hero of Japanese folklore, fights evil with his canine band of brothers. In the first grade, I was cast in a school production, in Tokyo, as one of the demons. The role required red face paint and Sharpie horns and growl-prancing, and I was as terrifying as a four-foot Japanese Caliban could be. This is all to say that I watched “Isle of Dogs” as a Japanese person—as someone who was born in Japan, who spent my childhood and adolescence there, and who looks and speaks and reads and eats like a native.

I saw the movie in New York. I arrived early. As I waited, I read critiques of the film, which is set in the fictional city of Megasaki, and which follows a group of dogs, and one or two humans, after the mayor banishes all canines to nearby Trash Island. The dogs speak English; the humans, for the most part, speak Japanese, which is often but not always translated. Reading the reviews, I found that there were some familiar gripes: the film Orientalized, it Othered, it had a white-savior narrative, it rendered Japanese people flat and mysterious and inscrutable, and it was part of a grand old Euro-American tradition of white men plundering Japanese aesthetics for their art. I put on my headphones and listened to a Slate interview in which a critic, Inkoo Kang, responded to the movie with a “first reaction: Yuck. Second reaction: Yawn.”

The movie began. The Japanese characters started speaking, without subtitles, and suddenly, in a Loews in Lincoln Square, surrounded by a sea of Americans inhaling corgi-sized tubs of popcorn, I was hearing voices from home. 

They were neither inscrutable nor flat. They were Japanese, in various shades of age and talent and fame. I heard Mari Natsuki—better known Stateside as the voice of Yubaba, from “Spirited Away”—in the host mother who dresses down an overexcited white girl: “Be quiet, go to sleep, I don’t care about your newspaper, just go to sleep.” I strained to place a TV-news anchor’s voice until, yes: it was the lead singer of the teen-rock band Radwimps, who’d starred in a mixtape that my first boyfriend had given me, in a brown paper bag, in front of Shibuya Station, more than a decade ago.

To say that the Wes Anderson film dehumanizes the Japanese is to assume the primacy of an English-speaking audience. Photograph by Fox Searchlight Pictures / Everett

Even when the voices weren’t familiar, they were distinct. Someone—if not Anderson, then perhaps the actor Kunichi Nomura, who co-wrote the film—cared enough to insure that the voices sounded pitch-perfect as types. A scientist, presenting her findings on snout flu, spoke with the bored, clipped tone of every ponytailed researcher on Japanese daytime TV. In a scene that must’ve seemed an incoherent buzz to non-Japanese viewers, a doctor interrupts another’s hushed importance during surgery with an equally serious “Gauze!”—a deadpan, bull’s-eye rendition of “Iryu,” the Japanese version of “ER.” No one else in the theatre got it, but I couldn’t contain my laughter.

As the film progressed, I picked up cues hidden from the rest of the audience. At one point, the dogs leapt on a trolley that read “Trash: For Compression and Crushing” in faint white kanji. Mayor Kobayashi’s propaganda poster—“For the Greater Good of Megasaki City”—was a playful riff on “For the Greater Good of Children,” a principle upheld in Japanese courts to protect kids against negligent parents. (That it was being used as a campaign slogan was, of course, ironic, given that Kobayashi was deporting his ward’s pet.) And then there were the gags: Atari, the ward in question, washes the dog Chief in a tub-sized can labelled “Hokusai Beer.” When the credits rolled, the staggering number of kanji characters—of Japanese people involved in making the film—lit the screen brightly for seconds and seconds.

As I walked out of the theatre, Anderson’s decision not to subtitle the Japanese speakers struck me as a carefully considered artistic choice. “Isle of Dogs” is profoundly interested in the humor and fallibility of translation. This is established early, by the title card: “The humans in this film speak only in their native tongue (occasionally translated by bilingual interpreter, foreign exchange student, and electronic device). The dogs’ barks are translated into English.” 

From the start, Anderson points to the various and suspect ways in which translation occurs. Official Interpreter Nelson, voiced by Frances McDormand, works for the government, but her reliability is thrown into doubt when she starts inserting her own comments—“Holy Moses!”;“Boy, what a night!”—while on the job. In one scene, she’s casually replaced by a little boy. The simul-talk devices, meanwhile, are shown to be operated by shadowy men in white starched shirts. This is the beating heart of the film: there is no such thing as “true” translation. Everything is interpreted. Translation is malleable and implicated, always, by systems of power

This theme persists throughout the film, especially in the character of Tracy Walker, the foreign-exchange student who’s been deemed, in some reviews, as a white savior of sorts. Tracy has a hunch that the government is covering up a mass conspiracy. During a rally she cries, “Not fair!” and stamps up to Kobayashi, demanding that her voice be heard. Kobayashi blinks, then revokes her immigration visa, leaving her in tears. (Notably, the children who provide more than just bluster are Atari and the Japanese hacker from Tracy’s newspaper club, both of whom end up saving the day.) If Tracy is a white savior, her role is immediately neutered. What is interesting about the scene is that she speaks to the crowd in English. Both Kobayashi and the crowd understand her words, but respond in Japanese. This was a revelation: in the world of Megasaki City, the Japanese can speak and understand English but choose to speak in their native tongue. They demand fluency on their own terms. At a climactic moment, the movie rejects the notion of universal legibility, placing the onus of interpretation solely upon the American audience.

