Today’s 6–3 Supreme Court decision is a hinge point for American democracy.
oday’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster.
Congressional action has long seemed the only realistic lever for Democrats to resist red states’ surge of voter-suppression laws, which are passing, as I’ve written, on an almost entirely party-line basis. In the state legislatures, Democrats lack the votes to stop these laws. And while the John Roberts–led Supreme Court—which opened the door to these restrictions by eviscerating another section of the Voting Rights Act in his 2013 Shelby County decision—always seemed unlikely to restrain the Republican-controlled states, today’s ruling from the six GOP-appointed justices eliminated any doubt.
Republicans will understandably view Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion upholding two disputed Arizona statutes as a green light to pass voting restrictions that could disproportionately limit the ability of minority groups to vote: “Even if the plaintiffs were able to demonstrate a disparate [racial] burden caused by [the Arizona laws], the State’s ‘compelling interest in preserving the integrity of its election procedures’ would suffice to avoid [VRA] liability,” Alito wrote. Republican legislators will likely interpret Alito’s repeated emphasis in his decision on the importance of stopping “fraud” and his somewhat gratuitous swipes at voting by mail, both of which echo themes from former President Donald Trump, as much more than a wink and a nod of approval for the laws that are proliferating across red states. (“Fraud is a real risk that accompanies mail-in voting even if Arizona had the good fortune to avoid it,” Alito insisted at one point.) If anything, Alito’s decision, which all the other GOP-appointed justices joined, underscores how thoroughly the determination to restrict voting access in the name of combatting illusory “fraud” has permeated every corner of the GOP. (Even the rare GOP critics of Trump’s discredited fraud claims, such as Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have also defended the restrictive new state laws.)
While the ruling signals long odds for the Justice Department’s effort to challenge those laws (starting with Georgia’s) in court, civil- and voting-rights advocates might welcome the clarity the decision provides. It makes plain that if Congress doesn’t establish new federal standards, the nation is headed toward a two-tier voting system, with red states imposing ever-tightening restrictions that especially burden Democratic-leaning constituencies—young, minority, and lower-income voters.
It’s no coincidence that red states are imposing these restrictions precisely as Millennials and Gen Zers, who represent the most racially diverse generations in American history, are rapidly increasing their share of the total vote, as I wrote earlier today. The rise of those younger generations especially threatens the GOP hold on Sun Belt states such as Georgia, Texas, and Arizona, which Republicans now control through their dominance of older and non-urban white voters; in that way, the voting restrictions Republicans are enacting amount to stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change.
After a Republican filibuster blocked their sweeping voting-rights bill, Senate Democrats are working to unify behind a more limited plan—and to persuade holdout Democratic Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema (and perhaps others) to change the filibuster rules to pass it. Following today’s decision, the demands from civil-rights groups on Senate Democrats and Biden to change the rules will grow even more intense.
“Our elected leaders need to wake up and start acting like the house is on fire—because it is, and this ruling pours more gasoline on the flames,” Nsé Ufot, the CEO of the New Georgia Project, said today in a statement that was echoed widely by other groups. “Black and Brown communities gave Democrats federal power to protect the vote and passing bills like the For the People Act is what we both expect and deserve.”
With more measured (though no less passionate) language, the fierce dissent from Justice Elena Kagan and the other Democratic-appointed justices seemed to be sending the same message. They obviously never endorsed any legislation, but their tone reminded me of the pleas to the Senate majority (particularly Manchin and Sinema) from Democratic legislators in the states passing these restrictive laws. We’ve done all we can here, the justices seemed to be saying: Now it’s up to Congress whether to protect democracy at what Kagan called “a perilous moment for the Nation’s commitment to equal citizenship.”
‘What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?’ Douglass demanded in 1852
he papers and placards say that I am to deliver a 4th [of] July oration.”
So began Frederick Douglass on the platform of Corinthian Hall in Rochester, N.Y. It was a Monday, the day after the Fourth of July in 1852, and he was speaking to a packed room of 500 to 600 people hosted by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. Douglass was about 35 years old (he never knew his actual birth date) and had escaped enslavement in Maryland 14 years earlier.
Although by this time he was world-renowned for his speeches, he began modestly, reminding the crowd that he had begun his life enslaved and had no formal education.
“With little experience and with less learning, I have been able to throw my thoughts hastily and imperfectly together,” he began, “and trusting to your patient and generous indulgence, I will proceed to lay them before you.”
Over the next hour and a half, Douglass made what is now thought to be among the finest speeches ever delivered: “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” He quoted Shakespeare, Longfellow, Jefferson and the Old Testament. He certainly bellowed in moments, exclaiming and anguishing in others. He painted vivid pictures of exalted patriots and the wretched of the earth.
First, he posited that while 76 was old for a man, it was young for a nation. America was but an adolescent, he said, and that was a good thing. That meant there was hope of its maturing vs. being forever stuck in its ways.
He wove through the familiar tale of taxation without representation, tea parties and declarations of independence. “Oppression makes a wise man mad,” he said. “Your fathers were wise men, and if they did not go mad, they became restive under this treatment.”
Perhaps at this point it was imperceptible to his audience that Douglass repeatedly said “yours” and not “ours.” Did they notice the hint of what was to come?
But his business was with the present, not the past, he said, and here his critique began to build.
Fellow-citizens, pardon me, allow me to ask, why am I called upon to speak here today? What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? Are the great principles of political freedom and of natural justice, embodied in that Declaration of Independence, extended to us? and am I, therefore, called upon to bring our humble offering to the national altar, and to confess the benefits and express devout gratitude for the blessings resulting from your independence to us?
...
The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth [of] July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me, by asking me to speak to-day?
...
“At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed. O! had I the ability, and could I reach the nation’s ear, I would, today, pour out a fiery stream of biting ridicule, blasting reproach, withering sarcasm, and stern rebuke. For it is not light that is needed, but fire; it is not the gentle shower, but thunder. We need the storm, the whirlwind, and the earthquake. The feeling of the nation must be quickened; the conscience of the nation must be roused; the propriety of the nation must be startled; the hypocrisy of the nation must be exposed; and its crimes against God and man must be proclaimed and denounced.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.”
...
“Behold the practical operation of this internal slave-trade, the American slave-trade, sustained by American politics and America religion. Here you will see men and women reared like swine for the market.
