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DECEMBER 7, 2020

7 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 15 THE TALK OF THE TOWN David Remnick on the cost of Trump’s war on the press; the value of a life; the treasures of Frank Zappa’s vault; a Coney Island school’s COVID lawsuit; Tobias Menzies.

BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. Nathan Heller 22 The Back Office Virtual assistants in a globalized world.

SHOUTS & MURMURS Simon Rich 28 Raised by Wolves

LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES Francesca Mari 30 A Lonely Occupation Homeless house sitters in a broken real-estate market.

A REPORTER AT LARGE Larissa MacFarquhar 36 Solomon’s Dilemma Families split by a clash of Hasidic and secular values.

COMIC STRIP Roz Chast 41 “A Cheery Story”

PORTFOLIO Christopher Payne 48 Vital Vessels with Raffi Khatchadourian The race to make vials for coronavirus vaccines.

FICTION Paul Theroux 58 “Dietrologia”

THE CRITICS BOOKS Adam Gopnik 65 The mythology of the Mafia. 69 Briefly Noted

A CRITIC AT LARGE Dan Chiasson 70 A new biography of Henry Adams.

MUSICAL EVENTS Alex Ross 74 Orchestras adapt to a season of streaming.

ON TELEVISION Alexandra Schwartz 76 “Roadkill,” “I Hate Suzie.”

THE CURRENT CINEMA Anthony Lane 78 “Nomadland.”

POEMS Brenda Hillman 42 “Winter Song for One Who Suffers” Yusef Komunyakaa 61 “Little Spy in My Bedroom”

COVER Adrian Tomine “Love Life”

DRAWINGS Lila Ash, P. C. Vey, Darrin Bell, Emily Flake, Julia Suits, Edward Koren, Sofia Warren, Liana Finck, Paul Noth, Tom Chitty, Ellis Rosen, Sam Gross SPOTS Edward Steed Something for everyone. (Including yourself.) Shop for original and limited-edition items online at The New Yorker Store.

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Subscribers, save 10% through December 10th with the code TNYAD10. ADVERTISEMENT SHOWCASE CONTRIBUTORS FIND OUT MORE ABOUT NEW PRODUCTS AND SPECIAL OFFERS FROM OUR ADVERTISERS Larissa MacFarquhar (“Solomon’s Di- Nathan Heller (“The Back Office,” p. 22), lemma,” p. 36) is a staff writer and the a staff writer, has contributed to the author of “Strangers Drowning.” magazine since 2011. He is at work on a book about the Bay Area. Paul Theroux (Fiction, p. 58) published the book “On the Plain of Snakes,” Francesca Mari (“A Lonely Occupa- about Mexico, in 2019. His new novel, tion,” p. 30) has written for the Times “Under the Wave at Waimea,” will come Magazine, The New York Review of REPLACEMENTS, LTD out next spring. Books, and The Atlantic, among other At Replacements, our stacked-to-the- publications. rafters warehouse is packed with more Brenda Hillman (Poem, p. 42), a chan- than eleven million pieces of history- cellor of the Academy of American Christopher Payne (Portfolio, p. 48) soaked china, crystal, silver, estate Poets, teaches at Saint Mary’s College specializes in industrial and architectural jewelry and watches, and more. of California. Her latest poetry col- photography. His book on American REPLACEMENTS.COM/NEWYORKER lection is “Extra Hidden Life, Among manufacturing will come out in 2022. the Days.” Roz Chast (Comic Strip, p. 41), a New Adrian Tomine (Cover) is a cartoonist Yorker cartoonist since 1978, published, and an illustrator. His most recent book, with Patricia Marx, “You Can Only a graphic novel, is “The Loneliness of Yell at Me for One Thing at a Time.” the Long-Distance Cartoonist.” Yusef Komunyakaa (Poem, p. 61) is a Carrie Battan (The Talk of the Town, professor of English at New York Uni- p. 18), who has been a staff writer since versity. His latest book of poems is AMERICAN BLOSSOM LINENS 2018, began contributing to The New “The Emperor of Water Clocks.” 100% Organic Cotton Bedding. Yorker in 2015. Made entirely in the U.S.A. Alexandra Schwartz (On Television, No formaldehyde, dyes, or chemicals. Raffi Khatchadourian (Portfolio, p. 48) p. 76), a theatre critic for the magazine, Luxuriously soft, woven to last a lifetime. has been a staff writer since 2008. became a staff writer in 2016. Use code NEWYORKER20 for 20% off. 888.825.0110 AMERICANBLOSSOMLINENS.COM

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888.646.6466 PAGE-TURNER THE SPORTING SCENE JOHN-CHRISTIAN.COM Jennifer Wilson on the Belarusian Louisa Thomas on how college foot- poet Valzhyna Mort’s book “Music ball, in bringing people together, may for the Dead and Resurrected.” be making the pandemic worse.

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4 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 THE MAIL Our world may change, THE DOOMED HEROINE Kremlin, Putin more likely viewed but your OF HENRY JAMES Trump simply as a buffoon incapable of nuanced, long-term strategies, around legacy will I enjoyed Merve Emre’s piece on the whom he could run rings in the geo- academic Sianne Ngai’s book “Theory political arena. Still, I agree that Putin never waver. of the Gimmick,” and especially its looks like a genius in the end. Trump closing critique: “if the propensity for has done more subversive damage to gimmickry is all around us, then it is U.S. institutions and to fundamental also nowhere in particular” (Books, No- principles of democracy than any net- vember 16th). But I wonder whether work of Russian agents could have Emre inadvertently reproduces Ngai’s hoped to achieve. Whether deliberate tendency to overstate the gimmick’s or not, that is the true result of Rus- purview. As she points out, Henry sia’s collusion. James observes in his preface to “The Larry Deblinger Wings of the Dove” that exposure to 1Monroe, N.Y. death or danger makes a character in- herently interesting. But James’s rec- A BENEVOLENT DEITY ognition of what Emre calls a literary gimmick doesn’t stop him from con- James Wood, in his review of T. M. ferring a terminal illness upon one of Luhrmann’s books “When God Talks the novel’s main characters, Milly Back” and “How God Becomes Real,” Theale. Indeed, the preface justifies the contrasts the “loving” God of the New choice: “Why should a figure be dis- Testament with the “severe” God of qualified for a central position by the the Hebrew Bible, “who, for instance, particular circumstance that might most orders Abraham to kill his son” (Books, quicken, that might crown with a fine November 9th). In including Luhr- intensity, its liability to many accidents, mann’s characterization of God as dif- its consciousness of all relations?” For ficult and austere, Wood repeats a mis- me, Milly’s illness is a heartbreaking conception about the relationship Your charitable conceit that has little in common with between God and the Israelites. The the gimmickry of Jennifer Egan’s Pow- story of the Akedah, in which God solution for an erPoint slides. commands Abraham to sacrifice Isaac Colton Valentine and, at the last second, stops him from uncertain future. 1New Haven, Conn. doing so, is not proof that God seeks to punish. Rather, the episode is a test PUTIN’S GENIUS of Abraham’s commitment to God, and establishes that God, in contrast David Remnick, in his post-election to the deities that Abraham had wor- Comment, contends that Vladimir Pu- shipped before God spoke to him, re- tin’s interference in the 2016 election jects human sacrifice. Reading the Old was prompted by the Russian leader’s Testament’s God as primarily harsh is Charitable legacies desire to be “left alone, free of American rooted in the Christian tendency to intrusion in Ukraine, free of nato’s privilege the New Testament over the Donor-advised funds influence in the Baltic States and in Torah. Non-Jews do not have a mo- Philanthropic advising Eastern and Central Europe,” and that nopoly on a benevolent Deity. Putin wished for the U.S. to be “tied Amy Ashe up in its own internal tumult” (No- Far Rockaway, N.Y. vember 16th). Unless Putin is related Contact Jane Wilton at to Grigori Rasputin, and has inher- • (212) 686-0010 x363 ited the mad monk’s powers of clair- Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, or giving@nyct-cfi .org voyance, it seems unlikely that he fa- address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited www.giveto.nyc vored Trump because he foresaw the for length and clarity, and may be published in internal tumult that he would cause any medium. We regret that owing to the volume as President. From his perch in the of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 5

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 2 – 8, 2020

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

The most memorable moment in Heartbeat Opera’s “Fidelio,” from 2018, was a video of several prison choruses—dozens of men and women, including Michael Powell (pictured)—singing. Heartbeat’s new streaming show, “Breathing Free” (Dec. 4-12), pairs excerpts from the Beethoven opera with spirituals and works by Black composers to consider the racial disparities in classical music, the prison system, and beyond. Powell, who was released from prison in May amid a CDVID-19 outbreak, joins a panel discussion on Dec. 5.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SHIKEITH 1 expressions and matching outfits from the at the Matthew Marks gallery, attests to the A RT Gap (normcore avant la lettre). The series continued allure of his eccentric, conceptual forecast a near future in which the mean- approach. In his signature faded color pal- ing of “downtown” would shift from haven ette, Ghirri captured signage, murals, and ads Art Club 2000 of misfits to retail mecca; it also attracted layered onto the surfaces of a city; his fron- Is it possible for a project to be a flash in the the very hype it derided, minting Art Club tal, symmetrical compositions often flatten pan while playing a long game? Yes, judging by 2000 as an art-scene brat pack. The collective three-dimensional space, an effect that might an engrossing retrospective of the short-lived deployed its best-of-both-worlds approach be described as trompe l’oeil in reverse. In the New York-based collective Art Club 2000, until it disbanded, in 1999. Now, as New York’s dreamy, sunlit factory scene “Ferrari Automo- whose meta-critical photos, videos, and instal- mega-galleries operate like publicity-hungry bili,” from 1985-88, an upright, glossy-red car lations look both dated and prescient at Artists big-box stores themselves, Art Club 2000 is hood recedes on an assembly-line track—but Space. In 1992, seven ambitious undergrads ready for the spotlight again.—Andrea K. Scott the view is oddly cropped by a metal arch- at the Cooper Union found a Svengali in the (artistsspace.org) way. Some of Ghirri’s works might be easily downtown art dealer Colin de Land, whose mistaken for photomontage. The American American Fine Arts, Co. was as much an anti- abstract painter Matt Connors, who organized commercial subversion as it was a gallery. For Luigi Ghirri the exhibition, writes that these photographs their first show there, “Commingle,” the group Media was the muse of this Italian photog- “are built rather than composed, things rather staged a faux ad campaign, mocking youth-ob- rapher, who died in 1992, at the age of forty- than images.” Indeed, Ghirri’s uncanny ability sessed collectors and curators with their blank nine. “Luigi Ghirri: The Idea of Building,” to establish an equivalence between objects and pictures makes his work feel as fresh as ever.—Johanna Fateman (matthewmarks.com) IN THE MUSEUMS Hulda Guzmán Tropical vistas, mise-en-abyme effects, and images of a plump cat are among the many lush pleasures in this young Dominican paint- er’s exhibition “My Flora, My Fauna,” at the Alexander Berggruen gallery. Guzmán’s colorful works, in acrylic gouache, depict a surreal world in which domestic interiors spill into jungle landscapes. In “Pintando la Almendra,” the artist is seen painting a self-portrait at night, head tilted back in laughter or anguish; thanks to the studio’s big picture windows, she almost appears to work in the jungle. The daytime scene “Quarantine Visitor” evokes a similar mood of stir-crazy solitude: the titular guest is a palm tree growing through the floor. The artist’s signature wit may be most evident in “Happy Cow,” a nocturnal enchantment in which blue livestock leap over a pond, sur- rounded by flowers and shooting stars.—J.F. (alexanderberggruen.com)

“Making the Met: 1870-2020” The Met is our Home Depot of the soul. It has just about whatever you want, and it has “What looks good today may not look good tomorrow,” reads an ebullient a lot of it, very largely the harvest of past donations. (It needs to be said that recent twelve-foot-high canvas by the German painter Michel Majerus, from scholarship has cast shade on the colonialist 2000, now hanging at MOMA. On the other hand, what was overlooked provenance of many of the Met’s treasures—a yesterday may dazzle today. That’s one takeaway from “Fall Reveal,” an problem shared by other formerly piratical museums.) This huge show roughly tracks the inspired reinstallation of roughly a third of the museum’s permanent-col- sequence of acquisitions since the museum’s lection galleries. (Advance tickets are required, available at moma.org.) founding, in 1870. It opens in a chapel-like The Majerus hangs on the second floor, in a room that ponders the fate of room, containing a van Gogh painting, a Rodin sculpture, a sixteenth-century Nepalese art after Google. Upstairs, on the fourth and fifth floors, crowd-pleasers mask, a wooden power figure from the Kongo are refreshed by their adjacency to hundreds of rarely exhibited works. Kingdom, a Greek marble stele, a Surrealist Chance-driven paintings by Japanese artists of the Gutai movement sculpture by Isamu Noguchi, and a Richard Avedon photograph of Marilyn Monroe. Do (founded in 1954), a kinetic showstopper by Carolee Schneemann (a the juxtapositions disorient? Good. You’re motorized hybrid of painting, sculpture, and stage set), and mesmerizing primed for the panoply of incongruities that footage of the jazz great Cecil Taylor enliven more familiar, contempo- follow, which detail—and embarrass—the moral character of what has been mirrored to raneous works by Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Elsewhere, us as the sum of a comprehensive civilization. Andy Warhol’s iconic “Campbell’s Soup Cans” (pictured above, in the In such company, it’s satisfying to see Faith company of similarly cumulative works by the German Pop-art pioneer Ringgold’s “Street Story Quilt” (1985), a for- mally commanding array of three large sewn Thomas Bayrle and the first sculpture that Yayoi Kusama ever made, in panels that captures in sprightly imagery and 1961) get strong competition from another artist who played with her demotic words a host of Black citizens—real food: the Canadian filmmaker Joyce Wieland, whose hilarious 1964 short lives, really led—in the windows of tenements along a city street that’s past due for inter- “Patriotism” mocks American nationalism, and the patriarchy behind it, secting with Fifth Avenue.—Peter Schjeldahl —Andrea K. Scott with a stop-motion army of hot dogs. (metmuseum.org) MOMA COURTESY

8 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020

York and North Carolina but also Australia, CONTEMPORARY DANCE South Korea, Indonesia, and Iran. Everyone is muted, and viewers, who can join the meeting whenever, have the option of whether to display 1themselves.—B.S. (heidilatskydance.org/odg2020) THE THEATRE

The Ars Nova Forever Telethon Ars Nova, a small but spirited theatre in Hell’s Kitchen (with a newish outpost downtown), is known for its relentlessly ambitious enter- tainments, including the musicals “KPOP” and “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812,” but perhaps more important is its sense of artistic community. When the pandemic hit, in March, the company committed to paying its artists through June, and it’s now distributing emergency grants while doing what it can to keep everyone busy. The telethon, which runs for twenty-four hours, starting at 6 P.M. on Dec. 4, is a live-streamed hootenanny featur- ing appearances by Dave Malloy and Rachel Chavkin (“The Great Comet”), Larry Owens Every December, the dancers of Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre (“A Strange Loop”), and the droll raconteur fill the City Center stage, night after night, with their joy, verve, and Isaac Oliver, as well as a dance party and a technical prowess. Traditionally, most of those performances end with special edition of “Showgasm,” Ars Nova’s in-house variety show.—Michael Schulman “Revelations,” Ailey’s signature work from 1960. Inspired by the Baptist (arsnovanyc.com/telethon) services that Ailey attended as a child in Texas, “Revelations” captures the urgency and the yearning expressed in spirituals such as “Fix Me A Christmas Carol Jesus” and “I Wanna Be Ready.” Like all great art, it never gets old. In Why limit yourself to one role in a show? In fact, in recent years, with civil rights at the forefront of our national 2004, Jefferson Mays won a Tony Award for “I conscience, its power has only grown. Ailey’s virtual season kicks off, Am My Own Wife,” in which he channelled a transgender woman and the people in her life. on Dec. 2, with an online gala, featuring excerpts from “Revelations,” A decade later, he barrelled through madcap filmed outdoors at Wave Hill, in the Bronx. The company broadcasts costume changes as he portrayed every mem- eight additional programs through Dec. 31—don’t miss, in particular, a ber of the D’Ysquith family in the zany musi- cal “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” new work, set to the music of Charlie Parker, by the company’s excellent Now Mays is taking on all the characters in new resident choreographer, Jamar Roberts (Dec. 14). All the content Charles Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol,” in an is free, a real gift.—Marina Harss adaptation that he wrote with his wife, Susan Lyons, and the inventive director Michael 1 Arden (“Once on This Island”). The show, which débuted two years ago at the Geffen Playhouse, in Los Angeles, has been restaged DANCE Kinetic Light for a streaming version filmed at the United This disability-arts ensemble, founded by Palace, in New York City—a rococo geyser of Alice Sheppard, presents the online première red velvet and gold detailing that is the perfect JoyceStream of “Descent,” Dec. 3-5. The hour-long work is a setting for a Victorian tale.—Elisabeth Vincen- If the Joyce Theatre’s latest sampler of duet that hints at an astrological love story be- telli (Through Jan. 3; achristmascarollive.com.) free digital programming (available Dec. tween Venus and Andromeda. An ingenious set 7-Jan. 3) lacks the discoveries of previous of ramps serves as a canvas for projections of installments, it’s still admirably diverse. stars and seas, and as a surface for wheelchair A Thousand Ways Short pieces by Rennie Harris Puremove- motion with the gliding grace of ice dance. This piece by 600 Highwaymen—designed to ment (a heartbreaking duet, a tour-de-force Though misty and diffuse, the work strives— be staged, ultimately, in three parts, the latter embodiment of a guitar solo) are predict- successfully in spots—to break through pre- of which will involve physical encounters, safety ably powerful; the Ballets Trockadero de conception into a new beauty. Some versions permitting—takes a simple premise and turns Monte Carlo, with its parodic yet punctil- of the video feature an enhanced audio descrip- it into magic. Part 1, which is being rolled out ious “Paquita,” pleases, as usual; and Streb tion for nonvisual audience members.—B.S. virtually (check the troupe’s Web site for dates Extreme Action induces customary gasps (northrop.umn.edu/events/kinetic-light-2020) and tickets), consists of an hour-long phone call with daredevil stunts and huge machines. between two strangers, mediated by a friendly The lesser-known Native American troupe female-sounding robot. At an appointed time, Indigenous Enterprise makes a strong point “On Display Global” the theatregoer calls a number, is introduced to a about continuity by filming gorgeously per- For the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Amer- partner, and is asked to decide who will be Person formed tribal dances in urban and suburban icans with Disabilities Act, in 2015, Heidi A and who Person B. The two participants chat, locales. In “Pachuquísmo,” Vanessa Sanchez Latsky Dance created “On Display,” a sculpture with prompts from the robot, the random and and La Mezcla honor the undersung women court of diverse bodies, mostly still, exposed the banal grapevining with the profound. The de- involved in the zoot-suit riots of the nine- to viewers’ stares, that implicitly questioned liberately asymmetrical titration of information teen-forties—more evocatively through pho- ideas of beauty. This year, on Dec. 3, to coincide is integral to the piece’s mystery, and its plea- tos and newspaper snippets than through the with the United Nations’ International Day sure. There is a story, of a sort, woven through dancing, a mix of standard zapateado and of Persons with Disabilities, the event turns all this choreographed talk, which touches on contemporary tap in period attire.—Brian virtual. Now it’s a twenty-four-hour Zoom the twee. Nonetheless, it might just leave you

Seibert (joyce.org/joycestream) gathering, with participants from not only New with that best and rarest of feelings—wanting RUIZ DAIANA BY ILLUSTRATION

10 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 more.—Alexandra Schwartz (Reviewed in our Vanessa Benelli Mosell: that is up close and personal. The electronic issue of 11/2/20.) (600highwaymen.org/1000-ways) music she creates under her own name is “Casta Diva” much more distant and shapeless, ambient 1 CLASSICAL “Muzak” is probably the first word tracks that twinkle beyond a far-off horizon. that comes to mind when people think about “Hill, Flower, Fog,” a meditative synth album MUSIC piano transcriptions of opera, but such formida- recorded during a single week in March, is ble pianists as Liszt, Chopin, and Busoni have arrayed in simple patterns, never changing lent distinction to this subgenre of keyboard much yet consistently soothing. Sprague has Black Cadmium: “Chemistry” works. On Vanessa Benelli Mosell’s new album, described the album as a “vision for herself,” ELECTRONIC The Rotterdam duo Joginda Macnack “Casta Diva,” the young Italian pianist plays outlining priorities, and it functions well as and Mike Richards, both Surinamese, make pieces that translate the pyrotechnics of bel tuned-out music for self-actualization—a can- playful dance tracks together as Black Cadmium. canto and the lyricism of Romantic opera into vas upon which to project paths to fulfillment Their new EP, “Chemistry,” is strongly charac- the language of pianistic ostentation. Mosell beyond the immediate uncertainty of our tu- terized by the loose breakbeats, Pac-Man-gob- studied with Stockhausen and recorded his multuous present.—S.P. bling-pills acid patterns, aqueous string pads, thorny, mysterious piano works to acclaim, and stiffly hurtling bass lines that marked turn- and her new project succeeds when she handles of-the-nineties British house music—not to complex material. Some of the adaptations are Young Marble Giants: “Colossal mention a positivity that flies in the face of too literal to be interesting, but, when she wraps concurrent social conditions. The beguiling airi- her hands around Liszt’s freewheeling, extro- Youth 40th Anniversary Edition” ness of these arrangements is the draw here; the verted reworkings of “Rigoletto” and the “Wil- ART-POP No landmark album associated with title track has lyrics, but they’re fittingly buried liam Tell” overture, her light-fingered agility punk approaches the daintiness of “Colossal by their surroundings.—Michaelangelo Matos and kaleidoscopic tone shine.—Oussama Zahr Youth,” the 1980 masterstroke by the Cardiff trio Young Marble Giants. The record’s magic dwells in Alison Statton’s luminous, ostensi- “Cy Twombly and Music” Emily A. Sprague: bly bored singing, in the ghostly homemade CLASSICAL In envisioning an online season that drum machine, and in the cracks between the stands apart from the virtual crowd, Houston’s “Hill, Flower, Fog” sounds. Periodically reissued onto fresh musi- eclectic chamber-music presenter and producer ELECTRONIC As the lead vocalist of the indie-pop cal landscapes, as if dropping in from another DACAMERA has a distinct advantage close band Florist, Emily A. Sprague makes music planet, the album resurfaces again with this at hand: the incomparable Menil Collection, whose galleries have supplied programming notions and vivid settings for more than three AFRO-POP decades. On Tuesday, DACAMERA hosts the streaming première of a 2018 recital that the maverick flutist Claire Chase introduced in the museum’s Cy Twombly Gallery, including a commissioned piece by Erik Ulman and works by Marcos Balter, Suzanne Farrin, and Felipe Lara.—Steve Smith (Dec. 8 at 8; dacamera.com.)

Future & Lil Uzi Vert: “Pluto x Baby Pluto” HIP-HOP Two of hip-hop’s greatest purveyors of the Auto-Tuned form, the prolific hedonist Fu- ture and the versatile oddball Lil Uzi Vert, collide on “Pluto x Baby Pluto,” a sporting sixteen-track album that finds both in cruise control. Future is no stranger to this kind of superstar rap team-up, having previously connected with the chame- leonic Young Thug and the late crooner Juice WRLD, and this album finds him ceding space to a younger peer once more. They aren’t exactly compatible—Future croaks through a codeine-in- flected stupor, whereas Uzi zips around like a hyperactive toddler—but even without natural chemistry they often click through sheer tal- ent. On the guitar-driven “Drankin N Smokin” and the bluesy shoot-’em-up “Million Dollar Play,” they so mirror each other that their move- ments begin to blur together.—Sheldon Pearce The twenty-six-year-old Ghanaian-American musician Amaarae sounds like the future of Afro-pop. On her début album, “The Angel Billy Hart You Don’t Know,” a striking introduction to her effortless genre-bend- JAZZ The drummer Billy Hart was a first-call ing, her unique style makes her flexing seem wayward and whimsical. musician by his early twenties. Six decades later, Born of the alté scene, where iconoclastic West Africans are experi- with a C.V. that spans jazz’s post-bop universe and an insatiable urge to strike creative sparks menting with unorthodox music and fashion, Amaarae is an outlier at every gig, he brings a wealth of experience among outliers: her voice is nearly cherubic; her songs marry slinky and astonishing energy to the bandstand. This R. & B., rattling Southern trap, soul, experimental pop, and main- eightieth-birthday event, live-streamed from Smoke, finds him in typical form: mixing it up stream Afrobeats; and she’s described the album, on Twitter, as “non with crafty, and considerably younger, improvis- stop affirmations and incantations 4 bad bitches.” This wondrous dark ers—the pianist Kevin Hays and the bassist Ben magic is never more potent than on the bopping, indulgent “Sad Girlz Street—each ready to soak up as much musical wisdom as he possibly can.—Steve Futterman Luv Money” or the chirping, self-reliant “Hellz Angel”—both songs

ILLUSTRATION BY CIENNA SMITH BY ILLUSTRATION (Dec. 4-5 at 8; smokelive.com.) of uninhibited self-confidence.—Sheldon Pearce

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 11 fortieth-anniversary edition, accompanied by whose mother owns the house. But Allison’s rancher who cheated him, and flees home, the requisite EP and oddity tracks, plus a video presence is an irritant; she sparks the couple’s along with his wife, Rosa (Yoná Magalhães), of the band’s final New York appearance, in scathing squabbles and Blair’s fierce jealousy. to join a pilgrimage led by a self-proclaimed 1980, at a Manhattan night club. The trio’s ho- Levine writes lacerating dialogue for the trio saint (Lidio Silva) with a utopian, gory gos- hum stage presence is unlikely to surprise its and ramps up their tension into metafictional pel. The Catholic Church and the govern- latter-day devotees; for pasty British art-punks, games that lay bare the emotional dangers ment send a hired gun, Antonio das Mortes such an appearance portends tedium, break- of filmmaking. Levine and his wife, Sophia (Maurício do Valle), to stop the procession— ups, and all-encompassing woe.—Jay Ruttenberg Takal—who is also a filmmaker—starred to- and the revolutionary bandit Corisco (Othon 1 gether in his two previous features, and he Bastos) plans to stop Antonio. Rocha’s hectic dedicates this film to her; the drama’s rapt drama is, in effect, a political Western that focus on Allison, along with its depiction of rages at Brazil’s governmental corruption MOVIES high-risk cinematic adventures, is its hot emo- and plutocratic oppression. His raw, grand, tional core, and only an excess narrative wink urgent images—and the raucous, incanta- or two dampen its energies.—Richard Brody tory soundtrack set against them—seem to Black Bear (In theatrical release and on video on demand.) erupt with long-suppressed rage. For all its The drastic measures taken by a filmmaker heroic energy, hortatory anger, and impulsive who’s struggling to write a script give rise youth, it’s very much a philosophical work of to wild complications in Lawrence Michael Black God, White Devil its time, a bitterly terrifying fantasy of no Levine’s tricky yet passionate drama. The This ecstatic panorama of furious visions way out. In Portuguese.—R.B. (Streaming filmmaker, a former actress named Allison and revolutionary dreams in the vast, violent on YouTube.) (Aubrey Plaza), goes on an informal retreat landscape of rural Brazil, made in 1963 by at the sumptuous lakeside villa of a Brook- the twenty-four-year-old director Glauber lyn couple who are lucky in real estate, Blair Rocha, is one of the founding works of the Hillbilly Elegy (Sarah Gadon), a dancer, who’s pregnant, modern Brazilian cinema. Manuel (Geraldo Ron Howard’s syrupy adaptation of J. D. and Gabe (Christopher Abbott), a musician Del Rey), a young cowherd, kills a wealthy Vance’s memoir puts fierce performances in the service of sentimental platitudes. The screenplay (written by Vanessa Taylor) builds WHAT TO STREAM copious flashbacks into the story of the char- acter J.D. (Gabriel Basso), a law student at Yale in 2011, whose family origins in Ken- tucky’s hill country, tough childhood in a small Ohio town, and ongoing financial strug- gles put him at odds with the school’s ethos. Awaiting an interview for a much needed summer internship, he’s summoned home to care for his mother, Bev (Amy Adams), a former nurse, who has overdosed on heroin; his rush to get back for his interview turns her crisis into a cheesy thriller. The movie’s core is J.D.’s childhood and adolescence, involving Bev’s fall from stability and the heroic efforts of his grandmother, whom he calls Mamaw (Glenn Close), to raise him for success. Close brings Mamaw’s principled profanity and ferocious sense of family to life, but the movie reduces its complex characters to symbols and its moving incidents to plot points.—R.B. (Streaming on Netflix.)

Locke A man gets into a car and stays there. Such is the burden of Steven Knight’s 2013 film, which stars Tom Hardy as Ivan Locke, a brawny Welshman in a BMW. We hear other voices calling him on the phone as he drives Every biography involves two stories—the subject’s life, and the biog- to London by night, but his is the only face rapher’s legwork that brings it to light. The new documentary “Billie” we see. There are no chases or accidents, and (streaming and in theatres on Dec. 4) uncovers both. It’s a fascinatingly no flashbacks or cutaway shots, although the story is not without incident: Locke’s marriage detailed portrait of Billie Holiday, the greatest of all jazz singers (who crashes, and his job—as the site manager on a died in 1959), developed by means of audio interviews with many major building project—begins to collapse, all of Holiday’s musical associates (including Count Basie and Melba because of a single mistake in his past. Knight deftly releases this information drop by drop Liston), some of her relatives, and even two law-enforcement officials (though scenes in which our hero addresses who harassed her, all of which were recorded by Linda Lipnack Kuehl the unseen ghost of his dead father in the back in the nineteen-seventies. Kuehl, who was working on a biography of seat are more hokey than Hamlet-like). The movie’s greatest asset by far is Hardy, whose Holiday, died in 1978, reportedly from suicide, without completing the rich, unflappable tones, even in times of high book; with copious excerpts from Kuehl’s recordings (as well as archival emotional pressure, bear a distinct echo of interviews with Holiday), the film’s director, James Erskine, outlines Richard Burton; here is a man who rolls up his sleeves at the wheel and sets about trying Holiday’s political activity and the government’s plot to arrest her on to save his own life.—Anthony Lane (Streaming drug charges, while also delving into the mysteries surrounding Kuehl’s on Amazon, Hulu, and other services.) death. Despite some dubious editing (including the colorization of im- 1 ages), Erskine aptly anchors the movie in Holiday’s art, with well-chosen For more reviews, visit

clips of her startlingly intense performances.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town / GETTY / CORBIS COLLECTION HULTON-DEUTSCH

12 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 point since 2014; he became a regular a grilled cheese featuring thyme-and- of the deli, and then close friends with chili-flecked feta and a layer of fig jam. Puk, whom he thinks of as his honorary The meze stacked in the glass refrig- grandmother. The pair had spoken casu- erators are all Massih’s own, a tantaliz- ally about Massih someday taking over ing array including stuffed grape leaves, 1 the business. When the pandemic hit and marinated olives, garlicky labneh, and Puk decided to move to Pennsylvania, it spicy tomato jam. For dinner one re- TABLES FOR TWO became a reality much sooner than either cent night, I collected them all, plus pita had imagined. In July, just a few months (from Damascus Bread & Pastry Shop, Edy’s Grocer before Massih turned twenty-six, Maria’s next to Sahadi’s on Atlantic Avenue), 136 Meserole Ave., Brooklyn Deli became Edy’s Grocer, an invitingly a container of winter-squash fatteh—a bright and cheerful shop and café. mix of roasted butternut, delicata, and During the first few years of his ca- Students of Sahadi’s, a hundred-and- acorn, tossed with chickpeas and ta- reer, the chef Edouard (Edy) Massih, twenty-year-old Middle Eastern market hini—and ready-to-heat riz a jej, which who started a Brooklyn-based catering with locations in Brooklyn Heights and Massih describes as Lebanese dirty rice, company when he was twenty-two, got Industry City, will recognize many of the flecked with fine-ground beef, plump into the habit of lying about his age. If packaged goods; Massih uses the store, shreds of chicken, melty bits of onion, anyone asked, he was thirty. “New York which is owned by a Lebanese family, and pomegranate seeds. has a really bad problem with ageism,” as a supplier. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, For good measure, I swept the “Pol- he told me the other day. “Nobody takes painted pale pink, are lined with Leba- ish Classics” section of the menu, too. you seriously if you’re in your early twen- nese olive oil (sourced from near where Massih is bold in looking ahead—the ties. You’re just another millennial who Massih was born, and where his grand- world needs a Middle Eastern equiv- doesn’t know what they’re doing.” father presses small amounts of his own), alent to Massimo Bottura and David Plenty of clients who hired him to rose water, pomegranate molasses, grains Chang, he told me—but uninterested in pull off lavish events, including weddings and lentils galore, Master-brand potato erasing the past. He pays tribute to his and bat mitzvahs, were none the wiser, chips, and sesame-studded breadsticks. predecessor with pancakes of shredded and none the worse for it; their glowing But Edy’s is much more than a Sa- potato or zucchini, plus a preposterously recommendations were how he built a hadi’s satellite. Massih carries domes- puffy fried-apple variety, each served booming business and became a darling tically made products from companies with a plastic ramekin of sour cream of the fashion world, completely by word started by other young immigrants, seasoned with harissa or cinnamon. of mouth. But the person who gave him including tahini and halvah from Seed Among the jars of pickled Lebanese wild perhaps his biggest boost knew exactly + Mill and Sound sparkling rose-car- cucumbers (thinner and reedier than how old he was. Maria Puk opened Ma- damom tea. A rotating monthly menu the domesticated kind) and grilled-egg- ria’s Deli, in Greenpoint, in 1978, when offers house-made Lebanese soups such plant pulp, you’ll find Polish sauerkraut, she was just twenty-four, fourteen years as adas bil hamoud, a lemony lentil, and grainy mustard, strawberry syrup, and after she’d immigrated to New York made-to-order dishes such as a man’oushe, cherry confiture, preserves both literal from Poland. Massih, who was born in or Lebanese breakfast flatbread, topped and figurative. (Meze and ready-to-heat Lebanon and immigrated to the U.S. with tomato, cucumber, olives, and dishes $3.50-$20.)

