Extra rewards were available to those, like Walter Duranty, who played the game particularly well. Duranty was The New York Times correspondent in Moscow from 1922 until 1936, a role that, for a time, made him relatively rich and famous. British by birth, Duranty had no ties to the ideological left, adopting rather the position of a hard-headed and skeptical “realist,” trying to listen to both sides of the story. “It may be objected that the vivisection of living animals is a sad and dreadful thing, and it is true that the lot of kulaks and others who have opposed the Soviet experiment is not a happy one,” he wrote in 1935—the kulaks being the so-called wealthy peasants whom Stalin accused of causing the famine. But “in both cases, the suffering inflicted is done with a noble purpose.”This position made Duranty enormously useful to the regime, which went out of its way to ensure that Duranty lived well in Moscow. He had a large flat, kept a car and a mistress, had the best access of any correspondent, and twice received coveted interviews with Stalin.

On March 31, just a day after Jones had spoken out in Berlin, Duranty himself responded. “Russians Hungry But Not Starving,” read the New York Times headline. Duranty’s article went out of its way to mock Jones:

Later, some of the students in the choir tell me they’re Bikinian and that their parents, already displaced by nuclear testing, were among the first immigrants to Enid. Because many have been unable to save enough for the $2,000 plane ticket back to Majuro, their children have never seen the ocean. When I mention I’ve been to the Marshall Islands some of the students ask, in awe, “Did you swim in the ocean? What was it like?”

Yet, though Marshallese are legal workers who gladly take undesirable, low-paying jobs, Enid hasn’t exactly welcomed them. “It’s a redneck state and we have a bad name here,” Ashlyn says later. “You hear a lot of ‘Go back where you came from, go back to the Marshall Islands!’” (Ashlyn was born and raised in Oklahoma.)

Traders would come and go, supplying the Organization’s needs and wants — including cigarettes, which some fighters smoked despite the fact that they were banned for Raqqa residents.

Under nearly universal interpretations of Islam, a woman must wait three months before remarrying, mainly to establish the paternity of any child that might have been conceived. The waiting period, called idaa, is not only required but is a woman’s right, to allow her to grieve. But even in the realm of divine law, the Islamic State was reformulating everything.

she refused to have her worth judged by the amount of skin she had covered

They had to be savage when taking a town to minimize casualties later, the men insisted. Mr. Assad’s forces were targeting civilians, sweeping into homes in the middle of the night and brutalizing men in front of their wives; the fighters had no choice but to respond with equal brutality, they said.

He set her up in a spacious apartment with new European kitchen appliances and air-conditioning units in each room — almost unheard-of in Raqqa. She eagerly showed off her new home to friends and relatives. Her kitchen became the place where the other fighter’s wife in the building — a Syrian who, like Aws, had married a Turkish recruit — stopped in for coffee. Each morning, Abu Soheil’s servant shopped for them and left bags of meat and produce outside the door.

Though Aws had always wanted a baby, Abu Muhammad asked her to take birth control pills, still available at Raqqa’s pharmacies. When she pressed him, he said his commanders had advised fighters to avoid getting their wives pregnant. New fathers would be less inclined to volunteer to carry out suicide missions.

In Raqqa, the Syrians had become second-class citizens — at best.

I told her it was their own fault; they had come out wearing the wrong thing,”

Dua had only been working for two months with the Khansaa Brigade, the all-female morality police of the Islamic State, when her friends were brought to the station to be whipped.