“You know what is a swine-drover? I will show you a man-drover. They inhabit all our Southern States. They perambulate the country, and crowd the highways of the nation, with droves of human stock. You will see one of these human flesh-jobbers, armed with pistol, whip and bowie knife, driving a company of a hundred men, women, and children, from the Potomac to the slave market at New Orleans. These wretched people are to be sold singly, or in lots, to suit purchasers. They are food for the cotton-field, and the deadly sugar-mill.
“Mark the sad procession, as it moves wearily along, and the inhuman wretch who drives them. Hear his savage yells and his blood-chilling oaths, as he hurries on his affrighted captives! There, see the old man, with locks thinned and gray. Cast one glance, if you please, upon that young mother, whose shoulders are bare to the scorching sun, her briny tears falling on the brow of the babe in her arms. See, too, that girl of thirteen, weeping, yes! weeping, as she thinks of the mother from whom she has been torn!
“The drove moves tardily. Heat and sorrow have nearly consumed their strength; suddenly you hear a quick snap, like the discharge of a rifle; the fetters clank, and the chain rattles simultaneously; your ears are saluted with a scream, that seems to have torn its way to the center of your soul! The crack you heard, was the sound of the slave-whip; the scream you heard, was from the woman you saw with the babe. Her speed had faltered under the weight of her child and her chains! that gash on her shoulder tells her to move on.
“Follow the drove to New Orleans. Attend the auction; see men examined like horses; see the forms of women rudely and brutally exposed to the shocking gaze of American slave-buyers. See this drove sold and separated forever; and never forget the deep, sad sobs that arose from that scattered multitude. Tell me citizens, WHERE, under the sun, you can witness a spectacle more fiendish and shocking. Yet this is but a glance at the American slave-trade, as it exists, at this moment, in the ruling part of the United States.”
He also indicted the American church, “with fractional exceptions,” for its “indifference” to the suffering of the enslaved, its willingness to obey laws so clearly immoral. It was a theme echoed a century later by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in his “Letter From Birmingham Jail.”
The church, Douglass charged, “esteems sacrifice above mercy; psalm-singing above right doing; solemn meetings above practical righteousness. A worship that can be conducted by persons who refuse to give shelter to the houseless, to give bread to the hungry, clothing to the naked, and who enjoin obedience to a law forbidding these acts of mercy, is a curse, not a blessing to mankind.”
He turns to the Constitution, and here he defends it and raises it up as a pathway to liberation for the enslaved.
“In that instrument I hold there is neither warrant, license, nor sanction of the hateful thing [slavery]; but, interpreted as it ought to be interpreted, the Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT. Read its preamble, consider its purposes. Is slavery among them? ...[L]et me ask, if it be not somewhat singular that, if the Constitution were intended to be, by its framers and adopters, a slave-holding instrument, why neither slavery, slaveholding, nor slave can anywhere be found in it. What would be thought of an instrument, drawn up, legally drawn up, for the purpose of entitling the city of Rochester to a track of land, in which no mention of land was made?”
That is why, he said, despite the “dark picture” he painted, “I do not despair of this country.”
“There are forces in operation, which must inevitably work the downfall of slavery. ‘The arm of the Lord is not shortened,’ and the doom of slavery is certain,” he says. “I, therefore, leave off where I began, with hope.”
When he finished speaking and took his seat, “there was a universal burst of applause,” according to one newspaper account. Within a few minutes he had promised to publish his words as a pamphlet.
Douglass was right. The forces that would end slavery in little more than a decade were in operation, and he was one of those forces.
But he couldn’t see what would follow: sharecropping and Jim Crow, redlining and Bull Connor, incarceration rates and George Floyd. Would Douglass still figure us an adolescent nation, with the youthful hope of transformation — or something else?
But now, more than six months following his departure from government, Barr is trying to do some image damage control.
In interviews with journalist Jonathan Karl for a book excerpted in the Atlantic, Barr details how his final break with Trump finally came after he went public with claims undermining Trump’s last-ditch effort to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden.
“To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” Barr told an Associated Press reporter on December 1.
Barr told Karl that comment prompted an angry Trump to summon him into a meeting in which the president unloaded on him, saying things like “how the fuck could you do this to me?” and “you must hate Trump.”
Barr indicates that not only was he not intimidated by Trump’s outburst, but he fired back, comparing the Rudy Giuliani-led effort to overturn the results to a circus.
“You know, you only have five weeks, Mr. President, after an election to make legal challenges,” Barr told Trump, according to Karl. “This would have taken a crackerjack team with a really coherent and disciplined strategy. Instead, you have a clown show. No self-respecting lawyer is going anywhere near it. It’s just a joke. That’s why you are where you are.”
Barr ended up leaving the Department of Justice days before the January 6 insurrection. The new account of the weeks leading up to his resignation has led some to describe him as a “patriot.” But that’s going way too far even when Barr’s account is read in the most charitable light.
Barr was eager to spread Trump’s election conspiracy theories right until the bitter end
While Karl’s portrayal of Barr isn’t flattering, the book excerpt doesn’t get into how Barr spent the run-up to the 2020 election serving more as an arm of Trump’s campaign than he did as an independent arbiter of the rule of law. Barr was happy to amplify Trump’s lies about mail voting and voting fraud up to the point where it was clear to all but the most fanatical Trump supporters that he had lost the election.
Consider, for instance, the disastrous interview Barr did with CNN’s Anderson Cooper on September 2, when he couldn’t produce any evidence of mail voting fraud and resorted to saying its general existence is a “matter of logic.” Or his DOJ’s decision a few weeks later to issue a factually incorrect press release announcing an investigation into alleged mail voting irregularities in Pennsylvania — an announcement that violated DOJ’s policies. Or Barr’s move three days after the election to authorize investigations into “substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities,” even though there was no evidence of such irregularities.
In his interviews with Karl, Barr portrayed his decision to authorize fraud investigations despite a lack of evidence as a strategy he used to make sure he would be able to tell Trump that his conspiracy theories were baseless when the time came.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr said to Karl. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.”
That might sound reasonable enough on its face. But as Greg Sargent highlighted for the Washington Post, it’s not normal for the DOJ, which is ostensibly supposed to operate with a modicum of independence from the executive branch, to pursue investigations based on “bullshit” conspiracy theories favored by the president. But Barr spent years turning the DOJ into something akin to the president’s personal law firm.