PHOTOGRAPH BY HEAMI LEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW HEAMI LEE FOR BY PHOTOGRAPH when he was ten, has lived in Green- za’atar; a chicken-shawarma wrap; and —Hannah Goldfield

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 13

THE TALK OF THE TOWN

COMMENT page items about his personal and com- called “the lamestream media.” Trump REAL NEWS mercial exploits. It was of little concern craved the acceptance of such institu- to anyone that these items were, in the tions as the Times and the Washington residents have always complained main, preposterous. Occasionally, inves- Post, but he knew that his base loathed Pabout the press. At awards ceremo- tigative reporters, profile writers, and them. And so he would loathe them, nies and journalism-school conferences, the courts would look more deeply into too, while at the same time declaring a Thomas Jefferson is often remembered Trump’s swindles and business bank- new, Trumpian reality, constructed of for his principled support: in 1787, he ruptcies, but, as long as he skirted total what his adviser Kellyanne Conway wrote to the Virginia statesman Edward ruin, he seemed to think that even his memorably called “alternative facts.” Carrington, “Were it left to me to de- bad press added to his allure. On his second day in office, Trump cide whether we should have a govern- Trump’s relationship with reporters sent his press secretary, Sean Spicer, to ment without newspapers, or newspa- inevitably changed when he shifted his the White House briefing room to con pers without a government, I should not occupation to the command of the fed- the nation the way he had conned the hesitate to prefer the latter.” Yet, by 1814, eral government. First as a candidate, tabloids. The crowds on the Mall for having endured the Presidency, Jeffer- and then in the early days of his Presi- Trump’s Inauguration, Spicer insisted, son was not quite as high-minded, whin- dency, he discovered that the press was were unprecedented, despite the evidence ing by post to a former congressman a variegated beast; Cindy Adams and to the contrary. A few weeks later, as news about “the putrid state” of newspapers Maggie Haberman were not of the same coverage further nettled Trump, he took and “the vulgarity, & mendacious spirit stuff. He could still depend on toady- to Twitter to declare that CNN, ABC, of those who write for them.” ing support from some quarters, par- NBC, CBS, and the Times were “the You could hardly blame him. How ticularly the editorial holdings of Ru- enemy of the American People.” The res- would you like to read that one of John pert Murdoch and emerging properties onance was clear. In the Soviet era, to be Adams’s surrogates has branded you a like Breitbart and Newsmax; however, branded an “enemy of the people” was to “mean-spirited, low-lived fellow”? No he was now getting a more scrupulous await a boxcar to the Gulag. Even the President escapes scrutiny or invective. going-over from what Sarah Palin had U.S. Senate, whose Republican majority In 1864, Harper’s listed the many epi- would prove so unfailingly loyal to Trump, thets that the Northern press had hurled seemed alarmed. In August, 2018, the at Abraham Lincoln: Filthy Story-Teller, Senate passed, by unanimous consent, a Despot, Liar, Thief, Braggart, Buffoon, resolution attesting to “the vital and in- Monster, Ignoramus, Scoundrel, Per- dispensable role the free press serves.” jurer, Robber, Swindler, Tyrant, Fiend, But Trump knew precisely what he Butcher, Ape, Demon, Beast, Baboon, was doing, and he never let up. During Gorilla, Imbecile. a meeting at Trump Tower, Leslie Stahl, Donald Trump began his career con- of CBS News, asked why he kept at- vinced that reporters, once exposed to tacking the press. “You know why I do his myriad charms, would be willing ste- it?” he said. “I do it to discredit you all nographers of his story. He learned to and demean you all, so that, when you elevate himself, his brand, and his in- write negative stories about me, no one terests largely by supplying the New will believe you.” York tabloids with a ready-made char- Trump may have devoted more mental acter, a strutting snake-oil salesman who energy to his degradation of the press—

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATIONS provided an unending stream of gossip- through lawsuits, threats, and hundreds

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REQUEST A QUOTE The employees of Morgan Miller Plumbing pride themselves on being a small, tight-knit family, and they treat their customers the same way. With a free Business Profi le on Google, Morgan Miller Plumbing has been able to reach more customers. And while COVID-19 has presented new challenges, they’ve been able to adapt. More people are contacting them every week, and they’re actively looking to hire additional technicians to help meet demand. Find free resources for your small business at google.com/grow of tweets—than to any other issue. He who routinely parrot his slogan of “fake himself. Now that Fox News has proved called reporters “corrupt,” “scum,” and news” and lock up offending journalists. insufficiently servile, he is likely to join “some of the worst human beings you’ll Perhaps Trump’s most disgraceful act in forces with, buy, or launch an even more ever meet.” And those words riled up his this regard was his refusal to speak a destructive media enterprise. base, so much so that at his rallies re- critical word against the Saudi leader- As President, Joe Biden cannot bat- porters were often berated and menaced. ship after the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, tle the debasement of a reality princi- Last year, the F.B.I. arrested a Coast a columnist for the Post. ple in American life by executive order. Guard officer who had drawn up a hit The costs at home are no less omi- But support for press freedoms ought list that included reporters at MSNBC nous. It is now estimated that one Amer- to be a central element of his domes- and CNN, and an Army officer was ar- ican dies every minute from Covid-19. tic and foreign policies. What’s more, rested after allegedly conducting an on- Every two or three days there is a 9/11- the press itself needs to learn from the line discussion in which he talked about scale death count. How many of those prolonged emergency of the past four blowing up the headquarters of a major people died because they chose to believe years. Just as it must go on applying in- TV network. the President’s dismissive accounts of the vestigative and analytical pressure to all Trump’s assault on the press and his disease rather than what public-health forms of power, including the new Ad- assault on the truth––he made more officials were telling the press? Half of ministration, it cannot relax in calling than sixteen thousand false or mislead- Republican voters believe Trump’s charge out the deeply anti-factual and anti- ing claims in his first three years in office, that the 2020 election was “rigged.” What democratic foundation of a movement according to the Washington Post’s fact- will be the lasting effects on American like Trump’s. The stakes are high. Don- checking operation––have taken their democracy of that disinformation cam- ald Trump may be moving to Mar-a- toll. Where once American Presidents paign? Bit by bit, Trump is being forced Lago, but he, and the alternative real- gave at least rhetorical support to civil to give up his attempt to overturn the ity he has created, could be with us for liberties, he has given comfort to for- election. But he will continue his efforts a long time. eign autocrats, from El-Sisi to Erdoğan, to build an alternative reality around ––David Remnick

DEPT. OF VALU E S down for two weeks,” he said, and ex- students why focussing on wages might WHAT’S A LIFE WORTH? plained how to conduct a cost-benefit understate the value of a life. analysis, weighing the advantages against “Emotional impact,” a student said. the potential economic losses. Bingo. Iverson said, “That pain and The critical factor in making such an trauma—the consequences kids have if assessment, he said, is determining the they lose a parent—can have big impacts.” “value of statistical life,” a variable that Using Zoom’s chat feature, a student calculates a fractional risk for an entire ventured, “How much you are worth uring a recent Zoom lecture, Terry population. “If we have a million peo- with your organs and such on the black DIverson, an economist at Colorado ple and each person has a one-in-a-mil- market was what I thought of,” she State University, posed a question to the lion chance of dying, that would count wrote. “100,000.” students in his introductory economics as one statistical life.” He went on, “Does Another young woman chimed in: course. It was one that Americans have anybody have any idea what they think “Could it also be a person’s wage or jobs? been mulling all year. “What’s the value the value of a statistical life should be Like, a C.E.O. of a company has a re- of a life?” he asked. “And how do we in the U.S. in 2020?” Although partici- ally high income, then a doctor has a compare lives saved with the value of pation, according to the class syllabus, lower one. Then you’d say that the lost economic activity?” accounts for ten per cent of a student’s C.E.O. has, like, a more valuable life?” For professors, particularly those in grade, no one jumped to answer. “Make “Excellent question,” Iverson said. the social sciences, COVID-19 has pro- a guess,” he prodded. “Should society view a richer person vided a real-time trove of case studies on “Twenty-four thousand?” a young being worth more than a poorer per- which to center syllabi. Iverson began woman asked, haltingly. son?” He guided the students back to developing his course, The Economics Iverson seemed taken aback. “Twenty- looking for a figure more representative of COVID-19, in April. He specializes in four thousand .. . dollars?” he asked. “Uh, across a population. “Throw out a num- climate change, and as lockdowns were to put that in perspective, that’s about ber that you think is too high, since we starting he began to draw connections half the median income of a person in have a number that’s too low.” between ecological disaster and global the U.S. Do you think that a life is only “I’d say half a million, or anything in pandemic. In the lecture, he told his stu- worth six months of income?” that range, would be too high,” a young dents, “If we think about COVID, we might The girl laughed nervously. “No.” man offered. want to add up the costs and benefits of “If we looked just at people’s wages, “Half a million feels too high?” social distancing.” Iverson, who is forty- what would be the right amount of “Assuming I had the money to save four, had a salt-and-pepper beard and wages?” he continued. “A year of wages, someone’s life, how much would I spend wore black-rimmed glasses. “Suppose their whole lifetimes of wages? That’s just to save some random stranger’s life?” the state of Colorado is going into lock- an interesting question.” He asked the the student went on. “I wouldn’t spend

18 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 that much, because that would possibly bankrupt me. And I would also feel like, Why is this person special? Why not help save this other person?” “What if that person was you, or someone you cared about?” Iverson asked. The class began to feel more like phi- losophy than like economics. “It’s supposed to be an anonymous person,” the student noted. “It would suck, but, at the same time, I can’t really help the fact that they don’t know me.” Iverson was unpersuaded. “It’s more like, What should society at large be will- ing to spend to avoid loss of life in gen- eral?” He mentioned the way in which seat-belt laws constrain personal liber- ties but save thousands of lives. In the “You know times are tough when a rugged voice saying chat, a student wrote that, when seat- ‘We’re all in this together’ dubbed over footage of an S.U.V. belt laws were first passed, “people would snaking down a mountain road is comforting.” cut them out of their car.” Iverson ig- nored the comment and told the class that the government actually has a num- •• ber. “The number tends to be a little higher when the President is a Demo- home recording studio that Frank called tographed naked on a toilet in London’s crat and a little lower when the Presi- the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen. Royal Garden Hotel in 1967, the hero of dent is a Republican,” he said. “They After his death, from prostate cancer, free expression who was fêted in the tend to range from about five to ten mil- Gail closely guarded his copyrights and Czech Republic after the Velvet Revo- lion dollars. So it’s quite a bit higher than legacy, as well as access to a legendary lution. The film’s main focus, Winter what you guys have thrown out there.” vault, rumored to exist beneath the Zappa told Gail, would be Zappa the avant- “How’d they get to that number?” family home, in Laurel Canyon. It held garde composer, whose little-known someone asked. music that had never been released, draw- orchestral music is sometimes ranked “It’s actually quite an interesting puz- ings, videos, and Frank’s Stan Brakhage- among works by Charles Ives, Edgard zle,” Iverson said. But the class was over. style home movies. Varèse, and other seminal twentieth- They’d have to wait till next time. Ahmet, forty-six, joined Winter, fifty- century artists. 1—Carrie Battan five, on a recent Zoom call to discuss “That’s how Alex got the movie,” the film, called “Zappa.” A poster of Ahmet said. “That was the thing Gail LEGACIES Rodan, Godzilla’s flying frenemy and cared about.” EXHUMING ZAPPA one of Ahmet’s middle names, was vis- Gail mentioned the vault. During ible behind him. (It was a gift from his breaks in Winter’s acting career—he buddy Johnny Ramone, who “liked that plays Bill to Keanu Reeves’s Ted in the I was named after a rubber monster,” “Bill & Ted” series—he’s made music Ahmet said.) He recalled that, when videos and short rock bios, which led to Winter approached him, “I said, ‘Look, two documentaries, “Downloaded” and we’ve gone through multiple directors “Deep Web.” In the course of interview- lex Winter’s latest documentary who tried to get this done.’” Gail had ing rock stars, “I’d heard a lot of bullshit Abegan with a deceptively simple shut them all down. “ ‘I’m totally happy spun,” he said, and he assumed that the question, one that came up in a brain- to make the introduction, but, I’ve got Zappa vault was similarly mythic. “Gail storming session with his producer, Glen to say, my mother is a vibey, spiritual, said, ‘No, there’s literally a vault under Zipper: Why hasn’t somebody made an super-smart person with a point of view.’” the house.’ They took me down there, authorized movie about Frank Zappa? “I was scared of her before I ever and it was like the end of ‘Citizen Kane.’ Seeking an explanation, Winter contacted walked into her house,” Winter said. But Filled floor to ceiling with media from Ahmet Zappa, one of the late musician’s they met, they vibed, and Winter pitched. his birth all the way till, like, yesterday.” children. The short answer, Ahmet told He didn’t want to make a film about He was overwhelmed, and then cowed. him, was Gail, the mother of Ahmet and Zappa the rock god, whose epic shirt- How to portray a man who began as the the three other Zappa kids: Moon, Dwee- less guitar solos are readily available on Dionysian leader of a Dada-esque band, zil, and Diva. During Frank’s life (1940- YouTube. He was interested in Zappa the Mothers of Invention, and became 93), Gail helped manage his business as a culture warrior in the Lenny Bruce/ a First Amendment advocate with a suit affairs, including an indie label and a Richard Pryor tradition—the icon pho- and tie and a haircut (at least he kept the

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 19 mustache), testifying in Washington them,” Winter said. However, “he would current of the Pacific Ocean,” Joseph said. against Tipper Gore’s call for warning not be lost on their daughters.” “We knew we were drowning, and we labels on albums and arguing with John 1—John Seabrook were just going to try to keep swimming Lofton on CNN’s “Crossfire”? as long as we could.” Before Winter could start making SOCIAL CONTRACT DEPT. At issue in the lawsuit is the Pan­ use of the archived material, some of it CIVICS 101 demic and All­Hazards Preparedness had to be preserved and digitized; the and Advancing Innovation Act, which footage was deteriorating rapidly. The President Trump signed into law last filmmakers launched a Kickstarter cam­ year. The act sets requirements for the paign, which raised $1.2 million, a rec­ executive branch, including running a ord amount for a documentary. “We said federal testing­and­tracing program, re­ to the fans, ‘We could take some of the leasing timely information about out­ money we raised for the doc, or we could any Americans seem to have aban­ breaks, and soliciting input from the take all of it and put it toward preserv­ Mdoned hope of a functioning gov­ public. If the school prevails, it will not ing the stuff in the vault,’” Winter ex­ ernment. The country is cresting its third win monetary damages, but the United plained. “And they said, ‘Look, we love Covid­19 peak; it hasn’t flattened any States District Court would compel the you, but we’re here for Frank. Please curves so much as stacked them into government to do its job. preserve the media in the vault.’” one ascending, surrealist staircase. The Does a school’s taking on the C.D.C. Then, in 2015, Gail died. Ahmet and lame­duck President ditched the G­20’s represent democracy in action? The other Diva had a falling­out with Dweezil pandemic­preparedness summit for a day, a handful of Coney Island Prep his­ and Moon over the estate and the use round of golf. Congress is hopeless. Elec­ tory students convened on Zoom to dis­ of the Zappa name. The Laurel Can­ tions are deemed fraudulent. Perhaps cuss. A girl named Karema, who wore only one great national tradition remains a sage­colored hijab, spoke up. “Com­ viable: Americans can always sue. ing from someone who is taking A.P. A few weeks ago, Coney Island Prep, U.S. history this year and just came out a charter school in Brooklyn, filed a law­ of global history, you learn a lot about suit against Alex Azar, the Secretary of the Renaissance and all these ideas of Health and Human Services, and Rob­ the social contract,” she said. “And what ert Redfield, the director of the Centers happens when the government isn’t for Disease Control, for their handling doing their job? Revolution happens! of the pandemic. The school and a few Someone goes and starts beheading the co­plaintiffs allege that the government’s entire royal family. The French Revolu­ incompetence is not just destructive— tion all over again.” leaving people dead and making it hard Heads nodded. A girl named Ana, for many others to do their jobs—but who had a blue streak in her hair, pointed also illegal. “People are dying, and it’s our out that the government wasn’t repre­ kids’ parents, our kids’ grandparents,” Les­ senting the will of the people. Civilians lie­Bernard Joseph, the C.E.O. of Coney weren’t doing so great, either. “So Hal­ Island Prep, said recently. Most of the loween happens,” she said. “We all know school’s thousand students are Black or those who were posting on Snapchat, Frank Zappa Latino. Many are poor. When the pan­ ‘Hey, I was going to a party!’ And now demic hit, the school decided not to ex­ the holidays are coming up, and a lot of yon property was put up for sale, and pect much help, and formed its own safety people have been saying, ‘You’re not going Lady Gaga bought the house, the Muffin net. It distributed about eight hundred to stop me from seeing my grandma!’ Kitchen, and the now empty vault, for laptops and tablets, a hundred and twenty­ Well, guess what? Grandma’s not gonna $5.25 million. Restoring the materials five thousand meals, and more than a be there if you’re gonna go see her!”An from the vault took two years and in­ hundred thousand dollars to parents, to assistant principal jumped in with a ques­ volved more than fifty specialists. After cover rent and other expenses. It’s also tion about American exceptionalism. A Winter finished the documentary, he paying for fifty families’ Internet. boy named Collins said, “When you talk made the latest “Bill & Ted” install­ “That should be the government’s job, about power in America and American ment, in which the eighties slackers are but that’s actually not what I need help exceptionalism, I think of the police.” the fathers of two brainy and much with right now,” Joseph said. He wanted His classmates agreed. The power struc­ cooler daughters. readily available tests, and reliable infor­ ture, Ana added, was represented by the Six years after the fateful brainstorm, mation, so that the school doesn’t have maskless officers she passed every day. Winter’s film, distributed by Magnolia to keep ripping up its plans. In October, The conversation turned. Students Pictures, is in theatres and streaming four days before the school was to open, considered protest versus social dis­ online. According to Ahmet, Gail would the governor declared the neighborhood tancing. They discussed the Enlighten­ have loved it. What about Bill and Ted? a “hot spot.” The school was shut down. ment. The faithful execution of laws was “I think that Zappa might be lost on “It’s been like trying to swim against the weighed. These were not theoretical

20 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ideas. The longer the virus raged, the Carter a chance to romp (“There was a more the students suffered. Ana’s father young lady from Dallas!” she says, trad- had lost his construction job because of ing limericks with L.B.J. at a White the pandemic. A girl named Jahdiel said House dinner), and the role of Philip that the virus had marooned her with has given Menzies a chance to invest a cousins in New Jersey. In the spring, a stolid figure with layers of intrigue. student’s father died of COVID. When a “What’s continually being unwrapped mother of four students died, the fam- with Philip is this contradictory ten- ily fell behind on rent. sion—quite a lot of emotion for the de- One student, Margarita, chimed in sire for things to be incredibly straight- periodically; behind her, young kids were forward and unemotional,” he said. “Even playing. “This is a very small apartment, in interviews where he’s really giving very and there’s eleven people living here little away, there’s a hot emotionality that with six children, and everybody has to seems to pour off him, despite his best be in school,” she said. “I’m responsible attempts.” In the new season, which dives for my brother and my sister. And it’s headlong into the eighties, Diana (Emma difficult for me to pay attention to my Corrin) comes on the scene, as does classes. Sometimes I get really emo- Margaret Thatcher (Gillian Anderson). Tobias Menzies tional—it’s just so overwhelming.” Her “That’s the last thing this country needs,” dad worked long hours. She cooked him Philip tells the Queen (Olivia Colman), Kent, where he attended a Waldorf dinner when he returned late at night. as they watch the news. “Two women school. “In my teens, in the early nine- “I wish the government would be doing running the shop.” The Queen disagrees. ties, my mum was taking me to see the- something. Like, I just wish they would Menzies is tall, lean, and understat- atre, the best stuff that was going on in be more focussed on helping people.” edly handsome, with grooved cheeks London,” he said. “There was this ex- 1—Zach Helfand and a brow that creases with concern. plosion of visual theatre, dance theatre, Whether he’s playing Brutus, on “Rome”; movement theatre.” (He explored that THE FIRM the academic Frank Randall or his an- realm himself, and hoped to attend mime OUTER SATELLITE cestor Black Jack Randall, whipping school, but couldn’t afford it; he went to fiend, on “Outlander”; or the nobleman drama school instead.) As a teen, he saw Edmure Tully, on “Game of Thrones,” Wallace Shawn’s “mad, amazing” one- whose wedding ends in mass murder, man play “The Fever,” at the Edinburgh Menzies conveys the sense that there’s Festival. “This character goes through a much going on beneath the surface. All fever of self-recrimination, class guilt,” actors, he said, “come with a set of things he said. “It always stayed with me.” In ike Prince Philip, the actor Tobias that come for free, that you bring to 2015, Menzies performed it himself, un- LMenzies, who plays him in Seasons every part, where the unconscious as- der the direction of Robert Icke, for a 3 and 4 of “The Crown,” occupies pre- pects of you bump into the work.” His small audience, in a room at the May war lodgings in London. He shares his might be “a certain kind of ...” He trailed Fair hotel. “I remember feeling pretty home not with Queen Elizabeth II but off, thinking. “Reticence.” sick to my stomach every night before with a black cat named Bernie, who Early in the fourth season, Philip I did it,” he said. But Shawn himself came to him as a stray. “My cat’s shout- seals his son’s fate during a weekend at came—“a great privilege”—and “seemed ing at me,” he said on a recent Zoom Balmoral, in Scotland, when Diana vis- very delighted by what we’d done.” from his kitchen, as Bernie piped up in its and flatters Philip on a stag-hunting Lockdown has given him time to the background. “I might have forgot- excursion. (“Good shot, sir!”) Season 3 reflect—not a Philip-style midlife crisis ten to feed him.” Menzies, forty-six, wore showcases Philip’s interior life, especially but a sharpening of focus. He’d like to eyeglasses and an oxford shirt, an open in a midlife-crisis episode, in which he do some “highly authored film work,” he cabinet behind him exposing cookbooks becomes fixated on the moon landing. said—“working with, you know, the Paul and a toaster. (“A backstage view,” he (“Extraordinary. What men. What cour- Thomas Andersons and the Joanna Hoggs, said, laughing.) When lockdown began, age.”) The camera lingers on his face as these filmmakers who I admire so much.” he had just moved back into his flat, it cycles through quiet shades of disbe- His next project is a second season of after renovations had required him to lief, wonder, and amusement, his eyes Aisling Bea’s Channel 4 dramedy, “This couch-surf. “One of the places where I brimming with tears. Way Up,” in which he plays her poten- stayed was with Helena, which was de- Menzies was born in London, to a tial love interest, a moody widower with lightful,” he said. “I was sort of an outer drama-teacher mother and a BBC ra- a young son. In the first season, “I’m not satellite of the Bonham Carter family.” dio-producer father. Growing up, “we a great dad, and I’m pretty distant,” Men- On “The Crown,” he and Helena never paid a huge amount of attention zies said, smiling. Another onion to be Bonham Carter, as Princess Margaret, to the Royal Family,” he said. His par- peeled, perhaps? “So many onions,” he are both outer satellites of the Queen. ents separated when he was six, and he said, laughing. “My eyes are watering.” The role of Margaret has given Bonham and his mother and brother moved to —Sarah Larson

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 21 felt betrayed and then, immediately, BRAVE NEW WORLD DEPT. envious. Tuesday or Wednesday? Why didn’t I have one of these e-mail lurk- ers? I reflected for a moment and re- THE BACK OFFICE membered that I couldn’t afford one. This made me doubly a loser. Peo- Virtual assistants will organize your work. Will they disrupt the workforce? ple usually get recognized and elevated for the achievements they have time BY NATHAN HELLER to make, not for the hours they spend maintaining filing systems. One an- swer to the primal question about Won- der Women and Men—how do they do it?—comes down to help: book- keepers, housecleaners, lawyers, strat- egists, and nannies. Many of the best have managed thus. Mark Twain, not thought to be a highfalutin man, en- joyed the help of a private secretary and a butler (named Claude). Mother Teresa had personal assistants (her good deeds seemingly did not extend to pa- perwork), and Malcolm X depended on a secretary whom he’d hired away from this magazine. Highly effective people may share certain habits, but what they usually share more generously are tasks that get in the way of their being highly effective. Odd, then, that, in an age of harried two-income households, assistantship is on the wane. Over the past twenty years, the number of people in the U.S. employed as executive secretaries and administrative assistants has more than halved, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which ex- pects assistantship across industries to decline nine per cent by 2029. In part, that’s due to changes in the nature of the work: bits of what a secretary ack when the world seemed bright of my time which generates an income. would have done thirty years ago are Band ambitious—another century, As a moonless night wore on, filled with handled today by technology and by it might have been—I managed to con- snacking and monsters, I futzed with jobs with different titles. But the shift vince myself, despite a lot of evidence the formulas in my sad expense spread- is economic, too. Assistance positions to the contrary, that what I really needed sheets and knew that these were hours are often among the first to go when in my life was an assistant. This was of life I’d never get back. companies cut costs, and financially December, the month when tradition- In the matter of assistant-having, I strapped middle-class workers have less ally I can no longer outrun the cleri- was not (as Titian might have said of to spend on help outside the office, even cal tasks that have stalked me since the Venus) without models. My introduc- if they need it more. middle of the year. I had weeks of crin- tion came the first time I answered a The problem of efficiency, produc- kled receipts to expense: the year-end peer’s e-mail and realized with a start tivity, and how to make a market out tax on negligence. I was halfway through that we were not alone. “Julianne can of some but not really enough dispos- the process of contesting the charge on help us find a time,” my correspondent able income is an obvious target for a vaccine shot that my insurance com- wrote. Who? But here was this un- startup tech, and the brigades have al- pany had refused to cover, and I had known person in the CC field, sud- ready come through. “If you think about to transcribe hours of interviews before denly at my side like an attendant bear- what exists in the movie ‘Her’ or ‘Iron I could begin to write—the only use ing Q-tips in a German men’s room. I Man’—a super-powerful assistant ser- vice that knows you and takes care of Apps offer to outsource the mundane tasks of small businesses and busy families. the world around you—it’s a really heal-

22 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY ELENA XAUSA ing version of the future,” the entre- was that complex processes can be bro- Pedraza named his own assistant preneur and venture capitalist Sam Les- ken down and run in bits. Pedraza’s in- character John Keats, for his favorite sin told me not long ago. In 2015, he spiration, on the latter point, was Henry dead poet. The character is not pup- co-founded a company, called Fin, that Ford. “Every year, the price of Ford motor peted by one person: behind him is a released a virtual-assistant app with cars kept dropping and the quality kept team of people, which, unlike a real as- actual humans on the other end. The improving,” he said. The key was sepa- sistant, can do an endless number of competition was weak; the closest most rating production into simple tasks, such things at once. When Pedraza includes of us have got to “Her” is Siri (a known as screwing in a single lug nut, and then John Keats’s address on an e-mail— moron), Alexa (a known snoop), or that snapping those tasks together like Legos for example, an e-mail about meeting officious paper clip from the nineties. on the factory floor, allowing processes with me—a hidden system moves into But Fin, like other companies, ultimately to be built without hiring new teams, action. One meeting is broken into gave up on virtual assistance (it now then tightened to the inch. multiple tasks, appearing in a queue on does data analytics), because the busi- Pedraza has brown hair, streamlined the company’s proprietary delegation ness turned out to be hard. People an- into a short crop; a long, chiselled face; software, where they are claimed by ticipate human error from human as- and a predilection for what he calls workers around the world. Someone sistants, but from tech they want perfec- “books by dead people.” (“You should in, say, Bangladesh goes into Pedraza’s tion. And the model was strained by distrust the New York Times best-seller Google calendar to find times; some- employee management. “You end up in the airport bookshelf,” he told me. one else, maybe a few continents away, hiring thousands and thousands of peo- “Trust ‘Self-Reliance,’ by Ralph Waldo in Guatemala, compiles a briefing memo ple to get the scale,” Lessin said. Emerson, because people are still read- about the participants. Often, in Pedra- Faced with personnel challenges, ing Emerson today.”) When I met him, za’s case, the tasks are not strictly pro- some assistance startups have turned he had just heard of Philip Roth for the fessional. He recently had John Keats to poor nations abroad. A wage that’s first time, possibly because Roth had book him an elaborate laser hair-re- illegal in the United States will keep recently been alive. Some of Pedraza’s moval procedure he’d been hoping to you well fed in Kenya, American en- colleagues amiably call him crazy. He get. (“There was some, you know, con- trepreneurs have noticed. Lately, some is known for saying uncommon things fusion about what, uh, areas were cov- companies have sought to shift the bur- in surprising ways. “Ideas are almost ered by this,” he said. “Invisible just han- dens of a struggling American middle like aliens trying to come into the real dled it for me.”) Sometimes, he has class to workers in Africa, South Amer- world, and we’re just pregnant with John Keats trawl through his first- ica, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcon- them,” he has said. He has published and second-degree connections on tinent, and elsewhere. To manage the more than two thousand essays on his LinkedIn for contacts who might be mundane tasks of their narrow worlds, Medium blog, and during this sum- interested in Invisible, and begin cor- the thinking goes, small businesses and mer of unrest he wrote against “silenc- responding with them from his e-mail busy parents can turn to the wider one. ing all disagreement as evidence of account, under his name. Some ex- oppression”—a position that he also press interest, and meetings are set up. ne of those companies is Invisible claimed for Socrates, Diogenes, Tire- Until Pedraza goes to those, the whole OTechnologies, which launched in sias, the Jewish prophets, Martin Lu- process churns on like a software up- 2015 and now has staff in thirty-five ther, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Pe- date in the background of his life. He countries, from Malaysia to Ghana, draza keeps a Roman gladius in his likes to sign his e-mails (or someone Serbia to Pakistan. It emerged in part closet, for athletic practice, and speaks does) “Efficiently yours.” from the idea that great savings can be of “human potential” in the way some The average pay for foreign work- harvested from the developing world. people talk about their favorite foot- ers at Invisible—known as “agents”— “Labor is incredibly cheap, and the big- ball team. He sees Invisible as a tool is five dollars an hour. High-performing gest arbitrage opportunity in the world for realizing that potential by break- agents can make up to ten. “We are is the fact that you’ve got the largest ing past the clutter of modern life; he gathering all of their training data, all labor market in history, with people who describes the company’s workflow as a of their performance data,” Pedraza told are connected to the Internet, speak En- “digital assembly line.” me. Agents are monitored in an endless glish, and have amazing attitudes,” Fran- Compared with sprawling labor-for- screen share, with superiors looking over cis Pedraza, Invisible’s thirty-one-year- hire marketplaces like the site Upwork, their shoulders all the time to see what old C.E.O. and founder, told me. “The where users enlist jobbers for specific they’re doing and how long it’s taking. ability to tap into that and create things tasks such as copywriting or data pro- Instead of replacing humans in slow is infinite.” cessing, Invisible is about order and parts of the assembly line with robots Besides these savings, Invisible grew scale. Most of the assistance it does (Ford’s practice), the company writes from two ideas, one about bigness and is for entire companies. For businesses software to speed through rote steps the other about smallness. The bigness of one—say, a hapless writer—it offers once they’re set. idea was that processes in a business or an “executive support” service, which Offshore outsourcing, which in- a life ought to be managed by one en- connects an individual with a virtual cluded more than fourteen million tity—a virtual super-assistant who can character to whom he or she can assign workers in 2018, has been linked to un- deal with anything. The smallness idea wishes and tasks. employment and wage stagnation in

