Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 62

Why Was NJ Transit Going Too Fast in Hoboken?

The NJ Transit train that jumped the tracks, killing one person, injuring scores, and inflicting serious damage at a Hoboken terminal last week was going twice as fast as the speed limit, transportation officials said Thursday.

The train should have been going no faster than 10 miles per hour as it entered the station, but instead it accelerated from 8 mph to 21 mph, starting just 38 seconds before the train collided with a bumper, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Less than a second before the collision, the engineer applied the emergency brake.

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The Train Crash in Hoboken, New Jersey

Thomas Gallagher, the engineer, survived the crash and is cooperating with authorities. He says he has no memory of the incident. It has taken investigators longer than expected to gather facts about the crash, both because Gallagher does not recall what happened and because a data recorder at the back of the train was found not to be working. Instead, they had to wait several days while the recorder from the front of the train was found in the wreckage.

The news that the first recorder was not working has rattled some officials. “That’s bizarre. And obviously not normal,” Steven Ditmeyer, a former railroad official, told The Wall Street Journal.

On Wednesday, NJ Transit announced it had instituted new rules requiring that conductors be present alongside engineers in the cab as trains pull into Hoboken and Atlantic City stations, providing a second set of eyes and ears.

But there’s still no indication what might have caused the accident, or why the train accelerated rather than braking during the final minutes before the fatal crash. NTSB investigations often take months to complete, so no answer may be immediately forthcoming. Meanwhile, the Hoboken terminal remains closed, with no word on when it might reopen.

Pakistan's Stricter Penalty for Honor Killings

NEWS BRIEF Pakistani lawmakers unanimously approved Thursday legislation to stiffen the penalty for honor killings by removing a loophole that previously allowed those convicted to walk free.

“Laws are supposed to guide better behavior, not allow destructive behavior to continue with impunity,” Sughra Imam, a former senator and author of the bill, said of the law.

Pakistani law previously allowed those convicted of honor killings to walk free if they are pardoned by the victim’s family. Under the new legislation, which first passed the senate in March, those convicted who are also facing the death penalty may be pardoned by the victim’s loved ones, though they will still face a mandatory life sentence in prison, which in Pakistan is 12 ½ years.

The country’s parliament also passed a law on rape that would enforce a mandatory 25-year prison sentence to those convicted.  

The law’s passage follows the high-profile killing in July of Qandeel Baloch, a singer and Internet star who gained fame for her outspoken presence on social media, where she often challenged conservative elements of Pakistani society and urged women to combat cultural norms. Baloch’s death is being investigated as an honor killing and her brother has been arrested in connection with the crime.

More than 1,000 women were killed in honor killings in Pakistan in 2015, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, though the figure may be higher as not all honor killings are reported. The issue received international attention following the release of A Girl in the River, a documentary about honor killings in Pakistan which won the Academy Award for best documentary short in February. Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, the filmmaker behind documentary, praised Pakistani lawmakers for taking action on the issue.

The anti-Honor killing bill passes in the joint session! I hope now there will no longer any forgiveness in honor killing #pakistan

— Sharmeen Obaid (@sharmeenochinoy) October 6, 2016

Senator sughra Imam the work you started two year ago has borne fruit today! May it safeguard more women #antihonorkilling bill

— Sharmeen Obaid (@sharmeenochinoy) October 6, 2016

Rom, Calm: The Mindy Project's New Spin on Coupling Up

(This post contains mild spoilers for the fifth season of The Mindy Project.)

In a late-in-the-series episode of Sex and the City, Carrie, frustrated with the pressures women face to channel their emotions into institutions … marries herself. The circumstances of the unlikely union are extremely silly: Carrie had gone to her friend’s Kyra’s baby shower—to which she wore Manolos, because she’s Carrie—and the shoes, somewhere between the hors d’oeuvre and the party games, disappeared. Kyra refused to reimburse Carrie for the expensive footwear (on the grounds, she argued, that it’s silly to spend $485 on shoes). So Carrie—having roughly calculated all the money she’d spent on gifts celebrating her friends’ many weddings and babies—informed Kyra that she, too, would be married. She had registered for only one gift, for this celebration of her singleness: a pair of Manolo Blahnik stilettos, size seven.

The episode—it is titled, by the way, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes”—remains one of the series’ most iconic, both despite and because of its absurdity. Marrying yourself! It’s pointless. It’s rebellious. It’s enticing. It’s a concept that more and more women, in the age of increased economic parity, are toying with. Which might be why it informs the latest romantic plot twist in a show that has been full of them: The Mindy Project.

It’s a classic romantic trope: Edward and Jacob. Rick and Victor. The two guys from “Two Princes.”

