THE CARTOON ISSUE DECEMBER 28, 2020

6 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 17 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Amy Davidson Sorkin on the First and Second Spouses; herd rebellion; good vibes; a Harlem romance; testing times. PROFILES Michael Schulman 22 Extraordinary Alien The strange and fanciful comedy of Julio Torres. SHOUTS & MURMURS Sarah Akinterinwa 28 How to Survive Christmas with Your Toxic Family PERSONAL HISTORY Calvin Trillin 30 Some Notes on Funniness Lessons in humor from grade school to Johnny Carson. COMICS Edward Steed 26 “Life Drawing” Roz Chast 33 “A Cartoonist’s Life” Ali Fitzgerald 36 “The Museum of Purgatory” Ronald Wimberly 42 “Pandemic Paper Doll” 44 The Funnies Jillian Tamaki 52 “Junban” Liana Finck 76 “Stay-at-Home Fun” FICTION Nick Drnaso 58 “Acting Class” THE CRITICS BOOKS Adam Gopnik 78 Animation’s wild and golden age. 81 Briefly Noted Merve Emre 83 The surreal life and work of Leonora Carrington. POP MUSIC Kelefa Sanneh 87 Morgan Wallen’s hard-partying country style. ON TELEVISION Naomi Fry 90 The hormone-crazed teens of “Big Mouth.” THE ART WORLD Peter Schjeldahl 92 Artists and ideology in MOMA’s new show. THE THEATRE Alexandra Schwartz 94 “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face.” POEM Ian Frazier with Edward Koren 34 “Greetings, Friends!” COVER Harry Bliss “In with the New”

DRAWINGS Arantza Peña Popo, Mick Stevens, Zoe Si, Teresa Burns Parkhurst, Lars Kenseth, Benjamin Schwartz, Carolita Johnson, William Haefeli, Colin Tom, Drew Dernavich, Sofia Warren, Amy Hwang, Roz Chast, Ngozi Ukazu, E. S. Glenn, Tadhg Ferry, Caitlin Cass Our advisors listen, so you know you’ve been heard.

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Michael Schulman (The Talk of the Jillian Tamaki (“Junban,” p. 52) won, Town, p. 20; “Extraordinary Alien,” with Mariko Tamaki, a Caldecott Honor p. 22) is a staff writer and the author for the young-adult graphic novel “This of “Her Again.” One Summer.” Her latest picture book is “Our Little Kitchen.” Ali Fitzgerald (“The Museum of Purga- tory,” p. 36), an artist and a writer, first Nick Drnaso (Fiction, p. 58) is the au- contributed to the magazine in 2016. thor of the graphic novels “Beverly” She published “Drawn to Berlin” in 2018. and “Sabrina.” He is at work on “Act- ing Class,” which is due out in 2022. Harry Bliss (Cover) has contributed cartoons and covers to the magazine Calvin Trillin (“Some Notes on Funniness,” since 1998. He is the author, with Steve p. 30), a contributor to The New Yorker Martin, of “A Wealth of Pigeons.” since 1963, has written thirty-one books, including “Jackson, 1964” and “About Liana Finck (“Stay-at-Home Fun,” Alice.” p. 76) is a New Yorker cartoonist. Her latest book is “Excuse Me.” Sarah Akinterinwa (Shouts & Murmurs, p. 28), an illustrator, created the comic Ronald Wimberly (“Pandemic Paper “Oyin and Kojo.” She began contrib- Doll,” p. 42), the founding editor of uting cartoons to the magazine in 2020. LAAB magazine, is the creator of the graphic novels “Prince of Cats” and Ian Frazier (Poem, p. 34) is the author “Black History in Its Own Words.” of, most recently, “Hogs Wild.” He is working on a book about the Bronx. Roz Chast (“A Cartoonist’s Life,” p. 33), a New Yorker cartoonist, published, with Jeremy Nguyen (“Sketchpad,” p. 21) began Patricia Marx, “You Can Only Yell at publishing cartoons in The New Yorker Me for One Thing at a Time.” in 2017.

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4 THENEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE MAIL

ON BECOMING A HERETIC ever, when individuals choose to stay and demand acceptance, Orthodox commu- Larissa MacFarquhar’s article is a sen- nities slowly change over time. As the sitive examination of the complexities executive director of Eshel, a nonprofit of the child-custody cases that play out that creates community for L.G.B.T.Q. in civil courts when ultra-Orthodox Orthodox Jews, I have seen the begin- Jewish parents make the wrenching de- nings of evolution. My organization cision to leave their community, and it runs a retreat that was mentioned in the adds an important dimension to the article; its existence is proof that there growing body of films, memoirs, and are queer Orthodox Jews who would scholarship on the subject of those who like to find ways to stay in their com- abandon religion (“Solomon’s Dilemma,” munities. The work we do with Ortho- December 7th). But in one description dox parents of L.G.B.T.Q. people and MacFarquhar’s casual tone could give a with Orthodox rabbis shows that these wrong impression. Voicing one source’s communities can become more accept- account of friends who have experienced ing of a diverse membership. a crisis of faith but haven’t left Hasi- Miryam Kabakov dism, MacFarquhar writes that they “vi- Northampton, Mass. olated Shabbos all the time, watching sports, and just lied to their families I left the Hasidic world at the age of about it.” In my book about religious forty-five, and I have seven children. Jews who lead double lives, “Hidden Hasidic kids are born into a system that Heretics,” I find that people who have withholds the education they need to lost their faith but have decided to stay function in the secular world. The sta- don’t “just” lie to their spouses and chil- tus quo is upheld by politicians who turn dren. The emotional and moral reason- a blind eye to yeshivas that do not ad- ing behind their lies is complex, and it here to state educational standards, even is based, above all, on a desire to avoid though the schools are ostensibly ac- causing hurt to their loved ones. Some credited and supported by public funds. NEW ALBUM OUT NOW are afraid of the outside world, and oth- Many Hasidic adults can barely read or ers, especially women with few resources, write in English. What’s important to are afraid of losing their children in the remember is that Hasidim are not in a kinds of divorce scenarios that MacFar- quaint world apart from ours; they are quhar describes. Indeed, many hidden Americans. Young adults are leaving heretics have told me that, despite their ultra-Orthodox communities without doubts about the truth of the Torah, the skills they need to survive. They face they believed that staying in their com- homelessness, depression, addiction, and munity was the most ethical thing to suicide. MacFarquhar’s article depicts do. Ironically, by choosing to stay, these the lives of these apostates and their “McCARTNEY RETURNS TO THE SOUND OF HIS EARLY SOLO WORK people expose their children to their communities in a lyrical way, but avoids FOR A LAID-BACK GEM” changing understanding of choice, in- hard numbers and the sordid political “A CHANCE FOR THE MASTER TO dividuality, tolerance, and critical think- collusion. At the end, the piece becomes KICK BACK AND SMILE AWAY.” ing—thereby changing ultra-Ortho- a love story, as if in love there is resolu- doxy itself. tion. I am a lesbian. I left my commu- Ayala Fader nity in order to survive. “…ONE OF HIS MOST COMPELLING Professor of Anthropology Leah Lax ALBUMS IN DECADES…” Fordham University Houston, Texas New York City • “...EVOKES THE DELICACY OF Belonging to a Hasidic community offers Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, ‘YESTERDAY’ OR ‘BLACKBIRD’” a life style of unparalleled social cohe- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited sion, but, as MacFarquhar shows, the for length and clarity, and may be published in community’s tight embrace all too often any medium. We regret that owing to the volume strangles those who don’t fit in. How- of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. PaulMcCartney.com In an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, many New York City venues are closed. Here’s a selection of culture to be found around town, as well as online and streaming.

DECEMBER 23 – 29, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

When the Rink at Rockefeller Center (above) opened, on Christmas Day in 1936, it was meant to be a temporary attraction. But the “skating pond,” as it was then known, has long since become a winter fixture of New York City. Holden Caulfield went on a date there in “The Catcher in the Rye,” and Truman Capote took to the ice for a Life magazine photo op. The rink is open to the public, for fifty-minute skating sessions, until Jan. 17; masks and advance tickets (via rockefellercenter.com) are required.

PHOTOGRAPH BY PETER LIEPKE 1 mist, seem obliquely related to the spectral underrepresented voices to speak on issues that A RT sculptures, as if connected by the same bleak, move them, is to offer a purposeful corrective to ancient narrative. An accompanying essay, the predominantly white, predominantly male by the curator and critic Bob Nickas, sheds podcasting sphere. In each episode, the speaker “100 Drawings from Now” light on TARWUK’s haunting, fragmented (guests have included the writer Bernardine Eva- This invitational show, at the Drawing Center, world, citing the Croatian War of Indepen- risto, the body activist Jada Sezer, the editor Tobi in SoHo, speaks to our lockdown epoch with dence, in the nineteen-nineties, as a formative Oredein, and the journalist Poorna Bell) takes startling poignancy. All but one of the works trauma for the artists and noting the pop and on a single word, such as “failure,” “strength,” or were created since the pandemic’s onset. Few art-historical references in their dense visual “empire,” and then delivers a manifesto exploring are thematic. There are scant visual refer- lexicon—which is cryptic but well worth de- her own definition oft he term. What results is a ences to the spiky virus, though there are some coding.—J.F. (martosgallery.com) heady combination of TED talk, literary reading, good jokes on homebound malaise. Among 1 rousing impromptu lecture delivered in a smoky the better-known artists, Raymond Pettibon bar, and raw confessional.—Rachel Syme pictures himself bingeing on episodes of “The Twilight Zone” and Katherine Bernhardt re- PODCASTS ports a homeopathic regimen of cigarettes Lolita Podcast and Xanax. Stylistic commonalities are scarce, Very few books have vexed and divided more aside from a frequent tilt toward wonky figu- Anthems people than Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 master- ration. The show confirms a deltalike trend— The British podcast producer Hana Walker- piece, “Lolita,” the tale of a pedophile named or anti-trend—of eclectic eccentricities with- Brown launched her new show, “Anthems,” in Humbert Humbert, who is hideously obsessed out any discernible mainstream. What unites March, to mark International Women’s Day. The with a twelve-year-old girl. Jamie Loftus, a Rashid Johnson’s grease-stick abstraction, goal of the program, which provides an outlet for writer and the host of the podcast “My Year conjuring a state of alarm in a pigment that he has invented and dubbed Anxious Red; Cecily Brown’s pencilled carnage of game animals after a seventeenth-century still-life by Frans AT THE GALLERIES Snyders; and a meticulous, strikingly sombre self-portrait by R. Crumb? Isolation. Intended or not in individual cases, the melancholy gestalt is strong, as is its silver-lining irony of satisfying all artists’ ruling wish: to be alone in the studio. Alone with themselves. Alone with drawing. I found myself experiencing the works less as calculated images than as prayers.—Peter Schjeldahl (drawingcenter.org)

Sally Saul This veteran ceramicist’s small, brightly glazed animals, figures, and flowers (allmade during the pandemic) become something like an indoor sculpture garden at the Rachel Uffner gallery, where they’re placed on pedestals of varying heights. Saul, who lives in the Hudson Valley, titled her show “In the Woods,” playing on an undercurrent of anxiety lurking in the bucolic. Working in a forthright style, informed by folk traditions and the Bay Area art scene of the nineteen-seventies, Saul is attuned to the nat- ural world and depicts birds—white-throated sparrows, a red-winged blackbird—with par- ticular charm. Some of the pieces evoke tur- moil, both inner and outer. In “Transformed,” a woman whose features recall emojis appears on the brink of a breakdown; in “Troubled Waters,” a ring of white waves encroaches on a figure in an inner tube (or a black hole). Such sculptures offset the show’s more contemplative moments and remind us—like the title of a bust of a be- The American artist Benny Andrews, who died in 2006, at the age of sev- spectacled woman in a blue mask—that we’re still in the midst of “Hard Times.”—Johanna enty-five, painted with deep feeling for working people. He arrived at the Fateman (racheluffnergallery.com) extraordinary composite technique he called “rough collage”—incorporating fragments of clothing and other elements into his figurative images—while TARWUK completing a portrait of the janitors at the School of the Art Institute of The Croatian artists Bruno Pogačnik Tremow Chicago, which he attended on the G.I. Bill. One of the tenderest and most and Ivana Vukšić, who collaborate as TAR- dynamic pictures in the wonderful exhibition “Benny Andrews: Portraits, WUK, make a mesmerizing, if occasionally head-scratching, début at the Martos gallery. a Real Person Before the Eyes,” at the Michael Rosenfeld gallery (through (The duo now live in New York.) Weath- Jan. 9), presents the artist’s father, a Georgia sharecropper, at hard-earned ered-looking figurative sculptures, made from rest in an easy chair. Andrews also painted his fellow-artists—his wife, Nene materials as varied as polyurethane foam and actual teeth (human and coyote), combine Humphrey; Alice Neel; Norman Lewis; Howardena Pindell—because he sci-fi aesthetics and the corporeal concerns “wanted to make them appear as much a part of everyday existence as taxi of such predecessors as Alina Szapocznikow drivers or lawyers.” In the show’s tour de force, “Portrait of the Portrait and Paul Thek. Abstract paintings, which are based on cosmographic geometries and have Painter” (above), from 1987, Andrews turned his loving and intelligent —Andrea K. Scott COURTESY THE BENNY ANDREWS ESTATE AND MICHAEL ROSENFELD GALLERY AND MICHAEL ROSENFELD ESTATE ANDREWS THE BENNY COURTESY surfaces that suggest cratered terrain and eye on himself and his labor.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 7 tent enclosing the Land of the Sweets. A PODCAST DEPT. small number of lucky families will get to see it live—following extremely strict health protocols—but there will also be a free stream of the ballet, available Dec. 23-26.—Marina 1Harss (nutcrackeratwethersfield.com) THE THEATRE

A Christmas Carol Why limit yourself to one role in a show? In 2004, Jefferson Mays won a Tony Award for “I Am My Own Wife,” in which he channelled a transgender woman and the people in her life. A decade later, he barrelled through madcap costume changes as he portrayed every mem- ber of the D’Ysquith family in the zany musi- cal “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” Now Mays is taking on all the characters in Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” in an adaptation that he wrote with his wife, Susan Lyons, and the inventive director Michael Arden (“Once on This Island”). The show, which débuted two years ago at the Geffen Playhouse, in Los Angeles, has been restaged The episode that got me hooked on “Ologies,” a weekly talk show hosted for a streaming version filmed at the United by the boisterous, flame-haired comedian Alie Ward, was “Scorpiology.” Palace, in New York City—a rococo geyser of red velvet and gold detailing that is the perfect Ward interviews an intrepid entomologist named Lauren Esposito, who setting for a Victorian tale.—Elisabeth Vincen- has spent her career studying scorpions. As a person with an extreme telli (Through Jan. 3; achristmascarollive.com.) aversion to creepy-crawlies, I tuned in with trepidation, but an hour later I was walking in loops around a block so I could keep listening and This Is Who I Am felt a newfound tenderness for and excitement about the wild world of For the Palestinian playwright Amir Nizar venomous stingers. This was in no small part thanks to Ward’s gregarious Zuabi, cooking does not just anchor individ- uals and families; it also serves as a storytell- interview style, which is at once casual, curious, and concrete. The show— ing device. In his one-woman play “Oh My each episode of which features a long chat with a scientist, a professor, Sweet Land,” from 2013, a small audience or some other eccentric expert—is about digging into not only quirky gathered to watch an actor prepare a dish of kibbe in real time. Now comes “This Is Who subject matter but the humans who choose to devote their lives to study- I Am,” a live-streamed production directed by ing fringe fields. You’ll meet a nephologist (clouds), a nassologist (taxi- Evren Odcikin and produced by PlayCo and dermy), a cucurbitologist (pumpkins), and many others. Ward is generous the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, in which a father (Ramsey Faragallah) and his and inquisitive, warm and never judgmental; when it comes to pulling son (Yousof Sultani) cook the savory pies touching stories out of scientists, she has it down to an art.—Rachel Syme known as fteer. In a sign of the times, they are chatting over Zoom: the older man is in Ramallah, the younger in New York (the actors are in their respective kitchens), and in Mensa,” first read “Lolita” when she was in staple and a reliable crowd-pleaser since its their relationship is physically and emotion- middle school and has been haunted by it ever début, twenty years ago. On Dec. 23, Ballet ally distant. The virtual format works well in since. She decided to unpack her complicated Hispánico streams a 2019 performance of the this context, but Zuabi’s ripe dialogue can’t feelings about the material in the new “Lolita piece on its YouTube channel and Facebook avoid the clichés that so often burden recon- Podcast” (produced by iHeartRadio), which, page. The screening also includes a conver- ciliation narratives.—E.V. (Through Jan. 3; despite its simplistic name, is a remarkably sation with the company’s artistic director, woollymammoth.net/event/who-i-am.) researched and complex dive into the rab- Eduardo Vilaro; the work’s Cuban-born cho- 1 bit hole of Nabokov’s work and the cultural reographer, Pedro Ruiz, a former company twisting of his reputation. Loftus believes member; current dancers; and alumni.—Brian that Nabokov intended the story to damn its Seibert (ballethispanico.org) MUSIC protagonist rather than exalt him, but she is more interested in exploring the long fallout of the novel than in taking sides. She probes The Nutcracker at Wethersfield The Hamrahlíð Choir: many aspects of the “Lolita” industrial com- The ritual of attending one of many versions plex, from the film adaptations to the fashion of “The Nutcracker” during the holidays “Come and Be Joyful” shows, attempting to get to the heart of why looks different this year. With few excep- CLASSICAL There may be no advocates for ad- the book maddens and endures.—R.S. tions, companies have reverted to some form olescent vocalizing more compelling than 1 of online presentation. Troy Schumacher, Iceland’s Hamrahlíð Choir, whose alumni in- a soloist at New York City Ballet with a clude the operatic bass Kristinn Sigmundsson, burgeoning choreographic career, is trying the pianist Víkingur Ólafsson, and, according DANCE something different: an experiential version to Björk, “every single Icelandic musician at Wethersfield, a stately home with formal you have ever heard of.” Having sung in the gardens, in Amenia, New York. The story is choir when she was sixteen, Björk engaged the Ballet Hispánico told through a series of danced scenes, each youthful group and its venerated conductor, “Club Havana,” a fun evocation of nineteen- in a different room of the house—and on the Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, for her album “Uto-

fifties Cuban floor ows,sh has been a company terrace, in the gardens, and, finally, in alarge pia” (2017) and for “Cornucopia,” an elab- ANNA RUPPRECHT BY ILLUSTRATION

8 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 orate, mesmerizing 2019 stage production (with an outdoor concert filmed in the fall), York, where he met and married a younger that she mounted at the Shed. “Come and Be and the choral and orchestral forces of Trin- dominatrix who called herself Lady Jaye. Joyful” comprises the choir’s contributions ity Church Wall Street (with a live concert Their romantic and artistic partnership is to that show, including versions of Björk’s from 2019). For non-“Messiah” programming, depicted—tenderly, unstintingly, and in in- “Sonnets” and “Cosmogony,” plus other folk the charismatic bass-baritone Bryn Terfel timate detail—by the director Marie Losier, songs balancing rusticity and sophistication, sings a set of carols for the “Met Stars Live in who spent plenty of time in their company and luminously voiced.—Steve Smith Concert” series (through Dec. 30). The New unfurls the remarkable range of their activity, York Philharmonic’s brass section, donning in public and in private. They played music Santa hats (and at least one Santa beard), together, but their key project—which they Paul McCartney: “McCartney III” polishes holiday favorites to a near-impossible named “Pandrogeny”—involved extensive ROCK As the Beatles were disintegrating, the gleam in an outdoor amphitheatre, trimmed plastic surgery that made the couple resemble band’s bass player turned his attention to with garlands, at Montclair State University each other. The dual portrait, using home his solo début, a shambolic set performed (through Jan. 4).—Oussama Zahr (Check Web movies, archival footage, Losier’s own ecstatic almost entirely alone and, despite its funda- sites for links.) images, the couple’s music, and extensive in- mental Paul-ness, simply titled “McCartney.” terviews with P-Orridge (Lady Jaye died in With a home-baked charm nodding ahead 2007), brings amazing stories to light, includ- to indie rock, it’s the rare classic that sounds M. Ward: “Think of Spring” ing his public art scandals of the mid-seventies like the bonus-track outtakes from another. EXPERIMENTAL “Migration Stories,” an album and his association with William Burroughs A decade later, McCartney released a sequel that M. Ward released in April, was a pic- and Brion Gysin. P-Orridge is revealed as an that shared the first album’s independent torial meditation on movement across space innate artist who inflects and illuminates every mind-set but shifted to eccentric synthesizer and time. For Ward’s second project of 2020, aspect of existence, whether humble or exalted, pop. Now the global pandemic has led to a “Think of Spring,” he pauses for a moment with a singular sensibility; Losier’s film, from third entry, most of it recorded solo again. and sits inside the music of the jazz legend Bil- 2011, captures the poignant paradoxes, the Like its predecessors, “McCartney III” draws lie Holiday. The songs are loose, understated ecstasies and burdens, of the transformation strength from its nonchalance and seems to reworkings of those from Holiday’s penulti- of life into art.—Richard Brody (Streaming on ramble into its brightest spots, especially the mate album, “Lady in Satin,” and although the Criterion Channel.) linked acoustic-guitar pieces that bookend they can’t live up to the deep soul and emo- the album. The record radiates warmth in tional weight of her inimitable performances, a manifestly bleak period, with a chummy they aren’t meant to: Ward, who remembers One Night in Miami old voice bespeaking comfort, kindness, and once mistaking Holiday’s tender delivery for This vigorous and insightful drama—the first familiarity.—Jay Ruttenberg a guitar, simulates her singing with his instru- feature directed by the actress Regina King— ment and, in the process, offers a testament imaginatively fills in the details of a mighty to the alchemy of her voice and its pull across event that took place behind closed doors: Ben Monder, Tony Malaby, music forms.—Julyssa Lopez the 1964 meeting, in a motel room, of Mal- Tom Rainey 1 colm X (played by Kingsley Ben-Adir), Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom, Jr.), Jim Brown (Aldis JAZZ Things can get hairy when the guitarist Hodge), and the boxer then known as Cassius Ben Monder, the saxophonist Tony Malaby, MOVIES Clay (Eli Goree), who had just beaten Sonny and the drummer Tom Rainey—all respected Liston to win the heavyweight championship. longtime members of New York’s jazz avant- The gathering of friends was rooted in con- garde—assemble as a trio. They join forces for The Ballad of Genesis troversy—Clay’s conversion to Islam, which a live-streamed show from Bar Bayeux. Re- he hadn’t yet announced publicly. The script, straint is thrown to the wind as sonic textures and Lady Jaye by Kemp Powers, dramatizes the four friends’ are bandied about with gleeful immoderation. In the early nineties, the industrial-rock involvement in the civil-rights movement Yet there are stretches of jagged lyricism lurk- pioneer Genesis P-Orridge came to New and, in particular, Black artists’ and athletes’ ing amid the roughhousing. The road map may not always be clear, but players this familiar with one another’s improvisational ploys always manage to find a way home.—Steve POP Futterman (Dec. 23 at 7:30; barbayeux.com.) Following her folk-rock revelation, “Planet Mu 25” “folklore,” a sublime album of fables and ELECTRONIC Mike Paradinas, a producer best flashbacks written and released earlier in known for his work under the alias µ-ziq, the pandemic, Taylor Swift found herself founded the label Planet Mu in 1995, and in the quarter century since it has become the swept up in its many stories. She kept rare imprint that has made deep marks on writing them, and now “evermore,” which multiple electronic-dance styles—armchair she describes as a sister album to “folk- I.D.M. in the late nineties, dubstep in the two-thousands, footwork in the twenty-tens. lore,” exhaustively plumbs those pathways. All of those are featured on the anniversary Again created in collaboration with the collection “Planet Mu 25,” but, instead of a National’s Aaron Dessner, the album is an retrospective, it’s a survey of the label’s pres- ent roster—a highly diverse collection with even rootsier offshoot of her chamber-pop tracks that fit into the Planet Mu legacy by songcraft, expanding her cast of charac- moving sharply forward.—Michaelangelo Matos ters to include the small-town girl turned starlet Dorothea, Swift’s late grandmother Streaming Holiday Concerts Marjorie, and a (very real) Haim sis- CLASSICAL Not even a pandemic can suppress ter, Este, who gets caught up in a (very Handel’s “Messiah,” a work of preternatural jubilance and comfort—such is its incorrupt- made-up) whodunnit. “Evermore” lacks ible power. Several ensembles are making its predecessor’s hushed sense of enchant- their streams of the oratorio available through ment, but the sorcery is still present in the New Year, including the Handel and Haydn Society (with masked and distanced Swift’s authorship—a master songwriter —Sheldon Pearce ILLUSTRATION BY VICKY LETA VICKY BY ILLUSTRATION singers), the Oratorio Society of New York enlivened by the form.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 9 ADVERTISEMENT

reduction in relapse rates per year, compared to those who took a placebo ONE PATIENT’S STORY OF USING A (MAVENCLAD 0.14 vs placebo 0.33). In people with MS, white blood cells CONVENIENT SHORT-COURSE ORAL called T and B cells, or lymphocytes, do TREATMENT FOR PATIENTS WITH RELAPSING not communicate properly and become overactive, leading them to attack the FORMS OF MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS central nervous system and cause damage and inflammation. “MAVENCLAD is believed to work by reducing the number of T and B cells in the body, so there are fewer of them to attack the nerves,” Dr. Khatri said. Once treatment is finished for the year, the immune system will begin to produce new T and B cells. It may take several months or more for the recovery of T and B cells, but some patients may not go back to pre-treatment levels.