Barr’s comments about authorizing election fraud investigations aren’t the only thing he tries to whitewash during his interviews with Karl. He also explains away his fawning resignation statement as a gambit to calm down political tensions. (Barr wrote of Trump: “Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance,” adding that the president “had been met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds.”)
“To defuse the tension, Barr had written an effusive resignation letter, which he handed to the president when he got to the Oval Office,” Karl wrote.
But, as Jonathan Chait notes for New York magazine, “if Barr had decided Trump was dangerous and undemocratic” — and his comments to Karl suggest he had already reached that conclusion weeks earlier — then “why would he continue to claim publicly that the true danger was Trump’s opponents?”
Barr and Mitch McConnell come across as cynical political operators
It’s not even clear to what extent — if at all — Barr’s break with Trump was motivated by a desire to protect American democracy. Instead, Karl’s piece makes it seem as though Barr and then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell were primarily interested in helping Republicans win special elections in January for two US Senate seats.
Karl writes that McConnell had been urging Barr throughout November to speak out against Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories, because those theories were complicating the argument Republicans wanted to make about how maintaining the Senate majority was important as a check on Biden’s power. But McConnell was reluctant to speak out himself for fear that if he did so, an embittered Trump would sabotage the Republican candidates.
From Karl’s story:
“Look, we need the president in Georgia,” McConnell told Barr, “and so we cannot be frontally attacking him right now. But you’re in a better position to inject some reality into this situation. You are really the only one who can do it.”
“I understand that,” Barr said. “And I’m going to do it at the appropriate time.”
On another call, McConnell again pleaded with Barr to come out and shoot down the talk of widespread fraud.
“Bill, I look around, and you are the only person who can do it,” McConnell told him.
So while it’s good that Barr ultimately stood up to Trump, it’s worth keeping in mind how abnormal it is for the US attorney general to be scheming with the Senate leader on ways to ensure their political party retains power.
Of course, by the end of the Trump administration, that sort of norm-shattering behavior had become par for the course, and Barr worked as hard as anyone to pervert the DOJ into an arm of the president’s reelection campaign. Only when it became clear that Trump lost did he think twice. Even then, he appears to have been motivated more by cynical political concerns than he was by doing right by American democracy.
Despite Barr’s devotion to him and the key work he did fending off the Mueller investigation, Trump predictably responded to the Atlantic story with a statement attacking Barr as a “RINO” and a “disappointment in every sense of the word.” As always, anything short of complete and unflinching loyalty isn’t enough for Trump.
Even as officials picked up the pace of disbursal, the delivery of the funds remained well behind demand.
tate and local officials responsible for doling out more than $46 billion in federal rental assistance had distributed just $1.5 billion as of the end of May, according to new Treasury Department data that illustrated a severe bottleneck in the aid.
Even as officials picked up the pace of disbursal — they served 160,000 households in May, a 60 percent increase from April — the delivery of the funds remained well behind demand, with fewer than 350,000 households served so far by programs intended to help millions.
“State and local governments must do more to accelerate aid to struggling renters and expand programs to meet the scale of assistance needed,” Treasury said in a blog post Friday. “While some state and local programs are increasingly reaching households in need, others lag far behind, and many programs have just launched in recent weeks.”
Congress passed two tranches of rental relief in December and March, allocating $46.5 billion to help keep tenants in their homes during the Covid-19 crisis. Last week, President Joe Biden extended a federal eviction moratorium to July 31 amid lingering concerns about how much of the aid had reached landlords and renters.
Treasury on Friday said numerous state and local governments receiving the relief funds — including some with larger allocations — failed to open their programs “until May or even early June” and reported little or no household assistance disbursed through May 31.
Some 6 million tenant households are behind on their rent, with 1.2 million households reporting they were “very likely” to face eviction in the next two months, according to a Census Bureau survey .
State and local officials point out they have had to stand up new programs to distribute an unprecedented sum of taxpayer money. In some cases that entailed hiring new employees and contractors to review applications.
n a classroom with dirty walls in the Tigray highlands, a woman is leaning against a blackboard. She is crying. Beneath her wraparound skirt, she is wearing an underskirt on which a red patch is slowly spreading. It is lighter on the margins, but dark in the middle. Blood is running down her legs and soaking into the shimmering white fabric. She is staring at the wall, her right hand pressed against the blackboard. With her left hand, she is stroking the romper of her six-month-old daughter.
She then turns around and leans against the wall. Her expression is desolate. Every movement is painful. Meaza’s abdomen has been inflamed ever since Eritrean soldiers attacked and raped her. "They did it over and over again,” she says with a brittle voice.
Outside the window, hungry people walk through the camp, the dusty ground crunching under their feet. Thousands of refugees have sought shelter in a former school in Shire, a town in the Tigray Region of Ethiopia. Laundry has been hung up to dry on the walls of an unfinished building. An old, emaciated man lies on his deathbed in a tent. "I can’t stay here. I need help,” implores Meaza.
The Tigray Region, in the far north of the country, has been beset by war since early November, when Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed launched a military offensive against the regional government under the leadership of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). For months, the Ethiopian government closed off access to the region, with not even aid organizations allowed in. They are still unable to reach many of those in need of help.
This Monday, following heavy losses, the Ethiopian government announced a unilateral ceasefire. It is unlikely that the Tigrayan Defense Forces will go along with it. Rather, they may continue what a lot of Tigrayans now see as war of independence.
Famine as a Weapon
Tigray is one of 10 regions in Ethiopia and has a population of around 7 million, the vast majority of whom belong to the Tigray ethnic group. The fighting in the region has escalated into a brutal conflict involving the neighboring countries of Eritrea and Sudan – with tens of thousands of traumatized women, starving children and around 1.7 million displaced persons.
The United Nations warns that 350,000 Tigrayans are already suffering from catastrophic food shortages. Mark Lowcock, the UN emergency relief coordinator, said recently that the hunger will "get much worse.” Last week, USAID said that the number of people living under famine conditions had risen and now stands at up to 900,000 people. The war in Tigray is one in which rape and starvation are both being widely deployed as a weapon against the civilian population.
The roots of the conflict reach back to 2018, when Abiy Ahmed, who was 41 at the time, became prime minister. Abiy promised reform, released political prisoners and negotiated a peace deal with archenemy Eritrea within just a few months. Many people were initially hopeful about his leadership. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
His rise also marked the end of almost three decades of Tigrayan rule over Ethiopia. For years, they had led a coalition government in Addis Ababa, appointing allies to key positions and controlling the country with an iron fist.