This is a sly subversion, in which the Japanese evince an agency independent of foreign validation. Indeed, to say that the scene dehumanizes the Japanese is to assume the primacy of an English-speaking audience. Such logic replicates the very tyranny of language that “Isle of Dogs” attempts to erode. Anderson is a white, non-Japanese director, but had he not been interested in the power dynamics behind translation, and instead made a twee fever dream imitating Japanese aesthetics, “Isle of Dogs” would have looked and sounded a lot different. His commitment to showing the daily rhythms of a living, breathing Japanese people reveals itself not only in his cast of twenty-three Japanese actors but in his depictions of how exactly a Japanese TV-news anchor transitions to a new topic (“This is the next news”), what milk cartons for elementary schools look like (labelled “extra-thick”), or how a couple of scientists might celebrate—with a clink, “Yo—oh!,” and a clap. The film invites a kinship with a viewer who will find these banalities familiar, and lets these moments flow by, unnoticed, for those who do not.

This is not to assert the primacy of my own experience with the film. Whenever an Asian-American controversy flares up, whether in regard to whitewashing or appropriation, there’s usually a move, in the media, to ask those in the homeland what they thought—whether they were offended, say, by Scarlett Johansson playing a Japanese character. That move implies that being Japanese, and the corresponding right to take offense, are innately tied to growing up there. That the Japanese person usually responds in the negative—of course we’re fine with Scarlett!—speaks only to the fact that Japan is a country with neither ethnic diversity nor a substantial critical race discourse. To be Asian-American, meanwhile, is to develop a brutal familiarity with seeing Asia, and Asian characters, distorted, passivized, and flattened by white hands.

But we might note, when considering “Isle of Dogs,” that the tradition of white men “appropriating” Japanese art was, in large part, aided and abetted by the Japanese. The history of Japonism—of the West’s obsession with Japanese aesthetics—can’t be unwoven from the fact that said obsession served as an efficient, effective distraction as Japanese troops invaded Manchuria, Taiwan, and the Korean Peninsula. Kabuki, haiku, woodblock prints by Hiroshige and Hokusai—the very forms that are supposedly arrogated by Anderson—were, in some respects, cultural ambassadors that ushered forth imperial expansion. And Japan, too, used language as an oppressing force; in Korea, the imperial government banned the study of Korean and enforced a Japanese-only policy.

Language is power. “Isle of Dogs” knows this. It shows the seams of translation, and demarcates a space that is accessible—and funny—only to Japanese viewers. One of the most potent shots in the film is of graffiti on gray cement. A large black scrawl asks, “Douyatte bokura wo korosu tsumori?” How on earth do you plan on killing us? For most viewers, it’s a mark on the wall. For Japanese ones, it’s a battle cry.

(Source: New Yorker)

Coronavirus: Tiger at Bronx Zoo tests positive for Covid-19

A four-year-old female Malayan tiger at the Bronx Zoo has tested positive for the coronavirus.

The tiger, named Nadia, is believed to be the first known case of an animal infected with Covid-19 in the US.

The Bronx Zoo, in New York City, says the test result was confirmed by the National Veterinary Services Laboratory in Iowa.

Nadia, along with six other big cats, is thought to have been infected by an asymptomatic zoo keeper.

The cats started showing symptoms, including a dry cough, late last month after exposure to the employee, who has not been identified.

"This is the first time that any of us know of anywhere in the world that a person infected the animal and the animal got sick," Paul Calle, the chief veterinarian at the zoo, told Reuters news agency on Sunday.

One of the Bronx Zoo's Malayan tigers. Getty Images

There have been isolated instances of pets testing positive for the coronavirus elsewhere in the world, but experts have stressed there is no evidence they can become sick or spread the disease.

Mr Calle said he intends to share the findings with other zoos and institutions researching the transmission of Covid-19.

"We tested the cat [Nadia] out of an abundance of caution and will ensure any knowledge we gain about Covid-19 will contribute to the world's continuing understanding of this novel coronavirus," the zoo said in a statement.

Nadia, her sister Azul, as well as two Amur tigers and three African lions who showed symptoms, are all expected to make a full recovery, the zoo said.

The big cats did have some decrease in appetite but "are otherwise doing well under veterinary care and are bright, alert, and interactive with their keepers", it said.

The zoo said it is not known how the virus will develop in animals like tigers and lions since various species can react differently to new infections, but all the animals will be closely monitored.

None of the zoo's other big cats are showing any signs of illness. All the tigers showing symptoms were housed in the zoo's Tiger Mountain area. It is unclear if the others will be tested.

All four zoos run by the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City, including the Bronx Zoo, have been closed to the public since 16 March. New measures will now be put in place to protect the animals and their caretakers at all the facilities.

What do we know about animals and the virus?

This coronavirus was first detected in humans in the Chinese city of Wuhan late last year.

The coronavirus (called Sars-CoV-2, which causes the disease Covid-19) is thought to have originated in wildlife and been passed to humans via a live animal market in Wuhan.

The pandemic has been driven by human-to-human transmission, but the infection of Nadia raises new questions about human-to-animal transmission.

There have been less than a handful of isolated reports of companion animals testing positive for coronavirus, including two dogs in Hong Kong.

There is "no evidence that any person has been infected with Covid-19 in the US by animals, including by pet dogs or cats," the zoo's statement noted.