The season-five premiere of Mindy Kaling’s now-on-Hulu series finds the eponymous romantic heroine choosing between two guys: Danny (Chris Messina), Mindy’s ex and her former co-worker and the father of her young son, Leo; and Jody (Garret Dillahunt), her current co-worker. (The Mindy Project is a rom-com that is also, for better or for worse, a workplace comedy.) Mindy can make a case for, and against, either guy. Danny is the father of her kid! They have wonderful chemistry! He’s approximately as good-looking as that actor Chris Messina! But he and Mindy also have different values, and want fundamentally different things out of marriage—and, really, out of life.

Jody, on the other hand, is caring, and dashing, and gallant. (Summoning the blithe materialism of Sex and the City—remember when Big wooed Carrie back with a walk-in closet?—Jody bought Mindy an apartment as a grand gesture of his affection for her. Yep, a whole apartment.) The “but” with him, though? As Mindy tells her clinic’s receptionist, Beverly (Beth Grant), who briefly abandons her typical role as the office crank to function as a voice of reason: Mindy just doesn’t “feel a spark” with him.

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In Praise of Boring Romance

So on the one hand the episode (“Decision 2016,” it’s titled) revolves around that classic romantic trope, the woman having to choose between two guys who adore her. Edward versus Jacob. Rick versus Victor. Prince One versus Prince Two.  

But the latest Mindy Project update also revolves around a larger decision: the choice between settling down and … not settling. The choice between social expectation—marriage, babies, with each dependent on the other—and personal desire. “I’m a single mother barreling toward 40,” Mindy tells Beverly. “I should pick one of the rich, handsome doctors that will have me.”

Beverly disagrees. “If neither one of these guys is right, wait for someone special to come along.” (The receptionist adds, Beverly-ly: “Until then, get escorts.”)

Mindy nods. “So ... don’t operate out of desperation,” she says. She pauses. “That never occurred to me.”

The Mindy Project is, on its surface, as light and as bright as the decor in Mindy’s Pinterest-perfect office: It is a romantic comedy in the cheeriest, most optimistic sense of that genre. Lately, though, the show has been expanding beyond the will-they-or-won’t-they premises of the traditional rom-com to explore the broader phenomena that affect women’s lives, be they “love lives” or not. The Mindy Project, in its last season, took on subjects like work-life balance and having kids while having a career and—via Mindy’s egg-freezing clinic and her own pregnancy—the time-bound nature of fertility. It tackled vaguely taboo subjects like the fear—not just the nervousness, but the full-on fear—that can accompany the physical demands of childbirth. It also tackled an even more taboo anxiety: the worry that “mother” is a job that cannot be quit if you turn out not to be good at it.

Mostly, though, The Mindy Project, the ultimate rom-com, questioned romance itself—as a social expectation, as a kind of institution. The show, last season, explored the dullness that can settle into long-term relationships. And the difference, in those relationships, between “talking” and “communicating.” And the ways one’s job can provide so many of the things—excitement, devotion, love—that were once expected to be fulfilled by romantic relationships. The primary pressure point in the long-running romance between Mindy and Danny was that she had, the whole time, a side piece: her job. One that she is really, really good at. One that makes many demands of her. One that she loves.

She’s single, but she’s not alone.

But that point took a while to reach. It took Mindy a while to realize how much her job—and her life outside of romantic partnership—mattered to her. The season-three finale found Mindy declaring, to Danny, her desire for marriage—her willingness, in fact, to give him up if he did not share that desire. It wasn’t an ultimatum so much as a pragmatic recognition of her own needs; and, in the era of the Cool Girl, it was its own kind of rebellious move.

Now, though, with another season having begun, Mindy has rebelled again. And so, for that matter, has the guy who met her desire for marriage with his own aggressive ambivalence about it. “I need someone to take care of me,” Danny tells her, in “Decision 2016”—“and for whatever reason, you don’t need that anymore.”

She doesn’t. (At least, in a show that can sometimes resemble a tilt-a-whirl, for now.) And so the conclusion to the mini-rom-com that played out as the show premiered this week featured the ultimate rom-comic standby: a happy ending. Mindy rejected both men. Danny wasn’t right for her; Jody revealed himself to be, as a coda to all that gallantry, kind of a jerk. The episode summoned a litany of cinematic cliches—to announce her decision to Jody, Mindy ran to his apartment, through the pouring rain, through heavy Manhattan traffic, in her nightgown—but they were all, it would turn out, there to serve a new kind of couple: Mindy and … Mindy. Mindy and her job, and her friends, and her son. Single, but not alone.

So Mindy, by the end of things, had pulled a Carrie: She had effectively said “I do” to herself. She had summoned the thinking of her writer and portrayer, Mindy Kaling, who told an interviewer last year, “In my 20s, and especially in my teens, I completely fetishized a wedding. But I think much less about marriage now. It’s less interesting to me.” “Decision 2016” brought a 2016 spin, in the end, to the note that Kyra included when she sent Carrie, finally, her stiletto-heeled wedding gift: “Carrie, congratulations, we couldn’t be happier for you and you.”

