.. INTERNATIONAL EDITION | TUESDAY, MARCH 28, 2017 TALK TO THE BOT STAND-IN KEEPS POP FANS HAPPY PAGE 16 | TECH MORE THAN WINE FINE DINING IN BORDEAUX BACK PAGE | TRAVEL SCULPTURE IN SPACE ASTRONAUT TEAMS UP WITH ARTIST ON EARTH PAGE 18 | CULTURE Just before Thanksgiving 2012, Ariel Levy, a staff writer at The New Yorker, flew to Mongolia to report on that coun- try’s mining boom. She was 38 years old and five months pregnant, and on her second night there, she miscarried in her hotel room, delivering her son in a torrent of blood that nearly killed her. Her son would not survive, but Ms. Levy detailed in a heartbreaking essay a year later that would win her a National Mag- azine Award that after she yanked the placenta from her body, crawled to the phone and called a local doctor, she took the boy’s photo. “I worried that if I didn’t,” she wrote, “I would never believe he had existed.” The essay, titled “Thanksgiving in Mongolia,” was a brutal read. Ms. Levy wrote of the feeling of her son’s skin, “like a silky frog’s on my mouth,” and of the image of a white bath mat someone had thrown over a bloodstain next to her bed that would slowly darken as her blood seeped through it during the five days that she spent holed up in her hotel room. Back home, she wrote, she sobbed, bled and lactated in an awful storm of hormones and grief. Before the miscarriage, she had con- sidered herself lucky: buoyed by the gains of third-wave feminism, success- ful at her chosen career, legally married to a woman and carrying a baby made by a friend’s donated sperm. Afterward, as she wrote, she felt buffeted by a dif- ferent kind of fate, something more Shakespearean or biblical, “the 10 or 20 minutes I was somebody’s mother were black magic; there is no adventure I would have traded them for.” And yet. Not only did she lose her child, but her marriage also fell apart. This felt like a karmic smackdown, and Ms. Levy wanted to interrogate her own responsibility for such a sequence of grim events. That is the intellectual backbone, anyway, of “The Rules Do Not Apply”: her memoir that lays the groundwork for what happened in Mon- golia and picks up where the essay left off, raising, once again, that hoary con- ceit, the one about women and “having it all.” “I felt like this very fortunate benefi- ciary of the women’s movement,” she said during a recent interview in her bright, one-bedroom walk-up in Chelsea. “I got to have all these choices, and the rules” — biological, historical — “did not apply. So it was a very shocking experience to find myself, childless and alone at 38. I felt like a complete failure, on the deepest level. “Some of it was like someone in a Jane Austen novel, getting her comeuppance, but some of it, most of it, was feeling like a mother, but where’s the baby? There is no child. Then you’ve got a little identity crisis on your hands.” Ms. Levy bought the apartment dur- ing her marriage, when she and her for- mer spouse, now a recovering alcoholic, separated for a time. She lives there alone, attended by two amiable, rotund To have and have not Ariel Levy’s new memoir reflects her loss after a miscarriage and divorce BY PENELOPE GREEN ARIEL, PAGE 2 Ariel Levy at home in Manhattan, a bright one-bedroom walk-up that she bought when she was married. NATHAN BAJAR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES When the head of a small Italian mu- seum called Detective Inspector Alex- ander Horn of the Munich Police, she asked him if he investigated cold cases. “Yes I do,” Inspector Horn said, recall- ing their conversation. “Well, I have the coldest case of all for you,” said Angelika Fleckinger, director of the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeol- ogy, in Bolzano, Italy. The unknown victim, nicknamed Ötzi, has literally been in cold storage in her museum for a quarter-century. Often called the Iceman, he is the world’s most perfectly preserved mummy, a Copper Age fellow who had been frozen inside a glacier along the northern Italian bor- der with Austria, until warming global temperatures melted the ice and two hikers discovered him in 1991. The cause of death remained uncer- tain until 10 years later, when an X-ray of the mummy pointed to foul play in the form of a flint arrowhead embedded in his back, just under his shoulder. But now, armed with a wealth of new scien- tific information that researchers have compiled, Inspector Horn has managed to piece together a remarkably detailed picture of what befell the Iceman on that fateful day around 3300 B.C., near the crest of the Ötztal Alps. “When I was first contacted with the idea, I thought it was too difficult, too much time has passed,” said Inspector Horn, a noted profiler. “But actually he’s in better condition than recent homicide victims I’ve worked on who have been found out in the open.” There are a few mummies in the world as old as Ötzi, but none so well preserved. Most were ritually prepared, which usually meant removal of internal organs, preservation with chemicals or exposure to destructive desert condi- tions. The glacier not only froze Ötzi where he had died, but the high humidity of the ice also kept his organs and skin largely intact. “Imagine, we know the stomach contents of a person 5,000 years ago,” Inspector Horn said. “In a lot of cases we are not able to do that even now.” Those contents, as it turned out, were critical in determining with surprising precision what happened to Ötzi and even helped shed light on the possible motive of his killer. The more scientists learn, the more recognizable the Iceman becomes. He was 5 feet 5 inches tall (about average height for his time), weighed 110 pounds, had brown eyes and shoulder-length, dark