The new virus is part of the coronavirus family, which includes the common cold, Sars and Mers. Getty Images

That is also the view of the World Organisation for Animal Health and the World Health Organization (WHO), which says there is no evidence that pet dogs or cats can pass on the coronavirus.

The World Organisation for Animal Health says studies are under way to understand the issue more. and urges anyone who has become sick to limit contact with pets.

Dr Sarah Caddy, Veterinarian and Clinical Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, is among experts to respond to the reports.

"It is surprising that the tiger has become infected with what must have been a fairly low dose of virus - we can assume the tiger did not have continual close contact with the asymptomatic zoo keeper," she said about the transmission.

"It is also interesting that the tiger showed clinical signs consistent with Covid-19 in humans. Although scientific proof is lacking, the chance this is just a coincidence is low."

Conservation experts have warned that the virus could pose a threat to some wildlife like the great apes - and have said measures are needed to reduce the risk of wild gorillas, chimps and orangutans.

(Source: BBC)

Coronavirus: New York doctors make diagnosis breakthrough

Ground-glass opacities seen in patient CT scans were identified as similar to those seen in related outbreaks such as Sars and Mers

Examining coronavirus patients' CT scans could lead to a quicker diagnosis of those with suspected symptoms, doctors have discovered.

A team of researchers in Mount Sinai, New York - the first in the US to analyse CT scans of patients - have said they can identify specific patterns in the lungs as markers of the disease.

The study revealed scan analysis could be a viable option for suspected patients and help determine which patients with inconclusive results should be kept in isolation.

A man wearing a face mask crosses a road in Wuhan, the epicentre of the novel coronavirus outbreak. Reuters

The doctors, who published their findings in Radiology, received the scans of 94 patients in China who had been admitted to four medical centers in four Chinese provinces between 18 January and 2 February. 

Most of them had traveled to Wuhan or had close contact with an infected patient, the Mount Sinai School of Medicine said.

Of the 36 patients who received scans in zero to two days within reporting symptoms, more than half showed no evidence of lung disease.

In a group of 33 patients who received CT scans three to five days after reporting symptoms, the team observed patterns of “ground-glass opacities” - white patches showing up on the scan which became more round in shape and dense. 

In the 25 patients scanned six to 12 days after symptoms, the scans analysis showed fully involved lung disease.

Patterns seen in these images are similar to patterns seen in related outbreaks such as Sars and Mers.

“Recognizing imaging patterns based on infection time course is paramount for not only understanding the disease process and natural history of COVID-19 but also for helping to predict patient progression and potential complication development, “ said lead author Adam Bernheim, assistant professor of diagnostic, molecular and interventional radiology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

Doctors said when patients first report symptoms of possible COVID-19, they are nonspecific, often resembling a common cold, so it can be difficult to diagnose and confirmatory tests by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can take several days.

It also cited that the study allows hospitals in the United States and worldwide to confirm or rule out coronavirus based on CT images.

If lung scans for patients with early symptoms are inconclusive, doctors can consider holding the patient in isolation for a few days until a decisive verdict can be made.

Prof Bernheim added: “This is necessary for prompt diagnosis for any individual patient (which will lead to more rapid and effective care), but also for patient isolation to prevent the spreading of the highly contagious disease.”

Currently, there are 81,191 confirmed cases of coronavirus and 2,768 people have died from the respiratory virus.

(Source: Independent)

Creator of New York City subway map Michael Hertz dies

Michael Hertz, the man who designed the map of the New York City subway system, has died aged 87.

In the 1970s his firm, Michael Hertz Associates, was hired by city transport officials to redesign the old map.

At the time, crime was on the rise and subway ridership was at its lowest level since the late 1910s. Few tourists rode trains to see sights.

His team added streets, reshaped parks, distorted boroughs and re-formed and gave curves to the snaking train lines.

The New York Subway map which was first used in 1979

A native of New York's Brooklyn borough, Mr Hertz previously helped create transit maps for Houston and Washington DC before undertaking the New York project for the city's Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA).

In an effort to remove some of the straight lines that were disliked by riders, Mr Hertz hired a Japanese designer who rode every subway line with his eyes closed so that he could better depict the curves in the railways.

The map that Mr Hertz produced in 1979 was tweaked by his firm several times, but the basic design remains.

In 2004, he told the New York Times that he appreciated every time he saw tourists using the map for the first time.

"I still get a pleasure in a subway station when I see somebody in lederhosen looking at the map," he said.

(Source: Independent)

New York beats Tokyo to become world's top innovative city

New York took first place in a list of the world’s most innovative cities on Tuesday, with the United States performing strongly for its embrace of smart technology and startups.

Tokyo — last year’s winner — and London took second and third place in the Innovation Cities Index, with Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston also making the top 10.

“What really surprised us this year was a United States bounce back at the top of the league,” said Christopher Hire, director of commercial data provider 2thinknow, which publishes the annual ranking of 500 cities.

Chicago entered the top five for the first time since the poll began in 2007, due to a burgeoning number of startups and top-ranked universities, the index found.

People walk on the waterfront that overlooks the skyline of lower Manhattan in Jersey City, New Jersey, on Nov. 6. | AP

One of the big losers was the San Francisco Bay — home of the Silicon Valley headquarters of tech giants such as Apple, Facebook and Google — which fell six places to ninth spot due to “tech controversies, homelessness and privacy issues,” it said.

