For many right-wing European leaders who have wooed Russian President Vladimir Putin, the war in Ukraine has been a blow to their popularity.

Not so for Viktor Orbán.

The Hungarian prime minister is facing his toughest election yet on April 3, against a united opposition led by a Christian conservative. Before the invasion, the public fretted about COVID-19, high inflation, migration, the defense of traditional family values versus greater LGBTQ rights, and how Budapest’s conflicts with Brussels over rule of law, corruption, and media freedoms might play out. It seemed like a formula for Mr. Orbán’s ouster.

But the conflict in Ukraine has pushed traditional hot-button issues into the background – and looks likely, experts say, to boost Europe’s self-styled “illiberal” strongman’s chances at the ballot box.

The latest polls suggest Mr. Orban’s Fidesz party could win by a narrow margin. The public’s logic seems to be that Mr. Orbán puts the economic well-being of Hungarian families first and national interests above geopolitical considerations.

Marton Monus/Reuters

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks during the closing rally of his electoral campaign in Szekesfehervar, Hungary, April 1, 2022. Mr. Orbán has sought to assert Hungary’s neutrality in the war in Ukraine, even as his allies in the European Union and NATO move to assist the embattled country.

“We really trust in Viktor Orbán,” says Gyöngyi Bors, a redheaded hairdresser who came with her grandchildren to hear the Hungarian leader speak in Budapest. “As long as he is in power, this country is safe and the people of Hungary are safe. He is reliable. He is authentic. And whenever we go outside Budapest, we see that Hungary is developing in a great way. Everything is getting more and more beautiful. Things are built.”

While Fidesz is expected to win, it is also expected to lose the supermajority it secured in 2018 – which made constitutional changes possible.

“There is room for surprises,” says Stefano Bottoni, a teacher of Eastern European history at the University of Florence and author of a book on Mr. Orbán. “The war totally changed the situation.”

From freedom fighter to Putin’s ally

Mr. Orbán knows how to pivot and nail down messages that resonate with the majority of Hungarians, analysts say. He shot to political fame as an anti-communist freedom fighter who stood in Budapest’s Heroes’ Square in 1989 demanding that Russian troops exit Hungary. It was Mr. Orbán who oversaw Hungary’s accession to NATO in 1999. And for years, he insisted that Hungary should diversify its energy sources and lessen its dependence on Russia.

“We don’t want to be the happiest barracks of Gazprom,” Mr. Orbán declared in 2007 when his Fidesz party was in the opposition.

That fiery antagonism toward Russia ended in 2010, when Mr. Orbán traveled to Moscow and reset relations with Mr. Putin. In the summer of 2014, he declared Russia – along with China and Turkey – as political models to follow, proudly launching Hungary on the path to “illiberal democracy.” Mr. Orbán’s authoritarian tendencies and sweeping reforms are today major points of concern for the European Union.

On the economic front, Mr. Orbán signed a contract with Russia’s Rosatom to expand the Paks Nuclear Power Plant. More recently, he invited the controversial Russian-led International Investment Bank to set up its headquarters in Budapest, reportedly providing diplomatic immunity to its staff even if critics see it as a front for Russian spying. These projects are perceived to be dear to the Hungarian leader’s heart, fruits of a carefully crafted, pragmatic relationship with Mr. Putin.

They are also why he is widely perceived as Mr. Putin’s last ally in Europe.

“That’s not a viable position,” says Dr. Bottoni. “He seemed quite unsure for a couple of days [after the invasion of Ukraine began]. Then he assumed this new position of peace fighter. He has a pass for victory now because he has a new narrative as commander in chief for peace and many Hungarians want to hear this. The war scares people, and Hungary is a border country [with Ukraine].”

“There is moral risk”

The war changed the dynamic of the parliamentary campaign, as the opposition seized on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine to present Mr. Orbán as Mr. Putin’s lackey in Europe. It highlighted that Hungary blocked Ukraine’s accession to NATO, and that Mr. Orbán stood alongside Mr. Putin weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, celebrating their 12th meeting since 2010.

It’s a matter of “East versus West” and democracy versus greater authoritarianism, opposition leaders say.