brown hair, and a size 7½ foot. He was about 45, give or take six years, re- spectably old for the late Neolithic age — but still in his prime. Ötzi had the physique of a man who did a lot of strenuous walking but little upper-body work; there was hardly any fat on his body. He had all of his teeth, and between his two upper front teeth A reconstruction of the Iceman in the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano, Italy. He died after he was shot with an arrow in the back, piercing his subclavian artery. PHOTOGRAPHS BY DMITRY KOSTYUKOV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES Who killed the Iceman? BOLZANO, ITALY Seasoned detective pieces together a murder mystery from 5,300 years ago BY ROD NORDLAND ICEMAN, PAGE 5 The Iceman mummy on display at the museum. He was found frozen in a glacier, and its high humidity kept him remarkably well preserved, with his organs intact. A little-known start-up called Neurala helped the United States Air Force make military robots more perceptive and NASA make its rovers autonomous. But when Neurala needed money, it got little response from the American military. So Neurala turned to China, landing an undisclosed sum from an investment firm backed by a state-run Chinese com- pany. Chinese firms have become signifi- cant investors in American start-ups working on cutting-edge technologies with potential military applications. The start-ups include companies that make rocket engines for spacecraft, sensors for autonomous navy ships and printers that make flexible screens that could be used in fighter-plane cockpits. Many of the Chinese firms are owned by state- owned companies or have connections to Chinese leaders. The deals are ringing alarm bells in Washington. According to a new white paper commissioned by the Depart- ment of Defense, Beijing is encouraging Chinese companies with close govern- ment ties to invest in American start- ups specializing in critical technologies like artificial intelligence and robots to advance China’s military capacity, as well as its economy. The white paper, which was distribut- ed to the senior levels of the Trump ad- ministration last week, concludes that United States government controls that are supposed to protect potentially criti- cal technologies are falling short, ac- cording to three people knowledgeable about its contents, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “What drives a lot of the concern is that China is a military competitor,” said James Lewis, a senior fellow at the Cen- ter for Strategic and International Stud- ies, who is familiar with the report. “How do you deal with a military com- petitor playing in your most innovative market?” The Chinese deals can pose a number of issues. Investors could push start-ups to strike partnerships or make licensing or hiring decisions that could expose in- tellectual property. They can also get an inside glimpse of how technology is be- ing developed and could have access to a start-up’s offices or computers. Trump administration officials and lawmakers are raising broad questions about China’s economic relationship with the United States. While the report was commissioned before President China bets on sensitive start-ups in U.S. tech HONG KONG Report to Pentagon raises fear Beijing could advance its military capabilities BY PAUL MOZUR AND JANE PERLEZ CHINA, PAGE 12 One of President Trump’s rare strengths has been his ability to project competence. The Dow Jones stock index is up an astonishing 2,200 points since his election in part be- cause investors believed Trump could deliver tax reform and infrastructure spending. Think again! The Trump administration is in- creasingly showing itself to be breath- takingly incompetent, and that’s the real lesson of the collapse of the G.O.P. health care bill. The administration proved unable to organize its way out of a paper bag: After seven years of Republi- cans’ publicly loathing Oba- macare, their repeal-replace bill failed after 18 days. Politics some- times rewards braggarts, and Trump is a world-class boaster. He promised a health care plan that would be “unbe- lievable,” “beautiful,” “terrific,” “less expensive and much better,” “insur- ance for everybody.” But he’s abysmal at delivering — because the basic truth is that he’s an effective politician who’s utterly incompetent at governing. It’s sometimes said that politicians campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Trump campaigns in braggado- cio and governs in bombast. Whatever one thinks of Trump’s merits, this competence gap raises profound questions about our national direction. If the administration can’t repeal Obamacare — or manage friendly relations with allies like Mex- ico or Australia — how will it possibly accomplish something complicated like tax reform? Failure and weakness also build on themselves, and the health care deba- cle will make it more difficult for Trump to get his way with Congress on other issues. As people recognize that the emperor is wearing no clothes, that perception of weakness will spiral. One of the underlying problems is Trump’s penchant for personnel choices that are bafflingly bad or ethi- cally challenged or both. Mike Flynn was perhaps the best-known example. But consider Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism adviser to the presi- dent. Gorka, who is of Hungarian A braggart tyrannizes in bombast Nicholas Kristof OPINION Mr. Trump has crafted an administration in his own image: vain, narcissistic and dangerous. KRISTOF, PAGE 15 Issue Number No. 41,691 Andorra € 3.60 Antilles € 3.90 Austria € 3.20 Bahrain BD 1.20 Belgium €3.20 Bos. & Herz. 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