All three firms have pledged billions to ease California’s housing crisis, as fast-growing tech companies have drawn protests from Northern California residents who blame them for rising housing costs.

In the run-up to the 2020 U.S. presidential election, big tech companies are being challenged across the political spectrum, from privacy concerns to their policies on political ads and ensuring election security.

The index looked at more than 100 indicators including transport, infrastructure, citizen privacy, green architecture, property prices, startup office spaces and internet users.

Several Chinese cities made gains, including Beijing and Shanghai, in a sign of rising global power, 2thinknow said.

“Our index is designed to measure innovation conditions, and often predicts rising cities before other rankings,” said Hire.

“It is up to the city whether they can keep on top of the latest trends, and exploit their innovation potential.”

China is preparing to become the first country in the world to roll out a digitized domestic currency — powered partially by blockchain technology and dispersed through digital wallets — in a move closely watched by financial services.

London, Paris and Berlin were the only three European cities to make the top 20, fewer than in previous years, while African cities fared worst, languishing at the bottom of the index.

(Source: JT)

Isis-inspired pair who wanted to be ‘bad bitches’ admit plot to bomb New York

The duo shopped for bomb ingredients with a third woman called 'Mel' - who turned out to be an undercover police officer

Two women inspired by Isis are facing up to 20 years in prison after admitting a plot to carry out a terror attack in New York.

Asia Siddiqui, 35, and Noelle Velentzas, 31, had studied how to make car bombs and had stockpiled propane gas tanks, soldering tools, jihadist propaganda and machetes in their homes in the Queens area of the city.

They also visited a Home Store looking for equipment for their bombs with a third woman they knew only as “Mel” - who was actually an undercover counter-terrorism officer.

Velentzas was said to have become “obsessed with pressure cookers since the Boston Marathon attacks in 2013”, when two brothers detonated bombs which killed three people and injured hundreds more.

New York City ( AFP/Getty Images )

She allegedly once asked her co-conspirator: “Why can’t we be some real bad bitches?”

She was heard on an undercover recording in 2014 saying that she and Siddiqui were “citizens of the Islamic State” and said that Osama bin Laden was one of her heroes.

On being told that an American had been arrested on his way to Syria to wage jihad, she said there were opportunities for “pleasing Allah” in the US.

The pair apparently discussed attacking the funeral of a police officer who had been shot and killed with his partner in the city.

They also talked about government targets, with Velentzas saying “you go for the head” when carrying out attacks.

Appearing in a federal court in New York on Friday, both women pleaded guilty to “teaching and distributing information pertaining to the making and use of an explosive, destructive device, and weapon of mass destruction, intending that it be used to commit a federal crime of violence”.

US attorney Richard Donoghue said in a statement: “In an effort to implement their violent, radical ideology, the defendants studied some of the most deadly terrorist attacks in US history, and used them as a blueprint for their own plans to kill American law enforcement and military personnel.”

The guilty pleas mean that details of the New York Police Department’s sometimes controversial undercover operations will not be revealed in court.

Civil rights groups have accused the police of using tactics that could lure innocent people into plots they may have had no intention of getting involved in otherwise. The undercover officer known as Mel had been instructed to mingle with young Muslims to identify potential threats.

Police officials had expressed concern that her cover have been blown had she been forced to testify.

(Source: Independent)

Train from Manchester to London costs more than flights to New York

‘Something’s very wrong with our railways’

The exorbitant cost of UK rail travel has been highlighted again after a passenger shared a picture of his return rail journey from Stockport to London, costing £287.10.

Editor and writer Ben Hoare posted a snap of the Virgin Trains ticket on Twitter with the caption: “Given how much my Stockport-Euston day return (booked a week ago) cost, is it any wonder this Virgin Train is half empty? Something’s v wrong with our railways.”

He added: “I think this shows trains are way too expensive and ticketing too complicated. The sad thing is, we invented railways.”

A return flight from London to New York with low-cost airline Norwegian can be purchased for less than Hoare’s train ticket price, with October returns available from £285 to travel the 6,950 miles. A journey from Stockport, in Greater Manchester, to London and back is 310 miles as the crow flies.

Hoare’s post prompted more than 100 shocked comments.

Given how much my Stockport-Euston day return (booked a week ago) cost, is it any wonder this @VirginTrains is half empty? Something’s v wrong with our railways @helenpidd @AndyBurnhamGM pic.twitter.com/ml4orqXHKO

— Ben Hoare (@benhoare5) 30 July 2019

Jean Thierry wrote: “Mediocre service on dirty outdated rolling stock with little or no compensation available for poor service. This is the downside of letting private companies run the railways. Actually there isn’t an upside for the traveller. Railways in most other EU countries are state owned.”

While some commenters pointed out that train prices differ vastly depending on which service you book, and that passengers can get a good deal if they travel off-peak or try split-ticketing, others countered that commuters shouldn’t be penalised for needing to travel at certain times.

Virgin Trains return tickets between Stockport and London can cost £350

 “I see you have been plagued by the split ticketing bores. And the know-it-alls who say you could have got a cheaper train if you had got a different train at a different time and booked on a different date,” replied Helen Pidd, the Guardian’s north of England editor.