MAVENCLAD is the only short-course oral therapy that requires a maximum of ten treatment days a year over two years. “For me, the best part is the dosing schedule,” Sagal said. Patients take one to two tablets for up to five days per month for two consecutive months during the first year, and then repeat that course “I’m enjoying my life, easing back into But then, after five years, Sagal’s at the beginning of the second year. work and college,” Sagal said, as the fatigue and headaches returned and she “Since I’m not taking MAVENCLAD for twenty-four-year-old urban-engineering had to put her college studies and work ten months out of the year, I don’t have to student described her routine. For a on pause. A new MRI confirmed some take it everywhere with me,” she added. long time, life was significantly more progression of the disease. Dr. Khatri told challenging for Sagal, who was diagnosed her about MAVENCLAD® (cladribine) Your healthcare provider will with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis, tablets, which had recently come on continue to monitor your health during or RRMS, when she was in high school. the market. “I had been following the the two yearly treatment courses, Her primary-care physician attributed development of MAVENCLAD for years,” as well as between treatment courses her fatigue and migraines to hormones Dr. Khatri said. “I felt that Sagal was an and for at least another two years, or developmental issues, and teachers excellent candidate for this short-course during which you do not need to implied that she was lazy. “I blamed oral therapy.” take MAVENCLAD. Your healthcare myself,” Sagal said. “To compensate, I provider may delay or completely signed up for an early-morning gym class, He made sure that Sagal and her family stop treatment with MAVENCLAD if ate healthily, and pushed myself to do well were aware of potential side effects. you have severe side effects. It is not in school.” He explained that there is a cancer risk known if it is safe and effective for associated with the medication, so she people to restart MAVENCLAD after Despite her efforts, Sagal’s symptoms needed to follow screening guidelines the full four-year period. began to escalate: tingling and numbness prior to treatment. Dr. Khatri also noted in her arms and legs, loss of sense of taste, that there’s a risk of birth defects for Sagal completed her second course and increased fatigue. One day during her pregnant women, and that men and of treatment in August of 2020. Today, senior year, Sagal was struck by intense women of childbearing age should use she and Dr. Khatri are pleased with how dizziness and vomiting. “My dad took me to effective birth control during treatment she’s doing. “Over all the years I’ve known the emergency room, where the doctor did and for at least six months after the last Sagal, she seems more like herself now,” not take me seriously,” she said. Her father, dose of each treatment course. The most Dr. Khatri said. Sagal has returned to also a doctor, insisted that she be admitted common side effects for MAVENCLAD college, though classes are virtual due for testing. A spinal tap revealed that Sagal include upper respiratory infection, to the coronavirus, and works part-time. had MS. “I cried—I thought my life was headache, and low white blood cell counts. “MS is not holding me back,” she said. over,” she recalled. “But I also felt a little Reflecting on her experience, she said, relieved, thinking, ‘I’m not crazy!’” Sagal’s Dr. Khatri was reassured by the fact “I would offer this advice to people who neurologist, Dr. Bhupendra O. Khatri, a that “the pharmaceutical company, EMD are newly diagnosed with MS: There are founder and medical director for the Serono, Inc., had performed analysis by people who care. Stay hopeful!” Center for Neurological Disorders, in collecting safety data from two thousand Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which treats 3,500 patients over 15 years.” During a ninety- MS patients per year, prescribed a daily six-week clinical trial for MAVENCLAD, pill. She became well enough to attend inclusive of 433 patients on MAVENCLAD college on a limited basis and to work and 437 on placebo, patients who took part-time. the medication experienced a 58%

MAVENCLAD is a prescription medicine used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include relapsing-remitting disease and active secondary progressive disease, in adults. Because of its safety profile, MAVENCLAD is generally used in people who have tried another MS medicine that they could not tolerate or that has not worked well enough. MAVENCLAD is not recommended for use in people with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS).

MAVENCLAD may cause serious side effects. Treatment with MAVENCLAD may increase your risk of developing cancer. You should follow healthcare provider instructions about screening for cancer. Because of the risk of fetal harm, do not take MAVENCLAD if you are pregnant or of childbearing potential and not using effective birth control. FOR MORE INFORMATION VISIT MAVENCLAD.COM I’M READY FOR AN MS TREATMENT THAT’S NOT AN INFUSION, NOT AN INJECTION, NOT A DAILY PILL.*

*Not taken every day of the year.

MAVENCLAD is the first and only short-course oral therapy with no more than 10 treatment days a year over 2 years.† Talk to your healthcare provider to fi nd out if MAVENCLAD is right for you, and visit mavenclad.com for more information. MAVENCLAD is a prescription medicine used to treat relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include relapsing-remitting disease and active secondary progressive disease, in adults. Because of its safety profi le, MAVENCLAD is generally used in people who have tried another MS medicine that they could not tolerate or that has not worked well enough. MAVENCLAD is not recommended for use in people with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS). MAVENCLAD may cause serious side eff ects. Treatment with MAVENCLAD may increase your risk of developing cancer. You should follow healthcare provider instructions about screening for cancer. Because of the risk of fetal harm, do not take MAVENCLAD if you are pregnant or of childbearing potential and not using eff ective birth control. Your healthcare provider will continue to monitor your health during the 2 yearly treatment courses, as well as between treatment courses and for at least another 2 years, during which you do not need to take MAVENCLAD. Your healthcare provider may delay or completely stop treatment with MAVENCLAD if you have severe side eff ects. It is not known if it is safe and eff ective for people to restart MAVENCLAD after the full 4-year period. †Depending on your weight.

Please see Important Information, including serious side effects, on the following pages.

©2020 EMD Serono, Inc. All rights reserved. US-MAV-00481 Printed in USA 09/20 IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT MAVENCLAD® (cladribine) tablets, for oral use

Read this information carefully before using It is not known if MAVENCLAD is safe and effective in MAVENCLAD and each time you get a refill, as there children under 18 years of age. may be new information. This information does not take Do not take MAVENCLAD if you: the place of talking with your healthcare provider (HCP). o have cancer (malignancy). What is the most important information I should know about MAVENCLAD? o are pregnant, plan to become pregnant, or are MAVENCLAD can cause serious side effects, including: a woman of childbearing age or a man able to father a child and you are not using birth control. See o Risk of cancer (malignancies). Treatment with “What is the most important information I should MAVENCLAD may increase your risk of developing know about MAVENCLAD?” cancer. Talk to your healthcare provider about your risk of developing cancer if you receive MAVENCLAD. o are human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) positive. You should follow your healthcare provider o have active infections, including tuberculosis (TB), instructions about screening for cancer. hepatitis B or C. o M AVENCLAD may cause birth defects if used during o are allergic to cladribine. pregnancy. Females must not be pregnant when they start treatment with MAVENCLAD or become o are breastfeeding. See “Before you take MAVENCLAD, pregnant during MAVENCLAD dosing and within tell your healthcare provider about all of your 6 months after the last dose of each yearly medical conditions, including if you:“ treatment course. Stop your treatment with Before you take MAVENCLAD, tell your healthcare MAVENCLAD and call your healthcare provider provider about all of your medical conditions, right away if you become pregnant during including if you: treatment with MAVENCLAD. o think you have an infection. • For females who are able to become pregnant: o have heart failure. � Your healthcare provider should order a pregnancy test for you before you begin your o have liver or kidney problems. first and second yearly treatment course of o have taken, take, or plan to take medicines that MAVENCLAD to make sure that you are not affect your immune system or your blood cells, or pregnant. Your healthcare provider will decide other treatments for MS. Certain medicines can when to do the test. increase your risk of getting an infection. � Use effective birth control (contraception) on the o have had a recent vaccination or are scheduled to days on which you take MAVENCLAD and for at receive any vaccinations. You should not receive live least 6 months after the last dose of each yearly r live-attenuated vaccines within the 4 to 6 weeks treatment course. o preceding your treatment with MAVENCLAD. You · Talk to your healthcare provider if you use oral should not receive these types of vaccines during contraceptives (the “pill”). your treatment with MAVENCLAD and until your · You should use a second method of birth control healthcare provider tells you that your immune on the days on which you take MAVENCLAD and system is no longer weakened. for at least 4 weeks after your last dose of each o have or have had cancer. yearly treatment course. o are breastfeeding or plan to breastfeed. It is not • For males with female partners who are able to known if MAVENCLAD passes into your breast milk. become pregnant: Do not breastfeed on the days on which you take � Use effective birth control (contraception) during MAVENCLAD, and for 10 days after the last dose. the days on which you take MAVENCLAD and See “Do not take MAVENCLAD if you:” for at least 6 months after the last dose of each yearly treatment course. Tell your healthcare provider about all the medicines you take, including prescription and over-the-counter What is MAVENCLAD? medicines, vitamins, and herbal supplements. MAVENCLAD is a prescription medicine used to treat How should I take MAVENCLAD? relapsing forms of multiple sclerosis (MS), to include relapsing remitting disease and active secondary o Limit contact with your skin. Avoid touching your progressive disease, in adults. Because of its safety nose, eyes and other parts of the body. If you get profile, MAVENCLAD is generally used in people who MAVENCLAD on your skin or on any surface, wash it have tried another MS medicine that they could not right away with water. tolerate or that has not worked well enough. o Take MAVENCLAD at least 3 hours apart from other MAVENCLAD is not recommended for use in people medicines taken by mouth during the 4- to 5-day with clinically isolated syndrome (CIS). MAVENCLAD treatment week. o If you miss a dose, take it as soon as you remember � decreased strength on the same day. If the whole day passes before you � problems with balance remember, take your missed dose the next day. Do not take 2 doses at the same time. Instead, � changes in your vision you will extend the number of days in that � changes in your thinking or memory treatment week. � confusion Your healthcare provider will continue to monitor your � health during the 2 yearly treatment courses, and for changes in your personality at least another 2 years during which you do not need o liver problems. MAVENCLAD may cause liver problems. to take MAVENCLAD. It is not known if MAVENCLAD is Your healthcare provider should do blood tests to safe and effective in people who restart MAVENCLAD check your liver before you start taking MAVENCLAD. treatment more than 2 years after completing 2 yearly Call your healthcare provider right away if you have treatment courses. any of the following symptoms of liver problems: What are the possible side effects of MAVENCLAD? • nausea MAVENCLAD can cause serious side effects, including: • vomit ing o See “What is the most important information • stoma ch pain I should know about MAVENCLAD?” • tiredness o l ow blood cell counts. Low blood cell counts have • loss of appetite happened and can increase your risk of infections during your treatment with MAVENCLAD. Your • your skin or the whites of your eyes turn yellow healthcare provider will do blood tests before • dark urine you start treatment with MAVENCLAD, during your treatment with MAVENCLAD, and afterward, o allergic reactions (hypersensitivities). MAVENCLAD as needed. can cause serious allergic reactions. Stop your treatment with MAVENCLAD and go to the closest o serious infections such as: emergency room for medical help right away if you • TB, hepatitis B or C, and shingles (herpes zoster). have any signs or symptoms of allergic reactions. Fatal cases of TB and hepatitis have happened Symptoms of an allergic reaction may include: skin with cladribine during clinical studies. Tell your rash, swelling or itching of the face, lips, tongue or healthcare provider right away if you get any throat, or trouble breathing. symptoms of the following infection related problems or if any of the symptoms get worse, including: o heart failure. MAVENCLAD may cause heart failure, � which means your heart may not pump as well as fever it should. Call your healthcare provider or go to the � aching painful muscles closest emergency room for medical help right away � headache if you have any signs or symptoms such as shortness of breath, a fast or irregular heart beat, or unusual � feeling of being generally unwell swelling in your body. Your healthcare provider may � loss of appetite delay or completely stop treatment with MAVENCLAD if you have severe side effects. � burning, tingling, numbness or itchiness of the skin in the affected area The most common side effects of AVENCLADM include: � skin blotches, blistered rash and severe pain o upper respiratory infection • progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). o headache PML is a rare brain infection that usually leads to o low white blood cell counts death or severe disability. Although PML has not been seen in MS patients taking MAVENCLAD, it may These are not all the possible side effects of MAVENCLAD. happen in people with weakened immune systems. Call your doctor for medical advice about side effects. Symptoms of PML get worse over days to weeks. You may report side effects to FDA at 1-800-FDA-1088. Call your healthcare provider right away if you have Distributed by: EMD Serono, Inc., Rockland, MA 02370 any new or worsening neurologic signs or symptoms MAVENCLAD is a registered trademark of Merck KGaA, of PML, that have lasted several days, including: Darmstadt, Germany. � weakness on 1 side of your body For more information, call toll-free 1-877-447-3243 � loss of coordination in your arms and legs or go to www.mavenclad.com

©2019 EMD Serono, Inc. All rights reserved. US/CLA/0619/0371 Printed in USA 07/19 struggles to express themselves freely in at the café, she encounters Ryan (Bo Burn- (Angela Bassett), but, in his excitement, he white-run media, the overlapping quests ham), a doctor and former classmate, but has a fatal accident, and his soul ascends to for economic and political power, and the struggles to confide in him about the past. As a grandiose yet rigidly bureaucratic place in government persecution endured by Black Cassie’s schemes become more complex and the sky where character traits and personal activists. The foursome’s mounting conflicts violent, the tale grows diabolically clever yet identities are assigned. Joe’s soul wants to get lay bare crucial historical fault lines; the cartoonishly exaggerated—her machinations, home for the gig, and, aided by a rebellious fervent performances, which King passion- implying the skills of both a secret agent and soul (Tina Fey), he escapes; back in the city ately and probingly spotlights, match the a crime boss, just happen. The film’s writer through some posthumous trickery, he learns momentousness of the high-stakes dialectical and director, Emerald Fennell, suggests that valuable lessons about his wonderful life. wrangling.—R.B. (In limited theatrical release.) extreme measures are needed to achieve even The movie’s depiction of an afterlife that’s minimal justice; Cassie’s history and ongo- run like a corporation is as chilling as its ing confrontations with predators inspire message about not quitting one’s day job. Promising Young Woman righteous outrage and aching empathy, but Far from teaching children to follow their The thirtysomething Cassie (Carey Mul- her passionately solitary devotion remains dreams, the movie—directed by Pete Docter ligan), a medical-school dropout, works as abstract and impersonal.—R.B. (In limited and co-directed by Kemp Powers—advo- a barista and goes out every night to bars theatrical release.) cates leaving the dreaming to the pros.—R.B. and clubs, where she feigns drunkenness and (Streaming on Disney+.) teaches the men who pick her up a lesson about consent. The backstory eventually Soul emerges: in medical school, a female stu- Pixar’s latest creation, bouncy and earnest, is Sylvie’s Love dent—Cassie’s best friend—was raped while (like “Inside Out,” from 2015) an experiment This teeming and sprawling romantic drama, drunk and reported the crime, but the school in psychology—and, as the title suggests, written and directed by Eugene Ashe, takes took no action, and, soon thereafter, she died it’s a metaphysical one. Joe (voiced by Jamie on a mighty symbolic burden—one that by suicide. Ever since, Cassie has been im- Foxx) is a middle-school music teacher who nearly overwhelms its narrative. The ac- proving the world, one man at a time, and has long aspired to a career as a jazz pianist. tion begins in 1957, sparked by the meeting awaiting her chance for revenge; meanwhile, He gets a gig with a famous saxophonist of two young Harlem residents—Sylvie (Tessa Thompson), who works in her fa- ther’s record store and dreams of becoming a television producer, and Robert (Nnamdi WHAT TO STREAM Asomugha), a rising jazz saxophonist who takes a job in the store. Sylvie, who’s en- gaged to a promising businessman (Alano Miller), has a brief affair with Robert but loses touch with him until a chance encoun- ter, in 1962, by which time she’s married and has a child—and a successful TV ca- reer, which causes conflict at home. Ashe meticulously and lovingly re-creates the conventions and styles of glossy Hollywood dramas of that era—and re-centers them on Black characters. Embracing a large span of time and a wide scope of action, the movie rushes through its plot and keeps charac- ter development spare, but its imaginative flair packs great emotional power.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon Prime.)

This Must Be the Place This film by Paolo Sorrentino—his first fea- ture to be set outside Italy—stars Sean Penn as a creaking, middle-aged rock god of the gothic variety. Attended by his wife (Frances McDormand), he rattles around in a large Dublin house, still clothed in black, with hair of undiminished wildness. A phone call summons him to America, for the obsequies Though the screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz is in the headlines of his father; he then heads farther afield, in as the protagonist of “Mank,” it’s worth noting the more comprehen- search of the elderly Nazi who persecuted the father at Auschwitz. That solemn turn sive artistry of his younger brother, Joseph (a supporting character in of the plot feels both unearned and deeply “Mank”), who won Oscars for writing and directing the acerbic 1949 unwise, and yet, once our hero is on the road, melodrama “A Letter to Three Wives.” (It’s streaming on Amazon Sorrentino is granted ample opportunity to inspect this newfound land with his usual be- and other services.) Set in a comfortable New York suburb, the film is musement. The result is startling but slight, centered on three couples, close friends whose marital troubles (drama- and at no point are we encouraged to think of tized in flashbacks) are brought to the fore by a letter from a glamorous Penn’s character, in all its carefully controlled fragility, as less than endearing. With Judd divorcée who claims to have run off with one of the three husbands. The Hirsch, and featuring a brief performance action highlights conflicts of class and culture; the most passionate and from David Byrne, whose song of the same contentious reminiscence, involving a young salesclerk (Linda Darnell) name supplies the movie’s title. Released in 2012.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue and her boss, a middle-aged department-store owner (Paul Douglas), of 11/5/12.) (Streaming on Amazon, Tubi, and pivots on a New Year’s Eve celebration in which love and lust, pride other services.) and rage are compressed into a single mercurial encounter. A year later, 1 Mankiewicz won the same pair of Oscars for “All About Eve”; “A Letter For more reviews, visit

to Three Wives” is the deeper film.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town / EVERETT FOX 20TH CENTURY

14 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 the dining room advertise what is, in my They’re as personal to Heller as Straus- opinion, M.O.M.’s biggest draw. “Not man’s are to him: boiled in water fla- Your Grandfather’s Bagels,” they read, vored with honey instead of malt, they with “Not” crossed out. In the August of refer also to Montreal bagels (Heller his career, Strausman is chasing his youth, went to college in Canada), and are 1 attempting to re-create the bagels (plus made with flour milled from heirloom bialys) that he remembers eating as a kid. grains grown in Illinois, her home state. TABLES FOR TWO He started this quest at Freds “be- Edith was Heller’s great-aunt, who cause I was having a midlife crisis and once ran a deli in Brooklyn, and whose State of the Bagel wanting to get rid of my motorcycle,” archive of recipes, many scrawled on he told me. “Bread-making became a paper plates or napkins, inspired some The other day, hours after I’d hung up the passion because there’s an insanity about of the pop-up’s dishes, including the phone with the chef Mark Strausman, he it.” At M.O.M., he has a proper wood- smoked-trout salad, served on a bagel accidentally called me back. “Oops!” he fired bagel oven, which helps attain a with house-cultured cream cheese, sliced said. “That’s what happens when your distinctly crunchy exterior—coated in radish, and trout roe. Otherwise, Heller fingers are covered in olive oil.” Straus- toppings only lightly, and on just one aims to explore the Jewish diaspora. She man was at his new restaurant, Mark’s Off side, so as not to compete with the flavor hesitated before offering schnecken, Madison (41 Madison Avenue), which of the malt-infused dough. Straussie’s traditional German-Jewish sweet buns débuted last month near Madison Square bagels, as he calls them (available only on whose name (German for “snails”) Park. His hands have been covered in weekends), are both denser and smaller doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. “I was olive oil for most of his sixty-odd years. than most of their latter-day equiva- a little nervous that people wouldn’t get In the early nineties, the Queens native lents. The increased puffiness of bagels it and they couldn’t pronounce it,” Heller opened a series of Italian restaurants, in- is not, Strausman explained, a result of told me the other day. But, she said, “we cluding Campagna and the original Coco the broader supersize phenomenon but, want to tell stories with our food.” Pazzo. In 1996, he created Freds at Bar- rather, of technological advancement; Edith’s schnecken encase sour cher- neys, turning it into an institution with to make bagels automatically, you need ries and Turkish pistachios, or honey satellites in Beverly Hills and Chicago. a wetter dough or else the machine will seasoned with the paprika-forward Last year, Barneys went bankrupt, jam. More water means more fuel for Middle Eastern spice mix baharat. But and Strausman was let go. Never mind: yeast, which means more rising and ex- perhaps the best represented of the plan- he was already hard at work on Mark’s panding. Strausman is preserving the et’s scattered populations of Jews is the Off Madison, which he abbreviates dying art of hand-rolling. one right here in New York, in the form as M.O.M., to emphasize the Jew- So, too, is a young woman named of a bagel sandwich called the BEC&L. ish-mother theme. Devotees of Freds Elyssa Heller, across the river, at her That’s “B” for bacon (with apologies to will be delighted to find many of its sig- indefinitely running pop-up, Edith’s the rebbes), paired with egg, Cheddar nature dishes resurrected here, including (60 Greenpoint Avenue, Brooklyn, in cheese, and a gloriously crispy, thick the chopped chicken salad (with avo- the pizzeria Paulie Gee’s), which offers golden latke. (Mark’s Off Madison bagel cado, string beans, and pears), Estelle’s what you might call your great-great- platters $22-$38. Edith’s bagel sandwiches chicken soup, and bolognese lasagna. But grandmother’s bagels—hand-rolled but $10.50-$12.50.)

PHOTOGRAPH BY CASSIDY TURNER FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW TURNER FOR CASSIDY BY PHOTOGRAPH hand-painted letters on a glass wall in also twisted, as in Old World Poland. —Hannah Goldfield

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 15 In case you’re a food person.