Zoltan Mathe/MTI/AP/File

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán (right) and Russian President Vladimir Putin hold a joint press conference in Budapest, Hungary, Oct. 30, 2019. Mr. Orbán has developed a close relationship with Mr. Putin over the years after initially holding Russia at arm’s length while his Fidesz party was in the opposition in Hungary.

“Choose Europe, freedom, and growth instead of East, slavery, and deprivation,” urged Péter Márki-Zay, the joint opposition candidate for prime minister at a rally last month. As a small-town mayor and churchgoing father of seven, he embodies the conservative values that resonate with the right-wing Fidesz voter base but also has the support of liberal parties. Many believe he is the country’s best hope to unseat Mr. Orbán.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has also criticized Mr. Orbán in recent days, blaming him for holding back on some sanctions, blocking weapons transfers to Ukraine via Hungary, and importing Russian oil and gas. “There can be no Russian branches in Europe that divide the EU from within, that are trying to help Russia make as much money as possible even now,” Mr. Zelenskyy said Tuesday. “Europe must stop listening to the excuses of Budapest.”

Hungary has come out looking soft relative to the other central European nations. When the prime ministers of the Czech Republic, Poland, and Slovenia – which, along with Hungary, form the so-called Visegrád Group – went to Kyiv to show support for Ukraine earlier this month, Mr. Orbán stayed home. Hungary’s weaker line toward Russia also led the rest of the Visegrád Group to snub a planning meeting of defense ministers in Budapest this week.

Still, Hungary did fall into line with the EU and impose sanctions on Russia. And for all the cozying up to Mr. Putin in recent years, Mr. Orbán has never called into question Hungary’s membership in NATO or the EU per se, analysts note. “We were trying to expand our range of motion,” says Dr. Bottoni. “Until now, it didn’t seem so risky. It seemed even a smart move, playing a bit with the Russians, with the Chinese, imagining a global role for Hungary.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine dramatically changed the equation. “It’s not only risky; there is moral risk,” Dr. Bottoni adds. “You are aligning with bloody dictatorships; you are aligning with isolated regimes. You are perceived as a kind of last ally [to Mr. Putin]. And Hungary has a very bad tradition, unfortunately, in the 20th century of standing on the wrong side.”

Remembering the Soviets

The majority of Hungarians are wary of being dragged into the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary was stripped of two-thirds of its territory in the aftermath of World War I. Hungary sided with Nazi Germany in World War II largely because Adolf Hitler offered to return the land. Large swaths of the population still dream of restoring Greater Hungary, a sentiment Mr. Orbán plays on.

“Hungary had to pay a high price for these wars,” says Ágoston Mráz, director of the conservative think tank Nézőpont Intézet. “That is why the sentiment to stay neutral is so strong in society.”

Dominique Soguel

Fidesz supporters listen to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán deliver a speech on March 15, 2022, in Budapest, Hungary. "We know the nature of war from our history," he told the crowd, speaking of the danger of getting involved in the war in Ukraine. "The best war is one that we manage to avoid."

The stakes of a conflict with Russia are clear for the average Hungarian, even if ties between Budapest and Moscow have been at their best under Mr. Orbán, and even if Fidesz media repeats Russian tropes about the Ukrainian conflict. Hungary lived under communist rule until 1989.

“We know what it is like to fight with the Russians,” says Endre Pokasz, a press officer tasked with showing the aircraft museum, upgraded churches, and cultural venues set up under Mr. Orbán in the town of Szolnok. “If anyone thinks the Russians can be beaten easily, they are wrong. Hungary must keep the peace. What if Russia takes revenge on us? We are too small for this. If they close the gas, we will have no heating. Companies will have to stop working. Nothing will work.”

Russia supplies 80% of Hungary’s gas. Mr. Orbán signed a 15-year deal with Gazprom last year. That makes energy prices in Hungary cheaper compared with the rest of Europe. “It is a powerful weapon for Orbán,” says Dr. Bottoni. “We have to do what is good for us. You are paying less for gas and oil. Do you want to pay more? Please vote for the opposition, break down the agreements with the Russians. ... If not, we have to accept that the Russians are our partners. Whatever they do.”