Abiy formed a new unity party without TPLF participation. Soon, anti-Tigray propaganda began emanating from government circles, referring to them as "daylight hyenas" or a "cancer." Media outlets fueled the campaign. Tigrayans were removed from the army and government services and were also increasingly discriminated against in day-to-day life.
Abiy promised to hold parliamentary elections in summer 2020, but suspended the vote due to the coronavirus pandemic. In Tigray, though, the TPLF decided to hold regional elections nonetheless, whereupon Abiy cut financial support to the region. In November, the conflict between the Tigrayans in the north and the central government in Addis Ababa broke out into the open. According to a new report from the African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, it was Abiy’s troops who launched the war in the early morning hours of Nov. 4.
The delayed national elections were finally held on June 21. The results have not yet been announced, but it is considered a certainty that the incumbent prime minister will emerge victorious – in part because many opposition candidates boycotted the election or are currently in prison.
A DER SPIEGEL team was able to travel from the regional capital of Mekelle to Shire, in the heart of Tigray in late May. Burned out tanks, military trucks and buses lined the roads. In the towns and villages, survivors tell stories of looting and executions. If they had protested, they say, they would have been killed as well.
The scent of incense wafts into the room in Shire where Meaza is leaning in pain against the wall. She's still crying. Meaza is not her real name: She asked that we use a pseudonym for her protection. She is from Mai Kadra in western Tigray, where she used to run a shop selling coffee and sugar. Her income was enough for her, her husband and their three children.
Then, the war began. Militias from the neighboring state of Amhara descended on the town last November after Tigrayan fighters had attacked Amhara residents. Meaza fled to the east, until she ran into five Eritrean soldiers. The men, Meaza says, pulled her into a forest and ripped off her clothes. They raped her, one after the other, over and over again, for an entire day. Right on the hard ground between the trees. Then, according to Meaza, one of them said: "It’s not enough to rape you Tigrayans. She says that they then inserted a hot metal rod. "You should never again have children,” they said. Since then, Meaza hasn’t been able to sit or lie down. When she rests, she hunkers over on all-fours, on her knees and elbows. She hardly sleeps at all.
Plundering and Executions
Her account is difficult to verify, but it is consistent with the stories told by numerous other women. You hear stories like the one told by Meaza frequently in Tigray.
A trip through this region gripped by war and suffering is also a journey into the heart of fear. Along the main roads and in the larger towns, in places where life looks completely normal at first glance, people everywhere have pretty much the same stories to tell. They speak of executions, massacres, gang rapes and imprisonment – of how Eritrean troops have ransacked entire cities and villages.
The Ethiopian army, after all, isn’t conducting the fight in the north on its own. Because the country’s troops are unable to bear the burden of fighting in Tigray on their own, Abiy Ahmed has formed an alliance with Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki, the former archenemy of Ethiopia. Now, it’s not just Ethiopian troops terrorizing the region, but also – especially – those from Eritrea. One Eritrean soldier who deserted recently told Ethiopian expert Alex de Waal that he and his comrades had been ordered to "crush” the Tigray. Eritrean troops, he says, were encouraged to steal, burn, rape and kill.
The large roads in Tigray are lined by factories and shops that have been plundered. The buildings have been partly destroyed and the machinery taken across the border into Eritrea as war loot. People can be seen crying at the graves of their children, who were forced to help transport the goods and were then executed.
Most of the hospitals have also been plundered and destroyed. Back in March, the aid organization Doctors Without Borders warned that only 13 percent of all health-care facilities in the region were able to function normally.
The Eritrean troops don’t just ransack factories, hospitals, schools and universities, they don’t just block or steal aid deliveries. They also burn food stores in addition to stealing or killing livestock. They even take the plows from the fields, making it impossible for farmers to plant their crops. Or they forbid farmers from working and threaten them with penalties if they disobey.
The famine that is developing in the region is intentional. Starvation, warns UN Emergency Relief Coordinator Lowcock, "is being used as a weapon of war.” The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that around 90 percent of the entire grain crop has been destroyed or stolen.
On our trip through Tigray, it becomes clear that Nobel laureate Abiy Ahmed is waging a war that he won’t be able to win in the long run. Peace, say the people of Tigray, is only possible when the people are able to determine their own fate. And for an increasing number of them, that means leaving Ethiopia. A growing majority of the Tigray populace is apparently in favor of seceding from the rest of the country and becoming independent.
Back in the old school in Shire, a second woman walks into the classroom. We’ll call her Rozina. She, too, is from western Tigray, where militias from Amhara have driven many thousands of Tigrayans from their towns and villages. The Amhara, who are fighting hand-in-hand with the Ethiopian military, claim western Tigray as their own. And they are using the war to brutally make that claim reality. Observers have described the campaign as widespread "ethnic cleansing.”
"I Couldn't Keep Up"
Rozina’s story is similar to that told by others who have been driven from the region. When she tried to flee in November, she was locked away with thousands of other Tigrayans in an old warehouse. Over and over again, she says, young men were taken away by Amhara militias and executed.
Rozina is a thin, 28-year-old. She pulls at the white cloth she has wrapped around her face and smooths her blue skirt. She was able to escape the warehouse and then tried to flee to Sudan with others. "But I didn’t have any shoes," she says rapidly. "I couldn’t keep up on the rocky ground."
She and another woman lost their way and ran into a group of Amhara men with machetes. They suspected the women of being spies and took them prisoner, Rozina says. "Some said: 'Kill them.' Others said: 'They know something. Let’s interrogate them.'" Rozina pauses briefly and looks out the window, her eyes filling with tears. She gazes out the window.
A donkey brays outside. A thin stream of water drips out of the faucets where children have lined up. All of the residents of the camp in Shire complain of hunger. They eat the breadcrumbs given to them by town residents, carefully storing them in plastic bags. Sometimes, they grow moldy. They complain of the indiscriminate arrests of young men. Many of them sleep on the hard, concrete floor or in the dust outside.
"They took us to a police station,” says Rozina. "Tortured us with electric shocks and beat us with cables.” The men forced them to undress and rammed their hands into their vaginas, allegedly to search for hidden papers.
Then, they loaded the two women onto a truck with other prisoners and drove them to the east. Up to 150,000 Tigrayans were being systematically displaced around this time, according to estimates from independent observers in the country.