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Head to trycvr.co/newyorker to order. COMMENT Spouse, and he and Harris will be the the Obama Administration, she and Jill LADIES AND GENTLEMEN first interracial couple in their position. teamed up to create Joining Forces, an And yet, if Emhoff is an unconven- initiative that offers support to military “ ey, Dr. Biden, how are you— tional figure, it is mostly because his families—as bipartisan a project as one Hhow’re you doing?” the driver of wife is one on a more historic scale: the could imagine. The incoming Admin- a Teamsters Local 633 pickup truck first woman and the first person of color istration disabled its Web site within called out cheerfully to Jill Biden, Ed.D., elected to the Vice-Presidency. The re- hours of Trump’s Inauguration; Jill Biden one day this fall when she was cam- actions to Jill Biden and Doug Emhoff plans to revive it. (Emhoff has said that paigning for her husband in New raise different, if related, questions. In he is considering working on food in- Hampshire. The other occupants of the her case, it’s how her simple wish to be security or access to the justice system.) truck offered similar greetings. In re- known by a title she earned could ex- But women’s experience of first hav- cent days, the soon-to-be First Lady’s cite such fury. For Emhoff, it’s what it ing their credentials ignored and then use of the title “Dr.” has inspired an un- means to say that a successful, white being mocked if they assert them is all accountable spate of anger on the right. corporate lawyer still has new barriers too familiar, in almost every arena. That In a Wall Street Journal opinion piece, to break. is doubly true for women of color; Har- Joseph Epstein wrote that it “sounds One explanation for the scorn di- ris is a U.S. senator and a former attor- and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch rected at Jill Biden is that our political ney general of California, but Donald comic.” Tucker Carlson, on Fox, called culture is so unhinged that anybody Trump has portrayed her as pushy, dis- her “poor, illiterate Jill Biden.” Yet the close to a President-elect gets pelted likable, and alien, drawing on the most Teamsters, like any number of people with whatever material is available, tedious racist and sexist tropes. “Ka- whom Biden has encountered in the whether it makes sense or not. Michelle maala. Kamala,” he said at a rally in Oc- political world and in academia over Obama, after all, was attacked for want- tober, mangling each syllable. “You know, the years, had no problem using the ing to plant a vegetable garden. During if you don’t pronounce her name exactly honorific. (The community-college stu- right, she gets very angry at you.” dents she teaches call her Dr. B.) The Nor is it incidental that both Epstein only novel aspect of the encounter in and Carlson suggested that the topic of New Hampshire came when she ges- Biden’s dissertation, which has what Ep- tured to a man standing next to her and stein called an “unpromising title”—it’s asked, “You met Doug, right? Every- “Student Retention at the Community body met Doug?” College: Meeting Students’ Needs”— They had met Doug Emhoff, the was piddling. If anything, that topic is husband of Vice-President-elect Ka- more urgent than ever. Last month, a mala Harris, and many more Ameri- study by the National Student Clear- cans will get to know him in the weeks inghouse found that community-college leading up to her swearing in, along- enrollment had fallen, in the course of side Joe Biden’s, on January 20th. When the pandemic, by almost ten per cent; Biden announced his selection of Har- among underrepresented minorities, ris as his running mate, he said that that number is close to thirty per cent. Emhoff would be a “barrier-breaker” Community colleges provide a route to as the first Second Gentleman of the the middle class for people who are low United States. He will also be the first income, the first in their family to at-

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA; ABOVE: EDWARD STEED EDWARD ABOVE: FAZENDA; JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATIONS Jewish person to be a Second (or First) tend college, immigrants, single parents,

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 17 or all of the above. When Joe Biden was (Tipper Gore, Laura Bush, Karen supporting can be an act of strength, Vice-President, Jill Biden taught at Pence), a J.D. (Hillary Clinton, Mi- for a man as well as for a woman. Northern Virginia Community Col- chelle Obama), or a Ph.D. (Lynne Emhoff has won praise and ardent lege, becoming the first known sitting Cheney). Emhoff was involved in liti- fans for doing something that should Second Lady to hold a full-time paid gation surrounding the Taco Bell Chi- not be extraordinary: expressing pride job. She has written that it was easy for huahua; Michelle Obama once pro- in his wife’s achievements. O, The Oprah her Secret Service agents to blend in at tected the intellectual property of Magazine, after reviewing Emhoff ’s the college, because the average age of Barney the Dinosaur. The “traditional” social-media posts—photographs of the students was twenty-eight. Her plan picture has long been outdated; per- Harris next to an airport shop display is to teach as First Lady, too. haps an advantage of being a gentle- that includes a book she wrote, of a TV Emhoff will also be teaching, in his man, rather than a lady, is not being screen on which an interview of her is case a course on entertainment law at told to pretend otherwise. playing, and of himself wearing a Har- Georgetown University. (“Just call him Harris and Emhoff found each other ris campaign hoodie—declared him to professor Doug Emhoff,” a story in relatively late in life, when both were be “the ultimate hype-man we all de- People began, though he will techni- in their forties. She had not been mar- serve in a partner.” That is as good a cally be a lecturer—a reminder that ti- ried before; he was divorced, and his summation as any of the aspiration for tles come more easily in some cases two children call Harris “Momala.” ordinary decency—something that has than in others.) He is leaving behind (Stepparents are not new in First and often seemed out of reach in Trump’s a partnership at the international law Second Families; the list includes not Washington. Perhaps Emhoff ’s radical firm DLA Piper. Still, in terms of qual- only Jill Biden but Melania Trump, task is to remind people that respect ifications, he is not an outlier. Since Nancy Reagan—and George Wash- for a woman’s career and credentials can 1993, every First and Second Spouse, ington.) Emhoff has said that his role be something quite normal. He can al- with the exception of Melania Trump, is not to be Harris’s adviser but to “sup- ways ask Dr. Jill Biden for advice. has had an advanced degree: a master’s port her.” His useful message is that —Amy Davidson Sorkin

BERKSHIRE COUNTY POSTCARD idemiologists, physicians, and statisti- is 100% against herd immunity! Our NAME GAME cians, as well as a stray philosopher, town’s name has been hijacked!” a local published a report called the “Great posted on the town’s Facebook page. Barrington Declaration.” “The Declaration has absolutely noth- Sponsored by the American Insti- ing to do with GB. I wonder if it’s even tute for Economic Research, a libertar- legal to use GB’s name in a case like ian think tank based in the town, the this,” another wrote, adding, “Why not declaration argues against lockdowns issue something called the Great Bar- teve Bannon wasn’t angry, but he and in favor of a strategy of herd im- rington Nazi Party Declaration and put Swas very disappointed. “You know, munity as a way to contain the corona- swastikas on it.” Mostly, residents were I’m pretty low-key,” he said one recent virus. Its chief signatories are professors worried that tourists would stay away— evening. “And I think my instinctive re- at Stanford, Harvard, and Oxford, the or, worse, turn up without masks. Leigh action was ‘I really wish they had not last of whom asserted in May that covid Davis, a select-board member, drafted done this to our town.’ Because I love was “on its way out” in the United King- an angry letter to the A.I.E.R., protest- our town, and we didn’t deserve it.” He dom. The document immediately at- ing its “despoiling of our town’s good was sipping hot chocolate outside a busy tracted international attention. Chris name.” The select board decided against café in Great Barrington. “And I must Whitty, England’s chief medical adviser, publishing it, on the ground that it was tell you, with my name,” he added, “it told a parliamentary committee that it too harsh. seemed like a double whammy.” was “scientifically weak, probably dan- Instead, town leaders fell back on a Bannon, who frequently receives “very gerously flawed, operationally imprac- tried-and-true strategy: painting things. nasty” e-mails meant for the right-wing tical, and, I think personally, ethically a In May, they had tried to send a hope- political operative, is a pharmacist and little difficult.” Tedros Adhanom Ghe- ful message by adding rainbow stripes the chair of the select board in Great breyesus, the World Health Organiza- to a number of Main Street crosswalks. Barrington, a town of around seven thou- tion’s director-general, said that it was In July, a local youth group painted a sand souls in the corner of the Berkshires “scientifically and ethically problematic.” colorful Black Lives Matter mural in a where Massachusetts meets Connecti- Anthony Fauci dismissed it as “ridicu- prominent alleyway. After the declara- cut and New York. A popular second- lous.” The White House embraced it. tion was published, the town stencilled home spot for New York City residents, For the people of Great Barrington, sidewalks with reminders to social-dis- the town was until recently best known it was the declaration’s title that caused tance and wear masks. “We have been to city dwellers as the nearest place with anguish. They saw it as a slur, in the way very proactive,” Bannon said. a full-service pot dispensary. But that that Mike Pompeo’s insistence on calling The select board also tried to disso- distinction was overshadowed in Oc- SARS-CoV-2 the “Wuhan virus” vilified ciate itself from the declaration. “We’re tober, when more than three dozen ep- China. “The town of Great Barrington not a town that does a lot of national

18 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 press releases,” Bannon said. But, for this, “we put out two international press releases.” The first, published in Octo- ber, made the point that “the town it- self had no role in, or forewarning of, the declaration bearing the town’s name.” A second was addressed to the A.I.E.R.: “Your co-opting of our town’s name .. . is exploitative and unwel- come.” Mark Pruhenski, the town man- ager, wrote a letter to the Guardian, lamenting that the A.I.E.R. “has caused immeasurable distress to many in our community and confused many others about our town’s safety.” The last time the town made the national news was in 2012, when Bill O’Reilly, then still at Fox News, called it “the town that hates Christmas,” claiming that it had banned festive lights on Main Street. O’Reilly had first picked on the town in 2007, when the select board imposed an ordinance mandat- ing that Christmas lights be turned off at 10 p.m., to save energy. Great Bar- rington weathered those unwelcome “Hon, it’s not daytime yet. Those are just moments in the limelight. Residents our neighbor’s Christmas lights.” are hoping that this one, too, shall pass. Ed Abrahams, another select-board member, gave an interview to the Berk- •• shire Edge, an online newspaper, in which he pointed out that “the Paris N.Y.U. One night, he and some fel- play anything. “I have a very spongy Accords were signed in Paris and I don’t low-students were recruited to work as brain,” he said the other day. “If I’ve think the people of Paris formally ap- runners at the reopening of the night heard it, I can play it. Until recently, my proved that document.” He added that club Limelight. The naked-but-for- fans didn’t know I had these skills.” Ralph Lauren had once marketed a line body-paint dance troupe being late, the These fans, who include Bruce Spring- of bedding named for Great Barrington. students, attired in black turtlenecks steen, Elton John, and Barack Obama, “Though it’s possible,” the Edge noted, and slacks, were asked to improvise some will now guess, correctly, that this Pan- “those pillow shams and dust ruffles are moves. Our honoree, dutifully Dieter- demic Person of the Year is Adam Weiner, named after the village of Great Bar- ing, looked down from the stage and the songwriter, singer, piano player, and rington in Gloucestershire, England, saw Donald Trump: “He was staring chief showman behind the band—and from which the southern Berkshire directly at me, with a look on his face occasional solo act—Low Cut Connie. County town derives its name.” that said, ‘What is this garbage?’” His sixth album, “Private Lives,” came 1—Leo Mirani This was his second encounter with out this fall. One track, “Look What the future President. When he was nine They Did,” laments the mess that Trump YEAR’S BEST or so, his parents took him, as they often and others left behind in Atlantic City. TOUGH COOKIE did, to Atlantic City. “We’re in the Taj The album has had some chart success Mahal, and Trump shows up, with Marla and has made (and even topped) some Maples. And so I—and I don’t remem- year-end best lists. And yet, for what- ber doing this, my parents tell this sto- ever reason, Weiner, who is forty, has ry—I stood on my chair and yelled out, never had a record deal. (Several albums ‘Hey, asshole! Fuck you!’” ago, he started his own label.) In New York, our awardee worked What has enabled him to show off oday’s Pandemic Person of the Year around town as a pianist, eventually his spongy brain, as well as his chops Tstarted out as a cross-eyed boy in under the stage name Ladyfingers; for and his bountiful good vibes—Little Cherry Hill, New Jersey, with a bully- a time, he had a regular gig at a now Richard meets Mr. Rogers, maybe—is able surname and actorly dreams. He defunct gay bar called Pegasus, across his twice-weekly interactive live stream, moved to New York in 1998 to enroll from Bloomingdale’s. They hired him called “Tough Cookies,” which he began in the Experimental Theatre Wing at because he looked good, but he could in March. Deprived of the thrill and

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 19 ing, no makeup, just chest hair hanging watching them make it rain.” Across out. It ain’t shit.” He interviews guests: Convent Avenue was his elementary Darlene Love, Dion, Nils Lofgren, Nick school, where Spike Lee shot exteriors Hornby. Mathew Knowles, Beyoncé’s for “Jungle Fever.” dad, came on to talk about the checkered Harlem and the movies are all tan- role, in the industry, of skin complexion. gled up for Ashe, especially now that The death of George Floyd, and the he has written and directed “Sylvie’s tumult that followed, brought some Love,” a romantic drama set in the late extra seriousness to the proceedings, but fifties and early sixties, which will be the aim remained uplift. After almost released on Amazon this week. Tessa seventy episodes, Weiner has played Thompson plays the title character, a some six hundred covers, sometimes in young woman who works at her father’s medley—say, “War Pigs” into “Macho record store, where she meets a hand- Man”—and a hundred originals. A dis- some jazz saxophonist named Robert quisition on the origins of Cardi B’s (Nnamdi Asomugha). Ashe, who is soft- “WAP” one night took him back to 1929, spoken, with stubble and catlike eyes, to “Wet It,” by the female imperson- said that he wanted to emulate the big- ator Frankie (Half Pint) Jaxon. screen romances of the era—“Breakfast Adam Weiner “I feel like I left the music business at Tiffany’s,” “That Touch of Mink”— and I’m in the entertainment business,” but with Black characters. “When we the income of performing live, he started Weiner said. “I feel like I have my own talk about the sixties and Black folks, broadcasting from the guest room of TV show.” He was sort of amazed that it’s often framed through our adversity,” his row house, in South Philadelphia. he hadn’t heard from HBO. he said. “What I saw growing up was “We had no plan,” he said. He’d The owner of Mimi’s, a piano bar in very different.” driven up to Manhattan to accept the midtown, let him in out of the cold, Ashe was born in 1965, and the char- honor, in a midtown pocket park. He and Weiner noodled on the keys, under acters are loosely inspired by his parents, had on a black hoodie, a jean jacket, a plaque that read “What is your favor- Vinnie and Dolores. Near St. Nicholas faded black jeans, and a silver mask, ite song?” He found this one hard to Park, where Sidney Poitier once filmed which seemed almost to reach the front answer. Prince? “Stardust”? “Maybe a scene for “Edge of the City,” he pointed edge of his Jerry Lee Lewis curls. “We Aretha: ‘Niki Hoeky.’” out the building where he lived until he just turned the phones on and hung out. Later, outside Mimi’s, a decked-out was eight, across a courtyard from his And there was no audience or laughter figure in high heels, of indeterminate grandmother’s place. “They used to run or applause. I didn’t know how many everything, strutted past. Weiner’s eyes, a clothesline, and my grandmother would people were watching or if they’d like visible between mask and pompadour, wash my brother’s and my clothes,” he it. All I knew was that at the end of the followed. “That’s what I miss about recalled. The neighborhood, in the pre- hour I was lying on the floor in my un- New York,” he said. “The mystery.” crack years, had a swanky middle class. derwear, covered in sweat.” The next 1—Nick Paumgarten In “Sylvie’s Love,” the colors are saturated, stream attracted a hundred and fifty the clothes elegant. (Chanel lent five thousand views. Realizing that this was THE PICTURES dresses.) “I wanted to see ‘Ms. Thomp- going to become a regular thing, he HARLEM TIME T R AVEL son’s gowns by Chanel’ in the credits,” christened it “Tough Cookies.” “I named Ashe said. it after the people who watch it,” he Because of Thompson’s schedule, said. Among them were nurses in Covid he couldn’t shoot on location, so he wards who pinned their phones, in zip- re-created Harlem on Hollywood back locks, to the wall, and viewers in more lots, taking visual cues from old fam- than forty countries, including Leba- ily photos. He pulled one up on his non and Afghanistan. hen the filmmaker Eugene Ashe phone: his father in front of a blue tail- “Tough Cookies” is a homespun va- Wwas growing up, in Harlem, he finned Chevy, with Ashe’s older brother, riety show: music, comedy, interviews, watched Sidney Lumet shooting “Ser- Tony, in a kid-size suit from Barneys. spieling, shvitzing, stripping. Dressed in pico” in his neighborhood. “It was the “This is what Black folks looked like,” a white tank top, or his grandfather’s ma- scene where Al Pacino got shot in the Ashe said. His mother’s cousin Juanita roon Pierre Cardin bathrobe, surrounded face, and they took him into the emer- Hardy was Poitier’s first wife, and Ashe by oddments and schwag, Weiner hams gency room,” he said the other day, walk- remembers visiting them in Pleasant- it up on an upright piano, accompanied ing past the old Knickerbocker Hospi- ville, in Westchester County. “There’d by a guitar player, Will Donnelly, who tal, now a senior-citizen residence. He be all kinds of people there, like Ossie keeps the beat with a stomp box under pointed to the rooftop where he had Davis and Ruby Dee,” he said. Sylvie, one foot and a tambourine on the other. perched, as the movie people created a after breaking up with Robert, moves “We shoot it on our phones,” Weiner said. fake downpour: “I remember being to the suburbs with her husband, who “I don’t even use a mike. There’s no light- seven years old and sitting there and disapproves of her burgeoning televi-

20 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 sion career. Ashe’s mother also worked, SKETCHPAD BY JEREMY NGUYEN at a telephone company. “I don’t think my mother was going to be happy sit- ting around being a housewife,” he said. His parents split up when he was thir- teen: like the movie, a not quite happy love story. “You look at these old pic- tures and you wonder. It looks so idyl- lic, right?” Walking through City College, he squinted at a photo of his mother on the campus, posing with his brother’s baby carriage near a bust of Lincoln. Ashe stopped a passerby and asked, “Do you have any idea where the Lincoln head is?” “It’s inside the building now,” the woman said, nodding toward Shepard Hall. “His nose is completely polished, because the students rub it for good luck.” The campus was shut down, so Ashe ambled on to Hamilton Terrace, a brownstone-lined street. “This is what I was going for, when Robert walks Syl- vie home,” he said. After studying at Parsons School of Design, Ashe began working at an interior-design firm, but found it “boring.” In the early nineties, his life took an unexpected turn toward R. & B. stardom, when his cousin, tapped by the C+C Music Factory producer David Cole, started a Boyz II Men copy- cat group, called the Funky Poets, and got Ashe to join. They had a track on the “Free Willy” soundtrack and a spot on “The Arsenio Hall Show” (“which thrilled my dad”), but Ashe didn’t like the attention. “When you are the soap that you’re selling, it’s a lot to deal with,” he said. The group’s record deal lapsed, but he transitioned to writing music for TV shows such as “Oz.” En route to becoming a filmmaker, he opened two restaurants on the West Side, Réunion Surf Bar and Playa Betty’s, which he’s been struggling to keep afloat during the pandemic. Rounding back onto Convent, Ashe looked wistful. His brother had died the day before, from cancer, years after he was a first responder at Ground Zero. He got to see “Sylvie’s Love” in his last months. “He’s a big history buff, so he really dug it,” Ashe said. “But he lives on in these photographs and the mem- ory of this time. There were four of us: my mom, my dad, me, and my brother. And I’m the only one left.” —Michael Schulman eating in terrifying, beaky thrusts. An- PROFILES other was an infomercial for a minia- ture staircase that people can put next to their ears at night, so that their dreams EXTRAORDINARY ALIEN can come out and dance, to prevent headaches. Speaking about his unmade The otherworldly comedy of Julio Torres. pieces, Torres told me, “I have mourned every loss.” BY MICHAEL SCHULMAN But the ones that made it to air were strange and fanciful enough to earn him a cult following—rare for a writer who doesn’t appear on the show. In “Papyrus,” Ryan Gosling plays a man haunted by the fact that the movie “Av- atar” used the Papyrus font for its logo. “Wells for Boys,” a mock Fisher-Price commercial, features a toy well, meant for “sensitive boys” to sit beside long- ingly and wish upon. (“Some boys live unexamined lives,” a voice-over says, “but this one’s heart is full of questions.”) Torres, who grew up gay in El Salva- dor, wrote “Wells for Boys” with Jer- emy Beiler, who helped shape his ab- stract concept into the fake-ad format. “We couldn’t quite pinpoint what was so funny about it,” Beiler told me. “But that to me was a signal that it was ab- solutely worth pursuing.” Even Torres’s political humor had a whiff of fairy tale. The first sketch he got on the air was “Melania Moments,” in 2017, which re- cast the new First Lady as a sort of cap- tive princess, gazing out at Fifth Ave- nue from Trump Tower and wondering if a Sixth Avenue exists. (He lost in- terest in Melania’s inner life after she wore the “I REALLY DON’T CARE DO U?” jacket on her way to an immigrant- detention center.) here once was a chandelier at the short that Julio Torres pitched again Torres, who is thirty-three, is more TMetropolitan Opera who thought and again at “Saturday Night Live,” attuned to the visual world than most that the audience was applauding just where he worked as a writer from 2016 comedians. His imagination is a comic for him. The chandelier fell in love with to 2019. The piece never got made, be- synesthesia, assigning anthropomorphic one of the janitors, a man named Rocco, cause it presented practical problems. traits to colors, objects, and design flaws. and wanted only Rocco to change his The show would need to take over the Another digital short was inspired by bulbs. Rocco returned the chandelier’s Met for an evening. Also, a lot of “Sat- a visit to a bland, newly renovated apart- love, but when his boss found out about urday Night Live” sketches are tailored ment on the Upper East Side. When the affair he was fired. Late one night, to the celebrity guest hosts, and, as Tor- he used the bathroom, he was appalled Rocco broke into the Met and stole the res said recently, “one of the pivotal flaws by the ornate green glass sink. “My world chandelier. They settled into Rocco’s in ‘The Chandelier’ is that there was was rocked,” he said. “I took, like, thirty apartment, blissful in their union, the no juicy human role.” Many of his re- pictures of it.” At “S.N.L.,” he wrote an chandelier’s light blazing through the jected ideas dwelled in the surreal, closer internal monologue for the sink (“Am window onto the street below. to Ovid or Gabriel García Márquez I too much? Oh, my God. I’m simply This peculiar romance is not from a than to “Dick in a Box.” In one, a man too much”) and had the crew return to magical-realist novel or a quarantine goes to Heaven and discovers that the the apartment to film it. That week’s fever dream. It’s an idea for a digital angels act like birds, building nests and host, Emily Blunt, did the trembly voice- over. “She can play damaged very well,” Torres has an “ethereal, gossamer quality,” “S.N.L.” ’s Bowen Yang observed. Torres said.

