Texas Blogger’s ‘Man Crush’ on Putin Leads to Lengthy Heart to Heart

Nonetheless, last week Mr. Young scored a journalistic coup, publishing a lengthy written interview with Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir V. Putin. Mr. Young approached the Russian government last year after blogging repeatedly about his “man crush” on Mr. Putin, and the questions he sent the Russian prime minister were, shall we say, softballs. They included, “Are there Yetis or Russian ‘wood goblins’ in the taiga?” and “Are you the coolest man in politics?”

The decision to grant the interview appears to be part of an attempt by Mr. Putin to soften his image in the West. During the three years since Mr. Putin entered a power-sharing arrangement with President Dmitri A. Medvedev, the president has been cast as the smiling face of a “reset” in the relations with the United States. In the eyes of Western observers, that has left Mr. Putin as the bad cop, which could pose a problem if he decides to return to the presidency next spring.

“There is some truth in this argument, and I think Putin has realized he needs to care about his image in the West,” said Alexander Rahr, a Russia specialist at the German Council on Foreign Relations. “The only argument which really speaks for Medvedev is this Western thing. That is his trump card. Putin has to counter it.”

The Outdoor Life interview — at times an exercise in mutual back-slapping — is not likely to have much impact, especially since it was released the same day as a much-anticipated news conference by Mr. Medvedev.

But it does show Mr. Putin trying to present himself in a softer, more friendly light. In between discussions of tiger poaching, Ernest Hemingway and the fragility of human existence, Mr. Putin tells Mr. Young that the United States and Russia have been powerfully drawn to each other since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The recent improvement in relations “seems to point to the fact that the vast majority of barriers between our peoples were unnaturally and artificially forced upon them,” Mr. Putin said. “Ordinary people always want to live in peace rather than in war and to be able to freely socialize, interact and make friends, if you wish. For too long, we had been cruelly held apart from each other, so it was only natural that the fall of the Iron Curtain generated a huge wave of interest toward Russia.”

Mr. Putin also plays up his image as an avatar of manliness, which has been established by photos of him riding shirtless on horseback, shooting a tiger with a tranquilizer gun or offering judo instructions. Asked about an episode last summer, when he shot a dart at the exposed back of a gray whale from a rubber dinghy, Mr. Putin drifted into Hemingway territory.

“All that surrounded me — the low sky, the stormy sea and, of course, the whales — was magnificent,” he said. “Besides, these elegant giants showed us a real performance, leaping out of the water in front of our boat.”

On that occasion, a reporter asked Mr. Putin whether it was dangerous, and the prime minister responded, “Living in general is dangerous.” In the Outdoor Life interview, he elaborated, saying that a human being is “still one of the most vulnerable creatures on earth,” barraged by disease, disaster and criminality.

“However, this is not a reason to hide away from life,” he said. “One can truly enjoy his or her life only while experiencing it, and it is inevitably related to a certain level of risk.”

It was the gray whale episode that especially captivated Mr. Young, 42. After he began writing about his “man crush,” his blog hits grew so high that his editors asked him for more, and he published an open letter to the prime minister proposing that the two men go hunting together.

Before long, Mr. Young was communicating with the press attaché in the Russian Embassy in Washington and with Ketchum, a public relations firm that represents Russia.

“My editors were like, ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’?” Mr. Young said. But early in the spring, he was told that Mr. Putin was in the process of answering Mr. Young’s questions — at considerable length. The draft originally sent to Outdoor Life was almost 8,000 words long and had to be edited down by almost 3,000 words, Mr. Young said.

“I got to tell you, I’m more in love with the guy than ever,” he said. In an interview from his home in Texas, Mr. Young said Outdoor Life was hoping to send him to Russia to go fishing with Mr. Putin, who is not a keen hunter. It seemed Mr. Young’s ardor does not extend to Mr. Medvedev, since a mention of the Russian president’s name was met with silence on the other end of the line.