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 23 for random errands—such as hag- gling with Verizon customer service— but excellent with repetitive, mind- numbing chores. “Whatever you most hate doing in your life is perfect,” she told me. I decided to assign Mr. Blake one of my saddest tasks, filing expenses. At The New Yorker, this is done via a cryptic online platform. I walked through the rigmarole with Sam Mata, one of Invisible’s “delivery managers.” He works from his home in the Do- minican Republic, meeting with new clients to gauge their needs—a con- versation that Invisible calls “discov- ery,” and that often has a therapeutic mood. (In workflows as in life, people rarely see the heart of their problems clearly.) Did I want receipts filed sep- arately, or in bundles? Mata asked. And how often should Mr. Blake check for new ones? Darden had explained “Give in and buy a space heater.” that a first-rate assistance operation would intercept the work before it even reached my radar screen. Ideally, •• Mr. Blake would log in to my e-mail account, look for receipts, and file them the American workforce: it’s harder to the work—but the reality is that Invisible on his own. get a raise if your competition abroad is doing such a good job, and we’re seeing Log in to my e-mail? I had visions works for much less. Pedraza often such cost efficiencies, that post-corona- of my not-favorite poet pawing over boasts that Invisible, which hires six virus we’re maybe not considering em- inchoate notes I’d sent myself, weird per cent of applicants, is more selec- ploying for these tasks again.” forwards from Mom, love letters I’d tive than Harvard. At the moment, in received in the Obama years. I could fact, Harvard’s acceptance rate is five n a spirit of adventure, I signed up hear him snickering over embarrass- per cent, and many people go there be- Iwith Invisible myself. Over e-mail, ing purchases, such as—just to give cause it is thought to open wormholes I was introduced to my new assistant, an extremely hypothetical example—a to the world of the élite, while most William Blake. (Not my favorite poet, twenty-five-minute sleep meditation agents at Invisible simply want a de- but whatever.) I had planned to ask for narrated by Diddy. Not to fear. The cent job. his help transcribing an interview, but agents would use a secure-key client Once, it was big companies such as I faltered at the crucial question. How and never see my passwords. And, I Nike or Google that did most out- to address him? “William” felt ludi- was assured, their bosses would be sourcing. But today the practice ap- crous. “Blake”? Unfair to art. I settled watching for any funny business. peals to small businesses weathering on “Mr. Blake”—appreciative and re- The next morning, I sat down at COVID-19. Invisible’s revenue has more spectful, like Mr. Darcy, Mr. Robot, my desk to find ten e-mails from the than tripled since the beginning of the Mr. Shawn—and wrote him a long, dreaded New Yorker expenses portal: year, and its agents in the developing solicitous set of instructions. An eighty- my submissions had been approved. world now handle some of the clerical five-hundred-word transcript came back My personal dashboard on the Invis- work involved in setting restaurants up the next day. ible site revealed a breakdown of the on several of the largest food-delivery Invisible’s executive-support clients job by unit cost (rounded to $1.83 per platforms. We hear a lot about changes are required to spend at least two thou- expense) and total ($27.50). I felt as if to the American labor market during sand dollars on services per month. This someone had broken into my home the pandemic, but this one is likely to is not cheap, though it’s worth noting and scrubbed my bathroom while I linger when it ends. that a full-time-ish assistant some- slept. For all the quantitative specific- “In mid-April, we had to let forty where like New York costs much more. ity, though, I couldn’t see the names of per cent of our company go,” the di- Hayley Darden, the company’s mar- the agents who had worked on the job rector of revenue operations at one keting director, advised me to regard behind Mr. Blake’s façade. mobile-commerce startup told me. “Be- Mr. Blake less as a personal assistant Next, I arranged for Mr. Blake to fore, we probably had ten people doing than as a process assistant: not good book my meetings. Mata sent me tem-

24 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 plates for Mr. Blake’s e­mails, which on a long tradition of stories about of opportunity is the mandate to be turned out to be a dangerous overture; clever servants acting beyond their always striving. my writer’s compulsions kicked in as master’s ken: Jeeves and Bertie Wooster And so, just as many assistants have soon as I opened them. Mr. Blake made are crossed by the order of things, the been slightly terrified of their power­ first contact by writing: boss set to task and taste by his assis­ ful bosses, a number of powerful bosses tant, and the injustice is comic be­ now appear to be slightly terrified of Hello [Name], Happy to help you and Nathan connect. cause both of them are powerless to their assistants. Business kingpins fret Below are suggested . . . correct this misarrangement. over being sold out. Luxury­industry In the middle of the twentieth cen­ leaders worry about assistants abscond­ But did “Happy to help you and Nathan tury, the old nonsense about class and ing with goods or money. A surprising connect” maybe sound slightly grudg­ station started to fall away in the West. number of Hollywood types seem to ing? With that phrasing, it was easy to With the turn toward supposed mer­ share a fear that their assistants will envision Mr. Blake as a twenty­four­ itocracy, a different literature of assis­ experience a Norma Desmond mo­ year­old Bard graduate, cooler and tance emerged. Recent stories look ment and attack them with a weapon. smarter than me, returning to his three more like bildungsromans; the trans­ In theory, Invisible’s assistance pres­ roommates each night with stories of gression of roles is where the drama, ents no such human perils. Pedraza can his effete boss, Nathan, who was inca­ not the comedy, comes through. “The be sure that John Keats isn’t trying to pable of scheduling his own meetings Devil Wears Prada” and “Clouds of take his job, embezzle, or have sex with and who needed to have everything printed Sils Maria” are narratives about assis­ strangers in his favorite chair, because out. I changed it to: tants becoming or choosing not to be­ John Keats is just a big tin man of frag­ Delighted to help you and Nathan connect. come, and about bosses who watch mentary shared processes and incoher­ their pasts replay from the far side of ent passions. This had the ring of job contentment. life choices that they can’t reverse. As­ In practice, though, the mandate to I spent fifteen more minutes turning sistance may be where people start out, strive is spread across the globe. Even the sentences around before going back but it is no longer necessarily where before COVID­19, Invisible had no office, to my work. Ah, efficiency. they end up, and that knowledge makes and not long ago I went to visit Pe­ for friction in the daily grind. The curse draza at his apartment and operations few days later, I Zoomed with A Prabhat Hira, an agent who had worked on my expense filing. He was based in New Delhi, and appeared in a collared jersey for the Gryffindor quidditch team. “The delegations I worked on for you were kind of excit­ ing!” he said—the most enthusiasm for expense filing that I had ever heard. Season’s Hira had started working as a free­ lancer online in order to spend more time at home with his young family. Greetings He spoke fondly of his “journey through Invisible” and, like all the workers whom I met, described the company’s collegiality. “It feels really Fabulous Christmas trees. good to talk to people from different Festive décor. countries, from different cultures,” he said. Still, most of the people he was Immersive virtual experiences. talking to were other agents. During Make Hillwood your the nearly three years he had worked at Invisible, Hira told me, I was the holiday oasis. first client he’d ever met. For a long time, the de­facto genre of assistantship stories was comedy, because societal roles were thought to be fixed, and straining against the or­ der of things had funny outcomes. Malvolio, the imperious steward in “Twelfth Night,” chafes against the Hours: Tues – Sun 10am – 5pm HillwoodMuseum.org limits of his station and gets punished 4155 Linnean Ave. NW, Washington DC Free parking with ugly socks. P. G. Wodehouse drew Photo: Erik Kvalsvik center in Brooklyn, a shimmering, Jen- Bands. Wearers would commit to doing young startup needs. “Being able to ga-like glass tower on the East River. something, such as running a mara- have an extra set of hands you can spin In deference to the pandemic, I had thon, and, when the task was com- up at any moment is a huge competi- proposed a virtual meeting. But Pe- pleted, log their achievement in an on- tive advantage—the reason being that draza, who described himself as being line database and pass the bracelet on you’re trying a lot of little things, and, “risk-friendly,” preferred something to someone else. When Pedraza grad- once you see one working, you want more personal. In the lobby, one door- uated, he moved to Palo Alto and tried not to just double down but to double man guided me to another doorman, to launch a social iPhone app to help down on the double-down,” Ligten- who guided me to a large elevator bank, people achieve personal goals. He found berg said. Without outsourcing, he’d and I went up. no investors until he lucked into an in- have to undertake a round of hiring The apartment where Pedraza leads troduction to the venture capitalist Peter every time he wanted to start a new a growing empire of work was not much Thiel, who invested fifty thousand dol- initiative—and a round of firing if it larger than a college dorm room. The lars; $2.5 million in additional funding didn’t work out. kitchen spanned a counter near the followed. The app was called Everest, In Silicon Valley, the conventional door. The rest of the space was domi- and it had around half a million down- wisdom is that companies must grow nated by a platform bed with an un- loads, but the company failed after three quickly and focus on a narrow band of covered duvet. years. “The fatal flaw,” Pedraza told me, the market (often called “going verti- “Sometimes I have guests here. I’ll “was that people would quit working cal”). Pedraza favors margins over fast cook a meal,” Pedraza told me. It was on their goals.” growth—Invisible aspires to be prof- nice to imagine. He sat down by a desk. Invisible is plainly oriented toward itable by next fall—and thinks that He was wearing a black shirt, white its clients’ achievement, but Pedraza gains accrue horizontally: a little Lego shorts, and white canvas shoes. I sat on believes that it helps its workers along, piece is invested for one process in one a small gray couch. There was one win- too. He’s an advocate of employee- industry, but it can be used in others, dow—the death-prevention kind that owned business; fifty per cent of In- and the skills that agents learn have opens only a few inches. visible is currently in the hands of its concomitant range. Pedraza grew up in San Diego, with staff. If agents in distant countries show Pedraza’s other education goal for parents who come from immigrant fam- outstanding initiative, he says, they can agents is more numinous: “Teach them ilies. (His mother, a former entrepre- take equity, too. So far, only two out how to think, teach them how to cre- neur, is Persian; his father, an architect of two hundred and seventy-nine have ate, help them to discover their da Vin- by training, was brought up largely in reached his standard, but he holds out cian potential.” To this end, he often Venezuela and Japan.) When he was hope for the rest. He told me, “Invis- chats with agents on Slack. Last year, in elementary school, he was bullied. “I ible in its very, very long-term strat- he undertook a world tour to meet was ready to be friends with everybody,” egy is sort of a back door into an ed- some in person. “It was a magical trip, he told me, “but I wasn’t willing to go ucation company.” He means that it you know, and a couple of things were through the hazing rituals of ascending can serve as a kind of school: Invisible eye-openers for me,” he told me. “One the hierarchy.” At twelve, he enrolled in offers skills that, in theory, can be trans- is that our agents are nearly all college a five-year Skype course on “the great ferred to other desirable jobs. Nadine graduates.” Pedraza tries to share his books of Western civ- Jost, an agent in Pretoria, intellectual interests; for example, he ilization” and his world told me, “You have a test posted clips of himself on YouTube changed. He learned to every week, and, if you test reading Bastiat’s economic essays. “As inhabit a private order low, they will tell you that a company, every day, we’ll read a chap- drawn from books and you need to be retrained.” ter in a book I love,” he told me. “Right personal dreams. On his Although virtual charac- now, we’re reading Aesop’s fables. darker days, he identified ters like John Keats or Wil- They’re wonderful, and so simple any- with Don Quixote. On liam Blake make the inter- one can understand them.” brighter days, too. “The face accessible to individuals, The hope for shared aspirations most wonderful and ex- the heart of Invisible’s busi- across the globe isn’t unique to Invis- citing future is one in ness is churning through ible. Phoebe Yao is the founder and which as many individ- labor-intensive processes for C.E.O. of another outsourcing startup, uals as possible are expressing as much small or medium-sized companies. Pareto, based in San Francisco. Its mis- of their potential as possible, and ev- “This is a juicy, juicy market,” Scott sion is to spread female empowerment; eryone has their own ideas about what Downes, Invisible’s forty-nine-year- it draws on a labor pool of mostly Fil- the future is going to look like,” he said. old chief technology officer, told me. ipino women, whose pay starts at four Pedraza went to Cornell with high Roland Ligtenberg, a co-founder of dollars an hour. “Essentially what we’re hopes, but the giant lectures vexed him. Housecall Pro, a business platform ca- teaching these women is how to think He spent a year abroad, at Oxford, and tering to home-service companies— critically about the world and the liked its one-on-one research tutorials. plumbers, carpet cleaners, and so world’s problems,” she told me.“We go Back in Ithaca, he started a line of Live- forth—uses Invisible to help coördi- through this monthlong process of strong-like bracelets that he called Do- nate the sorts of growth efforts that a teaching them to ask the right ques-

26 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 tions.” I asked for an example. “First, it’s that you can ask questions,” Yao said. “And then, when they ask, it’s usu- ally things like ‘Is it O.K. that I’m doing something like this?’ ‘Is this something that you want me to be doing?’ ” When Pedraza shares insights from his ten years of entrepreneurship, he likes to emphasize an up-and-at-’em attitude. He told me he wants agents to overcome the “mental block” to suc- cess—the voice that says, “No, I couldn’t start a company that’s worth millions of dollars.” “No, actually, you can,” he insisted to me. “Like, I know you’re in Kenya, and I know it’s harder there, but, like, look—I’ll help you.” Yet global assistantship as appren- ticeship remains more notional than actual. Not long ago, I spoke with one of Invisible’s agents in Kenya, Brigh- ton Ooko. He is thirty years old, and he excelled as a programming student at the Multimedia University of Kenya. In 2017, he became the second agent hired at Invisible. He has since been promoted to middle management, at ten dollars an hour, and he oversees a team of fifteen. His income is a healthy “Thanks to the effects of time dilation, only three days one in Kenya; he bought a plot of land will have passed for us, but when we return to Earth the in Malindi and had a house built for Trump Presidency will have just ended.” his wife and son. But the grind is real. Ooko begins his workday at 4 p.m. and continues through to morning, logging •• in sixty or seventy hours a week. The nonstop nocturnal schedule, plus the with close-set eyes. “I think narcis- and he feared that he was shirking, business of raising a family, is less than sism—clinically, psychologically—is a maybe not being efficient enough. He totally conducive to flights of entrepre- very bad term, and also a term we use worried that if he didn’t keep up he’d neurial imagination; when I asked Ooko a lot casually, but in a classical sense be left behind, because some people about his long-term ambitions, he re- it’s not necessarily a bad thing. To know were running so quickly and with such ferred me to Invisible’s corporate goals. thyself is the beginning of wisdom.” focus that, if you didn’t do the same, Another picture, of a black figure you risked betraying your future. p in his tiny apartment in the Jenga- trapped in a gray oval, the walls clos- He told me this, then turned back Ulike tower, Pedraza was giving ing in, was inspired by reading Heideg- to his computer, to check what John me a tour of everything he’d imagined ger. “In your inner mind you can be Keats had scheduled next. Recalled to but hadn’t had a chance to execute. On screaming into the abyss,” Pedraza said. the clockwork of his day, he seemed to the little desk lay a stack of Moleskine I looked around the little studio, shake off his uncertainty and rejoin the notebooks filled with ideas: other busi- with Pedraza’s paintings tacked up, and flow of necessary work. He’d more than nesses he’d dreamed up, sketches, asked how all his amateur production halved the company’s burn rate this poems. On the wall to my right were fitted with his churn of global efficiency year. He was giving his investors rea- pictures Pedraza had drawn, projec- at work. son to be pleased. “The products are tions of unbuilt buildings from his Pedraza was silent for a while. “You’re getting better, and the operations are imagination. “I’m an amateur in the touching on an insecurity of mine— getting better,” he said. Before I left, sense of the word amator,” he told me. really, a nest of insecurities,” he said at he rose to crack open the window be- “I think bad art is the secret to good last. “Am I focussed? Is all this”—he hind me, to catch a little of the breeze art. You just have to do it and not let ran his eyes over the room—“a distrac- outside, and as he undid the latch I felt your ego stop you.” tion?” These questions arose sometimes a wave of vertigo, although I didn’t “That’s my Narcissus,” he said, when he chose to read a novel or a phi- know whether it came from looking pointing to a portrait of a long face losophy book instead of a business book, up or looking down. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 27 By rehabilitating themselves, they had SHOUTS & MURMURS robbed her of an audience for her suffer- ing. It was one more deprivation, the lat- est in a chain stretching all the way back to her childhood. Two piercing howls sounded outside. “I think that might be them,” Gabe said. “Do you want to let them in?” “You can do it,” she said. Lauren refilled her wineglass while Gabe opened the window so that her parents could jump into the living room. “Sorry we’re late!” her mother said. “You know your daddy—he didn’t want to ask for directions!” “Good thing I had my better half!” RAISED BY WOLVES he said. Lauren cringed as her parents nuz- BY SIMON RICH zled. When she was a kid, her father had cheated on her mother constantly, with In 2003, a group of hunters discovered a ren said. “I mean, growing up with them her friends and neighbors and, once, with young woman in Siberia who had appar- was a full-on nightmare.” a log that had a hole in it. And now ev- ently been raised by wolves. Scientists were “Maybe it’s worse in your memory?” eryone was supposed to pretend like their unable to explain the child’s origins, but “It was documented by scientists,” she marriage was perfect? an examination indicated that she was said, frustration creeping into her voice. “So, how’s everything?” her father approximately eighteen years old and in “There have been books about it, and an asked. “How’s work?” surprisingly good health. Researchers award-winning documentary.” “It’s fine,” Lauren said. named her “Lauren” and worked to as- Gabe rubbed her shoulders in a way There was a two-second pause, and similate her into human society. With that managed to somehow make her feel Gabe rushed to fill it. “Work’s better than effort, Lauren caught up to her peers, both even more tense. “I know your folks aren’t fine,” he said, smacking Lauren’s arm with socially and intellectually. By the age of perfect,” he said. “But they came all the an annoying amount of force. “Honey, thirty-five, she had married an actuary way from Siberia. They’ve been running tell them your news!” named Gabe and given birth to a daugh- and swimming for months, and they’ll “It’s nothing,” she said. ter. Lauren never interacted with the be gone in half an hour. The least we can “It’s not nothing,” Gabe protested. He wolves that raised her, except when they do is be civil, right?” turned to her parents and gestured at her came over for Thanksgiving. “I guess,” she said. like a game-show host: “You are looking “Great!” he said, sealing the agreement at Verizon’s newest regional marketing- auren was considering whether or with a condescending forehead kiss. “Be- communications manager!” Lnot to take a Klonopin when her sides, it might be fun. I mean, your dad’s Lauren’s parents tackled her and licked husband shuffled in, straining under the stories are pretty epic.” her face. “We’re so proud of you!” weight of a dead elk. “You didn’t have to Lauren smiled tightly as Gabe set out “So what does this mean?” her father get that,” she said. the napkins and the tarps. She’d told him asked. “You get to hunt bigger animals?” “It’s the least I can do,” Gabe said, in all about her screwed-up childhood. The “I’m not a hunter,” she said. “I work a chipper Boy Scout voice. “It’s so cool barking, the growling, the total lack of for Verizon. In telecommunications.” of them to come all the way out here!” structure and support. Her parents had “Ah, gotcha,” he said, lowering his He dumped the carcass on the coffee never been abusive, but it had still been eyes. “I’m sorry I got it wrong.” table, shattering several bowls of nuts and a dysfunctional home. Her therapist had “You’re not wrong,” Gabe told him, olives. Lauren sighed. confirmed it. reassuringly. “She got a raise, which is “What’s wrong?” Gabe asked. “They did not see you,” she’d said. sort of like the human equivalent of hunt- “I just don’t understand why we al- “And you were not heard.” ing bigger animals. Right, honey?” ways have to accommodate their needs.” Still, though Gabe was aware of her “I mean, I guess,” Lauren said. Gabe shot her a look. “Because they’re parents’ transgressions, he’d never actu- “I’m not surprised,” her mother said. your parents. And our guests.” ally witnessed any. They had mellowed “We always used to say, ‘There goes Lau- Lauren popped the Klonopin and considerably with age. Her father had ren, our little genius!’” washed it down with Pinot Grigio. stopped howling at the moon following “Huh,” Lauren said. “Look, I get it,” Gabe said. “Parents his stroke, and, after a few false starts, her Gabe shot her a warning look. are hard. Mine drive me crazy, too. I mean, mother had finally quit drinking. Lau- “What?” her mother asked. my dad, with those puns?” ren knew that she should be grateful for “I just don’t remember you ever

“I think my parents are worse,” Lau- their progress, but somehow it galled her. saying that,” she said. “My memory, GUTIÉRREZ LUCI

28 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 in fact, is that you never named me.” again, that might not be a perfectly ac- and her grandparents obediently fetched Her parents hung their heads. curate description of what happened. But it. It was surreal to Lauren to see her folks “Would anybody like to eat this dead that’s what I remember about that day.” so docile, but to her daughter it made elk’s ass?” Gabe asked. “That’s what I remember, too,” said perfect sense. She didn’t see her grand- “I’m not hungry,” her father said. her mother. parents as vicious wolves. To her, they “O.K, I’m sorry,” Lauren said, rolling “There’s no point doing this,” Lauren were just Papa and Gam Gam. her eyes. “I should have remembered the said. “It just leads to frustration.” Someday she’d have to tell Haley the family rule: never say anything about any- “We’re frustrated, too!” her father said. truth about her childhood and the trauma thing uncomfortable, ever.” He sighed. “I’m sorry for growling. I was she’d endured. Lauren’s father put his tail between flooded.” Or maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe she’d his legs. “Maybe coming here was a mis- “That’s all right,” Lauren muttered. tell a different narrative, one that focussed take,” he murmured. “Maybe we should “Thank you,” he said. “My point is, I on the things that they’d got right. How just leap out the window.” know we weren’t great parents. We were they’d fed her, sheltered her, and defended Lauren shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the young, and we were wolves, and we didn’t her from hawks. For all their dysfunction, first time you left.” always know what we were doing. But she’d ended up doing O.K. In some ways, “Sweetheart,” he said. “We went over every time we see you all we do is apol- her parents’ flaws had even contributed this in therapy. The reason I left the fam- ogize, over and over, and it’s not easy. In to her success. (She knew that her essay ily had nothing to do with you. It was a order to do it, we both had to learn to about them, for example, had been a major period in my life when I was confused. I talk English, and it hurts our throats and factor in her getting into Brown.) thought that log with a hole in it was sounds insane. Just hearing my voice right Haley was about to throw the ball your mother. I literally thought the moss now, coming out of my snout—it’s in- again when she walked over to her mother. on it was her fur. It was a crazy time for credibly unnatural and disturbing. So if “Now Mommy throw,” she said, press- me. I had rabies.” you want us to keep saying sorry in these ing the soggy ball into Lauren’s hand. “I’m supposed to feel sorry for you weird, choking animal voices, we will. Lauren turned it over in her palm. It now?” Lauren asked. Despite the wine Because we are sorry. But, at a certain was hard to tell if the drool was her par- and Klonopin, her hands were shaking. point, the ball is in your court.” ents’ or her daughter’s. Haley had some “We’re not asking for sympathy,” her The room fell silent, allowing them new teeth coming in. Lauren had recently mother said. “And, if there’s something to hear a distant squeak. taken her to the dentist, and the X-ray you need to say to us, we’re here to lis- “Sounds like someone’s up!” Gabe said, of her child’s jaw had shocked her. There ten. Right, darling?” grateful for an excuse to flee. He returned wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but “Yes,” her father said. “We are pre- holding their three-year-old daughter, it was disturbing to see all those adult pared to honor your emotions.” Haley. She was gripping a small orange teeth embedded in her skull, a lifetime Lauren clenched her fists; she hated ball—the source of the squeaking. Her of canines and molars waiting to erupt. it when they used therapy jargon. eyes were bleary from sleep, but when It would be years before the teeth broke “Let’s start with my leaving,” her fa- she saw her grandparents she let out a through her gums, with braces and re- ther said. “Why did it upset you so much?” squeal and buried her face in their fur. tainers along the way. Why couldn’t hu- “Oh, I don’t know,” Lauren said, sar- Lauren was surprised that Haley re- mans come out fully formed, with every- castically. “Maybe because it happened membered who they were. She’d barely thing they needed? Why did it have to on my fucking birthday?” Her parents spent any time with them. There was take so long and hurt so much to finish eyed each other subtly. “Let me guess,” last Thanksgiving, and that Memorial growing up? Lauren said. “You don’t remember.” Day when they’d flown her to Siberia She gazed at her parents, who were “Honestly, no,” her father said. because Gabe’s sister was getting mar- crouching low on the carpet in a show “So you’re saying that I made it up?” ried and there were no kids at the wed- of deference. In wolf years, they were “I’m not saying that!” he said, raising ding, and it was just the easiest child- four hundred years old. She wondered a paw. “It totally could have happened care option. Lauren had expected Haley what they had been like when they were the way you remember it. I’m just saying to be homesick on the tundra, but she’d young. They’d been raised by wolves, too, that my memory is different.” enjoyed herself. It didn’t hurt that her of course. They’d never spoken about their “O.K., fine,” she said. “What’s your grandparents had given her unlimited parents, and it occurred to Lauren only memory of the day you left?” screen time. They claimed it was because now that she had never asked. She held “O.K., well—and, again, this could be they didn’t understand what screens were up the ball, and her parents stared at it inaccurate. We’re talking about a long and had no way of differentiating be- with tired yellow eyes. Their panting was time ago, and my brain is the size of a tween an iPad and any other reflective labored, but their pupils tracked the ball pine cone, and I have no understanding surface, like a puddle or an eye. Lauren as she tentatively traced it through the air. of time or numbers. But my memory of suspected that they were lying, but she She could hear them faintly whimpering, that day is: I was walking in the woods. was charmed. In their coddling of Haley, plaintive as pups begging for scraps. And then the big, yellow god that lives she sensed a desire to make up for the “Throw, Mommy,” Haley pleaded. in the sky shined hot. And then there past, a subconscious awareness that there Lauren lifted the ball high, feeling its was a smell, like, ‘O.K. time to go.’ So I were wrongs that needed righting. heavy, sticky weight. Then she took a ran into the wet place that is cold. And, Haley tossed her ball across the room, deep breath and let it go. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 29 Evans was homeless when he was hired. LETTER FROM LOS ANGELES Now he lives in properties that are being flipped, guarding them through the renovation, staging, open-house, and A LONELY OCCUPATION inspection periods. In the past seven years, he has protected more than The homeless people guarding empty houses in a broken real-estate market. twenty-two homes, in thirteen neigh- borhoods around Los Angeles, almost BY FRANCESCA MARI all historically Black and Latino com- munities. A McMansion in Fontana; a four-unit apartment complex in Comp- ton; a “baby mansion on the peak of the mountain” in East L.A., which had been left to a son who, according to the neighbors, borrowed so much against the equity of the house that he lost it to foreclosure. Before leaving, he poured liquid cement down the drains. Evans guarded the property as the plumbing system was replaced. Empty houses are a strange sight in an area that has one of the most severe housing shortages in the United States. L.A. has the highest median home prices, relative to income, and among the lowest homeownership rates of any major city, according to the U.C.L.A. Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Renting isn’t any easier. The area has one of the lowest vacancy rates in the country, and the average rent is twenty- two hundred dollars a month. On any night, some sixty-six thousand people there sleep in cars, in shelters, or on the street, an increase of thirteen per cent since last year. The housing shortage was caused, in part, by restrictive zoning, rampant NIMBYism, and the use of California’s environmental laws to thwart urban de- andering around Northwest Pas- away, I heard a genteel Southern accent velopment. In 1960, Los Angeles was Wadena, I pressed my face against from behind me: “Can I help you?” A zoned to house some ten million peo- the window of a dingy pink stucco house Black man with perfect posture, wear- ple. By 1990, decades of downzoning at 265 Robinson Road. It was April, 2019, ing loafers and a black T-shirt tucked had reduced that number to 3.9 mil- and in two blocks I had passed thirteen into belted trousers, introduced himself lion, roughly the city’s current popula- bungalows, duplexes, and multifamily as Augustus Evans. tion. Then, in 2008, the subprime- homes that had gone through foreclo- I wasn’t the first person to wonder mortgage crisis struck, and in the years sure in the past fifteen years. Twelve of what Evans was doing there. A few that followed thousands of foreclosed them were still unoccupied. No. 265 had weeks earlier, two sheriffs had knocked homes were sold at auction. Because been in foreclosure for a year and a half, on the door around 11 p.m. and hand- they had to be purchased in cash, many and the two small houses on the prop- cuffed him. In his car’s glove compart- of them were bought by wealthy inves- erty had long sat empty. But now, in- ment, they found a letter of employ- tors, private-equity-backed real-estate side the rear house, there was a gallon ment and the cell-phone number of a funds, and countless other real-estate jug of water and a bag of peanuts on a woman named Diane Montano, who companies, leaving less inventory for Formica kitchen counter. The walls were runs Weekend Warriors, a company individual buyers. In the end, the 2008 a mangy taupe, but African-print sheets that provides security for vacant houses. crash made housing in California even hung over the windows. As I walked Like many of Montano’s employees, more expensive. No. 265, along with thousands of Augustus Evans, a poet, lives in and protects properties that are being flipped. other homes in L.A., was acquired by