“Orbán gave a very smart answer saying in wartimes, the most important thing for Hungarians is not who is responsible for the war and not moral issues. But the question is who can guarantee the freedom and peace of Hungary, and through that the prosperity of Hungary?” concurs Mr. Mráz.

Victory for the opposition would mean a complete re-orientation of Hungary’s foreign policy toward the West. That is the fervent wish of lawyer Gabor Matlak, in Budapest. Lingering by the banks of the Danube River with his family after the opposition rally, he clung to the flag of Europe.

“We are afraid we will not be part of the EU anymore if Orbán wins again,” he explains. “It is our last chance for Hungary to stay in the European Union and NATO. I think Europe will not tolerate Orbán anymore if we are not strong enough to kick him out.”

In early March, analysts at the U.S. National Ice Center began to notice changes along the eastern coast of Antarctica. 

First, a large piece of ice, some 13 nautical miles in length, broke off the remnants of an area known as the Glenzer ice shelf. Ice shelves are sections of glacial ice that extend off land and rest on the ocean, and occasionally “calve,” or break apart, to produce icebergs.

Although it’s less common for such an event to take place on the eastern side of Antarctica – the western side is far more dynamic and tends to be the focus of scientists who study glaciers – it is by no means unprecedented, says Christopher Readinger, the Ice Center’s lead Antarctic ice analyst.

He quickly put out a memo, informing sailors and scientists that a newly named iceberg, C-37, was now floating in what is already considered one of Earth’s most harrowing maritime environments.  

But then, a week later, something else happened. 

The ice shelf adjacent to Glenzer, a New York City-size mass called the Conger ice shelf, collapsed completely – the first time this had happened in East Antarctica since scientists began using satellites to record such events.

The collapse came around the same time as a stunning heat wave in the region, which had included temperatures reaching nearly 70 degrees Fahrenheit above normal. (This pushed the temperature to a relatively balmy 11 degrees F, compared with the typical 56 below zero.) Some scientists have described it as Earth’s most extreme heat wave ever recorded.

Mr. Readinger sent out another report and named a new iceberg, C-38, made from the ice that had been the Conger ice shelf. And scientists around the world began to scramble to understand what, exactly, was going on in Antarctica – a part of the world known to be a crucial regulator of global climate, but one still filled with mystery.

SOURCE:

Velocity data generated using auto-RIFT (Gardner et al., 2018) and provided by the NASA MEaSUREs ITS_LIVE project (Gardner et al., 2019); U.S. National Ice Center

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

“It’s a gut check for the glaciology community” says Peter Neff, a glaciologist with the University of Minnesota. “We have record low sea ice [around East Antarctica]. We have a much stronger heat wave than we ever thought was possible. And an ice shelf collapsing in a place where we didn’t expect it to collapse. ... It causes concern for us that we’re not fully appreciating the vulnerability of East Antarctica.”

That vulnerability matters – not only for the ecosystems of this remote, southern continent, but for climate and sea levels worldwide. It is a reminder of how much scientists still don’t know about Antarctica, its ecosystems, and the Southern Ocean that surrounds it. And it shows the importance of the scientific and geopolitical collaboration that takes place on this continent, even as researchers struggle to understand it. 

“It’s still an unknown place,” says Catherine Walker, an assistant scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. “For the most part, it’s unexplored. You do your best [to understand it] with the measurements you can get. But events like this last week – we were all surprised.”

Dr. Christopher A. Shuman/UMBC/NASA/AP

This satellite image provided by NASA in March 2022 shows the main piece of C-37 close to Bowman Island. Scientists are concerned because an ice shelf the size of New York City collapsed in East Antarctica – the first time scientists had seen an ice shelf collapse in this area of Antarctica.

A continent’s complexities

On the one hand, the reason for the Conger ice shelf collapse and the preceding heat wave seems clear. A warming climate has created changes in Earth’s systems, such as rising ocean temperatures and shifts in the way atmospheric currents carry heat and moisture, that in turn lead to events like city-size ice blocks dropping off a continent.

But it’s also far more complicated than that.