The Biggest Problem With Netflix's Comic-Book Shows

Four episodes into Netflix’s Luke Cage—that’s four 60-minute episodes into a 13-part season—the show finally seems to be done setting its basic story in motion. The titular hero is motivated by the death of his mentor and the proliferation of crime in his neighborhood. Viewers have seen flashbacks explaining the origins of his bulletproof superpowers, and they’ve met the ensemble of heroes and villains around him,. It’s the kind of setup a pilot can accomplish in 42 minutes on network TV. So why do Luke Cage and the other superhero shows in Netflix’s growing catalog take 240 minutes to pull everything together?

When Daredevil premiered on Netflix in April 2015, I praised it as a perfect model for presenting a classic serialized format: the comic book. Rather than cramming a hero’s origin story, a villain’s origin story, a romance, and a climactic battle into the formula of a two-hour movie, the longer-form capabilities of television seemed to suit the grand arcs of superhero comics well, building their case issue by issue—or episode by episode. But the ultimate result has been frustrating. After two seasons of Daredevil, one of Jessica Jones, and now one of Luke Cage, the Netflix model feels fundamentally flawed, encouraging the kind of molasses-slow plotting comic books are designed to eschew. The problem isn’t that these shows are bad, necessarily—Luke Cage is certainly one of the most interesting drama offerings of the year. But they all take far too long to get going, by which point many viewers will have already tuned out.

Part of the problem is that Netflix doesn’t care about viewers tuning out, since its model isn’t just based on rapid binge-watching. The streaming service cares more about subscribers, not viewer data, so if audiences lose interest, they can take as long as they want to catch up on Luke Cage—as long as they keep paying their subscription fee every month. This is a much more freeing creative model than the classic network-TV approach. The latter pits shows against each other in ratings free-for-alls and demands big twists from dramas and a return to the comfortable status quo from comedies to keep people coming back week after week. The network-TV model, which depends on new viewers being able to pick up a series midway through a season, can be the enemy of serialization.

Meanwhile, the longer-form approach lets a show like Luke Cage thrive in its details, with its villains Cottonmouth (beautifully played by Mahershala Ali) and Mariah Dillard (a commanding Alfre Woodard) spouting long, open-ended monologues about the history and future of Harlem to each other. But a comic-book series needs its villains to have real plans and purpose beyond perpetuating crime. Four episodes into Luke Cage, there isn’t much for the show’s hero to fight, just vague, foreboding menace and street-level criminals to bust up.

Daredevil and Jessica Jones were also small-scale tales of heroism centered on Manhattan, and both gave in to many of the same indulgences as Luke Cage. Lengthy flashbacks deepened each hero’s origin and backstory, and supporting members of the ensemble got whole adventures to themselves, even though some of this material felt like a desperate effort pad out a 13-episode season. Daredevil’s second season couldn’t repeat the origin of Matt Murdock’s superpowers, so instead it committed itself to recounting his college years and his romance with the femme fatale Elektra. A lot of this detail was good, but it could have been considerably compressed—none of the Marvel Netflix series, so far, would have lost much by being squeezed into 10 episodes, or even 8.

If Netflix shaved the 60-minute running time down quite a bit, it would likely inspire more economical—and better—storytelling from its shows. Emboldened by the advertising-free revolution of HBO dramas like The Sopranos and The Wire, prestige series have come to see 60 minutes as a standard running time for an episode. As I’ve previously written, this makes binging shows on streaming networks (like Bloodline, Sense8, Orange Is the New Black, and The Path) that much more of a daunting proposition. For comic-book TV, that length feels even more absurd—the typical comic issue runs only 22 pages, so why not divide the story into bite-sized chunks? Luke Cage episodes could easily be 45 minutes long, or even 30.

This approach has worked for other genres. One of the smartest, and most audacious, TV narrative gambles of recent years was the BBC’s 2005 adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Though the series had the trappings of any other Masterpiece Theater costume drama, it aired twice weekly in half-hour chunks, designed to imitate the intense serialization of Dickens’s chapter-by-chapter storytelling. Every episode ended with a shocking twist; the lean format encouraged the show to focus on plot, and it was all the better for it.

Still, despite its languid narrative style, Luke Cage is doing many fascinating things. Its mood and visual aesthetic are as well-honed as the perfectly bleak Jessica Jones; its action scenes, when they arrive, are brutal and swift; and its lead performers are uniformly terrific, most of all Mike Colter as Cage, who wrings endless charisma from his character’s resolute stoicism. The show’s creator, Cheo Hodari Coker, clearly wanted Luke Cage to be more than a typical superhero series—in a wonderful interview with The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb, he referenced the frequent name-dropping of black authors, artists, and historic figures.

