Like many combat veterans, Anthony Marquez returned from Afghanistan suffering from both trauma and survivor’s guilt. His Marine unit had lost 17 soldiers in five months. This heartrending but uplifting Independent Lens documentary chronicles how he paid tribute to his fallen comrades by carving wooden battlefield crosses and personally delivering them to the families of the deceased. Monday, Nov. 11, at 10 p.m., PBS; check local listings.

by Atossa Araxia Abrahamian

The very rich don’t park their wealth out in the open, where it can be taxed, said Alana Semuels in The New York Times. They funnel it through “special economic zones” and “extraterritorial domains.” Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s new book offers a tour of that secretive world. Like the protected coves once used by pirates, today’s tax havens provide stashes for corporations and billionaires, all practicing “a less conspicuous form of colonialism.” We find such havens all over: in Panama and Malta, which let shipping firms reflag their vessels to skirt regulations; in duty-free Geneva and Dubai; even in Norway, on an archipelago with no passport requirements. The creation of free ports in Renaissance Italy initiated the tradition. The Hidden Globe introduces us to economists who’ve modernized the practice, “including a few who regret their role in helping countries excise pieces of themselves in the name of allowing the already privileged to become even wealthier.” 

With this “stellar work of literary journalism,” Abrahamian “peels back murky legalese to expose the machinations of these enclaves,” said Hamilton Cain in The Minnesota Star Tribune. Aided by management consultants such as Arthur D. Little and its descendants, McKinsey and Deloitte, tax havens have sprung up from Singapore to the Caribbean across the past century, and the escaped “genies of deregulation” have become hard to tame. In Abrahamian’s view, no nation is more complicit than the U.S. Yet her “artistic touch” prevents the book from turning into a mere polemic of blame. “She peoples her narrative with the famous and infamous,” including cameos from Mary Shelley and Che Guevara. 

The citizens of the shadow commonwealth The Hidden Globe describes “do not believe they are obligated to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” said Gideon Lewis-Kraus in The New Yorker. But they’re not rebels. The system is sustained “not by the defiance of national sovereignty but by its clever manipulation.” We learn, for example, how an art dealer turned a Swiss port into a virtual black box: “a climate-controlled, secrecy-preserving bunker for the storage of works sold in the British Virgin Islands to firms registered in Cyprus.” Once legally relieved of their status as objects, the paintings and sculptures functioned as “tokens of untraceable exchange among oligarchical speculators,” facilitating money laundering. Born in Canada and raised in Geneva by parents of Russian and Armenian extraction, Abrahamian is herself a globalist product, fluent in four languages and holding three passports. Nonetheless, she is “unsparing in her judgment of a system in which profits accrue to global citizens while everyone else is condemned to their nearby slag heap.” The Hidden Globe is “a vivid, revelatory, and politically unpredictable tour of this present-day network state.”

The bassist who laid the Dead’s grooves

Phil Lesh had never played the bass when a fellow Bay Area musician, Jerry Garcia, asked him to join his new rock band, the Warlocks, in 1964. Nor was Lesh a rock fan. He was a classically trained trumpeter and violinist drawn to works by Bach and jazz greats John Coltrane and Charles Mingus. As the Warlocks morphed into the Grateful Dead, Lesh drew on those influences to create a freewheeling style that helped define the group’s trippy sound. Eschewing the traditional bassist role of unobtrusive timekeeper, he spun buoyant, shifting melodic lines that intertwined with Garcia’s ethereal lead guitar and propelled the Dead’s trademark marathon jams. The Dead’s only bassist through their 30-year history, he also contributed vocal harmonies and enduring songs, including the plaintive “Box of Rain.” The band “was born at a time when magic and change were in the air,” he said in 2005. “It felt as if we were an integral part of a cosmic plan to transform human consciousness.” 

Raised in Berkeley, Calif., where his parents owned a repair business, Lesh “began his long musical odyssey” with violin lessons in the third grade, said the Associated Press. Taking up trumpet at 14, he joined the Oakland Symphony Orchestra in his teens and briefly studied jazz in college. But he was driving a mail truck when he was recruited by Garcia, then a bluegrass banjo player. The nascent Grateful Dead “became the house band for Ken Kesey’s infamous acid tests,” said Rolling Stone. Lesh, a “staunch advocate of psychedelics,” was “profoundly affected by these evenings that erased the line between band and audience,” and the drugs helped shape the Dead’s improvisational, genre-bending sound. 

The group toured unceasingly for decades—performing more than 2,000 shows for a devoted and nomadic fan base—and only disbanded after Garcia died in a rehab clinic in 1995, said the Los Angeles Times. In subsequent years, Lesh “kept the group’s adventurous spirit alive through a series of musical offshoots,” alternating between solo projects and assemblages that reunited some of his former bandmates. Retiring from touring in 2014, he would still perform at Terrapin Crossroads, a club he owned in San Rafael, Calif., with a shifting lineup that often included his two sons. He didn’t record, though, saying the stage was where he could realize his vision. “The longer I’m in music, the less I like the idea of freezing music in amber,” he said. “I want it to be different every time.”