According to The Independent’s research, a same-day return between Stockport and London on peak services, booked for travelling today, costs £350. This works out as £1.12 per mile.

The cheapest price offered, travelling today on off-peak trains, is £192.95 return.

The best price The Independent could find online was £48 return (£24 each way) for advance tickets on certain services in September and October.

A Virgin Trains spokesperson said: “The vast majority of our customers take advantage of our discounted tickets, with fares between Stockport and London starting at £24. These great value fares are one of the reasons we’ve won almost all the market share between the northwest and London from airlines and why we’re seeing record numbers travelling on our trains.”

(Source: Independent)

The morning when normal ended: A personal account of September 11

Author of the 2012 bestseller ‘The Expats’, Chris Pavone’s latest thriller ‘The Paris Diversion’ takes place in the French capital as it faces multiple terror attacks. Eighteen years on, the New Yorker recalls the horror of 9/11 and its aftermath, and how it has informed his writing…

On 10 September 2001, I went to bed with a stuffy head, and took a decongestant. So on the 11th I awoke late, groggy. My wife had already left for work. Our dog kept me company while I shaved and showered, dressed and caffeinated. I was aiming to leave for the office by a quarter to nine.

I was one minute late.

Smoke pours from the twin towers of the World Trade Centre after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack ( Getty )

So it was 8.46am when I bent to say goodbye to Charlie Brown, and off to the side some fast movement caught my eye, with a whirr-whoosh that sounded like a cartoon version of an incoming missile, some disaster about to befall Wile E Coyote. I spun my head to the window where the noise had shot by, but I saw nothing. I stood up. I turned to the south. That’s when I saw.

This was not a great apartment. But one corner of the loft was lined with huge windows that faced the Hudson River to the west, and the World Trade Centre just a couple of blocks to the south. The view was breathtaking, the immensity of the towers filling your field of vision. Sometimes I’d just sit and stare at the towers, awestruck.

Now, at 8.47 on a Tuesday morning, I was staring at a hole in one of the buildings. 

I immediately called my wife, told her, “I think the World Trade Centre just got hit by a missile.” I turned on the television, which was at first reporting nothing definitive, but the situation was definitely alarming. I was still staring out the window, listening to nothing on the TV, when the second plane hit. The fireball briefly looked like it was never going to stop expanding, it would engulf me. I flinched away, nearly toppled over my chair.

Now we knew that New York was being attacked. But was that attack finished? Or were these planes just the first two salvos of a massive bombardment, an invasion of the country, the end of the world as we know it?

I definitely didn’t want to go outside. Our home was surrounded by high-value targets – City Hall, Wall Street, both the New York and the American Stock Exchanges, the Federal Building, every level of government and finance, the main switching station for transatlantic and East Coast telephone calls, big bridges and long tunnels, all this crucial infrastructure was right out the door. Back in college in the 1980s, I’d taken a poli-sci class called War and Peace in the Nuclear Age, and one of our assignments was to determine the single spot in the entire world that could do the most damage – human fatalities, economic disruption, political upheaval – with a modest-sized nuclear device. Everyone in the class came up with the same answer: that spot was right here. It was demonstrable; it was math.

What was I going to do? I definitely wasn’t going to the office. But should I be behaving as if the city was being invaded? What would that behaviour look like?

I started to notice pieces of building falling off a tower, one bit after another, from the very top. This didn’t make sense, I didn’t see any damage up there. So I looked more carefully. Those were not bits of building. Those were people. They were jumping off the roof, a thousand feet in the sky.

A firefighter breaks down after the Twin Towers collapse (Getty)

When the south tower began to collapse, for the briefest second it wasn’t obvious to me what was happening, then I understood, but it still wasn’t thoroughly clear how exactly the building was going to fall, or how much of it, or in what direction, and if that tower fell over like a lumberjacked tree, and tipped my way, it would land on me.

When the debris cloud hit, the building shivered, and I heard a small crash, like someone had dropped a wineglass at a party
The immense cloud of dust and debris came hurtling towards me, a terrifying mass containing... what? Girders, I-beams, mammoth chunks of concrete, who the hell knew, maybe the entire collapsing building was in that cloud – was that cloud – headed my way at a hundred miles an hour, two hundred, who could tell? So I picked up Charlie Brown and fled from whatever was going to come crashing through the window, through the walls, through the roof. I shut us in the dark of the windowless bathroom.

I thought: I might be about to die. Right now.

When the debris cloud hit, the building shivered, and I heard a small crash, like someone had dropped a wineglass at a party. Was this the last noise I’d ever hear? I waited, my hands shaking as I stroked the dog, my heart racing...


After a few seconds of nothing, I opened the door.

Smoke and wreckage of the World Trade Centre two days after the terrorist attack (Getty)

I hadn’t turned on any lights that morning, because it was a spectacularly beautiful day, as usual for that time of year; I have since come to think of it as 11 September weather. But now the rooms were almost completely dark in the blackout of that cloud. I couldn’t see anything out the windows, just thick dark greyness pushing up against the glass, like Stephen King’s fog. I turned on lights. The sound of shattering glass? That was a picture that had been shaken off the wall.

I couldn’t even see the building across the street, 40ft away. But the cloud slowly dispersed until finally I could dimly make out the World Trade Centre site, where there was now only one Twin Tower. Was there really nothing left?