30 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 PHOTOGRAPH BY RICARDO NAGAOKA Wedgewood, a real-estate company, ing in the Robincroft Castle, a seven- On a late October morning, Evans, founded in 1983, that specializes in flip- thousand-square-foot historic landmark Stevens, and two other men walked into ping homes, managing everything from across the street, which sold for $1.39 the American Savings and Loan on lockouts and financing to renovation million in 2016 and three years later Crenshaw Boulevard wearing rubber and staging. In gentrifying neighbor- was listed for $2.49 million. And he masks of Presidents Johnson, Nixon, hoods, empty houses are sitting ducks, took to caring for a colony of ants under Ford, and Reagan. The men bagged two so companies like Wedgewood hire a tree, feeding them chicken bones. The hundred and twenty-eight thousand Weekend Warriors and other house- bones disappeared quickly, so he kept dollars and several exploding dye packs, sitting services for cheap security. watch and spied a cat and a possum in what was then the largest bank rob- Around Robinson Road, several prop- come by, and realized they weren’t just bery in Los Angeles history. (It inspired erties had been broken into. At No. 265, eating the bones but the ants and ev- scenes in the movie “Point Break.”) a middle-aged Black couple had re- erything else. Three months later, Evans was caught cently crawled in through the front in Tampa, Florida, just before board- window. When Evans told them to orn to sharecroppers in the Arkan- ing a cruise ship to the Bahamas, where leave, they apologized; the man was a Bsas Delta, Evans is the seventh of he’d hoped to hide. He spent the next jazz musician, and they said that they ten children. He picked cotton until he seven years locked up, reading, writing, were struggling with crystal-meth de- was eleven, when his family hitched a and preaching. When he got out, it was pendency and that they used to sleep ride on a hay truck to Tulare, Califor- hard to find work. in this house before Evans arrived. The nia. In school, the other children and In 1998, Evans rented a derelict office three went to the front porch and chat- teachers ridiculed him—for his accent, in South L.A., across from the Magic ted while smoking cigarillos. his coveralls, his lunches of fatback and Johnson Theatre, to work on his po- Evans, who was sixty-seven at the collard greens. He dropped out after etry and various business projects, in- time, took me through the two houses the eighth grade. At sixteen, he and cluding a short-lived toilet-paper-de- on the lot. He’d laid a blue tarp over some cousins were washing cars at a livery service. One day, he gave a CD the cream-colored carpet, and, in one gas station when a money-green Ca- of himself performing his poetry to a room, he’d set up an inflatable mattress dillac Eldorado rolled in and a Black woman who worked in the salon down- neatly made with a floral fleece cover- man stepped out. One of Evans’s cous- stairs; he’d noticed her singing to her- let. A Haitian-flag baby blanket was ins asked the man how he could afford self as she braided hair. “She was a vo- wrapped around his pillow. He liked such a car, and he told them that, if calist out of this world,” Evans told me. his room warm; when he woke up, he’d they came to Los Angeles, he could “I mean, she’s another Aretha Frank- crank up his space heater, then brew a hook them up with a job that paid two lin, Patti LaBelle, Whitney Houston cup of coffee and read and write—po- hundred dollars a day. That afternoon, quality of a singer.” Soon they got mar- etry, essays, screenplays—at a plastic the boys took a Greyhound bus to Ven- ried and he moved into her small apart- folding table by his bed. He was con- ice, where they began selling little bal- ment in South L.A., where they paid templating writing a memoir. “This is loons of heroin out of their mouths for some six hundred dollars a month. They how I keep my sanity,” he told me. He ten dollars each. Not long afterward, had two sons, and eventually, afraid that had the run of both houses, but he kept Evans offered drugs to an undercover their children would become involved to this one room, his life contained in officer. He was arrested and sent to ju- in the local gangs, they moved with Ev- several milk crates on the shelves. He venile detention, where he joined the ans’s mother-in-law and brother-in- showed me his eighth-grade diploma Nation of Islam. His faith estranged law to Moreno Valley, a suburb with a and a picture of a poetry venue that he him from his Christian family. “The fast-growing Black population. They had opened in Compton in the nine- old Muslim people, they brainwashed had another son, and, over the years, ties. (It closed after becoming a target him, I think,” his sister Ercell Murray they rented homes that ranged from of the Crips gang.) Two of his screen- told me. When Evans was released, he two thousand to four thousand dollars plays were on the shelves, along with a moved to Compton, the heart of L.A.’s a month. book, “The Thoughts of Augustus the Black activist community. In the sev- As the world eased out of the Great Final Poet,” which he had self-pub- enties, he sold Amway products door Recession, in 2010, his wife told him lished in 2014: “Hey, Mr. Income/You’re to door and taught martial arts. He that their differences had grown too my best friend./ My pockets are wanted to open a martial-arts academy, great. Although she had a talent for empty /Where have you been?” He’d but no bank would give him a loan. singing, she’d earned her nursing de- saved a receipt from the Los Angeles In the fall of 1983, when Derrick Stev- gree, but he was still holding on to the Unified School District, which bought ens, a friend from juvenile detention, hope of becoming a famous poet. “You two hundred and eighty-five copies for asked if Evans wanted in on a bank can’t just get stagnated and stuck on a its classrooms. robbery, Evans said yes. “I never thought dream that has not materialized,” she He spent most of his time inside, of robbing a bank, but I did know that told me. After their divorce was final- but when he wanted a change of scen- that’s the building with the money in ized, he put his belongings in a trash ery he sat in his S.U.V., a 2001 Infiniti, it, and if you got a lot of money you bag and walked out, beginning a life of which he’d bought with his house- could do anything you want in Amer- homelessness. He got two weeks’ worth sitting savings. Evans dreamed of liv- ica,” Evans told me. of motel vouchers from General Relief,

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 31 and when those ran out he headed to- last visit. “They know Daddy has to Compton, told me. “He’s the one and ward Union Station, where he hoped work away from the house,” he told me. only golden oldie.” Whereas Evans to sleep on a bench. He was crossing “They’re big boys now.” dressed in trousers, blazers, and loafers, Normandie and Vernon when a couple Around the end of the month, the Moosa, a Black Panther, preferred a he knew from the Black-consciousness driver would deliver a check. In seven louder look: he wore a leather jacket, community spotted him. They took him years of working for Montano, Evans rose-tinted sunglasses, and African into their store, a Caribbean gift shop has never met her. (Montano declined beads, and carried a staff with a black called Bles-sed Love, and told him that to comment for this article.) plastic snake coiled around it. Learn- he could sleep there in exchange for ing that Evans was house-sitting made some help at the counter. There was a t No. 265, two construction workers him feel less miserable about his own windowless black-lit room in the back, Ajunked the decades-old kitchen situation. Moosa walked Evans through with murals of Egyptian iconography appliances and Formica counters, tore the small three-bedroom house, point- on the walls and the solar system painted up the carpeting, and laid down ash- ing out the lack of sinks, cabinets, hot on the ceiling. He slept there for nearly wood laminate floors. By the end of water, and heat. The only thing that two years, waking at dawn for morn- June, the exterior was painted gray with functioned was the toilet. ing prayers and opening the store two slate-gray trim, the interiors a bright Moosa’s life has been shaped by hours later. white. Shaker-style cabinets and gran- L.A.’s demographic trends. As recent One morning, a customer told Evans ite countertops were installed in the books like “The Color of Law,” by Rich- that he supplemented his Social Secu- kitchens. Edison bulbs hung from the ard Rothstein, and “Race for Profit,” by rity income by house-sitting for Week- ceiling in black metal light fixtures. Ev- Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, explain, end Warriors. There were two types of ans’s beat-up white microwave and mini- a number of inner-city ghettos, like gigs, he explained: 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., which fridge looked incongruous. By October, Compton, were formed by government paid five hundred dollars a month, and the property was staged for showing, policy. During the Great Depression, 24/7, which paid eight hundred dollars. with wishbone chairs, reclaimed-wood the government tried to enlarge the All you needed was an I.D. Evans called tables, and woven wall hangings. In middle class by encouraging homeown- Diane Montano at around 12 a.m., and 2225, it had sold for four hundred and ership through the creation of the thirty- at 2 p.m. a van picked him up and took twenty thousand dollars; now it was year mortgage. But restrictive covenants him to a house in Riverside. listed for nine hundred and thirty thou- prohibited Black people from buying The rules were simple: don’t leave, sand. A few weeks later, a termite tent houses in certain neighborhoods, and don’t host guests, and don’t talk to any- went up to address bugs found during further limitations were imposed by one—not contractors, property manag- a home inspection, the final step in many redlining, which barred prospective buy- ers, real-estate agents, or prospective buy- L.A. real-estate transactions. ers in areas with large numbers of peo- ers. If you were working a 24/7, only short Montano told Evans to leave for a ple of color from receiving federally trips to the market or the laundromat couple of days, to escape the fumes. insured loans. were allowed. The premises had to be Usually, he slept in his car (as does During the Second World War, kept clean at all times, or about a third of Los An- L.A.’s Black population almost dou- pay would be docked. The geles’s homeless popula- bled, as newcomers were drawn by driver supplied Evans with tion), but a strong El Niño factory jobs. Residents of Compton, a mini-fridge, a small mi- had brought heavy rain to which was then nearly all white, pro- crowave, an inflatable mat- California. He accepted tested new housing for the workers. A tress, and plastic floor cov- Montano’s offer to “bunk large public-housing complex that had erings to protect the carpet. up” with another house sit- been planned for the neighborhood was The driver came by to ter, in Compton, in South moved to Watts, a racially mixed neigh- check on Evans occasion- L.A., where the city’s rents borhood nearby. “By 1958, it was 95% ally, always unannounced, are rising the fastest and black,” Rothstein wrote in an op-ed in photographing each room where Black residents are the Los Angeles Times. “Public hous- and sending the pictures to most likely to be homeless. ing policy was largely responsible for Montano, so that she could monitor It’s also where many of the house sit- this segregation.” It wasn’t long before Evans’s cleanliness and track the prog- ters are assigned work. white people fled Compton, where ress of the renovations. By the time Mansa Moosa-El opened the door Moosa’s parents bought a house in the Evans was living at No. 265, he had and was surprised to find that his bunkie early seventies. By then, L.A. had the learned the rhythms of the gig. He knew was Augustus Evans. “He has tremen- fastest-growing Black population out- that the driver wouldn’t come by at night dous respect on the street,” Moosa, who side the Southeast, three-quarters of it or on Sundays. When he could, he’d was born Adrian Rhone, told me. He concentrated in South L.A. Moosa’s fa- steal out to Moreno Valley, an hour and knew that Evans had walked with Louis ther worked for the city, in the records twenty minutes away, to visit his sons. Farrakhan in the early eighties, and he library, and as much as a fifth of the He kept loose change in a coffee cup had seen him at community events. “I’m Black population had solid manufac- in his car, and he’d give his youngest the fantastic immortal classic,” Moosa, turing jobs. But, by the eighties, those son all the coins he’d collected since his who is forty-nine and was born in jobs had disappeared or gone overseas.

32 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 Moosa, like many Black Gen X-ers, fared worse than his parents. The foreclosure crisis was ruinous to L.A.’s Black communities, in part because residents, after decades of being denied mortgages, had been dispropor- tionately targeted for predatory loans and reverse mortgages. When the bub- ble burst, Black people were seventy- one per cent more likely than white people to lose their homes. Last year, Black homeownership reached its low- est rate since 1967, when housing dis- crimination was outlawed by the pas- sage of the Fair Housing Act. Even as renters, Black people are in a uniquely precarious situation. Jacque- line Waggoner, a president of Enter- prise Community Partners, an affordable- housing nonprofit, and the chair of the Ad Hoc Committee on Black People Experiencing Homelessness, told me, “When people are severely rent bur- dened, they don’t really have anyone to call. Their siblings or family members— many of them are one paycheck away “You may be king of the jungle, Tim, but don’t from being homeless themselves.” A forget—here you’re just another actuary.” 2016 report found that white house- holds in L.A. have a median net worth of three hundred and fifty-five thou- •• sand dollars; the figure for Black house- holds is four thousand dollars. ical young activist, Moosa had served number. Moosa took a selfie and tex- The pandemic is making a terrible time for commercial burglary, posses- ted it to her along with a picture of housing crisis even worse. For the first sion of an explosive device, and assault his state I.D. Soon afterward, a driver time in more than a decade, rents have and battery. His driver’s license had also picked up Moosa and took him to an stopped rising, but income has fallen been suspended. “Can’t be no Black Pan- apartment complex in Buena Park, an precipitously. It is estimated that, among ther and follow all the rules,” he joked. affluent area in Orange County. “I was, renters in L.A. County—a group that For a year, Moosa slept wherever like, Yeah, all right, this is it!” he said. is disproportionately Black and Latino— he could: on couches, on someone’s But as an outsider in white suburbia, at least three hundred and sixty-five laundry-room floor, and in cars and without a car or money, he went hungry. thousand households currently don’t mobile homes that friends were trying After several days, he texted his brother, have an adult with enough income to to sell. He stayed until he wore out his who drove him to a Wendy’s. Moosa pay the rent. welcome. “You can tell you have to took a sip of cold soda and his system Although only eight per cent of Los walk,” he said. “Rather than make it all was so shocked that his entire body Angeles residents are Black, Black peo- melodramatic, you better do that.” On began to shake. ple make up forty-two per cent of the April 1, 2017, he had a heart attack; a “It’d be a lot of unpredictability and homeless population. “I come from a year and a half later, he had a stroke. instability to it,” Moosa said of house- pretty good family,” Moosa told me. “I (The average life expectancy of home- sitting. “There’s been times I feel like grew up with a two-parent household, less people is estimated to be almost a turkey on Thanksgiving Eve.” If a and I still couldn’t make it work.” thirty years shorter than that of the property was listed for sale, he might Like Evans, Moosa found himself general population.) When a doctor find out at six in the morning, when a homeless after his marriage fell apart, learned that he didn’t have a home, he real-estate agent, wanting to beat traffic, in 2017. In 2017, half of all unhoused was referred to a shelter. arrived without warning. “I’ll be pump- people in L.A. County were homeless Many of the people checking into ing a log, and they’ll come in before it for the first time in their lives. A com- the shelter were unbathed or mentally hits the water,” Moosa said. “I’ll exit the pounding factor for both Evans and ill; the shelter felt like “county jail on bathroom and the Realtor is standing Moosa was a criminal record, which the streets,” Moosa said. His younger there, three feet away. ‘Oh, um, can we made it harder to get a job and to pass brother, who had been house-sitting look in here?’” credit and background checks. As a rad- for a couple of years, shared Montano’s The house sitters aren’t told who

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 33 owns the homes they’re protecting, but Wedgewood’s role in the housing that mix with the gray granite tops,” it’s apparent when the “For Sale” signs crisis hasn’t gone unnoticed. The week he said. go up: Wedgewood and its subsidiary, before Thanksgiving, 2019, a group of There was one house-sitting assign- Maxim Properties, which are based in Black mothers calling themselves Moms ment that rested uneasily in Lindsey’s Redondo Beach. In recent filings, the 4 Housing occupied a Wedgewood mind. A house in Compton that had company has reported buying and sell- property in West Oakland that they been lived in by the same family for ing several thousand homes in L.A. said had been vacant for years. They three generations was foreclosed on after County each year, and many more up washed the walls, installed a water the mother died. When Lindsey showed and down the West Coast and in Flor- heater, and set up their children’s bunk up, the family was still there. Rather ida. The company uses more than a beds. Then they began paying the water than informing Weekend Warriors and dozen different L.L.C. names, many of and electric bills. Two months later, Al- calling the sheriff for a lockout, he de- which sound like ski resorts, such as ameda County sheriff ’s deputies arrived cided to give them another week. He Catamount Properties and Brecken- in riot gear and removed them. told his boss that the property was se- ridge. A significant number of its Los Shelter-in-place orders to minimize cure and that he could clear out the fur- Angeles properties—and seemingly all the spread of Covid-19 have brought niture himself. The family cried in re- of those assigned a house sitter—are in new attention to vacant houses owned lief when he told them. But, after the communities of color. by investors. The Alliance for Califor- week was over, the construction work- “Many of the neighborhoods that nians for Community Empowerment, ers arrived, and they had to leave. were redlined are seeing investment which supported Moms 4 Housing, I asked Moosa, as he stood smoking pour back in for the first time since staged an occupation of vacant homes in the back yard, if it felt weird to work they were redlined in the nineteen-thir- owned by Caltrans in L.A., and through- for a company that’s implicated in the ties,” Braden Crooks, a co-founder of out the summer the group organized gentrification of his neighborhood. Designing the We, a design and social- rent strikes and protests against eviction. “Hold on,” he said. “Man, wow. Does impact studio that has staged exhibits Mychael Lindsey, another house sit- that shit feel weird?” He looked up at on redlining throughout the country, ter, didn’t like how Wedgewood ac- the sky, considering, and then snapped told me. “But, because of this historic quired properties from people who had his head down. “No!” he yelled. “It feel wealth destruction, because people lost lost them in distress, but he told me like racist white folks still controlling ownership and are mostly renters . . . that he’d made his peace with it, and my existence all the time, which is still you don’t see the speculative investment at least he loved how Wedgewood the same reason why I don’t even vote!” that’s pouring back into urban and red- renovated them. “All of our signature But Evans saw house-sitting as a lined neighborhoods lifting everyone’s houses have the pretty cream carpet, blessing. “Unfortunately, I am one of boats. You see it washing them away.” the gray wood floors that are really nice, those who need shelter of any kind, and I’ve got shelter with pay through the cold, raining months, thanks to Diane,” he said. The checks were often late, but they always came eventually, and he could concentrate on his reading and writing. “I get twenty-four-hour peace,” he said. His years in prison had accus- tomed him to solitude—he could sit there for ten, twelve hours a day. He tried to stay out of people’s way.

n November, 265 Robinson Road Iwent into contract, and on a rainy Thursday in early December the new owner, a Black man in his forties, knocked on the door. He toured the house and told Evans that he would be moving in the next day. “All of this?” Evans said, pointing to his colorful Af- rican sheets and inflatable mattress. “It won’t be here tomorrow! It’ll be like I was never here.” Montano had a new assignment for Evans: replacing a house sitter whom she didn’t trust at a condo that was under contract for three hundred and “ ‘A’ is for ‘anxiety,’ ‘B’ is for ‘boredom,’ ‘C’ is for ‘coping mechanisms’ .. .” thirty thousand dollars in Panorama City, a predominantly Latino suburb. the woman that she had to leave. She to have my children dreaming night- Intruders had left a large black stain walked to the complex’s trash area and mares over their father’s story,” he told on the carpet in the master bedroom. began digging. me. “My life, you know, is not an attrac- Montano told Evans to protect the tive life. There’s no glory in it. I’ve never property while the carpet was replaced. oosa was fired from house-sit- been in the military. I’ve never been out When he arrived at the beige stucco Mting in January, after a neighbor of the country. The only thing that’s im- complex, a young man and woman were accused him of making racist comments. pressive is that in a few days—shoot, rolling a blunt on the front steps. Evans He told me that he had merely intro- next week—I’ll be sixty-eight years old.” toured the premises: a living room with duced himself to the neighbors, as in- He longed for a home of his own, a fireplace, a dining area with a low- structed by Weekend Warriors. As the where he could watch movies with his hanging light fixture. Upstairs were two coronavirus began to rav- sons and be surrounded by bedrooms, with cream-colored carpet age communities of color, the possessions that he was throughout. Evans put protective plas- his ex-wife agreed to let currently paying eighty dol- tic on the floor of the smaller room, him move in temporarily lars a month to keep in stor- which had a view in two directions, and with her and their children. age. His Social Security inflated his mattress. An early fatality was Ev- check was eight hundred At one-thirty in the morning, Evans ans’s ex-wife’s brother, whom and thirty-eight dollars a heard the front door opening. He rose Evans had lived with in month; he couldn’t afford and walked to the top of the stairs and Moreno Valley. He caught much. But, as a senior cit- saw a man and a woman in their thir- the coronavirus in a conva- izen, he thought he might ties. “Are you squatting in here?” the lescent home, where he was qualify for affordable hous- man asked, agitated. “I’m security,” recovering from a toe am- ing. He called three non- Evans told them. putation necessitated by his diabetes. profits specializing in housing for the “Well, can a woman use the bath- Evans called Montano and requested his elderly. All of them said that they had room?” the man asked. “No, come on, house-sitting check so that he could con- a waiting list of between five and ten let’s go,” the woman said. tribute to the costs of the funeral—which years. The news gave him insomnia. In The next morning, workers came to the family still hasn’t been able to have. the middle of the night, he wrote: replace the bedroom carpet, and Mon- But the virus brought a measure of sta- Millionaires and billionaires and trillionaires, tano texted Evans to tell him that he bility to Evans’s life. He’s been in the You will not be moving from this earth to needed to be out by 11 a.m. He could same home since January, when he was any other planet. bunk back in Compton. assigned to a duplex in Santa Ana. Con- You will not be importing water to start For the first time in what seemed struction stopped in March, after a truck civilization on the moon. My name is Augustus and I am here to an- like years, it was Friday and Evans was deposited new appliances, which sat in nounce your doom. off the clock. That night, he decided to their boxes unopened all summer. Evans I want you to look me in my eye and read go to one of the clubs he used to visit didn’t mind the lockdown. “I’ve been my lips in his youth, order a Shirley Temple, quarantining for seven years!” he said. before you trip trying to run from the angry and see some live music. But, before he He began writing a new essay about the populations and board space ships. could choose which club to go to, he sort of relationship he sought, the type One night, he asked me how to use got a text from Montano: the sale of of woman he’d want to be cooped up Craigslist. We pulled it up on his phone. the condo had fallen through—the roof with during a pandemic. It was inspired “What’s your dream neighborhood?” was leaking and water was streaming by a radio story on the recent rise in do- I asked. into one of the bathrooms—and she mestic violence. “Oh, wow,” he said, marvelling at the needed him back there immediately. Yet sometimes restlessness struck idea of choosing where he wanted to He got into his car and hoped it would him. He bought two maps, one of the live. “Culver City. Wait, no. Carson? make it back to Panorama City. U.S. and one of the world, and taped Carson got too much pollution there. A couple of weeks later, at 9 a.m., them on the wall opposite his bed. He Long Beach.” There was a pause. “Damn. Evans heard the front door open. A thought about getting a passport—“I What neighborhood would I want to woman in her forties entered, with a always thought it was thousands of dol- move into? bag full of recycling. She knew the lars, but it’s only a hundred,” he said— “Well, you know, I’ll just type this smart-lock code and assumed that and looked up prices for flights to Egypt in, just to see,” he finally said. “C-O- Evans was the boyfriend of the woman and Jamaica. M-P-T-O-N.” who’d given it to her. She’d come to His memoir project had stalled around He scrolled through bland bunga- take a shower. “A lot of times, when Christmas. He’d been trying to dictate lows on run-down blocks. “You know, Diane hires someone, they’re pretty the book into Otter, a voice-transcrip- they used to call that Chocolate City,” much homeless anyway, so they iden- tion app, but hadn’t had the heart to he said wistfully. tify with the homeless and as a result keep talking alone. I suggested that he “You can’t even get a single for six- they sympathize and break the rules,” invite his sons over to listen, but he shook teen hundred dollars,” he said, trying Evans told me. “I can identify with the his head. “So much of my history and to navigate the pictures. “I got to go sell homeless myself.” Nevertheless, he told my life I conceal, because I don’t need me some books.” 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 35 ot many people leave ultra- Orthodox Jewish communities. N Most who do try to keep it se- cret, because, if everyone knew, the mar- riage prospects of their siblings could be irreparably damaged. The shame of leaving is very great. It is said that any- one who leaves must be a ruined per- son—penniless, homeless, probably on drugs, maybe a prostitute, living like an animal, for carnal appetites alone, like the goyim, or else mentally ill. It’s true that leaving is traumatic. Many people do fall apart at first. There are suicides, and near-suicides. Some who lose their faith would give any- thing to have it back. Others who think about leaving can’t bring themselves to do it. Leaving means giving up every- thing you know, and a close, envelop- ing community where you are never alone, with little sense of what could replace it. Your spouse might divorce you, your parents reject you. You have to be desperate. A REPORTER AT LARGE Twenty years ago, those who left could feel that they were stepping into a void. They might know no one else who had done what they were doing. SOLOMON’S DILEMMA There was a network of blogs written by people who no longer believed but When one parent leaves a Hasidic community, continued to go through the motions; what happens to the kids? some called themselves Reverse Mar- BY LARISSA MACFARQUHAR ranos, for the Jews in medieval Spain who faked renouncing their religion in order to survive. But many Haredi com- munities—their preferred term for ultra- Orthodox, which means “those who tremble before God”—restricted access to the Internet. Then, in 2003, Malkie Schwartz, who had left the Lubavitch group in Crown Heights, founded Footsteps, an orga- nization for people who had left Haredi communities. She started it as a support group, but she found that people who had left were usually in need of help with practical things as well: improving their English, since Yiddish was often their first language; figuring out how to go back to school or find work with few secular qualifications; finding some- where to live. Over the years, Footsteps expanded into a fully fledged nonprofit. In 2010, Schwartz was succeeded by Lani Santo, who had a master’s degree in nonprofit management from N.Y.U. At that point, around five hundred peo- ple had gone to Footsteps for help; by Where Chavie Weisberger grew up, the secular world was thought to be sinful—but

36 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 she was curious about it. The possibility of leaving her community was so extreme that it took years to form in her mind.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAWIT N.M. THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 37 2020, around eighteen hundred had, the loss of a child to secular life was that the rules were important. When and still more had contacted other unbearable, because it meant that the nobody was looking, she would put groups that had sprung up. By then, child’s future, and that of all his de- on the lights on Shabbos, or turn on Footsteps had become notorious among scendants, would be ruined, not only the air-conditioning. She never really Haredim, suspected of preying on vul- in this world but also in the next. prayed; she just mumbled the words. nerable people who were struggling in She knew that she ought to be ashamed their faith. Some who sought its help havie Weisberger grew up in Mon- of this, and she was, but she wasn’t first heard of it when they were accused Csey, a hamlet in Rockland County, afraid of God; she was afraid of get- of being members. just north of New York City, with a ting caught. One of the most painful difficulties large Hasidic population. Her grand- Her community believed the secu- that leavers faced was the risk of los- father Rabbi Moshe Wolfson was the lar world was sinful, but she was curi- ing their children. In the early days, the venerated founder of the Emunas Yis- ous about it. She sneaked glances at few who left had not attracted a lot of roel Hasidic group to which she be- the TV in the doctor’s waiting room; attention, and some got custody of their longed. Emunas Yisroel, like all Ha- she stared at people in the mall. In high kids without much of a fight. But, as sidic groups, traced its lineage to an school, she discovered that she was at- more people defected, communities eighteenth-century charismatic move- tracted to girls, and she slept with a alarmed by the prospect of so many ment in Eastern Europe. Hasidism val- few of them, especially at summer camp. children lost to Haredism mobilized ued joy and emotional connection with She knew that what she was doing was to keep them. Secular courts were called the divine as much as Torah study. It wrong, because it was immodest to upon to determine the best interests of also concentrated power in its rebbes, show your body to another person, but children who were being torn between who acted as intermediaries between she didn’t think of it as gay sex—she two irreconcilable ways of life: what to believers and God. didn’t know that it was sex at all. She one parent was a basic human freedom Chavie was the fifth of ten children. certainly never connected the experi- might be, to the other, a violation of She saw herself as a good girl, a rule- ence with the fact that in a few years the laws of God. To many Haredim, follower, but she never really believed she would be married to a boy. A matchmaker paired her with Naf- tali Weisberger, a boy from her neigh- borhood, and they married in 2002, when she was nineteen. The wedding night was horrific. It felt to Chavie as though they were violating each other. It wasn’t that he was rough— he was meek and shy. But they had been told that they had to consum- mate the marriage that night, and if they were having trouble they should call the rabbi, so they did. For her, there was no way to come back from that night. She couldn’t imagine lov- ing the person who had put her through it. And although she had not previously connected her relationships with girls with marriage to a boy, now she thought, This isn’t love. I know what love is, because I have felt it. After a year, Chavie told her par- ents that she was unhappy in the mar- riage, and they sent her to a Hasidic therapist. The therapist told her that people became gay because they were abused in their childhood. When she told him that she hadn’t been abused, he hypnotized her to try to get her to remember, and taught her to self-hyp- notize when she was having sex with her husband. Six years into the marriage, Chavie and Naftali had three children, the youngest a few months old. That summer, Chavie, Naftali, and the kids went away to a camp in the Catskills. these children alone, how do I want to certainly her mother was very bitter Being back in that place, Chavie re- do it? And what do I actually want in about her religious upbringing. But, as membered vividly what it had been like my life? She consulted a Modern Or- Marie grew older, her mother’s stories to be there as a girl—how fun and in- thodox rabbi, hoping he would tell her piqued her interest. She was looking nocent summer camp had been—and that she could be both gay and reli- for a way of life that was more spiri- she felt more than ever that her hus- gious, but he said that if she was really tual and structured than the way she’d band was dragging her down. a lesbian she had to be celibate. And grown up, and, after moving every three A few months later, early one morn- so her choice slowly became clear to years from place to place and country ing, Naftali was changing the baby’s her: she could be celibate; she could to country, she wanted a community diaper when she fell off the bed and live a secret life and lie to everyone; or to belong to. By the time her parents broke her leg. Chavie bolted upright she could leave the com- settled in Killeen, Texas, in bed when the baby screamed and munity. This last possibil- near Fort Hood, when she said they had to take her to the hos- ity was so extreme that it was in high school, she had pital right away, but it was Saturday— took several years to form found herself wanting to Shabbos—and they were staying with in her mind. become Orthodox. her husband’s family for the weekend. Outwardly, she was still She couldn’t force her Her father-in-law asked a neighbor, a good girl. She worked at family to keep kosher, so she who was an emergency medical tech- a community magazine, ate vegetarian. She babysat nician in the religious ambulance corps, she was involved with the and mowed lawns in order to examine the baby, and the techni- PTA. But she must have to earn money to buy an cian concluded that the baby’s injuries had some kind of air about extra set of dishes, so they were not serious enough to warrant her, because people started wouldn’t be tainted by her driving on Shabbos. (A lawyer for Naf- confiding their own weird stuff. This family’s non-kosher food. She stopped tali Weisberger declined an interview one wished she could wear shorter wearing pants. Her mother was ap- requested on his behalf.) All through skirts; that one wanted to go to the palled; she said that Marie was spitting the day, as Chavie held the screaming movies. Some women were meeting on her family’s way of life. Eventually, baby, she grew angrier and angrier. As strangers they had found on Craigslist. this caused so much strain that Marie soon as Shabbos was over, the family One day, she heard her co-workers went to live with a religious friend she went to the hospital, but the doctor gossiping about a woman named Chani knew from her synagogue. After grad- was so disturbed by the broken femur, Getter. Chani was a little older, but uating from high school, she went to and by the fact that they had waited Chavie knew who she was—she had Baylor to study premed. nearly ten hours to bring the baby in, grown up on the next block. Someone While she was in college, Marie met that the hospital called child-protective said, Did you hear? Chani is a lesbian a rabbi from Monsey. He told her that services. That night, while Chavie slept now, and she’s running crazy wild re- in Monsey there were men who were in the hospital with the baby, she was treats for lesbians, and she takes her a little older than she but still unmarried watched by a child-protection worker, kids there. The co-workers were hor- because for some reason they weren’t for fear of abuse. rified, but Chavie went home, Goo- considered a catch. If she wanted to Not long after, Chavie decided she gled Chani Getter, and called her. marry a Haredi man, he said, she should was done. She knew that husbands look for a man like that, because with were often reluctant to give their wives arie was an Army brat—she grew her dubious religious background she a get—a religious divorce—so when Mup half in Germany, half in the wasn’t a catch, either. It took her a while Naftali agreed to give her one and they U.S. (“Marie” is a pseudonym.) Her fa- to get used to the idea of marrying a went to the beis din, the rabbinical court, ther was a Christian, an American sol- man she didn’t know, but she believed she readily signed whatever papers she dier; her mother came from a Haredi that she should trust God without ques- was given. She didn’t pay much atten- German family. Neither was religious, tioning, so she did. She met a twenty- tion to a clause requiring her to raise and they celebrated holidays in an ir- seven-year-old man in a religious chat the children Hasidic. In March, 2009, regular fashion—a bit of Hanukkah, a room, and left college to marry him in they were officially divorced. Later that bit of Christmas. When Marie was a the fall of 2001. month, Naftali married again. After child, her mother told her stories about When Marie first arrived in Monsey, he remarried, he told Chavie that he growing up Haredi, and the one that it felt wonderful to her to be in a place needed to focus on his new wife, and stuck in her head was about how if she where nobody thought she was strange he stopped seeing their children regu- used the wrong fork and made it un- for being religious. There were kosher larly. Sometimes he took them out for kosher she had to go outside and thrust stores everywhere, lots of people were pizza, but he didn’t have them over to it into the ground, and sometimes it modestly dressed. People in the commu- his new house. He didn’t pay child sup- was so cold and the ground so hard nity spoke Yiddish, but Marie under- port. Soon he and his wife began hav- that it was difficult. At the time, Marie stood them because she spoke German. ing babies of their own. thought this sounded crazy—some- Early on, a woman walking near her on It was at this point that Chavie al- thing that only bizarre, mean parents the street grabbed her shirt and yanked lowed herself to think, If I am raising would force their children to do—and her over to let a man pass by, so that he

