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APRIL 5, 2021

4 GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN 11 THE TALK OF THE TOWN Jonathan Blitzer on Biden and the border; from war to the writers’ room; so far no sofas; still Trump country; cooking up hits. FEED HOPE. ANNALS OF ASTRONOMY Daniel Alarcón 16 The Collapse at Arecibo FEED LOVE. Puerto Rico loses its iconic telescope.

SHOUTS & MURMURS Michael Ian Black 21 My Application Essay to Brown (Rejected)

DEPT. OF SCIENCE Kathryn Schulz 22 Where the Wild Things Go The navigational feats of animals.

PROFILES Rachel Aviv 28 Past Imperfect A psychologist’s theory of memory.

COMIC STRIP Emily Flake 37 “Visions of the Post-Pandemic Future”

OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS Ian Frazier 40 Guns Down How to keep weapons out of the hands of kids.

FICTION Sterling HolyWhiteMountain 48 “Featherweight”

THE CRITICS BOOKS Jerome Groopman 55 Assessing the threat of a new pandemic. 58 Briefly Noted Madeleine Schwartz 60 The peripatetic life of Sybille Bedford.

PODCAST DEPT. Hua Hsu 63 The athletes taking over the studio.

THE ART WORLD Peter Schjeldahl 66 Niki de Saint Phalle’s feminist force.

ON TELEVISION Doreen St. Félix 68 “Waffles + Mochi,” “City of Ghosts.”

POEMS Craig Morgan Teicher 35 “Peers” Kaveh Akbar 52 “My Empire”

COVER R. Kikuo Johnson “Delayed”

DRAWINGS Johnny DiNapoli, Tom Chitty, P. C. Vey, Mick Stevens, Zoe Si, Tom Toro, Adam Douglas Thompson, Suerynn Lee, Roz Chast, Bruce Eric Kaplan, Victoria Roberts, Will McPhail SPOTS André da Loba CONTRIBUTORS Caring for the earth.

©2020 KENDAL Rachel Aviv (“Past Imperfect,” p. 28) is a Ian Frazier (“Guns Down,” p. 40) most Discover a retirement community with staff writer. She received the 2020 Front recently published “Hogs Wild.” He is an emphasis on sustainability where Page Award for investigative reporting, at work on a book about the Bronx. the pure beauty of nature is nurtured. for her story about a covid-19 outbreak in an Arkansas prison. Kathryn Schulz (“Where the Wild Things Go,” p. 22), a staff writer, won the 2016

EQUAL HOUSING 1.800.548.9469 OPPORTUNITY Daniel Alarcón (“The Collapse at Are­ Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. Her kao.kendal.org/environment cibo,” p. 16), a contributing writer, is the new book, “Lost & Found,” will be out executive producer of “Radio Ambu- in early 2022. lante,” a Spanish-language podcast. He ADVERTISEMENT teaches at Columbia’s Journalism School. Sterling HolyWhiteMountain (Fiction, p. 48) grew up on the Blackfeet Reserva- Emily Flake (Comic Strip, p. 37) is a tion, in Montana. A former Stegner Fel- New Yorker cartoonist. Her latest book low and a current Jones Lecturer at Stan- WHAT’S THE is “That Was Awkward.” ford University, he is at work on a novel. BIG IDEA? Craig Morgan Teicher (Poem, p. 35) will Madeleine Schwartz (Books, p. 60) is a Small space has big rewards. publish a new poetry collection, “Wel- regular contributor to The New York come to Sonnetville, New Jersey,” in April. Review of Books.

TO FIND OUT MORE, CONTACT JILLIAN GENET 305.520.5159 Wyna Liu (Puzzles & Games Dept.) is Michael Ian Black (Shouts & Murmurs, [email protected] an associate puzzle editor at the Times p. 21), a comedian, an actor, and an and an assistant editor at the Ameri- author, has written the forthcoming can Values Club Crossword. children’s book “I’m Sorry.”

R. Kikuo Johnson (Cover) teaches car- Kaveh Akbar (Poem, p. 52) is the author tooning at the Rhode Island School of of the poetry collections “Calling a Design. His graphic novel “No One Wolf a Wolf ” and “Pilgrim Bell,” which Else” will come out in November. is due out in August.

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2 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 PROMOTION

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IMMOBILE HOMES a minimum lot size and only one fam- ily per lot, make it nearly impossible for Sheelah Kolhatkar describes how, when mobile-home owners to afford to buy investment firms acquire mobile-home land within commuting distance of a parks and suddenly raise rents on the land, major city. Such rules are usually justi- mobile-home owners become trapped fied as protecting farmland or deterring (“Trailer-Park Trades,” March 15th). One sprawl. But the truth is that landowners solution, as Kolhatkar discusses, is for fear that someone might park a mobile the law to treat mobile-home parks home nearby. more like rental housing, and to ex- Those who build McMansions in tend tenants’-rights laws to cover them. the exurbs and use zoning to deny home- This may help in the short term, but ownership opportunities for adjacent it does not change the fundamentally properties have effectively established a feudal relationship between homeowner monopoly. In a free housing market, and landlord. people should have the right to buy a A better answer is for residents to or- small plot of land and develop it in ac- ganize themselves in coöperative mutual- cordance with their means—even if aid associations and together buy the doing so offends a neighbor. trailer-park land. Successful examples Richard Cowden of this approach exist. I worked with 1Takoma Park, Md. residents near Cumberland, Wisconsin, who, when faced with the sale of their HIDDEN LIFE ON mobile-home park and possible evic- SIXTY-THIRD STREET tion, formed the Country View Coop- erative and purchased the property. Each Casey Cep’s review of Paulina Bren’s new mobile-home owner has one share in book about the history of the women’s- the co-op, and the accompanying right only Barbizon Hotel, in Manhattan, is to lease his or her lot; lots are owned insightful and, for me, evocative (Books, collectively by the residents through the March 8th). I lived in the Barbizon for co-op. For mobile-home owners, the five weeks in the mid-nineteen-sixties, threat of withholding rent payments while working as a guest editor for Ma- can be a source of power. And, by form- demoiselle. In retrospect, I feel as though ing a co-op with the intention of keep- I inhabited a metaphor. I will never for- ing monthly holding costs low, residents get the contrast between the elegant can ward off absentee investment groups, reception area, which was on display which will be discouraged by unstable for outsiders, and our airless, confin- revenue streams. ing, basic bedrooms. The Barbizon’s Stephen Parliament façade projected desirability, and masked Department of Teacher Education the constraints we encountered behind University of Wisconsin–River Falls the scenes, in our careers and love lives. River Falls, Wis. We may have appeared to be sophisti- cated and carefree, but even those of us Kolhatkar’s article highlights the terrible who went on to achieve luminous suc- situations that low-income people face cesses faced daunting obstacles during when they rent space from politically our time there. powerful interests. This story is part Joyce Wood and parcel of a larger issue: the monop- Rottingdean, England olization of land itself. Mobile homes are relegated to rented space in the first • place partially because zoning laws for Letters should be sent with the writer’s name, the perimeters of urbanizing areas tend address, and daytime phone number via e-mail to [email protected]. Letters may be edited to prevent entry-level housing from en- for length and clarity, and may be published in croaching on tony exurban develop- any medium. We regret that owing to the volume ments. The laws, which tend to require of correspondence we cannot reply to every letter. 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.

MARCH 31 – APRIL 6, 2021

GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN

When moma first showed the work of Alexander Calder, in 1930, the museum had been open for little more than a year. The artist’s first retrospective there, in 1943, proved so popular that it was extended by seven weeks. “Alexander Calder: Modern from the Start” (through Aug. 7) explores this nine-decade-long relationship with some seventy works, mostly from moma’s collection, including the 1945 standing mobile “Man-Eater with Pennants” (a detail is pictured). Conceived for the sculpture garden, it hasn’t been seen there since 1970.

PHOTOGRAPH BY SASHA ARUTYUNOVA 1 who followed in the wake of Jimmy Smith, a of control and oppression—a subject also MUSIC man who basically put the Hammond organ explored on the band’s 2018 album, “I Can on the musical map. A respectable career Feel You Creep Into My Private Life.” Such followed Lonnie Smith’s emergence, in the themes make “sketchy” a challenging listen: American Modern mid-sixties, and by the millennium he’d been the singer and musician Merrill Garbus howls taken up by a new generation hungry for his and chants over tangles of vibrating synths Opera Company authentically soulful keyboard work. On and jarring transitions, unafraid to grate and OPERA The enterprising artists of American “Breathe,” Smith shares space with support- shock the nerves. But there’s delight in all Modern Opera Company (AMOC) have ing horn players and his fine guitarist Jona- the noise, akin to a child happily banging spent recent weeks in a bubble residency at than Kreisberg, but his slithery organ runs on pots and pans and unlocking a sense of the Catskill Mountain Foundation, work- have the last word. Smith’s takes on Timmy freedom.—Julyssa Lopez shopping a new project with the composer Thomas’s “Why Can’t We Live Together” and interactive-electronics trailblazer and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” feature George Lewis. Now, as the Guggenheim’s droll readings by Iggy Pop—just the kind of Neil Young: “Young Shakespeare” “Works & Process” series resumes responsi- goofy notion you might expect from a man ROCK No, the title isn’t a declaration of the bly managed live performances, the AMOC who has adopted a doctoral designation and artist’s greatness—this live recording, from members Jonathan Allen, Anthony Roth Cos- dons a trademark turban because, well, he January, 1971, took place at the American tanzo, Miranda Cuckson, Conor Hanick, feels like it.—Steve Futterman Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford, Connecti- Aaron Wolff, and Emi Ferguson showcase cut. The performances aren’t declarative, ei- material newly developed with Lewis, plus ther; Young was in a contemplative mood, and some company favorites, in a brief rotunda Tune-Yards: “sketchy” songs that he has typically performed with performance. Tickets are available seventy- EXPERIMENTAL Although Tune-Yards has never a rugged spark, including “Cowgirl in the two hours in advance.—Steve Smith (April 4 been worried about sounding messy, unbri- Sand” and “Ohio,” are given tender treatments at 8; guggenheim.org.) dled, and even a little unhinged, “sketchy” here. But the performance is hardly sombre: is among the group’s most liberated albums, he cracks the audience up while introducing loose at the joints and intense with move- “Journey Through the Past.” And the range “The Island We Made” ment. Inspired by recent books on using cre- of the material, traversing six early albums, OPERA Angélica Negrón’s new opera, “The ativity for racial healing, the project builds makes it a decent place for a Young novice to Island We Made,” directed by Matthew on a growing interest in dismantling systems begin.—Michaelangelo Matos Placek for Opera Philadelphia’s streaming channel, is a gracious observation of the love and healing exchanged between a mother and POP her children. In Placek’s ten-minute film, Sasha Velour—the bald and brainy win- ner of the ninth season of “RuPaul’s Drag Race”—moves about a carefully decorated suburban-style home as she lip-synchs to the vocalist Eliza Bagg’s gossamer singing. Wearing a canary-yellow dress and rhinestone accessories, Velour stands out from the sea of beiges and florals like a benevolent spirit: she is the love that lingers in a space after the business of raising a family—with its tears, tantrums, and quarrels—has passed. Negrón’s music offers a single, sustained texture of electronics and harp; in its delicacy and calm, it doesn’t so much yearn for understanding as embody it.—Oussama Zahr

Lost Girls: “Menneskekollektivet” EXPERIMENTAL “In the beginning, there is sound,” Jenny Hval declares in the opening moments of “Menneskekollektivet,” the début album from her duo Lost Girls. The Oslo musician speaks in the elegantly accented deadpan of dystopian science-fiction narra- tors. A keyboard drones serenely alongside her voice, courtesy of Lost Girls’ other half, Håvard Volden. As the song stretches out, a beat creeps up behind Hval until, unshackled, she lets out a croon, transforming from a Fame and its power centers become alienating in “Chemtrails Over the Laurie Anderson-smitten spoken-word artist Country Club,” Lana Del Rey’s follow-up to the epic “Norman Fucking into a disco diva. Much of the album dwells in the little-explored gap between these realms. Rockwell!,” from 2019. Again largely produced with Jack Antonoff, That a record blessed with the title “Men- “Chemtrails” finds refuge in small towns, in leaving the big city behind. neskekollektivet”—and starring a vocalist After years of making coastal pop wafting with nostalgia—for old Holly- who has published novels in Norwegian—is dominated by English may seem a missed wood, for the cosmopolitan beatnik scene, for Mustangs, horse races, opportunity, yet it remains an absorbing dis- and other such Yankee status symbols—Del Rey now pushes toward play of this genuinely uncanny pair, dancing the heartland, and her visions of Americana begin to overlap with the in a remote corner they’ve carved out for themselves.—Jay Ruttenberg musical tradition. On “Tulsa Jesus Freak,” she coos about going back to Arkansas and experiencing backwater romance along the Bible Belt. Dr. Lonnie Smith: “Breathe” Over hushed, isolated piano and soft guitar riffs with folk overtones JAZZ Dr. Lonnie Smith is among a number (and a Joni Mitchell cover), one of the more prescient songwriters of our —Sheldon Pearce ILLUSTRATION BY BIJOU KARMAN BY ILLUSTRATION of very adept and very funky organ players time retreats to a personal hamlet of her own making.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 5 OFF BROADWAY Miami City Ballet / Paul Taylor Dance Company It’s a nifty idea: this collaboration, between Is it time, finally, to once again gather in a dancer from Miami City Ballet (Saman- a dark room and watch a play? Maybe, tha Hope Galler) and another from the Paul maybe not. But New Yorkers now have Taylor Dance Company (John Harnage), is a long-distance pas de deux. The two perform an intriguing option in “Blindness,” in different cities, but thanks to the ingenu- beginning previews on April 2, at the ity of the choreographer Amy Hall Garner, Daryl Roth Theatre. Walter Meierjo- working through Zoom, they seem to inhabit the same space, responding to each other’s hann’s production, imported from Lon- movements and thoughts. Garner, equally don’s Donmar Warehouse, is an adapta- comfortable in ballet and modern dance, finds tion by Simon Stephens (“Sea Wall/A a language that suits both dancers’ ways of moving. The performance, entitled “ViVa,” Life”) of José Saramago’s 1995 novel, will be released on both companies’ Facebook about a city thrown into chaos by a mys- pages on April 1.—Marina Harss terious—and highly contagious—epi- demic of sudden blindness. Theatregoers, Pacific Northwest Ballet masked and distanced in two-person pods As we dream of returning to theatres rela- (lone viewers can purchase a whole pod), tively soon, online dance offerings continue to proliferate. Pacific Northwest Ballet pre- listen on headphones as they watch the sents a mixed bill, running April 1-5, that story unfold amid immersive lighting and includes two new works recorded at the staging. For tickets and information on company’s Seattle home theatre, one by the soulful Alejandro Cerrudo and the other by safety protocols, which include “enhanced Donald Byrd, a veteran choreographer who building ventilation technologies,” visit has tackled such weighty subjects as blackface blindnessevent.com.—Michael Schulman and minstrelsy, and the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921. Byrd’s piece, “And the sky is not 1 cloudy all day,” for six men, set to music by John Adams, explores the American myth of “a gathering with my Nuyorican family— the West in all its problematic, naïve nostal- THE THEATRE part Spanish, part English, all Spanglish.” gia. The third ballet on the program is Alexei At the risk of alienating monolinguals in Ratmansky’s wild, eccentric, and gloriously both languages, the director Saheem Ali musical “Pictures at an Exhibition,” in a re- Glass Town and the playwright Ricardo Pérez González cording captured in 2017.—M.H. (pnb.org) Miriam Pultro’s new song cycle imagines have blended Elizabethan English with Al- the Brontë siblings as members of a rock fredo Michel Modenessi’s modern Span- band—this premise, at least, scores points ish translation to create a multicultural San Francisco Ballet for not being about Emily Dickinson, who in mashup that transcends time and space. George Balanchine’s ballet “Jewels,” created recent years has become pop culture’s go-to (“Buenas noches, till it be morrow!”) The in 1967, is like food for the soul—and a sort of nineteenth-century writer. The project is stellar cast of twenty-two, including Juan homage to the historical arc of classical bal- essentially a concert with a few spoken inter- Castano and Lupita Nyong’o in the title let. The first section, “Emeralds,” with music stitials, with Pultro herself playing Charlotte roles, inflect the sixteenth-century tragic by Gabriel Fauré, takes the viewer to France, Brontë as well as keyboards, the bassist and romance, originally set in Italy, with re- where the art of ballet really came into exis- music director Katrien Van Riel as Emily, gional accents from Mexico, Colombia, tence. It is elegant, wafting, delicate. Then the guitarist Eddy Marshall as Branwell, and Guatemala, and elsewhere, against a sonic comes “Rubies,” brash and bold, set to Stravin- Emma Claye as Anne. Not that you would backdrop of electronic cumbia, Latin jazz, sky. This is New York, the Jazz Age, the spiky know without looking at the credits: char- fireworks, sirens, and swordplay.—David silhouette of the Chrysler Building. Finally, acterization is lacking and the lyrics sport Kortava (publictheater.org) “Diamonds” transports the audience to the a vague emo sensibility rather than a fiery 1 grandeur and the melancholy of St. Peters- romantic one. Produced by the Tank and the burg, accompanied by Tchaikovsky’s Third Center at West Park and directed by Daniella Symphony. San Francisco Ballet offers a virtual Caggiano, “Glass Town,” which is named DANCE evening of “Jewels,” available April 1-21. Only after an imaginary world dreamed up by the “Emeralds,” led by Misa Kuranaga, Angelo young Brontës, does not do much to reflect Greco, Sasha Mukhamedov, and Aaron Robi- the original quartet’s bond, or their literary Matthew Bourne’s son, is newly recorded; the other two are from output.—Elisabeth Vincentelli (thetanknyc.org; the archives.—M.H. (sfballet.org) through April 4.) New Adventures Festival This monthlong digital festival sampling the repertory of the British choreographer Step Afrika! Romeo y Julieta Matthew Bourne—famous for his famil- In 1739, enslaved Africans in the colony of In the 1997 book “Growing Up Bilingual,” iarizing updates and remixes of classics— South Carolina revolted. One outcome of the the linguist Ana Celia Zentella observed finishes with his “Romeo and Juliet.” The rebellion was a law restricting slaves’ activities, that Puerto Rican children in New York darkly dramatic 2019 work, streamable via including the use of drums. And one unin- City code-switched from English to Spanish New York City Center through April 4, tended outcome of that law was to encourage about once every three minutes in conver- takes place in the near future, in a prisonlike the transfer of rhythms from drums to the sations with peers. Some of Zentella’s now institute where teen-agers are controlled body—the beginnings of hambone, stepping, grown-up subjects may be among the fans with medication, among other disciplinary and tap. This is a story that the skilled Wash- of this bilingual audio rendition of Shake- measures. As in Shakespeare, and in the ington, D.C., troupe Step Afrika! has addressed speare’s “Romeo and Juliet,” presented by many ballets set to the same Prokofiev before, in its recent stage show “Drumfolk.” the Public Theatre and WNYC Studios. score, love meets death, but here the trag- Now it riffs on history again, in “Stono,” a During a live-streamed Q. & A. with some edy of warring families is replaced with the forceful thirty-minute film shot in various out- of the cast and creative team, one listener trauma of mental illness.—Brian Seibert door locations, available on the Joyce Theatre’s

commented that the radio play recalled (nycitycenter.org) Web site April 1-14.—B.S. (joyce.org) DEHLER KATE BY ILLUSTRATION

6 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 1 line, animals, one of Horn’s cast-glass sculp- (Letourneur), Carole (Carole Le Page), and A RT tures in a forest—are accompanied by narra- Camille (Camille Genaud)—eat twice: in an tive texts and free-form musings. Although it apartment in Paris where the three young would take a full day (at least) to truly absorb women chat about love, sex, and their previ- María Fragoso the many entries, that might not be a bad use ous summer’s jaunt to the Locarno Film Fes- Stare at the figures in this young Mexico of time, given the fascinating interiority and tival, and in the apartment that they shared City-based painter’s fantastic show at the poetic qualities of this impressive, impres- in Locarno. Sophie is obsessed with the real- 1969 gallery and you may have the unset- sionistic work.—J.F. (hauserwirth.com) life actor Louis Garrel and spends much of tling feeling that they’re staring back. Fra- 1 the festival searching for him; the sexually goso’s gender-indeterminate subjects are frustrated Carole is looking for a lover; and surrounded by figs, pomegranates, glossy the uncertain Camille finds herself in a push conch shells, and snails trailing slime. In MOVIES and pull with an indifferent young man (the “To Mouth,” from 2020, one masked couple critic Julien Gester). But, as the action flips is awkwardly entangled on their hands and back and forth between past and present, knees, their bodies glowing in supernatural Les Coquillettes the women’s recollections of their awkward shades of pink. In “Seeding,” clear fluid drips The title of Sophie Letourneur’s giddy, encounters at the festival clash subtly and from the parted lips of crimson-gloved twins. time-bending 2012 metafiction means “elbow antically with the camera’s unflinching rec- Thirteen drawings accompany the six paint- macaroni,” which its protagonists—Sophie ord. Letourneur’s dialogue adorns their ings on view, revealing another aspect of the artist’s vision. Here her symbolic lexicon is isolated and distilled: swans, fruit, ceramic AT THE GALLERIES vessels, and ornate portraits are rendered in red colored pencil on white sketchbook paper. Fragoso nods to several historical styles—the smoldering nudes of the Eu- ropean Renaissance, strains of Surrealism, Mexican devotional paintings—but her lush and grotesquely erotic vision is entirely her own.—Johanna Fateman (1969gallery.com)

David Hammons The real star of the Drawing Center’s com- prehensive exhibition of the body prints that Hammons made between 1968 and 1979 is the artist’s energetic, younger self. In 1963, when he was twenty, Hammons moved to L.A. from his native Illinois and began using his own anatomy, combined with pigment and paper, as a printmaking tool. Yves Klein’s “Anthropometries” (made with female mod- els) and Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil’s collaborative “Blueprints” had already used similar methods to propose that all art emanates from the artist’s body. Now, Ham- mons asked, what if that body is Black? Gal- vanized by the civil-rights and the Black Arts movements, he returned, again and again, to the subject of America, and her relation- ship to Black men as builders and targets, outsiders and originators. Throughout the thirty-two prints and drawings on view (with such punning titles as “Bye-Centennial,” from 1976), one can feel the provocateur’s excitement about his medium, but also his need to push its boundaries, which led to his great interest in performance—another disci- pline that celebrates the human form, and the ephemeral.—Hilton Als (drawingcenter.org) In 2003, when Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn began hanging shows and hosting performances in her town house on East Ninety-fourth Street, Roni Horn the mood was always more Stettheimer-sisters salon than commercial An installation of very large drawings—cut up gallery. This maverick spirit prevailed even when Salon 94 expanded and reconfigured to resemble scrambled maps, neural networks, and circuitry—commands to two white cubes downtown. Now this unflagging gallerist, design the first room in this veteran conceptualist’s dealer, and art adviser (who was also a judge on a “Top Chef”-but- show at Hauser & Wirth. They seem like for-art TV series) has a new headquarters—a four-story building at supersized keys to the increasingly intimate works that follow. In the next room, silk 3 East Eighty-ninth Street, across from the Guggenheim, that formerly screens featuring associative clusters of hand- housed the National Academy of Design. Its three inaugural shows written words and idiomatic phrases (“when (on view through April 24; appointments available via salon94.com) in Rome,” “when pigs fly,” “a little bird told me”) evoke a buzzing semiconscious state. have an impressive aesthetic wingspan: the gloriously unruly ceramics The show’s highlight is the diaristic “LOG of Takuro Kuwata, a kaleidoscopic suite of Derrick Adams’s stylized (March 22, 2019-May 17, 2020), (2019-2020),” portraits, and, most rewarding of all, a deep dive into the radical composed of more than four hundred works on paper installed in a wall-traversing grid. jubilance of Niki de Saint Phalle, a must-see pendant to the artist’s —Andrea K. Scott COURTESY SALON 94 / CHANDELIER BY PHILIPPE MALOUIN / CHANDELIER BY 94 SALON COURTESY Photographs of all manner of things—a sky- current retrospective at MOMA PS1.

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 7 observations with a tooth-tingling array of Inspector Tony Pope (Raymond Burr). In connections die hard, and Mullan’s combat- Franglicisms; much of the action is displaced this tight-lipped film noir of suburban frus- ive, unsentimental performance makes Joe’s to Facebook and text messages, and the con- tration and doomed romance, the director, slow ruin not just credible but unavoidable. spicuous dubbing of voices throughout gives Gerd Oswald, gets all the little things right, Whether the maddened high drama of the this vertiginous, documentary-style com- from the frowzy styles and smeary makeup climax rings equally true is another mat- edy the air of a live-action cartoon.—Richard to the inspired casting (including Fay Wray ter; Loach’s talent for small pleasures and Brody (Streaming on MUBI.) as Pope’s wife) and the terse visual wit of crackling provincial gags has always been gunshots and kisses. Released in 1957.—R.B. more winning than his determination to (Streaming on Amazon.) be a tragedian, let alone a political sooth- Crime of Passion sayer.—Anthony Lane (Reviewed in our issue Kathy Ferguson (Barbara Stanwyck), a of 2/1/99.) (Streaming on Amazon, Vudu, and hard-nosed, street-smart journalist in San My Name Is Joe other services.) Francisco—and a proudly single woman on Joe (Peter Mullan), the hero of Ken Loach’s the brink of middle age—is taken off the funny and excoriating 1999 movie, starts gossip desk to cover a murder investigation things off by announcing that he is on the Stephanie Daley by two cops who have come up from L.A. wagon. This being Loach, you can be fairly Half a terrific movie. This drama, from 2006, She falls in love with one of them, Lieu- certain that Joe will spend the next ninety written and directed by Hilary Brougher and tenant Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden); her minutes falling off it, and, sure enough, starring Amber Tamblyn and Tilda Swinton scoop lands her a big New York promotion, he winds up in a foul blur of booze. What (who is also an executive producer), reflects but she turns it down and marries him on a comes in between—and, in a terrible way, the virtues and the burdens of its independent whim. Doyle is a big, sardonic doormat of a sets him back on the path of self-destruc- production. The engrossing half concerns the team player whose burden is lightened by life tion—is a love affair. This unemployed Glas- title character (Tamblyn), a sixteen-year- with Kathy, but she wants more for him. She’s wegian meets a health worker named Sarah old girl in a Hudson Valley town who gives ambitious by proxy, and her idle-hands plot (Louise Goodall), who appears to offer him birth while on a ski trip. The newborn dies, for his advancement involves Doyle’s boss, a better sort of life. But his old habits and and Stephanie, who successfully concealed her pregnancy from family and friends, is charged with homicide. Most of her richly WHAT TO STREAM textured and poignant story—which high- lights the pervasive influence of religion in small-town life—is told in flashbacks during interrogations by the forensic psychologist assigned to the case, Lydie Crane, played by Swinton. Lydie is pregnant, has recently suf- fered a stillbirth, and endures a clichéd range of bourgeois marital stresses and silences. (Timothy Hutton plays her intellectually suave, emotionally needy architect husband.) Her story, despite its potential, is rendered generically; Stephanie, as brought to life in Tamblyn’s nuanced and daring performance, deserves to have the film to herself.—R.B. (Streaming on Tubi.)

Tower This documentary, by Keith Maitland, re- constructs with forensic precision and dra- matic immediacy the 1966 sniper attack at the University of Texas at Austin that left eighteen people dead, an event that’s widely considered the first modern mass shooting. Maitland blends archival footage, original in- terviews with survivors and responders, and animated images of several sorts—including, strikingly, ones that return the interview- ees to their age at the time of the attack. The director Courtney Stephens’s found-footage film “Terra Femme” The animation, by Craig Staggs, has a sharp (which is streaming through April 3 in MOMA’s “Doc Fortnight” pro- imaginative specificity, and the complex in- gram) began as a series of live presentations. This format converges terweaving of styles turns the film into a horrifying true-crime thriller that’s enriched with the documentary’s very subject: amateur travel films—in effect, by a rare depth of inner experience. The effect home movies—from the nineteen-twenties through the forties, made is as much intellectual as emotional, folding by women, some of whom similarly presented them publicly with their the movie reflexively into its subject: the per- sonal importance of public discussion. The own in-person commentary. Stephens discerningly culled this footage dearth of archival interviews regarding this from many public and private archives; she accompanies her insightful event corresponds to the interviewees’ ret- montage of the clips with her own deeply researched monologue, in- rospective view of the mid-sixties. Exhorted at the time to put the troubles behind them tertwining tales from the lives of the filmmakers with self-questioning and discouraged from speaking about their discussions and stories of her efforts to make a film of her own travels. experiences, many of the subjects approach In showing the filmmakers’ wide-ranging cinematic practices and Maitland’s interviews as long-overdue, albeit pain-filled, acts of personal liberation. Re- points of view, she pursues the underlying question of whether there leased in 2016.—R.B. (Streaming on Amazon, is such a thing as the “female gaze”; she develops far-reaching analyses YouTube, and other services.) of women’s filmmaking in an era when few women had professional 1 directing careers—and ultimately connects their work to the sociology For more reviews, visit

and the spirit of travel itself.—Richard Brody newyorker.com/goings-on-about-town STEPHENS COURTNEY COURTESY

8 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 In addition to a ticketed dinner series, roasted-beet dip, and in a rich sauce it Tanabel’s roster included cooking classes played earthy foil to buttery, pan-roasted and catering, pop-ups at restaurants, and cod topped with caramelized onions and a stall at the Queens Night Market. The fried almonds. name comes from the Souk el-Tanabel The following Saturday was Nowruz, 1 market, in Damascus, where venders the Persian New Year. A pre-Nowruz hire local women to process fruits and Thursday dinner for two featured a smoky TABLES FOR TWO vegetables in their homes so they can eggplant salad called kal kebab, the bean, be sold ready to cook—tanabel trans- greens, and noodle soup ash-e reshteh, Tanabel lates to “lazy people.” In April, 2020, and a small cake drizzled in saffron-rose the name became even more apt: Gold- syrup and encrusted with almonds. For In 2017, Hannah Goldberg founded berg shifted to delivery, and currently Nowruz itself, my delivery bag was like Tanabel, a food-and-events company, offers three-course “dinners for two” and Mary Poppins’s satchel—I could hold it in in response to the 2016 election. Seeking larger-format “feasts” on Thursday and one hand without effort, and yet somehow an outlet for her anger, she had joined a Saturday evenings, respectively, to parts it contained enough food to cover a six- task force at her synagogue devoted to of Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens. foot table, and gorgeously. assisting refugees from the Middle East. On a recent Thursday, a startlingly Handfuls of fresh herbs were scat- A culinary-school grad and a profes- vernal salad—green chickpeas, lightly tered with edible flowers and radishes sional chef who trained at Jean-Georges grilled asparagus, zucchini, and spring on- cut to look like blossoms, to be grazed on and in Europe before a stint in wine and ions, and tiny leaves of endive, fresh mint, with Persian cucumbers, walnuts, wedges cheese importing, Goldberg organized and watercress on a bed of squash mou- of fresh, salty cheese, and a golden oval fund-raising dinners; to support an ini- tabal (a cousin to baba ghanoush)—pre- of barbari, a traditional Iranian flatbread. tiative to supply milk goats to Syrians in a ceded succulent chunks of skewer-grilled Crisp yellow-pea fritters came with ruf- camp in Jordan, she roasted a whole goat. chicken strewn with cherry tomatoes and fled leaves of lettuce, for wrapping, and Soon she began hiring refugees sautéed red onion, to be spooned over an a sweet-sour sauce. The classic Iranian to cook with her, building a business expansive, fluffy flatbread with cucum- omelette known as kuku sabzi, more herb around empowering displaced women ber-mint yogurt. For dessert, there was than egg, was sliced into neat rectangles by paying them a living wage while orange-blossom milk pudding, its surface and garnished with barberries; still more spotlighting and preserving their na- glossy with sour-orange marmalade. herbs and barberries were stuffed into tive food cultures, including techniques Goldberg’s co-chef that evening was the cavity of a whole trout. The featured and recipes passed down through their Fatima Kwara, who arrived in New York chef was Roya Azhari, who fled Tehran families. “I met with a lot of the refu- from Damascus, by way of Jordan, in for the U.S. last year. For Nowruz in past gee-resettlement agencies,” Goldberg 2016. A few days later, the pair produced years, Goldberg worked with Nasrin Re- recalled the other day. She was on a a tahini-themed feast in partnership jali, also from Iran. This year, Rejali was search for “a woman who might light with Seed + Mill, a tahini-and-halvah otherwise occupied. Her new company, up when she talks about food, who just brand. Every dish contained tahini, and Nasrin’s Kitchen, was offering a Nowruz can’t stop feeding people. And they’d be, yet the menu wasn’t remotely repeti- feast for delivery, too. (Dinners for two like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve got one for you, she tive. The ingredient lent a floral note $60; feasts around $135.)