22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BRANDON GEETING Last year, Torres left “S.N.L.” to focus budget allows, arena-rock effects (Kevin when he dressed up as a gem miner. on “Los Espookys,” the outré HBO sit- Hart). But Torres approaches comedy On a sofa was a throw pillow made com that he created with the comedian like an inspiration board. Describing an of clear plastic filled with shredded Ana Fabrega and Fred Armisen, a for- idea for a future special about fables, he Mylar, designed by someone he had met mer “S.N.L.” cast member. Torres plays told me, “The set is a garden, and there’s through Instagram. I remarked that, if the heir to a chocolate fortune, who goes a pond. Maybe there are clouds painted, Torres were a pillow, he would be this into business with his friends producing and then I walk about the garden and one. “Yes,” he said. “Impractical. A pil- custom horror and gore effects. (In the talk about the fables.” He had not writ- low by definition, but not in execution. pilot, a priest hires the gang to stage an ten any of the fables. One of his few sty- A pillow, because what else are you going exorcism so that he can show up a younger listic antecedents is Pee-wee Herman, to call it?” rival priest.) The series, which is bilingual, the antic character played by Paul Reu- premièred in 2019; the second season bens, who inhabited a candy-colored play- “ os Espookys,” set in an unnamed is in pandemic limbo. Armisen told me house. Pee-wee’s hyperactivity matched LLatin-American country, is shot that, before he started working with Tor- his visual maximalism, though; Torres in Santiago, Chile. The series originated res, he would call his friends at “S.N.L.” has a deadpan stillness at odds with his with Armisen, who had been thinking to ask who was behind certain sketches. twink-from-space look. On the “Tonight about creating a show in Spanish. His “Most of the time, it turned out to be Show,” he has appeared, unsmiling, to mother is Venezuelan, and his family Julio,” he said. give Jimmy Fallon suggestions for Hal- lived in Brazil for a time when he was Torres has a boyish face, a small, fit loween costumes (“the lost city of Atlan- growing up. “There was a real obses- torso that he flaunts on Instagram (his tis”) and Christmas gifts (“a music box sion with death,” Armisen recalled. “I handle is @spaceprincejulio), and the that can only be locked from the inside, remember soap operas had a sort of self-possession of an oracle. The “Sat- by the ballerina”). morbid element.” After visiting Mex- urday Night Live” cast member Bowen I first met Torres in late 2019, in ico City several years ago, he got inter- Yang spoke of his “ethereal, gossamer the pre-COVID world, at his apartment ested in the Latin goth scene and, draw- quality.” Armisen compared Torres’s in Williamsburg. He had lived there ing on a range of tonal influences, from “outer space” aura to that of the Ice- only four months, but the living room “Twin Peaks” to “The Monkees,” came landic musician Björk. In Torres’s HBO looked art-directed: blue lighting that up with a show about a “Scooby-Doo”- special, “My Favorite Shapes,” which made it feel like the inside of a fish- type gang that stages horror scenes. was released in 2019, Torres sits on a bowl, metallic statement lamps, a wavy Armisen gave himself the part of a dreamlike pastel set, and, as small items sectional. Torres sat beneath a circular mustachioed valet and brought in Tor- come out on a conveyor belt, he nar- mirror, near a row of delicate-looking res and Fabrega to write and star along- rates their inner thoughts. A pink rect- ceramic hooks made by a friend. “I love side him. He had imagined one mem- angle with a chipped corner is “hav- them, because, if you were to use them, ber of the gang being able to sculpt ing a really bad day.” An oval is prone they would break,” he said. “So, instead prosthetics out of chocolate. Torres to gazing at its reflection, “wishing he of me putting them through the pain spun the character, Andrés, into a were a circle.” The conceit sounds twee, of failing, they’re just arranged together. “pouty little prince,” and pushed the but Torres’s delivery has the matter- They’re like actors, I guess. Fragile lit- humor into the mystical. In the first of-factness of a child describing the tle things.” season, Andrés has visions of a water secret lives of his toys. He appears in Torres wore blue socks, a black shirt, demon (played by Torres’s former his space-prince guise: bleached hair, and a sky-print jacket with a clear roommate, the nonbinary comedian silver jacket, see-through vinyl shoes. breast pocket, which held a watch. He Spike Einbinder), who promises to re- “My favorite color is clear,” he tells the had worn the watch on his commute veal the secret of Andrés’s origins if he audience, as a replica of Cinderella’s to the “Los Espookys” writers’ room agrees to watch “The King’s Speech.” glass slipper comes down the track. that morning but had taken it off to Fabrega told me that, while the sec- When he started doing standup com- work. (“I can’t think when I have stuff ond season was being written,“Julio edy, he wore only black, but gradually on my hands.”) The watch, like all was, like, ‘I want to have the moon be he has expanded his palette to include three of his wall clocks, was broken. Andrés’s friend that does him favors.’ white, silver, clear, and blue. His hair “It’s a symptom of a bigger problem, And we were, like, ‘O.K.’” functions as a mood ring. When he which is I never know where I’m sup- Torres dyed his hair midnight blue got melanoma a few years ago, he dyed posed to be or what I’m supposed to for the role, “to trick the eye into think- it from white back to its natural brown, be doing,” he said. He led me into his ing I’m acting.” (While shooting the because, he recalls thinking, “blond me small office, where the desk was strewn first season, he left blue stains all over can’t handle this.” with spherical dice, an ostrich figu- the furniture of his Airbnb.) The color Standup comedy favors minimalism: rine, a squiggly metal brooch. (Squig- complemented his air of wintry inac- a bare stage, a microphone, and outfits gly shapes, he said, were “a constant cessibility, but, when I met him one that range from casual to barely out of for the time being.”) “And then you day in the dead of January, his hair was bed. Its optical elements are usually lim- can never have enough of these,” he sunset orange. “For such a big chunk ited to wacky props (Carrot Top), rub- said, spilling out a cache of plastic of my comedy career, I was very into ber faces (Leslie Jones), or, when the diamonds left over from Halloween, the idea of ice and diamonds and silver,”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 23 he explained. “And now I’m feeling a handbags that resemble seashells or A large chunk of his time was spent little warmer. I feel like lava.” open eyes. For “My Favorite Shapes,” on Barbies. Unhappy with Mattel’s pre- We were at Mood Fabrics, a store they made digital renderings of the set, made Dream Houses, he enlisted his in the garment district. Torres visits which Torres reviewed in New York. mother to make customized homes out several times a year, to pick out mate- Marta recalled, “Every time we would of cardboard. “I wanted circular win- rials for his wardrobe. He then deliv- send him something, he was, like, ‘More dows and for the doors to open a cer- ers the fabrics to a tailor in San Salva- shapes! More levels!’” tain way, so she made them per my dor, where his mother, Tita, an architect At the fabric store, Torres placed his specifications, setting me on this life- and designer, still lives and can oversee finds at the cash register and kept brows- long journey of being, like, ‘If it doesn’t the fabrication process. “Then we ex- ing. He refuses to use credit cards (“I exist, I have to create it,’” he said. (At periment, with, like, a sixty-per-cent just don’t like games”) and, for a time, “Saturday Night Live,” he channelled success rate,” Torres said, wandering shut down his bank account. “At that his Barbie obsession into a recurring the aisles. He was there to select ma- point, I had, like, forty dollars,” he said. sketch in which interns at Mattel write terials for his summer attire, anticipat- He surveyed the brocade aisle. The store captions for Barbie’s Instagram account.) ing a months-long turnaround. He eyed was closing soon, and he was getting His parents encouraged his nontradi- some shimmering silk. “Normally I’d impatient. “There’s something that we’re tional interests. “It gave him the power be, like, ‘This,’” he said. “But now I’m just not finding,” he said. “I’m vibing to be different against the world,” his not feeling too shiny.” with flowers a lot, but I hate florals.” sister said. On the second floor, he gravitated Finally, he spied a brocade with a blue- When Torres was eleven, his grand- toward a roll of neon-orange neoprene. and-green watercolor pattern. He pulled father died, leaving crippling debts, “Could be some fun shorts,” he said, the bolt from the shelf and felt the cloth which his father inherited. His moth- and asked an employee to cut him a between his fingers. “A floral that’s not er’s store went out of business, and the strip. We walked through the spandex a floral!” he said. “It does exist.” family had to move to a farmhouse aisle, where he took a swath of purple where Tita had been brought up, on mesh. “I have tried to make swimwear,” orres’s unlikely rise was foretold the outskirts of the city. Torres was prone he said. “Micromanaging the fit of a Tshortly after his birth, when a for- to allergies and developed a respiratory Speedo long distance is very difficult.” tune-teller informed his grandmother condition. He hated the outdoors. And But difficulty seemed to be the point: that one of her descendants would be- he no longer had his mother’s seam- why buy a pair of shorts when you can come a success in New York City. The stresses at his beck and call. “It was al- make your own across hemispheres? grandmother claimed the prophecy for most like that little kingdom came tum- “It’s something that comes up in ther- several of her grandchildren, but Tita bling down,” he said. He thinks of “My apy a lot—not always having to pick was convinced that it was about her six- Favorite Shapes” as a way of “claiming the harder way,” Torres said. In a few month-old son. She had visited New back my childhood, like: ‘I want to go days, he was leaving for Chile, which York while pregnant, not long after an back in that little room and just play, had erupted in civil unrest, to begin earthquake devastated San Salvador. without worrying about other stuff.’” filming the second season of “Los Tita loved science fiction and Brazil- As an adolescent, he became with- Espookys.” The whole series felt like ian telenovelas, which often feature fan- drawn and dressed plainly, as if in hi- an act of ostentatious difficulty: a bi- tastical story lines. Torres half-remem- bernation. “Truly the dark ages,” he lingual show with a convoluted prem- bered one about a man in a dungeon recalled. “I wasn’t even an angsty teen- ise, shot in a country in the throes of whose lover is reincarnated as the moon. ager—I was a patient one.” In line with a revolution. “It’s a miracle that it was Torres was born during the last years the fortune-teller’s prophecy, he vowed made,” he said. of the Salvadoran Civil War, and he has to move to New York someday. He and “My Favorite Shapes” was also a dim memories of hiding under the din- his sister won scholarships to attend a Pan-American project. Torres enlisted ing table with his mother as helicop- private high school in San Salvador, his mother and his younger sister, Marta, ters noisily hovered. But, by his account, where their rich classmates were picked who lives in San Salvador as well, to his childhood in San Salvador was idyl- up by servants. “I got picked up by my create the look of the show, down to his lic. The family lived in a stylish apart- dad, whose car was older than I am,” two-toned blue chair and translucent ment above his mother’s clothing store. he said. “Oh, my God, the noise the car shoes. (They were credited with “Ar- (His father, also named Julio, is a civil made, pulling up to this castle.” chitecture and Overall Visual Concept,” engineer.) Tita sewed his and his sis- He knew that he was gay, but con- a designation that stumped the Emmy ter’s clothes; she told me that her chil- sidered his sexuality a “frivolity” that he committee.) “He said that we were the dren were “mis muñecas”—“my dolls.” would address only when he absolutely only ones who would understand what Torres had few friends, immersing him- had to, like going to the dentist. “It felt he wanted to do,” Tita told me, in Span- self in his toys. When his father brought like one of a myriad of things that made ish. The family shares an aesthetic lan- home miniature cars, he created elabo- me an other,” he said. He was more pre- guage, influenced by the Memphis de- rate traffic jams, mimicking the cacoph- occupied with his atheism. As a child, sign movement of the eighties, which onous streets of San Salvador, and sold he had been told the truth about Santa favors bold colors and cutout shapes; the drivers imaginary lottery tickets. “I Claus—a “politically difficult year to Tita and Marta collaborate on a line of was just in my own little world,” he said. navigate,” since some kids were still be-

24 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 lievers—and expected a similar revela- ing is for you.’ That was the moment ‘So unless anyone has any questions .. .’” tion about God to follow, but it never where I realized that New Yorker car- In 2015, his visa was about to expire. In did. After high school, unable to afford toons were based on a reality.” He wrote order to apply to stay in the country as tuition at an American college, he en- in his notebook, “Standup comedy?” a comedian, he had to pay more than rolled in a two-year advertising pro- That night, he Googled “standup com- five thousand dollars in legal and filing gram in El Salvador, at a “scam of a edy open mics NYC” and found one in fees. His new friends in the comedy nothing school” that he despised. He the East Village, where he told the coat- world, including Chris Gethard, Jo Fire- finished the program, and, while work- check story in his comedy début. stone, and Newman, made a YouTube ing at an ad agency, he gathered his rel- By then, he was living in an apart- video called “Legalize Julio,” and the atives and gave a detailed presentation ment in Bushwick with Einbinder and money was raised in an hour. His new on why they should pay for him to go another friend. Einbinder, whose mother, visa classified him as an “alien of ex- to school in New York. His second time Laraine Newman, was an original cast traordinary ability.” applying to the New School, he got a member on “Saturday Night Live,” en- Feeling liberated, he had begun significant scholarship, and in 2009 he couraged Torres’s comedy career. They dressing in silver and had dyed his hair moved to Manhattan, with enough started making funny videos, including white. Ana Fabrega, who had been money to live there for two years. “They one in which Einbinder plays a mermaid working at a credit-risk-management wanted a translation of my transcripts, intern navigating the microaggressions firm when Torres coaxed her into try- because they were in Spanish, so I trans- of office life. (Her co-workers assume ing standup comedy, recalled, “He made lated them myself and I embellished a she knows everyone in the ocean.) They it a point to say, ‘I was wearing dark bunch of courses,” he said. “And then I performed live sketches at bars and com- colors because I was absorbing, and sheepishly put it in front of the admis- edy clubs. “In one, we were bitchy lit- now I want to reflect.’” His otherworldly sions officer, and she was, like, ‘Oh, my tle angels texting on a cloud, just talking new look matched his place in the com- God, why didn’t you say you took all about how bored we were, and about a edy scene. “I realized that I was so much these courses when you applied?’ And party and who’s going to be there from of an other in that world, as much as she takes out her calculator and says, Heaven,” Einbinder recalled. “And then I had been throughout my childhood,” ‘You’re a junior, not a freshman.’ And we started spreading cream cheese all he told me. “I wanted to lean in on that: I’m, like, ‘Ooh, I guess I am.’” over ourselves.” If I’m an alien, then I will be the alien.” Torres majored in English literature Torres was a peculiar presence in the but dabbled in playwriting. Spike Ein- comedy scene, which is riddled with n February, “Los Espookys” returned binder, whom he met in a class, acted dudes in flannel shirts complaining Ito Santiago to begin production in one of his short plays, as a woman about their girlfriends. He usually read on Season 2. Because of the nation- who is obsessed with a gargoyle on the non sequiturs from a notebook, with a wide uprisings, producers had looked Chrysler Building. “There was con- flat affect. “He would always say ‘Hi’ into shooting elsewhere, but Mexico’s struction that was obscuring her apart- before he started,” Einbinder said. “And film crews were overbooked, Colom- ment’s view of it, and it made her go then, at the end, he would always say, bia was having its own protests, and crazy,” Einbinder recalled. After grad- uating, Torres had a year to get a work visa in his area of study, but no com- pany would sponsor him. By the sum- mer of 2012, he was panicking and needed to focus. He wore only black and white and became a vegan. “There was something very monklike about it,” he said. “I was, like, I need to thrive within limits.” Finally, he found a job as an art ar- chivist for the estate of the late painter John Heliker. He worked in a window- less vault in Newark, cataloguing Hel- iker’s papers. “I glamorized the optics of that job,” he said. “Solitude has never really been a problem for me. I liked how weird and difficult it was.” He had a side gig at the Neue Galerie, on the Upper East Side. Working at the coat check one day, he recalled, “I overheard this elderly rich woman tell this other elderly rich woman, ‘Oh, remind me to send you that article on how good stand- LIFE DRAWING BY EDWARD STEED

26 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 other Latin-American countries lacked Live” in 2016, as the show was feeling of that, I thought, Oh, I’m sorry, is this the infrastructure to host an HBO sit- pressure to diversify. He had applied for one of the many good jobs I’m stealing com. By March, news of the corona- a writing job and been rejected, but then from hardworking Americans?” virus was picking up, but there were was asked to audition as a cast mem- only a few cases in South America. ber. “Instead of showing a wide array ne night in May, Torres hosted a One day, a cast member who had just of characters that I could play, I just OZoom comedy benefit to help un- come from the United States found out stood there and did my standup, with documented workers during the lock- that he’d been in contact with some- glitter on my face,” he recalled. He was down, titled “My Sun in Aquarius.” A one who’d tested positive. Shooting was brought on initially as a guest writer. few minutes after eight, he appeared paused. Everyone worried—the actor’s Torres managed to float above the show’s onscreen in a psychedelic sweater, under makeup artist was an older woman, and nerve-racking backstage culture. “It’s the blue light of his living room. “The she had touched his face. The actor the tradition to wear a suit on Satur- lack of laughter is jarring,” he said, as tested negative, but “that fear was days,” Jeremy Beiler told me. “On Ju- he greeted more than two thousand enough for us to say, ‘You know what? lio’s first Saturday show, he showed up remote spectators. One by one, he sum- It’s just not worth it,’” Torres told me. in a sparkly silver jacket. I was just, like, moned an all-star roster of guest per- Production was halted, with a third of ‘Oh, that’s another way to do it.’” formers. First up was the comedian the season unfinished. Torres, along with Beiler and Bowen Nick Kroll, who was lounging in front He flew home the day that Chile Yang, who was a writer on “S.N.L.” be- of a roaring fireplace. Torres gave les- closed its borders to foreigners. In fore becoming its first Chinese-Amer- sons in “hand acting,” instructing him Brooklyn, he spent nearly three months ican cast member, helped bring a stealth to act out scenarios using only his hands, in isolation in his apartment. He bought gay aesthetic to the show. When John such as dropping a knife after commit- a new rug, a mirror in the shape of a Mulaney hosted, Yang and Torres wrote ting a murder: “But you didn’t plan for human profile, and a lamp that looks a sketch for him about a social-media the murder—it sort of just happened.” like a “blob of lava.” He had a chair re- intern at Nestlé who gets chastised for Kroll tried it, using a pen. “One thing upholstered with more floral-but-not- accidentally posting hookup messages I found missing from your knife-drop- floral fabric he’d got in the garment (“Wreck me, daddy”) on the corporate ping was regret,” Torres said, then tilted district. But his splashy summer ward- Instagram account. The sketch got cut his own camera toward his hands and robe remained unmade. He cut his hair after dress rehearsal, but, last fall, after acted the scene with quivering fingers. down to its natural dark shade. “It’s al- Torres had left “S.N.L.,” it was revived Next, he called up the actress Nata- most like my shiny performance self is for Harry Styles. Before the broadcast, sha Lyonne to discuss the personalities on hold,” he told me. “He’s asleep. My the network’s lawyers asked them not of colors, including gunmetal gray and first self is back.” to use Nestlé, an advertiser, so Yang and rose gold. (Torres: “Rose gold just moved When the Black Lives Matter pro- Torres had to brainstorm. “That was out of Stuyvesant Town or even Hobo- tests began, he went out to march in two to three hours of us just texting ken. Rose gold just got it together, and two masks and a pair of goggles. Sev- each other back and forth, putting pho- now they live in Cobble Hill.” Lyonne: eral weeks later, he was still processing tos of grilled-cheese sandwiches with “It depends what era. Did rose gold his place in his adopted country, and these raunchy captions, doing experi- leave Joan Rivers’s house and move to within the larger capitalistic forces that mental trial-and-error work,” Yang said. Miami? I don’t know.”) Fred Armisen shape the entertainment business. “I’ve They landed on Sara Lee, and the sketch played a similar game with letters of seen so many corporations—HBO in- went viral. “I feel like Julio getting hired the alphabet. “I have very strong feel- cluded—talk about how now it’s time and getting his stuff on was this huge ings about Q,” Torres proclaimed. “To to ‘elevate Black voices,’ and that got quantum leap for the show,” Yang told me, Q is misplaced in the alphabet. Q me thinking about the Hollywood fairy me. “He brought both his queerness should be all the way in the back with tale that representation equals change,” and his hyper-specific point of view, and the avant-garde X-Y-Z.” He imagined he said. “For a while, I have felt like a then he glued those two things together.” Q performing early in the evening at pawn in this hollow representation Torres is clear-eyed about his suc- a rock club, between the more main- game. Because what the hell does Dis- cess. “I’m certainly not bringing in the stream letters P and R. “Q is doing ney’s ‘Coco’ do for Mexican children? big bucks for HBO,” he told me. “It noise music, and people are, like, Whoa.” Bob Iger gets richer. That’s the climax. feels like ‘Game of Thrones’ is a rich “That is so right on,” Armisen said. And then I’m researching the C.E.O.s student, and I’m the scholarship kid.” When I spoke to Torres’s mother, of these media conglomerates, and Abstract as it seems, his comedy is at- she described a recurring dream she’s they’re predictably the mushiest white tuned to the politics of the real world, been having, in which she is told that faces you can think of. You see who is including the Trump Administration’s her son is an alien. “Right before the reaping the benefits of all the ‘woke’ demonization of Latin-American im- pandemic, I had it again,” she said. “I content that me and my peers produce, migrants. In “My Favorite Shapes,” as can’t find him, and then these aliens and it’s just these kings. These mon- he contemplates a crystal pyramid, he come and tell me to go with them, and archs.” He let out a cynical laugh. “I talks about how difficult it was to choose they take me to a ship. And they tell don’t know what the answer is.” which shapes should appear in what me, ‘Don’t worry about your son. Your Torres was hired at “Saturday Night order: “And, as I was just deciding all son is fine. He’s here with us.’” 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 27 SHOUTS & MURMURS BY SARAHAKINTERINWA

28 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 29 get its cunning.” As I spoke, I extended PERSONALHISTORY my right hand from my body at a weird angle, dangling from a limp right arm. I finished the passage with my attempt SOME NOTES ON FUNNINESS to replicate the speech of someone whose tongue had cleaved to the roof Going for the laughs. of his mouth. The class exploded with laughter. The teacher simply exploded. BY CALVINTRILLIN I was ejected from the room. Was I then transformed into the class clown—the kid who sneaks a whoopee cushion under the pad on the teacher’s chair and is regularly sent to the vice-principal’s office? No. For one thing, there were guardrails at home to prevent that. I’ve often men- tioned that, as I interpreted my fa- ther’s aspirations for me, he wanted me to become the President of the United States and his fall-back posi- tion was that I not become a ward of the county. I’m certain that there were some callings in between that he would have considered acceptable, but none of them began with regular sessions in the vice-principal’s office. I did, though, make some attempts at humor during my school days. For a high-school literary society, I wrote a few comic short stories, all of which, I devoutly hope, long ago disintegrated at the bottom of some landfill. In a speech to decide the presidency of the Southwest High School student coun- cil, I remember saying that more waste- baskets in the halls were needed and that I’d thought of making my cam- paign slogan “Get swept into office with wastebaskets in the halls.” Feeble? Yes, but it got a laugh. Also, another stu- dent and I briefly had a sort of standup EPIPHANY entire week without a check mark for act. My partner did foreign accents, the any sort of misbehavior or distur- effectiveness of which was enhanced n an interview some years ago, I bance. When Friday arrived, I was the by the fact that most of the people in Iwas asked when I realized that on only one in the class with no check that audience of Kansas City high- occasion I could actually make peo- marks, so my reward was to spend an school students had never met a for- ple laugh. Remarkably, I knew. It extra period on the playground all by eigner. The one joke I can remember was in Sunday school. I think I was myself—lonely, bored, and insanely from the act was a weatherman saying, in sixth grade. I was a shy little boy well behaved. “Tomorrow will be muggy, followed by and, up to that point, insanely well In that Sunday-school class of my Tueggy, Weggy, Thurggy, and Frieggy.” behaved. The story that exemplifies epiphany, the teacher, a rather pedan- My only defense for that one is that we that level of decorum—the only story tic and self-important man, was dron- didn’t make it up; we stole it from a of my grade-school years in Kansas ing on about a passage in Psalms— radio disk jockey. At graduation, I wasn’t City that my daughters have ever en- “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my voted the Funniest Boy. That honor, as joyed hearing—goes like this: In about right hand forget its cunning and my I remember, went to a classmate who third grade, our teacher announced tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth.” acted out the records of Spike Jones on a Monday morning that there Suddenly, I found myself standing up. and His City Slickers, a band that was would be an extra recess period on In a loud voice, I said, “If I forget thee, to music more or less what the Har- Friday for anyone who had gone the O Jerusalem, may my right hand for- lem Globetrotters are to basketball. I

30 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY TAMARA SHOPSIN was voted third Most Likely to Suc- for people going into the fields you’re ceed. Third Most Likely to Succeed— going into,” I said, “the only thing I now, that’s funny. could come up with was ‘Rejection.’” It’s not that we didn’t sell some casu- CASUALS als. But what stands out in my mem- ory is rejection. stickler for precise language would Burt Bernstein, for instance, worked A probably argue that the bookstore for untold hours on a palindromic ca- shelf labelled “Humor” should really sual. It was in the form of a play called say “Attempts at Humor,” since the “Look, Ma, I Am Kool!,” and it had word standing alone implies that ev- characters delivering lines like “Nail a eryone will be amused. (Describing timid god on rood. Door no dog, dim yourself as a humorist, Ring Lardner Italian.” The New Yorker passed. The al- said, would be like a baseball player ternative market for palindromic casu- who’d been asked which position he als was not large. Some months later, plays saying, “I’m a great third base- Burt showed up at my office to an- man.”) What strikes one person as nounce that he was compiling and ed- funny might strike another person as iting a book of casuals written by the not funny at all. If that scowling man generation that followed the legendary at one of the near tables doesn’t think era of New Yorker writers like Thurber what the comic just said was funny, and Benchley and White and Perel- there’s no use trying to persuade him man. He asked if I had any pieces that that it was. A reminder that the audi- might be included. ence at the dinner show found the same “If I may ask,” I said, “am I correct joke hilarious wouldn’t help. in thinking that this is essentially a For those of us whose attempts at scheme you’ve hatched to get ‘Look, humor are mostly written rather than Ma, I Am Kool!’ into print?” verbal, the audience is an editor—an “But of course,” Burt said cheerfully. audience we, unlike the standup comic, “In that case,” I said, “Count me in.” have to please without the tools of tim- For a time, the magazine had a pol- ing or expression. In the first decades icy of tacking on a bonus for anyone of my time at The New Yorker, the pieces who sold six casuals in a calendar year. that we were trying to sell—the sort of As I recall, the bonus was a higher rate light pieces that would these days run for casuals sold during the remainder under the rubric of Shouts & Murmurs of the year, but I always imagined it as or possibly Personal History—were re- something akin to the pinball machine ferred to around the office as “casuals.” in the movie version of William Saroy- Some of the people submitting casuals an’s “Time of Your Life”: when the ma- were, like me, reporters who thought chine is finally beaten, lights flash and of casual-writing as a sideline. Some bells ring and an American flag pops were fiction writers drawing a small out to wave while “America” is played. salary that was ostensibly for writing Toward the end of one year in what Talk of the Town pieces. Some were must have been the mid-sixties, Tom Something people with no connection to the mag- Meehan and I had both sold five, and azine who simply thought they had our typewriters were burning up. Tom for everyone. come up with something funny. Bur- had written one of the magazine’s iconic ton Bernstein, a colleague who pub- casuals—“Yma Dream,” presented as (Including lished a biography of James Thurber, his dream of hosting a party at which the nonpareil producer of casuals, wrote he has to introduce people with names yourself.) once that the casual, which sounds like like Yma Sumac and Uta Hagen (“ ‘Ona something tossed off, is actually “one and Ida,’ I say, ‘surely you know Yma Shop for original of the more difficult and painstaking and Ava? Ida, Ona—Oona, Abba.’”) and limited-edition forms of writing known to humankind.” But he couldn’t come up with the sixth Contemplating casual-writing over the casual that year. Neither could I. When items online at past fifty years or so, I’m reminded of I think of that period, the visual met- The New Yorker Store. how I began a talk I once gave to peo- aphor that comes to my mind is Tom ple graduating from Columbia with and I meeting on the stairs between our newyorker.com/store master’s-of-fine-arts degrees. “When I floor and the appropriate editor’s office, tried to think of an appropriate subject one of us carrying a rejected casual and

THENEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 31 one of us carrying a casual that is about a couple of times a year. I was almost ring blowing had to be a sort of sideline. to be rejected. always in what we called the authors’ “He’s a player-piano dealer and cal- In the mid-seventies, Tom, a lovely ghetto—the final guest on the program, liope restorer,” I said. man, seemed to be struggling. His wife the guest who was fated to be bumped Jim looked excited. “Where do I was not well. Writing casuals and free- if the show went too long. By chance, find him?” he said. lance pieces was a chancy occupation I never did get bumped, and one time No more than three or four days later, for a man with a family to support, and I was actually not last. I was followed Jim phoned to say, “Watch Tuesday.” the project he’d spent years working on by a man who played the saw—the rare I couldn’t believe it. I assumed that otherwise, the book for a musical, had guest who was, if necessary, as expend- there were movie stars who’d waited the marks of a nonpaying long shot. able as a writer. months or even years for a booking on Then, in 1977, the musical actually made Appearing on the “Tonight Show” the “Tonight Show”—perhaps demean- it to Broadway. It was “Annie.” It won was an odd and unexpected gig for some- ing themselves in a variety of ways in Tom the first of what turned out to be one whose main line of work was doing attempting to hurry along the process. three Tony Awards, and it seemed des- reporting pieces for The New Yorker— Harry Garrison had been booked after tined to run forever. one evening, the guests were Mr. Rog- one phone call from Jim McCawley. Not long after “Annie” opened, my ers, Hulk Hogan, and me—but I en- Then I got busy finishing a piece of wife and daughters and I had tea with joyed doing it. I found it easy to talk to reporting and totally forgot to watch the Tom and some of the kids who ap- Johnny Carson. Part of the reason, I al- show on Tuesday. The next day, I was peared in the musical. I told Tom that ways thought, was that we came from having lunch with a friend who asked, everyone at the magazine was delighted the same part of the country and had “Did you happen to see Carson last about his reversal of fortune. He said similar notions of what was funny. I ad- night? There was the strangest thing—a that there had been a time when he mired his skill. He could extend a guest’s guy trying to blow smoke rings.” was beginning to feel like that Woody joke without taking the joke away, for “Did you say ‘trying’?” I said. Allen character in “Annie Hall,” who instance, and he could enliven a flat re- Apparently, the air-conditioning said life is divided into the terrible and mark with a quip or an expression. That system in the studio hadn’t been taken the miserable. skill was comforting to a guest waiting into account. Harry went through his “A Broadway hit can change a lot,” in the greenroom to go on: it greatly re- whole act, imperiousness and all, but I said. duced the chances that your appearance he produced only smoky clouds. I Tom smiled, and said, quietly, “Smash would turn into a total debacle. phoned Jim McCawley. “Well, I told hit.” After the show was taped, the “tal- you he wasn’t much of a smoke-ring That same year, Burt Bernstein’s ent coördinator” who booked me, Jim blower,” I said. “Charming guy, in his anthology was published. It contained, McCawley, and I would often repair to own way, but not really a first-class after an astute foreword by Burt on a nearby Mexican restaurant for a snack smoke-ring blower.” the state of what he termed “literate before I was picked up and deposited at “Are you kidding?” Jim said. “He’s humor,” contributions from a wide the airport for the red-eye to New York. sure to be on ‘The Best of Carson.’” range of casual writers. (I contributed One evening, Jim said that Johnny (ev- I could imagine Johnny, arms folded, two of my favorites—both New Yorker eryone called him Johnny) was inter- taking in Harry’s performance with rejects that had eventually found homes ested in having more “civilians”—that the stare he’d use for observing, say, a in other magazines.) The title of the is, non-show-business people—on the man who’d come on to demonstrate a anthology was “Look, Ma, I Am Kool! program. He’d recently been impressed bubble-making machine he’d invented And Other Casuals.” with a chicken-plucker. (I neglected to but couldn’t seem to start the two-stroke ask whether that civilian plucked chick- motor that powered it. The Harry Gar- HERE’SJOHNNY ens on the air or demonstrated a new rison segment was indeed on “The Best chicken-plucking machine or displayed of Carson,” in a short section devoted n essential fact about being a guest a talent completely unconnected with to what Johnny called disasters. In the Aon a late-night talk show is this: his chosen profession.) When Jim asked right hands, a man trying to blow you don’t have to answer the question. if I had any suggestions, I said, “I know smoke rings can be funny. It’s not at all like being interviewed on a remarkable smoke-ring blower—Harry I don’t think Harry Garrison ever “60 Minutes.” If you’re asked about Garrison, from Cincinnati. His person- thought it was funny. He was, after how you came to write your novel, and, ality takes a bit of getting used to—he all, a brilliant smoke-ring blower— knowing that a thorough answer could can seem imperious, particularly when a man known in magician circles as induce mass drowsiness, you tell an he’s demanding still air for his perfor- the Smoke-Ring King. He hadn’t in- amusing story about your mother’s mance and says something like ‘I detect tended to be the fall guy in a comedy cooking, the host is perfectly satisfied. the sound of human breathing’—but routine. Still, when he died, in 2013, He’s in the business of entertainment, he’s an absolutely brilliant smoke-ring an obituary in the Cincinnati Enquirer not information gathering. blower. By far the best smoke-ring blower did say, without elaborating, that his During roughly the final fifteen years I’ve ever seen. Maybe the best there is.” career as a performer included an ap- that Johnny Carson hosted the “To- “What does he do for a living?” Jim pearance on the “Tonight Show” with night Show,” I was a guest on the show asked, assuming correctly that smoke- Johnny Carson. 

32 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 A CARTOONIST’S LIFE BY ROZ CHAST

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 33 GREETINGS, FRIENDS!

Friends one and all! Let us unmute, Excite the timbrel and the lute, Make merry with our pots and pan (The hour is seven, so we can), Meg Knox, and wondrous Rosa Baum. Shout from the balcony or lawn “Yay!” for Jack and Marta Handey, For joy at what will soon be gone, And our ol’ pal Peter Canby! And praises sing for what is here: A super surge of Christmas glee The end to this undreamt-of year! To Joe and Jill from me and thee, Commune with us, dear friends, while we And all good things to Kamala Strew gifts abundant ’round the tree, And Doug from us and Momma-la. And help us pick out something nice This year, just in case you’ve wondered, For New York’s Dr. David Price, Roger Angell turned a hundred! The Bronx’s Dr. Ernest Patti, Unequalled master of this rhyme Every nurse in Cincinnati, From back when it was in its prime, Dr. L. Woodward, of U. Miss., He rocks! And so does Peggy Moorman, Dr. Pernell (she’s our own Chris), Who is the best and that’s for sure, man! L.A.’s Dr. Anna Darby, To those who lift us up: Godspeed! Arizona’s Dr. Barbee, We hope Josh Gad has all he’ll need; Harold Varmus, the Nobel-er For Alexander Vindman (Doc of reputation stellar), And bro Yevgeny, we’ve a plan Ashley Bartholomew, R.N. To wish them both benignity; And when we check the list again And with no loss of dignity It unscrolls out across the floor, Shout season’s blessings to Jack Black, With health-care stalwarts by the score— Mystery writer Steven Womack, By the millions! Heroes true! Jay Inslee, John Hickenlooper, (Forgive their student-loan debts—do!) David Chichester, Chris Cooper As we replay two-oh in slo-mo, (With, by the by, a friendly “Hi!” A Christmas cheer for Andrew Cuomo To V.P. Pence’s pensive fly). Is not amiss, nor would it be Should Christmas comfort be deployed, For bat virologist Zheng-Li Shi, May it descend on Terrence Floyd, Steak Diane, the cool mask-maker, Philonise Floyd, and their relations Dolly Parton, Peter Baker, (Rev. Al, thanks for your oration); Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, May peace, whatever peace there be, Issa Rae, Calvin (Bud) Trillin, Enfold the family Arbery; Stacey Abrams, Mikie Sherrill, May justice come to all who thirst Andrew Rea, and Colin Farrell. And hunger for it through the worst. The passing Comet Neowise, Dear friends, if we could rhyme away Which, lacking hands, can’t sanitize The year’s vast losses, we might say Them, yearns to be the wise men’s star These stumbling lines were justified Instead, and shining from afar As right in step with Christmastide. Lays tender beams upon A. Blinken, Does meter link up hope and history? Dr. Fauci, and, we’re thinkin’, The only rhyme word here is “mystery.” Too, on David Miliband, Let gladness rise, despite, despite; A’Lelia Bundles, Michael Land, “Love one another” routs the night, Gretchen Whitmer, fearless gov, And kindness is a folding chair Jon Ossoff, whom we’re so fond of, We carry with us everywhere. Chris Krebs, and Tyler, the Creator; In depth of winter, prospects brighten; Brightly and not one bit later, Mighty streams of light will lighten It shines on Amy Westervelt, The miles ahead, and goodness reign— Whose podcast, we have always felt, Once more, the angels’ grand refrain! Is great; on Alice Oswald, too; And, similarly, on a few —Ian Frazier

THEMUSEUM OF PURGATORY BY ALI FITZGERALD

36 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 37 38 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 39 40 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 41 PANDEMIC PAPER DOLL BY RONALD WIMBERLY

42 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 43 THE FUNNIES

Here are some gags about how we lived in 2020, to one day help explain your toilet-paper-hoarding habits to your grandchildren.

“Stand back—I am retrieving a cardigan from the ‘thrice-weekly Zoom happy hours’ era.”

44 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 “I miss when we could sit close enough to hear conversations more interesting than ours.”

“Who’s coming with me?”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 45 “I can’t tell if she needs to stop goofing off or take a break from studying.”

46 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 “We’ve built so much good will with the neighbors. Let’s not use it up with compulsive vacuuming.”

“Now everyone wants to talk.”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 47 “Forget about what else is going on in the world. As soon as we put on this uniform, it’s our job to remain creepy.”

48 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 “What did I tell you about overfeeding the sourdough starter?”

“Since you miss parties so much, I thought you could chase your dinner tonight.”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 49 50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 “Ahhh! The great outdoors!”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 51 JUNBAN BY JILLIAN TAMAKI

52 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 53 54 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 55 56 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 57 FICTION

ACTING CLASS BY NICK DRNASO

58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 59 60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 61 62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 63 64 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 65 66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 67 68 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 69 70 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 71 72 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 73 74 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 75 STAY-AT-HOME FUN BY LIANA FINCK

Match the hair style with its famous owner. A spoonerism is a familiar phrase whose initial sounds have been swapped to make a wacky phrase: for example, “bear hug” and “hair bug.” Can you decipher these illustrated spoonerisms? 1. a.

2. b.

3. c.

4. d.

5. e.

6. f.

7. g.

8. h.

9. i. PUZZLES BY LIZ MAYNES-AMINZADE AND ANDY KRAVIS ANDY AND LIZ MAYNES-AMINZADE BY PUZZLES

Can you improve these classic poems?

box fan (fox ban); dense fog (fence dog); crime lab (lime crab). crab). (lime lab crime dog); (fence fog dense ban); (fox fan box

crushing blow (blushing crow); funny bone (bunny phone); phone); (bunny bone funny crow); (blushing blow crushing animal spoonerisms: spoonerisms: animal

splitting hairs: 1 (d); 2 (f ); 3 (g); 4 (e); 5 (b); 6 (i); 7 (a); 8 (c); 9 (h). (h). 9 (c); 8 (a); 7 (i); 6 (b); 5 (e); 4 (g); 3 ); (f 2 (d); 1 hairs: splitting

Pretty much everything. everything. much Pretty spot the differences: the spot answer key key answer THE CRITICS

BOOKS HOT-ICE-CREAM DREAMS The marvellously mixed-up masters of early animated cartoons.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

nyone who came of age in the or that the relatively unsuccessful “Bull- this way is new, and significant. The pe- latter part of the twentieth cen- winkle” series, which concluded in 1964, culiar excellence of “The Right Stuff ” A tury will recall the constant flow could inspire four feature films three and was not that it showed astronauts to the of animated cartoons that made up most four and even five decades later. world but that it showed the astronauts of children’s programming on TV. In a In “Wild Minds: The Artists and Ri- as worldly. Wolfe explained that they culture of supposedly short memories, valries That Inspired the Golden Age of were far from dim-witted test pilots: they were an art form that reached right Animation” (Atlantic Monthly Press), they knew what they were doing and back across time. On the radio, “oldies” Reid Mitenbuler recalls that flood— what was being done to them. Miten- were a separate genre within pop music, and points out that the vintage cartoons buler’s larger aim is similar: to show us but on the kids’ shows there was a steady within it were often censored by later that the best cartoonists were not hap- stream of cartoons from half a century’s distributors in ways that robbed them of hazard artisans but self-aware artists, creation, reality intruding mostly with their original spice and sex appeal. Of working against the constraints of com- commercials for pre-sweetened break- the kinds of popular books that have merce toward a knowing end of high fast cereals. Everything ran together: proliferated in the past few decades— comic, and sometimes serious, art. The bending, bug-eyed dogs and cats play- the little thing that changed everything book’s governing idea lies in its heroes’ ing bad swing jazz on living clarinets (cod, longitude, porcelain), the crime or collective intuition that animated films from the thirties, spinach cans popping scandal that time forgot (Erik Larson’s could be a vehicle for grownup expres- open and tattooed muscles popping up specialty)—none are more potent than sion—erotic, political, and even scien- from the nineteen-forties, and Japanese the tale of the happy band of brothers tific—rather than the trailing diminu- animation of the sixties so limited that who came together to redirect the world. tive form they mostly became. A cartoon it hardly moved. The genre runs from Tom Wolfe’s “The tradition that could seem child-bound, There appeared to be a boundless Right Stuff ” through Jenny Uglow’s “The sexless, and stereotyped was once vital, reservoir of historical cartoon styles— Lunar Men,” and Mitenbuler’s “Wild satiric, and experimental. with some, the Bugs Bunny cartoons, Minds” is an attempt to do the same for Mitenbuler explains that the famil- clearly made on a theatrical scale and the history of American animation. iar form of the cartoon arose, in the nine- with big budgets and full orchestras, and teenth and early twentieth centuries, be- others, like the Bullwinkle cartoons, “ ild Minds” assembles its his- cause the same persistence of vision that cheaply made but slyly imagined, rich Wtory with love and a sense of enables a rapid sequence of photographic in satiric push. It all came at the viewer occasion. The chronicle that results, as stills to give the illusion of movement in an indiscriminate collage. R. Crumb, Mitenbuler explains in a prefatory note, works if you draw the images, with a the great underground cartoonist, had also appears at a moment when, for the pen. The joy of this discovery, made by the imagery so stored up inside that, first time in the history of the form, a close succession of animators, was that amid LSD trips in the sixties, everything everything is available. Obscurities that it set you free from the constraints of came spilling out—what he called “a in the past one would have waited years realism: you could make anything you grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carni- to find in a stray MOMA screening are imagined exist on film, from waltzing val”—and gave him a cast of characters now online. Even the lewd (though gov- dinosaurs to talking mice. Along with for the rest of his career. The flow of ernment-sponsored) “Private Snafu” car- this discovery came a subsequent, pain- cartooning past so imprinted itself on toons, made for G.I.s during the Sec- ful one—that drawing the frames, one us that nobody found it odd that the ond World War and written by Theodor by one, was insanely laborious and ex- 1996 movie “Space Jam” paired peak Mi- Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, can pensive. (The commercial history of an- chael Jordan with characters who had be found at a touch of the YouTube tab. imation from then on was basically a first appeared long before he was born, The act of pulling everyone together in contest between the pleasure taken in

78 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 SOURCE: ALAMY; OPPOSITE: TAMARA SHOPSIN TAMARA OPPOSITE: SOURCE: ALAMY; Betty Boop, remembered now mainly for her “Boop-oop-a-doop” cry, was in her day a full-fledged mini-Mae West.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX MERTO THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 79 seeing the extravagant imagination come early thirties the Fleischers seemed as A Disney princess Betty Boop was alive and the shortcuts that had to be likely as their great competitor, Walt Dis- not. In the mid-thirties, her skirt got devised in order to draw the pictures ney, to become the masters of animated lengthened and her manners curbed ever more cheaply.) cartoons. Proudly Jewish (their cartoons when Catholic groups pressed the Pro- Very early animation has a single occasionally exploded with Hebrew let- duction Code on Hollywood, and the theme, the fluidity of form: what’s some- tering) and extremely louche (Mitenbuler Fleischers turned their attention to Pop- times called the first fully animated film, speculates that they started the studio eye, from E. C. Segar’s lovely strip. They the French “Fantasmagorie” (1908), is a with money from the race track), they simplified the action; Popeye’s deus ex two-minute-long study in visual metamor- threw their careers away in a series of canica of spinach first became iconic in phosis, stick figures caught in a constantly misadventures worthy of a Michael Cha- their cartoons. In one of the great mis- changing two-dimensional world. The bon novel, choosing Florida over Cali- placed bets in American show business, first hero of Mitenbuler’s American story fornia as the place to make cartoons and however, the Fleischers moved their stu- is therefore Winsor McCay, the author then overindulging in the pleasures of dio to the nascent town of Miami, where of the “Little Nemo in Slumberland” se- the flesh once there. The Fleischers, we their largely Jewish and very New York ries, the amazing accounts of dream ex- learn, began by inventing a once famous employees sometimes had a hard time perience that anticipate Surrealist fan- clown, Ko-Ko, who was a fellow-travel- with swamp insects and other swamp tasy. We learn that McCay, though best ler of the first famous cartoon figure, Felix creatures. “On the mornings after Ku remembered now as a visionary fantasist, the Cat, both drawn under the orbit of Klux Klan rallies, the air sometimes was also an editorial cartoonist in the Chaplin, whose influence on early ani- smelled like the turpentine used to burn Hearst stable. Nor did McCay see his in- mation can be found everywhere. the crosses,” Mitenbuler records. Many ventions primarily as a means of enter- The Fleischers didn’t see why anima- of them fled back home. (Others had tainment. In 1916, after projecting his tion needed to remain a diminutive form. already been poached by the Disney stu- “Gertie the Dinosaur” cartoon as part of Having made stake money with Ko-Ko, dio, all the way out in California.) a vaudeville act, he invested his talents they took up what they thought was as Even before this difficult time, the and money in a twelve-minute—long for obvious a subject for animation as, say, Fleischers—Max, especially—clearly the time—animated version of the sink- the adventures of Pocahontas or the work- had in mind the hot-ice-cream dream ing of the ocean liner Lusitania, which ing life of any number of dwarves: Ein- of a feature-length cartoon, made fear- had been torpedoed by a German U-boat stein’s special and general theories of rel- somely difficult by the number of art- the previous year, with a huge loss of life. ativity. Earning Einstein’s approval, the ists and the amount of time needed to Though drawn in McCay’s distinc- silent film, released in 1923, is still an as- produce so many frames. Time-saving tive Art Nouveau-ish style—two ele- tonishingly early and sophisticated pop- tricks were sought. Max had developed gant fish under the ocean watch an om- ularization of his theory. But lacking, the technique of rotoscoping, which is inous torpedo approaching with dismay, perhaps, a mascot—Li’l Al the Light still in use and which enables live-action and turn away in synchrony—it is still Beam or the like—it was a flop, accord- film to be overlaid with animation. It piercing to watch. The sequence in which ing to Mitenbuler. Two years later, un- created the quivering, noir-El Greco the ship tips over into the water, as human deterred, the Fleischers used the occa- effect of their heroic figures, including figures leap from it in dignified silhou- sion of the Scopes trial to goose up a the Superman series of the early forties. ette, is more memorable and affecting history of life on earth as imagined by After Disney came out with a feature, than anything in “Titanic,” exactly for Darwinian evolution. (It caused a riot at the saccharine but successful “Snow its stylized equanimity. We register the the American Museum of Natural His- White,” in 1937, Paramount finally gave tiny figures coming down ropes, the tory when it débuted, but seems to have the Fleischers the money to work on a neatly outlined eruptions billowing made little money.) feature of their own, a full-length ver- smoke, the inkblot clouds of fire, the The Fleischers—having secured back- sion of “Gulliver’s Travels,” which was ship sinking beneath the hand-drawn ing from Paramount—had another go released in 1939. It lacks Swift’s satiric waves—it’s like an early newsreel re- at presenting the drama of sexual repro- fire, but the juxtaposition of the roto- imagined by Hiroshige. duction: they invented Betty Boop, the scoped and vividly human Gulliver with But McCay was limited by William first frankly sexy cartoon character. Later the smooth-edged cartoon Lilliputians Randolph Hearst, who owned him as bowdlerized, and remembered now has an almost creepy intensity that suits a kind of property and valued his mainly for her “Boop-oop-a-doop” cry, the subject. (In films with both human political-editorial work, while seeing Betty was in her day a full-fledged mini- movement and cartoon movement, like little profit in animation. In “Wild Mae West. A zaftig Broadway showgirl, “Who Framed Roger Rabbit,” it’s always Minds,” McCay then retreats, while she went topless, routinely seduced the real-world footage that looks coarse, Mitenbuler’s Chuck Yeager figure—the Bimbo the dog, and was just as routinely otherworldly, and disturbing.) too often overlooked and audacious seduced, and occasionally spanked, by The contrast between the practices hero who inspires the later, better-known her animal cartoon lover. (“Wanna be a of the Disney studios in Los Angeles adventurers—is double: the Fleischer member, wanna be a member?” she sings, and those of the Fleischers in Miami— brothers, Max and David. after rubbing her hands up and down long in debt to Paramount—is the ma- Though now mostly forgotten by her body, in one bizarre fantasy about terial for an American comedy. At Dis- non-experts, in the nineteen-twenties and the initiation rites of a mystical order.) ney, classes in drawing and composition

80 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 were compulsory. Mitenbuler tells us that “Jean Charlot, a Mexican artist who had painted murals alongside Diego Rivera, BRIEFLY NOTED a revolver strapped to his hip, provided lessons on composition and geometry,” The Walker, by Matthew Beaumont (Verso). Contending that while Rico Lebrun, an expert on animal our “increasingly authoritarian” cities, with their omnipres- anatomy, “dragged a deer carcass into the ent surveillance and commodified spaces, make the arche- studio and, over the course of several ses- type of the flâneur—a privileged stroller who observes with- sions, peeled back layers of pink tissue out being threatened—“unsustainable,” this heady blend of until he finally struck bone.” Bambi was history and theory seeks more fitting literary models. The born. Boris Morkovin, a professor at convalescent in Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” is a figure U.S.C., taught the theory of humor, an- whose illness allows him, finally, to experience the city out- nouncing, “Ve vill now explain vott iss a side the daily grind. H. G. Wells’s “The Invisible Man” por- gak.” (In the manner of the Russian for- trays a walker who is hounded and hunted. Beaumont de- malists, he had analyzed “over two hun- picts the city as unremittingly hostile, but his ambulatory dred gags into thirty-one basic types,” antiheroes hint at ways in which we might reclaim the Mitenbuler reports.) streets, declaring our freedom, as he puts it, “to wander and While the Disney animators were wonder at the same time.” dutifully studying life drawing, the Fleischers were living the life. Miten- Waste, by Catherine Coleman Flowers (New Press). Making buler writes that the red light above the case for investment in America’s rural population, this Dave’s door sometimes meant that he memoir moves from the author’s youthful civil-rights ac- was having sex with his secretary, and tivism to her continuing fight against wastewater-infra- that when Max complained about this, structure injustice. In Lowndes County, Alabama, where right in front of visiting suits from Para- Flowers grew up, some ninety per cent of septic systems are mount, David told them that Max was failing or inadequate. She documents conditions—raw sew- having an affair with his own secretary. age backing up into homes and yards—that led, in 2017, to “The tryst soured Max’s already stormy the country’s first outbreak of hookworm in decades. Indis- relationship with his wife, Essie,” Miten- putable connections emerge between our nation’s history of buler adds, who “was occupied with her slavery and sharecropping and the current inaccessibility, gambling habit. In order to reach her for some, of “the right to flush and forget.” bookie at any hour, she had wired the palm trees of their estate with telephones.” The Orchard, by David Hopen (Ecco). The adolescent nar- Soon the Paramount executives, no rator of this début novel, Aryeh (Ari) Eden, grew up in an surprise, more or less foreclosed on the Orthodox Jewish family in Brooklyn. When his family Fleischers and took ownership of all their moves to the fictional town of Zion Hills, Florida, Ari is intellectual property. Max Fleischer never confronted with the privilege of his new yeshiva classmates. recovered his studio or his momentum, (“Everyone has a Chagall,” someone tells him.) His reli- or, for that matter, his relationship with gious piety is soon challenged by secular distractions—Aston his brother. It was easier to blame his Martins, Olympic-sized swimming pools, house parties. Ari mishandling of his career on a business seeks out the “tragic grandeur” conferred by experience, even rival than on a character flaw. Through- as he realizes that it disrupts his ideals and his sense of self. out his long and mostly unhappy after- “I’d been filled, finally, with experience,” he says, after a life, this usually good-natured man would, blurry night out in Key West. “And yet along the way I’d at the mere mention of Disney’s name, been emptied out.” mutter, “That son of a bitch.” Stillicide, by Cynan Jones (Catapult). One meaning of “stil- espite wearing the red rose of the licide” is a continual dripping of water, and the chapters of Dintrepid Fleischers, Mitenbuler is this novel collect like rainwater to tell the story of a dysto- kind to Disney—kinder than a cultural pian Britain stricken by drought. Entrepreneurs propose historian of an earlier vintage might have razing homes to bring a giant iceberg into a London “Ice been. It wasn’t so long ago that “the Dis- Dock,” a plan that sparks protests. Jones mostly focusses on ney version” was the standard term for the disempowered—a dying nurse who writes her husband the worst kind of vulgarization of the a letter she’ll never send, a scientist who hopes his discov- classics. Disney is in better odor now, in ery will stop the Ice Dock, an elderly couple who refuse to part because of the proto-Spielbergian leave their home despite rising sea levels. A laborer whose spell he seems to cast in his best work, work on the Ice Dock will mean the destruction of his lov- like “Pinocchio,” and in part because er’s house muses, “How often the process of construction the lurid legends circulated after his starts with destruction.”

