"He was just a toddler when... his father brought him and his twin brother into a room where they and seven other boys were given a secret test...."

"Some of them refused to leave their parents’ sides. Others were drawn to the colorful candy that had been placed as distractions. This boy, A. Altannar, ... picked out a set of prayer beads and put it around his neck. He rang a bell used for meditation. He walked over to a monk in the room and playfully climbed on his legs. 'These were very special signs,' said Bataa Mishigish, a religious scholar who observed the boy with two senior monks. 'We just looked at each other and didn’t say a word.' They had found the 10th reincarnation of the Bogd... the spiritual leader of Mongolia... a symbol of Mongolia’s identity, a position dating back nearly 400 years to descendants of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan, who embraced Tibetan Buddhism and helped it spread across China and other conquered lands.... When someone sneezes, Mongolians say 'Bogd bless you.'..."

From "The 8-Year-Old Boy at the Heart of a Fight Over Tibetan Buddhism/He may have to defend the faith in Mongolia against pressure from China’s ruling Communist Party" (NYT).

The morning ritual — in Mongolia.

"The town of Tsagaannuur... was recently sealed off following the deaths of a local couple who contracted the plague from eating the raw meat and organs of an infected marmot..."

"... Some Mongolians believe eating the rodent’s uncooked innards to be 'very good for health,'... The husband and wife reportedly ate the kidney, gall bladder and stomach of the creature.... The 38-year-old man, who worked as a border agent, and his wife, 37, died of multiple organ failure caused by septicemic plague....  Deaths caused by the plague — a disease carried by small rodents that was responsible for wiping out a third of Europe’s population nearly 700 years ago and killing millions in China, Hong Kong and nearby port cities in the 1800s — are much more rare in modern times because of antibiotics, according to the CDC. But reports of people getting infected have continued to pop up around the world, including in the United States, William L. Gosnell, a program director with the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s department of tropical medicine, medical microbiology and pharmacology, told The Post. 'The bacteria maintains itself out in the wild in these animal populations,' said Gosnell, who is affiliated with the university’s John A. Burns School of Medicine. The plague is most commonly transmitted to humans by fleas that become infected from biting rodents carrying the yersinia pestis bacteria, which causes the disease..... Gosnell said he has never heard of a person getting the plague from eating raw rodent meat, but added that 'it wouldn’t be surprising. Any time you eat something raw, there’s always a chance for picking up all sorts of different pathogens,' he said. 'There are so many other zoonotic infections they could have picked up, unfortunately due to the locale, it just happened to be plague.... If you cook it, the bacteria is dead, you don’t got a problem,' he said. 'Some things you don’t eat raw.'"

WaPo reports.

Sometimes the precise thing you think you need to do for a particular desired goal is an easily avoided thing that is precisely what takes you as far as possible from that goal. In this case, the thing was eating raw marmot organs and the goal was good health. It's completely easy to cook the organs before eating them and cooking them would have destroyed the plague bacteria that killed them, but they seem to have thought that the rawness of the organs was the key to good health, the extreme opposite of death.

I hope it's not disrespectful to the couple who died — I'm sorry they died — to offer their story as a pattern of human decisionmaking. You're hopeful about an exciting idea — like eating raw marmot organs is good for your health — and you do it because you want what the idea says you'll get, so you do it, changing your good-enough condition into something much worse. It's the difference between do something and first do no harm. You might never consider eating raw marmot organs, but I bet that, many times, you've eaten the metaphorical raw marmot organs or voted for somebody who promised he'd make us all eat metaphorical raw marmot organs.

"At Caffe Bene, a trendy Korean coffee chain in central Ulaanbaatar, almost all the tables are occupied by young women on their own."

"One sits with her shopping bags on a chair, typing on her phone. Another reads a comic, while the woman across from her peers at a laptop. Single women in Mongolia face a certain stigma, which makes dating even harder....  For Anna Battulga, 25, a recent graduate working in human resources, dating seems different from how it was for her parents, who met in the 1980s in Ulaanbaatar when Mongolia was still under a communist system. Her mother was a shop assistant and her father a police officer who, after meeting Battulga’s mother, came to inspect the shop every week, scaring the owner. Eventually they started going to the cinema where her father would translate the films, available only in Russian, into Mongolian for her mother. After a few months he nervously asked if his parents could come to her house to ask for her hand in marriage, a Mongolian tradition. Battulga is more likely to meet someone on Facebook, Instagram or Tinder...."

From "Too smart, too successful: Mongolia’s superwomen struggle to find husbands/Highly educated women far outnumber men in the capital – making it difficult for them to find a partner" (The Guardian).

In the old days, a scary Communist policeman could snag a shopgirl. These days, women are educated and self-sufficient enough to reject marriage if the men aren't their equal:

Bulganchimeg Gantulga, 19, a university student studying political science... is considering never marrying at all. “When men don’t respect women, it’s obvious what kind of husband they will be,” Bulganchimeg says.

Meanwhile, the men reject the women who are above their level:

A survey released in March by the World Bank found Mongolian men in their 20s often described women as more ambitious than men, a trait they found unattractive. Some wondered why women invested so much in their education, given that it increased their risk of not being able to find a husband. 

It's interesting that women don't choose to underachieve.

The reverse gender gap in Mongolia.

The Christian Science Monitor reports:

Everyone knows what Otgonmuren will be. The slim 15-year-old with a strong singing voice will be a herder, like his father. It’s what he’s done since dropping out of school eight years ago: looking after the herd of 300 sheep, goats, horses, and cows.

“My daughters can go to another place, maybe even another country, but my son has to stay here so he can herd,” says his mother, Purevchuluun, who like many Mongolians uses one name....

Mongolia’s boys... make up only 38 percent of higher-education graduates, according to the National Statistics Office. As the country urbanizes, Khovsgol social worker Bayarsaihaa is among those who worry that herding boys could be further left behind if the lifestyle they’ve trained for begins to vanish – erased not just by modernization, but a warmer, drier, and more dangerous environment....

"My doctor told me that it was fine to fly up until the third trimester, so when I was five months pregnant I decided to take one last big trip... to Mongolia."

"People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself.

I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself.... I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange.... When I woke up the next morning, the pain in my abdomen was insistent....

"Mongolian neo-Nazis rebrand themselves as environmentalists."

"Tsagaan Khass, or White Swastika, whose leader has expressed reverence for Hitler, now says its main goal is to save nature."

"'Mongol' might as well be called 'Braveheart in a Yurt.'"

Ha ha. So writes Michael Phillips. That's what I thought: This is like "Braveheart," right down to the deep, minimalistic love story.

There's a lot in this war movie — the coming of age of Genghis Khan — that women can love. Beautifully photographed landscapes. Fabulous fashion. (Those hats!) Horses galore. Feisty kids. Manly men who sing in that amazing overtone voice. Beautiful women who make the first move, stand their ground, and accomplish daring feats. Lovers separated and united. Bondage. (Do you know what a cangue is?) Tribal customs from the 12th century. Lots of eating and drinking. (Meat carved off the bone and eaten from a knife and endless bowls of (occasionally poisoned) liquid). Also a lot of knives, arrows, and blood.

"Mongol" should count as a law movie too. Temudgin (Genghis Khan) comes up with the big idea: "Mongols need laws." And that related idea: "I will make them obey, even if I have to kill half of them." He also happens to say: "Mongols have the right to choose."

Here's Stanley Kauffmann:

... Immediately we think of... John Ford's The Searchers ...

Other reminders of Ford abound, as well as reminders of David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia... Olivier's Henry V and Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky must also be tucked away in [the director Sergei] Bodrov's head...