Scientists are generally loath to say that any one event, such as an ice shelf collapse, is the clear result of climate change. These are natural systems, after all, and direct correlation is not always clear. Dr. Neff, for instance, collects ice cores to try to understand historical climate markers – and to see, for instance, whether East Antarctica has experienced this sort of heat wave before. 

(To show just how complicated this is, the weather event scientists say led to the recent Antarctic heat – a band of warm, moisture-filled air called an “atmospheric river” – also brings with it a huge amount of snow. And that snow builds glaciers. Which means it’s not even clear whether a heat wave results in net melting. As Dr. Neff says, “Add tens of gigatons of snow over a couple of days to your glacier, and it can put a wrinkle in your model.”)

Meanwhile, when it comes to polar regions, Antarctica seems – at first glance, at least – to have been less affected by global warming than the north so far. 

“If you look at a map of warming over the last 50 years, Antarctica still looks pretty blue, or cold, and the North Pole is red, or warming,” says Dr. Walker. “We hear more about Greenland and shrinking sea ice in the north.”

Indeed, scientists believe that Antarctica serves as a global air conditioner. While ocean waters around the world absorb a quarter of all the carbon humans put into the atmosphere, the Southern Ocean does the most work, absorbing about half of those molecules. And the same churning that makes it so treacherous to sail – or do research – on the Southern Ocean also pushes that heat and carbon into deeper water.

In other words, without the Southern Ocean, the world would be a whole lot hotter, many scientists say. (Again, it’s not quite so simple – the churning also brings up natural carbon from organisms decaying at the ocean floor. But the dominant theory about the Southern Ocean is that it is a carbon sink.) 

But researchers also know Antarctica is changing.  

“We have indications of really important changes,” says Matt Long, an oceanographer with the National Center for Atmospheric Research. “There are direct observations of warming. Of freshening. Of increased freshwater input. We don’t fully understand the implication of those changes for Antarctic marine ecosystems. That’s something crucial for the scientific community to engage in and for the international community to address.”

One impact of all the heat absorbed by the Southern Ocean seems to be that ice is thinning from below. Antarctica holds 90% of the world’s ice, and 70% of Earth’s freshwater volume, according to the National Science Foundation. This means that even partial melting could have a catastrophic impact on coastal communities around the world.  

An international collaboration of scientists studying the Florida-size Thwaites Glacier on the western side of Antarctica, for instance, has warned of new cracks and melting in that ice.  

Should that glacier fully collapse, it could raise global sea levels by feet – but again, by how much, and how fast, is up for debate. 

The recent Conger collapse probably won’t have a big impact on sea levels, scientists say. Still, says Dr. Walker, they are monitoring it.  

“The thing we’re all sort of interested in is the process,” she says. “What happens, what’s next. That can help us learn what to expect from the bigger ones.” 

All nations have a stake

If this isolated continent is the site of mysterious – and perhaps unnerving – changes, it might also be the location of big global answers, both scientific and geopolitical.

Not owned by any one country, Antarctica is governed internationally. The first Antarctic treaty, signed in 1959, demilitarized the continent and explicitly made it a region where countries would collaborate on scientific research. Since then, other agreements have banned mining, oil and gas exploration, and required any fishing industry activity meet conservation goals.  

“Internationally, people often look at this treaty system as being very enlightened,” says Claire Christian, executive director of the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition. But there is still a need to monitor activity around the continent to ensure the goals of “peace and science” are being maintained.

Different constituents, she and others say, have conflicting opinions about the best way to do this. For some, economic benefits, such as krill fishing, outweigh conservation efforts, such as setting aside waters as protected areas. To others, scientific exploration is worth disrupting ecosystems. 

How Antarctica handles these conflicting goals, in the face of global change, can be illustrative.

“It’s a bit of a microcosm for the issue overall,” says Dr. Long. “You have this global commons issue that characterizes the climate change problem. And then you have Antarctica, where various countries have different perspectives.”

And overall, Ms. Christian says, the world needs to care about what happens here – and adjust its climate policies accordingly. 

“Antarctica belongs to everyone,” she says. “And everybody in the world has a stake in keeping Antarctica frozen.”