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 39 wouldn’t have to walk behind or be- ing, but Issac was always getting into only to pacify his father. The match- tween them, and that startled her, but trouble. When a teacher hit him, he maker didn’t know him or the girl per- she told herself that she was new to this, called the Fire Department. When one sonally—presumably, she had picked a and there were bound to be customs she of the school principals made him angry, girl for her failings, to go with his. didn’t know about. he squirted ketchup and mustard all His father mentioned the girl one The marriage, though, was difficult over all the principals’ lunches. He was day when he got home from work, and from the start. She wanted to go back bullied by the other kids. When he Issac drove up to Monsey to meet her. to college—she still hoped to become prayed, he tried to feel a connection to He was done trying to make himself a doctor—but she was scolded for try- God, but it never worked. Mostly, pray- look good—he thought, Let’s just get ing to overthrow her husband. (Ma- ing meant nothing to him. His father through this and go home. But he liked rie’s husband, too, declined to be inter- was always telling him stories about her. She was devout, but not stiff or viewed.) She saw that as a bride she people burning in Hell, and those would judgmental. She was very attractive. She had not received the same kinds of gifts frighten him for a while, but then it had had a difficult childhood and wasn’t as other daughters-in-law; her husband wore off. He didn’t doubt the existence living with her family. They talked for told her that she should be grateful that of God, exactly; he didn’t have a strong about an hour, and, fifteen minutes after his family took her in after the way she belief one way or the other. Issac left, the matchmaker called both had been raised, like an animal in a zoo. He was sent to sleepaway camp for of them and told each that the other When she and her husband had their the first time when he was nine or ten. wanted to meet again, although in fact first child, a daughter, she became ab- On visiting day his father came to see neither had said anything about it. They sorbed in being a mother and felt hap- him, and while the other parents played met the following afternoon, and then pier. A couple of years later, they had a games, or took their kids out boating, a third time. At this point, Issac had son. But the marriage grew worse. Her Issac’s father took him into the empty begun to think that something might husband controlled the household money, shul and said, Let’s review what you have actually come of it, so they talked seri- and told her that in order for him to studied these past two weeks. The sum- ously for four or five hours. He asked give her some, even to buy basic items mer that Issac was fifteen, he had a rough the girl, Faigy (a pseudonym), if she had such as sanitary napkins, she had to de- week at camp and decided to kill him- any questions for him, and she fetched serve it. He called her names, and when self. Luckily, he didn’t know how to do a list she’d drawn up. Faigy told him their daughter was around six or seven it—he took forty Benadryl pills and went about her childhood, and he asked her he started calling her names, too—ugly, to bed. The camp nurse gave him water if she was in therapy. She admitted that fat, stupid. Finally, in 2012, they went to the next day to flush his system, but apart she was. Issac told her, “If you weren’t, the beis din to get a divorce. She got cus- from that no one did much; mental ill- there is no way I would consider this.” tody of the children; he was to see them ness tended to be hushed up, because it She said, “I want to marry you.” for dinner a couple of times a week and could affect the marriage prospects of The first year of their marriage was every other Shabbos. everyone in the family. Issac didn’t see a easy. His wife was the opposite of his After her husband moved out, Marie therapist until about six months later, parents, he thought—she never told began seeking out family and old friends. and that was to deal with attention deficit him what to do. He felt that life with Before she had kids, she had been es- disorder. He was advised to tell nobody his parents had been a constant strug- tranged from her parents, but now they about the therapy, not even his brothers gle, and now the struggle was over. travelled from Texas to visit her. Her and sisters. Nine and a half months after their family knew that she hadn’t had a min- When Issac turned eighteen, in 2006, wedding, he and Faigy had a daugh- ute to herself during the more than it came time for him to marry, and ter. But being happily married to a re- ten years that she was married, so they matchmakers started getting in touch. ligious woman didn’t change Issac’s gathered together some money and Normally, a person had only one shid- feelings about religion, and, left to his told her to take a vacation. One of the duch—one match. Eight of Issac’s nine own devices, his observance started to friends Marie reconnected with was siblings married the first person they slip. He still did the basics, showing an Indian-Jewish woman whom she’d met, but Issac met five girls, and five his face in shul when he had to, but he met in college and who had moved times he was rejected. Part of the prob- wasn’t praying every day. back home afterward, and this friend lem might have been that he wasn’t a Everything changed when his daugh- invited her to visit. Marie arranged for yeshiva boy anymore—he worked in an ter, the summer before preschool, was the kids to stay with a family in Mon- office-supply store—and having a job rejected by the Bobov yeshiva because, sey for two weeks and bought a ticket was less prestigious. One matchmaker he and Faigy were told, Faigy, who had to India. told him that she’d fibbed on his be- been brought up in a community with half, saying that he learned with a study slightly different rules, drove a car. He ssac was born in Borough Park, partner every night, but it made no and Faigy had been pleading with the IBrooklyn, the ninth of ten children, difference. He was told that one girl re- school for months, and finally they asked in what would become the Bobov-45 jected him because he talked too much. for a meeting with the grand rabbi in group. (Issac is not the name he usu- By the time a matchmaker suggested a Borough Park. The rabbi didn’t under- ally goes by.) His father was exception- sixth girl, he no longer gave a shit. He stand why Faigy insisted on driving. ally devout and rigid about rule-keep- agreed to go through with the meeting Couldn’t she give it up for the sake of

40 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 COMIC STRIP BY ROZ CHAST her children? Issac said that maybe the Bobov school was the best school, maybe it wasn’t, but he wasn’t willing to chain WINTER SONG FOR ONE WHO SUFFERS up his wife to find out. Afterward, as he and Faigy walked away, down Fif- The stars stand up tieth Street, he didn’t feel angry; he felt behind the day. A known dove balances peaceful. He said to Faigy, “It’s over— on its claw the book is closed on Bobov.” at the window. A cosmic incident The next day, he realized that he of darkness has begun was done with more than the school. He said to Faigy, “If I don’t have to fol- & a mild excess of beauty low the rules for the yeshiva, then why will be offered to the dead, do I need to follow them at all?” He which they will eat. On a hill told her, “I think I can keep Shabbos, I think I can keep kosher, but beyond the wise man serves the people, that I’m not sure.” This was intensely your thought splits painful for Faigy, who was deeply pious. in half when he speaks of the old Issac had been untethered from reli- revolts, the return gion inside his head for a long time, of apocalypse, motive & advancement. but to her it felt as though everything she knew about her family had sud- A soul can crouch denly exploded into pieces. a long time while the heart Up to this point, whatever Issac had expands to reach its edges. done or not done at home was between What is missing past the glitter him and Faigy. Outside the house, he of the harvest? still looked and behaved more or less Friend, you chose like a religious man. But now he felt to live. How? You did. So many an urge to go to the barber and have choices, not just two, encrypted his beard shaved and his payos—side- behind the mystery of the sun, locks—cut off. At that point, his apos- tasy would become irretrievably pub- then the hurt was set aside, lic. He wanted to do it right away, but indeterminate chaos he decided to think about it, to make called in by love. sure that he would have no regrets. So he set a calendar reminder in his phone —Brenda Hillman for four weeks from that day, to give himself a chance to change his mind. be a good parent. At another retreat, since she was abandoning the values of havie had been afraid to talk to one of her new friends said to her, “I the community, she should come up Csuch a wild-sounding person as dare you to take your wig off.” Chavie with alternatives, so she started a “val- Chani Getter, but on the phone Chani was shocked—this felt even more ex- ues wall” in her house, and when she was very friendly. She invited Chavie posing than being naked, especially read a book with the kids they would to attend a retreat for L.G.B.T.Q. Or- since, unbeknownst to anyone, she had extract a value from it and paste it up: thodox Jews. At the retreat, Chavie was let her hair grow out into a Mohawk kindness, inclusivity, social justice. She asked to speak about herself, and she and dyed it in rainbow stripes—but she believed that a family should have rit- saw that people were moved by what did it. After that, things started mov- uals, so for every ritual she abandoned she said, and she thought, This is real, ing very fast. A month later, she went she invented a new one to take its place. this is actually who I am. At the retreat, to the friend’s house for the weekend She was worried that when the com- she met many queer parents who were and rode in a car on Shabbos and ate munity saw what she was up to it would there openly with their children, not bacon, and it didn’t feel frightening or try to turn her children against her— hiding or lying to them. She thought sacrilegious—it felt normal and right. she had seen that happen. But the key about how she had been behaving with And she realized, I guess I never be- was she had time. Outwardly, they were her own children, putting them to bed lieved in any of this. still a good Hasidic family, so no one and then locking herself in her bed- She began introducing her children was paying attention. room and watching a movie. Her chil- to her new friends—a lesbian couple, For three years after the divorce, dren were four, six, and eight, so it wasn’t a trans woman. She felt that she and Chavie didn’t tell her children that she too hard to keep them in the dark, but her kids were pushing open the door was queer. But then, in 2012, she thought she thought that as they grew older it of their ghetto together, and it was both that her older daughter suspected it, would be impossible to keep lying and scary and thrilling. She thought that, and Chavie told her that she was. That

42 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 fall, a transgender friend of hers had a Chavie would have relationships with practice a religion. The solution was to fire in their apartment, and she invited women after the divorce, but he had split the difference: Chavie was to make them to stay with her, at her home in expected her to keep them secret from sure that the children dressed and acted Borough Park. They brought their cats; the children. Chavie said that a parent like Hasidic kids when visiting their fa- pets were not exactly prohibited in the who hid her authentic self from her ther or attending school, but she could community, but they were a tell. Chavie kids, and raised them according to val- dress or act as she liked. grew bolder. She allowed the kids to ues that she didn’t believe in, was not a Chavie had been lucky, but she had eat non-kosher food a few times. She parent but a nanny, and to deprive chil- also had help. Around the time of her let the girls wear pants inside the house. dren of a parent was a terrible thing. appeal, in 2017, Footsteps hired Julie F. She let the kids watch a movie called The judge summoned several ex- Kay, a human-rights lawyer, who began “How the Toys Saved Christmas.” She perts to give testimony on the family. recruiting attorneys from top Manhat- told them that certain Hasidic beliefs A therapist testified that, ever since tan firms to represent Footsteps mem- were sexist and homophobic, and that Chavie had begun openly flouting Ha- bers in custody cases pro bono. For she was an atheist. Finally, she thought, sidic rules, her older daughter said that a long time, Footsteps members had I am done trying to please people. One she could not have normal friendships been at a disadvantage in court because day, she impulsively went outside in her with her classmates in school, and that they couldn’t afford to pay lawyers. neighborhood wearing secular clothes, she and her siblings were afraid of being Many Hasidic parents were also poor, with her hair—now short and blond— seen in the streets with their mother but they could turn to the community uncovered for everyone to see. She wearing secular clothing. A psycholo- for help, raising money in crowdfund- walked past a group of mothers wait- gist testified that her son’s behavior ing campaigns: ing at a bus stop. At first, they didn’t in yeshiva had grown disruptive and recognize her, and then they did, and defiant. Both said that Chavie’s criti- To all Jews and Community Leaders: Since my friend, a father of 7 children is grew very quiet, but she kept walking. cisms of Hasidism had left the chil- unfortunately fell into a bitter situation after She decided to come out publicly as dren deeply confused. A forensic psy- his wife was unfortunately caught in the bit- a lesbian, and was promptly fired from chologist testified that although Chavie ter net of FS (Footsteps). . . . I don’t under- her job at the magazine. The commu- was a loving mother who had a strong stand how can it be that there is a group that nity was horrified that Rabbi Wolfson’s bond with her children, by disparaging cuts from us pieces and pay monies and more monies to catch souls from the Jewish people granddaughter had turned out to be the Hasidic way of life in front of them and how can it be that the world isn’t shaking such a shocking person. People wrote she had put her own needs ahead of from all of this? . . . her letters telling her that she was dis- theirs; she should have shielded them I think to myself what kind of face will the turbing the soul of her father, who had from anything that could turn them Jewish nation have if right by the breakthrough recently died. But she never imagined against their father and his community. in this case they will God Forbi[d] they will take over the kids with two hands—This can that she would run into custody prob- The judge, appalled by what he felt was never be allowed to happen—How shameful lems. Her ex was busy with his new Chavie’s “remorseless” violation of her will that be? children. She figured that, even if he agreement to raise the kids religious, did take her to a secular family court, made his temporary ruling permanent. Chavie’s case had established that the judge would side with her, because Chavie appealed, and, two years courts could not compel a parent to she was progressive and wanted her later, the ruling was over- follow religious strictures; kids to get a good education. turned, on the ground that Kay hoped next to con- It turned out that she was wrong a religious-upbringing vince the courts that com- about this. In November, 2012, she re- agreement could be en- pelling a parent to moni- ceived an emergency order to show up forced only so long as it was tor her children’s obser- in Kings County Supreme Court. The in the best interests of the vance was not significantly judge told her that she was confusing children. The appeals court different from compelling and harming her children by making was more impressed by her to be observant her- such drastic changes in their upbring- Chavie’s care of the kids, self. There was, of course, ing, and ordered them removed from and by Naftali’s spotty vis- a long history of decisions her and sent to stay with their father itation and child-support in religious custody cases. that very day. record, than by Chavie’s For instance, a judge on rogue behavior. The appeals judges the Pennsylvania Supreme Court had few days later, the judge issued a accepted Chavie’s argument that it was written, in 1990, in Zummo v. Zummo: Atemporary order decreeing that not in the children’s interests for her to “The government is inherently and Chavie’s children could live with her conceal her beliefs from them. They constitutionally incompetent to de- for three nights a week, on the condition pointed out that the plain language of termine whether stability or insta- that while they were with her, and when- the agreement required a Hasidic up- bility in religious beliefs would be ever she was in Borough Park, she bringing for the children, but did not in the best interests of a child.” But dressed and acted like a proper Hasidic specify any requirements as to the be- state courts were under no obligation woman. In a subsequent hearing, Naf- havior of the parents; nor was it accept- to defer to precedents set by other tali told the judge he had assumed that able for a court to compel an adult to jurisdictions, so each principle that

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 43 Kay hoped to establish had to be lit- religion, she had had time to bring point of view, no more was necessary igated in New York. One of the prob- her children with her. Others were not to live a pious life. lems with Rockland County courts so lucky. In Haredi divorce cases, judges al- handling custody cases, Kay believed, most always ordered that the children was that their judges were elected, hile Marie was in India, she should stay in the same school, partly and no group in Rockland County Wspent time with a cousin of her to insure that one feature of the child’s voted with such discipline and una- friend’s, who had a Jewish mother but life remained stable, but also because nimity as the Haredim. a Muslim father. She had met this it was extremely difficult for children In the years after Chavie’s appeal, cousin before, when he visited her col- to be part of a Haredi community if and with the assistance of the pro- lege, in Texas, but he was several years they went to a public school, or even bono lawyers, Footsteps members be- younger than her and she hadn’t taken the yeshiva of another group. Yeshivas came more assertive: they regularly much notice of him. Now they bonded required adherence to a code of con- claimed that it was unconstitutional over family troubles, and over the diffi- duct that dictated nearly every aspect to force them to adhere to religious culty of being Jewish while having a of not only the children’s lives but those practices they didn’t believe in. These non-Jewish father. After she returned of the parents as well. Children at- tactics could backfire, however; judges home, they stayed in touch. Back in tended yeshiva six days a week; older in custody cases were apt to become Monsey, Marie felt hemmed in by scru- teen-age boys might be at their yeshiva irritated by lofty arguments about par- tiny and gossip. She believed that her from eight in the morning until eight ents’ rights, and didn’t like to get in- ex-husband was trying to find dirt on at night, eating all three meals there, volved in disputes about religion. For her, in order to get the kids back, and going home only to sleep. In many ways, this reason, lawyers for the religious that people were watching her on his the yeshiva was a child’s third parent, parents tended to frame their argu- behalf, looking to see if she had stopped with more authority than the other two. ments as commonsense pleas for sta- being observant, or if she was enter- Meanwhile, as Marie’s educational bility. Courts placed enormous value taining men in her house, getting drunk, petitions were pending in the court, a on stability—as much value, some- shooting up drugs. He told people in year after her first trip she went to times, as on the preservation of a re- the community that she didn’t keep India again. She spent more time with lationship with both parents. Going kosher, that she didn’t keep Shabbos. the cousin, and they became engaged, back and forth between households People rammed their shopping carts and, a year later, they married, although, with irreconcilable customs and be- into hers at Rockland Kosher. for visa reasons, her husband did not liefs caused the children to feel be- She found work as a home health move to America for many months. wildered and lost, the lawyer for the aide for elderly people, and tried to Her children were upset that she had religious parent would say. The secu- focus on being a mother. She had cus- married a man they had never met, lar parent had become so caught up tody of the kids, but the one impor- and Marie’s ex-husband began telling in the journey of her evolving desires tant thing that she had no control over people that Marie had married a Mus- that she jeopardized her children’s was their education, and what she saw lim and was no longer Jewish. mental health. The Footsteps lawyer in the yeshivas alarmed her. In the long Once this got around, the elderly might argue that children school day, little time was people whom Marie had been taking were resilient, that they devoted to secular subjects care of didn’t want her in their homes could cope with change. such as English and math. any longer, and she lost her income. At But the lawyer for the Many Hasidic children the same time, in the late spring of religious parent would spoke Yiddish at home, 2016 her landlord gave her thirty days’ point out that, if the chil- and might leave school notice to move out of her apartment. dren lived in a household without being fluent in Her government housing subsidy al- that did not conform to English. Marie wanted her lowed her thirty days to find a three- the norms of their group, kids to be able to go to col- bedroom apartment in Monsey for they might be shunned at lege, so she hired Elana Si- fifteen hundred dollars including util- school by their classmates, gall, an educational con- ities, which was nearly impossible. She and possibly expelled, sultant. Sigall had found called friends of her ex-husband’s and which would remove one of the few that most judges had almost no un- begged them to help her find some- constants from their already rocky derstanding of what went on in a ye- where to stay, but nobody did. lives. And this was true. shiva. They seemed to have a vague This was, as she thought of it, her Another factor was the feelings of sense that Jews valued education and in-case-of-danger-break-the-glass mo- the children themselves. Once chil- therefore Jewish schools must be rig- ment. She had nowhere to live and no dren were old enough to express their orous; but several yeshivas had told money to pay for it; the only place she views, judges were inclined to listen Sigall that by the conclusion of their had friends or family was Texas. She to them. Chavie’s case was unusual: education their boys were typically had full custody of her daughter, but because her ex-husband had been pre- reading English at a third- or fourth- she was not allowed to take her son out occupied with his second family during grade level. This was not regarded as of the state for more than a brief trip. the years she was moving away from a failure by the yeshivas: from their She considered going to a shelter, but

44 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 she figured that a court would hold that against her, too—it was lose either way. So she called her parents. Her plan, she told the kids’ yeshivas, was to make some money in Texas over the sum- mer, then come back in time for the next school year. She had to be out of her apartment by Sunday. On Friday afternoon, there was a knock on the door, and she was served with a restraining order forbid- ding her to take her children out of New York. Her parents were already on the road, driving from Texas in a U-Haul; she had intended for them all to leave Monsey the following evening, right after Shabbos. In a panic, she called her lawyer, who told her that there was no room in the shelter, but that she should on no account leave “By the time we find a spot, there’ll be nothing left to pillage.” the state with her kids. But she thought, Where else can I go? The next night, she piled the kids into the truck with •• her parents and left. The day after they got to Texas, the tle in the courts, he now has his kids tations anymore. Marie told the ther- police arrived early in the morning. back. But that may change soon if he apist this wasn’t true, that her son had Marie’s ex-husband was with them. doesn’t come up with two hundred and told her how much he liked coming The police got the children out of bed fifty thousand dollars for his lawyers.” to see her. The therapist said, “Talk to and took them away. Marie went to Then Marie’s ex-husband appeared him, he’ll tell you.” Then Marie did stay with her brother, in Pennsylva- and pleaded, in Yiddish, “Dear broth- something that, she realized later, de- nia, and commuted to court dates in ers, it is not easy to turn to you, but stroyed the fragile balance her son had New York. The judge was outraged what doesn’t a father do for his chil- tried to maintain: she confronted him. that Marie had ignored the order not dren. I’m begging you, help me.” As her son sat sadly, not looking at to leave the state, and agreed with her All the time she wasn’t seeing her her, she let her grief get the better of ex-husband that the sudden eviction kids, Marie kept texting her daughter, her and said to him, “What would I had been traumatic for the kids. The asking her what was going on, and her be without my children? A mother, court awarded her ex-husband tem- daughter told her that her father’s fam- her days, her nights, her life—every- porary sole custody of both children. ily was asking, Why is your mother tex- thing is her children. How can I live In court, Marie was pressed to prove ting so often, is she stalking you, is she without you?” Later, her son’s thera- that she hadn’t married a Muslim. Her crazy? Soon the daughter began echo- pist testified that, because the boy loved ex-husband’s lawyer displayed photo- ing the same words: Are you stalking his life in the community, awarding graphs of her at her wedding wearing me? Let me breathe, leave me alone. custody to his mother would be, for traditional Indian clothes, with wed- Marie found out in court that her him, “a death sentence.” ding henna on her skin. The judge, ex-husband’s mother had told her After both of her children stopped saying that she needed to assess Ma- daughter that if she talked to Marie seeing her, Marie lost any lingering at- rie’s credibility, told her that she should she would be stabbing her father’s fam- tachment to Hasidism. She stopped produce a valid ketubah to prove that ily in the back. The last time Marie observing holidays except when her her wedding was Orthodox. Although talked to her daughter on the phone, husband wanted to—he was more ob- the judge had ordered both parents her daughter said that she was a bitch servant than she was now—although not to disparage each other in public, who had married a goy. they always made an effort to have a an associate of her ex-husband’s posted For a while, Marie’s son tried to nice Shabbos dinner. But she kept a a video online, soliciting money to pay please both of his parents. He told kosher home, to make sure that, if her legal fees. “He woke up and found Marie, I say whatever I have to say to children ever came to visit her, she himself alone,” a male voice narrated, Tati to make him happy. But then a would be able to feed them. After a in English, over dramatic music. “No rabbi at her son’s yeshiva told the boy’s while, she realized that she no longer wife; no kids. Thousands of miles away, therapist that if he continued to visit believed in God. his wife converted to Islam and mar- his mother he could be expelled from By the fall of 2020, she hadn’t seen ried a Muslim man. He almost lost his school. The therapist told Marie that either of her children in more than children forever. After a lengthy bat- her son didn’t want to come for visi- two years. In theory, she still had the

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 45 right to visitations, but the judge had a child; he doesn’t care for me as I am. and just lied to their families about it. decided not to force the children to He ran upstairs to his childhood But he didn’t want to lie. The key, he see her if they didn’t want to. Marie bedroom and broke down sobbing. realized, was his not having given a realized that her children had been Faigy ran up after him, and although shit when he and Faigy first met. Be- put in the position of choosing be- it was Shabbos, right in front of her he cause he had shown her who he really tween her and everybody else—their went to the air-conditioner and turned was, right from the beginning, he wasn’t father, their grandparents, their cous- it on. Then he took out his phone and afraid to tell her what he was think- ins, rabbis at the temple, neighbors, texted a private Facebook group he was ing, even when he knew that it might friends, teachers at school, even God. part of. Faigy was shocked by these upset her. As a result, they talked about She was their mother, but she was just violations of Shabbos, but she didn’t his wanting to break the rules before one person. It was either her or their say anything. She had never seen him he did. Years later, Issac would get whole world. cry like that. He stayed in his room for phone calls from other men who’d been the rest of the day, and when Shabbos pulling away from observance but had ssac’s crisis came to a head in the late was over they left the house. never talked about it with their wives, Isummer of 2012. He and Faigy had During the next couple of weeks, and by the time they called him there met with the grand rabbi in May; he they talked about his not wanting to was such a vast gulf between the per- had cut off his payos about six weeks keep Shabbos anymore, and Faigy grew son their wives thought they were and later. Then, one weekend in August, he increasingly distraught. Her therapist the person they’d become that Issac and Faigy were in Brooklyn to spend asked Issac to come to an emergency thought there was no chance of the Shabbos with his family. They walked session and told him, “You know what, marriages surviving, because they were to a friend’s house to celebrate the birth do it for your wife. You can manage built on lies. of his baby, and afterward they walked twenty-four hours without a phone.” For years, Issac and Faigy talked the mile or so back to Issac’s parents’ Issac thought, She’s right, and he didn’t about Issac’s problems with religion. house to join them for lunch. It was a want to break up his marriage, so the They had many painful conversations, sweltering day, and by the time Issac got next Shabbos he put his phone away. and they avoided other conversations there he was so hot that he took off his The following day, Faigy said, “Never because of how painful they would be. fur hat and coat. His father, calling him keep Shabbos for me.” She had seen When Issac stopped observing, it had by a childhood nickname that he had how miserable he was—not at being felt, to Faigy, like the end of the world. always hated, said, “In my house, you away from his phone but from the feel- She had been raised to fear a venge- wear that for the meal.” His father said ing that he had been free and was now ful God, and to see her husband break- it quietly, but for some reason this com- caged again. ing God’s laws was to her incompre- mand was the one that broke him. He Issac had friends who violated hensible and terrifying. But then she thought, My father liked me when I was Shabbos all the time, watching sports, went to a rabbi for advice, and the rabbi told her that she was wrong to think of God that way—that God was a loving God. The rabbi asked her, “What is there in you that you can- not accept your husband?” Gradually, she came to believe that the rabbi was right, that God was indeed a loving God, and that her terror was just an- other demon from her past. She came to believe that God had given her Issac for a husband to make her understand what faith was really about. The rabbi advised her to compro- mise for the sake of her marriage, and, over time, she let some things go. She stopped worrying if a little of her nat- ural hair was visible under her wig. She bought food with a more lenient ko- sher certification. But she didn’t feel, as Issac did, that Haredi rules con- stricted her freedom—she felt that God’s commandments were given in love, as guideposts, to form a structure for her life. To her, it was a joyful thing to be part of a community and a reli- gion that were larger than she was, that had been around for thousands of years. do you know God’s not a She?” But in he and Faigy wouldn’t fit in with peo­ Faigy never told Issac not to do some­ the end he didn’t mind too much if his ple like that. thing, but she asked him not to do it in kids were religious. Even though the After Issac stopped being religious, front of her. Once he started going to blessing sung after a meal had always he decided that he didn’t want to have Footsteps meetings, he made secular annoyed him—he thought it was too another baby. It was hard enough to friends, and she feared that they would long—he loved to hear his children work out the religious conflicts with pull him away from her. It was espe­ sing it. The bottom line was that he the two girls they had. And what if a cially frightening that he had female felt he had no right to force anything third child was a boy? He knew that friends; in her world, there was no such on his kids, any more than he had a Faigy would insist on circumcising him, thing as a grown man being friends right to force anything on Faigy, or she and he couldn’t tolerate the idea of a with a woman. But, after a while, she on him. A few people had told him synagogue full of people celebrating said it was O.K. with her if he brought that he should write a book, the cutting of his son’s these secular friends to their house. To and though he doubted that penis. Then, when the boy her, their lives seemed very hard, and he would, he had a title: was older, people would ex­ she felt grateful that she had God to “You Don’t Fucking Own pect Issac to take him to support her. Nobody, Nobody Fucking synagogue on Saturdays, As time went on, Issac became Owns You.” and he wasn’t going to do more and more awed by her. He saw At some point, they it, and that would be an­ that she loved and accepted him even decided to buy a house, and, other source of misery for though many religious women would because Issac was sick of Faigy, every single week. have thrown him out of the house and parking his car fifteen But he told Faigy that if barred him from seeing his kids. He minutes away so that if he she wanted to talk about it knew from talking to other people wanted to drive on Shab­ they should talk about it, that his situation was vanishingly rare. bos he didn’t rile up the entire neigh­ and, every now and again, they did. He He saw that, because of her misera­ borhood, they ended up buying a house saw how much she wanted another ble childhood, Faigy appreciated his in a part of Rockland County where baby, and sometimes he would say to being a loving husband and father, de­ there were very few Jewish families. himself, or to his therapist, “Wouldn’t spite his apostasy and whatever other There was one observant family nearby it be wonderful if I told her we should failings he had. She remembered how, whose children were similar to theirs have one?” But then he thought, I don’t at the beginning of their marriage, in age, and they had had a meal with want another baby, and it’s not right to when she was having nightmares about them once, but then the father saw have an unwanted baby—pleasing Faigy her past, even though he hardly knew Issac driving on Shabbos and that was is not a good enough reason. For a year, her then, he supported her and loved the end of that. They didn’t have a syn­ he thought about it and thought about her and encouraged her to go back agogue community, because Issac didn’t it, working through his own objections. into therapy. pray anymore, and women in their He thought that if they had a boy they Faigy believed it was worse for neighborhood didn’t go to synagogue could circumcise him in a doctor’s office, the children to think that their father except on special occasions. They still with no people. Finally, he realized that was evil than for them to doubt that had a few friends from Borough Park, he was ready, and he told Faigy. The a person who broke the rules would and Issac had some secular friends from baby came, and it was a girl. go to Hell. She and Issac explained to Footsteps, but they didn’t know any The experience of having the baby the kids that there were rules they had couples like themselves. astonished him. It was different from to follow, but that when they were They wanted to find a place where anything he had experienced before. grownups they would be able to make there were like­minded people living “It’s amazing,” he kept saying, as he their own choices. She bought the chil­ nearby—people they could say hi to on looked at the baby’s face. “It’s amaz­ dren journals and told them that if any­ the street, families whom they could ing.” He thought, I guess this is how thing bothered them they should write have meals with sometimes, who had it is meant to be—making a baby with about it before they went to sleep, and kids that their kids could play with, and love. He and Faigy had loved each every night she read the journals and whom they didn’t have to put up a other before, but having the first two wrote back. façade with. To Issac, it felt like a lot babies hadn’t been a decision—they Issac tried not to do anything that to ask. They looked at Teaneck, New did what they were supposed to do would desecrate Shabbos for the rest Jersey, which felt right from a religious and the babies came. This time, it was of the family. He would have preferred point of view—the families there were conscious. Issac remembered that his to have the kids go to public school, mostly Modern Orthodox—but the father had told him before his wed­ but he didn’t push it—he knew how Teaneck Jews all appeared to be upper­ ding that during sex you should think important it was to Faigy that they be middle­class. It seemed that everyone of holy things, so that your child would brought up to love their religion. But had gone to college, many were doc­ be holy, and he thought, This baby is sometimes he would poke at it, just a tors or lawyers. Issac had the equiva­ the culmination of our five­year strug­ little. If the kids were praying and ad­ lent of an eighth­grade education and gle. Every day I see her and I think, dressing God as He, he would say, “How worked in a supermarket; he felt that She is our love. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 47 PORTFOLIO VITAL VESSELS More than a billion vaccine doses have to be shipped to an anxious world. A legacy glassmaker has a solution.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE

n old story about glass goes ready for distribution. Getting them something like this: A glass- to people who need them will require A maker, presenting his wares more than a billion vials to be man- to the Roman emperor Tiberius, ufactured, filled, and shipped, at top handed over a bowl for inspection. speed and in some cases under ex- After studying it, Tiberius returned treme stress. (Pfizer’s vaccine must be the bowl to the man, who promptly kept colder than ninety degrees below hurled it to the ground. Rather than zero.) Under any circumstances, put- smash to pieces, the glass merely dented; ting medicine into glass is a tricky it had been fashioned from a substance business. Standard medical vials— that the ancients called vitrum flexile. made of borosilicate—often break as Amazed, Tiberius asked if anyone else they’re filled, and just one damaged knew how to make it. When the arti- vial can ruin a batch of doses and stop san said no, the emperor—fearing that a production line. such an invention would devalue trea- These photographs, taken by suries filled with gold and silver—had Christopher Payne at two Corning him executed. facilities in upstate New York, tell The story was, as the historian Pliny the story of an alternative to borosil- wrote, “more widely spread than well icate, called Valor Glass, and its use authenticated.” But it captures an as- in the effort to deliver COVID-19 vac- piration nearly as old as glass itself: to cines. The development of Valor Glass create resilience in the fragile substance began in 2011, when Corning’s re- that results when hot silica fuses with searchers were working to reinvent other minerals. That aspiration now medical vials, which had not changed carries special importance. After many substantially for a century. Using plat- months in which the COVID-19 pan- inum-lined ceramic crucibles, heated demic has brought misery to much of to more than a thousand degrees, they the world, new vaccines will soon be spent hundreds of hours combining

In a seventy-year-old building upstate,

48 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 Corning is rushing to produce vials for vaccines. Machines called converters cut and shape tubes of proprietary Valor Glass.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 49 At Corning’s Sullivan Park laboratory, engineers use platinum-lined ceramic crucibles to test new ideas in high-temperature

50 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 silica with new ingredients. As Rob­ ert Schaut, one of the project’s leaders, said, “The periodic table is our tool­ box.” They found that, by adding alu­ mina and removing boron, they could make the glass far more resistant to degradation, and therefore less likely to leach contaminants into the con­ tents. Other innovations came later, and the vials went on the market in 2017. This June, the federal govern­ ment granted Corning more than two hundred million dollars to produce them for COVID vaccines. Corning’s manufacturing process, which Payne documents with an archi­ tect’s sensitivity to form, begins with cylindrical machines called converters. They cut and shape tubes of Valor Glass into vials, which are then sub­ merged in a molten­salt bath. Potas­ sium atoms in the hot mixture swap with smaller sodium atoms embedded in the surface of the glass, creating ten­ sion and therefore toughness. (Cor­ ning first developed this process for Gorilla Glass, which is used in iPhones and other electronic devices; a vial for­ tified in this way can withstand as much as a thousand pounds of force.) Af­ terward, the glass is rinsed, and the ex­ terior is given a polymer coating, so that bottles don’t grind against one an­ other on a filling line, generating glass dust that can ruin doses. All this work is being conducted under conditions of severe urgency. Corning’s facility is running around the clock. “Glass is used to protect our most valuable liq­ uids,” Schaut said. “It has an aura of protection.” By the end of the year, the machines in these images will have produced enough vials to deliver more than a hundred million doses of COVID­19 vaccines, but Corning’s production is merely one part of a larger effort. SiO2 Materials Science, a company in Ala­ bama, is manufacturing another alter­ native to borosilicate vials. The mak­ ers of the standard product have been ramping up operations, too. The de­ mand calls for everything. As the chief executive of AstraZeneca, one of the companies racing to produce a vaccine, warned, early in the pandemic, “There’s not enough vials in the world.” furnaces, heating silica compounds to thirteen hundred degrees. —Raffi Khatchadourian

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 51 Above: Corning researchers discovered that standard medical vials often rub against one another on production lines, generating glass dust that can contaminate medicines. To prevent this, vials made of Valor Glass are given a polymer coating that reduces surface friction. Right: A robotic arm dunks racks of vials into molten salt to strengthen the glass.