"They wanted to execute us,” Rozina says. When they ran across members of the Ethiopian Red Cross, the militia fighters left them behind.
She says that they walked until they reached a small village, where they found the Eritreans. "They saw me and raped me," Rozina says. Afterward, the women of the village hid her in a house. She was able to listen in when the Eritreans returned, asking: "Where is the girl?" They then took the sheep belonging to the villagers before going on to ransack the entire village. "They took everything: animals, grain, furniture."
When she left her hiding place after two weeks, she says, she was again raped by soldiers. "They said: 'We should turn Tigray into a desert and kill as many of you as we can.'"
Before the war, Rozina had a small restaurant. She wanted to go to high school and learn bookkeeping to give her daughter a better life. That was her dream. Now, she says: "I don’t know what the future will bring. I have seen too many dead people, too much destruction. The Eritreans and Amhara steal everything. I only see hunger and death in the future.”
Eritrea's Revenge
This week has now seen a potential turning point in the war. On Friday, June 18, Tigrayan troops launched Operation Alula, an offensive that has seen them push into the regional capital of Mekelle and other cities in the north of Tigray. Following the arrival of the troops, the Ethiopian government on Monday declared an "immediate, unilateral" cease-fire in the Tigray region until September, claiming it was a humanitarian gesture. In reality, though, Abiy’s troops appear to have been suffering such great losses that they couldn’t have continued fighting. The Tigrayan leadership then vowed to take back all of Tigray.
It is still not fully clear how Eritrean troops will respond to the announcement. Eritrean dictator Isaias’s primary interests in Tigray are revenge and the destabilization of Ethiopia. The Tigrayans were in charge in Ethiopia when the country waged a brutal border war against Eritrea from 1998 to 2000, a conflict that cost the lives of an estimated 70,000 people. That is the foundation of Isaias’s deep hatred of the Tigray people. For years, he has sought to instill in his people the idea that Eritrea’s neighbors to the south are responsible for all of their suffering and poverty. That could help explain the brutality deployed in Tigray by the Eritrean army. His troops seem to be retreating now, too, but are still holding territory in the north.
Back in April, Mark Lowcock of the UN noted that sexual violence was being used as a weapon of war in Tigray. But his warning did not lead to any consequences.
Gang Rape and HIV
For a long time, the regional capital of Mekelle was home to the only facility in the state dedicated to helping rape victims. Now, at least, there are a handful of them in the region, where women are provided medical and psychological care in the so-called One Stop Centers, and they can hide in safe houses.
Since the beginning of the war, Mekelle-based nurse Mulu Mesfin has watched as the number of victims has grown. And every day, Mulu continues to lose weight. She says she hardly sleeps anymore and only rarely eats. The suffering of the women in Tigray is eating her up. "I no longer take care of my own children. I no longer take care of myself. Everyone here is losing weight. But we have to help," she says. Then she starts to cry. Every day, 10 to 15 women are coming to her center alone, she says. "And the numbers keep rising."
Mulu knows hundreds of stories like those told by Meaza and Rozina. She has registered more than 500 women at her centers, and the total is more than 1,500 for all centers together. The true number, though, Mulu estimates, is surely 20-times higher. Dutch expert Mirjam van Reisen of the University of Leiden, who has been closely following the region for years, believes that estimate is credible. In a UN report released in April, the number of survivors of sexual violence was estimated at 22,500.
"Frequently, woman come to us with stories of 20 or 30 other cases in their villages. Women who never make it to our facility," Mulu says.
The girls and women who are able to escape are between the ages of four and 80. Around half of them are minors. Many arrive with broken bones, some are suffering from organ failure.
And a number of them have been infected with HIV, says Mulu. At Mulu’s facility, they have repeatedly heard stories of soldiers who tell their victims that they were sent to Tigray because they are HIV positive. Such claims are difficult to verify. Mulu says: "All gang rape victims who arrive here are HIV positive.” And most of the rapes, she says, are gang rapes, with groups of up to 30 soldiers attacking the women. "There are cases in which the number of rapists is so large that the women can’t count them anymore. In one instance, a group of 15 girls was loaded into a minibus and take to a military camp. Once there, they were raped by entire divisions," Mulu says quietly. "For an entire week."
The perpetrators, Mulu says, are careful to hold their victims captive for long enough that emergency HIV treatment is no longer possible. That is allegedly what happened to a nun in a nearby convent. The woman, Mulu says, was raped by soldiers for 10 days, and now she is HIV positive.
"Often, they force the families to watch," Mulu says. Mothers, fathers and brothers. Sometimes, says the nurse, they will then kill the families.
The physical injuries suffered by the women she is treating, says Mulu, are shocking. The rapists frequently insert trash or filthy towels into the women. Sometimes even acid. Mirjam van Reisen, who has been researching sexual violence in Eritrea for 12 years, says she has heard such stories before – from people who have escaped Eritrean prisons or camps.
Almost half of the women who come to nurse Mulu are pregnant, she says, and the hospital beds are full of women who have had abortions. "But we don’t have enough drugs because the government doesn’t provide any support to the hospital."
Even pregnant women are raped. "Afterwards, the soldiers beat them in the belly with the butts of their rifles until they start bleeding and lose their child." The head of an association for the disabled says that disabled women are increasingly among the victims.
"It has to stop,” implores Mulu. "We need peace. The world has to help us."
Birds native to Australasia are being found in Renaissance paintings—and in medieval manuscripts. Their presence exposes the depth of ancient trade routes.
adonna della Vittoria,” by the Renaissance painter Andrea Mantegna, must have looked imposing when it was first installed as an altarpiece in Santa Maria della Vittoria, a small chapel in the northern-Italian city of Mantua. The painting, which was commissioned by the city’s ruler, Francesco II Gonzaga, was completed in 1496, and measures more than nine feet in height. A worshipper’s eye likely lingered on its lower half—where the Virgin, seated on a marble pedestal, bestows a blessing on the kneeling, armored figure of Francesco—instead of straining to discern the intricacies of its upper half, which depicts a pergola bedecked with hanging ornaments and fruited vines. In the late eighteenth century, Napoleon’s forces looted the painting and transported it to theLouvre, where it now occupies a commanding spot in the Denon wing.