Early one Saturday morning, the vendor hung The Jeans on his stall on a dusty street corner in a Johannesburg township. They were a pair of secondhand Levi’s 550s. Straight leg. Relaxed fit. Waist 36, inseam 34. One hundred percent cotton, in a soft, brushed blue. The hems on the left pocket were frayed, and there was a small tear above one belt loop, but otherwise The Jeans could have been new. 

People who buy secondhand clothes here see Levi’s as a luxury brand, the vendor knew. A message stamped onto the inside of one of The Jeans’ pockets explained that Levi’s are “an American tradition, symbolizing the vitality of the West to people all over the world.” He could probably sell them for $10.  

But however symbolic they are of the American West, The Jeans were also global citizens. A glossy tag stitched inside the right hip read “Made in Lesotho.” Encircled entirely by South Africa, the tiny, mountainous country is about 250 miles away from the market where The Jeans now hung. But instead of a simple overland journey of five hours, these jeans had likely lapped the globe before ending up for resale back in southern Africa.  

Across the course of their life, The Jeans probably had their cotton grown in one country, spun and woven into fabric in another, were cut and sewn in a third, and were worn and donated to charity in a fourth, all before ending up here in South Africa, country number five. 

That journey from one neighboring African country to another, via an 18,000 mile detour to the United States, is a parable of Africa’s role in the fast-fashion industry, and Americans’ implication in it. The clothing industry, one of the world’s most environmentally destructive, is responsible for 10% of global emissions, more than air travel and maritime shipping combined. Meanwhile the people who make the world’s clothing – mostly women in the Global South – rarely earn above their country’s minimum wage, which is less than $200 a month in many African countries. Yet the continent is increasingly shouldering the burden of both creating America’s clothes, and disposing of them after they finish with them. 

Threadbare benefits for workers 

Bluejeans are perhaps the modern world’s most popular garment spun from cotton, a plant fiber that has helped shape much of today’s world as we know it.

“Without cotton cloth, we would have no global economy, no staggering social inequality between the Global North and South, no work for women outside the home, and no industrialization, which was all powered by slavery on expropriated and overtaxed land,” argues Maxine Bedat, the author of “Unraveled: The Life and Death of a Garment,” a book about the denim supply chain.

Born in a Nevada tailor’s workshop in the 1870s, denim was popularized by Levi Strauss & Co. as workwear for lumberjacks, cowboys, and railroad workers. By the mid-20th century, jeans had become a leisure item too. Today, an American woman, on average, owns seven pairs of jeans. A whopping 1.25 billion pairs are sold worldwide every year. 

Ryan Lenora Brown

A pair of Levi’s 550 jeans purchased secondhand in Johannesburg, South Africa. The jeans were originally sewn just across the border in Maseru, Lesotho, but traveled around the world before arriving back in southern Africa.

Sometime in the last few years, The Jeans were among them. 

First, though, they had to be sewn. Based on their “Made in” tag, this particular pair could have been stitched together in only one place, a scruffy industrial district of aluminum factory shells in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho.

Although the southern African country is a minuscule player in the global garment industry, jeans are big business for the country of 2 million. The vast majority of those who work in clothing factories here, like nearly everywhere in the world, are women. So it was almost certainly women in Lesotho who made The Jeans. About 100 of them, because that’s how many people’s hands a pair of jeans passes through, from the moment the roll of denim is unspooled on the factory floor until it’s packed in a shipping container.

What would The Jeans’ first moments of existence have looked like? 

They would have been loud. The cavernous interior of a bluejeans factory buzzes like a swarm of flies. Irons hiss. Washing machines clack and clatter. The only thing that’s more or less silent are the workers, hunched over their machines assembling a single item – a belt loop, a pocket, a leg seam – with laser focus, trying to keep pace with targets that run into the hundreds or thousands of pairs daily. 

Rorisang Kamoli has worked in the factories that produce for Levi Strauss in Lesotho for more than a decade. She’s slight, in her early 30s, with thick-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses and long braids. If The Jeans passed through her hands, here’s what she would have done. She would have run her fingers over the rivets, those tiny patented bronze buttons sutured to the front pockets of every pair of Levi’s, and the button on the fly. She would have twisted each one, to make sure it was secure, and felt for rough, sharp edges that would make The Jeans dangerous to wear. 