I know that there’s going to be people now that all of a sudden are going to read Donald Goines, they’re going to read Walter Mosley, because of the fact that Luke Cage was talking about it. I think that’s some of the power that you have in television.

Luke Cage certainly has power, and its philosophical intent shines through in its main characters’ frequent speechmaking, its musical interludes, and its vibrant visuals. But as a piece of superhero storytelling, it’s far less impressive (some spoilers to follow). Its best villain is dispatched midway through the season, seemingly for ineffective shock value, and the climactic episodes struggle to fill the void left behind, throwing increasingly uninteresting bad guys into the mix. Cage is sidelined and then kept out of commission late in the season, which reeks of story padding (it’s a trick Jessica Jones also pulled last year); frequent flashbacks serve little purpose, considering Cage has already been thoroughly introduced to audiences (again, in Jessica Jones).

What’s most frustrating of all is that Netflix isn’t getting rid of this approach anytime soon. Daredevil season three, Jessica Jones season two, Iron Fist, and The Punisher are all on their way, and each will follow the same 13-episode structure. With new heroes like Iron Fist, there’ll be hours of backstory to muddle through before viewers arrive at the major plot arc; with spinoff characters like The Punisher, there’ll be retelling of character details audiences may already be well aware of. The only respite may come in the form of The Defenders, a planned crossover series that will unite all the network’s heroes to do battle with some greater evil—over the course of just eight episodes. Who knows? The show might even surprise viewers and explain its villain’s motivations within the first hour. Until then, fans will be stuck needlessly giving over entire days to these series, while others are deterred from watching at all.

The Incomparable Career of Sandy Koufax

Fifty years ago on October 6, at the tender age of 30, Sandy Koufax bowed out of baseball. From 1962 to 1966, the Dodgers star had been an astonishing force in the sport, offering a five-year run of the most glorious performance by a pitcher ever in such a short span with four no-hitters (the last a perfect game). For five seasons in a row, Koufax led the National League in fewest runs and hits allowed per game. He became the first pitcher to average striking out over nine batters per game, and to give up less than seven hits a game.

When Koufax realized his injured arm couldn’t take any more, he quietly withdrew from baseball. No fanfare. No parade. No more pitching on two days’ rest or cresting 200 pitches in a game—both verboten today. In November, when the news of Koufax’s retirement broke, most of the Dodgers, playing overseas in Japan, were flabbergasted when asked for comment by the press. Except for one. On October 6, in what would become his final game ever, Koufax had gotten crushed by the Baltimore Orioles in the second game of the World Series, 6-0. Later, on the flight back from Baltimore, the outfielder Al Ferrara—who had grown up near Koufax in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn—found himself sitting alongside the master. Ferrara absently talked about the off-season and getting ready for next year.

“This is it,” Koufax said to Ferrara, who was troubled by his words. Ferrara told no one, wondering if he had heard right. A few weeks later, with the team in another country, Koufax took his leave of it.

There’s another milestone running parallel to Koufax’s, and to which it is directly related: On October 2 earlier this month, Vin Scully called his final regular-season game after 67 years as the Dodger broadcaster, a record perhaps as untouchable as any of Koufax’s, if not more so. It’s no surprise then that when the old elephants of the Dodgers gathered in Los Angeles this spring on Opening Day and in the fall, the one person Scully walked up to and embraced fully was Koufax. The caller and the doer. The one with the words and the one with the ball, both left speechless in the embrace.

Each has been curious about the other a long time. In 2013, Scully asked his unlikely double in an interview: “How do you define the art of pitching?” Koufax answered succinctly, “Control.” For all his blinding speed, Koufax took as much pleasure in pinpointing what Vin often called “his twelve-to-six curveball,” meaning it started at 12 o’clock and the bottom fell out to 6 o’clock. As the great power-hitting Chicago Cubs shortstop Ernie Banks once described it, “Sandy’s curve had a lot more spin than anyone else’s. It spun like a fastball coming out of his hand. It jumped at the end.” But over time the blood began draining from his left index finger—the critical one for curve direction—leaving it numb. His left palm, pinched at the heel of the bat when he swung in 1962 for a rare hit, didn’t help, nor a badly ruptured elbow when he dove back to second base in a Tony Cloninger pick-off attempt in 1964, after which he had “to drag my arm out of bed like a log.” His career ended at 30, with his already arthritic arm so wrecked he could not lift it. He found himself actually listening to his swollen arm, “the sound of liquid squishing around, as if I had a wet sponge in there.”

* * *

The truth is that Sandy Koufax for the first half of his career was only a marginal player and by today’s standards would have been dropped. Three years into his move to Los Angeles, and six years after Brooklyn signed him for a measly $6,000 per annum, he was preparing to leave the game, considering himself a failure, and ready to work in an electronics warehouse.