PHOTOGRAPH BY HEAMI LEE FOR THE NEW YORKER; ILLUSTRATION BY JOOST SWARTE JOOST BY ILLUSTRATION YORKER; THE NEW HEAMI LEE FOR BY PHOTOGRAPH can’t stop bringing food into the office!’” to a creamy, fuchsia-hued yogurt-and- —Hannah Goldfield

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 9 Subscribers, take a front-row seat.

Watch the première of The New Yorker Live.

Monday, March 29th, at 6 P.M. E.T. The poet Amanda Gorman and the playwright Jeremy O. Harris, in conversation with the contributing writer Lauren Michele Jackson.

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COMMENT more migrants to travel north, because Security Council, made the announce- AT THE BORDER he vowed to stop Trump’s heedless cru- ment in Spanish. But it was directed elty. Senator John Cornyn, Republican more at critics in Congress than at peo- uring the past decade, three U.S. of Texas, tweeted that Biden has “em- ple in Honduras and Guatemala, the DPresidents have each faced a hu- phasized the humane treatment of im- countries from which most of the fam- manitarian emergency at the southern migrants, regardless of their legal sta- ilies and children are coming. border. Barack Obama did in 2014, when tus.” He meant it as a criticism. The word “crisis” is both an overstate- tens of thousands of children from Cen- The Secretary of Homeland Secu- ment and an understatement of the sit- tral America arrived, without their par- rity, Alejandro Mayorkas, has predicted uation. There were more families and ents, to seek asylum. Five years later, that the United States will encounter children seeking asylum at the border under Donald Trump—and the harsh- more migrants by the end of 2021 than under Trump in 2019 than there are now. est border-enforcement regime in more it has at any point in the past two de- And the current numbers, if higher than than half a century—record numbers of cades. He has also, like the rest of the Biden anticipated, are not unexpected. children and families overwhelmed fed- Administration, avoided labelling the The pandemic has led to renewed des- eral authorities. Now, two months into situation a crisis. “This is not new,” he peration in Central America, as have Joe Biden’s Presidency, it’s his turn. Last said. “We have experienced migration two hurricanes that devastated the re- Thursday, the topic dominated the first surges before.” What is new, though, is gion last fall, displacing tens of thou- press conference he has given since tak- the pace: for most of March, about five sands of people. Yet, in another sense, ing office. “What we’re doing right now hundred and fifty children have been the situation is worse than much of the is attempting to rebuild the system that arriving at the border every day. Both public understands, because the issues can accommodate what is happening Mayorkas and Biden have gone on tele- involved are genuinely complex and today,” he said. “It’s going to take time.” vision to announce that the border is nearly impossible to settle as long as pol- There are currently some eighteen closed; at a White House press briefing, icymakers in Washington continue to thousand unaccompanied migrant chil- Roberta Jacobson, from the National regard decency as a sign of political weak- dren in U.S. custody, including more ness rather than of moral strength. than five thousand who remain in hold- The emergencies of the past decade ing cells, as the government scrambles are really three chapters of the same to find space to house them. Republi- struggle: an exodus from Central Amer- cans who were silent when Trump was ica has been under way, as families and separating migrant children from their children attempted to escape violence, parents and eviscerating the asylum sys- poverty, and government corruption. The tem are now denouncing “Biden’s bor- immigration system at the border, which der crisis.” The messaging appears to be was built up in the nineteen-nineties, effective; it’s causing all sorts of confu- with single, job-seeking adults from sion. Biden is turning away forty per Mexico in mind, was not designed to cent of asylum-seeking families and vir- handle a population seeking asylum on tually all single adults arriving at the this scale. On average, it takes almost border, under a controversial Trump pol- two and a half years to resolve an asy- icy known as Title 42, which he has left lum claim, and there’s now a backlog of in place. Even so, everyone from TV 1.3 million pending cases, up from half news anchors to the President of Mex- a million under Obama.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY JOÃO FAZENDA JOÃO BY ILLUSTRATIONS ico is blaming Biden for encouraging Biden faces another burden: by the

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 11 time Trump left office, he had effectively tem and to provide a path to citizenship sources available” to free up five thou- ended the practice of asylum and left the for eleven million undocumented immi- sand more beds, at a Texas military base. most vulnerable people to their own de- grants already living in this country. The Administration has rightly said vices. Some seventy thousand asylum The number of unaccompanied chil- that the problem needs to be addressed seekers were forced to wait indefinitely dren, however, has exceeded the govern- at the source. To do that, it intends to in Mexico, under a policy called the Mi- ment’s ability to move them into the care provide more aid to Central America, grant Protection Protocols. Trump also, of the Department of Health and Human and to target it in ways that circumvent in the name of a dubious public-health Services, which is responsible for plac- corrupt officials. The White House also order issued last March, turned away ing them with family sponsors. The pri- wants to restart a program begun under nearly everyone who sought asylum at ority is to keep them from languishing Obama, and ended by Trump, to pro- the border, including some sixteen thou- in the holding cells run by the Depart- cess children as refugees in their home sand children and thirty-four thousand ment of Homeland Security; by law, chil- countries, and to set up regional facili- families. That order had the perverse ef- dren are not supposed to be in such fa- ties to expedite their legal claims before fect of leading people to try to cross mul- cilities for more than seventy-two hours. the children reach the border. The plans tiple times; in the past year, there have But the H.H.S. shelters are almost at ca- are ambitious and still largely untested, been more than five hundred thousand pacity. Nine emergency shelters have and, as Biden admitted, they will take expulsions. Biden planned to phase the been set up, two in convention centers time—years, not months—to implement. asylum program back in gradually, partly in Dallas and San Diego, yet the aver- Trump sought to hide the asylum for operational reasons and partly for po- age amount of time that many children issue south of the border. Biden is pay- litical ones. If the Administration ap- are spending in D.H.S. facilities is al- ing a price for bringing it back into view. peared to be floundering, it would give most twice the legal limit. “We’re pro- The question is whether he can with- Republicans an opening to attack its viding for the space again to be able to stand the political onslaught long enough broader agenda, which includes legisla- get these kids out,” Biden said on Thurs- to begin to set things right. tion to expand the legal immigration sys- day, adding that he had “used all the re- —Jonathan Blitzer

SECOND ACTS premières this week, follows an Afghan DARK COMEDY interpreter, Awalmir, who is granted ref- ugee status and moves in with a down- beat Marine pal in Ohio. Before Zahori was hired, the produc- ers asked him to e-mail some Afghan jokes. These generally come in two vari- eties. The first are regional ad hominems, abib Zahori, an Afghan war re- teasing Wardak Province—Afghanistan’s Hporter, who is currently a writer New Jersey. The second are dirty jokes. for the CBS sitcom “United States of (From Zahori’s list: A waiter brings a Al,” was musing the other day on what man a steaming bowl of shurwa. Cus- separates the gravest brutality from the tomer: “Excuse me, why is your thumb in highest comedy. Take, for instance, the my stew?” Waiter: “It’s broken, and the Taliban. Funny? “The beating and the bonesetter told me to keep it warm.” Cus- torture and the prison,” Zahori said— tomer, angry: “Well, why don’t you stick definitely not funny. The public sham- it up your ass!” Waiter: “Doesn’t work. I ing, though perhaps worse, was another tried that before the stew.”) Habib Zahori story. “One time, during Ramadan, they Zahori is one of four Afghan writers caught somebody eating. They put him on the show, which is a Chuck Lorre versity of Oklahoma, for “cultural orien- on the back of a donkey, and they forced production. Many plotlines originate from tation.” “I was just standing there, and him to hold this piece of bread between their own stories and sense of disloca- four young women are walking in these his teeth.” Zahori began laughing. “Why tion. Zahori spent a decade as a journal- shorts,” he said. “Jean shorts. I almost would you do that to another human ist, covering corruption and war for the had a heart attack. I had never seen wom- being? It’s absurd! ” Times, and was a fixer for foreign corre- en’s legs!” The incident became an epi- Zahori, who has a shaved head and spondents. Eventually, the danger became sode in which Al, flustered by his first a beard, was taking a break from the vir- too great—assassinations, kidnappings, encounter with shins, flunks his driving tual writers’ room. He sat in his home the random killing of friends. Canada test. (“Didn’t you once charge a bunch office, in Ottawa, where he lives with offered him refugee status after he ille- of Taliban?” Al: “The Taliban were wear- his wife, Paula, and their two cats, Pope gally crossed the border from Maine, car- ing pants!”) Francis (“We both just love that man— rying a bike, through knee-deep snow. Zahori prefers comedy that is ridic- as an individual, not as the head of an He’d been in the U.S. for a Fulbright fel- ulous and ironic. He loves stoner humor, institution”) and Bodie. The show, which lowship; his first stop had been the Uni- especially Seth Rogen. Referential humor,

12 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 1 the stuff of many sitcoms, is not his bag. ON THE COUCH all of you, my new family of complete Although the Taliban banned pop cul- COMMON THREAD strangers,” Matt Freeman chimed in. ture, some movies (“Rambo,” “The Ter- Gus Goldsack: “Looking forward to minator”) seeped in. And, in 1998, “Ti- meeting you all at Zoe’s wedding!” Moe tanic.” “We all got haircuts like Leonardo Phillips: “I’d invite you all over but I DiCaprio,” Zahori said. “But we’d hide don’t have a couch.” it under a turban or a hat, because the Anger had been supplanted by light- Taliban hated that haircut.” After the hearted commiseration. “This is sooo Americans arrived, he said, “they used amazing we should either unionize or to air that super-racist and problematic oë Weiner, an editor at a wellness form a cult!” Roberta Garza suggested. show called ‘24.’ In Afghanistan!” He ZWeb site, received an e-mail last “Guess nobody’s hiding their afikomen continued, “I remember people’s dogs week from ABC Carpet & Home, the in their ABC couch this year,” Caren were named Jack Bauer.” high-end furniture store near Union Reuven wrote. “I’ve been sitting on a Hollywood is riddled with Jack Bau- Square. “It’s never easy to deliver an up- broken couch for 3 years,” Deirdre Curry ers. Zahori initially had reservations about date like this,” it began, “but we are ex- admitted. “Finally caved and bought the writing for a mainstream American show. periencing production and delivery de- Hannah in peacock ... Instant regret But the producers’ vision was kind, he lays.” It would be about six weeks before once purchased. Think I have couch said, and they were open to critique. Now she received the sofa that she’d ordered commitment issues.” he’s hoping to move to Los Angeles. during a Black Friday sale last year—a Discussions of how to wangle free “There are definitely some traumas sectional from ABC’s Cobble Hill line, shipping or discounts dovetailed with a that are so powerful that there is abso- custom-upholstered in a deep-pink vel- proposition that the group start a fund- lutely no way you could use humor to vet called Vance Blossom. raiser for a family in need—a worthy dismiss it,” Zahori said. These include When, months ago, as Weiner was use for money saved. Moments later, a the horrors of the civil war, which began moving into a new studio in Greenwich GoFundMe page titled “Serendipitous in 1992. His teachers warned students not Village, the original February delivery ABCCers” went live. to pick up toys they found along the road; date was pushed up to May, she “had a Photos were exchanged: of fabric often they hid bombs. Zahori’s family bit of a meltdown,” she recounted over swatches being used as coasters, and of moved within Kabul frequently, claiming FaceTime. “I decorated this whole apart- a cargo vessel blocking the Suez Canal Tajik ancestry in one neighborhood, Pash- ment around this very statement-making, (“Maybe our stuff is here”). Jane Rosen- tun in another. Schooling stopped. The coral-colored, massive couch.” This time, baum, an interior designer who’d or- family burned their Leninist books, but she was unfazed. Of greater consequence dered a sofa for clients, felt guilty. She’d they insisted that their kids keep learn- was the e-mail itself—an apologetic note told them to throw out their old love ing. They’d find years-old newspapers to signed by ABC’s C.E.O., Aaron Rose— seat: “I now wear the Vance Blossom read—news from a different world. When on which two hundred and three other fabric swatch as my scarlet letter.” Zahori was sixteen, he was memorizing couch-expectant recipients were cc’d in- Other singles expressed interest in the Quran, preparing for a life of devotion, stead of bcc’d. being fixed up: “Holler if you find any when a friend gave him a copy of “Les The reply-all avalanche began im- good ones that are more in the 35-40 age Misérables.” “I started questioning ev- mediately. Frustration crescendoed into range.” (“I wonder if ABC does Chup- erything—everything!—that was around outrage: “So what’s the current ETD?,” pahs,” Almond Zigmund, an artist in East me,” he said. “Men and women’s relation- followed by “I ordered in October! Paid Hampton, said.) A yoga teacher named ships, poverty, religion, God.” From then in full. This is just ridiculous.” Then, a Tara Glazier wrote, “After a year inside on, novels consumed him. He read at turning point: “Oh come on,” a woman with my family ... I wish i was single.”A night under the lights of shuttered shops. named Funda Rozan replied. “Like former student on the chain said hi. Arundhati Roy was smuggled into you’ve never had a bad day at work be- Theirs was not the only reunion. “204 mosques, “The Three Musketeers” into cause you’re exhausted, covid-weary, and people and the world is getting smaller,” weddings. (“I hate weddings,” he said.) stuck with the song ‘never eat soggy waf- Henry Lee wrote. “I have just recon- Above his desk in Ottawa, across from fles’ in your head. Now at least we have nected with my friend Melissa here. Now a framed copy of his first script, he has a little (but mighty) community of 204 I don’t have to go to Zoe’s wedding solo.” hung portraits of Hugo, Tolstoy, and people during this unprecedented short- Lee ordered a new couch after his ex got Dostoyevsky. He plans to add more of age of artisanally manufactured goods.” their Muuto sofa when they split. Re- the people he most admires, mainly au- Weiner seized the moment. “I’d per- ferring to the pandemic, he said, by phone, thors: Harper Lee, Malcolm X, James sonally like to make the most out of this “When I saw the e-mails, I thought, Baldwin. “I would die a happy person if bonkers thread and throw it out there We’re in that struggle together. The couch I died surrounded by a bunch of books,” that I’m a 29-year-old single woman in is minor.” he said. Perhaps, years from now, the NYC looking for a Jewish man.” The This was not the first time a commu- stacks would tip over as he read, and that floodgates opened. “You go Zoe shoot nity had sprung up around couch-related would be that. “What a way to go!” he your shot!!” a woman named Tanesha problems. In 2016, a writer named Anna said. It made him laugh. Smith-Wattley responded. “This is le- Hezel bought a West Elm model called —Zach Helfand gitimately funny and I am grateful for the Peggy (à la the “Mad Men” character),

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 13 which began to fall apart almost imme- fered a wedding planner, an Airbnb va- build twin golf courses, but after environ- diately. An article she wrote for the Awl cation home upstate, and a place to stay mental concerns scotched that plan— went viral, legions of dissatisfied Peggy in Morocco on our honeymoon—all uh-oh, wetlands!—he donated the par- owners banded together, and the com- from the thread community.” cels to the state. The “understanding,” pany offered refunds. In this case, the 1—Hannah Goldfield according to a letter from his attorney, villain is less obvious. By phone, Rozan, countersigned by a representative of the a third-grade teacher and a parent of DEPT. OF NAMING state, was that “each of the properties two, said that she felt empathy for Rose. WOULD SMELL AS SWEET? will bear a name that includes Mr. Trump’s “You know, what’s going on in his life?” name .. . prominently displayed at least she said. “Maybe he has kids on his back, at each entrance.” climbing all over him.” The State Legislature has become de- Rose, who joined ABC two years ago, termined to do something about this. does have children, whose remote school- The cause gained steam after January 6th, ing he’s been helping with—sometimes and bills that would strip Trump’s name on the couch, a Cobble Hill in gray vel- or a decade and a half now, motor- from the park are pending votes in the vet. Although the mass e-mails hadn’t Fists on the Taconic State Parkway, state senate and Assembly. At a joint leg- come to his in-box, his team had kept north of New York City, have been con- islative hearing in January, Commissioner him abreast. Citing the appeal of ABC’s fronted by exit signs for a Donald J. Erik Kulleseid, of the state Office of Parks, “sense of community,” he said, “This is Trump State Park. At first, the name was Recreation and Historic Preservation, a great example of the loyal customers merely curious; unlike hotels, mixed-use testified that his staff was “reviewing” just that we’ve had over time,” although he towers, and deli sandwiches, state parks how binding the old letter of understand- regretted being “the catalyst for it.” He are rarely named for reality TV stars or ing would be if the legislation becomes took responsibility for the delays, ex- blowhard real-estate developers. After law. There’s a big gray area here: yes, the plaining that supply chains worldwide the past six years, however, the name is former President is famously litigious, have been disrupted by COVID, and that still curious but also, for many, grotesque. but his lawyers will likely be battling on disastrous weather in Texas and Loui- Help may be on the way. many fronts in the next few years. “I doubt siana, where chemicals used to make Like America, Donald J. Trump State he’ll have the resources to care about that furniture foam are manufactured, has Park is split in half: one section, total- when the time comes” is how Assembly affected production. ling a hundred and fifty-four acres, is Member Daniel O’Donnell, a Democrat ABC matched the donations raised in Yorktown Heights, in Westchester from the Upper West Side, put the odds by GoFundMe, bringing the total to County; the other, made up of two hun- of a suit at the hearing. more than three thousand dollars. Three dred and eighty-two acres, straddles the Although Trump paid just shy of three days after the initial e-mail, Weiner was border between Westchester and Put- million dollars for the land at the end reaping her own benefits. “I have two nam Counties. Trump bought the land of the nineteen-nineties, he later claimed dates,” she reported, “and have been of- between 1998 and 2000, intending to that his gift, bestowed in 2006, was worth more than twenty-six million. In 2015, a campaign spokesperson made an even more lordly valuation—a hundred mil- lion. Whether such figures made their way onto Trump’s tax returns as write- offs is precisely the type of thing Man- hattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance, Jr., is said to be investigating. At the hearing, Kevin Byrne, a Re- publican Assembly member whose dis- trict includes the park, suggested that renaming it might be seen as an affront to the millions of New Yorkers who voted for Trump—including, in 2016, a majority of Byrne’s constituents. State Senator Brad Hoylman, a sponsor of the senate bill, remains steadfast. “I think the symbolism is enormous,” he said. A legislative “rejection of Trump and what he stood for” would be an important sig- nal to “all New Yorkers—and, frankly, Americans.” Hoylman, who is running for Manhattan borough president, said “Hey! I’m takin’ my little walk here!” that voters bring up the name-change issue to him all the time. “I think peo- Blanco, who is thirty-three, wore a ratty times walk to get coffee, and he’d leave. ple like their elected officials to take on Notorious B.I.G. T-shirt (“My pajamas,” One day I was, like, ‘We gotta write bullies, to right past wrongs, and to shine he explained, over Zoom) and a mess of something for Justin.’ And he just sat a light on dubious philanthropy,” he said. necklaces—one beaded, another with a down at that Wurlitzer, and I had a Assembly Member Nily Rozic, a Star of David pendant. You might think little keyboard in front of me, and we Democrat from Queens, has sponsored of a recording studio as a dark box, where started riffing and talking and in thirty multiple bills to rename the park. Aside an on-the-clock producer, hunched at a from the principles at stake, she said, a mixing console, seethes at missed takes. switch would provide a financial bene- But Blanco’s high-ceilinged space, with fit, given that the current signs frequently its white walls, cheerful canvases by such need to be replaced as a result of van- artists as George Condo, Andy Warhol, dalism. (One defacement, channelling and Jonas Wood, and even a bed, seems Jon Stewart, read, “Fuckface von Clown- more of a spot for a good-vibes hang. stick State Park.”) She’s open to sugges- “My whole shtick is I’ll never work with tions for new names. someone I’m not friends with,” Blanco If you want to enjoy Donald J. Trump said, sprawled on a couch. “Like, why State Park while it still honors the former would I want to work with you if I don’t President, bring a smartphone or a G.P.S. know you? Maybe you’re a shitty per- device: there are no signs once you exit son! So my thing is you come over to the Taconic, and the potholed roads are the studio and, first of all, I’m cooking tricky to navigate. Neither half boasts for you, I’m talking to you about your many amenities; mainly, they are open life. I don’t put pressure on anything.” spaces with pretty, woodsy terrain. On Blanco, né Benjamin Levin, grew the first day of spring, a single young up in the Virginia suburbs. As a teen, family was observed at each otherwise he was an aspiring rapper but quickly empty park. They, too, seemed polarized. grew interested in producing and song- Benny Blanco The father of a daughter at the southern writing. “I was so nerdy,” he said. “I’d section, who spoke with a Scandinavian do this thing where I’d print out the minutes we had the basis of the track.” accent, said that he hoped the park’s name liner notes from an album and cover up At first, Bieber was unsure about the would be altered to “something more rea- the names of the producers, engineers, song. “He was, like, ‘Do people really sonable.” At the northern site, another everything, to see if I could guess who want to hear this shit from me?’ ” Blanco father, who had on a “United States of worked on the song just from listening.” said. The song has gone platinum. Freedom” sweatshirt, disagreed. “I think In his early years as a producer, he ap- Poignancy, though, is not Blanco’s it’s retarded they want to change the prenticed under Dr. Luke, with whom dominant mode. “There’s so much seri- name,” he said. “Trump has nothing to do he collaborated on tracks like Katy ous shit in the world, and I’m not a seri- with the park. He just donated the land.” Perry’s “Teenage Dream” and Britney ous guy. I want to be the guy you come Should the legislation be signed into Spears’s “Circus.” Later, he produced to for dick and fart jokes,” he said. Re- law, MAGA recreationists may still have songs on his own for Rihanna, Justin cently, he’s been reprising his role as a options. A state representative in Ohio Bieber, and Kanye West. In 2018, he cocky, loquacious music producer on the has introduced a bill to rename a park decided to put his own name on an al- FXX show “Dave,” whose second season in that state for the former President. bum, “Friends Keep Secrets.” The rec- will première in June, and which stars The equally enticing current name: Mos- ord spawned several hits, among them and was co-created by Blanco’s close friend quito Lake State Park. the heartstring-puller “Eastside,” fea- Dave Burd, a.k.a. the rapper Lil Dicky. 1—Bruce Handy turing Halsey and Khalid. (“It became “I’m more humble in real life, but, oth- the biggest song. I was, like, Holy shit, erwise, it’s not that far off,” Blanco said. DEPT. OF SOUS-CHEFS O.K., I guess I can do this.”) How did Blanco know that he was NOT A SERIOUS GUY Last week, Blanco released “Friends ready for the spotlight? “I worked for Keep Secrets 2” (why mess with a win- all these artists for so many years,” he ning formula?), which includes “Lonely,” said. “Say I work at an Italian restaurant, a track featuring Bieber. The song, on the line, making Caesar salad, for ten which Blanco co-wrote with the mu- years. And I’m good at it.” He leaned sician Finneas, is a keening ballad that forward, getting into the food metaphor. draws on Bieber’s experience as an iso- “I toast the croutons the right way, I’m enny Blanco is all about chilling. lated young megastar. (“ ’Cause I’ve had getting the sauce fucking creamy, I got BOn a recent morning, the music everything/But no one’s listening/And all the Parmesan. And one day I’m, like, producer, songwriter, and recording art- that’s just fuckin’ lonely.”) “Me and I’ve been watching the guy next to me ist was puttering in his West Hollywood Finneas, he’d come over for sessions, make pizza for so long. I think I can try studio. Bed-headed and affable, with the and we’d never work. Ever,” Blanco and make a good one!” impish grin of a man used to being liked, said. “We’d talk for hours, laugh, some- —Naomi Fry

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 15 cades of wear and tear. It was, in many ANNALS OF ASTRONOMY ways, a death foretold. Even so, when the inevitable finally occurred, Monzón was stunned. THE COLLAPSE AT ARECIBO Monzón is a presence in Puerto Rico, a much beloved and trusted fig- The loss of Puerto Rico’s iconic telescope. ure, as meteorologists sometimes are in places where reporting on extreme BY DANIEL ALARCÓN weather can be a matter of life and death. She’d covered Hurricane Maria ust before eight in the morning Every year since Arecibo’s comple- and its harrowing aftermath, as well Jon December 1st of last year, Ada tion, in 1963, hundreds of researchers as dozens of lesser but still danger- Monzón was at the Guaynabo stu- from around the world had taken turns ous storms and the resulting floods or dios of WAPA, a television station pointing the radio telescope toward landslides. She’d done a Facebook Live in Puerto Rico, preparing to give a the sky to glean the secrets of the uni- through a magnitude-6.4 earthquake. weather update, when she got a text verse. It had played a role in the fields Still, she told me, the end of Arecibo from a friend. Jonathan Friedman, an of radio astronomy and atmospheric, was somehow harder, more personal. aeronomer who lives near the Arecibo climate, and planetary science, as well “It was devastating,” she said. “One of Observatory, about an hour and a half as in the search for exoplanets and the the most difficult moments of my life.”

For more than half a century, the Arecibo Observatory had the world’s largest single-aperture telescope. from San Juan, had sent her a photo, study of near-Earth asteroids that, were Arecibo, she added, “was a place of taken from his sister-in-law’s back they to collide with our planet, could unity for everyone who loves science yard, of the brilliant blue Caribbean end life as we know it. There were even on this island, and all of us who truly sky and the green, heavily forested biologists working at Arecibo, study- love Puerto Rico.” limestone hills. In the picture, a thin ing how plant life developed in the For more than half a century, Are- cloud of dust hovered just above the dim light beneath the telescope’s po- cibo was the world’s largest single- tree line; the image was notable not rous dish. aperture telescope, its global reputa- for what it showed but for what was Monzón, along with thousands of tion built on grand discoveries that missing. On a normal day—on any day other scientists and radio-astronomy matched its size: from the observatory, before that one, in fact—a shot from enthusiasts for whom Arecibo held the presence of ice on the poles of Mer- that back yard would have captured a special meaning, had been on high cury was first detected, the duration of Arecibo’s nine-hundred-ton radio- alert for weeks, ever since two of its that planet’s rotation was determined, telescope platform, with its massive cables had failed, in August and in and the surface of Venus was mapped; Gregorian dome, floating improbably early November. Although the tele- the first binary pulsar, later used to test over the valley, suspended from cables scope seemed to have survived Hurri- Einstein’s theory of relativity, was found five hundred feet above the ground. cane Maria, in 2017, without serious by astronomers working at Arecibo. Accompanying the photo was Fried- damage, the earthquakes that followed (They were awarded a Nobel Prize for man’s message, which read, simply, “Se had perhaps weakened components the discovery in 1993.) cayó ”—“It fell.” that were already suffering from de- In 1974, a team led by an astrono-

16 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY GOLDEN COSMOS mer at Cornell University named Frank was calling. She answered on air and, a town of about seventy thousand, with Drake (which included Carl Sagan) for an awkward moment, even wan- a harbor and a lively central plaza. In put together the Arecibo Message, a dered off camera. Everything was true, the sixties, it was a hub of rum pro- radio transmission that was beamed to she told her audience when she re- duction, home to one of the island’s a cluster of stars more than twenty-five turned. It was gone. largest cathedrals and three movie the- thousand light-years away. The mes- atres. Every year during carnival, peo- sage was meant to celebrate human he construction of a world-class ple came to Arecibo from all over the technological advancement, and, sup- Tradio telescope in Puerto Rico was, island to dance to steel-drum bands. posedly, to be decoded and read by ex- in some ways, an accident of the Cold There was a fifty-room hotel on the traterrestrials. Not all radio telescopes War. After the Soviet Union launched plaza, where visiting scientists and en- can both receive and transmit: this was the Sputnik satellite, in 1957, there was gineers sometimes stayed, and where one more way in which Arecibo was a lot of money in Washington for big the New York Times and the Daily News special. The message itself—a series of ideas that could showcase American were delivered every Sunday. Gordon bits and squares containing the num- power and technology, particularly in and his team moved to Arecibo in 1960, bers one through ten, the atomic num- space. Enter a Cornell physicist and setting up shop in a small office be- bers of certain elements, and a graphic astronomer named William Gordon, hind the cathedral. Several other main- of a double helix, among other scien- a veteran of the Second World War in land scientists and their families, along tific touchstones—was mostly sym- his early forties, who wanted to use with a few Cuban engineers, settled in bolic, to mark the occasion of an up- radio waves to study the upper atmo- Radioville, a seaside development a grade to the telescope’s capabilities, but sphere—something that required a couple of miles west of the center of it captured the public imagination giant transmitter and a massive dish. town—named for a radio station, not nonetheless. In theory, were any alien Nothing on this scale had ever been for the observatory, which, in any case, life-forms to respond, we earthlings done. Radio astronomy was still in its was still just an idea. could discern their answer at Arecibo. early days; Cornell was among the first Size was always a core-value prop- Each year, more than eighty thou- American universities where it was osition of the observatory at Arecibo. sand visitors came to the observatory, studied. The Advanced Research Proj- At the time, the largest radio tele- including tourists from all over the ects Agency, created by President Ei- scope, near Manchester, England, had world and twenty thousand Puerto senhower, funded the project, hoping a diameter of two hundred and fifty Rican schoolchildren, who had their that it would detect any intercontinen- feet; Arecibo’s telescope would be a first brush with the cosmos there. The tal ballistic missiles cutting a path across thousand feet wide, dwarfing every 1995 James Bond film “GoldenEye” the upper atmosphere. other such instrument in use. The featured an absurd fight scene that In order to be useful for planetary limestone hills of northern Puerto was shot at Arecibo, which culmi- study, the telescope had to be situated Rico were dotted with natural sink- nated in Pierce Brosnan’s Bond drop- in the tropics, where the planets pass holes, which made the excavation and ping a scowling villain to his death overhead in their orbits. Cuba, in the construction simpler, though there was from the suspended platform; two midst of revolution, was not an op- nothing simple about building a spher- years later, in the film “Contact,” Jodie tion. Hawaii and the Philippines were ical dish with the area of approxi- Foster and Matthew McConaughey too far away. Puerto Rico, which had mately eighteen football fields. The shared a kiss beneath a starry sky with formalized its colonial relationship curve of the dish had to be precise in the Gregorian dome as a backdrop. with the U.S. less than a decade ear- order for the radio waves to be gath- “If you had to tell someone about lier, emerged as a possibility, facilitated ered within a movable instrument plat- Puerto Rico,” Monzón told me, “you’d by a Ph.D. candidate from there who form. According to the astronomer say, ‘We have the largest radio tele- was studying at Cornell. The rest, as Don Campbell, who arrived at Are- scope in the world,’ and they’d say, they say, is history. Gordon, who died cibo in 1965 and is now working on a ‘Oh, sure, Arecibo.’” in 2010, described the rather arbitrary history of the facility, the construc- That December morning at the nature of the site-selection process in tion of the observatory—which was WAPA studios, Monzón told the pro- a 1978 interview: “Our civil-engineer built at a cost of around nine million duction team that she had to go on the man looked at the aerial photographs dollars, the equivalent of more than air right away, and minutes later she of Puerto Rico and said, ‘Here are a seventy million today—was a tremen- was standing in front of a weather map, dozen possibilities of holes in the dous achievement. her voice cracking: “Friends, with my ground in roughly the dimensions you The original walkway to the sus- heart in my hands, I have to inform need.’ And we looked at some and said, pended platform had wooden slats. you that the observatory has collapsed.” ‘Well, that’s too close to a town or a There was no phone communication She bit her lip and shook her head. city or something.’ Very, very quickly from the observatory to the city, though “We tried to save it however we could. he reduced it to three, and he and I there was a radio link to a phone that And we knew this was a possibility. .. .” went down and looked at them and rang on the fourth floor of the Space She trailed off, looked down at the picked one.” Sciences Building at Cornell. Back phone in her hand, and stammered The one that they picked was a half- then, the trip from San Juan to the that the director of the observatory hour drive into the hills from Arecibo, observatory might take two or three

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 17 entists at Arecibo had won it. Those who heard the news while having breakfast in the cafeteria danced joy­ fully around the table. Taylor later had a replica of the prize made for the observatory’s visitors’ center. The instruments and equipment at Arecibo were in a constant state of re­ invention. In 1974, the wire mesh that originally formed the spherical surface of the dish was swapped for roughly forty thousand perforated­aluminum panels, which made it possible to ob­ serve at higher frequencies. The most striking upgrade came in the nineties, with the twenty­five­million­dollar construction of a Gregorian dome, to house more sensitive instrumentation, which added an extra three hundred tons of weight to the platform. Ac­ cording to Campbell, Gordon, who had retired by then, visited the site and joked that the addition “destroyed the symmetry of my telescope.”