Years of this quality control work has left her thumbnails split open and her fingers calloused. Her mind, too, is equally weary, thinking about the people in America who buy these jeans for $69.50 – about half her monthly wage. 

“[Americans] just want to wear these products – they don’t care how we are living to make them,” she says. 

Among the things she suspects Americans don’t consider: her cracked thumbnail. Whether anyone can raise two children on $150 a month. What it feels like to have a colleague killed in a protest while trying to convince the companies to raise that wage to about $160 a month. The terror of watching half the world swap jeans for sweatpants during a global pandemic, when your life depends on bluejeans.  

When Ms. Kamoli was growing up, Lesotho had a different export – its men went to work in the gold, diamond, and platinum mines of neighboring South Africa. But beginning in the 1990s, the mines began to close. The men returned, and, as new garment factories opened, the women went to work. 

But the new opportunities made for a bitter independence. “Sometimes I feel angry with jeans. I hate them. Why should I have to work so hard, for a wage that’s not enough, to make a thing like this?” Ms. Kamoli says.

Secondhand imports flood Africa

Lesotho’s garment industry exists in large part thanks to an American trade deal called the African Growth and Opportunities Act, which, since 2001, has allowed Lesotho and three dozen other African countries to import certain goods, including clothes, to the U.S. duty-free.  

It also means that nearly all of Lesotho’s Levi’s are America-bound. So it’s fairly safe to say that’s where The Jeans went next. Americans buy clothing voraciously, purchasing dozens of clothing items per year – an average of 68, according to the clothing rental service Rent the Runway. 

In the 1950s, American families were spending 10% of their income on clothing, and purchasing just a few items a year. Now that figure is 2%, but thanks to the rise of so-called fast fashion, that amount buys nearly a new closet’s worth of items annually. 

For someone, somewhere, The Jeans were one of those many purchases. 

Then, along came the pandemic. Around that time, The Jeans and their owner parted ways. Who needed jeans anymore, when pants with an elastic waist existed and you were never leaving your house? Clothing donations spiked by more than 50% in 2020, according to the online secondhand retailer ThredUp. 

Because The Jeans were in near-perfect nick, their owner could have been forgiven for thinking they would be a great item to donate to a local Goodwill or Salvation Army. Someone would snatch them right up at a local thrift store, they might have reasoned, and the charity would earn some much-needed cash for its programs. 

Except that’s not what happens to most of the clothes Americans donate to charity, and it’s not what happened to The Jeans either. 

On average, American charity stores sell just 10% to 20% of the donations they receive. The rest end up in the hands of textile recyclers – companies whose entire reason for being is to make old clothes disappear. They buy charity shop donations by weight, then sort them. About 45% is considered “salable,” that is, high enough quality that it can be worn again, according to the Secondary Materials and Recycled Textiles Association. Another 50% can be made into either rags or insulation, and the worst quality stuff is simply thrown away. 

“Watching the process of sorting and grading feels a little like a visit to the slaughterhouse,” wrote George Packer of visiting a textile recycler in Brooklyn. 

The Jeans, it’s clear, made the cut for resale. So they were pressed, with hundreds of other pairs, into a cube about the size of a dishwasher, and loaded on another shipping container. 

Globally, 70% of donated clothes end up in Africa. But it’s not, as many assume, because Africans are desperate for the rest of the world’s castoffs. In the decades after independence, many African countries had major textile industries of their own. After Western governments and global lenders began putting pressure on those countries to liberalize their economies in the 1980s, trade restrictions fell, and clothing imports from the rest of the world flooded in. 

In recent years, some African countries have attempted to fight back. But when a bloc of East African countries banned the import of secondhand clothes in 2016, American textile exporters reacted predictably. They pressured lawmakers, and soon the U.S. was threatening to withdraw the African Growth and Opportunities Act, the trade deal that gives African countries duty-free access to American markets for many goods. In the end, only the central African nation of Rwanda stood its ground. 