The cop was there to enter every home before the residents, to look around quickly for anything horrifying that might have come hurtling through a window. I heard that people had found body parts
Just a few minutes later, the other building came down.  How did I not see that coming?

I eventually went downstairs, outside, to reconnaissance. It was slow-motion chaos out there, shell-shocked people staggering through the mess, papers fluttering in the sky, everything under a thick coat of ash, like fresh snow. The only thing that seemed to be happening quickly were the sirens, they were wailing from every direction, fast-moving vehicles somewhere I couldn’t see. I found a policeman, who told me I should prepare to leave, the electricity was going to be turned off, the gas, the water too, all for safety. My building was going to be evacuated. The whole neighbourhood.


So in the middle of the afternoon, I left home carrying a single change of clothing, and basic toiletries, and a couple of meals for Charlie Brown. My dog and I trudged through the ash across City Hall Park, up and over the Brooklyn Bridge, from which I couldn’t stop turning back to look over my shoulders, where there were no Twin Towers left at all.

It didn’t occur to me that I wouldn’t step back into our home for two weeks, and even then it was only a brief visit on a grim Sunday, accompanied by a police escort who was there to make sure we didn’t stay, or stick around too long. Also the cop was there to enter every home before the residents, to look around quickly for anything horrifying that might have come hurtling through a window. I heard that people had found body parts.

My wife and dog and I were living with relatives uptown, in a spare bedroom. Indefinitely.


We were finally allowed to move home in mid-October. Our neighbourhood had become the Frozen Zone, spanning a few blocks in every direction from Ground Zero, penned in by thousands of feet of newly erected chain link patrolled by National Guardsmen in battle fatigues and helmets carrying assault rifles, militarised checkpoints, we had to present ID to prove our residency, our identity. The local school had been repurposed as a staging area for a rescue effort that never rescued a single person; then for the recovery, the cleanup.

People stand transfixed as flames sweep through one of the Towers (Getty)

The thing that’s impossible to understand if you weren’t there was the smell. Those massive piles of rubble – what was left of two tremendous buildings, each more than a quarter-mile tall – those piles were on fire for one hundred days, acrid clouds of smoke that weren’t fully extinguished until mid-December. The stench was sickening. The sounds of the earth-movers constant. The stadium lights glared all through the night, every night. The armoured vehicles and uniformed men, weapons everywhere: a warzone.

But by 13 September I’d returned to work. I was 33 years old, married but childless, a moment in life when nothing seems as important as career. So of course I went back to work. But my publishing house’s office building was threatened with bomb scares every few days, we needed to evacuate and wander around Midtown, anxiously awaiting the all-clear. Eventually we stopped believing, we stopped leaving, even while anthrax attacks were invading other media offices in the neighbourhood, killing other people who walked these very same streets, people who could have been me. Everyone jumped every time a truck rumbled by. I never slept through the night, and repeatedly injured myself in the kitchen, knife cuts, burns. At the time, I didn’t recognise PTSD. I just knew my hands and arms were covered in wounds.

This is a terrifying way to live. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what terrorism is, that’s what it accomplishes
What was coming next? We were all convinced it was something.

In New York, especially down in the Frozen Zone, 11 September lasted a very long time. The terror seemed permanent. It wasn’t.


Fifteen years later, I rarely thought about terrorism anymore; it became something that happened somewhere else. But then I went to one of those somewhere elses: Paris, still reeling from its own series of brutal terror attacks, a city with soldiers everywhere, bomb-sniffing dogs, everything suffused with tension, fear. This felt so familiar, this felt exactly like New York after 9/11, this new category of historical moment: a global metropolis sieged by terror.

A medic tends to a man after the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks (Getty)

Not only did this remind me of 2001, it also reminded me of something that had become a constant part of my recent life: suspense novels, which I’d started writing in 2009. The beautiful foreign setting. The definite sense that something bad was going to happen, but the fundamental uncertainty about what exactly that bad thing would be, to whom, and why, and when. Is it now? What should I do? Should I be acting as if this is a life-and-death situation?

This all defined my experience of 9/11 and its aftermath, the uncertainty and confusion and mistaken assumptions – was that a missile, is the fireball going to engulf me, will the building fall on me, are there really bombs in the office, or anthrax, was that sound an explosion or a car backfiring, why the hell am I bleeding all the time?

This is a terrifying way to live. That’s the point, isn’t it? That’s what terrorism is, that’s what it accomplishes.

This is also what a certain type of suspense novel can do.

Ever since 9/11, it had dwelt in the back of my mind that I’d someday write a novel that revolved around a terrorist event. But I didn’t want to write the expected novel, with the expected villains, the expected heroes; I don’t want to write the expected anything. 


That someday was right now. The something that was happening next in Paris wasn’t an explosion, it was something much more mundane: I was going to write that terrorism novel, right now. I took my laptop to a café on the rue de Grenelle, opened a new file, and started work immediately, a story that begins on an autumn Tuesday morning at a quarter to nine, when normal ends.

(Source: Independent)

Humans know what happens in the minutes after they die, research says

Scientists have found evidence that suggests the human brain still works for a short time after death – meaning people know when they’re dead.

Researchers made the discovery by looking at cardiac arrest cases in Europe and the US.

What they learned was people who had been resuscitated could describe what happened, including conversations between doctors and nurses, after their heart stopped beating.