When Heather Dalton, a British-born historian who lives in Melbourne, Australia, took a moment to examine the painting some years ago, during her first year of study for a doctorate at the University of Melbourne, she was not in Paris but at home, leafing through a book about Mantegna. Although the Madonna image had been reproduced at a fraction of its true size, Dalton noticed something that she well might have missed had she been peering up at the framed original: perched on the pergola, directly above a gem-encrusted crucifix on a staff, was a slender white bird with a black beak, an alert expression, and an impressive greenish-yellow crest. Moreover, without the context of her own surroundings, Dalton might not have registered the bird’s incongruity. “If I hadn’t been in Australia, I wouldn’t have thought, That’s a bloody sulfur-crested cockatoo!” she told me.
The sulfur-crested cockatoo is a sizable bird, about twenty inches tall when full grown. It has mostly white feathers on its body and, atop its head, a distinctive swoosh of citrine plumage, which fans upward in moments of excitement or agitation—looking like the avian equivalent of a dyed-and-sprayed Mohawk. Cockatoos, a kind of parrot, are a familiar presence throughout northern and eastern Australia, where they live in parks and in wooded areas. To some people, the cockatoo is a squawking pest that can damage a building’s timbers with its beak; to others, the bird is a cherished companion. In captivity, sulfur-crested cockatoos can learn to mimic human speech, and some have been known to live for more than eighty years. There’s a national pride in the bird: it appears on the Australian ten-dollar bill.
Cockatoos are nonmigratory, and their native habitat is restricted to Australia, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and the Philippines. Most of the twenty-odd species of cockatoo originate east of the Wallace Line—a boundary, established in the mid-nineteenth century byCharles Darwin’s sometime collaboratorAlfred Russel Wallace, that runs through both the strait separating Borneo from Sulawesi and the strait dividing Bali from Lombok. In Wallace’s book “The Malay Archipelago,” about the studies he undertook there, in the mid-eighteen-hundreds, he wrote, “To the ordinary Englishman this is perhaps the least known part of the globe. Our possessions in it are few and scanty; scarcely any of our travelers go to explore it; and in many collections of maps it is almost ignored.” Wallace noted the absence in Australia of pheasants and woodpeckers, birds common on other continents, and wrote that the area’s cockatoos were among those species “found nowhere else upon the globe.”
Although goods from these regions sometimes entered Europe in the centuries before Wallace’s explorations, little was understood about their place of origin, or about how they moved westward. Even present-day scholarship of what is now called the Global Middle Ages—between 500 and 1500—has paid only glancing attention to Australasia, in part because of a dearth of written records of trade or other forms of cultural exchange with the continent. In a recent book, “The Year 1000,” the scholar Valerie Hansen points out that the direction of ocean currents in and around Southeast Asia makes it much easier for boats to go south—as the archeological record shows they did, to Australia, fifty thousand years ago—than to travel north. She writes that, before the fourteenth or fifteenth century, the people of Australia and Indonesia had very limited contact with people in continental Southeast Asia.
Before Dalton put down the Mantegna book, she asked herself, “How did a bird from Australasia end up in a fifteenth-century Italian painting?” After researching the question for a decade, she publisheda paperin the journalRenaissance Studies, in 2014, about the cockatoo’s unlikely appearance. She argued that the bird’s presence on Mantegna’s canvas illuminated the sophistication of ancient trade routes between Australasia and the rest of the world, concluding that Mantegna’s cockatoo most likely originated in the southeastern reaches of the Indonesian archipelago—east of Bali, perhaps on Timor or Sulawesi. The revisionist force of Dalton’s work attracted attention from many news outlets, including theGuardianandSmithsonian. In Australia,one newspapercame up with the irresistible headline “Picture Points to Renaissance Budgie-Smugglers.” (“Budgie-smuggler” is the preferred local term for a Speedo.)
The Mantegna painting isn’t the only image from the Renaissance that provides hints of at least indirect contact with Australasia. An ink-and-watercolor work by the Flemish artist Joris Hoefnagel, made around 1561 and now in the collection of the Getty, shows a furry gray creature seated on a gilded throne, gnawing on a branch. The work is titled “A Sloth,” but Dalton speculates that it may depict a New Guinean tree kangaroo.
Dalton’s work not only offers visual confirmation that the world has been interconnected for far longer than many people have supposed; it also offers a reminder of the value of a fresh eye. A historian interested in European art who lives on the opposite end of the earth from the Louvre saw a familiar object from an unfamiliar angle—and registered something that hardly any onlooker had registered before.
“Parrots are the nearest birds come to being little human beings wrapped in feathers,” Richard Verdi, a former director of the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, in Birmingham, England, wrote in the catalogue to “The Parrot in Art,” an exhibition mounted at the museum in 2007. Parrots, which can be found across the globe but are not native to Europe, have been considered remarkable for millennia. Verdi’s essay noted that Alexander the Great acquired one from the Punjab in 327 B.C.; the admiral of his fleet, Nearchus, declared that the bird’s ability to speak was miraculous. The Greeks prized the beauty and the intelligence of parrots from India, which had established overland trade routes with Europe in antiquity; Aristotle remarked that the birds were good mimics, and noted that they were “even more outrageous after drinking wine.”
Soon enough, parrots began showing up in European art. There are several representations of the bird in frescoes and mosaics found in the ruins of Pompeii and Herculaneum, including in a painting that is now lost but was documented by an engraving made in the eighteenth century: it depicted a parrot harnessed to a chariot driven by a grasshopper, which held a set of reins in its mandibles.
Parrots were initially incorporated into European art mainly because of their exotic allure. But by the Renaissance parrots were appearing in Christian-themed portraiture because of symbolic links with Mary: among other things, the bird’s improbable ability to talk was seen as comparable to the Virgin’s ability to become pregnant. In the early sixteenth century, several years after Mantegna painted his altarpiece, Albrecht Dürer made an ink-and-watercolor study in which a parrot perches on a wooden post near the Madonna and Child. Dürer was fascinated by parrots, and he eventually acquired some, on a visit to a trading hub in the Netherlands. “Madonna with Child and Parrots,” a 1533 work by the German artist Hans Baldung Grien, shows Mary with a frowning infant Jesus at her breast. A green parakeet stands near Jesus’ foot, and a gray parrot balances on Mary’s shoulder, its mouth open. The composition suggests that Grien was less familiar with parrots than Dürer was: given that parrots eat nuts and have beaks with the biting force required to crack shells, the gray bird’s beak is disconcertingly close to Mary’s face.