Koufax only briefly played high-school baseball—he was a basketball player for four years—and wasn’t much interested in the sport. With his outsized hands and arms and back he seemed a better fit for basketball, and at 6’2”, he was a decent size for a guard in those days. In his senior year at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, he averaged 16.5 points per game. The first time Koufax was ever highlighted in a newspaper article was for dunking during a basketball exhibition game when the New York Knicks took on local youth players. In fact, he showed up his own hero, the brawny center Harry Gallatin, who’d failed to dunk before him, to the dismay of the crowd. On February 10, 1953, The New York Post noted “the spring and coordination of a rangy youngster,” testimony Koufax would later wave at those who spread rumors that he was “uncoordinated” on a baseball field.

“To be successful and make my family proud of me” was listed as Koufax’s goal in his high-school yearbook.

Koufax’s tryout freshman year at the University of Cincinnati was good enough to secure him a basketball scholarship, and he ended up averaging 9.7 points for the Cincy freshmen. But he soon took a detour from roundball into what looked like a dead end for him at the time: baseball. To earn some extra cash, the Cincinnati basketball coach doubled as the school’s baseball coach, and he needed players for a junket accompanying the tennis team to New Orleans. Koufax volunteered, his chief credential being his duty with the Ice Cream League on a neighborhood sandlot team in Brooklyn.

What Koufax had set out to do in life was on the surface unremarkable. “To be successful and make my family proud of me” was listed as his goal in his high-school yearbook. But the people who were part of that family made the goal somewhat complex. His father, Jack Braun, left the family when he was three and rarely saw him for the rest of his life; until Koufax was nine, he lived with his grandparents, as the son of a working single parent. Evelyn, his mother, an accountant, finally remarried the lawyer Irving Koufax, who brought Sandy a stepsister, Edie, the only sibling he would ever have. When Edie died in 1997, Koufax’s second marriage soon unraveled.

Koufax was Jewish, and one of the best-known moments in his career is tied to his faith. During the 1965 World Series, Koufax declined to start the opening game in Minnesota because it fell on Yom Kippur. It made him, much to his chagrin, into some sort of Jewish saint, even though by his own admission, he wasn’t particularly observant. But an old neighbor of his, Carol Ann Greenberg Rudolph, remembered his trips home for the holidays as a particular local highlight.“When I was a young teen in Sandy’s first or second Brooklyn season, many of us kids gathered below where he lived on 48th street in Borough Park during Rosh Hashanah and the High Holy Days,” Rudolph told me. “He came out on his porch—or was it a balcony?—and waved gently, so sweet, to everybody, and then he just went inside. I think he was visiting his parents and letting the game go.”

In the beginning, Koufax had an arm that in a sense anchored him. He himself once described it as a “catapult.” Milt Laurie, a truck driver for newspapers who had lost his own chance with the pros after his truck crashed on a wet road, is credited with first recognizing the Arm’s uncommon strength. Laurie was one of Koufax’s sandlot coaches. Thus the legend of Koufax’s “devil or angel” fastball began in informal games in Brooklyn.

So much seemed undone in his life: his father gone; his college career snapped by the lure of baseball; in due time, even Brooklyn gone.

Speed draws scouts like flies. But many teams passed on Koufax, thinking his performance unstable. The team that actually came closest to signing him before Brooklyn was the Pittsburgh Pirates: Its scout, Ed McCarrick, was impressed with Koufax’s newly developing curveball, and the Pirates brought Koufax and his family to Pittsburgh to meet the great Branch Rickey. But Rickey’s son had seen Koufax get clobbered during a key sandlot game in the Ice Cream League and telephoned his father to advise against it. As it turned out, someone else had seen the exact same game and come up with exactly the opposite conclusion. Jimmy Murphy of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle told Al Campanis of the Dodgers that what impressed him the most was that, though Koufax was getting shelled, he didn’t give up and kept pitching with a blistered, bloody hand.

The Dodgers cinched the deal with a whopping $14,000 bonus. (In the 1966 season—his last—Koufax joined Don Drysdale in a watershed holding out for better pay that eventually led to free agency. Koufax wrangled $125,000 for the year, barely enough to pay a top pitcher today for two innings of one game.)

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Sandy Koufax's Yom Kippur Sacrifice

However, during Koufax’s first season in 1955, he was only a witness to greatness as the Dodgers won their first World Series ever. (He was rarely used, mostly as a reliever.) Sixty-six games passed before he mopped up a game the Dodgers were losing badly against the Milwaukee Braves. The first pro batter he ever faced, Johnny Logan, took a called first strike before he blooped a single to right field. The next batter, Eddie Matthews, hit a comebacker to Koufax, who whirled and threw the ball over second base all the way to center fielder Duke Snider. Koufax then walked Hank Aaron, “the smartest thing I did all year.” Somehow, however, he managed to strikeout the Dodger-killer Bobby Thomson.