“You’re going to have to remind me who that is,” Mr. Young said.

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Into the Heart of Guyana

In the opening paragraph of Rahul Bhattacharya’s first novel, “The Sly Company of People Who Care,” the unnamed narrator, a former cricket journalist from India, declares his intentions for his life, and thus his story — to be a wanderer, or in his words, “a slow ramblin’ stranger.” That rambling, through the forests of Guyana; the ruined streets of its capital, Georgetown; and out to the borders of Brazil and Venezuela, constitutes the novel’s central action. But its heart lies in the exuberant and often arresting observations of a man plunging himself into a world full of beauty, violence and cultural strife.

It’s impossible, reading Bhatta-charya, not to be reminded of V. S. Naipaul, even if he weren’t referred to several times throughout the story. Naipaul defined the lonely, empty middle ground occupied by the descendants of Indian immigrants living in Africa and the Caribbean who no longer belong to any nation. Bhatta-charya’s narrator, despite having been born and raised in India, occupies similar territory, having given up on his country and the identity that was supposed to come with it. By and large, though, the similarities end there. Unlike Naipaul’s disillusioned protagonists, who stand perpetually outside the world they live in, Bhattacharya’s narrator is thoroughly invested in Guyana and its striking blend of cultures, born out of colonization, slavery and indentured servitude. If anything, he is more reminiscent of Dante in the case of the “Commedia,” a careful listener and observer who, while in exile, faithfully records the stories that come his way.

For Bhattacharya, that listening and recording means creating a narrative loyal to the traveler’s experience, with all the awe and confusion that attend it. His novel is populated with images and people skillfully sketched rather than fully developed, so that often all that remains in the reader’s mind is the small detail — the upside-down watch on a man’s wrist, the plum-size dimples on a woman’s face. Similarly, the creole animating the novel’s dialogue and the often fleeting appearances of black and Indian characters seem to be incorporated at times less to illuminate than to add an auditory texture to the fictional world.

There is, inevitably, a disorienting quality here. Bhattacharya resists lingering too long in any one place or with any one person. As his narrator takes the reader through his apartment building in Georgetown and his impressions of its people (“Hassa the dead-eyed minibus driver; a pair of busty Indian-Chinese cashiers who people called Curry-Chowmein”), he reveals almost nothing of himself. The novel’s seduction, and the reason it deserves close reading and admiration, stems from its expansiveness and the quick movements of its prose, which can leap nimbly from a casual conversation with a con man to a trip into the jungle with that same con man in a single page.

The novel, thankfully, resists offering easy characterization of a culture that has to be seen and heard before it can be understood, of a place “ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.”

The narrator’s first expedition into the interior of Guyana to go diamond hunting, or “porknocking,” comes about as a matter of chance. He’s driven by whimsy but retains his depth of vision. Bhattacharya avoids the usual pitfalls of writing about a foreign culture with the intention of discovering something about it — a goal that all too often finds writers resorting to sweeping generalizations. The narrator describes the “slow-watching” of a waterfall and stands “alive in the drizzle, filthy-footed.” There is a music behind every-thing: in nature, the “amphitheater of leaves”; in life, the rhythms of the local language, and of the reggae whose lyrics of protest are constantly evoked.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of the novels “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” and “How to Read the Air.”

 

Into the Heart of Guyana

In the opening paragraph of Rahul Bhattacharya’s first novel, “The Sly Company of People Who Care,” the unnamed narrator, a former cricket journalist from India, declares his intentions for his life, and thus his story — to be a wanderer, or in his words, “a slow ramblin’ stranger.” That rambling, through the forests of Guyana; the ruined streets of its capital, Georgetown; and out to the borders of Brazil and Venezuela, constitutes the novel’s central action. But its heart lies in the exuberant and often arresting observations of a man plunging himself into a world full of beauty, violence and cultural strife.