And so The Jeans probably landed in South Africa’s coastal neighbor Mozambique. Technically, it’s illegal to import any secondhand clothing into South Africa – a move to protect its own clothing factories – but the rule is flagrantly ignored. Truckloads rumble unhindered across its border every day, much of it bound for a single market in downtown Johannesburg.

There, on a four-block stretch of De Villiers Street, wedged between a minibus taxi stand and the city’s main train station, dozens of hawkers sell secondhand clothes from bed-sized bins: heaps of gauzy blouses, T-shirts from American 5K races, vintage dresses, and yes, jeans. “AmaSkinnyJean! AmaSkinnyJean!” they shout, using the Zulu prefix to pluralize words. “Cheap cheap cheap!” 

The market also sells to wholesalers like the one who bought The Jeans. He then brought them 20 miles north, to a neighborhood whose name means “Olive Wood Forest” in Afrikaans, although it is a patch of prairie dotted with small houses and tin shacks, with no trees in sight. Like many South African townships – the mostly working class bedroom communities that huddle on the edge of all its cities – Olievenhoutbosch has a clothing market, where every weekend a couple dozen vendors set up shop on a corner near a dusty police station.

One weekend last November, The Jeans were among the clothes on offer. 

“How much?” asked a customer.

R150, the vendor answered. $10. 

She pulled the bills out of her wallet, Nelson Mandela’s face beaming up from the blue and red notes. 

And just like that, The Jeans, and all the stories they carried, belonged to me.  

Reporting for this story was supported by The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

Courtesy of Penguin Random House

Arthur C. Brooks, the author of “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life,” focuses on love in his formula for happiness.

Arthur C. Brooks has spent decades studying happiness. But in recent years the social scientist’s research turned into what he calls “me search.”

He found that those who are unhappiest later in life are often the strivers on a continual quest for money, power, pleasure, and prestige. Mr. Brooks turned his introspection into a bestseller, “From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”

Formerly the president of the American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Brooks is now a columnist for The Atlantic. He also teaches a class on happiness and leadership at Harvard Business School. The Monitor recently spoke with him about his book. The discussion has been edited for length and clarity. 

How did you embark on your quest to understand happiness – and what most surprised you about what you discovered?

My wife read it – these are just my notebooks – and she said, “You’ve got to publish this as a book.” I said, “I don’t know if anybody’s going to read it.” And it opened [shortly after its debut in February] at No. 1 on The New York Times bestseller list.

The most important skill that I talk about in this book is to really think about the happiness that’s occurring in your life. Why do I have these feelings that I have? What are the feelings that I wished I [had instead]? And when you do that, you can actually make some very affirmative and positive decisions in your life.

Like many people, you struggle with spending a lot of time thinking about the future. Why is that problematic?

My mentor Martin Seligman, at the University of Pennsylvania, believes that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens. He believes we should be called Homo prospectus. And the reason is because we’re the only species that can spend any significant cognitive energy on the future. 

The average person spends, according to Seligman, between 30% and 50% of his or her time thinking about the future. To be thinking about the future, ironically, is basically to take the current present and waste it because you’re treating the current moment like drudgery so you can live in a better future. In a very real way, you’re missing your own life.

You went for a long walk in Spain to learn not to constantly chase that state of happiness on the horizon. Tell me about it.

One of the ways that you can fix that is by getting into a rhythmic activity in which your only goal is to be present. I did it on the Camino de Santiago, which is this ancient Roman Catholic walking meditation. One hundred miles. You walk all day and your job is to be fully present and pray a lot. When I notice my mind focusing on scenarios of the future, I’ll take it back to the dust on my boots. Flowers on the side of the road. The feel of the rain on my bald head. At first there’s screaming inside your head. Then after about 24 hours the screaming starts to get softer and then pretty soon you’re just in rhythm. I wouldn’t say it’s a permanent game changer because you have to keep doing it. 

You write about the importance of cultivating a spiritual practice. Why?

The four habits that are most associated with the happiest people are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. That’s the happiness portfolio. The first of those is faith. By that I don’t mean a particular faith. One of the greatest sources of misery in our lives is that we’re obsessed with the most boring thing in the world, repetitively thinking about my job, my car, my clothes, my house, my relationships. It’s like the same TV show over and over and over again. 