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 81 death—that he was an anti-Semite who later Sgt. Bilko. Bugs isn’t mean, but he’s went on to produce a genuine full-length had himself frozen after death—turn out always ready to protect himself from the animated classic, “Mister Magoo’s Christ- not to be true. Mitenbuler, while regis- Elmer Fudds of the world with his own mas Carol” (1962). It included a first-class tering the relentless creep of formula into cleverness. In the Second World War, song score by two Broadway A-listers, the work, gives Disney credit for genu- Bugs became every put-upon G.I.’s totem Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, which, once ine artistic innovation: “Fantasia,” with and hero. Indeed, what’s demonstrated by heard, is hard to forget. its high-art hungerings and a score fea- the recirculation of those lewd training turing Paul Dukas and Igor Stravinsky, films—directed by, among others, Chuck o we live at the end of the era wasn’t the effort of a cynic. And, by elim- Jones and voiced by Mel Blanc—is that Dof two-dimensional animation? inating sex, Disney landed, in an almost the voice of the Everyman, Private Snafu, Though the fans of the form persuasively classic bit of Freudian-style sublima- is indistinguishable from Bugs’s. reassure us of the beauties of new classi- tion, on evil, the forbidden energy that’s The embodiment of the mythic cally animated works—including those essential to any fable. Disney’s villain- “trickster” figure in a rabbit or hare is, by Studio Ghibli, in Tokyo, and Cartoon ous characters—like the queen turned for reasons buried deep in the human Saloon, in Kilkenny—they will strike the witch—tend to be more memorable than psyche (or perhaps only in the bunny’s average parent searching for cartoons to the doe-eyed good ones. fertile nature), oddly ancient and uni- share like warmly glowing Edison bulbs If the Fleischers are the doomed Hec- versal, running from Japan to Africa in a sharp-lit L.E.D. era. The aesthetic- tors of Mitenbuler’s tale, his favorites are and into American indigenous culture. minded new animators still float on Mc- the hyper-energetic, demonic band of There’s a South African rabbit-trick- Cay’s waves, but most of the old-guard cartoonists who helped establish the War- ster story in which the rabbit, having Hollywood animation units now seem to ner Bros. animation studio in the thir- been instructed by the moon to share be listing like his Lusitania. ties and forties, inventing Daffy Duck, the certainty of resurrection with all The larger story of the intersection of Porky Pig, Pepé Le Pew, and, eventually, creation, says, instead, “Like as I die and commerce and the popular arts, within Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. do not rise again, so you shall also die which this history sits, is not a wholly It was during one of those irresistible and not rise again.” The moon, enraged, negative one, but it does have a specific creative moments that, for a brief time, hits him right in the kisser and splits shape. High moments in popular art begin everything fell right: Mel Blanc, the his lip. It’s a pure Bugs moment. You when no one has cracked the commer- voice artist, was integral to the inven- can hear him saying the offending line, cial code sufficiently to know what will tion of the characters. (At least one is a carrot like a cigar in hand. (If Bugs is work—will an Einstein cartoon take caricature of a studio executive.) Happy the ideal trickster, Wile E. represents off ?—and a proliferation of possibilities accidents happened: Porky Pig was voiced the necessary folk-tale adjunct, the trick- becomes available, including, above all, by an actor with an actual, frustrating ster tricked, excessive predatory inge- the possibility of open-ended, unkempt stammer, who turned it to creative use. nuity denied by his prey’s naïve energy.) emotion. This proliferation of possibili- The wild-man directors of the “Looney The Warner Bros. comedy is not gen- ties happened with pop music in the late Tunes” cartoons, Tex Avery and Chuck tle but hard-edged and, to an unusual sixties, with American film in the early Jones and Frank Tashlin, were hardly degree, bundled around the soundtrack. seventies, with long-form television in loony about their art. Tashlin articulated Not only did Mel Blanc’s voice charac- the first decade of this century. A recep- their purpose bluntly. “We showed those terization often drive the cartoons; the tive audience, a plurality of artists, and Disney guys that animated cartoons don’t scores, usually supervised by the Disney the basic commercial uncertainty about have to look like a fucking kids’ book,” refugee Carl Stalling—and played by the what works or what can be made to work, he said. Chuck Jones’s list of rules for his in-house fifty-piece orchestra—were and, presto, you get “Sgt. Pepper” and art are acute and broadly applicable: “You dense with musical puns and jests. Every “The Godfather”; then someone cracks must learn to respect that golden atom, moment had its music, and many of those the code of commerce, and you get that single-frame of action. . .. The differ- moments were as much allusive as illus- “Frampton Comes Alive!” and “Smokey ence between lightning and the light- trative, with old pop songs momentar- and the Bandit.” ning bug may hinge on that single frame.” ily summoned to accent the action. The good stuff never disappears, but What is true of frames is true of words, As a codicil to the Warner Bros. tale it does subside. We are living through and notes. of independence rewarded, Mitenbuler a moment of subsidence now. Flexibil- The Warner Bros. cartoons remain relates the slightly later story of U.P.A., ity of form meets the certainties of com- the high point of what might be called the left-leaning animation studio that merce. Dammed up, the flow of cre- American Wise Guy comedy. Where brought a short-lived stylistic renais- ative energy retreats, re-forms, finds a Felix and Ko-Ko (and Chaplin) repre- sance to cartooning in the fifties, with new opening, and starts to flow again. sented a beleaguered immigrant-naïf an unapologetically anti-naturalistic, The Fleischers were not wrong about comedy, Daffy and Sylvester the Cat and, clean and lean style, and cool jazz back- this. All art aspires to the condition of above all, Bugs Bunny are celebrations ground music. Some of the U.P.A. team, music, a wise man said once, and per- of unashamed American ingenuity. It’s a including the director John Hubley, who haps all cultural history aspires to the kind of second-generation-immigrant helped create Mr. Magoo, were black- condition of a cartoon: a seeming fluid- comedy, where wheedling and scheming listed by the House Committee on ity of movement, made up of countless are admired, very much like Phil Silvers’s Un-American Activities, but the studio small stops and starts. 

82 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 comedy more finely tuned to our grow­ BOOKS ing consciousness of the nonhuman world and the forces that inhabit it. In Carrington’s creation story, the butt EXTRAVAGANT CREATURES of the joke is her true origins, an incur­ ably repressive Anglo­Irish upbringing, Leonora Carrington’s matriarchal Surrealism. which she fled in 1937. She settled first in France, and then, when the Nazis de­ BY MERVEEMRE scended, Madrid, New York, and Mex­ ico City, where she spent the rest of her life. She never again saw her father, a Lancashire mill owner who, in her twen­ ties, had her committed to a mental in­ stitution. “Of the two, I was far more afraid of my father than I was of Hit­ ler,” she claimed. She seldom visited her mother, an able, sympathetic woman, more mesmerized by the whirligig of the London scene than by art or literature. “The Debutante,” a story Carrington wrote just after leaving home, shows the savagery she wrought from her family’s money and good English manners. A girl befriends a hyena at the zoo, teaches it to speak, and persuades it to take her place at a ball. The hyena attends wear­ ing the face of the girl’s maid, killed and eaten as part of its evening toilette. “Nurse! Do let’s pretend that I’m a hungry hyena, and you’re a bone,” Lewis Carroll’s Alice shouts, in “Through the Looking Glass.” Alice is too young to imagine her game of make­believe lit­ eralized as gruesome social satire, but Carrington, a devoted reader of Carroll and Jonathan Swift, certainly could. The Cheshire Cat and the Houyhnhnms Carrington and Max Ernst. She rejected male Surrealists’ views of women. must have taught her that comedy and critique both work by casting the famil­ hen asked to describe the cir­ The success of a creation story hangs iar aspects of life in new, doubtful guises. Wcumstances of her birth, the Sur­ on how richly it seeds the life to come. Which is more artificial, she asks: dress­ realist painter and writer Leonora Car­ Carrington’s encompasses all the elements ing a hyena as a human or a human as rington liked to tell people that she had of her life and her art. There is her dec­ a woman? What is the difference be­ not been born; she had been made. One adence and indelicate sense of fancy; her tween a hyena and a human? Shouldn’t melancholy day, her mother, bloated by fascination with animals and with bo­ the two be allies in a planetary war chocolate truffles, oyster purée, and cold dies, both otherworldly and profane. against débutante balls, against kings pheasant, feeling fat and listless and un­ Above all, there is her high­spirited, ba­ and queens and empires, against the desirable, had lain on top of a machine. roque sense of humor, mating the artifi­ cannibalizing machinery of capital, The machine was a marvellous contrap­ cial to the natural, and recalling Henri which takes the domination of women tion, designed to extract hundreds of Bergson’s claim that the essence of com­ and nature as its origin point? gallons of semen from animals—pigs, edy is the image of “something mechan­ Surrealist art, with its convulsive, out­ cockerels, stallions, urchins, bats, ducks— ical encrusted upon the living.” Her landish juxtapositions, showed Car­ and, one can imagine, bring its user to humor and its offspring—two novels, a rington how to discern the folly of the the most spectacular orgasm, turning memoir, a delightfully macabre collec­ humans she knew. It also invited her to her whole sad, sick being inside out and tion of stories, along with hundreds of cavort with nonhuman creatures, draw­ upside down. From this communion of paintings, sculptures, and objets—have ing on their beauty and suffering to make human, animal, and machine, Leonora been unearthed on several occasions since tame ideas about character and plot more was conceived. When she emerged, on her death, in 2011. Each time her work porous, elastic, and gloriously unhinged. LEE MILLER ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2020. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. ARCHIVES, ENGLAND 2020. LEE MILLER

© April 6, 1917, England shook. is reborn, it seems more prescient, her The distinctions between human and

PHOTOGRAPH BY LEE MILLER THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 83 animal, animal and machine, flicker in he immediately believes it to be real and tor who weaves the story of her life; the and out of focus in her early stories, but alive and as long as he believes this he reader who lets herself be ensnared by it. the fiction she wrote in the nineteen- is trapped inside the dead image, which “Down Below” imagines its narra- fifties and sixties dissolves them lavishly. moves in ever-increasing circles away tor and its readers journeying toward Here we find several barnyards’ worth of from Great Nature.” For Carrington, hu- Knowledge as a collective entity, yet the chimeras, extravagant beings who com- manity was a seductive costume donned circumstances leading up to its writing mune with all manner of “mechanical by dummies. To step out of the costume were singular and bizarre. They began artifacts.” They are bearers of utopian risked deranging the self that one un- with Carrington’s adolescent rebellions. hopes and victims of threats from ordi- thinkingly inhabited, courting madness, Her father sent her to a convent school nary humans. Consider her story “As the dissolution of the belief in the human in 1930; the nuns sent her back. In 1936, They Rode Along the Edge,” a romance world as the arbiter of reality. But it was her mother sent her to study art in featuring Virginia Fur, not quite woman, also to draw closer to Great Nature, in London, where she fell in with the Sur- not quite cat, with “bats and moths im- the quest for a new, liberating art. realists. They worshipped her as a muse, prisoned” in her hair and a blind night- a witch—not the old and ugly kind, ingale lodged in her throat. Her lover, he story of Carrington’s liberation André Breton explained, but an en- Igname the Boar, woos her in “a wig Tfrom the human world is the sub- chantress with “a smooth, mocking gaze.” made of squirrels’ tails.” Their children ject of her memoir, “Down Below” This reputation still clings to her, un- are seven little boars conceived under “a (1944). The book opens by summon- like the bedsheets she is said to have mountain of cats.” Virginia boils and eats ing its reader: worn to parties. Even her well-intentioned all but one of the children, after men biographer Joanna Moorhead writes Exactly three years ago, I was interned in hunt and kill their father. Dr. Morales’s sanatorium in Santander, Spain, with bewitched reverie of the teen-age In Carrington’s writing, the critic Janet Dr. Pardo, of Madrid, and the British Consul Leonora, “the beautiful, sparky young Lyon has observed, the appearance of an having pronounced me incurably insane. Since woman with her dark eyes, crimson lips, ordinary human always feels like an ab- I fortuitously met you, whom I consider the and cascade of raven curls” destined to erration, a harbinger of death. Ordinary most clear-sighted of all, I began gathering a meet the German Surrealist Max Ernst, week ago the threads which might have led me humans, when confronted with Car- across the initial border of Knowledge. I must twenty-six years older than her, and rington’s creatures, brandish their supe- live through that experience all over again, be- soon to anoint her his femme-enfant. rior rationality and industry. Sometimes cause, by doing so, I believe that I may be of Her family had wrongheadedly nick- they press the point with guns, other use to you, just as I believe that you will be of named her Prim. He renamed her the times with atomic bombs, as in her novel help in my journey beyond that frontier by Bride of the Wind. keeping me lucid and by enabling me to put on “The Hearing Trumpet,” to be reissued and to take off at will the mask which will be How far would the wind carry its next month by New York Review Books. my shield against the hostility of Conformism. young bride? Across the Channel, to a Yet they remain ignorant of how piti- small stone farmhouse in Saint-Martin- able it is to be merely human in the first Who could turn down this flattering d’Ardèche, in the Rhône Valley, which place. “To be one human creature is to invitation? You will serve as her accom- the couple bought in 1938. They painted be a legion of mannequins,” a goddess plice, as well as her pupil—the débutante its interior with fish and lizard-like crea- in one of her stories proclaims. “When to her masked hyena. Together, you form tures, women turning into horses, and the creature steps into the mannequin one of her conjoined beings: the narra- a blood-red unicorn. They sculpted a mermaid for the terrace, bought two peacocks to roam the yard, and mounted a bas-relief on the house’s façade. Its two figures still stand. A man in robes, with a bird cawing between his legs— this was Loplop, Ernst’s alter ego. Next to him, a faceless woman holds a lopped-off head in her hand. Her most notable features are her stony, round, vigorously protruding breasts. Here Carrington completed her first major painting, “Self-Portrait (Inn of the Dawn Horse),” in which a hyena with engorged teats and a woman with fero- cious hair and a pale, unalarmed face stare out at the viewer. But amid the painting, the drinking, the talk and the sex, the wind blew foul and fair. For one thing, the Nazis were drawing near. For “I wanted this to work, too, James, but it’s time we accepted it—I am another, Ernst was married, more estab- entirely grass, and you are clearly some part of the cat’s face.” lished, selfish, clingy, and demanding. One wonders if she started to see their me, because I, too, was jammed between chiatric institutionalization was mir- relationship the way that his patron Peggy Saint-Martin and Spain.” In Andorra, rored by Surrealism’s institutionalization Guggenheim did: “Like Nell and her she could only scuttle like a crab: “an at- in New York’s art market—a complicity grandfather in ‘The Old Curiosity Shop.’” tempt at climbing stairs would again with wealth depressingly symbolized by One also wonders if Carrington, eying bring about a ‘jam.’” The modernist ar- Ernst’s marriage to Peggy Guggenheim, the bas-relief, felt paralyzed by the way thropod—Kafka’s bug, or Eliot’s Pru- in 1942. “Surrealism is no longer consid- male Surrealists had treated women as frock, longing to be “a pair of ragged ered modern today,” a character in “The artificial beings—their bodies manipu- claws”—is a well-worn trope of alien- Hearing Trumpet” laments. “Even Buck- lable, their spirits elusive. Salvador Dali, ation and stasis, but for Carrington it ingham Palace has a large reproduction in his essay “The New Colors of Spec- sparked a breakthrough. Part car, part of Magritte’s famous slice of ham with tral Sex Appeal” (1934), had prophesied crab, part Carrington, she hit on the same an eye peering out. It hangs, I believe, in that the sexual attractiveness of modern revelation that all her fiction would offer: the throne room.” woman would derive from “the disartic- her body had only ever been a poorly ulation and distortion of her anatomy.” crafted artifice, caging her spirit and bar- “ he Hearing Trumpet,” one of the “New and uncomfortable anatomical ring the entry of others. Tgreat comic novels of the twenti- parts—artificial ones—will be used to And so a more profound journey beck- eth century, reprises the quest narrative accentuate the atmospheric feeling of a oned, not the expulsion of a single man— of “Down Below,” but with some key breast, buttock, or heel,” he wrote, only Ernst is forgotten by the narrator—but changes to insure it succeeds. Its narra- half-joking. She would appear a lumi- her reincarnation as a multiple and quix- tor, Marian Leatherby, is ninety-two years nous paradox, animate and inanimate, otic being: “an androgyne, the Moon, the old, gummy, rheumatic, gray-bearded, carnal and ghostly; perfect for being de- Holy Ghost, a gypsy, an acrobat, Leonora and deaf. Her lifelong dream is to tour sired and for being painted but not for Carrington, and a woman,” she wrote. Lapland in a sleigh drawn by woolly creating an art of her own. And a more terrible obstacle loomed. dogs. Barring that, she would like to col- Against this background, “Down Be- For her revelation, she was institution- lect enough cat hair for her friend Car- low” opens with Ernst’s internment by alized, made “a prisoner in a sanatorium mella to knit her a sweater. But Mari- the French as an undesirable foreigner, full of nuns,” and later injected with an’s son, Galahad, less noble than his after the outbreak of war, in 1939. His im- Cardiazol, stripped, and strapped to a Arthurian namesake, installs her in a re- prisonment, we learn, jump-started a rit- bed. She had a series of visions in which tirement home for women run by the ual of purgation. Carrington spent twenty- all the nuns and doctors, all of history, Well of Light Brotherhood and “financed four hours drinking orange-blossom water religion, and nature were contained in by a prominent American cereal com- to induce vomiting. Then she took a nap her, and she was the world. Freeing her- pany (Bouncing Breakfast Cereals Co.).” and reconciled herself to his absence. For self would free the cosmos, “stop the Before Marian is taken away, Carmella three weeks, she ate sparingly, sunbathed, war and liberate the world, which was gives her a hearing trumpet, pictured in tended potatoes in the garden, and ig- ‘jammed’ like me,” she had reasoned. The Carrington’s illustrations as a ridiculously nored the German troops thronging the place where will permeated all matter, oversized, scallop-edged object, “en- village. She wondered if her attitude “be- where the boundaries between bodies crusted with silver and mother o’pearl trayed an unconscious desire to get rid and beings dissolved, was not Spain but motifs and grandly curved like a buffa- for the second time of my father: Max, what she called “Down Below.” “I would lo’s horn.” Marian—part human, part whom I had to eliminate if I wanted to go Down Below, as the third person of animal, part machine—delights in the live,” she wrote, planning to sell up and the Trinity,” she announced. The title of artifice of her body’s enhancement. She drive to Spain. The reader who counts the book named her true destination, can hear now, and how prettily! the threads of the story—a purified her- her utopia. What can we hear through “The oine, her calling to vanquish an undesir- This, at least, is what we are led to be- Hearing Trumpet”? First, a thorough- able man, a journey through a mysteri- lieve. The reader, like any dutiful side- going commitment to absurdity; the plot ous land—knows that this is no lurid kick, awaits further instructions to go is gleeful nonsense. Then the driest strain memoir of psychosis and political chaos. Down Below. Instead, Carrington’s mad- of humor. Finally, the echoes of a rag- It is a quest narrative, designed to give ness lifts, and upon her release she jour- tag history of English literature, mined brisk expression to Carrington’s desire neys from Madrid to Lisbon to New not for its contact with human reality for a freer world. York. The quest is aborted, utopia aban- but for its capacity to conjure a world Like all quests, this one had its ob- doned, the threads of the story snapped beyond the one humans can see, smell, stacles. The first turned out to be her before they can be knotted together. Why, touch, and taste. The hearing trumpet, body, prized and painted by the Surre- the disappointed reader wonders, has the or otacousticon, is a seventeenth-century alists. Previously dismantled into its erotic heroine failed to complete her quest? The invention, and the scrapes it gets Mar- components—a torso in a photograph, epilogue to “Down Below” suggests that, ian into seem plucked from the earliest a breast on a wall—it began to integrate in life, no one was there to help convert picaresques. The retirement home is with everything around it. “Jammed!” Carrington’s madness into a fully real- headed by a lewd doctor who preaches Carrington proclaimed when the car tak- ized world. The artistic community of a doctrine of “Will over Matter.” The ing her to Spain broke down. “I was the European Surrealism was now scattered, women live in cottages, each more pre- car. The car had jammed on account of confined. Her surreal experience of psy- posterously shaped than its neighbor: a

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 85 lighthouse, a circus tent, a toadstool, a into a cauldron of meat broth and, in ible Painting,” is a testament to a kind cuckoo clock. The discovery of a docu- an act of Eucharistic voodoo, drinks of Fabian workshop in exile, whose tech- ment detailing the occult activities of an herself, lightly seasoned with salt and niques seemed enchanted by care. His old abbess suddenly launches us on a peppercorns. Dissolving like a bouillon mother’s “inner demons would dissolve” grail quest. It summons to Marian’s side cube, she finds her brothy spirit perme- when she did embroidery and appliqué; not Galahad but the winged animals ating the other women, who keep her woodworking yielded “a she-wolf inlaid and white goddesses of the Celtic and from spilling all over the place. Together, with abalone shells” and a roulette wheel Old English traditions. they forage mushrooms, raise goats, con- she painted with horses. She made dolls Carrington’s heroine succeeds be- jure bees whose honey they lick from stuffed with cat hair for the children and cause she is matched by a narrative form their bodies, and make spinning wheels. cooked for everyone—a procession of as chimerical as she is—not the short They hope to people the frozen earth outrageous meals over which they would story or the memoir but the novel. “The with “cats, werewolves, bees, and goats”— gather to speak a hybrid of Spanish, En- Hearing Trumpet” reads like a spectac- an “improvement on humanity,” Mar- glish, and French. ular reassemblage of old and new genres, ian declares. Underneath all this shimmering play the campy, illegitimate offspring of Mar- For all the outlandishness of the nov- runs a deep vein of vulnerability. “I am garet Cavendish’s romances and Rob- el’s action, there is something supremely an old lady who has lived through a lot ert Graves’s histories, with Thomas Pyn- practical about its tone, as if it were well and I have changed,” Carrington wrote to chon’s riotous paranoia spliced in to keep within our power to step into its look- a friend in 1945. She was only twenty- it limber and receptive to the political ing-glass world—a world where Car- eight. She did not have to be elderly to anxieties of its moment. The search for rington’s recombinant art and utopian feel old—isolated, estranged from her the grail is undertaken after the “dread- imagination are not extraordinary at all body, her consciousness dispersed. She ful atom bomb” has inaugurated another but simple facts of life. Perhaps what was soon to be a new mother in a for- Ice Age, killing nearly all humans and made the novel’s surreal ending conceiv- eign country, never to live in her home- destroying their modern infrastructure. able was the environment in which it was land again. She had entered early retire- The Cold War has turned the world, produced, the artistic community that ment, settling into her self-fashioned well, cold. Carrington’s comedy of lit- formed around Carrington in Mexico assisted-living facility. After her younger eralization asks us how a metaphor has City. She arrived there in 1942, and found son, Pablo, was born, in 1947, Carrington become a terrible reality. A conversa- a city full of socialists and communists wrote to the art dealer Pierre Matisse ex- tion between Marian and Carmella pro- in exile, its arts scene presided over by plaining why she would not attend her vides an answer: the suspicious luminaries of Mexican solo show at his gallery in New York: “I Muralism. (Frida Kahlo apparently called haven’t been out of these four walls for “It is impossible to understand how mil- lions and millions of people all obey a sickly Carrington and her circle “those Euro- about 2 years & have become so intimi- collection of gentlemen that call themselves pean bitches.”) She married the Hun- dated by the outside world that I might ‘Government’! The word, I expect, frightens garian photographer Chiki Weisz, had have grown a hare-lip, a long grey beard people. It is a form of planetary hypnosis, and two children, and created a new “Surreal & three cauliflower ears, bow legs, a hump, very unhealthy.” Family,” anchored by two friends, the gall stones & cross eyes.” “It has been going on for years,” I said. “And it only occurred to relatively few to dis- photographer Kati Horna and the painter Some might see this self-imposed obey and make what they call revolutions. If Remedios Varo. The family was a matri- lockdown as a constraint born from her they won their revolutions, which they occa- archy, committed to dissolving the bound- insecurity, but it contained the condi- sionally did, they made more governments, aries between the daily work of art and tions of her liberation. The gray beard sometimes more cruel and stupid than the last.” the daily work of care—a feminist proj- would reappear on her heroine Marian, “Men are very difficult to understand,” said Carmella. “Let’s hope they all freeze to death.” ect more enduring and surreal than any as would her mistrust of institutional single romance or school of painting. consecration. Both are marks of wisdom, The women have no use for frozen in- proof of Carrington’s faith that the spirit stitutions. What they seek are living or the next several decades, the fam- of a community, where art is truly lived communities for all creatures, forged Fily experimented with traditional and made, can walk through walls. not through domination and cruelty but craftsmanship. Carrington’s studio was Whether she was young or old, locked through care and mutual assistance. “a combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, up or locked down, Carrington sum- The community that the novel cre- kennel, and junk-store,” her patron Ed- moned unseen forces to come and make ates is what distinguishes “The Hear- ward James observed, impressed by the a lonely world feel bigger. “The Hear- ing Trumpet” as a delicious triumph magic she could wring out of domestic- ing Trumpet” prophesied the rest of her of world-making. Unlike Leonora in ity. Atop a table one might spy a cot for life, and she was content with it. She “Down Below,” Marian is not alone in Horna’s daughter, with a parade of long- made her art, loved her friends and chil- her fight against Conformism. Her side- necked animals that Carrington had dren deeply, had no interest in public- kicks are not her spectral readers but a painted around the base; in later years, a ity, rarely offered explanations of her gathering of elderly women, animals, folding screen, a gift for Carrington’s son work, and never wrote another novel. and spirits, growing ever more crowded Gabriel, with whom she would smoke And why would she? “The Hearing and boisterous as the novel shuffles them the marijuana she grew on the roof. His Trumpet” contained the utopia she imag- to their end. In its climax, Marian leaps forthcoming memoir of her, “The Invis- ined, and the world she knew. 