It’s impossible, reading Bhatta-charya, not to be reminded of V. S. Naipaul, even if he weren’t referred to several times throughout the story. Naipaul defined the lonely, empty middle ground occupied by the descendants of Indian immigrants living in Africa and the Caribbean who no longer belong to any nation. Bhatta-charya’s narrator, despite having been born and raised in India, occupies similar territory, having given up on his country and the identity that was supposed to come with it. By and large, though, the similarities end there. Unlike Naipaul’s disillusioned protagonists, who stand perpetually outside the world they live in, Bhattacharya’s narrator is thoroughly invested in Guyana and its striking blend of cultures, born out of colonization, slavery and indentured servitude. If anything, he is more reminiscent of Dante in the case of the “Commedia,” a careful listener and observer who, while in exile, faithfully records the stories that come his way.

For Bhattacharya, that listening and recording means creating a narrative loyal to the traveler’s experience, with all the awe and confusion that attend it. His novel is populated with images and people skillfully sketched rather than fully developed, so that often all that remains in the reader’s mind is the small detail — the upside-down watch on a man’s wrist, the plum-size dimples on a woman’s face. Similarly, the creole animating the novel’s dialogue and the often fleeting appearances of black and Indian characters seem to be incorporated at times less to illuminate than to add an auditory texture to the fictional world.

There is, inevitably, a disorienting quality here. Bhattacharya resists lingering too long in any one place or with any one person. As his narrator takes the reader through his apartment building in Georgetown and his impressions of its people (“Hassa the dead-eyed minibus driver; a pair of busty Indian-Chinese cashiers who people called Curry-Chowmein”), he reveals almost nothing of himself. The novel’s seduction, and the reason it deserves close reading and admiration, stems from its expansiveness and the quick movements of its prose, which can leap nimbly from a casual conversation with a con man to a trip into the jungle with that same con man in a single page.

The novel, thankfully, resists offering easy characterization of a culture that has to be seen and heard before it can be understood, of a place “ripe with heat and rain and Guyanese sound and Guyanese light in which the world seemed saturated or bleached, either way exposed.”

The narrator’s first expedition into the interior of Guyana to go diamond hunting, or “porknocking,” comes about as a matter of chance. He’s driven by whimsy but retains his depth of vision. Bhattacharya avoids the usual pitfalls of writing about a foreign culture with the intention of discovering something about it — a goal that all too often finds writers resorting to sweeping generalizations. The narrator describes the “slow-watching” of a waterfall and stands “alive in the drizzle, filthy-footed.” There is a music behind every-thing: in nature, the “amphitheater of leaves”; in life, the rhythms of the local language, and of the reggae whose lyrics of protest are constantly evoked.

Dinaw Mengestu is the author of the novels “The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” and “How to Read the Air.”

 

A Beast in the Heart of Every Fighting Man

  THE TEAM LEADER Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, on patrol in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, 2010.

Last May, in the small village of Qualaday in western Kandahar Province, a young Army lieutenant and his sergeants met with several elders to discuss the recent killing of a local mullah. The desert heat was fierce, and the elders led the soldiers across their village to sit under the shade of nearby trees. Three days had passed since they were last there; during that interval the place appeared to have been abandoned. When they sat down, some of the soldiers removed their helmets, and a few elders their sandals and turbans. A freelance photographer was permitted to make an audio recording of the discussion. The lieutenant wanted to know where everyone had gone. One elder explained: People left because they were afraid.

THE INVESTIGATION Soldiers with the Third Platoon speak with Afghan elders about the death of Mullah Allah Dad. Staff Sergeant Gibbs is seated against the wall.

“Ask them, ‘Do they understand why we shot this dude?’ ” the lieutenant told his interpreter. During their last patrol to Qualaday, soldiers in the platoon had attacked Mullah Allah Dad with rifles and a fragmentation grenade that blew off the lower halves of his legs and badly disfigured his face. The soldiers claimed that Allah Dad was trying to throw a grenade at them. Two days after the killing, however, a company commander attended a council during which the district leader announced that people believed the incident had been staged and that the Americans had planted the grenade in order to justify a murder.