he problems began for Arecibo in Tthe mid­aughts, when the Na­ tional Science Foundation, which owned the site and supported it with about twelve million dollars a year, con­ vened a panel of astronomers to eval­ uate the foundation’s holdings. With “You want me on time, or you want me in a turtleneck?” the N.S.F. facing flat budget alloca­ tions, and with several large invest­ ments in new telescopes under way, •• the panel recommended a multimil­ lion­dollar cut to the Arecibo astron­ hours, longer during the harvest sea­ course, the chance to work on a tele­ omy budget, to be implemented over son, when trucks piled high with sugar­ scope of that magnitude was unique. several years. The report was stark and cane clogged the narrow roads. Joanna Planetary and atmospheric re­ final: if partners couldn’t be found to Rankin, a radio astronomer at the Uni­ searchers used Arecibo to transmit a help cover the cost of maintaining the versity of Vermont, who made her first radio signal toward a target—a planet, site by 2011, Arecibo should be closed. observation at Arecibo in 1969, told an asteroid, the ionosphere—and de­ According to Daniel Altschuler, me that the terrain at the site was so duced information from the echoes who was then the observatory’s di­ steep and unforgiving she found it mi­ that came back. Radio astronomers, rector of operations, the report had a raculous that the place had even been on the other hand, mostly listened to catastrophic impact on morale. But built. “Going up there at night was naturally occurring radio waves that Congress provided a lifeline when it like being on an island in the sky,” she originated in space—what was once mandated that NASA track at least said. “So vast and so delicate.” The fa­ known as “cosmic noise.” Because ninety per cent of near­Earth objects cility attracted an adventurous sort of radio astronomy doesn’t require dark­ larger than four hundred and fifty personality in those early days, Camp­ ness, Arecibo operated at all hours of feet—the kind, in other words, that bell said. Still, it was good living: the the day and night, and several of could wipe out entire cities. As it hap­ scientists worked hard all week and the scientists I spoke to described a pened, Arecibo’s powerful transmit­ went to the beach every Sunday. The tight­knit community, with colleagues ter could beam radio waves at aster­ Arecibo Country Club, which had no working across disciplines, delighting oids and measure their size, the golf course and whose swimming pool in one another’s discoveries. When quality of their surface, their speed, was often drained of water, nonethe­ word came that Joseph Taylor and their orbit, and their rotation in as­ less hosted great parties, to which the Russell Hulse had won the Nobel tonishing detail. This added a few scientists were often invited. And, of Prize, in 1993, it was as if all the sci­ million dollars to the yearly budget—a

18 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 stay of execution, more or less, which significant part of the fight for dol- in the dish and damaging about two eased the pressure without providing lars to support the observatory would hundred and fifty of its panels. It was a long-term solution. Scott Ransom, take place in Tallahassee, not Wash- concerning, but did not, at the time, a staff astronomer at the National ington. But the move stalled, accord- seem to represent an existential threat Radio Astronomy Observatory, in ing to Lugo, because of opposition to the observatory itself. The N.S.F. Charlottesville, Virginia, made obser- from José E. Serrano, a congressman authorized the purchase of replace- vations from Arecibo for twenty years. representing New York, who has since ment parts. Then, on November 6th, He told me that there was always a retired. (Serrano, who was born in while engineers were still studying sense that the facility was living on Puerto Rico, saw support of Arecibo how repairs could be made, a second borrowed time. “The next hurricane, as a federal commitment to the peo- cable broke. At that point, there was the next earthquake, the next down- ple there. “I didn’t want to let the N.S.F. no way back. On November 19th, the turn in the economy, the next politi- wash their hands of it,” he said.) N.S.F. declared that Arecibo’s tele- cal turn was going to be the end for Meanwhile, the damage from Hur- scope would be decommissioned, Arecibo,” he said. ricane Maria was assessed, and the con- pending an analysis of the safest way Bob Kerr, who became the direc- sensus was that the telescope had been to disassemble it. That question be- tor four years after Altschuler left, spared any serious impact—something came moot less than two weeks later, said that the observatory had some- of a miracle, considering the power of when the remaining cables gave way. how become “the poster child for so- the storm. It’s less clear what the con- The observatory, the most iconic sym- called life-cycle planning”—the notion sequences of the thousands of earth- bol of U.S. investment on the island that limited funds require decision- quakes that shook the island in early for nearly six decades, was gone. All makers to decommission older facil- 2020 may have been. In any case, main- that was left, in Lugo’s words, was “a ities as new ones are developed. Even tenance and repair on the instrument, bunch of aluminum panels sitting at now, Kerr finds this attitude mystify- given its size and complexity, had al- the bottom of a sinkhole.” ing. Not only were the scientists at ways been somewhat ad hoc. “It’s not Arecibo still producing cutting-edge as if replacement parts can be taken off few days after the collapse, the research but the observatory played a the shelf,” Luisa Fernanda Zambrano, A N.S.F. released a video of the mo- significant role in fulfilling many of a Ph.D. candidate who has worked at ment the telescope fell, shot from a the N.S.F.’s stated goals, including Arecibo for seven years, told me. “If drone flying just above the Gregorian democratizing access and inspiring something broke, repairs were always dome. The soundless video shows the young people, particularly Puerto a little bit MacGyver.” cables beginning to unravel, first one, Rican and other Latino students, to The first cable came loose on Au- then another, then several strands snap- enter the sciences. “These are things gust 10th, tearing a hundred-foot gash ping at once, before the camera turns, that you would have thought N.S.F. would have held as a jewel in the crown,” Kerr said. “I’ve never been able to understand why N.S.F. walked away from that accomplishment.” In 2015, he resigned. “Many staff mem- bers feared they would have to be the ones to turn off the lights,” he told me. In 2018, less than a year after Hur- ricane Maria, a partnership led by the University of Central Florida took over management of the observatory. Ray Lugo, the director of U.C.F.’s Florida Space Institute, who was ap- pointed after a long career at NASA, told me that, when Cornell oversaw the observatory, contributions from the N.S.F. ran to tens of millions of dollars a year. U.C.F. has enjoyed no such largesse. By 2023, the last year of its contract, N.S.F. contributions are slated to be reduced to just two mil- lion dollars. “They’re looking for a graceful exit,” Lugo said. U.C.F. pro- posed that the N.S.F. pass the title and ownership of the site to the State of Florida, which would mean that a “No, I’m not interested in your new hygiene protocol.” gazing suddenly down at the ruined and collaborators had written more fuelled Puerto Rico’s economy were dish. Another video, taken from below, than twenty-five white papers arguing phased out the year before the N.S.F. near the base of one of the towers from for the continued value of the obser- first threatened to shut down the ob- which the dome was suspended, shows vatory’s work. They were, until De- servatory. The island has been in re- the scene with sound, an ominous, cember, cautiously optimistic, but un- cession for the majority of the past fif- heaving rumble before the cables give fortunately the decadal committee’s teen years, while its debt has ballooned and the platform swings behind the review was nearly complete when the to more than seventy-two billion dol- trees and offscreen. The tops of the telescope fell. There was no indication lars—a figure so preposterous that, in towers snap like matchsticks. that it would be modified at such a 2015, Alejandro García Padilla, Puerto Online, videos of the collapse were late date to take what had happened Rico’s governor at the time, announced sometimes posted with a trigger warn- at Arecibo into account. that it was simply unpayable. Even be- ing. Chris Salter, an astronomer who When the second cable broke, a fore Hurricane Maria, the population worked at Arecibo for twenty-six years, group of astronomers from around had shrunk by more than ten per cent told me that he hadn’t been able to the world began holding daily vigils from its peak, in the mid-two-thou- bring himself to watch them yet. “It’s on Zoom. After the collapse, the focus sands; after the storm, an estimated like losing a family member,” he said. of those meetings widened to include hundred and thirty thousand people On social media, hundreds of Puerto plans for rebuilding. There was a sense moved to the mainland. And the earth Rican scientists and students posted of urgency, a desire to take advantage continues to shake: right now, the is- tributes to the observatory, under the of the public outpouring of grief. Some land is experiencing hundreds of trem- hashtags #WhatAreciboMeansToMe of the scientists, led by Arecibo’s head ors every month. “We’ve been through and #SaveTheAO. To scroll through of radio astronomy, D. Anish Roshi, a lot,” Monzón told me. “There are them was to be struck again and again met through December and January, people who don’t like the word ‘resil- by the staggering scale of the loss. Ac- and in early February released another ience,’ but that’s really what defines us.” cording to scientists at Arecibo, data white paper, with a proposed design Nonetheless, the fall of Arecibo was a collected there has fuelled thirty-five for what they called the Next Gen- painful setback. hundred scientific publications and eration Arecibo Telescope. The tele- When I spoke to Lugo in mid-Feb- nearly four hundred master’s or Ph.D. scope, which would cost an estimated ruary, he told me that workers were theses. More than twenty asteroids four hundred and fifty million dol- preparing to clear away the debris from were studied from the observatory and lars to build, would provide five times the shattered Gregorian dome, cutting named after Arecibo scientists and more sky coverage than the fallen in- it free from the limestone into which technicians. Abel Méndez, an astron- strument, with more than double the it had embedded itself when it fell. omer at the University of Puerto Rico sensitivity in receiving radio signals Some aspects of the grim cleanup, at Arecibo, told me that the very pres- and four times the transmitting power. which was projected to cost between ence of the observatory had helped Some two thousand scientists and en- thirty million and fifty million dollars, him overcome the impostor syndrome thusiasts in more than sixty countries were already under way, and the hun- that might otherwise have plagued endorsed the white paper. In a state- dred or so Puerto Rican staff members him, as a working-class kid from a pub- ment to me, an N.S.F. spokesperson on site were struggling. On more than lic school who dreamed of entering the wrote that the foundation had re- one occasion, Lugo told me, he’d turned sciences. He’d first seen the telescope ceived the paper and was still “col- a corner and come across an employee, as an eleven-year-old boy. There was lecting such input.” In a report re- alone, overcome with emotion. Lugo, no visitors’ center then, so he had called leased in early March, the N.S.F. said who is of Puerto Rican descent, un- from a pay phone across the street from that it was planning a community derstood what they were going through, his school and asked if he could tour workshop this summer to encourage because he was going through it, too. the observatory. “They took me be- the submission of proposals for the Zambrano was assigned to a team neath the dish,” he said. “To have a future of the observatory. tasked with salvaging parts from the place like that here, in Puerto Rico, it Many Puerto Ricans, though, fear debris, but for weeks she avoided look- gave me a sense of confidence.” that Arecibo will be yet another illus- ing directly at the damage. When she tration of the abandonment and ne- finally did so, in early February, she he collapse came at a particularly glect that have colored many aspects wept. Among the ruins, her team found Tfraught moment for Arecibo. of life on the island. It’s been decades two seven-foot klystrons—specialized Every ten years, scientists from the since Puerto Rico was the prosperous vacuum tubes that amplify radio fre- various branches of astronomy pro- tropical outpost of American capital- quencies—that had somehow survived duce a document, a kind of road map ism, used as a contrast and a cudgel the crash nearly intact. They had been for the coming decade of research, set- against socialist Cuba. The brightest installed shortly before the first cable ting priorities for new instruments and years of the island’s economy corre- broke and had never been used. Now the most promising fields of investi- sponded with the golden age of Are- she wondered if they might be saved, gation—all of which is a precursor to cibo, when the observatory was buzz- not to be used as intended but to be the allocation of N.S.F. funding. Be- ing and the science was at its most part of a museum exhibit about what fore the collapse, the team at U.C.F. revolutionary. The tax exemptions that Arecibo had once been. 

20 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 parable about McCarthyism, which SHOUTS & MURMURS was a terrible episode of American history that itself had a long-lasting impact on American history. Although I did not receive the part of Abigail Williams, I did play the pivotal role of Deputy Governor Danforth, who has several lines. Our school newspa- per declared my presentation “dra- matic” (review attached). This year, my senior year, Ms. Wilkie said that we would be doing the Pulitzer Prize-winning drama “Our Town.” Never could I have foreseen that “our town” would be affected by the respiratory disease only a few short months later. Needless to say, I watched in hor- ror in January and February of last year as news reports emerged from China about a new respiratory ail- MY APPLICATION ESSAY ment that threatened to sicken peo- ple and shut down vast portions of TO BROWN (REJECTED) the economy. In March, we received word that our very high school would BY MICHAEL IAN BLACK be closing its mahogany doors. The curtain on my high-school theatrical Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and tion process that sophomores would career, tragically, fell forever, before I natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting be considered for leading roles, but even had the chance to audition for impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to the parts of Othello, Iago, and Des- the central role of the Stage Manager, describe those impacts. —The 2020-21 college-admissions demona all went to upperclassmen, which I planned to reinterpret as a Common Application. even though none of them had taken strong, independent woman in the private acting classes, as I have, with wake of #MeToo. ovid-19 is a very destructive re- Leonard Michaels (Broadway cred- Perhaps Fate is the real Stage Manager. Cspiratory disease that has caused its include “Company,” “Starlight Ex- The Stanislavski method of acting much pain and suffering for millions press,” “Pump Boys and Dinettes”), at teaches us to incorporate our actual of people around the world. Although the Willows Dramatic Academy for experiences into our Craft. Should I my heart grieves for all the lives lost, Young Performers. have the great honor of studying at each of us has suffered in our own This experience taught me that au- the Department of Theatre Arts and unique ways. For me, that suffering took thority figures do not always have “the Performance Studies at Brown Uni- the form of not getting an opportunity answers,” a lesson reinforced when Dr. versity, I vow to incorporate the suf- to play the lead in our spring drama, Anthony Fauci, who is a very respected fering of this past year into my Art as which was, so tragically, cancelled. medical adviser to many Presidents of a tribute to all those, including my- For years, I have been working to- the United States of America, said at self, who have experienced such tre- ward this goal. As a freshman, I audi- first that masks should not be worn but mendous loss. tioned for the role of Laura in the Ten- then said that they should. It is believed that the immortal bard, nessee Williams famous American When discussing masks these days, William Shakespeare, said, “Instead of drama “The Glass Menagerie.” While it is impossible not to conjure in one’s weeping when a tragedy occurs in a I did not win the role, I find it very mind images of the famous “Comedy songbird’s life, it sings away its grief.” ironic that now, only three years later, and Tragedy” masks, which were worn My time at Brown will be my chance we have all become aware that life is in ancient Greece during the classi- to “sing away grief,” except that, unlike as precious as those fateful glass figu- cal period, from approximately 500 to the tragedies of Shakespeare and other rines due to Covid-19. 300 B.C. playwrights, my tragedy is real and As a sophomore, my efforts to se- Junior year was a turning point for therefore more tragic. cure the role of the wrongly accused my high-school theatrical career. I Please find attached a video of me Desdemona in William Shakespeare’s auditioned to portray Abigail Wil- in a scene from Herb Gardner’s “A important play “Othello” were, once liams in “The Crucible,” a play that Thousand Clowns” (performed with again, thwarted. Our drama coach, on the surface purports to be about J. Leonard Mitchell, member, Actors’

LUCI GUTIÉRREZ LUCI Ms. Wilkie, told me during the audi- the Salem witch trials but is in fact a Equity). 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 21 banging at my door. Braced for an emer- DEPT. OF SCIENCE gency, I rushed downstairs. The house had double-glass doors flanked by pic- ture windows, which together gave out WHERE THE WILD THINGS GO onto almost the entire yard, but I could see no one. I was standing there, sleep-addled How animals navigate the world. and confused, when up onto his hind legs and into my line of vision popped an ex- BY KATHRYN SCHULZ tremely scrawny and filthy gray cat. I gaped. Then I opened the door and asked the cat, idiotically, “Are you Billy?” He paced, distraught, and meowed at the door. I retreated inside and returned with a bowl each of food and water, but he ig- nored them and banged again at the door. Flummoxed, I took a picture and texted it to my landlord with much the same question I had asked the cat: “Is this Billy?” Ninety minutes later, Phil showed up at my door. The cat, who had been pacing continuously, took one look and leaped into Phil’s arms—literally hurled himself the several feet necessary to be bundled into his erstwhile owner’s chest. Phil, a six-foot-tall bartender of the badass va- riety, promptly started to cry. After a few minutes of mutual adoration, the cat hopped down, purring, devoured the food I had put out two hours earlier, lay down in a sunny patch of grass by the door, and embarked on an elaborate bath. How Billy accomplished his remark- able feat remains a mystery, not only to me but to everyone. In 2013, after an in- door cat named Holly went missing during a road trip with her owners to Daytona Beach and turned up back home two months later, in West Palm Beach, two hundred miles away, the col- ne of the most amazing things I the cat somehow clawed his way out of lective ethological response to the ques- Ohave ever witnessed involved an the carrier. Phil pulled over to the shoul- tion of how she did it was “Beats me.” otherwise unprepossessing house cat der but found that, from the driver’s And that bafflement is generalizable. named Billy. This was some years ago, seat, he could neither coax nor drag the Cats, bats, elephant seals, red-tailed shortly after I had moved into a little cat back into captivity. Moving care- hawks, wildebeests, gypsy moths, cut- rental house in the Hudson Valley. Billy, fully, he got out of the van, walked around tlefish, slime mold, emperor penguins: a big, bad-tempered old tomcat, be- to the other side, and opened the door to one degree or another, every animal longed to the previous tenant, a guy by a gingerly two inches—whereupon Billy on earth knows how to navigate—and, the name of Phil. Phil adored that cat, shot out, streaked unscathed across two to one degree or another, scientists re- and the cat—improbably, given his oth- lanes of seventy-mile-per-hour traffic, main perplexed by how they do so. erwise unenthusiastic feelings about hu- and disappeared into the wide, over- What makes this striking is that we manity—returned the favor. grown median. After nearly an hour in are living in a golden age of information On the day Phil vacated the house, the pouring rain trying to make his own about animal travels. Three hundred years he wrestled an irate Billy into a cat car- way to the other side, Phil gave up and, ago, we knew so little about the subject rier, loaded him into a moving van, and heartbroken, continued onward to his that one English scholar suggested in all headed toward his new apartment, in newly diminished home. seriousness that storks spent their win- Brooklyn. Thirty minutes down I-84, Some weeks later, at a little before ters on the moon. Thirty years ago, a in the middle of a drenching rainstorm, seven in the morning, I woke up to a herd of African elephants, the largest land mammals on earth, could still stage Why are other animals so much better than humans at way-finding? an annual disappearing act, crossing be-

22 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY MIGUEL PORLAN yond the borders of a national park each capable of navigating—of finding that more than a million of them might pass rainy season and vanishing into parts un- meal, that mate, and that hiding place, overhead every hour after dark, yet they known. But in the last few decades an- not to mention the way back home. are no more a part of a flock than you imal tracking, like so much of life, has Some impressive examples of this are when driving alone in your S.U.V. been revolutionized by technology, in- ability are widely known. Salmon that on I-95 during Thanksgiving weekend. cluding satellites, camera traps, drones, leave their natal stream just months after The stories of these avian travellers and DNA sequencing. We now have hatching can return after years in the are told in abundance in Scott Weiden- geolocation devices light enough to be ocean, sometimes traversing nine hun- saul’s “A World on the Wing: The Global carried by monarch butterflies; we also dred miles and gaining seven thousand Odyssey of Migratory Birds.” An ar- have a system for tracking those devices feet in elevation to do so. Homing pi- dent ornithologist, Weidensaul some- installed on the International Space Sta- geons can return to their lofts from more times shares a few too many details about tion. Meanwhile, the study of animal than a thousand miles away, a naviga- a few too many species, but one sym- travel has acquired tens of thousands of tional prowess that has been admired pathizes: virtually every bird in the book new contributors, in the form of ama- for ages; five millennia ago, the Egyp- does book-worthy things. Consider the teurs who use cell phones and laptops to tians used them, like owls at Hogwarts, bar-headed goose, which migrates every upload observational data points by the as a kind of early airmail. Many other year from central Asia to lowland India, billions. And it has also acquired—per- exceptional navigators, however, are at elevations that rival those of com- haps unsurprisingly, given the enduring, humble and unsung, and learning about mercial airplanes; in 1953, when Tenzing “Incredible Journey”-esque appeal of the them is one of the pleasures of “Super- Norgay and Edmund Hillary made the subject matter—a spate of new books navigators: Exploring the Wonders of first ascent of Mt. Everest, a member about advances in animal navigation. How Animals Find Their Way,” by of their team looked up from the slopes Two main lessons emerge from those David Barrie, and “Nature’s Compass: and watched bar-headed geese fly over books—one tantalizing, one tragic. The The Mystery of Animal Navigation,” the summit. Or consider the Arctic tern, first is that, although we are developing by the science writer Carol Grant Gould which has a taste for the poles that would a clearer picture of where animals go, we and her husband, the evolutionary bi- put even Shackleton to shame; it lays still have a lot to learn about how they ologist James L. Gould. Each winter, a its eggs in the Far North but winters find their way. The second is that the member of the crow family, the Clark’s on the Antarctic coast, yielding annual creatures with a credible claim to being nutcracker, recovers the food it has pre- travels that can exceed fifty thousand the worst navigators on the planet have viously cached over a hundred square miles. That makes the four-thousand- steadily reduced the odds of all the oth- miles in up to six thousand separate lo- mile migration of the rufous humming- ers getting where they need to go, by in- cations. When spiders of the Salticidae bird seem unimpressive by comparison, terfering with their trajectories, impair- family are confined to a maze and shown until you realize that this particular com- ing their route-finding abilities, and a prey animal, they will reach it even muter weighs only around a tenth of an despoiling their destinations. Those feck- when doing so initially requires mov- ounce. The astonishment isn’t just that less creatures are us, of course. While ing in the opposite direction. Rock lob- a bird that size can complete such a voy- other animals lend this field of study its sters migrate en masse from colder wa- age, trade winds and thunderstorms be fascination, we humans distinguish our- ters to warmer ones, travelling, as the damned; it’s that so minuscule a phys- selves chiefly by adding existential un- Goulds write, “in tandem conga lines, iology can contain a sufficiently power- dertones to the fundamental questions antennae to tail” and maintaining a per- ful G.P.S. to keep it on course. of navigation: How did we get here? And fectly straight course, despite powerful More generally, the astonishment is where, exactly, are we going? currents and the uneven ocean floor. that any physiology can contain a nav- All this is to say nothing of the great- igational system capable of such jour- ature, in her infinite creativity, has est navigational feats in the animal king- neys. A bird that migrates over long dis- Ndevised many ways for animals to dom: the long-distance migrations un- tances must maintain its trajectory by get from A to B. Birds fly, fish swim, dertaken by many bird species. If, like day and by night, in every kind of gibbons swing from tree branches (the me, you live in North America and don’t weather, often with no landmarks in technical term is “brachiate”), basilisk know much about ornithology, you prob- sight. If its travels take more than a few lizards walk on water, and web-toed sal- ably associate those migrations with a days, it must compensate for the fact amanders curl up in a ball and roll down- jagged V of Canada geese overhead, that virtually everything it could use to hill. Certain spiders drift about on home- their half-rowdy, half-plaintive calls sig- stay oriented will change, from the ele- spun balloons, certain cephalopods use nalling the arrival of fall and spring. As vation of the sun to the length of the jet propulsion, and certain crustaceans migrants go, though, those geese are not day and the constellations overhead at hitch rides on other species. But, how- particularly representative; they travel night. Most bewildering of all, it must ever they get around, all animals move by day, in intergenerational flocks, with know where it is going—even the first for the same reasons: to eat, mate, and the youngest birds learning the route time, when it has never been there be- escape from predators. That’s the evo- from their elders. By contrast, most mi- fore—and it must know where that des- lutionary function of mobility. The evo- gratory birds travel at night, on their tination lies compared with its current lutionary problem it presents is that any- own, in accordance with a private itin- position. Other species making other thing capable of moving must also be erary. At the peak of migration season, journeys face additional difficulties: how

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 23 to navigate entirely underground, or how we are not alone. One scientist, puzzled taneously more prosaic and more as- to navigate beneath the waters of a vast to find that his well-trained rats no lon- tounding. If you trap Cataglyphis ants and seemingly undifferentiated ocean. ger knew their way around a maze after at a food source, build little stilts for he moved it across his lab, eventually de- some of them, give others partial am- ow might an animal accomplish termined that they had been navigating putations, and set them all loose again, Hsuch things? The Goulds, in “Na- via landmarks on the ceiling. (That was they will each head back to their nest— ture’s Compass,” outline several com- a blow to the notion, much beloved by but the longer-legged ones will over- mon strategies for staying on course. behaviorists, that such rats were just learn- shoot it, while the stubby-legged ones These include taxis (instinctively mov- ing motor sequences: ten steps forward, will fall short. That’s because they nav- ing directly toward or directly away from turn right, three steps forward, there’s igate by counting their steps, as if their a given cue, such as light, in the case of the food.) Other animals use senses that pin-size brains contained a tiny Fitbit. phototaxis, or sound, in the case of pho- we possess but aren’t very adept at de- (On the next journey, they’ll all get it notaxis); piloting (heading toward land- ploying. Some rely on smell; those mi- right, because they recalibrate each time.) marks); compass orientation (maintain- grating salmon can detect a single drop Similarly, honeybees adjust their air- ing a constant bearing in one direction); of water from their natal stream in two speed in response to headwinds and tail- vector navigation (stringing together a hundred and fifty gallons of seawater. winds in order to maintain a constant sequence of compass orientations—say, Others use sound—not in the simple, ground speed of fifteen miles per hour— heading south and then south-south- toward-or-away mode of phonotaxis but which means, the Goulds suggest, that west and then due west, each for a spec- as something like an auditory landmark, by tracking their wing beats the bees can ified distance); and dead reckoning (cal- useful for maintaining any bearing. Thus, determine how far they have travelled. culating a location based on bearing, a bird in flight might focus on a chorus I have presented these navigation speed, and how much time has elapsed of frogs in a pond far below in order to mechanisms serially, but most creatures since leaving a prior location). Each of orient itself and correct for drift. possess more than one of them, because these strategies requires one or more bi- Many animals, however, navigate using different conditions call for different tools. ological mechanisms, which is where senses alien to us. Pigeons, whales, and What works at noon might not work at the science of animal navigation gets in- giraffes, among others, can detect infra- night, what works close to home might teresting—because, to have a sense of sound—low-frequency sound waves that not work far away, and what works on a direction, a given species might also need travel hundreds of miles in air and even sunny day might not work in a storm. to have, among other faculties, some- farther in water. Eels and sharks can Yet even all these tools in combination thing like a compass, something like a sense electric fields and find their way cannot account for the last of the way- map, a decent memory, the ability to around underwater via electric signa- finding strategies described by the Goulds, keep track of time, and an information- tures. And many animals, from mayflies which is by far the most arresting and rich awareness of its environment. and mantis shrimp to lizards and bats, confounding: true navigation. The easiest of these mechanisms to can perceive the polarization of light, a understand are those that most closely helpful navigation cue that, among other rue navigation is the ability to reach resemble our own. Most humans, for in- things, can be used to determine the po- Ta distant destination without the aid stance, routinely navigate based on a sition of the sun on overcast days. of landmarks. If you were kidnapped, combination of vision and memory, and Other navigational tools are simul- taken in pitch darkness thousands of miles away, and abandoned somewhere unin- habited, true navigation would be your only option for finding your way home. To do so, you would need a compass, along with the know-how to use it—for instance, an awareness that magnetic north and geographic north are not iden- tical. Failing that, you would need to be able to orient based on the movement of the sun—a tricky business, especially if your kidnappers weren’t kind enough to inform you of your latitude. If you plan to travel after dark, you’d better hope that you aren’t in the Southern Hemi- sphere, which has no equivalent of the North Star, or you’d better be able to rival Galileo with your knowledge of the nightly and seasonal course of the con- stellations. But, even if all this applied, you would still be in trouble if you did not also have a map. Being able to main- tain a given bearing with perfect preci- naturally occurring minerals, in the beaks question whether it works at all. We do sion isn’t much help if you have no idea of many birds, as well as in dolphins, know, though, that the earth’s magnetic where you are vis-à-vis your destination. turtles, bacteria, and other creatures. This field is almost certainly crucial to the Some animals plainly do have such was a thrilling discovery, quickly popu- navigational aptitude of countless spe- a map, or, as scientists call it, a “map larized as the notion that some animals cies—so crucial that evolution may well sense”—an awareness, mysterious in or- have built-in compass needles. have produced many different mecha- igin, of where they are compared with As with many thrilling and popular nisms for sensing the field’s polarity, in- where they’re going. For some of those scientific ideas, however, this one started tensity, and inclination. Taken together, animals, certain geographic coördinates to look a little strange on closer inquiry. those mechanisms would constitute the are simply part of their evolutionary in- For one thing, it turned out beginnings of a solution to heritance. Sand hoppers, those tiny, ex- that birds with magnetite the problem of true naviga- citable crustaceans that leap out of the in their beaks weren’t navi- tion. And it would be an el- way when you stroll along a beach, are gating based on north-south egant one, capable of ex- born knowing how to find the ocean. alignment, as we humans plaining the phenomenon When threatened, those from the At- do when using a compass. across a range of creatures lantic coast of Spain flee west, while those Instead, they were relying and conditions, because the from its Mediterranean coast flee south— on the inclination of the magnetic field isomnipresent even if their mothers were previously earth’s magnetic field—the on this planet. Given some translocated and they hatched some- changing angle at which it means of detecting it, you where else entirely. Likewise, all those intersects the planet’s sur- could rely on it by day and birds that embark on their first migra- face as you move from the by night, in clear weather tions alone must somehow know instinc- poles to the equator. But inclination pro- and in foul, in the air and over land and tively where they are going. vides no clues about polarity; if you could underground and underwater. But instinct alone does not explain sense it, you would know where you were That kind of sweeping explanation what such birds can do. In 2006, scien- relative to the nearest pole, but you would be convenient, because true nav- tists in Washington State trapped a group wouldn’t know which pole was nearest. igation, which was once thought to re- of white-crowned sparrows that had Whatever the magnetite in birds is doing, quire the kind of advanced reasoning and begun their annual migration from Can- then, it does not seem to function like sophisticated toolmaking exclusive to ada to Mexico and transported them in the needle in a compass. Even more cu- humans, seems increasingly likely to be a windowless compartment to New Jer- riously, experiments showed that birds a widely shared capacity. Countless bird sey—the avian equivalent of the kidnap- with magnetite grew temporarily dis- species can do it, as can salmon. Those ping thought experiment. Upon release, oriented when exposed to red light, even conga-line rock lobsters are so good at the juvenile birds—those making their though light has no known effect on the it that they appear to be impossible to first trip—headed south along the same workings of magnets. disorient, which we know because sci- bearing that they had been using back One possible explanation for this entists have gone to outlandish lengths in Washington. But the adult birds flew strange phenomenon lies in a protein to try to do so. As Barrie describes in west-southwest, correcting for a displace- called cryptochrome, which is found in “Supernavigators,” you can cover a rock ment that nothing in their evolutionary the retina of certain animals. Some sci- lobster’s eyes, put it in an opaque con- history could have anticipated. That find- entists theorize that, when a molecule of tainer filled with seawater from its na- ing is consistent with many others show- cryptochrome is struck by a photon of tive environment, line the container with ing that birds become better navigators light (as from the sun or stars), an elec- magnets suspended from strings so they during their first long flight, in many tron within it is jolted out of position, swing in all directions, put the container cases learning entirely new and more ef- generating what is known as a radical in a truck, drive the truck in circles on ficient strategies. Subsequent experiments pair: two parts of the same molecule, one the way to a boat, steer the boat in cir- found that mature birds can be taken at containing the electron that moved and cles on the way to a distant location, drop least six thousand miles from their nor- the other containing an electron left un- the lobster back in the water, and— mal trajectory and still accurately reori- paired by the shift. The subsequent spin voilà—it will strike off confidently in the ent to their destination. state of those two electrons depends on direction of home. How do they do it? At present, the the orientation of the molecule relative most compelling theory is that they make to the earth’s magnetic field. For the an- eedless to say, you and I cannot do use of the earth’s magnetic field. We imal, the theory goes, a series of such re- Nthis. If you blindfold human sub- know about this ability because it is easy actions somehow translates into a con- jects, take them on a disorienting bus to interfere with it: if you release hom- stant awareness of how that field is ride, let them off in a field, remove the ing pigeons on top of an iron mine, they shifting around it. blindfolds, and ask them to head back will be terribly disoriented until they fly If you did not quite grasp all that, take toward where they started, they will clear of it. When scientists went look- heart: even researchers who study the re- promptly wander off in all directions. If ing for an explanation for this and sim- lationship between cryptochrome and you forgo the bus and the blindfolds, ilar findings, they found small deposits navigation do not yet know exactly how ask them to walk across a field toward of magnetite, the most magnetic of earth’s it works—and some of their colleagues a target, and then conceal the target after