Dr Sam Parnia, who led the research, explained: They’ll describe watching doctors and nurses working, they’ll describe having awareness of full conversations, of visual things that were going on, that would otherwise not be known to them.

It [the time a patient is declared dead] is all based on the moment when the heart stops. Technically speaking, that’s how you get the time of death.

After the heart ceases beating, blood stops circulating to the brain and it begins to shut down.

But, this process can reportedly take hours to complete, leaving a window of time where a person is officially dead and still aware of what’s going on around them.

The team of researchers, from New York’s Stony Brook University of Medicine, hope their work will help improve treatment of cardiac arrests and prevent brain injuries during resuscitation.

Dr Parnia added: At the same time, we also study the human mind and consciousness in the context of death, to understand whether consciousness becomes annihilated or whether it continues after you've died for some period of time — and how that relates to what's happening inside the brain in real time.

The question of what happens when we die is still one of life’s greatest mysteries but the research shows there is some kind of life after death.

(Source: Independent)

America’s most expensive home sells for $238m to hedge fund billionaire in New York City

Sale of penthouse apartment dwarfs previous record holder by more than $100m

A hedge fund billionaire has purchased a Central Park penthouse apartment for $238m (£182.5m) – the most anyone has ever paid for a home in the United States.

The sale, which closed on Wednesday, was confirmed by a spokesperson for the buyer, Kenneth Griffin.

The unit, a nearly 24,000-square-foot combination of two apartments, is at the top of 220 Central Park South, an under-construction tower developed by Vornado Trust Realty and designed by the firm of Robert A M Stern.

The sale dwarfs the previous record-holder in New York City, a $100.5m duplex sold in 2014 at One57, a nearby high-rise that helped rechristen a sleepy strip of Midtown across 57th Street as “billionaires’ row".

The previous US record-holder was a $137m East Hampton home that sold in 2014.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the closing.

A spokesperson for Kenneth Griffin, founder of investment firm Citadel,
confirmed the sale of the 24,000-square-foot property ( AP )

Mr Griffin, founder of the investment firm Citadel, is not new to stratospheric real estate sales. He has spent hundreds of millions on apartments in New York, Chicago, Miami and London.

He holds the record for buying the most expensive apartment in Miami, a $60m sale in 2015 at the Faena House in Miami Beach. Last year he spent $58.75m on a Chicago penthouse, a record for the city, the Chicago Tribune reported.

The nearly 1,000-foot Central Park South tower has proved to be an outlier in an otherwise softening luxury market. In October, Steven Roth, the chief executive of Vornado Trust Realty, said the building was about 85 per cent sold.

In November, Tong Tong Zhao, a founder of a hotel management company based in Shanghai, bought a 27th-floor, 2,394-square-foot two-bedroom in the tower for $13.49m.

British musician Sting and his wife Trudie Styler, who recently sold a unit at 15 Central Park West, another Robert A M Stern tower, are buying a unit in the building.

The record sale says more about the peak of the last housing cycle than it does about the current high-end sales slump, said Jonathan J Miller, president of the real estate appraisal firm Miller Samuel.

“It’s been on my list for four years,” said Mr Miller, who said the unit, first listed for $250m, went into contract in the autumn of 2015. Sales of this magnitude can take years to close, because the purchase was made while the building was beginning construction, and the buyer probably had significant input on the final layout, he said.

At just under $10,000 per square foot, the sale is certainly in rare company, but less pricey than the $88m sale of an apartment at 15 Central Park West, which went into contract in 2012 for $13,049 per square foot, Mr Miller said.

It sold to a trust linked to the eldest daughter of Dmitry Rybolovlev, a Russian billionaire who made his fortune in potash fertiliser.

Overall, the New York luxury market is in the middle of a price correction. Homes seeking $4m or more took an average of 447 days to go into contract in 2018, according to Olshan Realty. Near the peak of the market, in 2013, similar homes spent only 172 days on the market. And at the current rate of sales, it would take more than six years to sell all the new development in Manhattan, which recently totalled almost 8,000 units, Mr Miller said.

Rumours of the record-breaking sale have circulated in real estate circles for years. Now that the apartment is nearly finished, how will it size up?

“That would be the hardest appraisal we’d ever done,” Mr Miller said – because there’s nothing to compare it to.

(Source: The Independent)

The best skin-care trick is being rich

Don’t rub the money directly on your face.

As a longtime resident of New York City, I’ve developed a little game I play when I’m alone in one of Manhattan’s especially ritzy neighborhoods: “Famous or Just Rich?”

To play, all you have to do is notice a person and try to decide if they’ve caught your eye because they’re famous. It will feel as if they’re famous. But more often than not, it’ll just be a regular person who looks like a celebrity, with that polished glow they always seem to have. If you play this game enough, you’ll eventually realize that it’s not just expensive-looking clothes or a striking resemblance to an actual celebrity that gives you pause. It’s the smooth, poreless look of their skin, even-toned and plump. The wealthy, both famous and not, tend to be visibly well moisturized.

The general folk wisdom of skin care has two simple steps. Step 1: Do healthy things. Wash your face, avoid the sun, stay hydrated, wear sunscreen, and get plenty of sleep. Step 2: Apply the right goop to your face, in the form of creams and serums. This advice is repeated time and again in women’s media, with an almost religious authority. If you find the right product and live the skin-care lifestyle (No alcohol! No dairy! Don’t enjoy anything!), then you will be rewarded with the glow of the youthful and righteous.