“Tell them it’s important that not only the people in this village know, but the people in surrounding villages know, that this guy was shot because he took an aggressive action against coalition forces,” the lieutenant told his interpreter. “We didn’t just [expletive] come over and just shoot him randomly. We don’t do that.”

Last month, in a military courtroom at Joint Base Lewis-McChord near Tacoma, Wash., 22-year-old Jeremy Morlock confessed to participating in the premeditated murder of Mullah Allah Dad, as well as the murders of two other Afghan civilians. In exchange for his agreement to testify against four other soldiers charged in the crimes, including the supposed ringleader, Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, the government reduced Morlock’s mandatory life sentence to 24 years, with the possibility of parole after approximately 8. The rest of the accused, who are still awaiting trial, contest the allegations against them.

The story that has been told so far — by Morlock in his confession and by various publications that relied heavily on the more sensational accusations from interviews hastily conducted by Army special agents in Afghanistan — is a fairly straightforward one: a sociopath joined the platoon and persuaded a handful of impressionable subordinates to join him in sport killing as opportunities arose. There may indeed be truth to this, though several soldiers in the platoon give a more complicated account. Certainly it’s a useful narrative, strategically and psychologically, for various parties trying to make sense of the murders — parents at a loss to explain their sons’ involvement and lawyers advocating their clients’ innocence and a military invested in a version of events that contains and cauterizes the problem.

On the day of Jeremy Morlock’s confession, I watched as several of his friends and relatives took the stand to vouch movingly for his character and struggle to fathom how the young man they knew could have committed the crimes to which he confessed. I watched, too, as Morlock himself recounted his failed ambition to follow in the footsteps of his father, a former master sergeant who died in a boating accident not long before Morlock deployed. “If he had been alive when I went to Afghanistan,” Morlock told the judge, “I know that would have made a difference. . . . I realize now that I wasn’t fully prepared for the reality of war as it was being fought in Afghanistan.”

Among the witnesses who testified that day was Stjepan Mestrovic, a sociologist who specializes in war crimes. Mestrovic was allowed to study an internal 500-page inquiry into the Fifth Stryker Brigade’s “command climate,” the purpose of which was to assess whether shortcomings in leadership might be partly to blame for the murders, and to identify any officers who should be held to account. In court, Mestrovic said he was shocked by how dysfunctional the brigade appeared to have been, and he added, “In a dysfunctional unit, we cannot predict who will be the deviant — but we can predict deviance.”

Luke Mogelson (luke.mogelson@gmail.com) is a freelance writer who has written, most recently, about prison reform for Washington Monthly. Editor: Joel Lovell (j.lovell-MagGroup@nytimes.com).

 

Medical Experts Dispute a Hospital’s Claims on Heart Device Data

This month, University Medical Center of Southern Nevada said in a statement, “results to date show significantly improved outcomes for our cardiac patients” who got heart implants made by a little-known company, Biotronik. The statement was attributed to Kathleen Silver, the chief executive of the hospital.

Ms. Silver issued that statement after an article in The New York Times reported that cardiologists there switched in 2008 to using Biotronik devices after that company started paying them thousands of dollars in consulting fees.

A hospital spokeswoman later said in response to a reporter’s question that Ms. Silver’s comments were based on data drawn from a national registry of heart patients who received an implanted defibrillator. University Medical Center also provided The Times with limited data from that registry that it said backed its contention.

But several experts knowledgeable about that defibrillator database said in separate interviews that it did not track how device recipients fared after they left a hospital. As a result, it cannot and does not provide data to hospitals or manufacturers about the long-term performance of any company’s device. It also does not produce data that can be used to compare the performance of competing implants made by different companies.

“To saying that we are doing better is a bridge too far for the data they have,” said Dr. Jeptha Curtis, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale, who has worked on research studies involving registry data.