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 25 Far North were wonderfully adept at nav- igating terrain that most of us would find all but featureless; the Inuit, for instance, made their way overland using extensive systems of landmarks and could navigate coastal waters in dense fog, by means of careful attention to wave patterns and the birdcalls of their home cove. In the equally unforgiving landscapes of the American Southwest and central Aus- tralia, native peoples navigated in part by cultivating an oral tradition full of top- onyms, each one containing detailed geo- graphic information. By the fourth cen- tury B.C., the Greeks had made their way to the Arctic Circle; by the second century A.D., the Romans had reached China; and by the ninth century Indo- “The white gown is for the religious ceremony. The red nesians had landed in Madagascar. As gown is for the secular tomato fight.” time went on, we began supplementing observation and memory with more and more physical tools: the astrolabe, the •• sextant, the compass, the map, the nau- tical chart, the global-positioning system. they start moving, they will stray off it is today, simply because it was crucial Perversely, it is partly because these course in approximately eight seconds. to survival: you can neither hunt nor tools got so much better that so many of The problem isn’t that humans don’t gather without straying from home. us got worse at navigating without them. have any innate way-finding tools. We, Moreover, some individuals and cul- In the past twenty years alone, the ubiq- too, can steer by landmark, and we can tures have long excelled at navigation. In uity of G.P.S.-enabled maps has all but locate the source of sounds or other en- “From Here to There: The Art and Sci- eradicated the need to orient on our own. vironmental cues and make our way to- ence of Finding and Losing Our Way,” the But long before the advent of that tech- ward them. (With sounds, we do this British journalist Michael Bond rightly nology other factors were already erod- much like frogs: by unconsciously assess- marvels at the navigational brilliance of ing our aptitude for way-finding. High ing either the intensity differential or the the early Polynesians, who, about five on the list was urbanization: after some time delay between a noise in our right thousand years ago, began paddling their three hundred thousand years of living ear and in our left one.) We also have a canoes around a vast area of the Pacific in close proximity to wilderness, we mi- host of specialized neurons to help keep Ocean now known as the Polynesian Tri- grated, in vast numbers and for the most us oriented: head-direction cells, which angle: ten million square miles of water, part in just a few centuries, into cities. fire when we face a certain way (relative bounded by New Zealand, Hawaii, and Those can be navigationally demanding to a given landscape, not to cardinal di- Rapa Nui, with perhaps a thousand other in their own way, but they are full of ob- rections); place cells, which fire when we islands scattered throughout. To steer from vious landmarks, written signage, pub- are in a familiar location; grid cells, which one of those islands to another, on routes lic-transportation systems, cab drivers, fire at regular intervals when we navi- as long as twenty-five hundred miles, and throngs of locals more or less able gate through open areas, helping us up- those early navigators relied on “the pat- to offer directions. Moreover, all those date our own position; and boundary terns of waves, the direction of the wind, artificial aids have rendered unusable cer- cells, which fire in response to an edge the shapes and colors of clouds, the pull tain helpful natural features. Rivers that or obstacle in our field of vision. of deep ocean currents, the behavior of were once easy to follow have been routed All this is key to our day-to-day func- birds, the smell of vegetation, and the underground; the movement of the sun tioning, but none of it enables us to nav- movements of sun, moon, and stars.” over days and seasons is largely obscured igate even half as well as a newt. Still, The price of distraction or error was dire; by narrow streets and tall buildings; and we do sometimes perform extraordinary in the vast open waters of the South Pa- ninety-nine per cent of Americans live acts of way-finding; unlike rock lobsters, cific, the odds of hitting an island by someplace where light pollution has re- however, we have to learn how to do so. chance are close to zero. Understandably, duced, sometimes to just a handful, the If you are the kind of person who never then, those early Polynesians revered good number of visible stars in the night sky. really grasped the parallax effect and navigators, and began training each new On top of these changes to our nat- doesn’t know your azimuth from your generation of them very young. ural environment, and arguably more del- zenith, that process can be painful. But Give or take some centuries and miles, eterious, are changes to our social norms. basic way-finding competence was once you can find similar feats in almost every We know from countless studies that the far more widespread in our species than culture. Many indigenous peoples of the more children explore the world the bet-

26 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ter their sense of direction. But, as Bond correspondingly smaller. The Yellow Sea, bird, the scarlet tanager, will likely move notes, how far they are allowed to roam for instance, was once lined with nearly north almost a thousand miles, into cen- on their own has declined drastically in three million acres of wetlands that served tral Canada. All on its own, the bird could just two or three generations. In England, as a vital stopover for millions of migrat- make that adjustment fairly swiftly—but in 1971, ninety-four per cent of elementary- ing shorebirds. In the past fifty years, there is no such thing in nature as a species age kids were permitted by their parents two-thirds of those wetlands have van- all on its own. The tanager thrives in ma- to travel alone somewhere other than to ished, lost to reclamation—a word that ture hardwood forests, and those cannot and from school. By 2010, that percent- suggests, Weidensaul writes, bitterly but simply pick up their roots and walk to age had dropped to seven. accurately, “humanity taking back some- cooler climates. Compounding this prob- Those factors take a toll on our nav- thing that had been stolen, when in fact lem of pace is a problem of space. Over igational abilities. Compared with neigh- the opposite is true.” Species that rely on the past few centuries, we have confined borhood maps drawn by kids who regu- those wetlands are dwindling at rates of wild animals to ever-smaller remnants of larly walk or bike, maps drawn by children up to twenty-five per cent per year. wilderness, surrounded by farmland or who are driven everywhere are woefully And then there is climate change, suburbs or cities. When those remnants impoverished, and the spatial memory of which poses by far the greatest threat cease to provide what the animals need, adults who rely heavily on G.P.S. declines to the customary movement of animals they will have nowhere left to go. more than that of those who do not. We around the earth. No species is unaffected If there is a silver lining to any of this— do not know what other price we might by it, but long-distance navigators are and one must look hard to see it, as with pay for letting our navigational abilities particularly at risk, partly because they the stars at night now—it is that the more atrophy; Bond goes too far beyond the are reliant on more than one ecosystem we learn about how animals travel the current science when he ponders a rela- and partly because the cues they use to more we can help them keep doing so. tionship between diminished way-find- get ready for their journeys—typically, Knowing that salmon follow the scent ing and Alzheimer’s. But we do know, the ratio of daylight and darkness—are of their natal stream, scientists added an from other areas of learning as well as increasingly decoupled from the condi- odor to hatcheries and used it to lure the from other species, that what we do or tions at their destinations. That is bad fish back to the Great Lakes, years after don’t internalize in our earliest years can for the migrant, which even under opti- pollution levels there, now ameliorated, be determinative. Perhaps there are Can- mal circumstances arrives desperately de- caused a local extinction. Knowing that ada geese living year-round on a golf pleted from its travels, and terrible for its peak songbird migration lasts no more course or in a local park in your home offspring, which may be born too late to than six or seven days in a given area, or- town. If so, that’s because they or their take advantage of peak food availability. nithologists have led successful efforts to ancestors, having somehow missed that In no small measure, this pattern is to dim lights during the relevant time frame. first flight with the rest of the flock back blame for the plummeting numbers of Knowing that a shorebird migrating when they were goslings, never learned countless bird species. twenty thousand miles a year uses less how to range far away and still find their Problems like these aren’t caused by than a single square mile of land along way home. higher temperatures, per se. The Goulds the way has helped conservationists en- point out that, throughout the two-hun- gage in smaller, more affordable, more ut it is not just our own navigational dred-million-year evolutionary history effective preservation. Bcapacities that we humans are en- of birds and the six-hundred-million- All these examples are arguments for dangering. Everything that has caused year evolutionary history of vertebrates, continuing to refine our understanding those to deteriorate—our increasing ur- “average global temperatures have ranged of animal navigation. Some of what we banization, our overreliance on automo- from below freezing to above one hun- stand to learn may prove existentially crit- biles, our ever more distant relationship dred degrees Fahrenheit.” During that ical, not only for other species but for our to the natural world—is also wreaking time, the ocean has been both hundreds own. In “Supernavigators,” which came havoc on the ability of other animals to of feet higher and hundreds of feet lower out the year before the pandemic, Barrie get where they are going. than it is today. Not every species sur- presciently notes that we cannot control That havoc now takes countless forms. vived those fluctuations, but most ani- the spread of zoonotic diseases if we don’t Illegal logging is destroying the moun- mals can adapt to even drastic environ- understand the travel patterns of the an- tain ecosystems of western Mexico, where mental change, if it happens gradually. imals that carry them. Other findings monarch butterflies overwinter. Glypho- Ornithologists suspect that those bar- might simply satisfy some long-standing sate, one of the world’s most commonly headed geese fly over Mt. Everest be- curiosity, like that piqued by Billy’s ad- used herbicides, is interfering with the cause they have been doing so since be- venture; even today, Barrie writes, “the navigational abilities of honeybees. Our fore it existed. When it began rising up navigational skills of dogs and cats have cities stay lit all night, confusing and from the land, some sixty million years received surprisingly little serious scien- imperilling both those animals that are ago, they simply moved upward with it. tific attention.” But the chief insight to drawn to light and those that rely on The first problem with our current be gleaned from how other animals make stars to plot their course. And as we ap- climate crisis, then, is not its nature but their way around the world is not about propriate more and more land for those its pace: in evolutionary terms, it is a their behavior but about our own: the cities and for timber and agriculture, the Mt. Everest that has arisen overnight. In way-finding we must learn to do now is portion available for other species grows the next sixty years, the range of one song- not geographic but moral. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 27 PROFILES PAST IMPERFECT Elizabeth Loftus changed the meaning of memory. Now her work collides with our traumatized moment.

BY RACHEL AVIV

lizabeth Loftus was in Argen- our memory.” In the past forty-five years, she wore a red jacket that she bought tina, giving talks about the mal- she has testified or consulted in more at Nordstrom Rack for about eighty- E leability of memory, in October, than three hundred cases, on behalf of five dollars and a thin necklace with a 2018, when she learned that Harvey people wrongly accused of robbery and golden feather that she has worn every Weinstein, who had recently been in- murder, as well as for high-profile de- day for the past forty years. As she dicted for rape and sexual assault, wanted fendants like Bill Cosby, Jerry Sandusky, walked through the courthouse, she to speak with her. She couldn’t figure and the Duke lacrosse players accused looked as if she were struggling to ap- out how to receive international calls of rape, in 2006. “If the MeToo move- pear sombre. “I have to admit,” she told in her hotel room, so she asked if they ment had an office, Beth’s picture would me later, “that it is fascinating to be, you could talk in three days, once she was be on the ten-most-wanted list,” her know, in the trenches with the trial of home, in California. In response, she brother Robert told me. the century.” got a series of frantic e-mails saying But after the conversation in Argen- She testified for roughly an hour, that the conversation couldn’t wait. But, tina, and after reading more about the presenting basic psychological research when Weinstein finally got through, allegations, she referred Weinstein to a that might lead a jury to think that neu- she said, “basically he just wanted to different memory researcher. Over the tral or disappointing sexual encounters ask, ‘How can something that seems so phone, she told his lawyers, “He’s a bully, with Weinstein could have taken on consensual be turned into something and I’ve experienced that bullying my- new weight in light of revelations about so wrong?’” self.” She didn’t realize that Weinstein his predatory history. “If you are being Loftus, a professor at the University was on the line until he piped up: “I’m urged to remember more,” Loftus said of California, Irvine, is the most influ- sorry if you felt I was bullying you.” at the trial, “you may produce, you know, ential female psychologist of the twen- She resisted the job for about four something like a guess or a thought, tieth century, according to a list compiled months, but Weinstein and his lawyers and that then can start to feel like it’s by the Review of General Psychology. Her eventually prevailed, persuading her to a memory.” work helped usher in a paradigm shift, fly to New York and testify on his be- “Can an event that was not traumatic rendering obsolete the archival model half, in exchange for fourteen thousand at the time be considered traumatic of memory—the idea, dominant for dollars, only ten thousand of which was later?” Weinstein’s lawyer asked. much of the twentieth century, that our ever paid. “I realized I was wanting to “If you label something in a parti- memories exist in some sort of mental back out for selfish reasons, and I didn’t cular way, you can distort memory of library, as literal representations of past want to live with that feeling about my- that item,” Loftus said. “You can plant events. According to Loftus, who has self,” she told me. (The only time she entire events into the minds of oth- published twenty-four books and more has ever turned down a case for reasons erwise ordinary, healthy people.” She than six hundred papers, memories are of repugnance was when she refused to explained that in one experiment, her reconstructed, not replayed. “Our rep- testify for a man accused of operating most famous study, she had convinced resentation of the past takes on a liv- the gas chambers at Treblinka.) adults that, as young children, they ing, shifting reality,” she has written. “It On February 6, 2020, the day before had been lost in a mall, crying. “The is not fixed and immutable, not a place she testified, she received an e-mail from emotion is no guarantee that you are way back there that is preserved in stone, the chair of the psychology department dealing with an authentic memory,” but a living thing that changes shape, at New York University, where she was she said. expands, shrinks, and expands again, an scheduled to give a lecture. Her plane The Assistant District Attorney, Joan amoeba-like creature.” tickets had already been purchased. “Un- Illuzzi, challenged the idea that exper- George A. Miller, one of the found- fortunately, due to circumstances be- iments done in a “pretend situation”— ers of cognitive psychology, once said in yond our control it is necessary to can- free of context, stripped of gender and a speech to the American Psychologi- cel your talk,” the professor wrote. Lof- power dynamics—are relevant to un- cal Association that the way to advance tus asked whether the cancellation was derstandings of trauma. the field was “to give psychology away.” because of the Weinstein trial; the pro- “You do not treat victims of trau- Loftus, who is seventy-six, adopts a sim- fessor never responded. matic events, is that right?” Illuzzi said. ilar view, seizing any opportunity to elab- Loftus can’t remember the last time “I may study them,” Loftus said, “but orate on what she calls the “flimsy cur- that she bought something she consid- I do not treat anyone officially.” tain that separates our imagination and ered unnecessary. At Weinstein’s trial, Illuzzi went on, “And isn’t it true, in

28 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 Loftus has testified for Harvey Weinstein and Jerry Sandusky, describing a “flimsy curtain” between imagination and memory.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MATTHEW BRANDT THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 29 skeptical of her decision to testify for Weinstein. Her ex-husband, Geoff Lof- tus (whom she calls her “wasband,” be- cause they still treat each other like fam- ily), an emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Washington, said that he thought, “Oh, God, Beth, re- ally? Come on.” Her brother David told me, “Here these women are blossom- ing into a world in which people are fi- nally going to listen to them, and then they’re going to have some professor on the stand—someone they’ve never met before—tell the jury that they can’t be believed.” “ ’m completely satisfied with my Ilife,” Loftus wrote in a leather-bound journal, in 1958, when she was thirteen. “I have a pretty good personality (not dull or anything), my family is one of the happiest.” She grew up in Bel Air, in Los Angeles, and spent weekends at the beach or at friends’ pools. For six years, she wrote in her journal every day, marking whether the weather was clear, cloudy, or rainy; recording compliments (in a middle-school poll, she won “best figure,” “lovable,” “most comical,” and “irresistible”); and describing the ex- panding circle of boys with whom she chatted on the phone. “Life is really my best friend,” she wrote. She almost never mentioned her par- ents, whom she outlined in impersonal terms—“the family.” When I asked Lof- tus to describe her mother, Rebecca, she could come up with only one vivid mem- ory, of shopping for a skirt with her. Lof- Loftus, seen as a baby, has few vivid memories of her mother, Rebecca. tus’s brother Robert said that he also faced an “empty canvas.” He told me, 1991, that the name of your book was not have stood next to her in a buffet “I can’t grab an adjective or noun to de- ‘Witness for the Defense’?” line.”) Loftus said, “I was reeling. How scribe my mother. There’s nothing that “One of my books is called ‘Witness about the presumption of innocence? will allow me to say, ‘This is who she for the Defense,’” Loftus answered. How about ‘the unpopular deserve to was as a person.’ There is no coagula- “Do you have a book called ‘Wit- have a defense’?” tion, no coherence.” He does have one ness for the Prosecution’?” Illuzzi asked. Not long afterward, the dean of the memory, from when he was seven or A few people in the courtroom laughed. law school received a letter from a group eight, of standing by the front door of “No,” Loftus said, calmly. of law students, who demanded that their house and misbehaving: “I was The next week, at the U.C. Ir- the administration “address the acute waiting for her to counter my disobe- vine law school, where Loftus teaches problem of Elizabeth F. Loftus.” “We dience with enforcement, and she just classes, she passed by a colleague who are terrified that she is a professor for couldn’t pull herself together. I remem- specializes in feminist theory. “Harvey future psychologists and lawyers and is ber thinking, Oh, my God, she can’t Weinstein—how could you?” the pro- training them to further traumatize and even parent me. I pitied her.” fessor said. “How could you!” (Loftus disenfranchise survivors,” they wrote. One evening, when Loftus was a young remembers that the conversation oc- The students asked that Loftus be re- teen-ager, she and her father, a doctor, curred at the buffet table at a faculty moved from the faculty, but she con- who was barbed and aloof, were driving meeting, but the colleague told me, “I tinues to teach. through Los Angeles. They stopped at a

know that it didn’t, because I would Her friends and family were also red light and watched a couple, laughing, DEBORAH BURDMAN COURTESY PHOTOGRAPH SOURCE

30 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 cross the street. “See those people having told her, ‘Beth, it was suicide.’” For de- recollections of the past in predictable fun?” Loftus’s father said. “Your mother cades, Loftus and her brothers didn’t dis- and systematic ways. “Does the mallea- can’t have fun anymore.” cuss with one another what had hap- ble human memory interfere with legal Loftus’s diaries read like an exercise pened, but they all individually decided justice?” she titled one article, in 1975. in proving that she existed on a differ- to ignore their father’s interpretation. She said, “I remember my father say- ent emotional register from that of her Within a week of her mother’s death, ing to me, ‘I don’t like the word “mal- mother. She summarized her mood with Loftus’s journal had returned to its usual leable.”’” She doesn’t recall why. She descriptions like “happyville,” “I’m so jaunty tone. “I’m a happy teenager!” she stuck with the term, which became happy!” and “Everything’s GREAT!” wrote in December. “It’s sort of sad to closely associated with her body of re- It’s as if she were continually trying to leave this year behind—it was such a search and gave energy to an emerging outdo herself. “I can honestly say that wonderful year for me.” But, on some innocence movement. (Her father died this was one of the happiest days I’ve pages of her journal, she used a paper not long after the conversation.) ever lived through,” she wrote in eighth clip to attach scraps of paper, where she Defense lawyers began calling on her grade. A few days later, she reached new shared private thoughts that she called to testify about the ways that memo- heights: “I’ve never been so happy. I love “removable truths.” She could pull them ries are distorted by leading questions, the world & everyone.” out if anyone ever demanded to read her sloppy police lineups, and cross-racial Loftus and her brothers didn’t have journals. In one “removable truth,” she identification of faces. (The chance of language to describe what ailed their blamed herself for her mother’s suffer- misidentification is greatest when the mother. Their father seemed annoyed ing. “She would be watching T.V. and witness is white and the defendant is by her vulnerability. Eventually, Rebec- ask me to come sit by her,” she wrote. Black.) James Doyle, a former head of ca’s siblings intervened and sent her to “ ‘I’m busy now,’ was my usual reply.” Massachusetts’s Public Defender Divi- a private psychiatric hospital in Penn- She labelled the memory, written in el- sion, who co-wrote a book with Lof- sylvania, near her brother’s home, where egant cursive, “My Greatest Regret.” tus, said that she “obliterated the idea she was treated for depression. “My that there is a permanent, stable mem- mother’s family blamed my father for hen Loftus discussed her moth- ory capacity in humans.” He told me, being so emotionally flatlined and un- Wer’s death, Maryanne Garry, a “Her work changed the whole story of available that he drove her to madness,” former postdoctoral researcher in Lof- what an eyewitness case was about, and Robert said. In her journal, Loftus, who tus’s lab, was reminded of the passage destabilized a solid and routine part of was then fourteen, never mentioned her in John Knowles’s novel “A Separate the criminal caseload.” mother’s absence. “Life’s wonderful!!” she Peace,” from 1959, in which the narra- Beginning in the early nineties, Lof- wrote, after Rebecca had been away for tor “jounced the limb” of a tree, caus- tus began getting questions about a new four months. “When I’m old and lonely ing his best friend to fall and eventu- kind of case. Incest had entered the at least I’ll know once I wasn’t!” ally die. The language in the passage is American consciousness, and women After nearly half a year, Rebecca was vague enough that it’s unclear if the act in therapy were uncovering memories discharged from the hospital, and Lof- was intentional. “I was always struck by of being abused by their fathers. The tus and her aunt Pearl, along with her something similar in Beth’s ambiguous discovery was reminiscent of a similar daughter, Debbi, drove to Pennsylvania framing of her mother’s death,” Garry one, a century earlier, when Freud real- to pick her up. They planned to spend told me. “It was as if the death existed ized that his patients had suppressed time together at a vacation lodge in without causality or agency.” memories of being sexually abused as the woods, fifty miles south of Pitts- Loftus’s career has been defined by children. Within a few years, Freud had burgh, that Loftus’s uncle owned. But, her recognition that the language we changed his mind, arguing that his pa- five days after arriving, Loftus drew an use to describe an event will change the tients were afflicted by fears and fanta- arrow in her diary that pointed to a way we remember it. She received her sies surrounding sex abuse, not by mem- smudge on the page. “A tear,” she ex- Ph.D. from Stanford in 1970, writing a ories of the actual thing. In doing so, plained. “Today, July 10, 1959, was the dissertation, on mathematical word Freud walked away from a revelation— most tragic day of my life,” she wrote. problems, that she found boring. She that sexual abuse of children was prev- “We woke up this morning and found wished to study a topic more relevant alent—but also proposed a more com- her gone, and an hour later we found to people’s lives. In 1973, around the time plex theory of the mind. her in the swimming pool. Only God that she accepted a job at the Univer- A new generation of therapists was knows what had happened.” sity of Washington, she borrowed re- careful not to repeat Freud’s mistake. “If The coroner ruled the death an acci- cordings of car crashes from police de- you think you were abused and your life dent. “She apparently fell in unnoticed,” partments and began examining the shows the symptoms, then you were,” a front-page article in the Uniontown, participants’ recollections. When she Ellen Bass, a leader in the recovered- Pennsylvania, Evening Standard reported. asked people to estimate the speed of memory movement, wrote, in 1988. The But when Loftus returned to California the cars when they “smashed,” they re- movement challenged the foundation and described the death as accidental, membered the cars going faster than of family life—the home, it turned out, Robert said, “our father tried to overrule when she used the word “hit.” She went was the site of cruelty and betrayal—as her in his fatherly way, to give his real- on to publish dozens of studies show- well as the authority of experimental istic stamp on what had happened. He ing that she could manipulate people’s psychology. Trauma was described as an

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 31 extraordinary and idiosyncratic experi- tus wrote in Psychology Today, in 1996. the idea of missing days of work that ence that could not be simulated in a But social influences on memory, how- she turned her surgery into an experi- lab, or even expressed by the rules of ever transformative, need not lead to a ment. Her anesthesiologist read her a science. “Trauma sets up new rules for “horrifying” result. Janice Haaken, a pro- hundred words while she was uncon- memory,” the psychiatrist Lenore Terr fessor emeritus of psychology at Portland scious, to see if she could recall them wrote, in 1994. State University, who has written several later. “We here report the results of a Loftus emerged as perhaps the most books about memory, told me, “Scholars rigorous experimental test conducted on prominent defender of her field. She could who look at the history of trauma under- a patient who was undergoing an ab- find little experimental evidence to sup- stand the importance of groups—often dominal myomectomy under general port the idea that memories of trauma, created by political or social movements— anesthesia,” Loftus wrote in the journal after remaining dormant for a decade or in holding on to memories. There is al- Acta Psychologica, in 1985. “The patient more, could abruptly spring to life, and ways a contest over versions of truth in was an experimental psychologist with she worried that therapists, history, and, if you don’t have a keen interest in human memory.” through hypnosis and other other people to help you hold The fibroid was removed, but she suggestive techniques, were on to your memories, you are couldn’t get pregnant. Six years later, coaxing memories into being. going to be disqualified, or she and Geoff divorced, in large part As she began testifying on seen as crazy.” because of the intensity of her work behalf of men who she be- Haaken, who has been ethic. “When I let up to do something lieved may have been wrongly deeply involved in femi- that seems frivolous I feel guilty,” she accused, she came to be seen nist activism for forty years, told a friend in an e-mail. Loftus had as an expert who was com- added that she is cautious of asked Geoff how many vacations she plicit with, rather than chal- slogans, popularized by the had to take per year to save the mar- lenging, institutions of power. MeToo movement, urging riage. But he said that relaxation quo- Phoebe Ellsworth, a so- people to “believe women.” tas wouldn’t work: even if she consented cial psychologist at the University of She said, “I think, in some areas of the to theoretically pleasurable activities, Michigan, said that, when Loftus was in- women’s movement, white feminists have she wouldn’t enjoy them. vited to speak at her school in 1989, “the not dealt with our country’s history of For decades, during cross-examina- chair would not allow her to set foot in putting people in prison, usually those of tions, lawyers have accused Loftus, a the psychology department. I was furi- color, based on eyewitness testimony that childless scientist, of being unable to ous, and I went to the chair and said, is wrong.” Few psychologists have been comprehend the pain of victims. “You ‘Look, here you have a woman who is more influential than Loftus in reveal- really don’t know anything about five- becoming one of the most famous psy- ing how standard police procedures can year-old children who have been sexu- chological scientists there is.’ But her ra- contaminate memory. Haaken said, “We ally abused, do you?” a prosecutor asked tionale was that Beth was setting back have enough history behind us as a move- her, in 1985, at the trial of a camp coun- the progress of women irrevocably.” Ells- ment to demand more than the princi- sellor accused of molesting his campers. worth and Loftus, who are friends from ple ‘believe women,’ which reduces us to “Well, yes, I do,” Loftus responded. graduate school, had started their careers children and denies us the complexity “I do know something about this sub- at a time when female research psychol- and nuances of everyday remembering.” ject because I was abused when I was ogists were so rare that the two of them six,” by a babysitter. At that moment, were treated “like dogs walking on hind oftus talks about her personal his- she later wrote, “the memory flew out legs,” Ellsworth said. Loftus identified Ltory candidly, yet there’s a sense in at me, out of the blackness of the past, with an earlier generation’s feminism— which it is also deadwood. Her openness hitting me full force.” she wanted to be treated as equal to men, does not translate into reflectiveness, The defense attorney at the trial, but she preferred not to draw attention though she welcomes personal questions. Marc Kurzman, recalled a “stunned si- to her particular experiences as a woman. Garry, her former researcher, described lence.” He said, “That was supposed to “I’ve trained myself to be wary of emo- her as a “disarmingly friendly, fuzzy Mup- be the big finale of the cross-examina- tions, which can distort and twist real- pet.” She seems genuinely curious about tion, and it pretty much shut the whole ity,” she has written. other people’s experiences and a little tired thing down.” Loftus rose to prominence at a time of her own. The first time we talked, she Some scholars have proposed that when the computer was becoming the warned me that, because of the pandemic, Loftus has her own repressed memo- dominant metaphor for the mind. So- “I’m feeling a little bored and boring.” ries. “She has not been able to integrate cial and cultural forces were treated as She has lived alone for thirty years. her own experience into her research,” variables that compromised memory She and Geoff tried to have a child, in two literary critics wrote, in 2001. “There processes, turning people into unreli- the mid-eighties, but, Loftus said, “it is something split off in Loftus,” the able narrators of their own experiences. was many years of seeing blood at the psychologist Lauren Slater asserted in “That’s the frightening part—the truly end of the month and saying, ‘Oh, shit.’” her book “Opening Skinner’s Box,” from horrifying idea that what we think we When her gynecologist recommended 2004. “She is the survivor who ques- know, what we believe with all our that she have surgery to remove a fibroid tions the validity of survivorship. That’s hearts, is not necessarily the truth,” Lof- from her uterus, she was so annoyed by one way out of a bind.”

32 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 The criticisms seem to suggest that She explained that, in “Witness for Corwin, recorded an interview with a there is only one kind of story that the Defense,” to avoid liability, she gave six-year-old named Nicole, whose par- women can tell about sexual abuse. But her babysitter a pseudonym. “I don’t know ents were fighting for custody of her. Loftus never forgot what happened. why I named him Howard,” she said. Nicole seemed sad and subdued. She She had shared the memory with Geoff When reading her diary, I noticed said that her mother was “rotten” and shortly after they married. “It wasn’t that Howard was the name of Loftus’s had put her finger up her vagina, an al- ‘Oh, my God, I was abused,’” he said. first boyfriend—an important and am- legation that her father also made, in “It was more like ‘What’s more, I my- biguous figure who “serenaded me on court. Corwin found the story of sex self was abused.’” He went on, “I have the phone” (“Wow! Blast!”) and also abuse credible, and, as a result, Nicole’s a very poor recollection of the conver- dumped her for another girl, causing mother lost custody. sation, which means that I probably her to cry in front of her mother. Ten years later, when Nicole was six- wasn’t shocked by either the act itself Loftus dismissed the idea that the teen, her father died, and she was placed or the casualness with which she de- name had any significance. She’d had in a foster home. She couldn’t remem- scribed it.” many boyfriends as an adolescent, so, ber why she and her mother were es- Loftus’s babysitter used to sit on the she said, “whatever name I gave the tranged, and she asked Corwin if she sofa with her, gently scratching her arm babysitter might have been, at some could see the video from when she was with the tips of his nails—“a sweet touch, point, the name of a boyfriend.” a child. Corwin agreed, but by the time soft, comforting, lulling,” as she writes Her brother David said that he had they met to watch the video, nearly a in “Witness for the Defense,” a mem- once encouraged Loftus to go to ther- year later, Nicole had reunited with her oir focussed on her work in court. One apy, but she told him, “I can’t, because mother. She had begun to wonder if, to night, after her brothers had gone to the next time I take the witness stand get custody of her, her father had made bed, the babysitter led her into her par- they’d grill me with questions.” (Loftus up a story about abuse and coached her ents’ bedroom, lifted her dress over her doesn’t remember the conversation.) He to say it. “I want her to be my mom,” head, took off her underpants, and pulled said, “I’m not sure if that’s why, or if the Nicole told Corwin. “I don’t want to deny her on top of him. Their pelvises were wounds are so deep and her habit all her a part of my life, so I’ve chosen to touching and she felt him pushing her life has been to avoid them.” say, ‘Well, if my dad did lie, it was just against her, until she squirmed off the because he wanted me so badly.’” bed and ran out of the room. t court appearances in the late nine- “Do you remember anything about Loftus was under the impression that Aties, Loftus was often asked about the concerns about possible sex abuse?” all girls start menstruating at the age of a landmark case that seemed to provide Corwin, who recorded the conversa- thirteen. But, when her thirteenth birth- concrete evidence of repression. In 1984, tion, asked her. day passed and she hadn’t got her pe- a child forensic psychiatrist, David L. “No,” she said, closing her eyes. “I riod, “I wondered if he did something that made me turn pregnant,” she told me. Loftus imagined that she had some- how been in a state of latent pregnancy for seven years. Eventually, she got her period, but she was distressed when she couldn’t figure out how to use a tam- pon. “I actually went to my father and said, ‘I’m worried there’s something wrong with me, because I can’t get this in,’ ” she told me. “And he drew me the hymen and explained that I was still a virgin, and then I felt better.” “That actually does sound traumatic,” I told her, in one of our many conver- sations on Zoom. “Seven years later, it was still in your mind that you might have been raped.” She paused for a few seconds, and ran her hand through her hair, which is the color of frost, and spread it like a fan. “I’m not sure,” she said. “I know you think that. But, somehow, you know, somehow when your mother gets de- pressed and goes away and drowns in a swimming pool—I mean, I had a lot more on my mind.” “Oh, great. Now I’ll be late for work.” mean, I remember that was part of the James Award, one of the most presti- what she did, because my case has now accusation, but I don’t remember any- gious honors in the field of psychology. become one of these ‘for the good of thing.” She inhaled deeply. “Wait a min- After an investigation that lasted science’ kind of situations.” ute, yeah, I do.” nearly two years, the university cleared As part of her psychological train- “What do you remember?” he asked Loftus of scholarly misconduct, but she ing, Nicole led a therapy group for adult her. felt so betrayed that she took a job at survivors of sexual abuse. As she lis- “Oh, my gosh, that’s really, really U.C. Irvine. In 2002, she published the tened to the other women’s stories, she weird,” she said. “I remember it hap- results of her research in the Skeptical felt, for the first time, that she was part pening, that she hurt me.” She started Inquirer, arguing that Nicole’s mother of a collective. Her suffering no longer crying. “I was getting a bath, and I don’t had likely been wrongly accused. Lof- seemed like a character flaw. She wasn’t remember anything specific until I felt tus called her report a “case study of a an object in someone else’s story—she that pain.” She went on, “It’s like I took case study—a cautionary tale.” Her could tell it in her own words. Being a a picture, like a few seconds long, a pic- friend Jacqueline Spector, a lecturer at survivor soon became the defining fact ture of the pain. . . . That’s all the mem- the University of Washington, said that of her life, the scaffolding on which she ory consists of.” With Nicole’s consent, Loftus’s psychological motivations were rebuilt her identity. Corwin published a paper in Child Mal- clear. “Beth didn’t have her mother long Yet there were days when she asked treatment, in 1997, that described how a enough, and here was this mother that, herself, What if it didn’t happen? She forgotten memory of sexual abuse had clearly—from Beth’s perspective—had tried to ignore the question. But, occa- resurfaced eleven years later. He also been robbed of her daughter.” sionally, when a friend asked about her played the set of videos of Nicole at Loftus told me, “I think I had this case against Loftus, or when she was professional conferences. Nicole cut off fantasy—maybe I could bring the mother cleaning her office and came across her contact with her mother again. and daughter back together.” old copy of the Skeptical Inquirer, she Loftus watched the videos and was Instead, Nicole sued Loftus for def- would revisit the article. She was dis- skeptical of the conclusions that psy- amation. Reading Loftus’s article, she turbed to see that Loftus had made chologists had drawn from them. She told me, was like “taking a very coarse compelling points. decided to embark on what she called piece of sandpaper and rubbing it over Some days, Nicole believed that her “my own little innocence project.” Al- my entire life.” mother had been wrongly accused, and though Nicole’s name wasn’t used in then she’d wake up the next morning the paper, there were biographical clues n Nicole’s interview with Corwin having changed her mind. In a conver- in the videos. With the help of two pri- Iwhen she was seventeen, she told him sation with the philosopher Eleanor vate detectives, Loftus discovered Ni- that she hoped to become a psycholo- Gordon-Smith, who interviewed Ni- cole’s identity and obtained sealed court gist. “I’m prepared to give my life, de- cole for her book “Stop Being Reason- records, which revealed that child-pro- vote my life, to helping other kids who able,” from 2019, Nicole said that her tective services had originally dismissed have gone through what I’ve gone uncertainty “affected every single rela- the allegations brought by Nicole’s fa- through,” she said. After ten years in tionship, in every possible way. It re- ther. Loftus interviewed Nicole’s foster the Navy, working as a helicopter pilot, quires me to have a sense of self that is mother, stepmother, and mother, Joan she fulfilled her goal, getting a Ph.D. not dependent on whether I was sexu- Blackwell, who shared with Loftus po- in clinical psychology and writing her ally assaulted by my mother. It’s a re- etry that she had written about the pain dissertation on how trauma affects mem- ally big ask.” She tried to step away from of being separated from her daughter. her identity as a survivor, a process that Blackwell told me that she felt at ease she compared to dieting: “You start, and with Loftus. “It had been a long time then you lose your motivation and you since I had felt anyone believed me,” go back to the way you used to eat. I she said, adding that the family-court would start, and then I would revert system had seemed sexist. “The attitude back to my old way of thinking.” was ‘He wouldn’t lie.’” Nicole, who is forty-two, spoke to Not long afterward, an administra- me from her home office, in San Diego, tor from the University of Washington’s where she now sees patients remotely. Office of Scholarly Integrity told Lof- She sat in a swivel desk chair and wore tus that she had fifteen minutes to hand ory and identity. By then, her case was a T-shirt that quoted Desmond Tutu: over all her notes and files on Nicole’s so well known—in the lawsuit against “If you are neutral in situations of in- case. Nicole had accused Loftus of in- Loftus (which she ended up losing), she justice, you have chosen the side of the vading her privacy. The university for- disclosed her full name—that one of oppressor.” When I asked if she knew bade Loftus to research Nicole’s case, her professors likened her to H.M., the of psychological literature about the ef- or even to speak about it, an experience famous patient with an unusual form fects of having one’s memories doubted, that Loftus described as an “Orwellian of amnesia who was studied from 1957 she told me, “Oh, no. There would not nightmare.” “Who, after all, benefits until his death. “I was appalled,” Nicole be literature on that, because clinical from my silence?” she said, in 2001, in told me. “My professor was making the psychologists are trained to believe.” her acceptance speech for the William point that Loftus had the right to do I was interested in what it meant to