Koufax ended his first season with about as many walks as strikeouts—a pattern that continued till 1961—and a win-loss record of 2-2. His roommate was the outfielder with the cannon arm, Carl Furillo, a loner whom he grew to respect. To this day, the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers are considered one of the best teams in baseball history. But Koufax contributed little to that achievement.

“I am with the team but not of it,” Koufax wrote in his 1966 autobiography, Koufax, about this early period. “I am wearing the uniform, but I am contributing nothing. I am denied even the therapy of being allowed to be unhappy.” From 1955 to 1960, Koufax’s win-loss record was a poor 36-40, especially for a team that won the World Series twice. So much seemed undone in his life: his father gone; his college career snapped by some lure of baseball, a sport he hardly knew; in due time, even Brooklyn gone. But on June 4, 1957, Koufax gave a glimpse of just what he could be: perfect through five innings against the Chicago Cubs.

* * *

Five things happened in 1961 that caused one of the great turnarounds in sports history.

Just before spring training, Koufax had a tonsillectomy. He stopped eating. He lost 20 pounds and arrived at Vero Beach for the first time significantly underweight (184 pounds). It forced him to work out harder to gain muscle mass; soon he was in the “best shape of my life.” Secondly, his pitching coach, Joe Becker, showed him that his fastball had a slight tail into left-handed batters making it easier for them to smack the ball into right field for a hit. So he was apparently taught a kind of cutter or “slurve”—“a curve that broke a little away from the lefty, as well as down,” like a slider, a little-known secret in his arsenal.

When in doubt, the only thing Koufax felt separated him from everyone else was his blinding speed.

Thirdly, Koufax engaged the services of the team’s statistician Allan Roth, a sort of early sabermetrics guy. Roth noted that Koufax’s big bugaboo was still walks. He walked five batters a game; the league average was three. So Roth made the obvious suggestion: better control. But for the big boys like Hank Aaron (who had a lifetime batting overage of .358 versus Koufax), Vada Pinson, and Roberto Clemente—all with lightning wrists—the solution was more specific: a first pitch strike. This was a risky proposition. Batters who hit Koufax’s first pitch batted a whopping .349. But then Roth showed Koufax a completely new statistic: “the count on which a decisive pitch is made.” That meant when the batter either walks, strikes out, or hits the ball. Koufax was surprised by what Roth had found; if he was ahead of the count for the decisive pitch, batters only hit .146 against him. His advantage was overwhelming. Solution: Get ahead on the first pitch.

A fourth key lesson was tossed out by the Dodgers outfielder Wally Moon. When he was on the Cardinals, Moon said it was common knowledge that Koufax tipped his pitches with a man on base. His hands would lift higher in the stretch position for a fast ball than for a curve. Koufax fashioned a smaller rise to hide that. In the fifth and final lesson, Koufax’s roommate at the time, a reserve catcher named Norm Sherry, told him to “take the grunt” out of his fastball. This was the hardest lesson for Koufax, because when in doubt, the only thing he felt separated him from everyone else was his blinding speed, and here Sherry was telling him to lose his advantage. But it worked. Easing up just enough, Koufax was able to locate his fastball much better, making the difference, as Vin Scully would often say, between a thrower and a pitcher. Reining himself in saved his career.

* * *

Thus began the five-year anni mirabili. The moments: Mickey Mantle, looking at a Koufax 98 mph fastball hit the inside corner of the plate for a called third strike, “How are you supposed to hit that shit?” The Dodgers sweeping the Yanks in 1963 against the fearsome Maris-Mantle-Ford team. Yogi Berra musing on Koufax’s record that year (25-5), “How did he lose five?” Koufax saying to Jeff Torborg, a reserve catcher nervous beyond belief during the 1965 perfect game: “Will you calm down? You’re throwing the ball harder than I am!” Koufax whispering to Sweet Lou Johnson, a journeyman left fielder who had spent most of his baseball life toiling in the minor leagues, recounted in Michael Leahy’s The Last Innocents: “I’m so proud of you. We couldn’t have won it without you.”

Still, some respectfully test the edges of the Koufax myth. “When I faced Sandy, I used to say my pray[ers],” said Manny Mota, one of the top pinch-hitters of all time who, after going hitless against the Dodger ace for three years, solved him in his last two years with the Pirates, registering a .323 average with four multi-hit games. How did that change happen? Confessing he “swung too hard, as hard as his fastball” when he was young, Mota found success—as Koufax did—in slowing down, “just being more disciplined, make contact, drive it to the opposite field.” Though he called his duels with Koufax “a privilege and great honor,” Mota admitted some got angry at the pitcher, even on his own team: “Once I hit a double down the third base line past Jim Gilliam, who had shaded toward shortstop, thinking fastball. He actually got mad. ‘What are you doing, Sandy?’ Gilliam yelled out. Koufax had thrown a three-finger, a change-up. I hit it hard.”