52 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 K8P0V4L

THEEW N YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 53 54 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 3-6-1-6-6-7-5-1-3

Left: After the vials are removed from the salt bath, they are submerged in water for an initial rinse. Above: At the Sullivan Park lab, engineers pour molten glass onto a stainless-steel tabletop to cool, so that it can be cut into pieces for tests. Glass used to store vaccines must prove highly stable and chemically inert.

THEEW N YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 55 Robotic arms transfer the vials—twelve at a time—onto plastic tracks, which convey them through a chamber where they are

56 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 further cleaned. Then they are air-dried and spray-coated. The facility is producing millions of vials a month.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 57 FICTION

58 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY RAPHAELLE MACARON isten, in the debris field oth- said, “Other people’s houses smell funny.” right in, running on the stones, bare- “ erwise known as my life, I re- “True—and that’s also part of the foot.” His face was lit with admiration. L call one funny thing—but ambiguity I feel now,” Sal said. “By that “It gives me hope that they’ll succeed, when I say funny I don’t mean it was I mean my state of mind. I’m confused.” with an attitude like that. Curious— funny chuckle-chuckle. It was horrible “Why are you confused?” the big- maybe a bit temerario. Nice.” and obvious, but I didn’t have the ca- ger girl asked, but Sal pretended not He was facing away from his wife, pacity to see it then—that was a gift I to hear, and made a business of re- smiling out the window at the drive- developed later. At the time, it was like moving the lid from the ceramic cookie way, in the direction they’d come, across when you’re in the water at the beach, jar and presenting each child with a the gravel, a fixed expression of wel- say, staring at something floating in cookie. Then they padded out to the come on his face, as though still see- front of you, and your back is turned, porch again, and he was back in his ing them. and you don’t realize that a monster rocker, and they were crouched at his “My glasses,” Bailey said, opening wave is about to wash over you. Maybe feet, chewing. and closing drawers, slamming them, a little pink slipper, like yours, that “Home,” he said, “the notion of and sighing. “Have you seen them?” someone lost is bobbing there in the home, like the notion of marriage, re- He turned his smile on her, think- water, distracting you, while the mon- quires the illusion of being indispens- ing of the children, but she went on ster wave is coming up behind you— able to someone. And I didn’t have that with her clattering search, the noise mannaggia! Except it wasn’t a wave. I illusion anymore. I can’t honestly say I she was making meant to remind him was in my car. It was after work, and I have it now.” of her effort and her mood—these days was tired from a long day. And here’s He fell silent, squinting past them, more frenzied. He knew why: he saw the funny—not funny—thing. Instead while they watched him, as though behind the noise. of going straight home, I drove around, waiting for more. But he was calm— “On the counter, near the cookie not near my house but on back roads spent and satisfied, benign again, re- jar,” Sal said. He was in his easy chair, and through the woods, until it got lieved, liking the careless crunch, and under the lamp, a book on his lap, a dark. And even then I didn’t go home. the catlike way they licked the crumbs drink in his hand, his usual place in the Look, I didn’t want to go home. I kept from their lips. He wanted to confess evening, waiting for Bailey to arrive. on driving, not in a hurry, keeping to to them, Usually I hate to see people eat, She was still opening drawers and claw- the speed limit, on and on, into the especially old people, the way they chew ing their contents. “The cookie jar,” he darkness. I did this for weeks—got out their food, and swallow hard, looking dis- said, and, raising his voice, “Behind it.” of work, set off in my car, and drove gusted. Imagine having to look at that In the silence that followed, he around, noticing things I hadn’t seen every day in the cafeteria of an assisted- looked up and saw that she was wear- before. People sitting on porches, chat- living facility. But your eating is beauti- ing her glasses. ting away. Kids on bikes. Man going ful. He said nothing; he watched the “You found them.” into a house—‘Hi, honey!’ Old man children with pleasure. “Obviously,” she said. She was star- and old lady, scuffing along the side- “Uncle,” the boy said. “Want to see ing at something in her hand—her walk, holding hands—beautiful. And, me do wheelies?” phone, he saw—regarding it with pained after a month of this driving around, “Yes. But tell me your name again. concentration. “I thought we agreed it came to me, the not very funny thing: I forgot it.” that the cookie jar was going, along that the monster wave in the back- “Kamana.” with all that other stuff.” ground was the state of my marriage. “And you?” Sal clucked, to indicate that he’d My wife was the reason I was killing “Bella,” the bigger girl said. “And heard her, but, instead of replying to time, driving longer and longer, stay- she’s Nanu.” that, he said, “Those kids—they re- ing behind the wheel of my car. I was “Cookie!” the child howled. minded me of that time when I was in putting it off. See, I didn’t want to go “It means ‘wave,’” Bella said. Malabotta, that forest—my first year straight home, because she was there. They jumped to their feet and ran in Sicily, trying to be a poet. I was on That was my first wife.” to the driveway and mounted their a path and heard it coming, the rain, “Uncle,” the girl said. bikes—the small girl on a tricycle— the way it announced itself, as it swept “Yes?” and wobbled on the gravel, skidding through the trees, the sound of it hit- “Can I have another cookie?” back and forth. Kamana pulled his ting the leaves high up in the canopy, “Sure,” Sal Frezzolini said, but re- handlebars back and reared, balancing the edge of the storm approaching. mained seated in his rocker. “Now you for seconds on one wheel and whoop- No water, just darkness and that smack- can see that it was home—the idea of ing. Then they made for the gate and ing sound, like running feet, foot soles home—that I was resisting.” were gone. hitting pavement. And then the rain “Can I have a cookie, too?” the boy itself, the hard splash and the hiss of said. “ hey were back again today,” Sal it, beating on the leaves, a deafening “And me! I want a cookie!” the small- Tsaid. “When I keep the gate racket, the sky collapsing on me, with est one, a girl, bawled, batting the air closed I don’t see them—they stay away. thunder and lightning. In one sudden with her hand. But when it’s open—even a crack— flash I saw a shed—open-sided, just a As Sal led them indoors, the boy they take it as an invitation, and come thatched roof on poles. I ran under it

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 59 and sheltered there and marvelled at feet,” Bailey said, perhaps to him, per- Kamana began to speak, stammer- how the bright afternoon had become haps into the phone. ing badly, but Sal realized that the boy crepuscolo, a tumbling creek of mud “It’s not enough,” he said. was mimicking his teacher, who’d rep- where the path had been. And, as I “How do you know?” rimanded him for talking—imitating stood away from the dripping eaves, a But she didn’t wait for an answer. I a scolding tone, peremptory but word- small boy ran into the shed. He held know, he thought, dietrologia. less nagging. a big, floppy philodendron leaf over his The next day he left the gate open. “I had a teacher like that,” Sal said. head like a parasol. He was wearing a “Miss Sharkey. And you, Miss Bella, yellow shirt, a sort of smock. Thick e saw them, their heads bowed in what did you learn?” black curls, and his wet face gleamed. Htheir usual peculiar listening “Nothing,” the girl said, twisting her About the same age as our neighbor stance, taking slow steps, pressing for- face as though to show futility. boy. Nine or ten, skinny legs, barefoot, ward, their arms out, as though mov- “Nothing!” the small girl, Nanu, said. peering out of the shed at the water ing through deep grass and parting it, “She doesn’t go to school,” Kamana rushing down the path. He’d found the boy in front, the bigger girl just be- said. refuge. Then another lightning flash, hind him, the small girl dawdling at “Uncle,” Bella said. “Can I have a he dropped his big leaf, and he care- the rear. They were halfway to him cookie?” fully stuck a finger in each ear. And, as when he went to the porch rail and “I don’t have any cookies for you just the thunder rumbled over us, he saw greeted them. But even so they walked now,” he said, and saw that they looked me smiling at him and stumbled in slowly, cautiously—was it because they defeated. “But I have a story. You like alarm, stepping back. I said something, were barefoot on the stony driveway? stories, don’t you?” and that was worse. More lightning, “Uncle,” the boy said, announcing “Miss Oshiro tells us stories,” Ka- more thunder. But he was more star- himself. mana said. tled by me than by the thunder. Again “Come on up,” Sal said. “This one is true,” Sal said. “Listen, he put his fingers in his ears and rushed They brightened and hurried to the I was in Italy a long time ago . . .” into the storm, his yellow shirt jump- stairs, jostling, and, as they mounted He told the story of the sudden ing, terrified.” them, Sal moved back to his chair, as storm in the Sicilian forest, the way the Sal paused, hearing the thunder and, though to encourage them, too, to sit. raindrops smacked the leaves, sound- in the distortion of the lightning, catch- “Let me guess your names,” he said, ing like running feet, the open-sided ing a last glimpse of the yellow shirt and pointed. “Kamana.” shed and the child in the yellow shirt twisting into the forest. The boy was dark, with short, spiky holding a big leaf over his head. Then “Maybe his first straniero.” hair and the face of a cherub; his faded the flashes of lightning, the thunder, Bailey made a sound in her sinuses T-shirt read “Toon Time,” over a mass the boy’s shock at seeing him. Rising that he could not translate into words; of big-eyed kittens. from his chair, Sal stood up and put a nor could he read anything in her eyes. “And this is Bella.” finger in each ear and showed how the She had a way of snatching at the air The girl turned her red baseball cap child had darted away into the thun- with her fingers when she was agitated, back to front. Her T-shirt, with the der and rain. and she was doing that now, her arms words “Keiki Great Aloha Run,” showed The children sat before him, their at her sides, one hand grasping, the faces fixed in concentration, as though other wagging her phone. hearing music—unfamiliar music but “I don’t think I’ve ever told you.” He a melody they could follow. They felt fragile, the memory like an urgent seemed to track its syncopation, nod- confession. ding softly. And their attention encour- “That those neighbor children come aged him to tell the story in greater de- by? Yes, many times.” tail, more slowly, with pauses. Their “Not that,” he said. listening was visible—he could see it But she hadn’t heard. “I’ve had an in their faces, the progress of the story awful day. The agent said she’d have an shining in their eyes, their lips moving offer by this afternoon—but where is a stencilled image of a winged foot. with his. it? And I need to sign off on the unit.” Her jeans were torn at the knees, the “Ha!” Bella said. “He was afraid.” “God, I hate that word,” he said. cuffs turned up. “Maybe he never seen a big haole Bailey was walking away, the phone “You’re Nanu,” Sal said. “And your before,” Kamana said. pressed against her ear, conspiring, he tongue is blue.” “That’s what I thought then,” Sal knew. “And we’ve got to do something “Lollipop,” she said, licking her said. “Afterward, I had to conclude about all those books. You promised.” upper lip. that he was employing a sort of inbuilt “I need them.” When Sal laughed out loud at this, dietrologia—that he knew he had to “You never read them.” they looked alarmed and drew back a separate himself from me. But it was a “I’ve read all of them, some more little. long time ago.” than once.” “What did you learn at school “How long?” Bella asked. “The unit is twelve hundred square today?” “More than fifty years,” Sal said.

60 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 Kamana frowned. “Are you afraid of thunder?” LITTLE SPY IN MY BEDROOM “Yes,” Sal said. “Like that little Ital- ian boy.” What’s that ticking sound “You said ‘crappy,’” Bella said. under the red velvet sofa, “Because it’s in the poem. And it’s breathing a little click-song my poem. I wrote it with this old hand.” stolen from South Africa, “How old are you?” Nanu asked, her perched on a windowsill fingers in her mouth. or lost in a coffin drawer “Guess.” singing a half-pint of good “Twenty-five?” luck, aping such big emotion? “No.” Whatever it is, it materialized “Eighty-five?” up here on the second floor, “No.” as if from my head—the silent “If we guess the right number can timekeeper’s rasping alarm. we have cookies?” I pace around the room, careful “Yes.” not to trip on the tiger rug, Kamana said, “Fifty—a hundred— to search out the mechanical thirty.” night song of a small being. “All good guesses,” Sal said, and led What good can it bring now them into the house for cookies, which in our highly evolved world he dispensed in the usual way, tipping of climate change & hunting the jar, framing each cookie with his death stars to give the names fingers, presenting it as though award- of hermit kings & outlaws. ing a medal. Love, have I always listened Kamana began to dance on the pol- with my whole damn body, ished wooden floor, skidding and jump- 18k. tick of a pocket watch? ing, and was joined by Bella, while Nanu I rise, gazing into an inlaid box squatted and watched. Sliding side- of hex signs & cheap rings. ways, Kamana bumped a table and upset Now I hardly hear the faint a large glazed plate that had been rest- noise, yet know it is here. ing on a display stand. Its smash si- I cover my eyes with my left lenced them, then Kamana began to hand to hear the machine shout at Bella. pulse of a careless heart, & “You made me do it! It’s all your fault!” in a patch of early-morning “It’s O.K.,” Sal said. “I never liked sunlight I see a black cricket. that plate. I’m glad you broke it.” Someone kicks off her shoe The boy laughed as Sal swept up before I can think to say, No, the glittering shards and wrapped them one of us must show mercy. in newspaper, making a parcel of them and placing it in the trash bin. —Yusef Komunyakaa Back outside, Sal said, “I wish I could tap-dance. I wish I could play the uku- lele. I wish I could fly. Though I often The children jeered at the number, “Did Miss Oshiro tell you a story fly in my dreams. There are so many Kamana shouting, “That’s silly—fifty today?” things I want to do before I get too old.” years!” Bella said, “Poem.” “I can fly,” Bella said, and ran from Sal stared at their wonderment, “What kind of poem?” the porch to her bike. She mounted it thinking, They have just arrived on “ ‘Itsy-Bitsy Spider.’” and rode in circles, crunching the gravel. earth. Time, which is everything to me, “Here’s a real poem,” Sal said, and “Look at me, Uncle,” Kamana called is nothing to them. It reassured him he recited: out, and he, too, skidded and howled, to think that for them big numbers chased by Nanu, and soon they were gone. were impossible. If you’re senselessly unhappy That evening, Bailey said, “What “Now can we have a cookie?” Bella On a cloudy afternoon happened to the majolica plate?” And regard the hand that feeds you said. without wonder, “I’m having it valued,” Sal said. The cookies stilled them, seemed And say everything is crappy “It was a wedding present,” Bailey to tame them, made them more atten- As you blow it off the spoon— said. She surveyed the room. She sighed tive, like the simplest sort of magic, or May I please call your attention to the and said, “God!” a drug. thunder? He knew what she meant: All this

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 61 humous. Elegiac. Incunabula. Oregon. Phthisic.” The children nodded at each word and laughed when he was done, Bella saying, “Again!” Grateful to be able to utter the words, to cast a spell that would rid him at last of his humiliation, Sal spoke them to the children, watching their bright eyes. “Phthisic,” Kamana said. Bella said, “Posthumous.” Sal wanted to weep at their saying the words correctly. “Don’t let anyone laugh at you,” he said. “It hurt me that Jane Godfrey laughed at me when I said ‘post-hewmous.’” “When did she do that?” “Sixty-two years ago,” Sal said. “It’s bad to laugh at people,” Bella said. “I feel better now.” He was aston- ished that he had carried the memory for all those years and had only now delivered himself of it. “Can we have a cookie?” Kamana asked, on all fours, tipping himself “Would you say it’s more of a burning or a stabbing pain?” upright. “One more thing,” Sal said, and in- dicated with his hand that the children •• should listen. “When people asked me what I did for a living I never told them, furniture, all these books, the pictures, They took their usual places before ‘I’m a poet.’ But that’s what I wanted to the vases, the house itself—dispose of him, and crouched in their listening be. The truth was that I was a claims it. Then proceed to the unit. postures, watchful and compact. adjuster for Territorial. At a desk where “I’ve been meaning to tell you that I wrote poems with my left hand.” n the succeeding days, he left the gate I’ve spent my whole life on the periph- “Cookie,” the small girl said, in a Iopen, but the children did not visit; ery. But I always knew what was going beckoning tone, as if calling to a cat. nor were they playing in the neighbor- on. I just didn’t know how to avoid the “Even Bailey doesn’t know.” Poetry hood or on the road, where he often consequences.” When they did not react is my secret, he thought, but poetry is saw them. He missed them, and won- to this, he asked, “Where have you been?” also my embarrassment. “By the way, dered where they’d gone, and envied “Father’s house,” Bella said. Bailey insisted on keeping her maiden them for not needing him, and was “He lives in town,” Kamana said. name. She hates my name.” He saw ashamed because he so badly wanted to “He doesn’t live with us.” their solemn faces and said, “Frezzolini.” see them. He admired them as import- “What about school?” They seemed startled by the sud- ant little vessels for his memories, and, “Rudy laughed at my shirt,” Kamana den, gulping word, but followed Sal in the hope that they’d return, began said. into the house, and, emboldened—be- saving up stories, and secrets that were “Why did he do that?” cause they’d been inside before—they a burden to him, to tell them. “Because it had a hole in it. He said dashed around the chairs and slid in a When at last they came back, unan- he could see my belly button.” skating motion on the polished floor. nounced, as though materializing from “That’s terrible. I know. Lots of peo- “You have a lot of books,” Bella said, the emptiness beyond the gate—creep- ple used to laugh at me,” Sal said. The and ran to the shelves and smacked the ing softly down the gravel, and noise- children looked at his shirt, as though spines of the books. Seeing her, Kamana lessly up the stairs to the porch, tenta- to see whether it had a hole in it. He joined her and punched them with his tive in their movements, as though said, “It was because I said words wrong. fist. Their glee, their fury, caused Nanu stalking him—he greeted them fondly, I could read them. I knew what they to squeal. almost tearful in his gratitude. meant. But I couldn’t say them right.” Sal said, “Why are you hitting the He surprised himself by saying, “I used Bella wrinkled her nose, looking books?” to be so afraid of strangers. Come to think doubtful. “What words?” “Because they’re bad!” Bella said, of it, I’m still afraid. But you’re not!” In a chanting tone, Sal said, “Post- slapping at them.

62 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 “Did you read them all?” Kamana In love and work, and things essential; in your car, when you didn’t want to asked. Bottom line—even the fate of hearts— go home.” “No,” Sal said, and again, “No.” Beware, or you will surely fail; So he told the story, slowly, now and Remember that the hardest part’s “Then why do you have them?” The skinning of the tail. then interrupted by the children, who “Because I’m a silly old man,” Sal said. corrected him when he missed a line “And you’re right. A lot of them are bad.” “That’s silly,” Kamana said. or used a different word. Seeing that slapping the books had some- “Dietrologia often seems silly,” Sal “It’s not my story anymore,” he said. how calmed them, he asked, “Does your said. “It’s yours. And, obviously, driving around father have books in his house?” “What’s that?” in the dark was a big mistake. I should “Fred,” Kamana said. “He’s got a Sal said, “You visit me and I’m have thought of something else.” flat-screen TV.” happy. You’re near and mysterious. He was relieved to be rid of the story, “Is he nice?” But my dietrologia tells me it’s just but when the children left, Kamana His question silenced them, and, the cookies.” churning the gravel with his bicycle when he asked again, Kamana said, “He Bella said, “I know what happens tires, Sal finished his thought: Some- hit my mom in the kitchen.” when you die.” thing reckless and decisive. “What did you do?” “I wish I knew,” Sal said. “I’d put it “Watched TV.” in a poem.” he children did not appear for an- “What did your mom do?” “When you die, they put you in a hole Tother week, and he came to under- “Cried,” Bella said. and you go to Heaven,” Kamana said. stand the pattern. They spent the lon- “Does he hit you?” “Uncle,” Bella said. “What’s going ger periods of time with their mother, “When we’re bad,” Bella said. to happen to you?” who lived up the road, in a house ob- “He gives us lickings,” Kamana Sal clutched at his knees and thought scured by a monkeypod tree and a added, in clarification. hard and said, “I sometimes think it’s mounded mass of bougainvillea, and the They spoke glumly but without ran- already happened.” He squinted, and rest of the time they lived with their fa- cor, as though they were to blame. savored the silence. He said, “I don’t like ther, somewhere in town. Bella said, “Tell us a poem.” what I see.” He longed for them to visit, especially “The ‘crappy’ one,” Kamana said, He was glad when they seemed to on those days when Bailey wanted to giggling on the word. brush the statement aside, and Kamana talk about the progress of the move. He “Let’s go outside,” Sal said, wearied said, “Tell us the story of driving around found listening to the details unbearable, and saddened by the talk of their being hit. “Can we have another cookie?” Feeling sorrowful, he gave them each three cookies, formally presenting them, and felt sadder when they shrieked, sur- prised by the number, Nanu barely able to hold them in her tiny hands, bring- ing them to her face and gnawing. On the porch, he said, “A different poem,” and recited: “I’m glad you’re back,” I lied, You hugged me, then you cried, “At last you’re home—we’re one!” I feel I want to run. With you I’m more alone Than when I’m on my own. They chewed, they wanted more, they insisted he recite the other poem again, for the pleasure of hearing the word “crappy.” So he said, “If you’re senselessly unhappy, / on a cloudy afternoon,” and they screeched when he spoke the word. “Here’s another,” he said, “from long ago.”

“Anyone can skin a gatto when it’s morto.” So the Siciliano told her. “La più difficile da scorticare È la coda.” But not just taxidermy, also other arts, and to prevent her from enumerating her glasses and looking over the top of the bluish patch, the bruise like a botched them—often she read from a list she’d the frames, a doubting gaze. She said, tattoo, making the girl seem older. made, holding a notepad and speech- “I sometimes think you’re resisting this.” “I was bad.” ifying—he pretended a weird enthusi- “It’s such a big move.” Sal involuntarily stood up, hurting asm, agreeing with whatever she said. “Downsizing,” she said. “It’s part of for the girl, but feeling futile. He con- This worked better than—as in the growing old.” trolled himself enough to ask, “Fred?” past—begging her to stop talking, which “We’re not that old,” he said. She blinked a yes. had only infuriated her into a more de- Turning away from him and adjust- “You need a cookie. We all need tailed monologue. But it was all like ing her glasses, she laughed—a loud, cookies.” thunder. He wanted to put his fingers knowing shout that made her seem On the lanai he said, “Fred what?,” in his ears and run. strong. Even the way she walked was and Bella told him her father’s last name. “The idea,” she told him one day, like marching, leaving him behind with “He’s a policeman.” “is that at first we just stop for lunch the echo of her laugh. “Ah.” at Ocean View—the cafeteria—and After they had gone, he sat for a get acquainted with the other resi- hen, a few days later, the chil- long while in the rocker, murmuring dents, and maybe spend a night or two Wdren returned, he gave them his declaration, and measuring how in the unit.” cookies without their asking, and they much he would need to say to rouse “Good idea,” he said, stiffening, con- sat in the afternoon sunshine, eating the policeman to action. vulsed with terror at the words “cafe- them in silence. When at last he picked up his cell teria” and “unit.” “When I was a boy I was always hun- phone, and was connected, he replied “Until the sale of the house goes gry,” he said. “I didn’t realize it until I to the gruff hello by saying, “I know through.” had a meal at a friend’s house. His what you’ve been doing to your chil- “Perfect.” His throat burned with mother would pile my plate with food, dren, Fred.” the lie. and when I ate it all, and sometimes Sal wondered, in the silence that fol- “Acclimate to the new environment, had seconds, she’d say, ‘You’re really hun- lowed, if he’d been heard. But then while at the same time arranging an gry!’” He looked for a reaction, but the came the confident, blaming voice he’d estate sale.” children were absorbed in their eating. expected. “I know who you are, Uncle.” Sal looked wildly around at books, “I thought it was a compliment—‘You’re At that, Sal put the phone down lamps, cushions, carpets, the cookie jar, a good eater, Salvatore!’ But those moth- and, still sitting, interrogated the shadow his rocker on the porch. ers understood what was behind my of the obvious. He knew just how it “What we don’t sell we can put into hunger. It only came to me much later— would play out, and he drummed his one of those units.” that I didn’t have enough to eat at home. fingers on the arm of his chair, as though “Our unit?” He stammered over A terrible thing, and they knew it.” tapping a fast-forward button, to speed the word. The word roused the children. They up the ensuing drama. “No, no, not Ocean View,” Bailey looked up, staring at him. Bella said, The future jerked before him, accel- said. “A storage unit. And we’ll have to “What was terrible?” erating in sequence: the vindictive re- do something about the car.” “That we were poor. But it didn’t sponse from the man, the misapplied “Yes, yes,” he said, in a panic, want- occur to me until thirty or forty years accusations, the unfortunate fretting of ing her to stop. had passed.” the children’s mother, the certain in- “Because we won’t need it. We’ll be They laughed, as they always did at volvement of the police, and their in- near all the shops. We’ll have our meals large numbers, finding them absurd, timidating visit, the howl from Bailey in the cafeteria. We—” and he joined them, grateful that he when she read the conditions of the “I’m glad you’re dealing with it,” he had these children near him, like finely restraining order. Finally, as her plans said, interrupting, and using his hands, calibrated instruments that only he fell apart and she found that Ocean too, to make her stop. could read. View would no longer admit him, an- His smothering voice, his pushing “What did you do with your father?” other howl: “This will follow you, Sal!” hands, angered her. She said, “I don’t “Watched cartoons.” But the disgrace would follow Fred, think you realize how much effort I’m “Does your mother let you watch too, and the children would be saved. putting into this.” cartoons?” She did not see beyond the shadow “Just take your time,” he said. But “No,” Kamana said. to what he saw clearly. That she’d be what he’d intended to calm her only “What do you do with her?” fine, and better off without him. Any- angered her more. “Church,” Bella said. way, he was not thinking of himself, of “Time is the one thing we don’t Sal said, “Soul butter.” his future living alone, somewhere to have,” she said. “We’re on a strict sched- Kamana hooted at the word, Bella be determined, among his old things, ule. Contracts. Deposits. Deadlines.” said, “Butter!,” and their shouts excited but only of the children, whom he knew “Yes,” he said, a panic in his voice, Nanu, who wagged her head. he’d never see again.  and when Bailey began to speak again “Tell us a story, Uncle,” Bella said. he said, “Absolutely!” “Wait, what happened to your arm?” NEWYORKER.COM She lowered her head, tugging down She drew back when he went to touch Paul Theroux on making sense of one’s life.

64 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 THE CRITICS GETTY

BOOKS ORIGINAL GANGSTERS The making of the New York Mob.