Verdi included Mantegna’s “Madonna della Vittoria” in his catalogue essay, noting the presence of what he characterized as a lesser sulfur-crested cockatoo, and remarking on its estimable position in the painting, above the figure of the Virgin. But Verdi did not linger on the implications of the bird’s geographical origin, even though the cockatoo species he named lives only in the southeastern islands of Indonesia.
When Heather Dalton started researching the Mantegna work, she found that other scholars had noted the peculiarity of such a creature appearing in a Renaissance art work—among them, Bruce Thomas Boehrer, a professor of English at Florida State University, whose 2004 book, “Parrot Culture,” offers a lively popular account of “our 2500-year-long fascination with the world’s most talkative bird.” But it seemed that nobody had considered the larger resonances. What had a cockatoo signified to Andrea Mantegna, or to Francesco II Gonzaga, one of the most powerful men of his time? And what did the bird’s presence reveal about the connections between an Italian city and distant forests that lay beyond the world known to Europeans?
Dalton, who was born in Essex, did not turn to academic history until she was in her forties. Her first degree, from the University of Manchester, was in American studies. She moved to Australia in the mid-eighties, having married a man from the country who had been working in The Hague. Before departing for the Southern Hemisphere, they took a road trip around Europe and stopped off in Mantua. Dalton visited the palace, which served as home to the noble Gonzaga family for nearly four hundred years. Its patriarch, Ludovico I Gonzaga, began ruling the city in 1328. Inside the palace, Dalton saw the works of Mantegna for the first time, and admired the lavish frescoes that he had executed for the Camera degli Sposi in the fourteen-sixties and seventies—his most important commission for the Gonzaga family, for whom he was the court painter.
In Australia, Dalton initially worked in publishing and in journalism. To mark the 1988 bicentenary of the establishment of a British penal colony in Australia, she wrote a number of articles on Australian history, including one about the country’s vigorous trade in bêche-de-mer, or sea cucumber. For centuries, the bêche-de-mer—which is a lumpy, sluglike creature related to the starfish—was harvested off the northern coast of Australia and then sold in Chinese markets, where it was regarded as a delicacy. In 2002, Dalton, by then a postgraduate student in history, returned to the subject. The fishermen, who had gathered sea cucumbers in shallow waters, had formed one end of a significant mercantile link between coastal Australia and Asia, but they had been largely overlooked in the narrative of Australia’s national founding, which, she said, favored “the digger, the pastoralist, and the drover.” (The song “Waltzing Matilda” commemorates an itinerant sheep-station worker.) Dalton, for her dissertation, wrote about a Tudor trader, Roger Barlow, who travelled around England, Spain, and South America; in 2016, she expanded the work into a book, “Merchants and Explorers.” She told me, “I was very interested in the idea thateverythingis about trade and economics, and the idea that we make discoveries for some national reason is something that you claim afterward.”
The cockatoo in the Mantegna painting reminded Dalton of her work on the bêche-de-mer. Both animals were clearly part of a bustling, poorly documented trade in luxuries. The cockatoo in Mantegna’s altarpiece, like parrots in other Renaissance art works, had a clear religious symbolism, but it also signalled the worldly matter of the Gonzagas’ immense wealth—bling with feathers. The rarity of the bird can be deduced from its singular occurrence in the altarpiece: Dalton could not find another cockatoo in works by Mantegna, or in those of his contemporaries. Although she acknowledges that the cockatoo may be a representation of a representation—say, a copy of an image imported from parts east—she argues that the bird’s detailed appearance strongly indicates it was drawn from life. Old Master paintings of cockatoos from the seventeenth century onward typically show the bird in profile, with its crest maximally displayed, as a taxidermy specimen would be arranged. On Mantegna’s canvas, the bird faces forward. It therefore holds the viewer’s eye, just as a curious, intelligent bird that began life in a distant tropical forest might gaze at a painter standing before an easel.
An inventory of objects owned by one of Mantegna’s sons made note of a large copper birdcage, but Dalton was otherwise unable to find any documentary evidence of either Mantegna or the Gonzagas having acquired a cockatoo. Yet it was plausible, she thought, that the parrot had arrived in Mantua by way of Venice, ninety miles east, where merchants were engaged in exporting glass and ceramics and in importing luxury items. In theRenaissance Studiesessay, she noted, “Wealthy citizens of Italian city-states buying such goods may have appreciated their rarity, but understood little of their geographical origins.” Wares arriving in Venetian markets would have changed hands many times during their journey: “A parrot, like an artwork, may have had a succession of owners as it was traded West towards Europe.” Dalton cited a handful of Italian traders who, in the fifteenth century, ventured as far east as Java and the Moluccas, where, she suggests, they might have encountered Chinese merchants plying established trading routes still farther east—and scooped up a prestigious parrot along the way. More likely, she thinks, the cockatoo may not have reached European hands until much closer to the end of its westward journey. Some birds travel very poorly: Barlow, the Tudor trader, attempted to bring a hummingbird back to Europe from the Americas, and ended up transporting a corpse. But a sulfur-crested cockatoo, especially one accustomed to human company, would have been more resilient—and, as a valuable commodity, it would have been well cared for.
Dalton told me that she now believes the cockatoo was probably transported largely by sea—not in a single epic voyage across the Indian Ocean but in a series of trips in small boats which hugged the coast of India and Arabia. Yet it remains a mystery how, precisely, the cockatoo painted by Mantegna reached Mantua.
For good reason, Dalton expected her paper to be the final word on cockatoos in early European art. But, not long after its publication, she learned that her extraordinary discovery had been trumped. However Mantegna’s cockatoo came to Italy, it was not the first bird of its kind to have made the crossing. It had been preceded by another cockatoo, two and a half centuries earlier.
In the late nineteen-eighties, Finnish researchers, led by a zoologist named Pekka Niemelä, gained unusual access to a rare manuscript in the collection of the Vatican Library, “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus,” or “On the Art of Hunting with Birds.” The book, attributed to Frederick II, the Holy Roman Emperor, was made between 1241 and 1244. The Vatican’s manuscript, which is in two volumes, was compiled by Frederick’s son Manfred more than a decade later, after the original work was lost during the Battle of Parma. The manuscript passed through the hands of several eminent noblemen and intellectuals before entering the papal collection, in 1622. Written in Latin, it contains hundreds of drawings of birds, and is of particular interest to scientists because it represents a strikingly early attempt at empirical zoology. Frederick II was a keen scientist, with a fascination for the animal kingdom and the human body. Reputedly, he once had a dying man sealed up in an airtight wine vat, in order to observe whether a person’s soul perished along with his body. He is also said, perhaps apocryphally, to have had surgeons cut open the bellies of two men who had been fed a large meal, to see if the one who had been made to exercise after eating had digested his food more efficiently than the one who had napped before being subjected to postprandial slaughter.