To a nervous reserve catcher during the 1965 perfect game, Koufax said, “Will you calm down? You’re throwing the ball harder than I am!”

Rick Dempsey, one of the few baseball players who played in four decades (the 1960s to the 1990s) and a great defensive catcher who caught the last Dodger World Series victory in 1988, challenges the legend of Koufax’s rising fastball. “It’s a deception,” he told me. “I’m with the skeptics. Koufax’s fastball did not go up. Of course, he had such a good release, a smooth point of delivery, that pop of the wrist at the end that projected the ball so strongly to home plate that the ball never went down as most fastballs actually do. It lost no velocity to gravity. That was different.” Dempsey also admitted Koufax’s curve “may have been the very toughest curve to hit ever” because of its steep north-south drop, offering “less time in the strike zone.”

Despite all the anecdotes told about Koufax, the man himself hasn’t offered many about his own game over the past few years. Originals can be reticent. But on September 23 this year on Vin Scully Night at Dodger Stadium, Koufax told a lot about himself in sharing a little-known story about Scully.  “Before the World Series, Vin would go to church and pray not for a win, but that there would only be heroes, not goats,” Koufax said. “That showed his compassion for the players … in both dugouts.”

“A Koufax-pitched game is a work of art,” as the great L.A. Times sportswriter Jim Murray wrote after the 1965 World Series victory over the Twins. And art, perhaps, begins in compassion, and, with grace, ends there.

Aleppo May Be 'Totally Destroyed' in Two Months

Updated on October 6 at 2:37 p.m. EST

NEWS BRIEF If the intensified bombing campaign by Russian and Syrian forces in Aleppo doesn’t cease, the once vibrant eastern part of the Syrian city may face total destruction by the end of the year, the United Nations warned Thursday.

“The bottom line is in a maximum of two months, two and a half months, the city of eastern Aleppo, at this rate, may be totally destroyed,” Staffan de Mistura, the UN envoy to Syria, said Thursday in Geneva. “We are talking about the old city in particular.”

De Mistura’s appeal to Moscow and Damascus follows the latest offensive by both countries to reclaim the eastern part of the divided city, considered the last major rebel stronghold whose takeover could mark a key turning point in the country’s five-year civil war. The intensified airstrikes on the eastern half of the city, where 250,000 civilians remain, has resulted in unprecedented destruction—the kind de Mistura said the UN would not ignore.

“There is only one thing we are not ready to do: be passive, resign ourselves to another Srebrenica, another Rwanda, which we are sadly ready to recognize written on that wall in front of us, unless something takes place,” the UN envoy said.

Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, Thursday that rebels and their families in eastern Aleppo would be permitted to leave if they agreed to lay down their weapons, though he refused to end the offensive aimed at retaking control of the city. Rebels are unlikely to take up such an offer.

Indeed, after five years of civil war, much of the damage to the ancient city—once the largest in the country—has already been done. To grasp the full scale of Aleppo’s destruction, here is an image from one of the city’s main markets, or souks, taken in 2010 before the civil war.

Khaled Al Hariri / Reuters

Here’s another image of a souk in Aleppo, this one taken three years later.

George Ourfalian / Reuters

In an appeal to rebel forces in eastern Aleppo, de Mistura offered to personally escort up to 1,000 Islamist fighters from the city in exchange for an immediate halt in the bombing, as well as UN access to the besieged city in order to provide humanitarian aid.

The prospects of a cease-fire, however, appear slim following the rapid deterioration of U.S.-Russian ties in recent weeks. The two countries had organized the weeklong cease-fire, which ended September 19. Further attempts to restart a truce have failed. On Monday, the U.S. announced the suspension of bilateral talks with Russia over Aleppo, citing Moscow’s failure “to live up to its own commitments.”

The Shrinking Blood-Testing Business of Theranos

NEWS BRIEF Theranos is shutting down all of its blood-testing facilities and reducing its workforce by 40 percent, the company announced Wednesday.

The embattled Silicon Valley company has already shut down one of its facilities and faced heavy financial sanctions after regulators found major indiscretions in its low-priced blood-testing results.

In an open-letter to stakeholders, CEO Elizabeth Holmes, who was banned by regulators in July from operating labs for two years, outlined the company’s restructuring plans, saying:

We will return our undivided attention to our miniLab platform. Our ultimate goal is to commercialize miniaturized, automated laboratories capable of small-volume sample testing, with an emphasis on vulnerable patient populations, including oncology, pediatrics, and intensive care.

In total, 340 people will be laid off from the company’s labs in Arizona, California, and Pennsylvania. As of July, the company had 790 full-time employees, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Holmes has appealed the sanctions, which have yet to take place. She still owns the majority stake in the company.

An Execution in Texas

NEWS BRIEF The state of Texas executed Barney Fuller, Jr. on Wednesday night, breaking an unusual six-month streak without executions.