86 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 a few industry connections, and a new- POP MUSIC found awareness that he had what many Californians considered a thick South- ern accent. “They’d be, like, Where are DRINK IT IN you from?” he recalls. He began think- ing about that question, too. How Morgan Wallen became the most wanted man in country music. These days, Wallen is a country-music star. His signature hit, “Whiskey Glasses,” BY KELEFASANNEH is a perfectly constructed ode to a woman and a drink, lost and found, respectively: “I’m a need some whiskey glasses / ’Cause I don’t wanna see the truth.” According to Billboard, it was the top country-radio song of 2019. The music video depicts a fictionalized version of the makeover that Wallen underwent after “The Voice.” He rips off the sleeves of a plaid flan- nel shirt and shaves the sides of his long hair, transforming himself into an Ev- eryman rock star: Bruce Springsteen meets Larry the Cable Guy, crowned with a glorious mullet. Through this process, Wallen became not just a singer but a character—and, in a development that seems to have surprised many Nash- ville professionals, a sex symbol, beloved by an army of fans who appear to be dis- proportionately female and thirsty. An innocuous photograph of him leaning against a truck recently drew nearly half a million likes on Instagram, and almost ten thousand comments, including a prayerful declaration from a young mother in South Carolina: “Lord have mercy im bout to bust.” Wallen was alarmed when the live- music industry shut down in March, but 2020 has turned out to be the best year of his career. A new single helped him maintain his radio ubiquity, and his early seven years ago, a shaggy school, by a debilitating injury to his homebound fans made him a TikTok Nsinger with a shy smile introduced ulnar collateral ligament. “I’m just a nor- favorite, reacting to snippets of songs himself to America. “My name is Mor- mal small-town kid, and I really don’t and recording their own versions. Some gan Wallen, I’m twenty years old, I’m have a clue how to get into music— non-country listeners first heard about from Knoxville, Tennessee, and I’m cur- other than this,” he said. Wallen in the beginning of October, rently a landscaper,” he said. He was Wallen had never been on an airplane when “Saturday Night Live” announced standing on a stage in Los Angeles, until he flew to L.A. for the taping, and that he would be the musical guest on competing for a spot on “The Voice,” he was unsure what kind of singer he an upcoming episode. Many more of one of those reality shows in which es- wanted to be. He auditioned with a husky them heard about him a few days later, tablished stars offer aspiring ones a version of “Collide,” an earnest ballad when the show announced that Wal- chance to discover, first hand, just how from the two-thousands, which impressed len’s appearance had been cancelled be- heartbreaking the music industry can Shakira, one of the celebrity judges. “Your cause of video footage that was circu- be. He was wearing a tie and a cardi- voice is unique—it has this raspy tone, lating, on TikTok (naturally), showing gan, with shoulder-length hair and most gritty sound to it,” she said. “It’s as manly him at an Alabama bar the previous of a beard, and he explained that his as it gets.” Even so, Wallen was elimi- weekend, sharing kisses—and, for all promising baseball career had been nated a month later, and he returned to anyone knew, virions—with at least two ended, during his senior year in high Tennessee with a slightly higher profile, different women. Wallen acknowledged his mistake in a downbeat but charm- Wallen’s music is sometimes wistful, sometimes rowdy, and almost always boozy. ing two-minute video, apologizing for

PHOTOGRAPH BY KRISTINE POTTER THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 87 what he called “short-sighted” behavior guess I’ll sing country music, because Mac and the bittersweet memory of an and signalling a temporary withdrawal this is the life I know.” old flame. “We thought we were cutting from the spotlight. “It may be a second After “The Voice,” Wallen moved to this deep cut,” Moi says. But Wallen’s fans before you hear from me, for a while,” Nashville, where he found a like-minded grew obsessed, posting and reposting the he said. producer: Joey Moi, known for his work snippet and begging him to release the He wasn’t gone long. In early De- with Nickelback, who had reinvented final version. When he eventually did, a cember, Wallen made it to “S.N.L.,” per- himself as a country hitmaker. Wallen few months later, they pushed it to No. 6 forming a couple of songs and starring was streamlining his singing style, ex- on the Billboard Hot 100, thereby mak- in a sketch in which he reënacted his cising bluesy flourishes to arrive at a mel- ing reality-television history. “The Voice” fateful trip to that Alabama bar and low but muscular country-rock hybrid. recently concluded its nineteenth season, begged forgiveness, singing, “I thank “He had no idea how good he was,” Moi and Wallen is the only contestant ever you in advance / For giving this poor recalls. Wallen’s first album, “If I Know to score a Top 10 hit. Southern boy a second Yankee chance.” Me,” from 2018, started with a likable On the second half of “Dangerous,” On Twitter, viewers debated his hair, his lead single, “The Way I Talk,” which Wallen reminds listeners who he is and hygiene, and his general persona. “Go stalled at No. 30 on the country-radio where he’s from. This is something that to any Circle K in Indiana and you’ll chart—an ominous sign for a new singer. mainstream country singers are obliged find yourself a Morgan Wallen,” one But then came a trio of No. 1 country to do, especially the men, who are ex- user wrote. But it is not clear that Wal- hits, helped by a collaboration with an- pected to inject new life into familiar len would consider this an insult. On other Moi client, the country duo Flor- lines about pickup trucks and women in January 8th, he will release “Dangerous: ida Georgia Line, and by that haircut, cutoff jeans. Not all of Wallen’s efforts The Double Album” (Big Loud), which a staple of nineties country fashion that in this regard are up to his usual stan- takes pains to reassure listeners that he had come to seem stylishly retro. (One dards, especially during a four-song is still a small-town guy, albeit one with of the most famous mullets belonged to stretch that includes “Somethin’ Coun- a marvellously grainy voice and a knack Billy Ray Cyrus, whose daughter Miley try” and “Country A$$ Shit” and “What- for singing clever songs that are some- has lately contributed to their revival.) cha Think of Country Now.” (It would times wistful, sometimes rowdy, and al- “If I Know Me” reached No. 1 on the not be a surprise to learn that one or most always boozy—in this way, at least, Billboard country-album chart in Au- more of these compositions began with he is a country traditionalist. One of the gust, more than two years after it was a songwriter losing a bet.) But more often advantages of his sleeveless-shirt image released. By then, Wallen had a new he establishes his bona fides with a wink, is that it provides him occasional op- song heading up the country charts, as in “Blame It on Me,” a mock apology portunities to upend listeners’ expec- “More Than My Hometown,” an an- to a woman who “goes country” for him, tations. “Ain’t it strange the things you them of civic pride that is also, inevita- and has a hard time going back. Perhaps keep tucked in your heart,” he murmurs, bly, a love story. He underenunciates, it is no coincidence that “Blame It on near the end of one song. And this un- using his drawl to make the wordy verses Me,” with its evocation of cultural au- expectedly philosophical flourish helps sound casual: “I ain’t the runaway kind, thenticity, is actually a musical hybrid: a draw out the double meaning in the I can’t change that / My heart’s stuck in tidy pop song, partly propelled by a drum next line, which suggests personal growth these streets, like the train tracks / City machine. Since the twenty-tens, coun- while also recapitulating the excuse that sky ain’t the same black.” And in the cho- try singers have grown increasingly adept he must have offered to “Saturday Night rus he makes his choice, declaring, over at borrowing from contemporary hip- Live” executives, not long ago: “I found classic-rock guitar, “I guess I’ll see you hop and R. & B., and Wallen sometimes myself in this bar.” around / ’Cause I can’t love you more sings with a rapper’s sense of rhythm, than my hometown.” even as he defines himself against urban allen grew up in Sneedville, Ten- Wallen made his first album in a rush, sounds and urban life. “Beer don’t taste Wnessee, an isolated town in a val- squeezing recording sessions into a ten- half as good in the city,” he sings. “Beer ley near the Virginia border, where his day window between gigs. This year, like don’t buzz with that hip-hop, cuz / But father was for a time the pastor of the many people, he found himself with more it damn sure does with a little Nitty local Southern Baptist church. Wallen free time, and that explains why “Dan- Gritty.” Although he is wrong about beer, took classical-violin lessons as a boy, but gerous” contains thirty songs. For tradi- he is surely right that many of his listen- by the time his family settled in Knox- tion’s sake, the album is split into two ers like to think of him as one of their ville, when he was in high school, he was “sides,” the first of which is gentler and own—loyal to a country community that listening to unpretentious radio-friendly better, starting with a lovesick Tennessee harbors, even now, mixed feelings about rock bands like Breaking Benjamin and boy in a “sunburnt Silverado,” reminisc- the cultural dominance of hip-hop. Nickelback. In Wallen’s account, his em- ing about a beachside fling. Near the end When Wallen found out that “Sat- brace of country music was less a stylis- comes “More Than My Hometown,” as urday Night Live” had rescinded its ini- tic choice than a cultural imperative. “It well as “7 Summers,” which fans first tial invitation, in October, he was sitting may not have been the biggest influence heard in April, when Wallen uploaded in a hotel room in midtown Manhattan, in my life, as far as musically,” he says. part of a demo to Instagram. “7 Sum- getting ready for rehearsal. As he pro- “But once I started writing songs, it just mers” uses a pair of major-seventh chords cessed the news, a member of his man- sounded country. And I was, like, well, I to evoke the breezy sound of Fleetwood agement team ordered him a steak din-

88 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ner from a nearby restaurant, which he ate in his room before flying back to Ten- nessee. This month, when he returned to New York for his second chance, he sounded excited to be on the show, though he didn’t pretend to be a regular viewer. “I think this is a huge opportu- nity for me to hopefully give ’em a good first impression,” he said, from a differ- ent room in the same Manhattan hotel. This time, he promised not to do anything to violate quarantine protocol. (TMZ cameras spotted him on his way to the set—dressed, counterproductively, in a camouflage sweatshirt.) Although his appearance went smoothly, it also illus- trated how wide a gap remains between the media mainstream and the country mainstream. During Wallen’s sketch, he bantered cheerfully with Jason Bateman, the host, and Bowen Yang, a cast mem- ber, who played versions of Wallen from the future, sent back in time to stop him from partying away his big chance at stardom; both actors did notably inex- act impressions of his accent. But during his final performance Wallen seemed “Really, Mom? You wrapped up the clothes I left on the floor?” defiant, as if he weren’t sure that he liked being the butt of all these New York jokes. “Call it cliché, but hey, just take it •• from me / It’s still goin’ down out in the country,” he sneered, using hip-hop slang of playful songs, “P.M.S.” and “Thick Nashville bar owned by a local celebrity to convey a sentiment as old as country Thighs,” and then, this summer, “Just who turned out to be sympathetic: Kid music itself. About Over You,” a well-crafted lament Rock.) Wallen has said that he wants to that propelled her out of the TikTok change his habits for the sake of his son, n March, not long after the lockdown underground and into the country main- who was born in July. And tucked near Ibegan, a woman named Priscilla Block stream. She signed a major-label deal the end of the album’s first half is his appeared on TikTok, brandishing a glass in September. version of “Cover Me Up,” by the cele- of wine and singing an updated version During this year’s lockdown, TikTok brated singer-songwriter Jason Isbell. of “Whiskey Glasses.” Instead of “I just has emerged as a new way for country The lyrics tell the story of a man recu- wanna sip ’til the pain wears off,” Block singers to get noticed, much the way perating from a bender, or a lifetime of sang, “I just wanna sip until the quar- TV singing competitions did a couple benders, surrendering to love and, maybe, antine’s done.” Both her voice and her of decades before. FM radio, not tele- sobriety; Isbell’s original is quavering timing were impressive, and her cover vision or social media, still defines the and uncertain, as if he were still learn- was played millions of times. Block was country mainstream, but sometimes it ing to believe what he sings. Wallen’s twenty-four, and had been living in scrambles to keep pace. “7 Summers” interpretation, which has been streamed Nashville, performing in local bars for was, fittingly, a summer hit on the Hot nearly a hundred million times on Spot- tip money. With the bars closed, she 100, which includes data from stream- ify, is brawnier and perhaps more sug- dedicated herself to TikTok, often post- ing services. But it is only now starting gestive. “Girl, leave your boots by the ing multiple videos in a day: she wielded to ascend the country airplay chart. bed, we ain’t leavin’ this room,” he sings, a makeup brush like a microphone, re- “Dangerous,” with its thirty songs, seems in a voice that justifies the enthusiasm corded sing-alongs from her car, and designed to keep radio stations busy of both Shakira and a certain mother in posted pleas for Wallen to release more well into the post-pandemic era. South Carolina. Wallen’s record com- music. (She wants it known that she The album includes plenty of party pany hasn’t decided whether to make it was a fan even before his makeover, not songs—so many, in fact, that some of a single and try to persuade radio sta- that she objected to it. “The mullet just Wallen’s fans may worry about him. (In tions to play it. Isbell’s songs are not typ- made it better, honey,” she says. “I love May, Wallen was arrested, but not pros- ically heard on country radio—but these the mullet.”) Soon Block began sharing ecuted, for public intoxication and dis- days just about anything Wallen sings snippets of her own work: first a couple orderly conduct after an incident at a sounds like a potential country hit. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 8 9 transformations that puberty wreaks on ON TELEVISION the young. The characters, who, back then, were seventh graders, encountered new growths and protrusions (hard-ons, THE YOUNG ONES pubic hair, boobs), distressing secretions (sweat, semen, blood), and the nutso psy- Season 4 of “Big Mouth,” on Netflix. chological effects these bodily changes incur. One of the show’s strong suits is BY NAOMI FRY its portrayal of the capricious ways in which youthful sexuality can express it- self: Jay ( Jason Mantzoukas), a greasy but sympathetic classmate of Andrew and Nick’s, discovers that he is bisexual by humping a “boy” pillow as well as a “girl” pillow; Andrew ( John Mulaney), a bespectacled, mustachioed ball of neu- roses, develops a crush on his cousin and, although he is ashamed, proceeds to send her a dick pic; the lovable, bucktoothed nerd Missy ( Jenny Slate) masturbates with her childhood Glo Worm and re- fers to the act as her “worm dance.” The show’s anarchic spirit is reflected in its graphic, borderline grotesque style of animation, which enables it to depict aspects of pubescent sexuality that might otherwise offend or disturb. (Goldberg was a longtime writer on “Family Guy,” an adult cartoon that is like “Big Mouth”’s coarse, alcoholic uncle.) The kids’ urges and fears are represented by a slew of fantastical creatures: there are shaggy, wisecracking “hormone monsters”; a finger-wagging “shame wizard”; a silk- en-voiced “depression kitty”; and, as of this season, a jumpy “anxiety mosquito” named Tito (Maria Bamford). Unsur- prisingly, Tito is a real bummer. “Their penises are thick hairy hogs and yours is a bald little piglet,” he tells Nick, a late n early episode of the fourth season drew Goldberg, Mark Levin, and Jenni- bloomer, as the boy is getting ready to Aof “Big Mouth,” now streaming on fer Flackett. By allowing its characters to take a shower at summer camp. Netflix, opens with the show’s protago- age—and by focussing in on them, to an The first three episodes of the fourth nists, Andrew Glouberman and Nick almost painful degree, as they do so— season, which take place at the camp, Birch, embarking on their first day of “Big Mouth” can feel more akin to live- are some of the funniest TV I’ve watched eighth grade. “Look at us, growing up,” action TV than it does to cartoons such in a while. There’s a new character named Nick (voiced by Nick Kroll) says. “Not as “South Park” and “Bob’s Burgers,” which Milk (Emily Altman), a mouth-breath- like Bart Simpson. That yellow schmuck have used animation to keep their pro- ing whiner who can’t stop bringing up has been in fourth grade for, like, thirty tagonists static over the course of many obscure factoids, seemingly apropos of years.” A clever but heartfelt cartoon that seasons, as if preserved in amber. nothing (“My dad’s friend Bob Reedy is bursting with pop-cultural references “I’m going through changes,” Charles says there’s no such thing as choice, only and is popular with adult viewers, “Big Bradley sings in the show’s opening destiny”). He is a familiar prototype: Mouth” owes more than a little to “The theme. (The tune was originated by Black the uppity dork who is so annoying that Simpsons.” (Even the use of “schmuck” Sabbath, that band of hormonal lads even the softer-hearted kids don’t feel is evocative of Krusty the Clown.) Still, from Birmingham.) Since 2017, when sorry for him. “Milk, your dick is so Nick’s comment identifies the unique- the first season aired, “Big Mouth” has weird. I can see the veins in your balls,” ness of this series, created by Kroll, An- depicted the riotous, often alarming a bunkmate tells him. “During the Re- naissance, scrota such as mine were con- The show’s teen-age protagonists are followed around by “hormone monsters.” sidered a delicacy,” Milk responds air-

90 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY SIOBHÁN GALLAGHER sullivan+ associates ARCHITECTS ily. Perhaps nothing embodies the “Big lieved to see “Big Mouth” double down Mouth” formula better than this ex- on that idea. One of my favorite gags change: gross, hilarious, weird, precise. was Andrew’s obsession with Jessi’s new boyfriend, Michaelangelo. Andrew, who TV show can have growing pains, is straight, swoons over the dreamy Brit, martha’s vineyard Atoo. Andrew and Nick are the alter but this is treated as unremarkable; it is egos of Goldberg and Kroll, who’ve been just one more facet of Andrew’s horni- real-life best friends since childhood, ness. A more serious arc deals with Na- and, early on, the series hewed closely talie, a trans camper. Jessi is upset when to their adolescent milieu: upper-mid- Natalie starts bunking with the girls— dle-class, white, straight Jews from West- not because Jessi is transphobic but be- chester. (In Season 1, the “Great Women”- cause last summer Natalie, who had not themed bat mitzvah of Nick and An- yet transitioned and was still known as drew’s sardonic friend Jessi—voiced by Gabe, from the boys’ cabin, teased Jessi Jessi Klein—has an Anne Frank table.) mercilessly, calling her “fire crotch.” European Beret $20 Season by season, “Big Mouth” has had The show also confronts questions 100% Wool • One Size Fits All Black, Navy, Brown, Red, Camel, Grey to figure out, in tandem with the roil- that were raised by Slate’s statement— Check or Credit Card w/Exp. Date. ing cultural and political realities of the Who should be able to give voice to Black Add $4 shipping plus $1 each additional www.johnhelmer.com past few years, how to develop and fine- characters? What would it look like to John Helmer • Est. 1921 • (503) 223-4976 tune its world alongside its characters. represent a biracial character fully?—by 969 S.W. Broadway, Dept. N120 • Portland, OR 97205 In Season 2, a gay classmate, Mat- turning them into plot points. This sea- thew (Andrew Rannells), and a Latina son, Missy, who has grown up in a “post- one, Gina (Gina Rodriguez), got more racial household,” grapples with both her airtime; in Season 3, a new student named burgeoning womanhood and her evolv- Ali (Ali Wong) introduced herself as ing racial identity. “N-word alert!” she pansexual. “If you’re bisexual, you like blurts out nervously, when visiting her tacos and burritos,” she said. “But I’m older, cooler cousins, Quinta and Lena saying I like tacos and burritos, and I (Quinta Brunson and Lena Waithe). could be into a taco that was born a bur- The cousins, who tell Missy that her par- rito, or a burrito that is transitioning ents haven’t let her be Black, take her Premier Senior Living into a taco.” This flippant distinction, to get her hair braided (“What shampoo In Beautiful Bucks County, PA which seemingly suggested that bisex- do you use?” “Well, Tom’s of Maine, of Life at Pennswood Village is all about uals could not be attracted to transgen- course!”) and encourage her to buy new Living, Your Way- independently, with der and nonbinary people, led to an out- clothes, which she does—but only after health care peace of mind. Guided cry online. (Goldberg apologized on bidding a weepy farewell to the overalls by Quaker values of dignity, equality and respect, Pennswood Village is a Twitter.) This summer, in the midst of she has worn for the past three seasons. welcoming and active 65+ community the Black Lives Matter protests, Jenny “Talking to your clothes? That’s some with opportunities for intellectual, Slate, who is white and Jewish, an- white-girl shit right there,” Quinta says. physical and social growth. nounced that she would no longer voice “Girl, please, you did the exact same thing Call 855-944-0673 Missy, a character with a Black father with your blanket,” Lena retorts, remind- for your FREE guide. and a white, Jewish mother, because ing us that categories, though useful as Virtual & In-Person Tours Available. “Black characters on an animated show shorthand, can be tricky. 1382 Newtown-Langhorne Rd Newtown, PA 18940 should be played by Black people.” Slate When Missy’s mother expresses www.pennswood.org had already recorded Missy’s dialogue doubts about whether her daughter’s for Season 4, but she would be replaced cornrows are “manageable,” Missy blows by the Black comedian Ayo Edebiri, be- up. “Stop stealing our men!” she yells, in ginning with the penultimate episode. a hilarious, shocking moment that turns Part of the charm as well as the signifi- heartrending when she gasps, through cance of “Big Mouth,” I had always felt, tears, “I just really wanted to show you was its commitment to the confusion of my new hair.” Later, in a Halloween- Never stop categories, born of a sense that identity, themed episode, Missy reaches a détente learning. sexual and otherwise, can be a messy with her fragmented self and kisses her ©2020 KENDAL thing that does not necessarily adhere to refracted reflections in a haunted house’s Retirement living in proximity to a clear orthodoxy. (In this regard, the broken mirror—a sweet reimagining of Oberlin College, Conservatory of show is similar to others I loved this year: a sequence from Jordan Peele’s horror Music and the Allen Art Museum. crude, funny, yet searching comedies like movie “Us.” In this moment, her voice FXX’s “Dave” and Hulu’s “PEN15,” which changes from Slate’s to Edebiri’s. “There

EQUAL HOUSING explore race and sexuality in unexpected I am,” she says, triumphantly. “I’m all of 1.800.548.9469 OPPORTUNITY kao.kendal.org/oberlin-connection ways.) As I watched Season 4, I was re- these Missys.” 