In this advice is a little sleight of hand. The guidance usually comes from the wealthy, who have all the access in the world to the best skin products and treatments, and it tends to overemphasize the importance of lifestyle while sweeping under the rug the actual cost of tinkering with your facial chemistry. Celebrities wouldn’t be as distractingly beautiful without dermatologists, estheticians, and the women behind the beauty counters at Bergdorf Goodman. You can drink as much water and wear as much sunscreen as you want, but the most effective skin-care trick is being rich.

The moral halo around “good skin” isn’t a coincidence. The behaviors associated with a clear, even-toned complexion require those who want it to reject hedonism in a way that is still deeply ingrained as virtuous in American culture; that the wealthy have mastered the look reinforces capitalistic notions of success and who achieves it (the ascetic, dedicated, and hardworking). The journalist Jaya Saxena found as much when she investigated the connections between skin and poverty earlier this year. “We assume those at the top are there because they’ve done something right. And if they have straight teeth, toned bodies, and smooth skin, that must be ‘right’ too,” she wrote. “It’s not that we think having bad skin is a moral failing. It’s that we think poverty is.”

ANNA WEBBER / GETTY / DR. JART+

Maybe that’s why the wealthy models and actresses and the media who exalts them are so dedicated to the idea that those results must be earned through actions, when in reality, they’re usually bought with money. Regular people are hungry for intel on how the rich and beautiful became that way, which means that almost all beauty media regularly publishes tips-and-tricks lists from models and actresses. It’s no mystery to beauty editors and writers, as well as the famous women surveyed, that the answer is a combination of youth, genetic luck, and access to expensive products, treatments, and cosmetic dermatology procedures that few people outside their world could ever hope to experience. But a dozen 20-somethings telling you about their expensive laser treatments would be too depressing for women to read about and too embarrassing for the professionally beautiful to admit.

For example, in a 2016 Elle magazine article surveying 17 Victoria’s Secret models, eight of them praised lifestyle habits such as drinking water and exercising, with several more crediting low-cost fixes such as drugstore pore strips. None of them mentioned Mzia Shiman, who tends to the skin-care needs of Victoria’s Secret models. The facials at her New York spa start at $200, and more advanced services offer tightening and plumping via LED light bed or electric micro-current.

Even if you forgo high-tech treatment and avoid skin problems such as cystic acne or dermatitis, which Saxena notes usually require intervention from an expensive dermatologist, a skin-care regimen itself can get very expensive, very quickly. Into The Gloss, a beauty website whose popular series The Top Shelf asks influential people to detail absolutely everything they do to their skin and hair, provides readers with a rare look at the litany of services and products required to keep the famous and wealthy looking that way. The most recent edition, from the veteran model Angela Lindvall, lists skin-care products that add up to $629, most of which come in small, quickly emptied packages. This price range is typical of The Top Shelf.

When affluent people name just one trick that supposedly works like magic, usually when prompted by a women’s publication, that elides hundreds of dollars’ worth of creams, serums, and peels. Even if you’re dedicated to low-cost alternatives, the trial and error of finding what works for your skin adds up, and you’ll probably go without some of the specialized ingredients that target problems such as wrinkles or hyperpigmentation. (And yes, many of those chemicals really do work.)

Which is not to say that a diet of fresh foods, plenty of water, and eight hours of sleep every night don’t affect how your skin looks; studies have demonstrated links between all three and physical appearance, and they’ll help most people achieve the modest goal of looking totally fine. Unless you’re very young and even more genetically gifted, though, self-denial won’t get the results it promises. What its constant recommendation in place of expensive beauty products belies is how closely tied those factors also are to wealth. Only some people have access to a diet of fresh fruits and vegetables. Only some people have the kinds of jobs with steady schedules that allow for a good night’s sleep. Only some people can drink the water that comes out of their faucet.

Sunscreen is another one of those beauty hacks whose accessibility is assumed, and it’s elemental to staving off visible signs of aging. Its actual accessibility is a bit more complicated, depending on who you are. In 2017, the YouTuber Jackie Aina posted a review of her favorite sunscreens, intended to help viewers navigate the ghostly cast that results when most SPF products are used on darker skin. All of the options cost more than $30, far more than lighter-skinned people have to pay for a functional sunscreen. Although darker skin is structurally less apt to show some of the most obvious signs of aging, people with it still encounter issues such as acne and uneven pigmentation, and they’re up against a global beauty industry that historically doesn’t prioritize their needs.

Skin tends to be the most visible proof of a person’s accumulated lifestyle, and that only becomes truer as people age. The past few years have been a boom time for skin care, as the oldest Millennials begin their late 30s and start to wrinkle around the eyes. Soon, they’ll need more than just a fancy cream to get results, because skin loses volume as the body ages, no matter how good your products are. That’s when fillers and Botox come in, and when the high prices of those treatments mean class differences are even more easily elucidated by the condition of a person’s skin.

Still, though, mainstream beauty media continues to aggregate the tips and tricks of the young and wealthy, usually without questioning the larger picture. If everyone admitted that skin care is primarily a function of wealth, then they’d have to grapple with who has money, and what we assume and expect of those who don’t.

(Source: The Atlantic)