34 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 conferences. Recently, though, “I stopped wanting to hide under a chair every time PEERS I thought she might be at a conference and decided, No, I’m going to stand here I’m thinking of you beautiful and let her see me,” she said. and young, of me young Nicole has entered a new phase in sorting out whether her mother abused and confused and maybe her. “Instead of waking up and wonder- beautiful. There were lots of us— ing where I’m going to land today,” she told me, “I just know that I don’t know these were our twenties, when, and that I’m probably not going to know post-9/11, we were about to in my lifetime.” She has found herself in a position not dissimilar to that of inherit the world, and we had no idea Freud’s female patients whose memo- what to do with it. And look ries of abuse were believed and then, a few years later, discredited. But she what we did, and we didn’t. doesn’t feel commandeered into some- And now look at us, and it. one else’s theory anymore. “On the face of it, I look like a sexual-trauma survi- We turned away for a blip, started vor,” she told me, referring to problems whispering, kissing, had kids, that she had with trust. But she won- dered if the conflict between her par- bought houses, changed bulbs, ents or her time in foster care were trau- submitted claims, changed channels, mas that could hold similar explanatory power. In recent years, she has drifted FaceTimed, streamed, upgraded, in and out of a relationship with her were two-day-shipped to, and midway mother. “I realized that I could just never give her what she wants from me, which through our prime earning years is to go back in time and be allowed to we look up again, decades groggy, mother me again,” she said. I told her of Loftus’s hope that her decades late. Forgive us, we thought— work might have inspired Nicole and but now it doesn’t matter. These are our her mother to reunite. “It’s transference,” Nicole said of Loftus’s preoccupation outcomes, consequences, faults, with her case. “To act out this darkness forties, when the hourglass from her own past.” In her clinical prac- tice, Nicole is cautious whenever she is beeping and bleak and people faces patients whose struggles remind like us have memories like this her of her own. “It is paramount that I say to myself, ‘Nicole, it is not your job and wonder if the beauty that’s left to save this person. You can’t go back is really still beautiful, if it was. and save yourself by saving this person.’” —Craig Morgan Teicher “ unravelled it,” Loftus’s brother David, I a seventy-four-year-old lawyer and the president of a Buddhist meditation “cross the bridge,” as she’d described it, Nicole was silent for a few seconds. center, told me in our first conversation. from victim to survivor. I asked if it was “You know, I realized something,” she One night, when he was in his late thir- similar to what Susan Brison, a philos- said. A few weeks earlier, she had ex- ties, he was in a hot tub and began to opher who has written about her expe- changed e-mails with a woman whose feel sleepy. “It was part of some drug ex- rience of rape, had characterized in her memories of abuse Loftus had cast doubt perience, and, as I was beginning to sub- book, “Aftermath,” as a process of tak- on at a civil trial. “We kind of realized merge, something woke me up,” he said. ing control of one’s narrative. “That con- together that we are survivors of Eliza- “I thought, Wow, this is what happened trol, repeatedly exercised,” Brison wrote, beth Loftus,” Nicole said. For years, she’d to our mom. It became so clear to me “leads to greater control over the mem- had intrusive thoughts. “I’m not sure if that there was nothing intentional about ories themselves, making them less in- there is a greater sense of outrage than her death.” trusive and giving them the kind of that of having your own memories chal- His younger brother, Robert, a prop- meaning that permits them to be inte- lenged,” she said. She had felt terror at erty manager in Garberville, a small town grated into the rest of life.” the idea of seeing Loftus at psychology near the northern tip of California, had

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 35 pieced together a different explanation. “With the way that you’ve made are—I mean, Debbi’s great, but.” She In the years after their mother’s death, peace with things that happened a long stopped mid-sentence. he was in “grief free fall,” he told me. “It’s time ago,” I said. The sun was setting in California, like somebody jumping out of a plane “I understand that completely,” Lof- and there were few working light bulbs who hasn’t figured out to pull the cord tus said. “In Linda Meyer Williams’s in Abe’s trailer. Robert wore a flannel on their parachute—and that’s where I paper”—a 1994 study in the Journal of shirt, unbuttoned, and his image was so came up with the idea of ‘accidental sui- Consulting and Clinical Psychology—“she dim and grainy that he somehow looked cide.’ The fact that it is an oxymoron did not want to tell people, ‘I have rec- like he was twenty again. He said, doesn’t bother me at all.” He theorized ords from the hospital that you were “When Beth did the Weinstein case, that his mother might have taken sleep- abused,’ because, if they were in denial she was saying that after one of the gals ing pills and then had some sort of panic and living with that, maybe it would do went through the interrogation it sort attack—perhaps she felt that her skin something bad to them. But I think we of massaged her memory in a way to was on fire—and jumped into the water. are giving you permission.” get it to migrate.” He went on, “But David tries to big- “You have to tell us, or you’re not in “You don’t need to bring in Wein- brother me and outmaneuver me, and our circle of trust anymore,” David joked. stein right now, Robert,” Loftus said, the other night he was trying to get me He was sitting at his desk in a two-bed- amiably. to walk back the ‘accidental suicide’ label room wooden geodesic dome in North- “I was sort of thinking of this in terms and say, Why not ‘accidental drowning’?” ern California. of how Debbi viewed what happened Since the pandemic began, Loftus “Yeah, our memories are already to Mom,” Robert continued, “and how and Robert have spoken on the phone polluted to the saturation point,” Rob- the general attitude in her home might daily. David joins their calls most week- ert said. have affected Debbi’s memory.” ends. Recently, on a Saturday evening, I explained that Debbi had been “Leave Weinstein out of it,” Loftus we all talked together on Zoom. “I’m with their aunt Pearl when she found said. “You know, because honestly—I pretending it’s happy hour,” Loftus said. Rebecca’s body—in a cold-water spring, was a blind witness. I didn’t even talk She sat in her home office, in her three- not a pool. I was about to continue about any specific people. It was just bedroom condominium in University when Loftus interrupted, “The swim- stuff about memory.” Hills, a residential complex for faculty ming pool was a little lake-ish, so I’m When I had first spoken with David, at U.C. Irvine. “So, hey—cheers,” she not sure I trust that. I mean, if it were he mentioned hearing a story about his said. She took a sip of white wine. in an urban area you would know the mother getting hold of his uncle’s gun. A few days earlier, I had interviewed difference between a lake and a pool, I told him that Debbi had heard about their cousin Debbi. “Oh, it was suicide,” but in this summer place—what is a similar incident. she told me when I asked about Rebec- a pool?” “That is total news,” Loftus said. ca’s death. That I had framed this as a “Sounds to me, from the country- “Not to me,” David said. question seemed absurd to her. “We found property point of view, that our idea of “How did you know?” Loftus asked her, my mother and I,” she said. “We a pool is much different,” Robert said. him. found her in a cold spring. I remember He had been a math prodigy, the most Beyond interactions on social media, it like it was yesterday.” Debbi had been brilliant of the three children, Loftus David hadn’t had a conversation with twelve at the time. Later, her father had told me. Now his speech had the Debbi in several decades, and even as showed her a suit of his with a bullet cadence of someone who had spent his children they were not close. “I bet she hole through one sleeve and explained formative years socializing with ston- posted something,” he said. “That’s my that Rebecca had initially attempted to ers. He does not have an Internet con- only guess. On Instagram. Or Facebook.” kill herself with a gun that he kept in his nection, so he was sitting in the trailer “Debbi wouldn’t have posted about bedroom closet. “She must have fired it of his adult son, Abe, who lives on his this on Facebook,” Loftus said. too early,” Debbi told me. “The bullet property, and was sharing his hot spot. “I know—that doesn’t make sense,” went through my father’s suit. It was at Abe sat next to him, staring out the David said. “That’s so interesting: when that point that my parents knew she trailer window. you have such a clear memory and then needed to be institutionalized.” “What else did Debbi remember?” you go, Well, how did I come to know Debbi hadn’t seen her cousins for years. Loftus asked. what I believe? And you can’t think of Loftus asked me what I had learned. I said that Debbi seemed surprised any way in which you could have ac- “We all would like our memories stim- that anyone believed Rebecca’s death quired that knowledge.” David spent ulated, if they can be,” she said, at the was an accident. “She sort of acted like five years studying Tibetan Buddhism beginning of our call. it was a no-brainer,” I said. in a Himalayan village in India, and he I warned them that Debbi did not “If she believes that . . .” Loftus paused seemed well suited to this line of pon- think there was any ambiguity about for a few seconds. “I’m not sure she be- dering. “Did something happen in a their mother’s death. “Maybe there’s a lieves it from her own observation or dream and I remembered it as true?” reason you’ve not asked her these ques- what she would have learned afterward. he said. tions,” I said. “I don’t want to mess Debbi was living in the world of the Earlier that day, Loftus had for- around with your—” relatives who hated our father, so I don’t warded a scan of her 1959 diary to David. “Denial system?” Loftus asked. think Debbi’s age-twelve observations It was the first time he had read her

36 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 COMIC STRIP BY EMILY FLAKE

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 37 later?,’ she said, ‘I honestly thought they would be better off without me.’” She told her brothers, “Mom could have had that thinking.” David recalled a memory of their mother standing at the top of the stairs in a slip when their father came home from work. “Dad yelled at her,” David said. “He said, ‘How can you run around the house naked in front of the chil- dren?’ And she cried and ran back into the bedroom.” “Oh, wow,” Loftus said. “I never knew you had that.” She had a poorer mem- ory of childhood than her brothers, and she treated their memories as posses- sions they’d been gifted unfairly. “We ended up with a few extra flying buttresses, Robert, who was now barely visible so we buttressed some other stuff.” in the darkness, recalled that Debbi’s father, Harrold, a former marine, had a den where he kept all his parapherna- •• lia from both World Wars. “It’s plausi- ble that Mom would be rummaging journal, and he was curious about the know where I got that. I have no idea.” around in there, and maybe Harrold had entry she had written the night before “If Debbi is sure it is suicide,” Rob- a sidearm in a holster that was draped their mother’s death. “Should I read it?” ert said, “it might be that some people over one of his uniform jackets, and this he asked. come into their experience of mental could have been what set the stage for Loftus, who hadn’t read the journal illness with a baseline rigidity. They can’t this alleged event,” he said. “I don’t buy for years, nodded. relate to mental illness and see these the fact that she attempted suicide with “My mother and I had a long talk people as extraterrestrial.” one of Harrold’s sidearms.” until midnight all about her childhood Robert’s son, Abe, who has had psy- David was building a fire, and we and many other things,” he read. “I was chiatric treatment, suddenly chimed in: could see only his legs. He came back to really happy because we’d never been “The first question they ask is ‘Have the screen and said, “Well, the interest- too close before, and now we were talking you had any suicidal thoughts?’ They ing thing is I had this idea, which I never like we really were.” shame you right off the bat. The min- really evaluated, that Dad had thought David looked up from the page he ute you get in their office. How can you it was suicide and Mom’s family thought was reading. “Beth, are you crying?” he answer something like that? And then it was some accidental thing. But I think said, tenderly. they say you’re depressed because you everybody knew it was suicide.” She was. “It’s O.K.,” she said, nod- can’t answer it correctly. That’s just me, “Nope,” Loftus said. “Not everybody.” ding quickly and pursing her lips. She though—sorry.” “I’m getting more comfortable with had never paid close attention to the “No, it’s O.K.,” Loftus said. “Abe, is the idea of accidental suicide,” David time line. “But, if I really was with her this weird for you?” said. until midnight the night before,” she Abe said that he didn’t realize he “Why?” Loftus said. “I thought you said, “it is a little bit weird that we’re had relatives who lived in Pennsylva- were rejecting Robert’s label.” having this really wonderful night and nia. Then they reflected on what a child “If somebody dies like that, then you she dies the next day.” The timing had in the nineteen-fifties would have un- go, ‘Well, I don’t know—I can really struck me, too. Sometimes, once peo- derstood about mental illness. “We could think whatever I want,’” David said. ple resolve to commit suicide, they be- not fathom it,” Robert said. “We had “But if you then hear there was a pre- come uncharacteristically lucid and emo- no metrics.” vious suicide attempt—” tionally expansive, perhaps because the I proposed that maybe there was “If there was,” Loftus said. end of their suffering feels near. some truth to the theory of “acciden- “Yeah, if there was,” he repeated. “Was she apprehensive about going tal suicide”; their mother may have been “You think Debbi may have misrecol- back to California—to an intolerable in so much pain that it wasn’t possible lected that?” household reality, to the responsibilities to speak of her as having full volition. “I think Debbi was twelve years old of motherhood and parenting?” Robert Loftus said that she had a friend, a and what Debbi knows she learned from asked. “I mean, where did I get that in- mother, who had tried to kill herself. adults who had their own ideas,” she fusion of images?” “And when I said to her, ‘I can’t believe said. “It’s all these different memories.” “I said that to you, because I do be- you did this—do you realize your kids Her voice rose in pitch. “And the idea lieve that,” Loftus said. “But I don’t will be still talking about this years that here we are, in our seventies, try-

38 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ing to sort this out!” She said this like portant to me—to not even challenge side?” he said. “Now, I’m not totally at- it was funny, but she looked upset. Lof- that fact.” tached to this view—because it seems tus’s approach to the conversation was The next evening, Loftus e-mailed like something I’ve contrived as an ex- so studious that it occurred to me that me saying that she and David had just planation—but it’s possible that she never this call, like the surgery that she turned spoken with Debbi. “We caught Debbi got appreciation from our father, so she’s into a memory experiment in a peer-re- in two major memory errors tonight!” now trying to win that approval by rep- viewed journal, might be another way she wrote. Debbi had forgotten that resenting the other rich white guys who of channelling life events into publish- she’d driven, rather than flown, to Penn- have been accused of doing bad things.” able work. sylvania. She also claimed that Loftus’s (Loftus has testified for numerous poor I told Loftus that it seemed hard to father had never once called to check defendants of color, too, in cases that avoid the thought that her career had on Rebecca—a memory that Debbi had tend to get less attention.) been shaped by the slipperiness of this to retract once David read aloud a pas- But there are rarely just two sides. A foundational memory. “No,” she said, sage in Loftus’s diary showing that her larger cast of characters, embedded in shaking her head. “No way. No way. It father had, indeed, called. The tone of different institutions of power, deter- was purely, Got a chance to work with a Loftus’s e-mail seemed somewhat dis- mine what kinds of stories get believed. professor in graduate school on a mem- ciplinary, but when we talked on the Even Loftus’s study about being lost in ory project, got a chance to—no. None phone it was clear that she saw noth- the mall, which has assumed an iconic of all this.” She asked her brothers, “Would ing shameful about Debbi’s errors. In- status, becoming one of the most fa- you guys agree?” stead, she expressed a sense of camara- mous experiments of the century, has “You’re kind of like Forrest Gump,” derie; they were fellows in misremem- lent itself to conflicting interpretations David said. “You’re the Forrest Gump bering—her cousin was just as human over time. (Its reputation is discordant of psychology, because you just tumble as she. “Thank goodness for indepen- with its size—there were only twenty- into these situations.” dent corroboration,” Loftus told me. four subjects.) In the study, subjects came “Oh, my God,” Loftus said, laugh- “Especially when you have somebody to believe the story about getting lost ing, perhaps harder than necessary, who expresses their memory with such in a mall because older relatives falsely because it was such a relief no longer confidence that you’re tempted to just told them that it was true. Loftus and to be talking about her mother. “You capitulate to it.” others have described the study as a kind know—it is a little Forrest Gump-y. I of parable for skepticism. But Steven step into it and suddenly there is Phil very week, Loftus receives letters Brown, a social psychologist at England’s Spector, and suddenly there’s Harvey Efrom prisoners, and she (or her re- Nottingham Trent University who stud- Weinstein, and there’s Martha Stewart, search assistant) always responds. “We ies memory, told me, “For those of us you know, and Michael Jackson”—she empathize with you,” she recently wrote differently positioned, the parable is en- had assisted with the defense of all to a man convicted of murdering an- tirely about power.” The study reveals four—“and I don’t even know why I’m other inmate while in federal prison. the ease with which children can be be- here. You’re right.” “We wish you the best and welcome trayed by adults, who lie to them, re- “All the people you mention are cor- updates,” she wrote to a man convicted writing their stories. rupt,” David said, to no one in particular. of shooting someone multiple times. In an interview on a Dutch televi- She said that Spector, who was con- “I received your letter and request for sion station, Loftus once said that if victed of murder in 2009, had sent her she had wanted to do experimental re- a beautiful card before he died. It was search that emerged from her own on the bookshelf behind her. childhood experiences she would not David asked if she’d like to read it have studied memory errors and dis- aloud, but she said no. We’d been on tortions. “I would have designed my Zoom for three hours, and Robert’s experiments to answer different ques- dog, which had spent the conversation tions,” she said. After the conversation in a parked car nearby, needed to be let with her and her brothers, I asked Lof- out. Loftus said she still believed that tus what those research questions would her mother’s death was either an acci- be. “You know, I’m not sure,” she said. dent or “accidental suicide.” Nothing in information on ‘my theory,’” she wrote She paused for a long time and then the past three hours had changed her to Jerry Sandusky, who in 2012 was teared up. “It’s the M-word,” she said, view. “We should not use a twelve-year- convicted of sexually abusing children referring to “mother.” Her brothers told old’s memory,” she repeated. She sug- while a football coach at Penn State. me that they have a saying: “Don’t say gested that they find some sort of con- “It must be terribly difficult for you the M-word, or Beth will break down.” crete evidence, perhaps a map of her and your family, and I hope you have She waved her hand in front of her uncle’s vacation property. “I don’t know the legal help needed to resolve your face, as if to cool the emotional temper- why, but I don’t like it being a spring,” situation justly.” ature. “Maybe it would be about, you she said. She shrugged. “I’ve always said David joked that maybe Loftus ex- know, how come this never goes away?” it was a pool and remembered it was a perienced some sort of Stockholm syn- she said, crying. “And is that true for pool, and I don’t know why that’s im- drome. “Because who would pick that other people?” 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 39 OUR LOCAL CORRESPONDENTS GUNS DOWN With the number of shooting deaths rising, Shaina Harrison is teaching kids to turn anger into advocacy.

BY IAN FRAZIER

t eight-fifteen on a pre-pan- two things about themselves that were But that’s something we’ll talk more demic Friday morning, Shaina true, and one that was a lie. The rest of about later in the year—how things you A Harrison arrived at the Bronx the class would then guess which two do in high school can stay with you and Academy of Health Careers, one of were true and which one was the lie. affect your life later. seven specialized high schools in the She went first: “One, I got in seven- “Second truth: Yes, I am Instagram massive Evander Childs Educational teen fights in high school.” The kids famous. I am a plus-size fashion influ- Campus building, in a northerly part of with their heads on their desks sat up. encer and mommy blogger with my the borough. She had come from Red She did look as if she might be able to own blog that tens of thousands of peo- Hook, in Brooklyn, where she lives, to fight. Then she said, “Second, I am a ple follow every day. My hashtags are teach a weekly for-credit class on gun singer. Third, I am famous on Insta- #FatGirlsBeWinning and #MyBravest- violence and how to prevent it. New gram. Now you tell me which are the Space. And why wouldn’t someone like Yorkers Against Gun Violence, or truths, and which is the lie.” me have a fashion blog? Look at how N.Y.A.G.V., the nonprofit organization A boy raised his hand. “I think you I dress. I promise you will never see me of which she is one of three full-time are a singer, you did get in fights in twice in the same pair of glasses. I have employees, has been sending her to teach high school, and you aren’t famous at least ninety-seven pairs.” in New York City high schools for nine on Instagram.” Now every student was paying at- years, since she was in her mid-twen- “Why am I a singer? Because I look tention. She continued, “So, what is my ties. She is almost six feet tall, and she like maybe I sing in a church choir?” lie? I said I’m a singer. That is definitely wears false eyelashes, bright-red lipstick, “Yeah. And I think you got in fights not true. Not all large Black women and striking clothes—on this day, a red in high school because people bul- can sing. Some of us can hardly sing a fleece coat, a bold black-and-white- lied you.” note. I wish I could sing, I like music, checked blouse, wide-leg trousers, and “Why did people bully me?” but I don’t have that gift. See, you made square eyeglasses with pink-and-black “I don’t want to say.” a decision about me based on how I frames. Her black, wavy hair hung to “Nothing will bother me. This is a look. But how we look might not be below her shoulders. safe space and a brave space.” who we are.” The students in the class were ninth “Because you’re overweight?” The kids went next. A girl said that graders, some still not much more than “O.K., I hear that. I receive that. she liked her English Language Arts little kids. She told them to call her And why don’t you think I’m famous class, she was nice, and she spoke four Shaina. Some kids were paying atten- on Instagram?” languages. Nobody believed she spoke tion, others had receded back into their “I don’t know. I just don’t think four languages, but it turned out that hoodies like monks in cowls, and two or you are.” she did: French, English, and two Af- three laid their heads on their desks and Another kid said, “You’re a smart rican languages, Fulani and Susu; it was closed their eyes. Harrison announced person. You don’t waste your time on not true that she liked her E.L.A. class. that this would be a safe space and also social media.” Then a boy said that he was from Can- a brave space where everybody could say More discussion. Finally, Harrison ada, he liked to cook, and he liked to things that were hard to say, without said, “O.K., here’s my answer. I did get play basketball. The class decided he being judged. Turning to some girls in in seventeen fights in high school— couldn’t be from Canada: “If you’re from hijabs who were talking, she picked up that is true. I didn’t like to fight, but Canada, why would you come here? the rhythm, chatted with them, and said somehow I got a reputation as a fighter, Canada is way better than here.” The to the class, “I’ll always receive what you and then people were always wanting surmise was correct; he was not from give, and hear it, and give you some- to fight me. Just bumping up against Canada. Another boy said that he had thing back. I want to hear what you’re someone in the hall, suddenly I’d be in a sister in school, he liked to laugh, saying. Your voice is more important to a fight. When I applied to colleges I and he was a bodybuilder. The class me than mine.” had all those suspensions on my rec- pointed out that he did not look like a She told everybody to take out a pen ord, so even though I got all A’s and my bodybuilder; he wasn’t. A girl said she and a piece of paper, because they were test scores were good, some colleges was good at video games, was born in going to play a game. The kids groaned. were afraid to take a chance on me. a foreign country, and had two pet tur- She said the game was called Two Truths Bowling Green, a college way out in tles. Someone said that it is illegal to and a Lie. She told them to write down Ohio, did give me a full scholarship. own turtles in New York City. The girl

40 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 When Harrison became an anti-gun activist, her neighbors were baffled: “I had to tell them I wasn’t snitching.”

PHOTOGRAPH BY NAIMA GREEN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 41 happily admitted to having made up much bigger turnout than expected. sister. After she had been with Amer- the turtles. Following that encouraging experi- iCorps for two years, New Yorkers When the class began, most of the ence, three of the rally’s organizers Against Gun Violence hired her away. students were in one of two modes: started a group called New Yorkers for On our first meeting, she and I poker-faced and shut down, or in groups Gun Control. walked around the playgrounds and of several kids locked on to one another For its first act of protest, the group streets of Red Hook as she showed me with that kind of teen-age telepathy in joined with an organization called Par- places where people had been shot, and which the slightest raised eyebrow can ents of Murdered Children and col- she described what it was like, in pre- produce screams of laughter. By the lected about a hundred pairs of shoes vious years, to hear gunshots all the end, they were like citizens of the class- that represented some of the people time. At thirty-three, she still lives in room. “I’m pushing you guys to look at killed by guns in the state in 1993. They the same neighborhood and now has your stereotypes,” Harrison said. “I want lined up the shoes on the sidewalk in a three-year-old son. you to notice how sometimes you don’t front of the office of Alfonse D’Am- Rebecca Fischer, the executive di- really see other people, how you ste- ato, the Republican senator from New rector of N.Y.A.G.V., started with the reotype them, and how they stereotype York, who always voted with the N.R.A. organization in 2013. She is forty and you. How does stereotyping lead to gun Afterward, Ellen Freudenheim, one of grew up in Massachusetts. Her father violence? Because it makes us feel that the group’s founders, did a more am- is a professor of labor law at Western we’re unsafe, and that we don’t know bitious performance-art-like piece on New England University; her mother each other. What we don’t know makes the steps of the Capitol in Washing- taught at the law school. In high school, us afraid. People pick up guns because ton, this time with thirty-eight thou- Fischer hung out with the skateboard- they feel afraid, and powerless. Being sand pairs of shoes, representing the ers and kids with shaved heads and afraid is a part of life, and we can deal number of Americans who were dying thought she was the only boring per- with it in better ways. And we are not from gun violence every year. The Si- son. She also got good grades, led the powerless, as I will show you.” lent March, as the event was called, re- school debate team, and played cello. ceived a lot of press coverage and re- She went to Tufts, where she majored hat class took place before COVID, mains one of the most powerful anti-gun in clinical psychology and compara- Twhen schools were still open. Har- protests ever. tive religion, and then to Benjamin rison has taught Two Truths and a Lie, New Yorkers for Gun Control, to Cardozo law school. She took a job she says, “hundreds of times.” Right broaden its mission, soon changed its at a New York boutique firm that ad- now, she is teaching it in Zoom classes, name to New Yorkers Against Gun vises nonprofits. At twenty-six, she to even more kids. During the year that Violence. Two years after its found- married another lawyer; they have two she has been teaching remotely, gun ing, N.Y.A.G.V. started an education sons and live in Park Slope, where deaths in New York City increased by fund, to bring the anti-gun-violence N.Y.A.G.V. began. eighty-eight per cent. In the past sev- message to schools. One morning in December of 2012, eral weeks, eighteen people were mur- I first met Harrison in 2013, when Fischer was texting with a colleague at dered in mass shootings in Atlanta, she had been with N.Y.A.G.V. for four her firm when the school shooting oc- Georgia, and in Boulder, Colorado. In years. Bowling Green College had not curred at Sandy Hook. The colleague the former incident, the suspect used a had a six-year-old son in the school. gun that he had bought the same day. Some time passed before she found out New Yorkers Against Gun Violence that her son was O.K.; he had sheltered began as the result of a shooting twenty- in a classroom and had to walk past eight years ago. On a spring afternoon bodies to leave the building. Fischer in Brooklyn in 1993, four teen-agers told me that being part of that experi- from Crown Heights tried to steal a ence, even at one remove, felt “surreal new off-road bicycle from a man named and insane.” She changed her life—she Allyn Winslow on a hill in Prospect got involved with social-justice groups Park. Winslow resisted and pedalled at her synagogue, met anti-gun-vio- away, and one of the boys shot him worked out. She was there less than a lence activists across New York, became twice with a .22-calibre pistol. One of semester when her grandmother, who a volunteer for N.Y.A.G.V., and even- the bullets hit his heart, and at the bot- had raised her and her younger sister, tually joined its board. When it was tom of the hill he fell off his bicycle died. Harrison returned to Brooklyn, looking for a new director, she applied and died. back to her old bedroom in her grand- for the job. The shooting frightened the neigh- mother’s apartment, in the Red Hook N.Y.A.G.V. has successfully lob- borhoods around the park. A few days Houses, and got a job with Ameri- bied the state legislature to pass major later, people from Park Slope arranged Corps, which sent her to a conflict-me- gun-safety measures. A law now re- a memorial and an anti-gun rally near diation organization in Crown Heights quires that all guns in homes with chil- the crime scene, with city and state of- called Save Our Streets. AmeriCorps dren be under lock and key, thanks ficials and community figures. Hun- paid her four hundred dollars a month, partly to the group. The ReACTION dreds of local residents showed up—a on which she supported herself and her curriculum, developed by Harrison and

42 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 scaled up by Fischer, is taught in nine- teen schools and serves more than five hundred students. Fischer sees her job as bringing forward the young activ- ists—Harrison and N.Y.A.G.V.’s other teachers—while she supervises, lobbies, and raises money.

he Evander Childs building sits Ton a major east-west Bronx thor- oughfare called East Gun Hill Road. During the Revolutionary War, Amer- ican troops stored cannons on high ground. One night, when the cannons were unguarded, two saboteurs pounded rat-tail files into the touchholes and broke them off so that the cannons could not be fired. The Americans brought the cannons to a local hill, farther be- hind the lines, to repair them—thus, East Gun Hill Road. The nation began in gunfire; at the surface of our con- sciousness and deep in our subconscious, guns are everywhere. On another morning at the Bronx “Rustle twice if you’re in there.” Academy of Health Careers, Harrison’s lesson took up the subject of “toxic mas- •• culinity.” She was wearing a red, green, and black plaid-flannel shirt, close-fitting black jeans, and shin-high faux-Timber- talk, you make your gun talk for you.” Logan, also seventeen, and Andrea land boots. She asked the students to The police department’s school-safety Gonzales, eighteen. Hernandez wore make one list of the qualities that a “good agents patrolling the halls sometimes his hair in cornrows, and he sometimes man” might have, and another of the stood outside the classroom door, the wore a sharp powder-blue blazer. Gon- qualities of a “real man.” Then she and staticky bursts from their radios giving zales described herself as “a queer La- the kids talked about each category: a small jolts to the day. Between periods, tinx mestiza,” and wanted to get some good man is caring, takes care of his fam- the corridors filled up and feet thun- piercings to make herself look fierce, an ily, works hard but doesn’t necessarily dered in the stairwells. Lots of kids knew effect her friends said she could never have a lot of money. A real man is tough, Harrison from previous classes. She re- pull off, because of her warm, empa- stands up for himself and his friends ceived hugs and greetings in the corridors; thetic eyes. Logan’s parents are West and family, doesn’t avoid conflict, doesn’t she always remembers names. Over the Indian and “very protective,” she said; cry. “A real man can’t be a wussie,” one years, she has kept in touch with hundreds she watches the world from behind boy said, and Harrison replied, “Thank of kids, and she gets calls at all hours round, scholarly spectacles. you for your answer, and you also didn’t from those who need to talk or just want Hernandez had co-founded Y.O.G. use the word beginning with a ‘P,’ and to say hi. after seventeen people were killed at Mar- I appreciate that.” jory Stoneman Douglas High School, She told a story about how her son n June of 2019, I joined Harrison in Parkland, Florida. He wanted to re- fell once while playing and began to Iand Fischer at an anti-gun march mind the public that Black and brown cry, and the boy’s father told him to across the Brooklyn Bridge. Youth Over communities lose young people to gun stop crying like a girl; she told him, Guns (Y.O.G.), an organization of city violence every day. Word of the Brook- “He’s hurt! Why can’t he cry? Crying high-school students and recent grad- lyn Bridge march spread on social media, is not a gender, it’s how human beings uates, had planned it as their second and on that Saturday about ten thou- react to pain.” The class watched a short big public event. Y.O.G. had agreed sand protesters joined with Youth Over documentary about men and boys who to affiliate itself with N.Y.A.G.V. as Guns as they crossed the bridge. The are told to “man up” and keep their feel- its youth-outreach arm. Members of large turnout completely astonished the ings to themselves. Harrison said that the group had been in classes Harri- young organizers. Today it looks like that kind of suppression is itself a form son taught; she had inspired them. Luis a precursor. of violence. She asked the class what Hernandez, who was seventeen at the That October, I joined Harrison and happens if you’re not supposed to say time, put the march together, along Fischer and the three members of Y.O.G. how you feel. A boy said, “If you can’t with fellow Y.O.G. members Alliyah at a national anti-gun conference in Las