Told of the experts’ assessments, Danita Cohen, the spokeswoman for the Las Vegas hospital, responded in writing by stating, “By way of clarification, U.M.C. did not intend to say that our better outcomes can be attributed to a particular device.”

She added that the hospital’s remarks about “improving patient outcomes” were intended to mean that its use of the defibrillator database was helping it monitor its performance.

The hospital’s disputed claims may intensify scrutiny of the ties between the Las Vegas physicians, Biotronik and a company called Western Medical that acts as the company’s sales representative in Nevada and several other states. Those ties are currently under review by state officials in Nevada. The Justice Department started a separate investigation last year into Biotronik’s sales and marketing practices.

The Times article focused on relationships between a device industry sales official named Caesar Fonte and cardiologists at a Las Vegas practice, Nevada Heart and Vascular. Before 2008, when Mr. Fonte worked at Boston Scientific, a defibrillator producer, the same cardiologists were paid consultants to that company and almost exclusively used its devices, hospital data shows.

Then in 2008, Mr. Fonte quit Boston Scientific and started Western Medical, the Biotronik distributor. The implant specialists at Nevada Heart and Vascular then became paid consultants to Biotronik and switched to using its devices in nearly all patients.

Both Biotronik, the physicians and Mr. Fonte have rejected any suggestion that the consulting fees were inducements to get them to use the company’s devices.

The defibrillator database is part of the National Cardiovascular Data Registry, a project run by the American College of Cardiology Foundation, in conjunction with a professional medical group, the Heart Rhythm Society. It is often referred to as the ICD registry, which is short for implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, the device’s formal name.

In 2004, Medicare mandated the creation of a national ICD registry as a condition for approving payments for defibrillators for a new class of patients, for whom evidence of a benefit was equivocal. Implant makers, who have realized vastly added sales from the Medicare ruling, supported the registry for one year then cut back financing. Its is now underwritten by hospitals, but limited financing has restricted the data it can collect.

Essentially, during a procedure to implant a defibrillator, information is collected about areas like a patient’s heart function and other medical conditions. If an existing defibrillator is being replaced by a new one, a hospital can also indicate one of several reasons why such a replacement is being performed.

The information from the national ICD registry provided by University Medical Center to The Times reflected data from two of those device replacement fields. It showed that for a four-year period between 2007 and 2010, no device had been replaced at University Medical Center because it had been recalled or because it had malfunctioned.

Earlier, when providing the data, Ms. Cohen, the hospital spokeswoman, said that its results were “highly significant” when compared with the national average for such replacement reasons. The hospital added that Biotronik has not issued any recent device recalls.

Experts like Dr. Curtis said, however, that the hospital’s data was effectively meaningless because there was no way of knowing from it whether a device being replaced at U.M.C. had been initially implanted there, or whether devices implanted at U.M.C. were later replaced elsewhere.

“If they are thinking that no news is good news from the registry, then they are misunderstanding what function the registry is performing,” said another registry expert at Yale, Dr. Harlan Krumholz.

The national ICD registry does report back to hospitals about in-hospital complication rates related to device implantation procedures so they can compare it with the national average. Asked for its complication rate, U.M.C. declined to release it.

 

Medical Experts Dispute a Hospital’s Claims on Heart Device Data

This month, University Medical Center of Southern Nevada said in a statement, “results to date show significantly improved outcomes for our cardiac patients” who got heart implants made by a little-known company, Biotronik. The statement was attributed to Kathleen Silver, the chief executive of the hospital.

Ms. Silver issued that statement after an article in The New York Times reported that cardiologists there switched in 2008 to using Biotronik devices after that company started paying them thousands of dollars in consulting fees.

A hospital spokeswoman later said in response to a reporter’s question that Ms. Silver’s comments were based on data drawn from a national registry of heart patients who received an implanted defibrillator. University Medical Center also provided The Times with limited data from that registry that it said backed its contention.