BY ADAM GOPNIK

f some nativist in this country had dismissed, correctly, as a bigot. The all the great rhapsodic movie directors, Iwarned in 1900 that mass Italian im- oddity is that something like this hap- and nearly all the (white) singers worth migration would bring us vendetta- pened, and, on the whole, no one seems hearing—the existence of those bad obsessed crime clans, capable of get- to mind. Quite apart from the over- guys, far from being seen as an excres- ting their tentacles on the public life whelming positives of the Italian pres- cence, has become another positive: it (and budgets) of major American cit- ence—the usual parade of professional has supplied our only reliable, weath- ies while also corrupting the Ameri- eminences, from attorneys to zoolo- erproof American mythology, one can labor movement for most of the gists, along with many of the best ball- sturdy enough to sustain and resist de- coming century, he would have been players, most of the passionate actors, bunking or revisionism. Cowboys turn

The notorious Mafia don Lucky Luciano leaves court, in 1936, while on trial for sixty-two prostitution charges.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 65 Your Anniversary Immortalized in Roman Numerals out to be racist and settlers genocidal, then Sinatra’s role as a middleman with and even astronauts have flaws. But the Mafia recedes in importance, and,

Order by 12/22 for Christmas! mobsters come pre-disgraced, as jeans since Sinatra’s own Mob ties turn out come pre-distressed; what bad thing to be largely ornamental, with no Ken- .646.6466 can you say about the Mob that hasn’t nedy connection he is merely another been said already? So residual virtues, occasional hanger-on, a stickpin rather if any, shine bright. than a stiletto. To keep Sinatra inter- You could still imagine that books estingly sinister, Kaplan has to debunk ADVERTISEMENT debunking the Cosa Nostra, reveal- Nasaw’s debunking. ing a truth less glamorous if not more We all, in other words, have a lot virtuous than what has been peddled, invested in the Mafia mythology. You would be plentiful. But, can still find the rare defla- where you could not get tionary history. Robert a popular historian to re- Lacey’s “Little Man,” a 1221 peat the story of, say, Clara biography of the legendary WHAT’S THE Barton and the American Meyer Lansky, known as Red Cross without much the Mob’s moneyman, BIG IDEA? close squinting and revi- made it plain that, while Small space has big rewards. sion, a book about the Mob quick with numbers and a in New York will happily good casino manager, Lan- repeat the same twenty sky wasn’t a genius, or much stories already known, of a mobster, or even very without probing the pos- rich. The truly smart guys sibility that, given the Mob’s secrecy didn’t run Cuban casinos; they opened TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT and need for self-generated storytell- Las Vegas hotels. The average unnamed JILLIAN GENET | 305.520.5159 [email protected] ing, much of what we think we know businessman who bought a strip mall may not be remotely true. When re- outside Reno must have made more vision does occur, it meets a stony re- money than the legendary “genius” of sponse. David Nasaw, in “The Patri- the Mob. arch,” his 2012 biography of the elder Yet it is almost impossible to de- Joseph Kennedy, took on one of the mythologize the Mob. “Wiseguy,” the hardier myths of the Mob in Amer- oral memoir of the small-time mob- ica: that, in the nineteen-twenties, Ken- ster Henry Hill which Nicholas Pi- nedy, Sr., was a bootlegger with Mob leggi put together, and “Goodfellas,” ties, and that the ties continued into the Scorsese movie it became, were in- later years, playing a role in his son’s tended to replace the myth of mel- election and, perhaps, his assassina- ancholic men of honor with the real- tion. Nasaw dismissed this as a late- ity of street-rat scrapping. Instead, the arriving myth propagated by aging rats themselves became legendary, and mobsters, one at odds with Joseph Ken- even, in a black way, lovable. Tommy nedy’s single-minded goal of making DeSimone, the original of the Joe Pesci his eldest son President. Kennedy, Sr., character in “Goodfellas,” was not a knew what would work to his advan- cute if murderous psychopath but a tage and what would not—and Mob murderous psychopath tout court. Yet involvement would not. It seems now even DeSimone has become so my- It’s Raining that he was confused with another, Ca- thologized that you can far more eas- nadian Joseph Kennedy, who really was ily find material about his life and death Cats and Dogs a bootlegger, and put his name on his than about, say, the life of Abe Beame, Featuring George Booth’s bottles—with the confusion boosted a small man who was the mayor of irascible cats and dogs, by mobsters’ natural temptation to New York around the time DeSimone the collapsible New Yorker claim collaboration with the powerful. was doing heists. Once a myth fills umbrella is the perfect (“Senator, we’re both part of the same some imaginative need, it becomes in- companion for a rainy day. hypocrisy,” Michael Corleone says to finitely adaptable: King Arthur prob- the senator from Nevada; real mob- ably began as a pan-Celtic hero, then sters love being able to say that, too.) got taken up by the people he had been Nasaw’s conclusion, in turn, annoyed fighting, then got made mystical and To order, please visit the Sinatra biographer James Kaplan, feminized by the French Grail ro- newyorkerstore.com in his fine life of the singer: if the Ken- mances, only to end up, in Tennyson’s nedys weren’t involved with the Mob, hands, as a melancholic Victorian. The

66 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 point of a myth is to be mythical, and reality shaped to supply a significant ing one of the few important mobsters no amount of archeology can shake moral, a parable of the tenements. to die in bed, the moral being that dis- the fairy dust from its heels. The moral, in this case, is that brawn cretion can be the better part of valor. alone is not enough. Every Luciano Joey (Crazy) Gallo breaks the rules of enerally, in Mob stories, the cute must have his Lansky. In the magiste- that decorum, shooting many gangsters, Gbits are not real, and the real bits rial 2001 history “Five Families,” Sel- and then being shot himself, at Umber- are not cute. Given that grim truth, there’s wyn Raab, the Gibbon of the New York tos Clam House. His life proves that something to be said for just shutting Mob, even quotes the Jewish Mob law- crazy doesn’t pay. The Chin returns, wan- your eyes and repeating the cute bits. In yer George Wolf remarking on the dering the streets of Greenwich Village the new book “Big Apple Gangsters” “surprisingly good harmony” between in his bathrobe, mumbling incoherently, (Rowman & Littlefield), Jeffrey Sussman the two immigrant groups, “the Ital- in what turns out to have been an im- repeats the genesis myths and exempla ians respecting the Jews for their finan- personation of psychosis as he secretly virtutis of the New York City Mob pretty cial brains, and the Jews preferring to fired off orders to his underlings: crazy much straight, no chaser. Sussman starts stay quietly behind the scenes and let can pay, if you commit to it. off with an obvious error—he thinks that the Italians use the muscle needed.” The preponderance of the Mafia Damon Runyon’s fictional version of Ar- The legend continues with the emer- stories that Sussman relates, however, nold Rothstein is Nathan Detroit, a small- gence of the five Mob families, which have the simplest and oldest of lessons: time craps dealer, when it’s really a very New York children used to be able to pride comes before a fall. Again and again, different character called the Brain, whose recite in their sleep: Gambino, Bonanno, some mobster or another becomes in- sad demise closely imitates the gambler’s— Genovese, Colombo, Lucchese. All the fatuated with his clippings, and then gets and yet his dependence on received wis- famous incidents and players of the five clipped. This leads eventually to the The- dom is the best feature of his book. He families make their appearance in Suss- ban plays of Mob tales, the long John offers the familiar stories in almost fossil- man’s book in energetically neat outline Gotti cycle, a classic story of hubris duly ized form, in a manner rather like the form—each, one realizes, with a sum- punished. Had Gotti been content to “Golden Legend,” the medieval collection mary moral attached. Frank Costello, wait his turn (i.e., not whack his boss, of saints’ lives. So we hear once again about the original of Vito Corleone, narrowly Paul Castellano, the head of the Gam- Rothstein as the mother wolf of the Mob, misses being assassinated in the lobby bino family), or even, having whacked the man who fixed the 1919 World Se- of his Central Park West apartment him, been content to appeal humbly for ries, who suckled the organization’s Rom- building by Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, pardon to the other dons, he might have ulus and Remus, the street boys Lucky and wisely recedes from the fray, becom- died at home. As it was, he was left largely Luciano and Meyer Lansky, who in the twenties jointly created the Mob as a kind of Italian-Jewish cross-immigrant compact. We hear about that first, rom- com meet-cute of the very young Lan- sky with the very young Luciano:

Luciano’s gang attempted to shake down the scrawny protection racketeer, who was short and skinny, hardly posing a potential threat to a gang of strong young Italian toughs. Yet, Lansky not only refused to retreat, but he also told Luciano to go fuck himself. Luciano was so impressed by the kid’s moxie that he invited him to join his protection racket. The two fu- ture crime bosses cemented an alliance that lasted until Luciano’s death in Italy.

This story has the omnipresence in the Mob literature of flood myths in the ancient Near East. The moment one scrutinizes it, though, it smells, rather like the flood, utterly fishy. The response of a teen-age gangster being told to fuck himself would be to be impressed by the other kid’s moxie? (And what did all the other kids in the gang think as Lansky dissed Lucky?) Even if there’s a shred of truth in this tale, we are in the presence of myth—meaning not simply a falsehood but some piece of “I can’t put it down! The characters are so richly developed!” friendless and at the mercy of the F.B.I. ter—behind it, intent on covering his evitable twist in the television series Like Oedipus, he had asked for it. tracks in a heist he’d masterminded? “Happy Days,” where Fonzie, the Italian All of this takes place against a du- The answer may be: all of the above. tough, is played by a Jewish actor, and biously fact-checked background. Part As with the reviewers of Norman Mail- the creator, Garry Marshall, is an Italian. of the lore that Sussman repeats is that er’s later fiction, there was no need for Luciano and Lansky collaborated to a conspiracy. Everyone separately de- eneath mythology and allegory is form the National Crime Syndicate, cided to have him whacked. Bthe shabby and sordid truth: the established around 1929, along with a price truly paid by America for the Mob judicial commission to oversee its dis- n talking about the Mob, we airily use was the price paid by organized labor. putes and rigid organizational disci- Iwords like “mythological,” but there’s As all the books demonstrate, in the pline. If you couldn’t get a hit autho- a sense in which the allegorical, rather nineteen-twenties, the unions in New rized by the commission, you couldn’t than the strictly mythological, level of York made a kind of deal with the Devil, do the hit. This organization, over the meaning is what makes the Mob irre- with the result of all deals with the Devil: decades, came to have a whiskered his- sistible. The Jewish-Italian connection the Devil takes the last trick. The unions, tory of its own, with a supposed list of is so central to the Mafia legend that one turning to gangsters to protect them- past bosses, like university presidents. senses it must be operating on a kind of selves from strikebreakers, quickly dis- Yet some chroniclers reasonably won- meta-level, where a larger conversation covered that the gangsters were just as der how real it ever was. People like about Jews and Italians in American cul- willing to play the other side of the street Lacey don’t deny that there’s collaboration ture can get dramatized. We can readily for a better offer. In short order, the among gangsters, but they suspect it’s convince ourselves that what might or gangsters controlled both sides. The few more implicit than highly orchestrated, might not be true about the Mob in New brave union souls who continued to re- rather like collaboration among book York—that the Italians have the passion sist the Mob get a surprisingly cursory reviewers in the “New York literary and the Jews the production savvy—is look in the mythologies. Several mov- mafia” (which was also sometimes called true about movies in Hollywood, and we ies have been made about Jimmy Hoffa the Family) in the fifties and sixties. use the New York myth to heighten our and the Teamsters, with the mobbed-up Lizzie loved Cal, who was protected by understanding of the wider world. Hoffa still presented as a kind of work- Bob, who was watching his back for It is certainly true of the masterpieces ing-class hero; in fact, the American knives from Philip—but there was never of the modern gangster movie—“The labor movement did have working-class a secret yearly meeting, as those who Godfather” and “Once Upon a Time in heroes, and Hoffa was not among them. were left out always suspected, where America” and “Goodfellas”—that the Hoffa has been played by Pacino and the editors of The New York Review of directors are all Italian while the pro- Jack Nicholson. Walter Reuther, of the Books and Partisan Review got together ducers are all Jewish, as if the New York U.A.W., a genuine hero, has never been to decide who was going to get whacked Mob had replicated its ethnic synthesis played by a star. A better moral than in their pages. Mafias act more by tacit in Hollywood. We use gangster mythol- usual might be found in a movie about collaboration over shared interests than ogy not just to tell stories about the the struggle, largely successful, to keep by actual conspiracy. mafiosi but to tell stories about ourselves. the Mob out of a key New York City So, just like the conspiracies that We want the Jewish-Italian axis to be union, the International Ladies’ Gar- paranoid (read: all) authors imagine are true of the streets because it gives a dra- ment Workers’. We hear too little about, rampant among book reviewers, the ar- matic form to the corresponding, if much say, Min Matheson, the heroic woman guments persist over why Tommy De- less epic, reality of our entertainments. union organizer who, in northern Penn- Simone got whacked. Was it, as repre- Indeed, one of the best ways to un- sylvania, faced down thugs organized sented in book and film, because he had derstand the “Godfather” movies is as an by the Mob boss Russell Bufalino—the violated a cardinal rule by whacking a extended allegory of the rise and corrup- mostly sympathetic character played by “made man,” Billy Batts? Or because tion of the Actors Studio, in New York, Joe Pesci in “The Irishman”—and main- John Gotti hated him? (“DeSimone with Brando, the fading but formidable tained the integrity of the I.L.G.W.U. whacked two of my top earners, and I don, teaching the Method to Pacino and in the region. let it go for a long time,” one source has De Niro. Here, the general moral narra- What ended the power of the Mob Gotti telling a fellow-capo. “Now he tive is that of the sellout of East Coast in New York? The standard answer, rep- wants to be made, and I’m not gonna to West Coast—symbolically, of theatre licated in Sussman’s book, is the pros- sit quietly. . . . I wanna whack the bas- to the movies. So the elderly Brando ecution of the Mob bosses by Rudolph tard, and I want you to give me the weeps, really, at the surrender of his the- Giuliani and other Feds in the nine- green light.”) Or was it instigated by atrical career, while Pacino had only a teen-eighties and nineties. The F.B.I. the Lucchese capo Paulie Vario, who partial one, and De Niro never really had got a bug into an apartment above the shrewdly egged on Gotti because DeSi- one at all. The tale of corruption and Gotti headquarters, at the Ravenite So- mone had assaulted Henry Hill’s wife, idealism, with the Western half of the cial Club, and produced an incriminat- with whom Vario had been having a country (Las Vegas, Hollywood) luring ing series of tapes of the crew at work. secret romance? Or, as another source authentic New Yorkers for what turns Add to this the creation of the RICO suggests, was DeSimone’s close friend out to be meaningless dollars, is a per- statutes that, with perhaps dubious con- Jimmy Burke—the De Niro charac- petual one. This process arrived at an in- stitutionality, made it possible to send

68 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 a crime boss to prison for life for a pat- tern of racketeering, instead of having to nickel-and-dime the smaller charges. BRIEFLY NOTED A persuasive alternative account makes less of RICO and more of porno. The for- Wintering, by Katherine May (Riverhead). This timely mem- mer Mafia prosecutor John Kroger, in oir details seven months that the author, suffering from a his 2008 book, “Convictions,” details his mysterious illness, spent sequestered at home. For May, who team’s victories against the Mob but ad- saw life as “linear, a long march from birth to death,” the en- mits, with some chagrin, that the Mob forced hiatus comes to feel like nonexistence. Yet it inspires was really defeated not by charges but unusual investigations—into hibernating animals, deciduous by changes. Crime battens on prohibi- trees, the cultures of places with long winters, and the ritual tion. The lotteries stripped the numbers pauses that once shaped human society. May’s message isn’t racket of its appeal; Internet porn took about how to be cheery during a personal winter but about a toll on the prostitution and smut busi- how to embrace the “negative presence” of these moments, ness; easily obtained credit cards robbed and to allow the rebirth they naturally engender. “We have the loan sharks of their monopoly. A seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall more permissive society—with gambling, from us,” she writes. “Given time, they grow again.” sex, and debt regularized—was a less Mafia-friendly one. Being a criminal is We Keep the Dead Close, by Becky Cooper (Grand Central). always a bad career choice; the risks are The woman at the center of this biography-cum-detective too high and the hours too long. It has story is Jane Britton, a doctoral student in archeology at Har- now become a ridiculous one. You’re bet- vard who was brutally murdered in 1969. Cooper, a Harvard ter off actually being in waste manage- alumna, tracks down people involved in the case—the neigh- ment than using it as a cover. bor who found the body, a policeman, university museum According to a new foreword to Sel- staff—and charts how Britton’s story has metamorphosed, wyn Raab’s big book, however, the story through successive generations of students, into a “myth” of the Mob’s vanishing in New York may about the dangers that women in academia face. While pro- itself be another, newer myth. There are jecting her own life onto Britton’s, Cooper weighs the re- signs that the Mob is holding on to life. sponsibility to accurately narrate the past: “Is it ever justifiable, A new generation of mobsters stay well I wondered, to trap someone in a story that robs them of below the radar and pursue their little their truth, but voices someone else’s?” scams away from the headlines, with minimal attention. The final irony there Bring Me the Head of Quentin Tarantino, by Julián Herbert, is that Donald Trump, who idolized the translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney (Gray- Mob bosses of the eighties, modelled wolf ). Conceptual artists and sicarios share a capitalist Wild his own behavior on theirs without ac- West in this Mexican writer’s phantasmagoric stories. A “per- tually being sharp enough to play in their sonal memories coach” extorts his clients; a crack addict im- league. National politics proved easier personates a famous writer; and, in the titular story, a film to con than the concrete Mob in New critic tutors the leader of a cartel who, bearing “the face of York. He learned the tabloid truths with- Quentin Tarantino,” has put a bounty on his doppelgänger. out having the tough-guy stones. Giddily undermining authorial convention—one character If the old Italian Mob of New York delights in “depositing a little vomit on those readers who fame is passing, one of its oddest lega- adore straightforward literature”—the stories show that, as cies is the word itself. Though the term the hapless film critic notes, “parody and the sublime are com- is Sicilian in origin, everyone has a plementary, even at times interchangeable, aesthetic concepts.” “mafia” now, including Russians, Co- lombians, Chechens, and Corsicans, not Music for the Dead and Resurrected, by Valzhyna Mort (Far- to mention those book reviewers. When rar, Straus & Giroux). Memory, metaphor, and myth inter- moviemakers want to indicate pure evil mingle to sometimes nightmarish effect in this collection by now, they employ the Albanian mafia, a Belarus-born poet. Mort excavates the individual and com- as in the Liam Neeson movies—Alba- munal traumas wrought by a violent and repressive national nians presumably being judged less likely history, and calls herself “a test-child exposed to the burning to be offended than other nationalities, reactor of my grandmother’s memory.” Her poetry can be or at least less well organized in their stark in its sorrow and startling in its horror, but it is enlivened offense. Had the Mafia never left rural with gallows humor and a surreal sensibility. “Why does un- Italy for fame in New York, the world folding this starched bedding / feel like / skinning someone would have been deprived of the win- invisible?” she asks. “Why can’t the spoons, head-down in ning name for a universal concept. It’s glasses, stop screaming?” Incantatory refrains evoke the wails a peculiar American triumph.  of an accordion, an instrument that provides a leitmotif.

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 69 (“We’re chipper as can be,” he told his A CRITIC AT LARGE brother), and in his anonymous report- ing he often channelled the moderate Republican positions he’d been fed in INSIDE STORY his father’s parlor. But in the longer essay he was working on, not published until Henry Adams excavated the past and anticipated the future. half a century later, Adams was less cau- tious. “The credit of the Government BY DAN CHIASSON was tottering,” he warned. Adams feared that the Constitution, a document that his family had been arguing about for decades, had licensed a “sectional power within the Govern- ment,” which had now “raised its hand to destroy that Government.” The cor- ruption of the outgoing Buchanan Ad- ministration seemed to him grotesque: “The frauds discovered . . . had begun to assume a vague and astonishing size,” while “public confidence and courage were shattered.” Looking back on the period, in 1907, Adams filled out the picture: the secessionists were “unbal- anced in mind,” “fit for medical treat- ment, like other victims of hallucina- tion,” “haunted by suspicion,” and prone to “violent morbid excitement.” Adams was an antislavery North- erner with a caste affinity for Southern gentlemen like his college friend Wil- liam (Rooney) Lee, Robert E. Lee’s son. Adams had made a faster start in pol- itics than even his distinguished ances- tors, but his sentences imply that he al- ready envisioned a different form of power. He was constructing a sensi- bility that could organize a wide vari- ety of information, “a hodge-podge of K8P0V4L world-fact, private fact, philosophy, irony,” according to his friend William way we go into a Presidential tran- were nevertheless intended, Adams James. His prose often made intricate Asition, one of the most worrisome wrote, to be read “a century or two hence,” beauty out of the ironic arrangement of since 1860-61, when the unity of the na- as a “memorial of manners and habits proprietary facts. It was a style that could tion hung in the balance. Henry Adams, at the time of the great secession of 1860.” be written only from a front-row seat not quite twenty-three, the grandson Adams’s point of view in his Wash- on the sidelines, since it made a show and great-grandson of U.S. Presidents, ington play-by-play remains elusive, of both its access and its independence. passed that season in Washington, serv- since it was deeply vested in personal ing as personal secretary to his father, motives and relations. He wrote about enry Adams was born in 1838, “under Charles Francis Adams, a congressman power “from within,” as David S. Brown Hthe shadow of Boston State House,” from Massachusetts, while making the puts it in his new biography, “The Last according to the famous opening sen- social rounds and working behind the American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life tence of his book “The Education of scenes as an anonymous correspondent and Improbable Education of Henry Henry Adams.” The “nest of associa- for the Boston Daily Advertiser. Adams Adams” (Scribner). Adams approached tions” that surrounded him from birth was also drafting a magazine essay and that winter in Washington as some com- put him within earshot of power from sending voluminous letters to his brother bination of reporter, satirist, historian, the start. He grew up tiptoeing around Charles, in which he promised to sup- and political operative. In his correspon- a man whom everyone in his family called ply “all the gossip.” These private letters dence, his tone was frequently upbeat “the President”: John Quincy Adams, his grandfather. He passed summer af- Writing from the inner circles of power, Adams sought a wider historical scale. ternoons reading Sir Walter Scott on a

70 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY AGOSTINO IACURCI bed of deteriorating congressional doc- way that he needed to monitor carefully, cess, the bankruptcy of the very distinc- uments. His destiny was, he wrote, to be he preferred the South to the North. tion between winning and losing. At a “stable-companion to statesmen.” Early But he seemed to require both sets of Harvard, he carouses with Virginians, in his life, he documented their power. values: his sentences mix long clauses graduates in the middle of the pack, and In old age, he recorded their inconse- with short quips, the leisurely punctu- is chosen as class speaker. He meanders quence. Once, during the Wilson Ad- ated by the terse, description by maxim. through Europe, fails to master Ger- ministration, Adams welcomed the As- Adams’s writing can be understood man, loses interest in studying law, and sistant Secretary of the Navy to his home as his lifelong attempt to draw out the is made his father’s chief Washington on Lafayette Square, which looked out implications of his famous name. Late aide. When Lincoln then appoints his on the White House. “Nothing that you in life, trying to escape himself, he trav- father minister to the Court of St. James’s, minor o6cials or the occupant of that elled to Samoa. But even there the lo- Adams heads to London and plays a house can do will affect the history of cals, fondly recalling a visit from the role in keeping the British government the world for long,” he told his visitor, U.S.S. John Adams, knew who he was. neutral during the Civil War, while his Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Adams may be the first American writer brother Charles stays and fights with Anyone writing about Adams’s life to have checked his privilege, as we bravery in the Gettysburg campaign. has to trellis the narrative to “The Ed- would put it. Brown’s term “American After a brief turn as a pundit calling for ucation,” written during Adams’s strange, aristocrat” would have struck Adams as government reform, Adams is invited Gnostic last period, under the influence an oxymoron, but he took for granted to teach medieval history at Harvard. of medieval stained glass and stonework, a social position so fixed that it could He protests, very honorably, that he and not made public until after his death, be wielded against itself. He enjoyed knows nothing about the subject; he is in 1918. It is an astonishing performance both what he called the “safeguards” of given the job anyway. in the key of autobiography, a kind of the Adams pedigree and the spoils of a The pace of the book in its early chap- lucid dream through which historical large fortune inherited from his mother. ters implies an even distribution of these names and events stray. A theme devel- Brahmin was the name given by Oliver life incidents across its length, as in a ops early: “life was double.” Childhood Wendell Holmes, Sr., around 1860 to conventional autobiography. But “The summers in Quincy, “a two hours’ walk members of Boston’s Old Guard fam- Education” is not conventional, and not from Beacon Hill,” were peonies, the ilies, who, wealthy from industries whose even quite an autobiography. Adams smell of hay, “peaches, lilacs, syringas”; economic miracle depended on free or usually refers to himself in the third per- winters in Boston were “cold grays” and exploited labor—the China trade, the son, adding a grand study of failure to “muddy thaws.” Weakened by scarlet railroads, manufacturing—began to sup- the library of volumes written about his fever and smaller than his brothers, ply themselves with heraldry and prop- family’s legendary statesmen. Adams Adams noted in his “character and pro- erty. More statesmen than merchants, saw himself as a passenger in his life, cesses of mind” a “fining-down process the Adamses were secure enough in riding his own name. “He accepted the of scale.” While men like his grand- their status to break many of the Brah- situation,” he wrote, “as though he had father had sat in “the best pews” since min codes, but Adams concluded that been a party to it, and under the same “the glacial epoch,” he found a kindred he was “held up solely by social posi- circumstances would do it again, the spirit in “the Madam,” his grandmother, tion and a sharp tongue.” That “solely” more readily for knowing the exact val- Louisa Catherine Adams, who kept a is a classic Adams note of overstate- ues.” At times this Henry Adams re- quietly appointed life apart, and repre- ment: those two ingredients not only sembles a persona, a little like the feck- sented art and interiority: held him up but fed a lifelong literary less antihero whom T. S. Eliot called project of situating a single human imag- J. Alfred Prufrock. The Madam was a little more remote than ination inside concentric rings of his- The sense that your life is happen- the President, but more decorative. She stayed much in her own room with the Dutch tiles, torical time, a presence at once puny ing not to you but to a kind of emissary looking out on her garden with the box walks, and, since it spoke so grandly of its in- dispatched into social and historical and seemed a fragile creature to a boy who consequence, huge. space is something many writers have sometimes brought her a note or a message, and felt. Henry Adams writes sentences; took distinct pleasure in looking at her delicate he title “The Education of Henry “Henry Adams” goes to soireés. Adams’s face under what seemed to him very becom- ing caps. He liked her refined figure; her gen- TAdams” recalls novels like “The choice makes “Henry Adams” the sub- tle voice and manner; her vague effect of not History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.” ject of gossip between the writer and belonging there, but to Washington or to Eu- But its structure reverses the classic for- the reader; even more than before, rope, like her furniture, and writing-desk with mula of a charismatic nobody rewarded, Adams could claim to be the ultimate little glass doors above and little eighteenth-cen- in a final turn, with his rightful wealth insider. “I am trying to persuade myself tury volumes in old binding, labelled “Peregrine Pickle” or “Tom Jones” or “Hannah More.” and pedigree. “Probably no child, born that there is any such thing as me,” he in the year, held better cards than he,” wrote to a friend in 1915.“More and more In these staged contests with the flinty, Adams writes of himself. Just like that, I am forced to admit that the whole Adams always sides with the sumptu- one very useful narrative structure, that show is a piece of idiocy.” ous. He prefers women to men, the hu- of adversity overcome, is ruled out. In- He published as a game of peeka- midity of Washington to the cold of stead, Adams tells the story of failing boo—by half measures, back channels, Boston, Paris to London; in some real up: he notes, with each unearned suc- and guises. The obvious differences aside,