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 43 Vegas that was sponsored in part by doing anything about it.” Buttigieg gave There are three schools within a few March for Our Lives, an organization a thoughtful response about building blocks of that corner. The crowd stood formed by survivors of the Parkland healthy neighborhoods, saying of cer- quietly as a priest said a prayer. Night shooting. In the lobby of their hotel, I tain areas that residents have been “red- fell, and a cold wind blew. Kids lay down asked Harrison how she liked the ac- lined into them and are now being on the sidewalk while other kids traced commodations. Dozens of anti-gun gentrified out.” N.Y.A.G.V. looks for the outlines of their splayed-out bod- groups attended; the ones that included nonviolent ways to overcome power- ies with chalk. A man said hello to me young people had been booked at this lessness. For Hernandez, that teaching and gave me his card. Eventually, the place near the airport because it was became real. To stand up in front of the crowd dispersed, but the police vans affordable and did not have large crowd and the TV stayed nearby, their lights still flashing slot machines. “Pfft—it’s cameras and ask his question blue and red. not much,” Harrison said. had required some nerving The card said, “James Dobbins III, “I was in Las Vegas last up. Afterward, he said he New York City Health and Hospitals.” summer, and the experience felt as if he were on top of I called the number, and a few days later was amazing. People were the world. I met Dobbins in his office on the sec- filming me for some fash- What I mainly took ond floor of Lincoln Hospital. He is ion commercials, they got away from the conference the assistant director of community af- me a suite in a hotel on the was statistics: about forty fairs for a nonprofit organization called Strip with a skating rink thousand Americans died Guns Down, Life Up (G.D.L.U.), which and an ice-cream bar on that year from gun violence, is a part of the hospital. He had a dia- the roof, I was modelling about sixty per cent of them mond stud in one ear, and he wore a these wild clothes, I went to the ‘Mind- suicides; more Americans have died V-neck sweater-vest, a tie, and a recep- freak’ magic show, the magician cut my from guns in recent years than have tive expression. Listening to strangers body in half on the stage—it was all a died in car accidents; guns are the No. 1 is what he does. As someone who served hot mess.” cause of death for African-American two prison terms, he qualifies as a “cred- “Why did I assume that Shaina had children and young men; the mentally ible messenger”—someone people on never been to Las Vegas?” Fischer asked. ill are more often the victims of gun vi- the street will pay attention to. He began “Of course Shaina has been to Las Vegas.” olence than they are the perpetrators by telling me two facts: Lincoln Hos- Nevada’s governor, Steve Sisolak, of it; ninety-six per cent of all mass pital, located in the southwest Bronx, welcomed everybody to the conference shooters are male; there may be ten mil- has the busiest emergency room in the and wept all the way through his re- lion assault rifles in private hands; and city, and people who are shot and sur- marks. Two years before, almost to the seventy-five per cent of gun owners say vive have a fifty-per-cent chance of being day, a gunman firing rifles modified to that owning a gun is essential to their shot again within five years. Of every shoot like automatic weapons had killed sense of freedom. ten people who present at a hospital fifty-eight people and wounded four with gunshot wounds and don’t die, five hundred and thirteen at an outdoor alking in the Bronx after Har- will eventually be shot again, and, of concert on the Strip. It was the worst Wrison’s classes one day, I learned those, two will die. mass shooting in the country’s history. the following: On the afternoon of Dobbins and others from G.D.L.U. Sisolak had spent the previous day re- November 27, 2019, the day before go to the scenes where violence has oc- membering the occasion with parents Thanksgiving, someone shot five peo- curred and make conversation with by- who had lost children, and with other ple at the corner of East 151st Street standers. They visit hospital bedsides, survivors. He told the audience that he and Courtlandt Avenue, in the Melrose talk to friends and family of victims, and had walked the site of the shooting the section of the borough. The victims in- try to find alternatives to retaliation. day after it occurred. “I saw the bodies, cluded a ten-year-old boy, a fourteen- After victims are out of the hospital, I saw the blood,” he said. “And there year-old boy, and a young man of twenty Dobbins keeps up with them. At any was an eerie silence, and you would hear who may have been the target. Had one time he is in touch with dozens of a cell phone ring, someone hoping that I not noticed a “Wanted” poster on a people still at risk of violence. Former their loved one would pick up that light pole with a photo of the suspect, victims sometimes call him at 3 a.m. phone. ...I’m never forgetting the sound I probably would never have heard about “I’ll be in bed, my cell phone rings, I’ll of those cell phones ringing.” the shooting. answer, and I’ll hear, ‘He’s right outside As the spokesman for Y.O.G., Luis I went to a protest rally on Court- my building, and I’m ’on blow the mofo’s Hernandez was the first to ask an au- landt Avenue at the shooting site. Local head off!’ Then I just stay on the line dience question. He asked the mayor leaders and teachers and girls from the and keep the brother talking.” of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigieg, nearby Immaculate Conception School Dobbins is one of three men and who was then running for President, were addressing a small crowd, saying two women who work for G.D.L.U.; how, if elected, he would help people that this should not be a regular part of they all stay current in the program’s in marginalized communities “who are life—people should not be getting shot “catchment area,” which includes the enduring gun violence at dispropor- on a busy sidewalk as neighbors are Melrose and Morris Heights neigh- tionate rates, and nobody is saying or shopping and schools are letting out. borhoods, offering their programs for

44 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 kids. The group’s bright-green hoodies Brooklyn, is another Cure Violence- incalculable suffering, and a hope for and T-shirts feature the slogan “Guns based program; Kings County’s emer- peace, the anti-gun groups proliferate Down, Life Up,” designed by Marley gency room is the second busiest in on one side, while on the other stands Marl, the hip-hop producer. Dobbins the city. the amply funded and seemingly im- wants everybody in the neighborhood There are faith-based anti-violence pregnable N.R.A. and in the entire city to start wearing groups, such as the Sixty-seventh Pre- In 2020, there were fifteen hundred them. In spare office space at the hos- cinct Clergy Council, also known as the and thirty-one shootings in New York pital, he started classes in fashion de- God Squad, founded by ministers, one City, almost twice as many as in 2019. sign that take kids through the process of whom hands out coupons for free fu- The number of people hit by bullets of producing and mass-marketing these nerals to active gang members he sees was eighteen hundred and sixty-eight. garments. He also leads kids on rides on the street. Smaller groups, sometimes Guns killed two hundred and ninety around the city, on bicycles provided by called “mom-and-pop nonprofits,” in- people in New York in 2020, an increase the hospital, and has found a pro-bono clude Harlem Mothers SAVE (Stop An- of eighty-eight per cent from 2019. recording studio for aspiring rappers other Violent End), founded by Jackie Forty-eight people were shot in one day and musicians. Rowe-Adams, who lost two sons to during the Fourth of July weekend, and “Kids around here see that crime shootings; Hip Hop 4 Life, which uses nine of them died. Ninety-five per cent pays,” Dobbins said. “They see an eigh- music and culture to promote a healthy, of the victims were Black or Hispanic. teen-year-old making two thousand, violence-free life style; LIFE Camp (Love A man was shot and killed in the Bronx three thousand a day, driving a Benz. Ignites Freedom through Education), while crossing the street, holding his But a drug-dealing person is not who founded by Erica Ford, who uses yoga six-year-old daughter’s hand. A video most kids are. They might like the look and mindfulness as tools for prevent- showed a gun at the end of an arm of it, but who they are deep down is ing violence; and G-MACC (Gangstas emerging from the window of a pass- someone else. We’re trying to help them Making Astronomical Community ing car, the man falling, the little girl find out who that is. I got out of prison Changes), of Brooklyn, whose founder running away up the sidewalk. the second time and decided I did not was arrested last year for threatening to Public-health studies have suggested want to go back to hustling drugs. Today, have somebody killed (his former law- some possible causes—the increase in I own a house in Queens, and I have yer says he’s innocent). unemployment, domestic abuse, drug two kids. I found what I love to do. I As the Las Vegas conference showed, and alcohol consumption, financial hard- save people’s lives. People ask me what anti-gun nonprofits have grown all across ship, and firearm sales that came with I do for a living, and I say, ‘I stop peo- the country. Forty thousand U.S. gun the pandemic, along with the temporary ple from shooting people.’” deaths in recent years work out to four shutdown of public support services. Guns Down, Life Up, multiplied by or five an hour. Driven by grief, outrage, In 1990 and 1991, nearly two thousand three dozen or more, gives you an idea of the number of anti-gun-violence or- ganizations in New York City. Through Fischer and Harrison, I met three other men, all of them formerly incarcerated, who do work like Dobbins’s; “violence interrupter” is the job description. As mayor, Michael Bloomberg made gun violence one of his big issues, but he dealt with it more through policing, using tactics like “stop-and-frisk,” while also funding some community-based anti-violence groups. Mayor Bill de Bla- sio emphasized and encouraged the latter. In 2017, he formed the Mayor’s Office to Prevent Gun Violence. It over- sees the city’s Crisis Management Sys- tem, which coördinates and funds com- munity-based anti-gun groups of all kinds. A lot of these, like G.D.L.U., follow a model known as Cure Vio- lence, developed by a doctor in Chi- cago, which considers gun violence a disease and a public-health crisis cur- able by a multi-step treatment. The Kings Against Violence Initiative, which is part of Kings County Hospital, in On a Wednesday in midwinter, they showed up doing things other teach- ers might have kicked them out for. Arguing, throwing fake punches at one another, making crinkling noises with their empty water bottles, toss- ing wadded-up paper, shouting, they briefly overwhelmed the classroom. At one point, Harrison was having animated conversations with three or four kids at once and started to go hoarse. But soon she got everybody settled down. The day’s lesson concerned the school-to-prison pipeline that Black and brown young people so often fall victim to. On the blackboard, she had written out the rap sheet of someone named James B. It listed the charges: “Trespassing; Petit Larceny; Trespass- ing; Disorderly Conduct; Indecent Ex- “I’m going to break my silence and have a tantrum.” posure; Trespassing; Fare Evasion.” Someone asked what petit larceny is. She explained that it’s the theft of some- •• thing of small value, as compared with grand larceny, the theft of something people were killed by gunfire in New are angry; they go out on the streets, pricier: “Petit larceny is if you steal a York each year. Observers disagreed where there now are fewer people, and phone charger. Grand larceny is if you about why the numbers went down, they take the opportunity to go after steal a phone.” to two hundred and ninety-seven, in their rivals.” She told the students to split into 2016, but studies have shown that the Since before the 2020 election, gun groups of six and talk among them- more nonprofit organizations a neigh- stores nationwide have been over- selves about who this James was and borhood has, the fewer the shootings. whelmed, with lines of customers some- how he acquired his rap sheet. As they Conservative critics blame the recent times waiting around the block. Gun were working, Harrison hit a speed- gun-violence surge on bail reform, de- collectors are making money selling dial number on her phone and ordered criminalization of minor offenses, and extra ammunition online. The N.Y.P.D. pizza and sodas. After five or ten min- cuts in the police department’s budget. now confiscates dozens of guns in ar- utes, she asked the kids how old they Replacement numbers of police offi- rests every day. An online nonprofit thought James was and what his fam- cers have not kept up with retirements; called the Gun Violence Archive lists ily life was like. Every group said he fewer cops are on the streets. Dobbins shootings in the U.S. almost as they was about their age—fifteen or six- thinks that shootings are up because occur. More than a hundred shootings teen—and lived with his mother. None everybody is at home and arguments are recorded in a typical twenty-four- said his father was in the picture. They start on the Internet. “Then, when peo- hour period. The violence spreads all gave him sisters, mostly younger. ple see each other on the street, the guns across the map—occurring in cities, Harrison asked, “So why does he have come out,” he said. rural places, Indian reservations. If we three arrests for trespassing?” A con- Dr. Jeffrey Butts, the director of the could somehow hear all those shots in sensus said that he was kicked out of Research and Evaluation Center at John real time, it would sound as if the U.S. the house, maybe because he got in a Jay College of Criminal Justice, dismisses were in the middle of a non-stop low- fight with his mother’s boyfriend, and explanations based on bail reform and intensity war. then went into nearby apartment build- the rest as “self-serving law-enforcement ings to sleep. Petit larceny? He shop- theories.” He told me, “Young men of arrison has been teaching at lifted a honey bun from a bodega be- color in the ages between fifteen and Hthe High School for Public Ser- cause he was hungry. Fare evasion? He twenty-five, the group most affected vice, in Crown Heights, longer than had no money. Disorderly conduct? by gun violence, are also very likely anywhere else. Before the city sus- “His father is gone, and maybe James to have the kind of jobs that disap- pended on-site teaching, the class met thinks he has to be the man of the fam- peared in the pandemic.” Summer-job Wednesdays at twelve-fifteen. By that ily, and he got in a fight with some- programs were cancelled, too. “And, of hour, students were keyed up and extra body who said something mean about course, the schools have been closed for lively, the way you often see kids act- his sister,” a girl said. a year,” he went on. “These young men ing on the subway in the afternoon. A big stack of pizza boxes arrived,

46 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 along with some thirty-two-ounce bot- New Yorkers Against Gun Violence but going to Albany, our state capital, tles of soda. The discussion continued take students on trips to Albany and that faraway place, scares them, and as the kids ate. Harrison said, “So, once Washington, D.C., to meet with and maybe their parents, also. We were hav- James has this rap sheet, maybe his lobby some of these powerful people. ing Zoom meetings with, like, the staff school administration and the police For her students, the idea that they of Kirsten Gillibrand, in D.C., or with think of him only as that—a kid with can participate in making laws that Jamaal T. Bailey, state senator from the a rap sheet. So what do you think will affect their own lives hadn’t crossed Bronx. We were seeing them in their happen if James is then arrested for their minds. homes—one staff person was even sit- something more serious, like getting ting on the floor of a closet to get away caught with a gun?” The kids all said he n 2021, N.Y.A.G.V.’s classes have con- from her family—and that really made would go to prison. “If you were the Itinued, although the school buildings them human.” judge, what would you do?” A majority have been closed. “In some ways the on- During a recent Zoom meeting of quickly answered that they would send line classes are better, more personal,” N.Y.A.G.V.’s seven-member staff, ev- him to prison, too. Harrison said. “The kids can see my lit- eryone agreed that policing and gun “But do you remember what we tle son in the background while I talk violence are not separate issues, and learned about stereotyping?” Harrison to them and take care of him. But it’s that the problem is racism, plus pow- said. “As you just discovered when you also like being in the classroom, in that erlessness, plus people being terrified were talking about James, there is an many of the kids are slow to participate of one another. “To reform the police, actual person with a complicated life at the start. At the beginning of the you need to build a healthier commu- behind the rap sheet. Most of you meetings, almost all of them have their nity where there’s less need to call the thought only of giving him jail time, screens turned off. But by the end of police,” Teah said. All seemed surprised and there’s an even worse stereotype as- the first class everybody has their screens by how many allies they discovered they sociated with having been in prison. on. That’s important, because a big part had. Last summer, they taught their James gets out, now he has a prison rec- of the curriculum is about making sure Anger to Advocacy program to twenty ord—and, by the way, I know some very that they are seen.” young anti-gun-violence activists, who good men who have prison records— The organization has strengthened are now teaching it to others through- and he can’t get a job, so he starts sell- its connection with Youth Over Guns out the country. ing drugs, and maybe at some point he by hiring Luis Hernandez, Alliyah “Anger to Advocacy shows you how again picks up a gun so he won’t get Logan, and Andrea Gonzales as part- to take your anger and move it in a pos- robbed. In the next class, we’re going to time employees. Hernandez graduated itive direction, by engaging with the talk about restorative justice, and peer in June, and Logan and Gonzales are state and local and national govern- mediation, and anything we can come in college. The three help in different ment, the people in power,” Logan said. up with together that would change areas—Logan in outreach, Hernandez “But a lot of it is also about changing James’s story.” in planning, and Gonzales with the on- yourself into an anti-gun activist, and As she often does in class, she re- line classes. “I taught a lot how to be comfortable in turned to the theme “Guns do not make of classes with Andrea,” said that identity.” you safer,” and to the subject of fear Frank Teah, the program “When I started work- amplified by racism. She said, “Our director for N.Y.A.G.V., ing with N.Y.A.G.V., problem is that we are terrified of each who’s in his thirties. “She people in my neighbor- other! The people at the takeout place made a big difference. An- hood couldn’t understand where I used to go in Red Hook would drea’s about the students’ what I was doing,” Harri- hand you your food through a little age, and that made it eas- son said. “Young Black window of bulletproof glass! I trusted ier for them to relate.” activists were not getting them enough to eat the food they “The beautiful part about accolades back then. Many cooked, but they didn’t trust me, they being young is that you have people were looking at felt a need to be protected against me.” this incredible amount of them like they were quote- The over-all message of her curricu- imagination,” Gonzales said. “We talked unquote snitches. I had to tell them lum is that fear, racism, and powerless- a lot about George Floyd and Breonna I wasn’t snitching, I was trying to build ness are at the root of gun violence. Taylor, but the classes were also very safe communities.” She believes that finding your ability hopeful. I said we can remake worlds “I’ve been an activist since I was four- to speak reduces both racism and pow- in our head.” teen,” Logan said. “In high school, I erlessness—the former by letting peo- As promised, the trips to Albany and would always get up petitions, plan pro- ple know that the stereotypes are false, Washington took place, but virtually. tests and whatnot, and nobody could and the latter by creating the sense of “In some ways, the trips were better, understand what in the world I was strength that comes from speaking out. too,” Harrison said. “In a shorter amount doing, not even my mom and dad. Ev- Her students learn who their city coun- of time we got to see more electeds and erybody thought I was just weird. Now cilmen, state representatives, congress- their staffs. A lot of our kids have never I can teach other kids that it’s an O.K. men, and senators are, and at the end been out of New York City. They might identity to have. Everybody should be of the year she and her colleagues at walk on dangerous streets every day, an anti-gun activist now.” 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 47 FICTION

Sterling HolyWhiteMountain

48 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN ADAMS hen I first met my love, I one straight out you want to fuck. That’s drunk and almost amused. The last one, had been off my reserva­ why we’re such failures in the white world. she had great abs—she was a former W tion for a little more than We can’t keep our mouths shut about hurdler who had taken up a serious Jim a year. I had become acculturated, we’ll anything. All this behind­closed­doors Beam habit to compensate for her ath­ say, to university life—and willingly! I and smile­to­your­face work doesn’t letic prowess. She wore sunglasses that wanted to know what larger America vibe for us. Those girls, though, they made her look like the woman out in was all about. I took on the aspect of were at war with themselves and they front of the asylum you might want to a young dog; everything was new to didn’t even know it. They wanted to talk to. me, I had my nose up everyone’s ass. wrestle on the spiritual banks of the I always wanted to be Native Amer­ First there was Lana, then Julie, then .. . American Dream, they wanted revo­ ican, she said. a few other names I can’t remember, lutions, they wanted dream lives and How’s that, I said. and then there was Barbara. That should dream marriages and dream families, You know, she said. Because it’s have been the name of a grandmother, and all I wanted was some ass! Or so romantic. but in fact it belonged to a sweet thing I thought. Well, I said. It’s something. It is who liked to call me her favorite in­ Me, I was a simple reservation boy. really something. dian toy. I always had a stalk of grass betwixt my I’ll be whatever you want, I said, lips. I squinted at the sky and com­ ater, from my love’s sunken mat­ long as we keep knocking those boots. mented in profound tones on the Ltress and box spring resting on the Which we did, because she was weather. Like a good tourist, I wanted floor of that cold room in graduate­stu­ young, almost too young for a guy more to witness the best the big city had to dent housing, the prayer flags strung than a few years out of high school. offer. I went to parties and laughed in above us in the dark, I would think back She had the courage that belongs only a genuine way with white boys—back­ to those white girls and their downy to those who don’t know that death is slaps and tough handshakes and big beds. There was something about their just down the block, waiting to intro­ grins. I got stupid drunk and pressed lives, even those of the tough rancher duce himself. As for me, I was not yet my hands between the thighs of white girls who grew up hearing all the worst old enough to not feel young. Accord­ girls in dimly lit alleys. All the truly things about us—racist cowgirls give ing to the literature, I should have been worst kisses happen in such places. I al­ the best head—there was nonetheless well on my way to a fulfilling life of sta­ ways asked those girls to take me home— a certainty about their place in this world bility and money and houses or what­ and sometimes they did! I wanted to that made no sense to me. With them, ever—but she didn’t know that. I was see where they lived almost as much as I sometimes had the feeling I was not just finishing my gen­eds, trying to stay I wanted to see them naked. I wanted in a bed at all but rather that I was rest­ awake, that sort of thing. I called her to get a feel for the glory of another ing on pillows that rested on pillows Barbie. I had always wanted to be with kind of life. There was always some­ that rested on pillows. It’s pillows all a doll. thing comfortable about those rooms, the way down, baby! Until you get to Barbie, I would say. Barbie, Barbie. even when they were spare, something the very bottom. Then we’re all burn­ Oh, Barbie. plush as we flopped and rolled and ing alive like one big happy family. But She should have been the one. Me groaned in the sheets. What a wonder my mother, my auntie, my gram—how and her, seventeen children of our own, the young are. The world is a confla­ could they not have wanted such beds adopt nine more, a farm next to a lake gration and they find nothing to do but for me? When my love asked me about full of muskrats. Two rescue dogs, prob­ play grab­ass. the white girls, she had this look of un­ ably. Lana, Julie, Barbie—their names Long nights, two­ or three­ or four­ mitigated disgust on her face, the kind were mantric. I knew reservation girls times­in­a­night nights, talk in the dark of look that made me want to buy her who had those names, but there was that wanders the most crooked paths, flowers. Whenever I needed to balance nothing new or special or fireworks long talks not really looking at each the relational budget, I would joke about about them. But these ones! What a other and maybe not even talking to leaving her for one of them. And she sight to behold, all that blond hair walk­ each other, both of us speaking into would say, ing across the U. Clarkston campus. I the dark. Maybe there’s a night­light Eww, go on, then! See how fun it had no idea where it had come from. plugged into the socket in the far cor­ is being a tour guide for the rest of And hailing from exotic lands such ner, maybe a country­music poster on your life. as Portland. They had a thing going, the wall, with a man and a guitar and Ah! I couldn’t get enough! Every those white girls. I swear to you, for a flag as big as the Ritz, maybe she syllable like a sword. Sometimes I said them everything was power. Either they has her head on my chest like we really things in the hope that she would cut wanted to steal it from me or they know each other—and maybe we do. me. She left me with the best scars. wanted me to wrest it from their tight Maybe it was a few nights of that or a Still, I could never rid myself of my and brutal fists. Relational theft and few weeks of that or a few months of mother, my auntie, my gram—their subterfuge, so to speak. Northern Plains that and then would come the kind of words, going all the way back to my people, though, it’s all out in front for comments these dreamcatcher­dangling middle­school years. us. No secrets where I’m from. Fist­ white girls always have up their sleeve. You can’t go with her, one of them fights and open hatred and telling some­ It got to where I waited for it, punch­ would say, she’s So­and­So’s daughter,

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 49 do, where they spin their hair around a finger. I could have watched her do it forever.

ot long after things got going, we Ntook a trip up to her rez. Her mom, she said this thing . . . I don’t know. It messed me up, gave me pro- phetic-seeming dreams, and I would wake with bleak and portentous feel- ings of the future, and the resulting apprehensions rode and whipped me into cowardice. Because that first, ti- tanic fuck had erased all the others, we avoided necessary conversations. Our meetings were exclusively nocturnal. Sometimes I sat on the frameless mat- tress and box spring she had got a few years before from her cousin who stole and totalled a car and then headed off “Olga, you don’t have to wear a mask—you’re a potato.” to prison. From my perch, I watched her study at a slender wooden desk, which she had bargained down from •• a dollar and fifty cents to seventy-five at a garage-sale situation. The desk’s and that’s your relative through your feather. She had these straight bangs elegance somehow belied the Soviet great-grandmother Sings Down. and this way of turning her face away simplicity and cruelty of the room it- Their voices in my ear, even now! from me and covering her mouth when self—blank walls, barren floor, a blan- Where I’m from, it’s the women who she laughed. ket she sometimes hung over the win- know how everyone is connected. When Hey, I would say, reaching for her dow to block out the sun. I would I was a boy, they were emissaries of the face. Don’t act shamed. stay there until she could no longer mysterium tremendum itself, they knew But of course she insisted. She was ignore my ultra-intense, cosmic-level all the stories and revealed them like like that—anything I said she rejected gaze and told me to get the fuck out the greatest of secrets. Of course, they on principle. Much of life irritated of her room, go the fuck home or had their own agendas, and since I was her. She found America in contempt whatever, she needed to write, she their lone living male issue, a different of court. needed to get high, she needed to be kind of weight fell upon me. I knew I could love her, because she alone. I took the vehemence of her Don’t go giving us a half-breed baby, was familiarly broken. She was from response as evidence that the furor in now! they would say. We got enough another tribe, people my people used her heart belonged only to me. She white blood already. to kill, so I knew it was O.K. to ask for rarely let me kiss her, but when she What if she’s light-skinned? I would her number. And because a storm had did we kissed gently, the way I have say, just to prod them a bit. arrived in Clarkston and wind tore the seen elderly couples kiss. They touch Well, if you have to, they would say. leaves from the trees and tossed them lips knowing that only the sweet and A lot of indians belong to the Church about in the driveways of all those lamp- simple thing can hold off the dark. of Latter-Day Eugenicists. Right there lit, Colonial-style homes in the univer- Sometimes before I left her room she out in the open, not even trying to hide sity district—where it seemed that ev- would call me over, touch my face, the travesty. Brown-skin supremacists. eryone who had ever lived there had and look at me. There was always That’s just how they are. known nothing but harmony and touch happening. Sometimes the irony is so great that warmth and an endless Christmas Her roommate likely resented us. the irony turns into cherry pie: I met Eve—I knew that I could go to her door That poor French girl, at U. Clarkston Allie on the first day of NativeAmerican late one night. on exchange; she was just there to study Heritage Month. I’m still unclear about It’s really fuckin’ cold out here, in America. Instead she got to hear two what we do on that day. Mostly it means I said. savages fuck. What was her name? Mad- selling beadwork to white people and What do you want me to do about eleine. Sometimes when Allie was show- talking big on social media. She had it, she said. ering, or maybe she’d gone out for cigs, this way of smoking cigarettes—she’d Forecast looks dark, I said. Storms I would chat up Madeleine in the liv- taken on the delicate affect of her room- and such from here on out. ing room or the kitchen. mate, who was French. My love, she Sounds familiar, she said. Come on, this one, I would say, just was light-complected and light as a She was doing that thing women say your name again.