THENEW YORKER,DECEMBER 28, 2020 91 pet of capitalism and savaged centrist THE ART WORLD opposition to the tyrant’s rise. The cover of the show’s catalogue features Heart­ field’s photograph of a worker’s soiled, WHAT ARE ARTISTS FOR? forward­grasping hand, which was used for a poster promoting the Communist The Constructivists, at MOMA. Party in a Weimar election in 1928. The image seems rather more menacing than BY PETER SCHJELDAHL rallying. It is at an extreme of the era’s politically weaponized design, which generally took less inflammatory forms in Germany and other European de­ mocracies. These countries incubated movements that are well represented in the exhibition but tangential to its Rus­ sian focus—Futurism, Dada, the Bau­ haus. In Russia, there was no partisan campaigning because there was only one party. After 1917, it won the ardent allegiance of a generation of creative types who reconceived of the artist as a self­abnegating servant of the masses and the state—or who professed to, whatever their private misgivings. What is an artist, anyway? MOMA’s show stalks the question. The Revolution usurped or bypassed the energies of the Russian Empire’s wartime avant­gardes, most prominently the metaphysically spirited Suprematism of Kazimir Malevich, who is allowed a perfunctory cameo in “Engineer, Agi­ tator, Constructor,” with one small ab­ stract painting, from 1915. His day was over with the coup of Constructivism. He continued to support the Revolu­ tion, but his manner was adjudged too esoteric for proletarian tastes. Central to the new dispensation was the extrav­ agantly gifted Alexander Rodchenko, our first impression of “Engineer, here. About two hundred of the roughly who was really—almost helplessly—an YAgitator, Constructor: The Artist three hundred pieces on view were re­ artist, despite his militant posturing. In Reinvented, 1918­1939,” a vast and ex­ cently acquired by the museum from 1921, he painted three monochrome can­ citing show, at the Museum of Mod­ the collection of Merrill C. Berman, a vases—red, yellow, and blue—and an­ ern Art, of interwar Soviet and Euro­ Wall Street investor and venture capi­ nounced that that was that for paint­ pean graphic design, may combine déjà talist. Fresh images catch the eye, as do ing, which was henceforth obsolete. He vu and surprise. You likely know the unfamiliar names. The scope is ency­ also posed for a chic photograph as a look, loosely termed Constructivist: off­ clopedic, surveying a time of ideologi­ platonic socialist worker, sporting a kilter geometric shapes, vectoring diag­ cal advertisement, when individuals uniform of his own design and stand­ onals, strident typography (chiefly blocky sacrificed their artistic independence to ing amid his own abstract sculptures. sans serif ), grabby colors (tending to programs of mass appeal. The celebrity gesture ran riskily afoul black and orangeish red), and collaged “The title ‘artist’ is an insult,” the Ger­ of Soviet impersonality and was not re­ or montaged photography, all in thrall man Communists George Grosz and peated. When, in 1932, he was accused to advanced technology and socialist John Heartfield declared in 1920. Grosz of “bourgeois formalism,” he retreated exhortation, in mediums including ar­ subsided into satirical painting and draw­ to sports photography, finding a safe chitecture, performance, and film. But ing, but Heartfield became a dedicated harbor that was denied his movement you won’t have seen most of the works propagandist who cast Hitler as a pup­ colleague Gustav Klutsis, a master of photomontage whose worshipful imag­

Liubov Popova’s “Production Clothing for Actor No. 7,” from 1922. ery of Josef Stalin didn’t forestall his ex­ / THE MERRILL C. BERMAN COLLECTION YORK NEW ART, OF MODERN THE MUSEUM COURTESY

92 T HE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ecution, on unclear grounds, in 1938. may prove to be ephemeral. No living omnibus ego to work for emancipatory Rodchenko’s diminution illustrates the artist I know of, however fervently ac­ personal and social consciousness. Pas­ Soviet tragedy of formal and visionary tivist, is renouncing art as a distraction sionately embracing Bolshevism, he genius that was ground underfoot even from moral commitment, as the more wrote successful plays, delivered stir­ before the inception, in 1928, of Stalin’s extreme Constructivists did. But a good ring speeches, supervised important ruinous first Five Year Plan, and of the deal of recent polemical art suggests a magazines, and became wildly popular. coerced visual banalities of socialist re­ use­by date that is not far in the fu­ During the New Economic Policy, alism. Not that the MOMA show in­ ture. Aesthetic judgment, based in ex­ instituted by Lenin in 1921, he collab­ dulges in historical drama. Its focus is perience, confirms differences between orated with Rodchenko, contributing scholarly, separately documenting cre­ what is of its time and what, besides snappy slogans to advertisements for ators who, as one redemptive credit to being of its time, may prove timeless. light bulbs, cocoa, and cigarettes: high­ Soviet social reform of the time, include I feel that our present moment, marked lights of the show. Even in love poems, a great many women. It builds knowl­ by imbroglios of art and politics, forces his free­verse style—a sort of machine­ edge. Meaning is up to us. the issue, even in face of tendencies a tooled lyricism—stuns and arouses. century old. (The American poet James Schuyler rt happens when someone wants As the exhibition unfolds, artists­ deemed the effect an “intimate yell.”) Ato do it. Advertising and propa­ penitent, shrinking from the perils of Politically, Mayakovsky can seem a ganda start from given ends and work originality, dominate in Russia. Ca­ fabulously specialized instrument of backward to means. There’s just enough reerist designers teem in the West, with worldly transformation. In 1926, he called genuine art in the exhibition to hone such fecund exceptions as László Mo­ his mouth “the working class’s/mega­ this point. The small Malevich, of cock­ holy­Nagy and Kurt Schwitters. I know phone.” He wrote a three­thousand­ eyed red and black squares on white, that I’m casting a wet blanket on work line panegyric in praise of Lenin. But elates. Then there’s my favorite work, that might be—and surely will be— by 1930, increasingly subject to hard­ which I’d like to steal: a version of the enjoyed without prejudice for its for­ line, and official, attacks for “petit bour­ sublimely sophisticated Liubov Popo­ mal ingenuity and rhetorical punch. geois” subjectivity and other supposed va’s “Production Clothing for Actor The architectonic and typographical apostasies, he was meekly policing his No. 7” (1922). A black­caped, robotic razzmatazz of the Austrian­born Amer­ unauthorized feelings: “stepping / on figure extends a square red sleeve like a ican Herbert Bayer, the Dutch Piet the throat/ofmy own song.” A tortu­ smuggled Suprematist banner. Personal Zwart, the Polish Władysław Strze­ ous love life may have helped drive flair and practical use merge. (What miński, and the Italian Fortunato De­ him—on April 14, 1930, at the age of would Popova’s fate have been if she pero afford upbeat pleasures, and a strik­ thirty­six—to shoot himself. But it’s hadn’t died of scarlet fever in 1924, at ingly sensitive Dada collage by the impossible not to think of him as mar­ the age of thirty­five? The Moscow art German Hannah Höch feels almost tyred by his own high church: a trashed world adored her.) Among a few other overqualified for its company. Strictly prototype of the Soviet new man. His serious gems included for passing ref­ as a phenomenon in design, Construc­ funeral was one of the largest in the re­ erence, the curators Jodi Hauptman, tivism and its offshoots merit celebra­ gime’s history. Adrian Sudhalter, and Jane Cavalier tion. It’s just that the historical out­ In the catalogue, the poets Katie hazard a Piet Mondrian from 1921, comes of the period get my goat, as Farris and Ilya Kaminsky offer their “Composition with Red, Blue, Black, does the show’s sidelining of first­rate fine translation of a poem that was Yellow, and Gray.” I wonder if the paint­ artists. Don’t look for anything by Vlad­ found with Mayakovsky’s body. It shows ing will give you, as it does me, a shock imir Tatlin, Malevich’s innovational what was lost to the world with his of recognition of true artistry: decisions peer in sculpture: not thematic enough, suicide. The poem, with its comic and made not for but with a purpose, as cap­ plainly. The show’s freest and most grand interiority, helps me imagine the tivating in the context of happy work­ prolific stylist is also, for me, the most unexpressed states of mind and soul of ers working, a heroic soldier standing annoying: El Lissitzky. A star mentee so many artists who were inspired and at the ready, and Stalin strolling among of Malevich’s who immigrated to Ber­ then blighted by a common cause: his subjects as is Wallace Stevens’s jar lin in 1921, Lissitzky popularized the Already Two in Tennessee. Constructivist look as an international It’s already two a.m. You’re likely asleep. Art unaffected by personality is ster­ style that wasn’t about anything: jazzy The Milky Way’s a silver river through the ile. That needn’t constitute a failure. It formal clichés that hugely influenced night. may be a clear­eyed choice made on commercial culture. At MOMA, ap­ I’m in no hurry; I’ll not storm your dreams with the lightning bolts of telegrams. principle. Many things are more im­ proaches to abstraction—logo­like ci­ “It’s not you,” as they say. “It’s we.” portant than art. Today, imperatives of phers by the Hungarian László Peri, Love’s boat has crashed on our lives. racial and social justice preoccupy nu­ and stark geometries by the Polish But we’ve already closed out our tab, merous artists. Hard light is wanted in Henryk Berlewi—deliver bright prom­ so there’s no need to list each a crisis; away with moonbeams. What ise, then evanesce. pain, pinprick, pang. You watch: silence settles on the earth. needs saying conditions how it’s said, The show has a posthumous heart. The night taxes the sky of its stars. which means accepting the chance that, It is lodged in the remains of the great In such an hour one stands up and speaks should conditions change, the work poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who put an to the ages, to history, and all creation. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 93 Time,” his feverish adaptation of THETHEATRE Borges’s short story “The Secret Mir- acle,” Gelb renders himself a charac- ter trapped in an animation, narrat- THE SAINT IN THE CLOSET ing a tale of art and persecution as it comes alive around him in hand- A one-man musical about Mother Teresa. drawn illustrations. These works, odes to theatrical flexibility, should serve BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ as a dare, and as an inspiration. Con- straint is an undervalued blessing. A closet can be a castle when the spirit moves you. “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” which was co-presented by Theatre Mitu’s Expansion Works, and was, like most Theatre in Quarantine productions, recorded live, could be called an abbreviated opera for a sin- gle singer. In a flitting monologue, spo- ken and sung, Mother Teresa (played by Gelb) tells us of her faith, her com- mitment to the poor, and her own pov- erty; she reproaches us for our indiffer- ence and herself for her vanity, and muses about the nature of time and God. She can be casual and confes- sional, as if speaking to a therapist, and imperious and commanding, too. Christian wrote the libretto and the shimmering, vehement music, which she recorded at home, playing the piano, synth, flute, and percussion. (Guitar and bass tracks were added by the sound designer and mixer Ada Westfall.) It is Christian whom we hear singing during the forty-minute piece, both solo and in pointillistic a-cappella backup; Gelb lip-synchs throughout. Christian’s supple spring-water freshness puts me in mind of Sufjan f the words “Expressionist musical using the closet as a stage since the Stevens, as does her interest in explor- Iportrait of Mother Teresa performed start of the pandemic, when he emp- ing religious themes in poetic, pop- in drag from East Village closet” make tied it of its contents, painted it white, inflected ways, but her work reaches your heart beat faster—and how could and stuck a camera where the door for darker, rougher notes. Her path to they not?—you’re in luck. Get your- used to be. Sacrificing storage space devotion is paved with struggle and self to YouTube, where you can find in this town? That’s commitment. doubt. Earlier this year, on Playwrights Heather Christian’s “I Am Sending In the past eight months, Gelb and Horizon’s “Soundstage” podcast, she You the Sacred Face,” the latest offer- a group of collaborators have put on débuted an exquisite musical work ing from Theatre in Quarantine, a upward of twenty shows, ranging from called “Prime.” Inspired by cloistered “pandemic performance laboratory” brief improvisations to a series of in- monks’ Masses, it is meant to serve as created by the writer, director, and creasingly ambitious new works, in- “a practical breviary” for prayer at the actor Joshua William Gelb. The closet genious bonsai creations of technical bleary hour of 6 A.M. on, say, an av- in question is in Gelb’s studio apart- inventiveness and stylistic panache. erage Tuesday. Set it as an alarm and ment. It is four feet wide, eight feet In Gelb’s version of “Krapp’s Last watch even the most sluggish sleeper tall, and two feet deep, and, like a ma- Tape,” his closet becomes a space shut- leap out of bed. “Prime” ends up ex- gician’s scarf-belching hat, contains tle, gently floating off into a great ploding into rousing, gospel-chorus astounding multitudes. Gelb has been abyss; in “Footnote for the End of joy, but Christian earns that commu- nal release through aching moments “I Am Sending You the Sacred Face” explores the saint’s unknowable mystery. of quiet privacy. “Shrink my need into

94 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ANJA SLIBAR a tiny acorn,” she sings, with yearn- bed and head,” she sings. “My com- anguish. Her Teresa speaks of having ing. You don’t have to be a believer to monality with those I serve gives dig- no soul, of being empty, undefended, take that prayer to heart. nity.” This is the saint known the world a vessel waiting hopelessly to be filled. over, the radically humble caretaker of There is a bitterness, even a sour humor, “ Am Sending You the Sacred Face,” the poor, come to us in the unlikely to her resignation. “I always said if Iwhich Gelb directed with the cho- guise of a rock star. Gelb, who moves they ever canonize me, I would want reographer Katie Rose McLaughlin, in precise, rhythmic jerks, flings his to be known as a patron saint of dark- opens with the sound of a buzzing body toward us, demanding contact, ness,” she says—one more prayer that mosquito. Gelb’s closet has been draped attention; he braces himself against has gone unanswered. in silvery tinsel; dressed as Mother Te- his closet’s walls and leans out, as if Gelb’s performance, built on me- resa, he stands inside it like an icon in strung to the prow of a ship, to sing tered gesture and pantomime, is a a church niche, a makeup ring light furiously into our faces. Mother Te- shrewd answer to the trick question transfigured into a glowing white halo resa, urgent and angry, wants us to look of how to embody an icon. He doesn’t, over his head. (His costume pairs the at the ugliness of poverty and see a because he can’t. His Mother Teresa saint’s trademark blue-striped wim- plague of human greed and indiffer- is about as far from the stooped, wrin- ple with a less orthodox sparkly se- ence—to realize that humans, not God, kled, beneficent postcard version of quinned gown.) He claps, and the scene must be responsible for ending it. the woman as you can get. (She has transforms into a Renaissance trip- But she doubts that she can live up equally little to do with the portrayal tych, with Gelb framed in each gold- to the standard that she preaches. Her of the nun as a grifter and a hypocrite edged panel. Stivo Arnoczy is respon- motives are impure. She describes her which is favored by her detractors.) sible for the wizardly video design, first calling, to be a nun, as coming Blasting away accumulated layers of which uses a series of loops and alter- from a phone in her heart (made wit- veneration, Gelb and Christian honor nating simultaneous streams to mul- tily manifest as a red landline whose the unknowable mystery of the per- tiply Gelb like the loaves and fishes, corkscrew cord is attached to Gelb’s son underneath, an ordinary woman while Kristen Robinson’s dazzling sce- chest). This call is easy enough to obey, living out an extraordinary life. The nography serves as a reminder of the but a second one terrifies her. God, show was made with the help of a trippy strain that runs through Cath- in the form of a lush, “Rocky Hor- “drag dramaturg,” Dito van Reigers- olic aesthetics. Take a look at the Res- ror”-style red mouth, commands her berg, and it’s refreshing to see drag, urrection panel of the Isenheim Al- to serve the poor. “You probably will a form that tends to codify feminin- tarpiece, with its funky boudoir Jesus not,” God says. He is mocking her. Te- ity even as it celebrates it, used in so floating before an orb of psychedelic resa panics; she equivocates. Even after strange and sexless a way, its familiar light, and recall that the monks for she accepts the mission, she battles tropes scrapped and reinvented. Any- whom Matthias Grünewald painted with herself, ashamed of the pride that one can try sainthood on, for an eve- his masterpiece cared for peasants she takes in her own humility. And ning, to see how it fits. One of Chris- dying of St. Anthony’s fire—an illness she struggles, hideously, with a dark tian’s points is that being Mother marked by hallucinations which was night of the soul—a fifty-year period Teresa every day was its own kind of caused by eating rye infected with the of miserable distance from God, which, performance: “a medieval darkness same strain of fungus that was used, in reality, began shortly after she re- done to a modern woman—so it was centuries later, to make LSD. ceived her calling and lasted until her quite a show.” The saint commit- Amid this splendor, Mother Teresa death. Though most of Christian’s lan- ted wholly to the act, and the world introduces herself. “I wear shoes that guage is her own, she draws on Mother watched in awe, while beneath the do not fit me./ Stink and sweat, refuse Teresa’s letters, published after her spectacle a woman labored, hidden, a fan, a phone, a TV/ praise my lousy death, to reveal the extent of the saint’s trying not to be seen. 

THE NEW YORKER IS A REGISTERED TRADEMARK OF ADVANCE MAGAZINE PUBLISHERS INC. COPYRIGHT ©2020 CONDÉ NAST. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 28, 2020 95 THE BACK PAGE COMEDIAN CAPTION SHOWDOWN

Each week, you, the readers, submit captions to a contest that runs on this page of the magazine. But you’re weary, and your face muscles ache from trying to grin and bear your way through 2020. So we called in the professionals—professional comedians, that is—to caption this cartoon by E. S. Glenn. Follow @newyorkermag on Instagram for a chance to pick your favorite.

“I’m sorry. I’m having trouble focussing. “He sees you when you’re sleeping? “My insurance covers the first Why the fuck are you dressed like Santa?” He knows when you’re awake? It’s time session, but your assistant said there’s ana fabrega we defund the North Pole.” a co-pay of four cookies?” ziwe fumudoh demi adejuyigbe “Wait. Can you explain it to me again? Do you know Jesus at all?” “What does that even mean, ‘nice’?” “I think the problem is less that I ‘need to mike birbiglia nick offerman believe again’ and more that my wife continues to sleep with my best friend.” “I really love oat milk. I can’t believe I used “Now bring us the figgy Prozac.” kyle mooney to drink whole milk! Ha ha, that’s so nasty.” pete holmes melissa villaseñor “In 2020, is the entire “Do you accept Zelle?” world on your naughty list?” “Hallucinations? I wouldn’t say so. Just kate berlant marie faustin these visions of sugar plums dancing in my head. Had ,em since I was a kid. “If I had been there that day, I know “Sorry, I just assumed I’d sit That’s normal, right?” Grandma would’ve been O.K….” on your lap during the session.” john hodgman rachel pegram karen chee

“I don’t have an Oedipus complex. “I mean, I don’t want “PS5s have sold out everywhere and I’m all I just didn’t like seeing you kiss my mom.” coal, but I deserve coal.” out of options. How good was I this year?” sarah cooper tim heidecker ify nwadiwe

“I know I ask you this every time, “Thanks for making time— “I was six years old and got coal for but you’re not making a list, are you?” I know this is your big day.” Christmas! Of course I have problems.” aparna nancherla alyssa limperis gary richardson ADVERTISEMENT DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS REPORTS ON ITS COVID-19 WORK

As coronavirus cases continue to rise, how does the global medical humanitarian organization make an impact? For nearly fifty years, (I.P.C.) in facilities that serve Médecins Sans Frontières, people who are homeless or known in English as Doctors housing insecure, increased Without Borders or simply access to services through MSF, has provided lifesaving distribution of phones, and medical care around the operated relief stations globe. The organization— providing safe access to which runs four hundred hygiene facilities. “There and fifty projects in seventy are a lot of services in New countries—relies on being York City—and amazing able to move experienced organizations,” Michelle staff and medical supplies Mays, a nurse and MSF around the world at a project coördinator in New moment’s notice. But as ran limited operations in health-education campaign to ensure the availability York City, said. MSF was the coronavirus swept the American Southwest, and mobile testing clinics. and affordability of these able to use its extensive through country after Florida, Michigan, New York, products worldwide. experience working in country, bringing travel Puerto Rico, and Texas, in In nursing homes in Detroit “COVID-19 is new, but epidemic settings to give restrictions, lockdowns, and order to reach vulnerable and Houston, MSF provided these issues of access are existing organizations a unprecedented disruptions people who suffer from a direct, in-person support not,” Dana Gill, who serves boost. Mays also noted in the global supply chain for lack of health-care access. to reduce COVID-19 as MSF’s U.S. policy adviser the role that race plays in essential personal protective transmission in shared on access to medicines, who is most impacted by equipment, medicines, and “One of the things that spaces and address the said. The organization is the pandemic: “Eighty-six medical materials, MSF had COVID-19 has done is to dual burden that staff at calling on governments per cent of New Yorkers to dramatically shift highlight the lack of a public- long-term-care facilities around the world to experiencing homelessness its process. health system that we’ve had face: carers experience demand that companies are people of color, and anxiety and grief in their disclose information and fifty-three per cent of New day-to-day reality, having costs associated with Yorkers are people of color. lost colleagues and residents research and development, So you see already just to COVID-19, while in order to know if those where those disparities are.” simultaneously enduring companies are charging a stigma in their sector, fair price for COVID-19 Although MSF’s operations Heather Pagano, a project medicine, vaccines, and in the United States have coördinator in Michigan, diagnostics. According now concluded, its work said. During a time of to MSF, companies will continue through local heightened emotional stress, should have even more partners and collaborations. MSF helped understaffed of an obligation to public In Puerto Rico, MSF’s and overworked teams cope, transparency now, since program offering home- especially those suffering billions of dollars of taxpayer based care and COVID-19 “A cookie-cutter approach in the United States,” Ruth from vicarious trauma—what money are going toward R. monitoring for people won’t work in this pandemic,” Kauffman said. Kauffman happens when someone & D. and the purchase of isolated at home will Kate White, the medical is a nurse, midwife, and experiences a traumatic COVID-19 products. All continue, thanks to the focal point for MSF’s MSF project coördinator reaction to something that COVID-19 health tools and newly formed organization COVID-19 task force, said. in the Southwest, where hasn’t happened to them technologies should be true Puerto Rico Salud, which “We have to engage with MSF provided activities directly, but to a patient or global public goods, free was created by a group of communities to understand for infection prevention colleague. “It’s not in health- from the price and access MSF’s Puerto Rican staff. what their concerns are, and control (I.P.C.) in care providers’ DNA to say barriers that patents and “We know that the crisis and adjust our activities in collaboration with local that they need help,” Athena other intellectual-property is not over and that many ways that both meet their leaders, tribal health Viscusi, a clinical social restrictions impose. people in Puerto Rico do most pressing health needs officials, and health-care worker and a psychosocial- not have adequate access and simultaneously reduce organizations. “Even though care specialist, said. “They’re The work of MSF in to health care,” Sophie the risks of COVID-19 we have money and we helpers. And, even in this the U.S. and across the Delaunay, the MSF project transmission. It’s pointless to spend a lot of money on society, we give very mixed globe is developed with coördinator in Puerto roll out a perfect COVID-19 health care, that money is messages. We say, ‘Thanks the understanding that Rico, said. “COVID-19 has service [when] it’s actually not distributed in a way that’s for being a hero.’ . . . But communities know the exposed many issues that peak malaria or malnutrition fair across the country.” when you’re saying you’re a answers to their own need to be addressed so that season, and that’s the main Among MSF’s regional hero, you’re saying, ‘You have problems, and that much people who get sick, whether cause of sickness or death in initiatives was a two-month some supernatural ability of what the organization from the virus or other that community.” program in Immokalee, to handle [everything]. And can provide is support and illnesses, can access medical Florida, where an estimated we don’t need to take care resources in answering care. We close our program The arrival of the coronavirus fifteen thousand to of you.’” those needs. In New York with a sense of reassurance has also meant beginning twenty thousand migrant City, where more than that the very next day after programs in new, if familiar, farmworkers continued to As pharmaceutical eighty thousand people MSF leaves, our former countries, including the work during the pandemic companies’ vaccines experience homelessness, medical staff through their United States. As cases with minimal access to are approved and begin MSF partnered with local newly formed group, Puerto of COVID-19 surged health care and testing. to be distributed, and organizations to support Rico Salud, will continue this nationally, the organization In collaboration with local as more medicines and at-risk groups. The nonprofit lifesaving work.” realized that it was needed health groups and the equipment approved to and its partners improved right here as well. Between county department of treat COVID-19 reach the measures for infection April and October, MSF health, MSF ran a public- market, MSF is working prevention and control DONATE.DOCTORSWITHOUTBORDERS.ORG