The Lone Star State, by far the nation’s most prolific wielder of the death penalty, had last performed an execution on March 6, when it killed Pablo Vasquez by lethal injection. Since Georgia’s execution of John Connor on July 15, the United States as a whole went almost three months without an execution before Fuller’s death.

Fuller volunteered for the death penalty by waiving his appeals. He was given a lethal injection with the increasingly common single-drug method. The Texas Tribune has more:

Laid out in the Texas death chamber with an IV in his arm, Fuller declined to give a last statement. At 6:23 p.m., a lethal dose of pentobarbital started running through his veins, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. He was pronounced dead at 7:01 p.m.

Fuller, 53, was sentenced to death for killing Annette and Nathan Copeland, his neighbors on the outskirts of Lovelady, a small town with around 600 residents at the time about 100 miles north of Houston. In the early morning of May 14, 2003, he fired into their home with an assault rifle before breaking in and killing them both with a pistol, according to court documents.

Wednesday’s execution comes one week after Ohio said it would soon resume executions by using midazolam as part of a three-drug cocktail. The controversial sedative was the subject of a lengthy legal battle after a botched execution in Oklahoma in 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld its usage in a sharply divided opinion the following summer.

Fuller is the 1,438th person to be executed since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment in 1976. His execution was the seventh performed in Texas this year and the 15th performed nationwide.

Another Suspension for Wells Fargo

NEWS BRIEF The Chicago City Council announced Wednesday that it was suspending business with Wells Fargo for a year—the latest action taken against the bank for its scandal involving fake bank accounts.

The ban will suspend a number of services the bank has previously provided to the city, including underwriting, brokerage, and trustee services, which have earned the bank more than $19 million since 2005.

“I hope this action by the city of Chicago will echo around the nation and make it clear to other institutions this conduct is unacceptable,” Alderman Edward Burke, chair of the city’s finance committee, .

Wells Fargo responded in a statement expressing its disappointment with the city’s decision, which it said was made “at a time when the city needs access to dependable financial partners.”

Chicago’s decision may soon be seen across Illinois. Bruce Rauner, the Illinois governor, announced Sunday the state would not be using the bank for debt deals “until further notice.” Michael Frerichs, the state treasurer, announced Monday the suspension of state investment activity with the bank totaling $30 billion.

The state of California issued a similar suspension against the bank last week in an unprecedented move that is expected to cost Wells Fargo millions of dollars.

Both decisions follow mounting national pressure on Wells Fargo, which was discovered last month to have created millions of phony bank and credit-card accounts over the past five years in an effort to hit sales targets. Federal regulators slapped the bank with a $185 million fine—the largest to be issued since the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau’s founding in 2011. Since then, the bank has fired 5,300 employees said to have been involved in the scandal, but that hasn’t placated lawmakers in Congress who have sharply questioned John Stumpf, the bank’s CEO.

The FBI's Arrest of an NSA Contractor

NEWS BRIEF The FBI arrested a National Security Agency contractor in late August for stealing classified material from the intelligence organization, according to court documents unsealed Wednesday.

Federal prosecutors have charged Harold Thomas Martin III, 51, of Glen Burnie, Maryland, with theft of government property and unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials. Martin had a top-secret national security clearance, according to Justice Department officials.

On August 27, police searched Martin’s home, two storage sheds, and his car and found hard-copy documents and information stored on electronic devices, according to the criminal complaint. “A large percentage of the materials recovered from Martin’s residence and vehicle bore markings indicating that they were property of the U.S. government and contained highly classified information,” the complaint says.

Prosecutors say Martin initially denied having taken the materials, but later “stated that he knew what he had done was wrong and that he should not have done it because he knew it was unauthorized.”

Martin’s arrest and charges were first reported by The New York Times, which said Martin worked for Booz Allen Hamilton, the same consulting firm where Edward Snowden worked as a federal contractor in 2013 when he took classified documents from the NSA about U.S. surveillance programs and shared them with journalists.

Booz Allen said in a statement Wednesday that after the company “learned of the arrest of one of its employees by the FBI, we immediately reached out to the authorities to offer our total cooperation in their investigation, and we fired the employee.” The statement does not mention Martin by name.

Martin’s lawyer, James Wyda, said in a statement Wednesday “there's no evidence that Hal Martin has betrayed his country.”

Snowden, who is living in exile in Russia, responded to the charges on Twitter:

This is huge. Did the FBI secretly arrest the person behind the reports NSA sat on huge flaws in US products? https://t.co/otgOwB5efm

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 5, 2016

Lazy: This guy and @Snowden both worked at @BoozAllen, so they are the same.



Not lazy: Booz must have a unique contract. Let's investigate.

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) October 5, 2016

If convicted, Martin faces up to 10 years in prison for theft of government property and one year for the unauthorized removal and retention of classified materials.