50 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 Of course, I always smiled when I Let’s do it together, I would say I didn’t say anything. I’m certain I asked. I had a great and easy smile back through the door. was practicing my active-listening skills. then. I was a toothsome young man. No, she would say. I fucking hate this, she said. I don’t Her inflected English was a won- Then let me watch, I would say. want to spend the rest of my life talking der to my ears, and those thin, im- You’re too much! she would holler. to white people about indins. Excuse ported cigarettes in their pastel box on I could have kicked the door open, me, I mean the indigenous peoples of top of the old tube television were like movie style, but I refrained. Sometimes North America. a shot of genius each time I walked I got down on my hands and knees She made a face and said it in this into the living room. Though my res- and put my eyes to the space at the snarky tone. She was always talking ervation was only a few hours and a bottom of the door. Like the bear that about social-justice terms. None of mountain range from that student-liv- went over the mountain, I just wanted them belonged to us. It seemed we ing complex, it seemed as far away as to see what there was to see. Nothing would never get to speak for ourselves Pluto. I often felt I was peering through but the dim red glow from the night- about the things we wanted to talk a complicated series of lenses, and light plugged in near the sink, the sound about in the way we wanted to talk sometimes, looking at her, I couldn’t of the fan, the heavy odor of weed. That about them. say which way was up. She went to the was how she liked it. She could never There will be no justice for us in fridge and I thought, calm down. Her nerves were always at this life or any other, she said. Ah, there she is, opening a Frigi- DEFCON 1. One night I told her the That’s fucking depressing, I said. daire as only the French can. true divide between us was not the No, she said. What’s depressing is When I found her eating cold len- thing her mother had told us but that learning there’s almost nothing you can tils and rice at the small, Formica- I came from buffalo people and she do about what you’ve learned. topped table under the naked yellow came from fish people. What if we made out? I said. kitchen light, I would think, No, she said. You come from sober You know what you are? she said. So that is how they do it in France. people and I come from people who You’re one of those smart people who She was an endless entertainment throw plates. like being dumb. to me. I once told her that, having seen I pulled her to me and kissed her how she ate, I knew all there was to he other day in a used-book store anyway. know about her homeland. She never TI saw a spine that caused me to She was delicate and slender in my understood my humor. I was compelled recall her desk that somehow with- arms, yet even as I held her she re- by the possibility that my irony would stood those tremendous tomes: “Indig- mained elusive; sometimes I had to never reach her. enous Post-Colonial Theory,” “Tribal search for her, had to make sure she Now that you’ve met me, I said, do Nation Building,” “The United States had not faded out like a photo left too you feel like you know everything Supreme Court and the Creation of long in the sun. One night she said, about Indian Country? Will you go Indian Country.” I marvelled again at This doesn’t qualify as a sustain- home and tell them you’ve met a real the slim legs of that lovely desk—how ability practice. I’ve been known to red man? much dignity they took on under the break things. No, she said, the vowel all up in her weight of those titles! She had pub- The Romantics, I said, believe love nose. But I do wonder why you laugh transcends space and time. at me so often. Writers, she said. Everything for her was serious, and We lay on our sides in the dark. I because I was always amused when I opened her legs and put my palm was around her, our times together against the rough hair between her were ones of great cross-cultural con- thighs. Every time I touched her there fusion. She seemed to think that there I felt like I’d returned home. was nothing in this life to smile about. You belong to me, I said. But who could blame her? There she Then do something about it, she was, probably turning up the music in said. her room while me and my love vis- lished a paper the year before about ited utter destruction on each other. the coming death of tribal sovereignty o that time we were up to Allie’s Does she ever think about us? Some- in the age of racialization. And now Smom’s house, the story she told where in France, we are in a woman’s she was wanted for these panels, there us. .. . There was this guy from my res- head. She looks up from her phone, was another paper to research and write ervation, it was the early nineteen-hun- the flight of a bird has reminded her and publish, her profs talking how she dreds, he had a last name that was more of something else; for a moment what might build her academic career. One familiar than I was comfortable think- is gone returns. Love is most often a night, after getting yet another confer- ing about. He and his young wife, they resurrected thing. ence invitation, she flopped down on left and went west over the mountains, Allie was always getting high alone; the mattress next to me and pressed ended up on Allie’s reservation. This she would go into the bathroom and her palms into her tired eyeballs. wife might have been my love’s great- lock the door and light up a joint. I just want to scream, she said. great-grandma. She also might have

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 51 been mine. I don’t know. Indian Coun- try is full of big stories and bullshit- ters. Nothing that matters is on paper MY EMPIRE and family lines are like strands of twine caught in a hurricane. Later on, when My empire made me I checked with my mom, she said she’d happy because it was an empire never heard this story, but when I and mine. checked with my gram she said maybe she had. Then she talked to me for, I was too stupid to rage at anything. like, two hours, giving me the all and sundry regarding our family. Once she Babies cried at birth, it was said, got going you couldn’t stop her. But because the devil pricked them as introduction when Allie’s mom told us about this to knowledge. woman she had smiled, one of those serious smiles that might have been a I sat fingering my gilded frame, counting threat but was probably more mean grievances like toes: amusement than anything. Me and Allie, we weren’t having any of it. We here my mother, here my ring, were just visiting. We had needed to here my sex, and here my king. get out of Clarkston, to get away from all its machinations and façades, friendly All still there. Wrath is the desire smiles and Native Americans on the to repay what you’ve suffered. university home page. We stayed the night in my love’s old bedroom and Kneeling on coins when we fucked she said to hold a pil- before the minor deity in the mirror. low over her face so she wouldn’t feel Clueless as a pearl. shamed out. You have to, she said. In a second I That the prophets arrived not to ease our suffering won’t know my own name. but to experience it seems—can I say this?— I lived for her cunt. I was always a waste? saying I wanted to come in her and she was always telling me no, so I held off. After our first time fucking, when we by the big fern at the student center. nambulant manner. She was using me both lay sprawled out, I said, Who was that? I would ask. for attention but some other man was What if I knocked you up sometime. A guy from Ancient Civ, she might her true satisfaction. I was her science That’s not gonna happen, she said. say. He sits next to me. We trade notes experiment, and our relationship—was But why not? I said. I’m the father sometimes. it even a relationship?—was her private of millions. An exchange of notes! Nothing could lab. Her true desire was to use me as Not mine, she said. be worse! A wild spiral into the dark fodder for a poem she would someday She was like that, she had her own ensues. How many such note-taking write from the security of a mythical crystal ball. men were there? I’m in my studio apart- and tremendous marriage to a white With her I often found myself tossed ment, flipping my phone open every guy with money. When I told her about into the cold—an unreadable gesture, five minutes like a true defeated ass- my psychic peregrinations, she would an unbreakable silence, the slightest hole, sitting on the edge of the couch I laugh—and not without a hint of cru- turning away of her attention, anything found on a corner on University Ave- elty, or so it seemed. to suggest more than the moment’s nue, waiting for the inevitable text, fro- Afterward, she might reveal her own surface and there I was, overtaken by zen in apprehension about the approach- consultations with fate, which resulted a maudlin and apocalyptic sense of ing dark. On such days and nights I was in irrefutable insights and a sense of an things. May the black wave come from a shambling horror. I slept well only all-cloaking darkness—but also had the black oceanic night and wash us when I slept next to her. Alone, I was nothing to do with us. Instead, she all away. May we all be lost in dark- a prophesying mess, my mind extend- would outline her vision for the future ness. Always, when she needed time to ing itself into the most byzantine and of Indian Country, and I could do lit- herself, when she was writing or read- pathetic and yet dignified of futures. tle but listen with unabashed awe and ing, the inner workings of my brain Me at ninety with nothing to show for suspicion. Each time I found myself would have it that she was out canoo- my life but dying alone with twenty-five again dazzled and bamboozled by dling with whatever man I had seen published books, my faithful dog nearby, her—I was at the mercy of my love. talking to her earlier in the week— ready to eat my kidneys. Though I at- All it took was to walk into that room maybe I saw them across the oval walk- tended class, I found myself deaf and and I was overcome by a consuming, ing to class, maybe they were sitting dumb. I walked across campus in a som- Goyaesque knowledge of reality. I

52 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 likes that and part of me thinks you’re the wrong kind of ex. What if this is the only real thing, I said, and life up to now was mere My empire made me happy preparation. so I loved, easily, its citizens—such loving I stepped back to her. I kissed her a kind of birth, an introduction to pain. neck. What if we’re related, she said. Whatever I learn makes me angry to have learned it. What if, I said. I kissed her cheek. Would you propose? she said. She The new missiles can detect a fly’s heartbeat looked like her mother when she smiled. atop a pile of rubble from six thousand miles away. Maybe, I said, but only if we’re blood. That flies have hearts, one hundred and four cells big, that beat. Eww, she said, pushing me away. You’re so gross. And because of this knowing: We laughed. a pile of rubble. hen it was break and the Clark- The prophets came to participate in suffering Tston streets were full of red and as if to an amusement park, which makes green lights and monstrous candy canes. our suffering the main attraction. We went back to our respective reser- vations. It was something about being In our brochure: home . . . I don’t know. Suddenly I felt a father’s grief over his dead father, high above that other life and all things the thorn broken off in a hand. below appeared clear and resolute and immutable in their nature. Allie began My empire made me happy cutting our talks short, and sometimes because it was an empire, cruel, I didn’t answer texts for half a day, maybe more. On New Year’s Eve she and the suffering wasn’t my own. called me and there were so many voices —Kaveh Akbar in the background I couldn’t hear what she was saying. I hung up. By the time we saw each other again winter had wanted to eat her like a moist piece of spell my mother and the others had increased to a cruel fullness, everything cake. The impossible desk, the unframed cast over me disappeared and for a mo- buried and frozen and brittle—by giv- and awaiting mattress in the corner, ment I felt free. ing the wrong look you could snap a the prayer flags lonely without a breeze, Is it true, I said, that what we do in light post in half. One night she told sweetgrass above the door and sage in bed is the purest expression of that po- me to finish inside her. The moment the cracked porcelain dish on the high litical discourse to which we most of what I believed to be the true glory windowsill—what it was was a place closely adhere? had arrived, but I could not do it. Af- of worship. With her I said things I’ve Look at you, she said. terward, we lay next to each other, say- never said again, in a tone both serious I can read, too, I said. ing nothing. She asked me what hap- and jocular that I’ve never used since. The way she stood there, tapping a pened, but I didn’t know. To this day I What if we have a baby and it’s cigarette from its half-crushed box, I can’t say if that was all of the truth. light-complected like you, I said. My had no choice but to rise and go to her, What about you, I said. Did you come? mom might hate it. My gram might to push her up against the wall and Never, she said. float it down the river. We might spend raise the slinky sequinned dress she With me or . . . our lives on the run, going from reser- had lifted from Goodwill. With you, she said. But only a few vation to reservation with my aunties Where’d your panties go, I said. times ever. in hot pursuit. They’re in absentia, she said, laugh- It was very quiet then. Fuck your aunties, she said. And ing and covering her mouth before she It’s not really about you, she said. fuck blood and fuck color. The future had even finished speaking. Why did you tell me to do that, of our nations is the only thing that Her body was cool to the touch, her I said. matters. But you don’t get that, do you. nipples hard under my hands. I was al- She sat up in the dark and searched I was lying on the bed and she had ways warming her up. She never wore for her cigarettes. stood to go smoke a generic-brand cig- a bra; she was typically revolutionary It doesn’t matter now, she said. Then arette from a pack I had bought her that way. Then I had my hand on her she was getting dressed. earlier that day. Her face was angular neck and maybe I went a little too far. Do you have to smoke right now? and shadowed in the unlit room. When- Careful, she said, rubbing her throat I said. ever she spoke like this, the mystical after I had stepped back. Part of me She stopped and looked at me when

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 53 she got to the door; she was nothing under flashing street lights. We drove she said. That’ll make you feel better. but a shadow. across town and then circled back. We We saw each other a few more times, Next thing, I heard the flick of her were the only people making tracks, and though there was still something lighter outside the slightly open win- everything finally belonged to us. We left of the diamond-shock feeling be- dow. Inhale. Pause. The long exhale. went down a street I had never been tween us, there was also a distance as The room was black, and I felt as on into a neighborhood I had never vast and incomprehensible as that be- though I had been jettisoned into space seen and have not found since and tween a mother and child. Allie moved and might be drifting for some time. she said, back to her reservation to live with her In the weeks that followed a new I don’t believe in this anymore. cousin, sending me a text that said she sense about things developed: every How so, I said. was out. Next I heard she was flipping day was casual Friday. We were like She waved her hand. burgers at a diner. She had left every- good friends who had been close many I’m just another white man’s dog, thing in the apartment to poor Mad- years before and upon reuniting could she said. That’s all they want. They’re eleine, who was perplexed but gener- be only simple and generous and shal- training me like a pet. ous when I asked to see the room. There low. And in bed the gloves came off. Someone has to do something, I was the graceful desk and those glori- If she had given a fuck before she said. ous, hopeful, and heavy books, and the didn’t now. She told me to do things It ain’t me, babe, she said. prayer flags and the broken dish with to her that I’ve never done since and She cocked her head and smiled at the sage, but it was already as if the could not have imagined before the me without showing her teeth. things that had taken place there had moment she asked. When I think Fuck, you’re miserable, I said. happened to someone else, and stand- about it now, despite the distance, my Whatever you say, cousin, she said. ing in the middle of the room I felt mitochondria still feel the shock. The She looked out the window and took myself caught at the center of a slowly plows piled snow into giant drifts on a long drag from her cigarette. The turning black hole, and I knew some the sidewalks and in the process bur- light from the street lights passed over part of me would never escape the grav- ied cars and sometimes the reckless her hand and face and over her hand ity of my own insufficiency. I accepted elderly and unsuspecting children. Ev- and face. it completely and forever, just as the eryone was leaning into the cold, sun accepts that it will never catch the squinting into the blinding whiteness t was not that long ago that my peo- moon. I began to sit at the back of class. all around. Breathe shallow or you’ll Iple placed the newly dead on scaf- I let my hair grow long, and I wore burn up your lungs. That sort of thing. folds of cottonwood, and their bones sunglasses I’d lifted from a convenience Allie stopped going to class. I didn’t were given up to the wind and the rain store. Sometimes, when I was riding ask her why. I knew that she would and the ice and the heat of the brutal the city bus, a feeling overtook me like never tell me and if I pushed for an sun. Those left behind might fast alone a lightning bolt emerging from an answer she’d just start again with the in the mountains and wail and cut empty sky, the desire to take the life of shouting that of late had become her themselves. Thus it is that we still pre- everyone around me, man or woman modus operandi. I stopped answering fer that our endings be intensely ele- or child, to crush their skulls with a my mom’s calls and she got worried mental and not without a certain stone war club whose head I had enough that she sent my uncle down amount of self-harm. A few nights painted with the red ochre paint of cer- to Clarkston to check on me. The after Allie cast me from her room, first emony, the likes of which I have seen night he was in town we got drunk striking me in the face with an open only in museums and in textbooks— and talked about things. hand and then throwing a lighter at and then I would find myself in neigh- Sounds like you need some new ass, me that exploded against the wall as borhoods I didn’t know. It was always he said. I left (I had said I was done)—an event dark by then, the night heavy with the That doesn’t really help, I said. that took place a week after she had scent of cottonwood buds. I would begin An hour later he left the bar with a called me twenty-seven times and sent to look for the bright, uncurtained win- girl who sat two rows from me in World me thirty-some texts in one night (that dows of houses where no one like me History. afternoon she had told me she was had ever stepped foot. When I found One late night me and Allie were done)—she went out with her cousin, one, I watched the people on the other trying to get things going but we had who had just got out of prison on good side of the glass and imagined what it run dry. We listened to the weather- behavior. Allie had never gone out was like in their living rooms and kitch- man on the radio for a bit and then I since I’d known her, but I was not sur- ens, where life seemed lit by a warm, turned it off. Outside it was very still. prised. Some of us are like that. One yellow glow that could dissolve all pasts The snow that had been falling since moment we’re one way, the next we’re and histories—and in this way those earlier in the night had stopped. another. A month later we are back to homes became my salvation, because Fuck it, I said. Let’s go for a drive. the first way. She was going to a place it seemed I could, if only for a moment, We had done that sometimes, driv- in herself where I could not follow be someone else.  ing with nowhere to go. The snow and I said that watching her do this was deep. Neon signs pulled us through felt awful. NEWYORKER.COM the dark, past the powdered cars and Go find some nice little white girl, Sterling HolyWhiteMountain on culture shock.

54 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 THE CRITICS

BOOKS BEYOND THE VACCINE Preventing another pandemic will be a political task as much as a medical one.

BY JEROME GROOPMAN “ ust a few years ago, many of us tion campaigns had become dramati­ in mortality with diphtheria, whoop­ Jin the global health policy com­ cally evident. Polio, once endemic in ing cough, tetanus, and a type of bac­ munity were thrilled at the prospect of more than a hundred countries, had terial meningitis. eliminating catastrophic infectious and been limited to three—Afghanistan, As the world nervously watches the tropical diseases,” Peter Hotez writes Nigeria, and Pakistan. Measles deaths rollout of the various COVID­19 vac­ in his new book, “Preventing the Next were down by eighty per cent, from half cines and surveys the human and eco­ Pandemic” (Johns Hopkins). He dates a million children worldwide in 2000 nomic cost of the pandemic, this period this high point of optimism to the start to a fifth of that number. Vaccination of optimism is hard to imagine. Yet of 2015, when the success of vaccina­ campaigns achieved similar reductions Hotez, a pediatrician and a specialist

Wars, migrations, and environmental factors were driving a resurgence of infectious disease even before COVID-19 appeared.

ILLUSTRATION BY ANSON CHAN THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 55 in tropical infectious diseases at Bay- As welcome as all this is, any hope and South Sudan, measles returned, lor College of Medicine who co-directs of containing future outbreaks will re- along with kala-azar, another type of a vaccine-development center at the quire tackling deeply rooted global leishmaniasis, which attacks internal Texas Children’s Hospital, shows that problems. President Biden’s belief in organs and is frequently fatal. The 2018 pandemics had been rebounding well the power of revitalized American di- Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Re- before the first COVID-19 cases emerged plomacy will be tested not only in such public of the Congo left more than two in Wuhan. His book draws lessons from areas as trade agreements and nuclear- thousand dead. In northeastern Nige- the field of tropical infectious diseases, arms control but also in the fight against ria, attacks by Boko Haram have de- and also from his international work epidemics that occur far from Ameri- stroyed as much as three-quarters of as a science envoy—a position created can soil. the infrastructure required for vacci- jointly by the State Department and the nations, and there has been a corre- White House—during Barack Obama’s ar and Pestilence ride together sponding rise in cases of polio, measles, Presidency. Hotez is perhaps uniquely Was two of the Four Horsemen of whooping cough, bacterial meningitis, positioned to expound a broad vision the Apocalypse, and there is no short- and yellow fever. A 2019 study cited by that marries science with geopolitics. (In age of historical precedent to demon- Hotez found that a child born within the past year, he has been a prominent strate the aptness of the allegory. The six miles of the conflict zone is half as TV expert on the pandemic.) We learn great influenza pandemic that began in likely to receive any vaccine as other not only about familiar scourges such as 1918 was propelled, in part, by troop Nigerian children. polio and diphtheria but also about a movements and population shifts at the Even in the absence of war, politi- host of so-called neglected tropical dis- end of the First World War. Both the cal instability can produce comparable eases, including dengue, leishmaniasis, First and the Second World Wars pro- results. Hotez discusses Venezuela, schistosomiasis, and Chagas. He melds duced typhus epidemics. Armed con- which, under Nicolás Maduro, has suf- an account of their biology with doc- flicts cause malnutrition, poor pest con- fered a level of economic collapse and umentation of the social and political trol, and sanitation problems; even the social chaos that has led to the unrav- factors that enable them to spread, and soil often becomes contaminated. Med- elling of the country’s health-care sys- passionately insists that we cannot pre- ical facilities are destroyed; doctors and tem. Measles had been eradicated, but vent pandemics in isolation from wider nurses, diverted to combat duty, are un- it reëmerged in 2017. As public-hygiene global currents. He identifies a cluster able to provide care, and vaccination infrastructure has deteriorated, there of non-medical drivers of deadly out- and other mass-treatment programs has been a spread of schistosomiasis, a breaks—war, political instability, human usually falter. disease transmitted by freshwater snails migration, poverty, urbanization, anti- The first two decades of this cen- and typically contracted when people science and nationalist sentiment, and tury have furnished many fresh exam- bathe or wash laundry in infested riv- climate change—and maintains that ad- ples. The ongoing conflict in Yemen ers. (The snails are vectors for a micro- vances in biomedicine must be accom- has produced the largest cholera out- scopic parasite whose eggs end up in panied by concerted action on these geo- break in history, which has infected two the liver and gut, causing inflamma- political matters. and a half million people since it began, tion and tissue damage.) A breakdown The message comes at a time when in 2011. Wars in Syria and Iraq led to in pest-control measures fuelled a rise the Biden Administration has done a resurgence of measles and polio. The in mosquito-borne illnesses, including much both to stem the pandemic in the collapse of insect-control programs the Zika virus, chikungunya, and den- United States and to reverse the dele- sparked the spread of cutaneous leish- gue. Of course, once infectious diseases terious approach of the Trump White maniasis, a parasitic disease that results take hold in one country they easily House. Biden has facilitated widespread in disfiguring skin ulcers. Known as spread to others. A diphtheria outbreak distribution of vaccines, recently an- “Baghdad boil” or “Aleppo evil,” it is in Venezuela’s illegal mining camps nouncing that all adult Americans would transmitted through the bite of blood- crossed the border into Brazil. A flareup be eligible for shots by the beginning feeding sand flies, which flourish in un- of dengue recently reported on the of May, and he has instituted public- collected garbage. By 2011, the destruc- Portuguese island of Madeira, off the health measures, such as mandatory tion of infrastructure in conflict zones coast of Africa, may well have originated masks on trains and planes, that should had brought about a tenfold increase in Venezuela. have been in place a year ago. He has re- in such cases in Syria, some two hun- It is estimated that ten per cent of affirmed U.S. membership in the World dred and seventy thousand a year, with Venezuela’s population—more than Health Organization, appointing An- another hundred thousand a year re- three million people—has emigrated, thony Fauci as the head delegate. And corded in Iraq. joining the ranks of the world’s refu- the Administration has withdrawn nu- Hotez writes that wars in the Mid- gees. In war-torn countries, people flee merous budget-cut requests that Trump dle East have made the region “a new at even greater rates, whether within sent to Congress, including one that global hot zone of emerging and ne- the country or outside it. As Hotez would have cancelled four billion dollars glected tropical diseases.” The news points out, refugees often lack adequate of funding for Gavi, a public-private part- elsewhere is scarcely better. During con- food and shelter, as well as access to nership that provides vaccinations in flicts in the Democratic Republic of the health care. In makeshift camps, mal- low-income countries. Congo, the Central African Republic, nutrition, crowding, and lack of vacci-

56 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 nation or medical care increase expo- Hay, which predicts that by 2050 den- “vaccine hesitancy” as one of the world’s sure to insects and microbes. Sexual gue infections will have made further most urgent health issues. violence spreads viruses like H.I.V. inroads into the United States. Hotez goes on to survey the politi- As refugees from African and Mid- cal power of the anti-vaccine camp. In dle Eastern wars have fled to Europe, ost of Hotez’s infection-boosting the United States and Europe, anti- diseases long thought eliminated have Mfactors have clear physical mani- vaxxers have joined forces with populist begun reappearing: chikungunya and festations. The exception, “anti-science and libertarian movements, and Amer- dengue have surfaced in Italy, Spain, and nationalism,” is in many ways the ican groups aligned with the Tea Party and Portugal; malaria in Greece and most exasperating. How can it be that invoke “medical freedom,” “health Italy. The island of Corsica has expe- we are threatened not only freedom,” or “choice” to jus- rienced its first-ever cases of schisto- by insects and filth and the tify withholding vaccines somiasis. Hotez is rightly careful not frailties of our own bodies from children. Anti-vaxxer to attribute these infections strictly to but also by something as in- political-action committees the migration of refugees, noting that tangible as our beliefs? For lobby state legislatures to warming temperatures in Southern Eu- Hotez, the rise of anti-sci- allow parents to opt out of rope, owing to climate change, and re- ence ideology—most par- school vaccine requirements. cessions in Italy and Greece may also ticularly, the anti-vaccine Under the Trump Admin- be factors. Another factor is that refu- movement—is highly per- istration, more than eight gees tend to flee to urban areas: in Syria, sonal. His previous book hundred and fifty thousand thousands have crowded into slums in centered on his daughter dollars in loans from the Aleppo; in the Democratic Republic Rachel, now in her twenties, federal Paycheck Protection of the Congo, Kinshasa has become a and bore the title “Vaccines Did Not Program went to five major anti-vaccine major hub. Cause Rachel’s Autism” (2018). He now groups—including such deceptively Migration aside, dense urbanization updates us on the results of his efforts named entities as the National Vaccine leads to the spread of infectious dis- to dispel claims that vaccines cause au- Information Center and Children’s ease, too, because burgeoning popula- tism-spectrum disorders. Noting that Health Defense. In January, when tions quickly outstrip sanitation infra- these claims were producing “steep de- COVID-19 vaccines were being adminis- structure. The coming decade, Hotez clines in the numbers of kids vaccinated,” tered at Dodger Stadium, in Los Ange- writes, will witness “the unprecedented he attempted to publicize the “massive les, far-right and anti-vaxxer groups creation of new megacities,” heavily evidence refuting any link, or even plau- blocked the entrance to the site, forcing populated urban centers with at least sibility, given what we have learned about the police to temporarily shut it down. ten million inhabitants. Some forty the genetics, natural history, and devel- Hotez examines how this obscuran- megacities are predicted to emerge by opmental pathways of autism.” For his tist ideology circulates, and offers three 2030, many of them in low-income na- pains, he was pursued online by anti-vaxx- case studies. Starting in around 2008, tions of Africa, Asia, and Latin Amer- ers who propagate specious accusations the Somali immigrant community in ica. Hotez paints an alarming picture that he personally profited from vaccines. Minneapolis was offered “town hall of megacities incapable of providing Hotez observes that there are some meetings” touting the vaccine-autism safe water and adequate sanitation, lead- five hundred Web sites spreading anti- link, and by 2017 the same community ing to typhoid fever and cholera, as well vaccine misinformation, whose asser- was in the throes of a measles outbreak. as leptospirosis, which festers in the kid- tions are further disseminated on social In 2019, the Orthodox Jewish commu- neys of urban rats and dogs and can be media and on e-commerce platforms. nity in New York was treated to ads with passed to people through contaminated “The largest e-commerce platform of “fake Holocaust imagery, including yel- drinking water. them all, Amazon, is now the most active low stars, to compare vaccines to the Ho- To complete this dystopian vision, promoter of fake anti-vaccine books,” locaust.” The result was “one of Amer- Hotez highlights how climate change he writes. “Go to Amazon books, click ica’s worst measles epidemics in decades.” will further inflame contagious disease. on ‘Health, Fitness, and Dieting’ on the The third target was the African-Amer- Unprecedented heat waves in the Mid- scroll down menu at the left, and then ican community in Harlem, which re- dle East have produced droughts that click on ‘Vaccinations’ to see how legit- ceived propaganda in which vaccines create food insecurity and fierce com- imate books on vaccines are pushed be- were compared to the infamous Tuske- petition for water supplies, driving rural hind by the fake ones.” He finds that gee syphilis study. Probing the motiva- populations to already overcrowded the online sensorium is so clogged with tion of the groups that spread such lies, urban centers. Warming temperatures misinformation that it is now hard for Hotez follows the money and concludes also shift insect ecosystems. West Nile concerned parents to find trustworthy that the perpetrators are often just “mon- virus is now common in Southern Eu- data: “Serious and meaningful informa- etizing the Internet by selling phony au- rope. Mosquito-transmitted viruses have tion regarding this topic resembles a lost tism therapies (including bleach ene- swept across South and Central Amer- message in a bottle floating aimlessly in mas) and nutritional supplements, fake ica into the Caribbean and then into the Atlantic Ocean.” Action is urgently books, or advertising.” Texas and Florida. Hotez cites a recent needed; measles cases are spiking in Eu- His suggested remedy is to pressure study, led by the epidemiologist Simon rope, and the W.H.O. has identified social-media and e-commerce sites to

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 57 take down misleading content. This is already happening, to some extent. In BRIEFLY NOTED December, Facebook at last banned misinformation about the COVID vac- Zabor, or the Psalms, by Kamel Daoud, translated from the cines—a rule that was expanded, in French by Emma Ramadan (Other Press). This second novel February, to cover vaccines of any kind— by the celebrated Algerian author of “The Meursault Investi- and it has since suspended groups like gation” is a deeply imaginative allegory about the possibilities the National Vaccine Information Cen- of language. Zabor, the narrator, proclaims that writing—not ter and Stop Mandatory Vaccination. “prayer, medicine, magic”—is “the only effective ruse against Nonetheless, anti-vaccine accounts on death.” After losing his mother at a young age and being aban- social media continue to flourish, hav- doned by his father, Zabor is sent to live with an aunt. He de- ing gained more than ten million new velops a passion for reading and writing in Arabic and French, followers since 2019. and becomes convinced that writing about a person can delay Hotez admits that there is no easy that person’s mortality. When he is summoned to his father’s way to put “the anti-vaccine genie back deathbed, he grapples with whether to use his power to save in the bottle,” but feels that scientists the man who spurned him. must “fight back through public engage- ment.” Two other recent books suggest Milk Blood Heat, by Dantiel W. Moniz (Grove). Set largely alternative avenues. In “Viral BS” (Johns in Jacksonville, Florida, this début short-story collection fo- Hopkins), Seema Yasmin, a public-health cusses on the monstrous. Two thirteen-year-old girls fantasize specialist at Stanford, frames the di- about death, until one goes too far; a woman who recently lemma as one integral to tribal identity. miscarried sees “little legs dancing” on a counter; a mother “False beliefs are very much a social punishes a teacher who tries to seduce her teen-age daughter. and cultural phenomenon,” she writes. The characters, mostly women and adolescent girls, know that “Shared beliefs are the glue of commu- they harbor dark yearnings, and that you can “be a ghost in nity; they confirm our place, our mem- your own life” or “a glorious creature, spare and glowing.” Moniz bership, and belonging. And because illuminates the uncanny interior lives of women who are con- belonging is deeply important to hu- nected “in an unbroken chain from the center of time, con- mans, beliefs can feel like life or death.” nected by milk and blood.” She uses the metaphor of vaccinating society against disinformation—“pre- Why the Innocent Plead Guilty and the Guilty Go Free, by emptively exposing people to weakened Jed S. Rakoff (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). The author, a federal rumors so that they build up mental judge, examines the failures of a judicial system that currently immunity against attempts to deceive incarcerates more than two million people (five times more than them.” She terms this tactic “prebunk- four decades ago), forty per cent of whom are Black men. Pol- ing,” but it’s not entirely clear what this iticians want to appear “tough on crime,” even though incarcera- would entail in practice. One possibil- tion’s role in crime reduction is unclear. Harsh sentences lead ity is described in “Think Again” (Vi- the vast majority of defendants, including an estimated hundred king), by Adam Grant, an organizational thousand innocent people, to opt for plea bargains, a process psychologist at Wharton. In a chapter that lacks oversight. Meanwhile, prosecutors fail to hold high- about “vaccine whisperers” in Quebec, level executives accountable for serious offenses. The govern- he details a nonjudgmental approach ment is allowing corporations to make gestures toward self-re- based on open-ended questioning. Pre- habilitation while denying ordinary citizens their day in court. senting categorical scientific information typically only hardens resistance, so the The Disordered Cosmos, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bold whisperers don’t aim to persuade, ex- Type). Physics and astronomy are often seen as abstract and actly, but rather to encourage anti-vaxxer universal, but this wide-ranging corrective, by a particle cos- parents to see changing their minds as mologist, emphasizes the fact that they are also “a human, so- a journey of “self-discovery,” and some- cial enterprise,” shaped by the same racism and sexism that thing that affirms their agency. Grant plague society as a whole. Prescod-Weinstein, a Black woman, reports that promising results have led charts the way that the hostility she faced throughout her ca- Quebec to fund implementation of this reer tempered her enthusiasm for particle physics, and charges one-on-one approach in neonatal units. the scientific culture with ignoring the contributions and con- cerns of ethnic and gender minorities—including Native Ha- arly in his book, Hotez pays trib- waiians who oppose the construction of a new telescope on Eute to his “role model,” the Amer- Mauna Kea. The ability to “know and understand the night ican virologist Albert Sabin, a Jewish sky” is a human right, she argues, and should be far more ac- immigrant from Eastern Europe who, cessible to Black and indigenous children. in the mid-nineteen-fifties, forged a

58 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 partnership with Soviet scientists to test lacked the technology to create their that Albert Sabin and his Soviet coun- an oral vaccine for polio. Sabin had de- own vaccines, and commercial pharma- terparts undertook in the U.S.S.R., his- veloped a vaccine based on live polio ceutical firms had little financial incen- toric as it was, had no effect on the Cold strains, but was unable to test it in the tive to combat the region’s emerging War. The project had wrapped up by United States, where much of the pop- infectious diseases. the end of 1961; the next year, the Cuban ulation had already received an intra- When Hotez became one of Obama’s missile crisis erupted. muscular vaccine. Beginning in 1959, the science envoys, in 2015, he worked mainly oral version was given to some hundred in Saudi Arabia and was impressed with hen Sabin and his Soviet col- million children and young adults in the the receptiveness of officials there, many Wleagues were collaborating, the Soviet bloc, and the results were so en- of whom had attended American or United States had a virtual monopoly couraging that the United States tested European universities. Together they on biomedical technology. Things are and approved the new vaccine in the assessed the kingdom’s particular vul- different now, with American, British, early sixties. For Hotez, this collabora- nerabilities. Diseases spread from war German, Chinese, Russian, and Indian tion, occurring during the most frigid zones in Yemen, Syria, and Iraq, and vaccines all vying for customers. The years of the Cold War, represents “the also entered the country during the two chance to wield soft power in develop- gold standard for how scientists of dif- great pilgrimages to Mecca, the hajj and ing nations has been particularly attrac- ferent ideologies can overcome diplo- the umrah, each of which annually at- tive to America’s rivals. Russia, hoping matic tensions or even overt conflict in tracts more than a million non-Saudis. to make its Sputnik V vaccine the pre- order to advance science for humani- Developing vaccines, essential to the ferred option in Latin America, has tarian purposes.” country’s security, could also, by boost- spread disinformation about competitors. Sabin’s example inspires Hotez’s ing the biotech industry, help it achieve For China, the vaccine is an extension advocacy of so-called vaccine diplo- its goal of diversifying its oil-dependent of its “Belt and Road” infrastructure in- macy, in which countries that have de- economy by 2030. As a result of these vestments around the world, and it has veloped vaccines make them available conversations, Saudi Arabia set up a pledged millions of doses to Indonesia, to countries that lack them. The im- center for neglected tropical diseases, Turkey, Ethiopia, Serbia, Egypt, Iran, pulse is both humanitarian and, follow- and Saudi scientists came to Hotez’s and Iraq, among others. As more and ing Joseph Nye’s doctrine of “soft power,” vaccine-development laboratory in more countries embrace vaccine diplo- strategic—an attempt to increase inter- Texas for training. macy, shots are coming to resemble a national influence by fostering good The approach that Hotez articulates kind of tradable currency. will. Hotez sketches in a prehistory of is both pragmatic and humanitarian. Medically speaking, the fact that the phenomenon, starting in 1806, when Still, one can’t help wondering whether many countries around the world now the British physician Edward Jenner, his faith in vaccine diplomacy makes have the capacity to create reliable vac- who had created the world’s first vac- him sometimes insufficiently mindful cines so quickly is cause for rejoicing. cine, against smallpox, was able to trade of its limitations. His work as a science Viruses don’t recognize borders or po- on his international reputation to se- envoy in Saudi Arabia concluded a litical rivalries, but a peculiarity of the cure the release of English prisoners year before the rise of Mohammed bin COVID crisis is that, though inherently during the Napoleonic Wars. Napo- Salman, but it’s still jarring that the global, it has also been intensely na- leon, who had had his troops inocu- book contains no mention of the king- tional—a time of international collab- lated, is said to have exclaimed, “Jen- dom’s new autocrat—let alone of Jamal oration and shared experience but also ner—we can’t refuse that man anything.” Khashoggi, the dissident journalist of travel bans and closed borders. It’s Hotez also regards Louis Pasteur as a whose murder he ordered. The king- too early to say how the politics of this vaccine diplomat, on the basis of the dom’s role in sponsoring wars that have new era will play out, and Hotez may Pasteur Institutes he founded across the brought disease to its borders is mostly be right to focus on medical problems Francophone world, including outposts downplayed. There is only a single ref- rather than getting overwhelmed by in North Africa and Southeast Asia, erence to Saudi bombings in Yemen, political ones. In his previous book, he which produced the first rabies vaccine. and we are told that, “by 2015, the King- wrote that he cherishes the rabbinic Hotez describes a speech by Presi- dom found itself situated between two concept of tikkun olam, “repairing the dent Obama at Cairo University in 2009 major conflict zones on the Arabian world through good deeds and actions.” as initiating America’s return to vaccine Peninsula.” Indeed. In an article published in 2017, he ex- diplomacy. Obama spoke of “a new be- This is not to invalidate vaccine di- tended this concept to include “science ginning between the United States and plomacy: a life saved is a life saved. But tikkun”—that is, improving the human Muslims around the world.” He pledged the approach is subject to the same eth- condition through “science, science di- to provide Muslim-majority countries ical quandaries that bedevil other forms plomacy, and public engagement.” His with a polio-eradication campaign, of engagement and soft power. Export- engagement with the daunting geopo- funding for technological development, ing vaccines and exporting values are litical drivers of pandemic disease re- and science envoys to disseminate ex- two very different things, and there’s calls another famous rabbinic concept: pertise in such areas as agriculture, en- no reason to suppose that medical “You are not obliged to complete the ergy, and medicine. At the time, the achievements will translate into polit- work, but neither are you free to de- Middle East and North Africa largely ical ones. Even the vaccination project sist from it.” 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 59 particular place, and never settled on a BOOKS particular reckoning of the events she had witnessed. Her novels and mem- oirs, jagged and patchworked, take on PUZZLING IT OUT the questions engendered by the period between the two world wars—questions The writer Sybille Bedford never pretended that her life cohered. of heritage and national boundaries. When she began reporting, in middle BY MADELEINE SCHWARTZ age, Bedford often focussed on law and trials, and compared the consequential whims of different legal systems. “I had come alive and physically in- tact through four decades of our fright- ful century, and I was conscious—in- termittently—of the privileges and the precariousness of my existence,” Bed- ford wrote at the end of her life. The stops and starts of her career were sus- tained by a strong belief that she was a born writer, and yet writing was, for her, often torturous and slow. In her work, she was driven by an obsession with or- igins, and also by a conviction that peo- ple shouldn’t have to be defined by them.