I’ve worked very closely with the Dalai Lama for the last 10 years. He says, “Always remember you are one in 7 billion.” Which does not mean I’m an ant or insignificant. It means I need to zoom out to find the majesty of life, to find the adventure in life. 

Every year, on your birthday, you compile what you term “a reverse bucket list.” Explain that concept.

Satisfaction is not a function of what you have. It’s a function of what you have divided by what you want. Most people try to have this kind of fruitless “haves” management strategy. Which puts them on what we call the hedonic treadmill. ... You go from have, to have, to have, to have. You can defeat that by modeling it in a different way by having a “wants” management strategy. The wants are the denominator of the satisfaction equation. And when you decrease the denominator, the whole number increases. So your satisfaction can go up, paradoxically, by wanting less. Now how do you want less? You have to make a positive affirmative decision to do that, and you absolutely can.

You write that love is the epicenter of happiness. Tell me more.

The world gives you a bogus formula for happiness. No. 1: Use people. No. 2: Love things. No. 3: Worship yourself. And it actually seems right because it’s so close to the truth. It just mixes up the nouns and the verbs. The right formula, based on all of the best neuroscience, clinical, [and] social scientific research, is simply: Use things, love people, and worship the divine. You can boil down all of the studies of happiness to five words. Those words are: Happiness is love. Full stop.

Reuters

Kenya's President Uhuru Kenyatta (R) talks to opposition leader Raila Odinga at a March 12 political conference which endorsed Odinga as a presidential candidate for this year's general elections.

In one of the world’s most unstable regions, the global drift toward authoritarianism has hit a wall, one draped in the red and black of judicial robes. Kenya’s Supreme Court ruled this week against President Uhuru Kenyatta, who had proposed constitutional changes that might have enabled him to remain influential in a new office.

The decision, on what was essentially a procedural question of executive power, illustrates how young societies – particularly those emerging from colonial pasts – develop the rule of law: not by inheriting systems of government, but through a deepening conviction in the moral foundations of equal liberty protected by an independent and impartial judiciary.

The decision will not only resonate in Africa, where rulers find it easy to manipulate the law to stay in power, but perhaps around the world. In its latest survey, Freedom House found that 60 countries saw a decline on key aspects of democracy. The trend has left only 20% of the global population living in what the survey calls “free” countries. In Africa, notes Leiden University law professor Nick Huls, even though all 54 countries have a written constitution, “a culture of constitutionalism is often missing.” Earlier gains in judicial independence on the continent have lately been in retreat.

During Kenya’s first 40 years of independence, as Chief Justice Martha Koome noted, the first two presidents pushed through 30 constitutional amendments to concentrate and perpetuate their power. That remains a common tactic in Africa. It is how Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni extended his 36-year grip on power last year.

Kenya has shed that tendency gradually as its citizens have demanded better governance. A three-year process culminating in the new 2010 constitution was widely inclusive. The new document rebalanced power among the branches of government and entrenched the rights of women and marginalized communities. By 2020, 88% of Kenyans agreed that government must always follow the law and 74% said presidents must respect court decisions, according to the polling group Afrobarometer.

The court’s decision on March 31 related to a presidential push for a constitutional amendment to create a new office of prime minister side by side with the presidency. Critics saw this as an attempt by Mr. Kenyatta, who cannot seek a third term later this year, to retain power and weaken political opposition. The Supreme Court ruling upheld two lower court decisions that found he had introduced the amendment unconstitutionally. The decision marked the second time the court has flexed its independence under the new constitution. In 2017 it annulled the presidential election, citing widespread discrepancies, and ordered that it be held again.

Justice Njoki Ndung’u, who dissented in the court’s interpretation of how the constitution allows for amendments, nonetheless observed, “Kenyans wanted to have a head of state who would not whimsically amend the constitution.”

Significantly, Mr. Kenyatta did not oppose the ruling in 2017. Nor has he now. At a turbulent moment globally, Kenya has reaffirmed judicial independence. More than a check on the actions of a president, it sends a timely message about democratic rule of law that restrains personal power and ensures self-governance.