While looking at reproductions of “De Arte Venandi cum Avibus,” Niemelä had noticed the presence, among images of hawks, of a cockatoo with white plumage. The bird was featured infourof themanuscript’sillustrations. “It was really, really shocking to see them,” Niemelä told me. Thanks to the intercession of Simo Örmä, an academic at the Finnish Institute in Rome, Niemelä and a zoologist colleague, Jukka Salo, were granted permission to see the manuscript, under the watchful eye of the head librarian. The scholars concluded that the four images were of the same bird, and, by examining the remains of pigment on the ancient pages, they ascertained the original creature’s coloring. They could also make an educated guess at the cockatoo’s gender: female, as indicated by reddish flecks in the iris of its eye. The cockatoo, they surmised, was either a subspecies of the sulfur-crested cockatoo or one of its close relatives, the yellow-crested cockatoo. This narrowed the bird’s origin down to New Guinea or adjacent islands.
After the publication of Dalton’s paper, Niemelä sent her an e-mail. Dalton, who had received a lot of odd queries about her work, initially dismissed the message. “I saw the name Pekka, and my paper was about a bird, and I thought it was a joke,” she told me. Finally, she read Niemelä’s note, and contacted him with excitement. Niemelä, Salo, and Örmä had not managed to publish their findings, but now, in collaboration with Dalton, they set about exploring more definitively the provenance and the significance of Frederick II’s cockatoo. In 2018, they publisheda paper, in the medieval-studies journalParergon,proposing that this bird most likely arrived in the cosmopolitan markets of Cairo after a journey from China, to which it would have been traded from somewhere in Australasia.
Their deduction was grounded in more than speculation: unlike Mantegna’s bird, Frederick’s cockatoo has a contemporaneous paper trail. The text accompanying one of the cockatoo images comments on the appearance of various parrots in the royal collection, one of which was characterized as having “white feathers and quills, changing to yellow under the sides,” and was said to have been “sent to us by the Sultan of Babylon”—the ruler of Egypt, Al-Malik al-Kāmil. As Dalton and her co-authors wrote, al-Kāmil had extensive links with a network of traders extending from China and India across central Asia. Frederick’s text also observes that parrots can “imitate the human voice and the words they hear most frequently.” It’s tempting to imagine that the Emperor’s cockatoo learned greetings, or curses, in different languages during its journey; unfortunately, Frederick’s scribe failed to note any polyglot repertoire, which might have provided further clues about the bird’s path.
The cockatoo was one of many animals that Frederick and al-Kāmil exchanged during a period of years, with what appears to be ever-increasing effort to impress each other. One of Frederick’s first gifts to al-Kāmil, Dalton and her co-authors reported, was horses equipped with golden stirrups encrusted with gems. Al-Kāmil, in turn, sent Frederick an even more wondrous gift, an elephant. For a medieval monarch, maintaining a menagerie fulfilled a function similar to the one an art collection plays for a modern-day plutocrat: it was a show of power and prestige. A particularly rare beast—say, a white peacock or a white bear, both of which Frederick sent to al-Kāmil—provided much the same cachet that a prime Basquiat would today. Among al-Kāmil’s gifts to Frederick was a gyrfalcon, a splendid bird of prey that originates in the Arctic and North America, and likely came from Iceland, then almost at the northwestern edge of European exploration. A white cockatoo with a greenish crest would have represented an equally resplendent gift—a rare bird retrieved from an almost inconceivable corner of the world.
Unlike gyrfalcons, which can cover enormous distances at a high speed, the sulfur-crested cockatoo does not travel far, unless driven by drought or wrested from its home by human intervention. A bird born on one island typically stays on that island for the rest of its life. Sulfur-crested cockatoos are social and companionable creatures: in early adulthood, they select a mate, and partner for life. The Europeans who first beheld such a strange creature in their midst must have been astonished by it. One can’t help wondering how the bird experienced the encounter.
Jukka Salo, the zoologist, helped me imagine the bird’s-eye view of a journey across Asia. He reflected on what the cockatoo might have experienced as it was taken from its home and transported from one place to another. Most likely, he said, the cockatoo would have been removed from its nest—a hole in a tree in a forest—when it was only a few weeks old, perhaps along with one other chick hatched from the same clutch of eggs. The hand that grasped it probably belonged to a seasoned hunter, who would have known the bird’s value, and also would have understood the optimal age at which to steal it: when the bird was old enough to survive without parental care but young enough to adapt to human company. Older birds are far less amenable to captivity. Salo told me that a trip to Italy “would have been very stressful.” The cockatoo may have spent months at sea, in storage, or it may have travelled in a camel caravan across the landmass of Asia. Salo said, “It would have been harsh travel—the most difficult time of the bird’s life.” Frederick’s and Mantegna’s cockatoos may have achieved a pictorial immortality, but they themselves are not examples of what historians now call “material culture.” They were living beings from long ago, as difficult to imagine as a land beyond the land we think we know.
oday’s Supreme Court decision further weakening the Voting Rights Act affirmed that the only way Democrats can reverse the wave of restrictive voting laws in GOP-controlled states is to pass new federal voting rights by curtailing the Senate filibuster.
illiam Barr began his tenure as Donald Trump’s attorney general with extremely evasive testimony during his confirmation hearing. He may be best remembered for giving a highly misleading summary of the Mueller report, and he spent much of 2020 trying to substantiate Trump’s conspiracy theories about the election being rigged against him.
tate and local officials responsible for doling out more than $46 billion in federal rental assistance had distributed just $1.5 billion as of the end of May, according to new Treasury Department data that illustrated a severe bottleneck in the aid.
n a classroom with dirty walls in the Tigray highlands, a woman is leaning against a blackboard. She is crying. Beneath her wraparound skirt, she is wearing an underskirt on which a red patch is slowly spreading. It is lighter on the margins, but dark in the middle. Blood is running down her legs and soaking into the shimmering white fabric. She is staring at the wall, her right hand pressed against the blackboard. With her left hand, she is stroking the romper of her six-month-old daughter.