THEEW N YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 71 he recalls Emily Dickinson, his contem- The scene in Cambridge, according to in the year 1800, Washington is seen as porary, in the ways that he constructed Adams, was like a “faculty-meeting with- “a fever-stricken morass,” the “shapeless, alternative platforms for publication out business,” so desolate that it would unfinished Capitol” backed by swamp- within an eager coterie. His writing was have “starved a polar bear.” land. A visitor would see only “a gov- sometimes cultivated, like a hobby farm, Adams’s life as a Bostonian in Wash- ernment capable of sketching a mag- as a wealthy man’s pastime. When he ington, hiding out in the spotlight, is nificent plan, and willing to give only a published a novel, “Democracy” (1880), the focus of Ormond Seavey’s “Henry half-hearted pledge for its fulfillment.” anonymously, and another, “Esther” Adams in Washington: Linking the For pages at a time, Adams’s “His- (1884), under a pseudonym, their author- Personal and Public Lives of Ameri- tory” is a jigsaw design of juxtaposed ship fuelled speculation among readers, ca’s Man of Letters” (University of Vir- facts and quotations. It is hard to imag- which Adams clearly enjoyed. A serene ginia). By 1880, a tight circle of inti- ine the archival work necessary to write book about the Middle Ages, “Mont- mates, who christened themselves “the even a single one of its paragraphs. Very Saint-Michel and Chartres,” was initially Five of Hearts”—the Adamses, John few lay readers have delved in. (When written as a gift to his nieces and pri- and Clara Hay, and the eccentric geol- Elizabeth Hardwick was asked whether vately distributed. Adams’s strangest book ogist Clarence King—had formed. The her divorce from Robert Lowell had was “Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai,” group later incorporated officially, even been painful, she reportedly replied, “Oh, dictated to him by a Tahitian queen dur- designing its own china pattern. Adams not at all, except, of course, the usual in- ing his late-in-life travels. His name went to work every day at the State De- tellectuals’ quarrel over which of us appears nowhere on it or in it: he calls partment library, returning in the eve- should get Henry Adams’s History.”) It himself Tauraatua I Amo, the honorific ning to the large house he and Clover struck some at the time as a quixotic, given him by the clan. “The Education” rented on H Street to socialize with monkish endeavor, or merely as a way was initially circulated only among a friends and famous callers, including of keeping a daily appointment with his small group of Adams’s friends; when it Matthew Arnold on a U.S. tour spon- desk at the State Department, where was officially published, in 1918, it ap- sored by P. T. Barnum. The Hays and no doubt many other men of means peared with a preface written by Adams the Adamses bought a parcel of land fac- scribbled their days away. The volumes yet signed by his old student and friend ing on Lafayette Square and hired the were published between 1889 and 1891, Henry Cabot Lodge. The preface con- renowned architect H. H. Richardson, but Adams’s interest in the project pe- cluded that Adams, a “small” artist, had their old friend, to design a conjoined tered out. “As long as I could make life failed to find sufficient “literary form.” house in the Romanesque style, looking work, I stood by it,” he remarked cryp- across the square at the White House. tically, when he was rounding the bend. e was mercurial and restless, but The consuming work of this period Hhe toyed with a respectable life was Adams’s nine-volume history of the dams alludes to his “History” only in the Boston bubble and among the fifteen years after his great-grandfather’s Aonce in “The Education,” and only Washington élite. In 1872, at thirty-four, Administration, “History of the United to disparage it: Adams married Marian Hooper, known States of America During the Admin- He had even published a dozen volumes of to everyone as Clover, a witty “Voltaire istrations of Thomas Jefferson and James American history for no other purpose than in petticoats,” according to her child- Madison.” It was traditional for Adams to satisfy himself whether, by the severest pro- hood friend Henry James. (Clover fa- men to lose themselves in the family pa- cess of stating, with the least possible com- mously said of him, “He chaws more pers, but Adams chose the careers of his ment, such facts as seemed sure, in such order than he bites off.”) Soon Adams resigned ancestors’ rivals. To many, it is the great- as seemed rigorously consequent, he could fix for a familiar moment a necessary sequence of his job at Harvard and the couple moved est work of history written by an Amer- human movement. to Washington in search of a social life. ican. In its opening survey of America Indeed, “The Education” leaves out ev- erything from Adams’s busiest and most productive period. He abruptly hops off the time line in 1871, leaping over his marriage to Clover as well as her tragic death, by suicide, in 1885. Clover’s name never appears in “The Education.” The story picks up in 1892, with barely a note of explanation: suddenly, it’s simply “Twenty Years After.” Part of the book’s fascination derives from this twenty-year black hole. Though Adams may have intended “The Education” as a caution against biography, he had to have known the void would be filled. Brown’s “The Last American Aristocrat” follows two “His parrot goes everywhere he goes.” multivolume biographies of Adams, by Ernest Samuels and Edward Chalfant, thing to seize. Like Mrs. Madeleine old age, Adams conducted himself with and a recent biography of Clover, by Na- Lightfoot Lee, the heroine of “Democ- the shocked air of someone who had talie Dykstra. The Adamses, Brown sug- racy,” who moves to Washington “to returned from a sojourn into the future. gests, could not conceive a child; Adams touch with her own hand the massive In Chicago, in 1893, and in Paris, in worked long hours, and Clover’s days machinery” of power, life had rattled 1900, he attended World Expositions settled into tedium. The couple walled him, and he longed for a new scale. “I of the new century’s technology. The themselves off from the world beyond want to go to Egypt,” Mrs. Lee exclaims historian in him detected in the huge, their exclusive set. Their barbs became at the novel’s close. “Oh, what rest it silent machines on display “a rupture too severe, their gossip too corrosive, the would be to live in the Great Pyramid in historical sequence.”Adams, accord- Five of Hearts too impenetrable. and look out for ever at the polar star!” ing to Brown, “could appreciate Chi- Suicide and mental illness were so Beginning in 1886, at the age of cago’s flux because he felt it in himself.” rampant in Boston’s ruling class that se- forty-eight, Adams struck out for his Seeing the “chaos” of his mind reflected crecy about it sometimes appears to be own polar star, travelling in the world changed him. the key to the entire Brahmin code. Clo- to Japan, Polynesia, Cuba, The word “ecstasy” comes ver once joked to her father, “The in- Mexico, and elsewhere. His from the Greek ekstasis— sane asylum seems to be the goal of every adventures put him in touch to stand outside oneself. good and conscientious Bostonian.” (In with expressions of spiritual Adams experienced, in his the years after Clover’s death, her sister, unity that he envied and, like later years, a period of won- Ellen, threw herself in front of a train, many wealthy Americans at der that, on the page, is ec- and her brother, Edward, jumped from the time, sought to appro- static, psychedelic. a third-story window.) Clover broke priate. He was kept abreast “The Education” begins down on the Adamses’ wedding trip, in of Washington’s ups and as Louis Seize and ends as Egypt, and again when her beloved fa- downs while abroad, and steampunk. Near its conclu- ther died, in the spring of 1885. Before embarked on a years-long sion, Adams beholds the hall she killed herself, she had been “off her collaboration with the sculptor Augus- of dynamos at the Paris Exposition of feed,” Adams wrote, for months. Clover tus Saint-Gaudens to design a memo- 1900. “As he grew accustomed to the had taken up photography and showed rial for Clover in Rock Creek Ceme- great gallery of machines,” Adams writes, a real mastery of its rapidly developing tery. Like the twenty-year gap in “The “he began to feel the forty-foot dyna- technology, but her last photos, taken Education,” it was meant as an enigma: mos as a moral force”: on a trip to West Virginia to buoy her enormous, shrouded, neither male nor In these seven years man had translated spirits, look vacant when compared with female, with no plaque or inscription. It himself into a new universe which had no com- the warm scenes she’d once captured. has been described as the greatest work mon scale of measurement with the old. He On the afternoon of December 6, 1885, of sculpture of its time. Adams liked to had entered a supersensual world, in which he Adams returned home from the dentist ride out to the cemetery and hide in the could measure nothing except by chance col- and found Clover dead, a vial of potas- hedges, listening to people’s ham-fisted lisions of movements imperceptible to his senses, perhaps even imperceptible to his in- sium cyanide, one of her darkroom chem- interpretations of the monument. It’s struments, but perceptible to each other, and icals, drained beside her. one of the few gestures he ever made so to some known ray at the end of the scale. After Clover’s death, Adams seems that put him even within scoffing dis- to have decided that he would lead a tance of the general public. One “instrument” that did pick up “posthumous” life. In the opening pages those signals from the future was Ad- of “The Education,” Adams—who lived he real fruits of Adams’s “posthu- ams’s prose. And so we have, in his book, for eleven years after its completion— Tmous” life are his books; above all, the eerie double exposure of a person embeds his death notice: “To his life as “The Education,” “Mont-Saint-Michel from the distant past almost stepping a whole he was a consenting, contract- and Chartres,” and a short, little-read on our toes as he describes the techno- ing party and partner, from the moment volume called “A Letter to American logical future. “After so many years of he was born to the moment he died.” Teachers of History.” He seemed to effort to find one’s drift,” Adams writes, At what moment in Henry Adams’s life grasp that literary power, unlike that of “the drift found the seeker, and slowly did “Henry Adams” die? The “Adams” Presidencies and political parties, had a swept him forward and back, with a whose story is told in the book’s second chance to outlast its moment. In “The steady progress oceanwards.” When I half is a man whose way of understand- Education,” he describes the elusive work read the last chapters of the book, I al- ing time and space has been perma- of deciding which artifacts of the past ways think of another great work that nently altered. His life as a sequence of matter: a “cane-bottomed chair” is prized ends with a delegate of historical time events has been overtaken by what he at auction long after its historical con- gazing at his own obsolescence: Stanley calls “force.” Historians, he wrote, had text has passed; meanwhile, we pay pen- Kubrick’s film “2001: A Space Odyssey.” always crafted stories of individuals and nies for the “philosophy and science” of Henry Adams, who considered himself institutions which assumed “in silence a bygone era. “a child of the seventeenth and eigh- a relation of cause and effect”; Clover’s His writing in these late works is teenth centuries,” who washed ashore death was a random event within the designed to hold its value, even once in the twentieth, knew that he’d glimpsed system which could cause the whole the world he observed has expired. In our world. 

THEEW N YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 73 drive-through “Götterdämmerung,” MUSICAL EVENTS which Michigan Opera Theatre pre- sented in October in Detroit, seems all the more staggering in retrospect: in any PREMIÈRE CONTENT year, it would have been a formidable accomplishment, and in the midst of a Orchestras “reimagine” their seasons with online events. pandemic it felt close to miraculous. When, over the summer, orchestras BY ALEX ROSS began making known their fall plans, the operative word was “reimagined.” At least twenty orchestras, from Al- bany to St. Louis, announced reimag- ined seasons. Yet, because so many in- stitutions were using identical language, it didn’t seem that anything particu- larly imaginative was going on. A cer- tain herd mentality also surfaced in the programming. Even a welcome con- centration on works by African-Amer- ican composers, in recognition of Black Lives Matter protests, leaned too much on a few names, with wide swaths of Black music left unexplored. One orchestra that avoided the “re- imagined” label was the Detroit Sym- phony, which had two distinct advan- tages: its programming was already livelier and more contemporary than that of most American ensembles, and for some years it has been in the habit

K8P0V4L of streaming its concerts. In August, not long after Detroit emerged from lock- down, the orchestra began presenting outdoor chamber concerts. These were charmingly intimate, neighborly affairs, with musicians providing spoken intro- ductions. Come fall, the ensemble moved back into Orchestra Hall, its longtime home, marshalling nearly thirty pro- grams. Jader Bignamini, Detroit’s gifted o many musicians’ ears, the word they are done, they tend to evaporate new music director, established himself T“stream” has an ugly ring: it sug- from memory, leaving only ghosts of as an incisive leader. As with Michigan gests a utility that can be turned on feeling in their wake. Opera Theatre’s “Götterdämmerung”— and off with a faucet. In recent years, Nonetheless, with no alternative in Detroit is dominating American musi- concert halls and theatres have found view, performing-arts institutions have cal life at the moment—several of the renewed appeal as places of refuge where decamped to virtuality. They have done orchestra’s events would have warranted listeners can escape the addictive in- so not only to maintain contact with attention in any season. jection of data—e-mails, texts, notifi- their audiences but, even more impor- In early November, the violinist Jen- cations, feeds, alerts—and focus on a tant, to keep their artists engaged. Many nifer Koh came to Detroit to play in single event made by fellow-humans. American orchestras are delivering some the world première of Tyshawn Sorey’s The near-total disappearance of live semblance of a fall season, even if di- “For Marcos Balter,” which the com- performance in the pandemic era has mensions are reduced and ambitions poser has described as a “non-certo”—a trapped us more than ever in front of confined. Opera houses have been mostly concerto shorn of theatrical conflict and screens, where distractions stretch out inactive, in light of the nearly insuper- virtuoso features. Sorey, a remarkable to the crack of doom. Streamed events able epidemiological challenges of as- and unclassifiable figure in contempo- lack the psychic imprint of the real, the sembling soloists, a chorus, and an or- rary American music, first established aura of shared experience: the moment chestra in one space. Yuval Sharon’s himself as an avant-garde-leaning jazz drummer and has more recently built Streaming lets the curious listener range freely across the musical map. up a compelling portfolio of works for

74 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY PING ZHU classical ensembles. He has the cardi- chestra in a pristine rendition of Al- terously racing score allows individual nal virtue of being unpredictable: each fred Schnittke’s brooding Piano Con- musicians to shine, and also serves to new piece of his feels like a departure certo, with Yefim Bronfman as the introduce eight of the collaborative part- into fresh terrain. soloist. The Dallas Symphony, under ners that Salonen has gathered around Morton Feldman, the master of ab- Fabio Luisi, organized a meaty night him in his new role: the flutist Claire stract quietude, also favored titles be- of Verdi excerpts, with thrillingly full- Chase, the guitarist-composer Bryce ginning with the preposition “for,” and throated singing by Angela Meade, Dessner, the bassist-composer Esper- “For Marcos Balter” opens in a very Jamie Barton, and Bryan Hymel. And anza Spalding, the soprano Julia Bull- Feldman-like world, with shifting con- a fifty-eight-player contingent from the ock, the A.I. innovator Carol Reiley, stellations of sustained tones, atmo- Boston Symphony, under Ken-David the violinist Pekka Kuusisto, the pia- spheric dissonances, and wisps of Masur, gave a forceful reading of nist-composer Nicholas Britell, and quicker figuration (a sextuplet on the Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, Muhly himself. The “Throughline” piano). That elemental texture persists thereby breaking months of melancholy video even has a silent part for Salonen: through the first part of the work, and, silence in Symphony Hall, one of the he is seen walking through the woods as mysteriously gorgeous as it is, it risks nation’s finest acoustic spaces. around his home in Finland. becoming pastiche. But then new pat- I especially relished the work of the The New York Philharmonic, the terns emerge: sustained tones, block Cincinnati Symphony, which is thriv- nation’s oldest orchestra, has been chords, murmurs of recessed melody. ing under the stylish, polyglot direc- largely absent from the streaming mar- By the end, an increasingly charged, tion of Louis Langrée. Cincinnati’s ketplace. Health regulations have pre- unstable mass of forces yields unex- all-American season-opening concert vented it from organizing even mod- pected tension. The coda is magnifi- included Jessie Montgomery’s 2014 est-sized recording sessions, although cent and ominous: the timpani thwack piece for strings, “Banner,” which rings an exception was made for a recent on- out a slow-rising sequence of notes, al- questioning variations on the national line gala, which included Bernstein’s most like a chopped-and-screwed ver- anthem; Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: “Candide” Overture and Elgar’s “Nim- sion of the opening piano gestures. Summer of 1915,” brimming with gauzy rod.” The orchestra did, however, make As it happens, the Seattle Symphony nostalgia; and Copland’s “Appalachian its presence felt in city squares and parks, streamed another major new Sorey work Spring,” an emblem of New Deal ide- in an initiative titled NY Phil Band- a couple of weeks later: “For Roscoe alism. Angel Blue sang piercingly in wagon. This was the brainchild of the Mitchell,” for cello and orchestra, with the Barber, and Christopher Pell, the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, Seth Parker Woods as the soloist and Cincinnati’s principal clarinettist, an- who accompanied squads of players in David Robertson conducting. It, too, chored an urgently glowing ensemble more than eighty concerts across the takes off from the Feldman model, with in the Copland. A month later, the vi- five boroughs. In October, I caught an tendrils of tone wafting across opaque olinist Augustin Hadelich tore into the event on a pedestrian island at Broad- chordal clusters. Yet its narrative arc is glittering Second Violin Concerto of way and Twenty-ninth Street. I’d never dramatically different from that of “For the eighteenth-century Afro-French heard a program for countertenor and Marcos Balter.” The cello fuses frag- composer Joseph Bologne, who received horn quartet, and may not hear one mentary motifs into long-breathed much attention this fall; the Detroit again. A few dozen spectators took in legato lines. Toward the end, violins Symphony played his First Symphony, “Dripping Amber,” a new piece by Jes- and violas pick up those songful pat- and the L.A. Opera revived his comic sica Mays; horn-quartet pieces by Ni- terns, as if preparing to break through opera “The Anonymous Lover.” kolai Tcherepnin and Alfred Diewitz; into some collective epiphany; but a The most elaborate production of and a strangely effective arrangement crisis intervenes, in the form of grisly, the fall came from the San Francisco of “Dido’s Lament.” dissonant quadruple-forte chords. The Symphony, which had to scrap most of For the most part, only those who cello descends deep into its bass regis- its plans to celebrate its new music di- are actively searching out streaming con- ter, in wounded retreat. Both of Sorey’s rector, Esa-Pekka Salonen. Its online certs will find them. The Bandwagon, imposing utterances come across as gala, on November 14th, encapsulated which featured Costanzo singing from monuments to a tragic year. Salonen’s questing spirit nevertheless, a bright-red pickup truck, caught the with the conductor on hand to lead a attention of many people who don’t oth- owever constricted the streaming movement from John Adams’s “Shaker erwise attend concerts. Although there Hritual may be, it lets the curious Loops.” The major offering was the was something dishearteningly mar- listener range across the musical map première of Nico Muhly’s “Through- ginal about the spectacle—most pedes- in a way that would be impossible under line,” which makes a virtue of distanc- trians paused only briefly before walk- ordinary circumstances. From my well- ing and isolation. In an astounding feat ing on—its very distance from the worn office chair, I was able to make a of editing, the video of the performance customary grandeur of classical presen- remote tour of a dozen or more Amer- integrates footage of players and en- tations may do something to change ican orchestras. Members of the Chi- sembles in various locations, resulting popular perceptions of the institution. cago Symphony turned in a rich-hued not in an anonymous wall of Zoom In any case, the series restored, if just account of the Dvořák Sextet. Franz boxes but in a seamless montage of for a moment, the psychic bond that a Welser-Möst led the Cleveland Or- closeup musical action. Muhly’s dex- season of isolation has broken. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 75 small-bore scandals and Victorian twists, ON TELEVISION faithfully upholds. It’s risk-averse in a way that is itself a kind of risk—com- fortingly old-fashioned, at the cost of PUBLIC LIFE staying one cautious step behind the present that it aims to represent. Political and personal scandals in “Roadkill” and “I Hate Suzie.” As the show opens, Peter has just had a triumph in court. After a newspaper BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ accused him of profiting from his gov- ernment position—by consulting for an American lobbying group when he was a junior minister of health—he sued for libel and won. Much like Brett Kava- naugh’s confirmation hearing, the Lau- rence case seems to have come down to a question of calendars; Charmian Pep- per (Sarah Greene), the journalist who wrote a story placing Peter at the lobby- ists’ Washington, D.C., headquarters, was forced to recant, after Peter’s team pre- sented an official diary scrubbed of the offlending visit. “They’re always the best cases,” Peter’s young barrister (Pippa Ben- nett-Warner) brashly tells a colleague, as the courthouse crowd spills onto the side- walk around her. “The ones you win when you suspect your client is guilty as hell.” Peter’s victory, and the scandal it con- ceals, is merely the first plot plate that Hare sets spinning. Soon his trusty, bum- bling aide, Duncan Knock (Iain De Caes- tecker), spirits him to Shephill, a wom- en’s prison, where an inmate (Gbemisola Ikumelo) insists that she must talk to him about his daughter. The daughter who doesn’t speak to him, or the other one? Peter asks. No, a third, the hereto- fore unknown offlspring of a youth spent in drunken philandering. Peter has just n Election Night, I was on the they hope to compete with the present? enough time to take in this dubious rev- Olive-streaming Web site Twitch, Such is the challenge faced by “Road- elation before he must rush offl to 10 helping a French friend try to make kill” (on PBS’s “Masterpiece”), David Downing Street, where he squirms be- sense of the incomprehensible for an Hare’s new political thriller in four ep- fore Dawn Ellison (Helen McCrory), audience of his compatriots. It was two isodes. Watching it now is like chasing the fearsome Prime Minister, who looks in the morning across the Atlantic, then the double tequila shot of the real with like a dyed tulip in her form-fitting three, then four, and still viewers stayed a milky cup of tea. The show is set in powder-blue suit and has the air of a cat tuned. “This is better than a TV show,” England, which Americans continue to about to pounce. A Cabinet reshuffle is one commented, as we puzzled through imagine as a land of escapist sanity, de- planned; Dawn dangles the possibility various disaster scenarios that seemed spite recent evidence to the contrary. of a major promotion, and Peter, blinded equal parts outlandish and plausible. “You have to forget about Brexit,” the by ego, steps obligingly into her trap. Suspense, villainy, pettiness, infighting, Tory transport minister, Peter Laurence “Roadkill” is a stylish show, with a gimmicks galore: the reality-TV poli- (Hugh Laurie), tells a caller to the radio handsome title sequence that calls to tics of our reality-TV President have talk show on which he regularly bloviates. mind the great Saul Bass, and a traips- had us mercilessly hooked, from slow- “It was a national trauma, as you call it, ing score, by Harry Escott, that casts a rolling attempt at a coup to dripping- but it’s a trauma we came through. It’s playful, mysterious mood. We get lots hair-dye debacle. Spare a sympathetic over.” That reassuring fantasy of politics of dark wood, dark suits, and dark cor- thought for television writers. How can as usual is one that “Roadkill,” with its porate cars that glide, unimpeded, down glistening gray streets. Much of the David Hare’s “Roadkill,” starring Hugh Laurie, is comfortingly old-fashioned. show’s appeal lies in its embrace of the

76 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY MOJO WANG familiar. The gruff, macho newspaper sure is the subject of “I Hate Suzie” (on editor (Pip Torrens); the fragile, neglected HBO Max), a destabilizing, off-kilter wife (Saskia Reeves); the chafing, un- show created by Billie Piper and Lucy satisfied mistress (Sidse Babett Knud- Prebble. Piper stars as Suzie Pickles, an sen)—we know them well. But Hare, actress who, like Piper herself, found dazzled by the buffet of tropes available teen-age stardom as a singer and is to him, can’t keep himself from loading now entering the career descent of early up his tray. It’s not enough for Peter’s il- middle age. (Action shows in which legitimate child to claim his attention she runs from Nazi zombies are her after twenty-odd years; his bratty daugh- bread and butter.) She lives in a cozy ter Lily (Millie Brady), resentful and en- house in the English countryside with titled, must be photographed by the tab- her husband, Cob (Daniel Ings), and loids snorting cocaine. Charmian Pepper, their young son, who is deaf. After her her name taken straight from Dickens’s phone is hacked, nude photos of her are reject pile, is given an alcohol problem splashed all over the Web, in flagrante to underscore her instability. (One de- delicto with a man whose cob is visi- pressing rule of thumb for this sort of bly not Cob’s. “There is a penis of color show is that the diligent journalist work- in the pictures,” she is informed by an ing to uncover the politician’s dirty truth indignant audience member at a sci-fi YOUR MONOGRAM must be a young woman, the better to convention—an absurdist phrase, at IMMORTALIZED be objectified by her bosses and prove once respectful and rude, that typifies IN GOLD & PLATINUM her worth as a go-getter even as she the show’s tart tonal mix. Seven styles available trades on her sex appeal. A second de- “I Hate Suzie” has a strange, strong JOHN- CHRISTIAN.COM pressing rule of thumb is that she must flavor, a briny funk with a surprising OR CALL (888) 646-6466 be disposed of, preferably by means of undercurrent of sweetness, like Scandi- ORDER BY 12/22 FOR THE HOLIDAYS a blunt collision—recalling the hurtling navian licorice. At first, I was repulsed. subway train that put an end to Kate Then dislike turned to craving. Each of HELP FOR ADDICTION Mara in “House of Cards.”) We get riots the show’s eight episodes is named for Dawn Farm offers affordable treatment for drug and alcohol addiction on a working farm. in prisons, vodka glasses thrown at heads a stage in coping with trauma: we start Accredited, internationally known, a unique in the heat of domestic anger, and vague, out with “Shock,” “Denial,” and “Fear,” program with compassionate care and hope. faceless foreign calamities. “It’s about before progressing through “Shame,” www.dawnfarm.org • 734.669.3800 Yemen,” a conniving politico tells the “Bargaining,” and “Guilt” to “Anger” and Prime Minister. Isn’t it always? “Acceptance,” but the artificiality of that What kept me watching was Laurie, structure is undercut by the show’s gen- who floats through the action with a be- uine, exploratory weirdness. mused, obliging look on his wonderful Berated by the furious, wounded Cob, lean, lipless face. There is something gen- Suzie goes off the rails. Woozy camera- tle and appeasing about his Peter, who work and screeching, witchy strings take prides himself on his working-class back- us into a mind altered by drugs, alco- ground, and is susceptible to maverick hol, and anxiety, but it is Piper’s raw, pricks of conscience—he alienates his comical performance as a not so smart OUR PORTLAND SHOWROOM IS OPEN! party, and seemingly all of Britain, by woman on the verge that stands out. 100 COMMERCIAL STREET, PORTLAND championing prison reform. (“The Brit- Suzie mumbles, makes excuses, and tells FREEPORT, PORTLAND AND SCARBOROUGH | MAINE ish like locking people up. It’s in our char- incompetent lies as the camera shows CHILTONS.COM acter,” the Prime Minister tells him—a her aging face in merciless closeup; she line that makes an American feel a little is a creature of haphazard instinct and less alone.) In the street, Peter is accosted ruinous libido. One excellent early ep- by selfie-seekers, but at home—where isode looks at desire from within, flash- Hare, a seasoned purveyor of female melo- ing through an array of Suzie’s sexual drama, unsubtly surrounds him with a fantasies as she and her savvy manager, Connecting pack of women who peck and nag—he Naomi (Leila Farzad), analyze them generations. is merely baffled, wondering what he’s together like critics at a screening. “We’ll ©2020 KENDAL doing neck-deep in this mess. sort it out like grownups, like in a Experience a retirement community Woody Allen film,” her oblivious lover that’s bringing generations together olitical reputations are made to (Nathaniel Martello-White) tells her, —engaging at every age and stage. P be won and lost. Private disgrace a reminder that adulthood is itself a is harder to grapple with, now that it performance, however derivative and

EQUAL HOUSING can be turned public with a click and imitative, that Suzie, like the rest of us, 1.800.548.9469 OPPORTUNITY kao.kendal.org/intergenerational a swipe. The violation of digital expo- must make her own. 

THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 77 around in your R.V. in search of tem- THE CURRENT CINEMA porary jobs, some of which come with a place to park, plus access to power and water. It was Bruder who came HARD ROAD TO TRAVEL across Linda, Swankie, and other no- mads, and reported in detail on the “Nomadland.” pattern of their endurance; now they have migrated into Zhao’s movie and BY ANTHONY LANE brought their weatherings with them. But what’s so dramatic about it? Why ne of the things we learn from the true to themselves—genuine wander- is it not a documentary? Ofilms of Chloé Zhao is this: bad ers, recounting their experience as birds In a word, because of Fern. She is a luck is the stuff that happens before of passage, and radiating a singular fictional creation, and she’s played by a story begins. As “The Rider” (2018) blend of stringency and warmth. Thus, a bona-fide film star, albeit one with a gets under way, the hero—a young fel- Linda, a smiling and capable figure hilariously low dose of airs and graces. low named Brady—already has an angry with silver hair, is played by Linda (If McDormand receives an Oscar nom- gash in his head, having tumbled from May; Swankie, who has seven or eight ination for her pains, as she should, ex- his horse at a rodeo and taken a hoof months to live, and who hangs a skull pect her to show up in Crocs.) One of to the skull. And now, at the start of and crossbones on the side of her the first actions that she is required to perform onscreen is to pee outside, in the middle of nowhere, on a freezing day. Later, an upset stomach forces her to excrete noisily into a bucket. At the other extreme, she gets to float naked in a creek, gazing up at the sky, with arms flung wide: a tranquil sight, though it doesn’t look especially healing or tran- scendent. It looks cold. I tried to imagine another actress in the role, but soon gave up. Only some- one as rooted and as resilient as Mc- Dormand, perhaps, can play so root- less a character. Fern used to live and to labor in Empire, Nevada, an old- school company town, owned by United States Gypsum. As we’re told at the outset of the film, 2011 marked the end of Empire; the plant was shut, and the Frances McDormand stars in Chloé Zhao’s film of hand-to-mouth living. town effectively died. Fern was mar- ried to a guy named Bo, but he, too, “Nomadland,” which Zhao wrote and van, is played by Swankie; and so on. passed away. They had no children, and directed, we meet Fern (Frances Mc- “Nomadland,” which won the main now it’s just her and Vanguard. At a Dormand), who no longer has a hus- prize at this year’s Venice Film Festi- sporting-goods store, she runs into a band, a regular job, or a home. Well, val, is based on the 2017 book of the family she knows. “Are you still doing she does have a home, but it’s a white same name, by Jessica Bruder. That is the van thing?” the mother asks, as if van that she has adapted, with lots of nonfiction, through and through: a deep nobody could keep up such a life for storage space, to be her only dwelling. delve, patiently researched, into the ris- long. “My mom says that you’re home- She calls it Vanguard. ing number of Americans for whom a less, is that true?” her daughter says. Another takeaway from Zhao’s stable existence is unaffordable. They Fern, unfazed, replies, “I’m just house- work: no land is more fertile than may have been scathed by personal less. Not the same thing, right?” the border zone between documen- hardship, or spit out by the financial tary and fiction. Brady, for instance, collapse of 2008. Most of them are of otion pictures, from their earli- is played by a real-life rider, also named riper years, weathered by a steady-hu- Mest days, have leaned toward peo- Brady, from the Pine Ridge Indian mored stoicism, and they’ve shrugged ple on the move. The medium is not Reservation, in South Dakota, and his off the burden of property ownership made for staying still. It seems natural wound is no invention. His sister, Lilly, in favor of what’s known as wheel es- that Chaplin, left alone in the final shot who has Asperger’s, plays a version of tate. According to the jargon, you can of “The Circus” (1828), on a patch of herself. In the same vein, most of the be a vandweller or, more specifically, a waste ground marked by a circle where folks in “Nomadland” are, as it were, workamper, which means that you travel the big top stood, should not linger

78 THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 ILLUSTRATION BY STEFFI WALTHALL long, in reflective mood, but turn and the chance to settle, in a safe haven, she Somewhere, inside this lovely and amble away. As the iris closes around rebuffs it. One day, after her van has desperate movie, there’s the ghost of a him, we don’t inquire where he might broken down, she visits her sister, Dolly Western. Though people still gather go next; what counts is the manner of (Melissa Smith), who lives on a pleas- around a campfire, their talk is of can- his going. The same applies to Jack ant suburban street—an alien planet, cer and P.T.S.D. Instead of cowboys Nicholson, as Bobby Dupea, at the bit- compared with the badlands and the driving cattle to high pastures, Fern ter end of “Five Easy Pieces” (1970), wilderness where Fern prefers to roam. and her kindred spirits converge, in abandoning his girlfriend at the gas “You left home as soon as you could,” certain months, on an Amazon ware- pumps, beside the Red Rooster Café, Dolly says to her, remembering their house—still obeying the rhythm of the and hitching a ride on a logging truck— childhood, and Fern, having borrowed seasons, I guess, as they bubble-wrap no wallet, no plans, not even a jacket, cash, is soon gone again. junk and box it in time for Christmas. although, as the trucker says, where Then, there is Dave, a workamper, Bruder’s book called attention to the they’re headed will be colder than hell. with too many miles on the clock. He’s economic ruthlessness of the Amazon Fans of that film will recall that played by David Strathairn, whom I setup, and the effect of the toil on older Bobby, whom we first see on a Cali- initially failed to spot, not just because employees; Zhao is more focussed on fornia oil rig, is a former classical pia- of his stiff white beard but also because Fern, as she greets her fellow-drones nist. It’s an odd conceit, yet we buy it, of the diffidence with which he ducks at lunch, and slices banana onto her because of Nicholson. Something sim- in and out of the frame. Zhao is the peanut-butter sandwich. ilar occurs in “Nomadland,” when Fern, foe of the meet-cute. Early on, Fern “Nomadland” is not primarily a pro- in conversation with a shy young drifter, walks away from a whimpering dog test. Rather, it maintains a fierce sad- suddenly declaims a Shakespeare son- and, contrary to the laws of cinematic ness, like the look in its heroine’s eyes, net. The scene is both unlikely and gratification, does not go back to claim alive to all that’s dying in the West. sublime, and it compels us to reassess it; with Dave, who is in equal need of That is why Zhao so often films at Fern’s motives. She was once a substi- companionship, she proves no easier to daylight’s decease, catching enormous tute teacher; is that not a portable skill? sway. Now and then, their orbits inter- skies of violet and rose, and why her Couldn’t she search for a school that sect—in the kitchen at Wall Drug, say, fable speaks to us, in 2020, as John needs a new teacher, drive there, and in South Dakota, where he flips burg- Ford’s “The Grapes of Wrath” did to begin again? Or—here’s the rub—has ers and she scrapes grease off the grill. audiences eighty years ago. Fern’s needs she gradually grown allergic to social Like many nomads, Dave has fouled and rights are as basic as those of the norms and addicted to the open road? up his life. (How, exactly, we can’t be Joad family, yet there was a breadth “All I wanted was to go somewheres; sure; but so expressive is Strathairn that and an uplift to their yearning that has all I wanted was a change, I warn’t par- we’re sure enough.) Not without trep- since dwindled to a speck. “Fellow ain’t ticular.” So says Huckleberry Finn, in idation, he is returning to his family for got a soul of his own, just a little piece the opening chapter of his adventures, the birth of his grandson. Fern is in- of a big soul,” Tom Joad said. “The one and it’s as if his craving has filtered vited to stop by, and so, at Thanksgiv- big soul that belongs to everybody.” down to Fern. ing, she rolls up, to the friendliest of Some hope. Fern has her own soul, No wonder the film is so tense. Fern welcomes. “You can stay,” Dave says. and it’s hers alone, packed away tight is never attacked or robbed, thank “Thanks, I need to do laundry,” she re- in the van, together with her tooth- heaven, yet the smell of possible dan- plies, though that isn’t what he had in brush and her chicken-noodle soup. ger hangs around. Notice how she stares mind. The bed in the guest room is so On she goes.  ahead as she eats, like a guard on watch. soft that Fern has no option but to go In everyday dealings, her courtesy is a and sleep in her van. She leaves before NEWYORKER.COM kind of armor, and, when she’s offered anyone else is awake. Richard Brody blogs about movies.

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THE NEW YORKER, DECEMBER 7, 2020 79 CARTOON CAPTION CONTEST

Each week, we provide a cartoon in need of a caption. You, the reader, submit a caption, we choose three finalists, and you vote for your favorite. Caption submissions for this week’s cartoon, by Michael Maslin, must be received by Sunday, December 6th. The finalists in the November 23rd contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the December 21st issue. Anyone age thirteen or older can enter or vote. To do so, and to read the complete rules, visit contest.newyorker.com.

THIS WEEK’S CONTEST

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THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“Are you gonna talk, or am I gonna have to flush the toilet again?” Thomas Kemeny, Austin, Texas

“I don’t have to. Your neighbor downstairs is going to kill you.” “Where were you between the hours of Charles Beckley, Harrisburg, Pa. beddy-bye and nighty-night?” Richard G. Marcil, Macomb, Mich. “Stop fighting it, kid—everyone eventually sings in the shower.” Scott Siemon, Oostburg, Wis.