Why I’m done trying to be “man enough” | Justin Baldoni

Justin Baldoni wants to start a dialogue with men about redefining masculinity — to figure out ways to be not just good men but good humans. In a warm, personal talk, he shares his effort to reconcile who he is with who the world tells him a man should be. And he has a challenge for men: “See if you can use the same qualities that you feel make you a man to go deeper,” he says. “Your strength, your bravery, your toughness: Are you brave enough to be vulnerable? Are you strong enough to be sensitive? Are you confident enough to listen to the women in your life?”

A Family in History

“My grandfather was the biggest Communist in America,” he said, “and I became the biggest capitalist in Russia.”

.. Bill Browder created his hedge fund, Hermitage, in 1996. The Kremlin turned on him hard in 2005, declaring him persona non grata. He had been a thorn in the side of Putin’s oligarchs.

In 2008, the authorities arrested Browder’s fearless and whistleblowing lawyer, Sergei Magnitsky — and tortured him to death.

.. I read an obituary of Felix Browder, Bill’s father. I then realized why Bill had asked me to be more specific when I asked, “Any relation?” Felix Browder was one of the greatest mathematicians in the world. (I don’t know from mathematicians.) He was, for example, chairman of the math department at Chicago.

Earl Browder had two more children, two more sons: Andrew and William. The former became the

  • chairman of the math department at Brown; the latter became
  • chairman of the department at Princeton. And there’s more Browder talent where that came from.

.. He was named after Shakespeare, having been born on the 400th anniversary of the writer’s birth (April 23, 1964).

.. Andrew’s daughter Laura, a professor at the University of Richmond, discovered something in the KGB archives: The dear nanny had been a spy, charged with keeping tabs on Earl. Of course.

.. Earl coined the famous (or infamous) slogan “Communism is 20th-century Americanism.” He ran for president in 1936, getting some 80,000 votes.

.. Communists in America were in particularly bad odor. In early ’41, the U.S. government sent Browder to prison on technicalities: passport fraud. But that summer, Hitler double-crossed Stalin, and the United States would soon be allies with Uncle Joe.

.. FDR commuted Browder’s sentence as a goodwill gesture.

.. After the war, Browder got on the wrong side of Moscow and was expelled from the American party. He died in 1973, having spent his last years with his son Bill in Princeton

.. Raisa, a Russian mother, and a mother of three sons. A Russian-Jewish mother at that

.. Felix entered MIT at 16. He had his bachelor’s degree in two years. By 20, he had his Ph.D. from Princeton.

.. One of his undergraduate professors testified that Felix was not a party member — and, moreover, that Felix had been the best math student in the history of MIT

.. Bill Browder affirms that his father was not a Communist. Rather, he was “a hard-core leftist professor,” like all the others. “I never met one who wasn’t,” says Bill.

.. Felix was indeed drafted into the Army. Not trusted with sensitive work, he spent two years pumping gas at Fort Bragg.

.. Felix worked on his math and, for the first and only time in his life, was around regular folks.

.. Felix and his wife Eva had another child besides Bill: their son Tom. He entered the University of Chicago at 15. Today, he is a leading particle physicist, dividing his time between Hawaii and Japan, searching for the origin of the universe.
.. Bill was a rebellious kid, and he figured out how to rebel against a family of leftists: become a capitalist. He majored in economics at Chicago, whose department was a den of free-marketeers.

.. In an act of shocking gall, the Russian state is investigating Browder for the murder of Magnitsky — and three other men. Thus do the murderers finger the champion of the murdered. Putin’s predecessors in the KGB would grin in admiration.

.. He could have walked away, tending his millions, but instead he has put himself in the crosshairs of one of the most powerful and ruthless governments on earth.

Trump’s Retreat From the West

Mr. Trump seems to have followed a blueprint for a resolution to the Korean conflict that China and Russia proposed a year before.

“The idea is to ensure a double freeze,” Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, said in an interview with NBC in Moscow on July 21, 2017. “North Korea suspends all their launches and tests, and in response, the U.S. and South Korea reduce the scale of their war maneuvers in the region.”

But all the meeting really accomplished was to open the prospect of new and probably lengthy negotiations for a final peace on the peninsula. Achieving that will depend on how the interests of five countries — North Korea, South Korea, China, Russia and the United States — can all be served.

North Korea and South Korea were created when World War II ended with Soviet troops occupying the northern part of the Korean Peninsula and American troops the south. After North Korea invaded the South in 1950, only to be driven back to China’s border by American-led forces, the fighting didn’t stop until after Chinese troops poured in and restored Communist control in the North.

.. A person of Mr. Putin’s age and experience cannot help seeing in Korea a likeness to a divided Germany. Having served in East Germany as a K.G.B. officer, Mr. Putin was deeply dismayed at the Soviet Union’s decision nearly three decades ago to give up control of what had been the Communists’ East Bloc. Today, his most powerful narrative of grievance is of the West expanding its institutions — especially NATO — to Russia’s western border. He would surely be loath to see the West achieve a matching situation at its eastern door.

..  Mr. Putin, speaking to Chinese reporters in Qingdao, called Mr. Trump’s decision to meet Mr. Kim “very brave and mature.”
.. It is likely that without Mr. Xi’s nod, Mr. Kim would not have met with Mr. Trump. And China may have kept its distance and let the American president steal the spotlight, hoping that a peaceful North Korea colonized by Chinese, Russian and American businesses might emerge and make an American military presence on the peninsula irrelevant
.. Mr. Trump’s foreign policy vision ignores concerns about other countries’ political structures as long as a deal can be reached. He clearly prefers bilateral deals to multilateral accords. He enjoys politics that are personal rather than institutional.

Somebody get this man a lawyer

Dowd was just the latest of several lawyers who have bailed on Trump. His longtime lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, was early on board and early to abandon ship — though he might yet come back. He, too, favored an aggressive strategy that, to Dowd and others, was sheer foolishness. At the moment, Trump’s team is led by Jay Sekulow, who has argued many times before the Supreme Court but has never tried a criminal case in his life. As is typical for a Trump aide, he has often appeared on Fox News. This, though, is not the same as courtroom experience.