But several experts knowledgeable about that defibrillator database said in separate interviews that it did not track how device recipients fared after they left a hospital. As a result, it cannot and does not provide data to hospitals or manufacturers about the long-term performance of any company’s device. It also does not produce data that can be used to compare the performance of competing implants made by different companies.

“To saying that we are doing better is a bridge too far for the data they have,” said Dr. Jeptha Curtis, an assistant professor of medicine at Yale, who has worked on research studies involving registry data.

Told of the experts’ assessments, Danita Cohen, the spokeswoman for the Las Vegas hospital, responded in writing by stating, “By way of clarification, U.M.C. did not intend to say that our better outcomes can be attributed to a particular device.”

She added that the hospital’s remarks about “improving patient outcomes” were intended to mean that its use of the defibrillator database was helping it monitor its performance.

The hospital’s disputed claims may intensify scrutiny of the ties between the Las Vegas physicians, Biotronik and a company called Western Medical that acts as the company’s sales representative in Nevada and several other states. Those ties are currently under review by state officials in Nevada. The Justice Department started a separate investigation last year into Biotronik’s sales and marketing practices.

The Times article focused on relationships between a device industry sales official named Caesar Fonte and cardiologists at a Las Vegas practice, Nevada Heart and Vascular. Before 2008, when Mr. Fonte worked at Boston Scientific, a defibrillator producer, the same cardiologists were paid consultants to that company and almost exclusively used its devices, hospital data shows.

Then in 2008, Mr. Fonte quit Boston Scientific and started Western Medical, the Biotronik distributor. The implant specialists at Nevada Heart and Vascular then became paid consultants to Biotronik and switched to using its devices in nearly all patients.

Both Biotronik, the physicians and Mr. Fonte have rejected any suggestion that the consulting fees were inducements to get them to use the company’s devices.

The defibrillator database is part of the National Cardiovascular Data Registry, a project run by the American College of Cardiology Foundation, in conjunction with a professional medical group, the Heart Rhythm Society. It is often referred to as the ICD registry, which is short for implantable cardioverter-defibrillator, the device’s formal name.

In 2004, Medicare mandated the creation of a national ICD registry as a condition for approving payments for defibrillators for a new class of patients, for whom evidence of a benefit was equivocal. Implant makers, who have realized vastly added sales from the Medicare ruling, supported the registry for one year then cut back financing. Its is now underwritten by hospitals, but limited financing has restricted the data it can collect.

Essentially, during a procedure to implant a defibrillator, information is collected about areas like a patient’s heart function and other medical conditions. If an existing defibrillator is being replaced by a new one, a hospital can also indicate one of several reasons why such a replacement is being performed.

The information from the national ICD registry provided by University Medical Center to The Times reflected data from two of those device replacement fields. It showed that for a four-year period between 2007 and 2010, no device had been replaced at University Medical Center because it had been recalled or because it had malfunctioned.

Earlier, when providing the data, Ms. Cohen, the hospital spokeswoman, said that its results were “highly significant” when compared with the national average for such replacement reasons. The hospital added that Biotronik has not issued any recent device recalls.

Experts like Dr. Curtis said, however, that the hospital’s data was effectively meaningless because there was no way of knowing from it whether a device being replaced at U.M.C. had been initially implanted there, or whether devices implanted at U.M.C. were later replaced elsewhere.

“If they are thinking that no news is good news from the registry, then they are misunderstanding what function the registry is performing,” said another registry expert at Yale, Dr. Harlan Krumholz.

The national ICD registry does report back to hospitals about in-hospital complication rates related to device implantation procedures so they can compare it with the national average. Asked for its complication rate, U.M.C. declined to release it.

 

Vital Signs: Risks: Focus on Heart Deaths in Student-Athletes

  The bane of political correctness, in film, television, literature and life.

    Imam Abdullah Antepli of Duke University and Mollie Ziegler Hemingway of GetReligion.org debate Americans’ views of Islam.

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