ybille von Schoenebeck was born in S1911 in Berlin, and her childhood was marked by wars fought globally and do- mestically. Her father, Maximilian, a Catholic baron, and her mother, Lisa, the daughter of a rich Jewish businessman, had a strained marriage. By the time Syb- ille was eleven years old, Lisa had aban- doned the family, chasing lovers abroad. Left with her father, who had been pushed to the brink of poverty after the First World War, Sybille was isolated, her ed- ucation neglected. She did not learn how to write until she was about eight years n the summer of 1940, when she was Bedford’s first novel did not appear old, later developing handwriting that Itwenty-nine years old, Sybille Bedford until more than a decade after this trans- even she found difficult to read. took on an unusual assignment: driving continental journey, and would be fol- At fourteen, Sybille was summoned Thomas Mann’s poodle across the United lowed, in the course of her career, by to Italy by her mother—the first invita- States. Bedford had known Mann, nearly similarly long stretches of silence—si- tion since Lisa’s departure. Just before forty years her senior, since her adoles- lences that may help explain why her Sybille left, her father contracted appen- cence, which she spent living among Ger- books, though sharp and discerning, have dicitis and died. “This was indeed the man expatriates in the South of France. often slipped out of public view. As the point of no return,” she later wrote. As An aspiring but so far unprolific writer distinguished biographer Selina Has- Sybille would recall in one of the many of fiction and nonfiction, she had come tings shows in “Sybille Bedford: A Life” semi-fictionalized depictions of her child- of age under his shadow. Now both she (Knopf), dedication to work and to life hood, Lisa greeted her daughter by ask- and Mann were refugees in another coun- were inseparable for Bedford, and the ing which language she spoke. Sybille’s try. Mann and his family, moving from two were not always in harmony. trip eventually led to a permanent relo- Princeton to Pacific Palisades, took the Like the writers she grew up with in cation to Sanary-sur-Mer, in France. The train; the country was experiencing a heat the nineteen-thirties, Bedford led a life expatriates in Sanary included Aldous wave, and the compartments were air-con- defined by rootlessness. Many of her and Maria Huxley, the Austrian writer ditioned. Bedford drove the writer’s car books feature a scene in which a woman Stefan Zweig, and Mann and his wife, with her girlfriend and Nico, the poodle, crosses a border; often, she is stymied Katia. Many of them—“promising, neu- stopping every once in a while for a bot- by the question of where, exactly, she rotic, vacillating between worship and tle of Coke, which she spiked with rum. comes from. Bedford rarely settled in a rebellion,” as Sybille later wrote—would

60 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY CHLOE CUSHMAN gather for Sunday luncheons and listen an expansive, variegated sound. Many in port wine.” These disagreements over to Mann hold court. And they tangled of her books deal with her personal his- religion mean that the two families, romantically. Maria became a partner in tory, “the same subject taken in a dif- though permanently linked, never fully Sybille’s sexual experimentation, Hastings ferent light and on another scale,” she mesh. When a scandal threatens the surmises, around the same time that Lisa wrote. As other readers have noted, she von Feldens, the press seizes on their took up with Aldous. When Lisa, now plays with form in a way that antici- connection with a Jewish family. One remarried, discovered that her husband pates much of the fictional nonfiction headline reads “Judo-Aristocrats Feast had a mistress, she became addicted to that we’ve come to see as contemporary. As Unemployment Soars.” morphine and was known on the Rivi- Her work is loosely plotted, animated “Once you can say, and believe, We era as Madame Morphesani. mostly by dialogue that can sound tran- are right—They are wrong, is that not The insular circle gave Sybille oppor- scribed rather than written. when wars break out?” Bedford wrote tunities to write—and material to write Bedford’s first and best novel, “A in her final novel, “Jigsaw” (1989). The about. In 1933, Mann’s son Klaus accepted Legacy” (1956), combines scenes, ob- ambivalent zone between those simple her essay on one of Huxley’s books for servations, and newspaper excerpts, pre- categories, “right” and “wrong,” defines his magazine. In it, Sybille mentioned, sented by a narrator who disappears many of Bedford’s novels. The books nearly in passing, the “bottomless stu- for hundreds of pages. Sometimes she deal with similar material—her own au- pidity” of Nazi Germany. After it was writes whole passages in German or tobiography—but play with the bound- published, Klaus Mann was stripped of in French; we hear bits of conversation aries of fiction and fact. In an author’s his citizenship. The German govern- with little indication of who is speaking note to “Jigsaw,” Bedford is elusive about ment, noting Sybille’s Jewish descent, cut or about what. The narrator, describ- how and why her characters deviate her off from the inheritance that had ing her family history, sees her fore- from reality. “My mother and I are a supported her. “How swiftly lives are up- bears from the perspective of the only percentage of ourselves,” she writes. “Ev- rooted, the trappings of life dismantled,” child at the grownups’ table. “Is every- eryone and everything else, are what she observed in a novel, more than fifty thing only what we remember it to be?” they seemed—at various times—to me.” years later. “I found it terrifying.” Bedford wrote in a later novel. “Where, The melding doesn’t always work. In Mann’s daughter had married W. H. then, and when is truth?” The book is “A Favourite of the Gods” (1963) and “A Auden in order to escape persecution, so both cluttered and vividly, sometimes Compass Error” (1968), Bedford has the Huxleys went looking for a gay man hilariously precise, giving it a lived-in trouble finding a vantage point beyond who might offer Sybille a similar out. Syb- quality—as if Bedford were presenting her own. She returns to the resonant ille, now poor and essentially orphaned, not a story to follow but a series of rooms themes of “A Legacy,” yet her charac- found Walter Bedford, the ex-boyfriend to wander through. ters seem trapped by their real-life coun- of an acquaintance’s butler, who agreed “A Legacy” centers on two families, terparts. Flavia, in “A Compass Error,” to marry her, in London, for a hundred the Jewish Merzes and the Catholic is meant to be a seventeen-year-old girl, pounds. On the morning the wedding von Feldens, who find themselves re- but, like the fifty-seven-year-old Bed- was to take place, Sybille’s passport was luctantly intertwined at the turn of the ford who published the novel, she has confiscated, and she feared deportation. twentieth century. Julius von Felden is a remarkable command of fine wines. Soon afterward, the issue resolved, Syb- an art-collecting dandy who lives in the After the success of “A Legacy,” and ille von Schoenebeck became Sybille Bed- South of France and insists on travel- with the encouragement of her editor ford and never saw her husband again. ling with his three apes. When he meets Robert Gottlieb, Bedford began covering In 1940, she and a girlfriend, the author Melanie Merz, his relatives consider her trials. Her journalism is rarely discussed Allanah Harper, took a boat from Genoa an unfortunate addition to the family anymore, especially compared with the to the United States—the last passenger and pressure her to convert. The Mer- work of her friend the writer Martha ship to leave the port before war broke zes regularly eat ham; they don’t pray. Gellhorn. It was Gellhorn, Bedford out in Italy. The fate of her writing ca- Yet they are horrified that their trea- wrote, who “lashed my conscience into reer might not have seemed auspicious: sured daughter should be asked to actual writing against the forces of self- she had drafted three novels by the end of change her religion. Melanie takes things doubt and sloth.” The resolute person- her twenties, and received many rejections. into her own hands, paying a visit to a ality that sometimes hampered Bed- (“Certainly not a professional writer and pastor and returning—triumphant— ford’s fiction made her a great nonfiction certainly not a novelist,” one agent wrote.) with a certificate of conversion. Her fu- writer. In “The Last Trial of Lady Chat- She spent the next decade writing little, ture sister-in-law Clara, examining it, terley,” an account of the public prose- mostly in New York and Europe, until “emitted a faint hissing sound”: cution of Penguin Books under the Ob- she published her first book, a travelogue scene Publications Act, in 1960, Bedford about Mexico, at the age of forty-two. “A Protestant,” she groaned and to every- keeps her gaze purposefully afar, watch- one’s consternation slipped from the chair to the floor. “On our knees, my child! and may ing as a procession of scholars and writ- edford later wrote that English was He have mercy on us.” ers, including Rebecca West and E. M. B“the rope to save me from drifting Forster, are brought onto the stand to awash in the fluidities of multilingual- The Merz matriarch tries to diffuse the defend the merits of D. H. Lawrence’s ism.” But her multilingualism also situation with a drink. She summons fiction, despite its “four-letter words.” shaped her chosen language, giving it the butler: “Bring the poor lady an egg Bedford notes that the prosecutor read

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 61 aloud the definition of “to deprave” and triangle; another about a childhood ac- seem, at times, trapped in the insular- “to corrupt,” while “the chief witness, quaintance, a Baronessa, who was later ity of the demimonde. In her later years, the book itself, was still unread.” married to a Nazi. Raised on literature, Bedford continued to move, but with Bedford held herself to very high stan- less frequency; her politics hardened. At alent, material, and a taste for risk: dards—standards that could often suf- one point, she began to support Mar- Twhy, then, did Bedford not begin focate the desire, as she wrote in “Jig- garet Thatcher, straining her friendship to publish until middle age? During the saw,” to seek “the links between private with Gellhorn, which soon ended. Her years when she was writing very little, and mass catastrophe.” eyesight failing, Bedford wore a green Bedford was having fun: travelling, fall- But her private world was enthrall- visor to shield her eyes while working ing in love, drinking wine, going to par- ing and always expanding. No matter and managed to painfully scrawl only a ties. Before a trip in Italy, Bedford stayed where she was, she seemed to find her- few lines a day. up late and then kept herself awake self in a room with her most interesting In “Quicksands,” the memoir she during the next day’s drive by reciting contemporaries. For much of her life, published in 2005, the year before she poetry to herself. In “Jigsaw,” she tries these acquaintances were well-known died, Bedford is sucked back into the to square this way of living with her writers, even when Bedford—stocky, same fragmented experiences that oc- dream of writing: “Is it part of the writ- bright-eyed, with a taste for men’s suits— cupy her previous books. This circuitous er’s flaw, wanting to get across so much had little career to speak of. And, from format allows Bedford to reconcile the and shrinking, so painfully, from the ex- adolescence onward, she had love affairs history she lived and her reaction to it; ecution?” Hastings quotes from a diary with women. A young woman’s attrac- her inability to respond as decisively or entry that Bedford made before the pub- tion to two older women forms much as honorably as she might have wished lication of her first book: “July 20th No of the plot of “A Compass Error”; a teen- to. Publishing her autobiographical ac- work—no excuse. 21st Thinking Fid- age crush appears in “Jigsaw.” In Has- count as nonfiction for the first time, dling—Dawdling . . . 25th Thinking— tings’s account, Bedford spent time in she returns to a project that had preoc- Dawdling—Dreaming—Fiddling . . . female-dominated salons in Paris, spaces cupied her decades earlier. She describes 22 Aug Hungover.” The anxiety of that fomented some of the most inter- visiting Ischia with Gellhorn and meet- wasted time comes through in her nov- esting advances in modernism and art. ing a Baronessa, the same woman whom els, too. “When one’s young,” Flavia says, At the same time, her statements she had once tried to characterize in a in “A Compass Error,” about women and being in love with novel. Bedford recognizes the woman women were often cold and cruel. “There as an old family friend. Gellhorn rec- everything is a rehearsal. To be repeated ad lib, to be put right when the curtain goes up IS something false about a relationship ognizes her as a woman connected to in earnest. One day you know that the curtain between two women. At least for me,” the Nazis: “How dare she show her face? was up all the time. That was the performance. she told an ex-lover. She disdained fem- She must be one of the wickedest women inism and spoke against the women’s in Europe.” Bedford doesn’t immedi- Bedford resisted any kind of work movement. Hastings quotes Bedford’s ately inquire what the Baronessa did that she saw as beneath her. “Where letter to a girlfriend in which she de- during the war. Instead, she notices the were the bootstraps?” she once asked. clines a meeting with a lesbian literary woman’s “white silk chemisier” and “per- She occasionally gave lessons and did agent in Paris: “I can’t bear this girlery fectly cut pleated skirt, polished Greek translations, but said she didn’t want to and cliquerei. One’s tastes are private. sandals.” Bedford is not so put together. interfere with her writing, even though It’s bad enough (in some ways) to be “You look a bit shabby,” the Baronessa there was often little to show for it. oneself.” When asked to speak to the says. “I suppose that comes from hav- Throughout her life, she was supported Oxford Gay Society, she wrote back a ing been on the winning side.” by a variety of friends and ex-lovers, simple “No.” In an interview with Coun- It sounds like a cop-out—narrated straining even her closest relationships. try Life, the magazine of the British by the Bedford whose interest in the “The most unlikely people turn out upper class, she said, “I do think that superficial world kept her from writing wonderful when it counts. Others not,” emancipation of women has gone far as much or as ethically as she wanted she said, when Gellhorn sent a thousand- too far. It’s ludicrous.” to. But it might, in fact, be the oppo- pound loan with a letter suggesting that site, a moment in which Bedford is see- Bedford start looking for a bootstrap edford refused to be categorized by ing herself, fully, from the outside. She or two. Bwhat we might call identity—in her has managed to capture her ambiva- Hastings’s view of these develop- sexuality, as a writer of novels or of jour- lence on the page: a profound repul- ments contains a bit of irony: “With al- nalism, or, for a long time, even as a res- sion at what the Baronessa represents, most a decade having passed since the ident of a particular country. But she and also a petty reaction to how she ap- publication of Sybille’s most recent book, relished the ways in which she could pears. Bedford has finally allowed her she at last began to feel ready to return control her image. It’s striking to see works to encompass not only her to work.” But even in Bedford’s less pro- how often she insisted on fine wine, thoughts but also her life—the moral- ductive moments she was always look- even while relying on the handouts of ity she strove for and the mottled na- ing for ways to deal with the history ex-lovers. There was a limit to her rov- ture of its actuality. After all, as she that she had lived. She started and aban- ing eye; preoccupied by the happenings writes, “to have survived, one has to doned many novels: one about a love of cosmopolitan expatriates, she can have been alive.” 

62 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 cemented his legend with an essay about PODCAST DEPT. his scrappy upbringing, titled “The NBA Is Lucky I’m Home Doing Damn Ar- ticles.” The All-Star forward Kevin Love GAME OVER wrote about struggling with depression. The Tribune helped popularize a wider How athletes began telling a new story about sports. range of athlete stories. Triumphs were flecked with pain or self-doubt; stars BY HUA HSU openly shared their traumas. In the past, if athletes wanted to speak candidly, they would write a tell-all book, do a sit-down interview, maybe phone in to a radio show. If they aspired to work in media, they would try to land a cushy network job, providing expert commentary or analysis. But the Internet, which allows any of us to air the slightest thought, has changed those rules. Players have grown infatuated with sharing their perspectives in real time, in direct, unfiltered ways. Retired greats have realized that they pos- sess endless content—stories, memories, behind-the-scenes morsels—that fans crave. And athletes everywhere are seiz- ing the means of production. Around the time that Jeter launched the Tribune, LeBron James got funding for a new company, Uninterrupted. Its aim was to produce content from players’ points of view, and to show that those players could be “more than an athlete.” People like Jeter and James no longer had to settle for being talking heads. Now they barely had to settle for sports at all.

he space where athletes—or male Tathletes, at least—have found the greatest success as storytellers is in pod- casting. The more polished shows can feel like extended auditions for media n October, 2014, three days after Derek tion of Jeter hounding athletes for their jobs, full of the rhythms and recurring IJeter played the last game of his Hall delinquent essays. Most imagined that segments of mainstream sports talk. The of Fame career with the New York Yan- the site would be little more than a place wrestler Chris Jericho hosts a surprisingly kees, he launched the Players’ Tribune, a for tight-lipped players to issue elegant brisk interview show, “Talk Is Jericho,” Web site for athletes to tell their side of press statements. But Jeter’s peers began with regular appearances from the Guns the story. It seemed like an odd decision. to understand the allure of speaking on N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan. The As a player, Jeter had always been a po- their own terms, and in their own voice. controversial, bro-centric media com- lite but almost pathologically reserved In 2015, Kobe Bryant announced his re- pany Barstool Sports produces “Spittin’ presence, offering the media pro-forma tirement by publishing a poem in the Chiclets,” featuring the former N.H.L. pleasantries, deflecting deeper inquiries Tribune. The following year, Kevin Du- players Ryan Whitney and Paul Bis- into his personal life. The site, he ex- rant revealed his free-agency decision sonnette, and helped launch a popular plained, would give athletes a chance to there. The appeal of the site as a space series by the former N.F.L. punter Pat speak directly to fans, who deserved “more for storytelling, and the extent to which McAfee. Mike Tyson leads “Hotboxin’,” than ‘no comments’ or ‘I don’t knows.’” it was disrupting traditional flows of which has a loose, philosophical en- Naturally, these were just the types of information, became hard to ignore. In ergy—it’s more “On Being” than “The answers that he was known for. 2017, Dion Waiters, a player renowned Joe Rogan Experience.” And, in 2016, At first, it was a bit funny, the no- for his astronomical level of self-regard, the writer Bill Simmons founded a Web site and podcast network called the A boom in athlete-driven podcasts has illuminated what players actually value. Ringer, which elevated podcasters like

ILLUSTRATION BY JOE MACCARONE THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 63 the former pitcher C. C. Sabathia, the ply for having tattoos, wearing certain up, chuckles, and recalls the first time he Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr, clothes, or speaking in ways that the heard the rapper E-40, in the mid-nineties, and the New Orleans Pelicans guard media deemed inarticulate. This was es- at a camp for the nation’s best players. J. J. Redick. If athlete-driven podcasts pecially true in the N.B.A. of the late “All the Smoke” rejects the decorum were once shoestring affairs, they’ve now nineties and early two-thousands, when of the TV studio, and one of its plea- been absorbed into the sports-media the league, confronting the decline of its sures is how openly the hosts talk about economy. Last year, the Ringer was ac- icon, Michael Jordan, cast about for a their inner lives, their experiences as quired by Spotify for around two hun- new identity. At the time, players could Black men. In one episode, Barnes asks dred million dollars. enter the league straight from high school, his former coach Doc Rivers what it Redick’s current podcast, “The Old bringing a youthful, hip-hop-adjacent was like to grow up with a father who Man & the Three,” which he started swagger that made owners and officials was a cop. Last September, Jackson spoke last summer, alongside his own produc- wary. A turning point came in 2004, when movingly about his relationship with tion company, embodies the strengths a skirmish broke out in the final seconds George Floyd, whom he befriended of these more tightly packaged shows. of a nationally televised game between when they were teen-agers, growing up Redick has interviewed Stacey Abrams, the Indiana Pacers and the Detroit Pis- in Texas. After Floyd’s death, Jackson Bob Iger, and Matthew McConaughey, tons. The Pacers star Metta Sandi- went to Minnesota to help lead protests but his primary role is as a sort of liai- ford-Artest—then known as Ron Ar- against police brutality. He described son between players and fans. He’s mel- test—charged into the stands after a how helpless he felt, contrasting it with low and thoughtful, conscious of his po- fan threw a drink at him. The media the feelings of control that he found on sition as a white athlete from a hippie demonized the players involved, and the court. Floyd had fallen into the background, which makes him an out- new rules about off-court dress were street life, Jackson said, and their friend- lier in the N.B.A. (His likability might introduced to make the league seem ship became complicated as they grew be surprising to those who recall his ca- more presentable. Athletes rarely got older. “That could have been you if it reer at Duke University, where his smug the chance to speak their minds from wasn’t for basketball,” Barnes observed. affect made him one of the most hated inside the fishbowl. The exchange laid bare the fallacy players in basketball.) Now a respected It’s not surprising that players from that athletes should “stick to sports”—a veteran, he often talks about the tedium this era have taken to podcasting, and that call that has grown almost in direct pro- of N.B.A. life; after all, it’s why he has they produce some of the richest, most portion to Black players speaking out time to podcast in the first place. vibrant work in the form. An exemplar about police brutality or racial abuse. A It’s particularly fascinating to hear is “All the Smoke,” hosted by the former subtle feeling of gratitude runs through Redick relate to younger players. In a re- players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jack- “All the Smoke,” a disbelief, on the part cent episode, he talked to his former team- son. (“Smoke” refers to their taunting and of Barnes and Jackson, that they are mate Markelle Fultz about a spell a few trash-talking, and winks at their fondness lucky enough to have full lives to look years ago, in Fultz’s rookie season, when for marijuana.) Barnes and Jackson were back on. In a recent episode, their guest the guard dealt with a mysterious injury. scrappy and competitive; they became was Kendrick Perkins, who retired in As Fultz recovered, the media seemed to folk heroes as part of the 2006-7 Golden 2019. Perkins was not a player known delight in dissecting every State Warriors, an underdog for his finesse, and he now draws on twitch of his body, and team whose coach now his blunt, bruising directness as an an- Redick lashed out at report- shares the pair’s enthusiasm alyst for ESPN. Perkins claimed that ers. On the show, Fultz ex- for weed. Their show is loose he appeared on the network for a year pressed his gratitude for and meandering, even play- without compensation. (Apparently, the Redick’s support, before fully unhinged. They tell sto- promise of “exposure” also works on peo- talking about the mental ries that few reporters could ple who have earned seven-figure sala- strain of being scrutinized. pry out of them—gossip ries.) He initially saw the gig as a ramp It was an interesting mo- about life on the road, into coaching. But he talked about Jack- ment, in which Redick was women, who was authenti- son’s influence as a trailblazer, and joked able to move between being cally tough. (Jackson was that the success of “All the Smoke” proved a teammate, sympathetic to part of the Pistons-Pacers that he, too, could speak “broken En- Fultz’s apprehension of the media, and an brawl, and he often ponders how his ca- glish” and find a home in the media. inquisitive member of the media himself. reer might have been different had he not In the past, this kind of mediation been vilified.) The show routinely sheds t remains enormously expensive to was handled mostly by journalists. That light on the fraternal aspect of basket- Ibroadcast live sports. Few things com- arrangement could be mutually bene- ball. Last year, it featured one of the last pel millions of people to watch TV like ficial for reporters (who sought access) interviews with Kobe Bryant before his a big game, and the captive audience and players (who wanted to protect their death. At first, Bryant, who had known props up an increasingly outdated eco- images). But there was always a tension Jackson since they were teen-agers, adopts nomic model of commercial breaks, thrumming in the background. Gener- his standard, media-trained mode, issu- high-profile sponsors, and advertisers. ations of Black athletes witnessed first- ing homilies about creativity and focus. But fan engagement is no longer bound hand how they could be misread sim- After a few minutes, though, he eases by live contests, or by seasons at all. Trades,

64 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 trash talk, and backstage maneuvering have made leagues like the N.F.L. and the N.B.A. year-round concerns, driv- ing up demand for more content. At times, the sheer volume of N.B.A.-related material online—from Bleacher Report’s House of Highlights brand, which ag- gregates clips, to the dozens of Insta- gram accounts devoted to player fash- ion—can make the games feel ancillary. Podcasts are a part of this shift, though they operate at a different rhythm. They’re slow and immersive, more concerned with humanizing players than with turning them into culture-war memes. In 2017, the veterans Richard Jefferson and Chan- ning Frye started a podcast called “Road Trippin’,” interviewing their teammates •• on the Cleveland Cavaliers. Both men admitted that they were just sticking around the league as long as they could, good at basketball. The sport seemed no tars that they could manipulate. Listen- riding the coattails of All-Star teammates more important than the clout it gave ing to players talk about what they actu- like LeBron James and Kyrie Irving. Fans him, which he could then apply to the ally value—for hours, and often to each are accustomed to seeing teams as en- issues—police brutality, Native rights, other—upends this theatre, destabilizing gaged in collective struggle, and we often food insecurity—that he cared about. the role that sports play in our lives. If, as frame that struggle in moral or political In a recent episode of “Real Ones,” a Bell suggests, the Internet makes us be- ways. But “Road Trippin’” also depicted Ringer podcast that pairs the former lieve that we might be understood, then the Cavs as a kind of workplace, where player Raja Bell with the journalist Logan athletes are still avatars, but for our real you simply had to tolerate some of your Murdock, Bell reflected on what it meant selves, rather than for our fantasies of colleagues’ strange habits. In one episode, for players like Irving to tell their own greatness. Durant, for example, is unflap- Jefferson and Frye talked to Irving shortly stories. He brought up a sour period from pably cool on the court. But on his podcast before the 2017 All-Star break. They joked his playing days in Utah, noting that fans he often seems open and slightly vexed, about the aliases they use when checking might have treated him differently had as though whoever he’s talking to might into hotels, and exchanged thoughts on he had a more expansive platform. But help him figure out something crucial. extraterrestrial life. At one point, Irving Bell also suggested that there was a gen- I recently began listening to “Knuckle- aired his skepticism that the Earth was erational difference between someone heads,” a podcast launched, in 2019, by round. “Here we go,” Frye said. Within like him, who came of age in the eight- Quentin Richardson and Darius Miles, the flow of their conversation, it was just ies and nineties, and a millennial like Ir- darlings of the stylish, early-two-thou- another quirky moment, proof that Ir- ving. Back in his day, social media would sands N.B.A. The two met as kids, in Il- ving was, in the parlance, a different dude. have been a useful tool against one-sided linois, and were handpicked by Jordan to But the clip became a sound bite—evi- reporting. Yet he didn’t necessarily share star in a commercial for his shoes—a fact dence, for the wider world, of Irving’s in- Irving’s need to feel recognized on some that still astounds them. The show grew soluble weirdness. He was constantly deeper, human level. “No one says you out of essays they wrote, for the Players’ asked about it by reporters. have to bare your soul,” Bell said. Tribune, about adjusting to their rising Since then, Irving’s relationship with fame, and listening to it can feel like eaves- the media has curdled, especially as he’s hen I was growing up, an athlete dropping. The pair often digress into become more outspoken about politics. Wlike Michael Jordan could feel Chicago-high-school-basketball minu- The most in-depth interview he’s given ubiquitous yet totally unknowable. In the tiae, memories of seeing palm trees for in some time was last fall, when he ap- eighties and nineties, this was what it the first time. Richardson is friendly and peared on his teammate Kevin Durant’s meant to be iconic: people grabbed on gregarious; Miles is shyer, and it’s some- podcast, “The ETCs.” A few months to fragments of your persona, as with times hard to hear him at all. If it were later, at the beginning of this season, he Jordan’s near-psychotic will to win, and any other podcast, I probably would have skipped his mandatory media sessions, turned them into tokens of virtue. Con- tuned out. But once Miles gets going, his writing on Instagram that he didn’t speak trolling one’s image meant withholding laugh crackly and warm, you hear how with “pawns.” Whatever the root offense any signs of weakness or vulnerability. simply talking aloud can be a form of had been, it was clear Irving no longer For the most part, the media abetted therapy. It’s a reminder that claiming your felt that reporters could convey the full this process. Fans turned to sports for es- narrative doesn’t necessarily mean that range of his thoughts or priorities. He capism, and sports coverage allowed them you’ll end up the hero. It means that you was a quester who happened to be very to view athletes from a distance, as ava- will be free. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 65 lections of identical common objects, THE A RT WORLD Daniel Spoerri gluing down remnants of meals and hanging them vertically, Jacques Villeglé presenting ragged, LIFE FORCE found street posters. Saint Phalle’s gunplay, realized in Niki de Saint Phalle at MOMA PS1. Paris in 1961, was a stunt for sure: cre- ation by destruction, theatrically perfo- BY PETER SCHJELDAHL rating first plaster-covered boards and then figurative plaster sculptures of male subjects—avatars of her hated father, who sexually assaulted her when she was eleven. Some pieces concealed spray cans, for explosive effect when hit. That year, Marcel Duchamp, seventy-four years old, introduced the thirty-year-old Saint Phalle and her friend Jean Tinguely, the Swiss kinetic sculptor, to Salvador Dalí, fifty-seven. In honor of Dalí, they fashioned a full-size bull, which, wheeled out after a bullfight in Catalonia, satis- fyingly blew up. Saint Phalle usually performed in fashionable white pants suits. The cultural frisson of a beautiful woman wielding deadly weapons and setting off explosives earned her noto- riety in France, but there was scant crit- ical curiosity, anywhere, about the mo- tives of the work: a traumatic personal backstory and a politically edged aspi- ration to better the world.

orn near Paris in 1930, to a tyran- Bnical French banker father and a suffocatingly pious Roman Catholic American mother, Saint Phalle had a childhood of privilege and of horror, Saint Phalle, photographed in France in 1962, was an artist ahead of her time. first in France and then, after her fa- ther’s finance company failed in the “ iki de Saint Phalle: Structures riod lasted from 1961 until about 1963. Depression, in America. Both parents Nfor Life,” at moma PS1, is a rav- The bodies consumed the rest of her were violent. Saint Phalle described ishing and scandalously overdue New life. Her masterpiece, the Tarot Gar- the homelife as hellish. Two of her sib- York museum show of the French-Amer- den (1979-2002), is a vast sculpture park lings committed suicide as adults. She ican avant-gardist, who died at the age in Tuscany filled with twenty-two free- was expelled from two Catholic schools of seventy-one, in 2002, of emphysema form, monumental women, animals, and from the Brearley School, in New probably caused by her use of toxic ma- and figures of fantasy, some the size of York, which booted her for defacing terials. The self-taught Saint Phalle is houses and made habitable with kitch- its classical statues by painting their fig one of the late twentieth century’s great ens and plumbing. She was popular in leaves red. (Even so, she always praised creative personalities, ahead of her time Europe but, until late in life, cut little Brearley for having instilled self-con- in several respects, with traits that once ice in transatlantic art circles. The prob- fidence in her as a young woman.) Start- clouded and now halo her importance. lem tracks to a schism, around 1960, ing in her late teens, she modelled for Her career had two chief phases: fem- with triumphant American formalist Life, French Vogue, Elle, and Harper’s inist rage, expressed by way of .22 ri- abstraction, Pop art, and Minimalism Bazaar. At one point, Gloria Steinem fles fired at plaster sculptures inside on one side, and, on the other, Euro- spotted Saint Phalle walking down which she had secreted bags of liquid pean Nouveau Réalisme, a cohort (all Fifty-seventh Street, purseless and in paint, and feminist celebration of wom- male but for Saint Phalle) of provoca- a cowboy getup. In an interview quoted anhood, through sculptures of female teurs given to neo-Dadaist stunts: Yves by the show’s curator, Ruba Katrib, in bodies, often immense, in fibreglass Klein painting with pigment-slathered the catalogue, Steinem recalled think-

and polyester resin. The shooting pe- naked women, Arman amassing col- ing, “That is the first free woman I / GETTY BOTTI GIANCARLO

66 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 have ever seen in real life. I want to be later, in marriage, with the pair collab- quality of her later work drew on the just like her.” orating on works that combine her sen- same fund of contrariness—the proto- At the age of eighteen, Saint Phalle suous sculptures and his wittily racket- feminist animus—that fuelled her early married Harry Mathews, a nineteen- ing machinery. weaponized exhibitionism. (She said year-old American aspiring musician, Until 1963, Saint Phalle continued to that she enjoyed the thought of men who became an experimental novelist create patriarchal icons in plaster and, looking “very small” next to looming after the poet John Ashbery introduced with bullets, make them bleed paint. Nanas.) At a time that was biased against him to the charismatically daft early- Some were relief portraits of leading pol- figuration and only just becoming alert twentieth-century work of the French- iticians, whom she loathed as a class— to feminism, she risked—or perhaps man Raymond Roussel. Crosscurrents one was of John F. Kennedy, before his guaranteed—condescension. It didn’t of creative influence flowed among many assassination. Then, in 1965, after some faze her at all. of the international bohemians of the fetching sculptural works, mostly in If anything disconcerts about Saint period. The couple quickly had a daugh- soft materials, on themes of melan- Phalle, it’s a steely consistency of tone. ter. Then Saint Phalle broke down. She choly brides and elaborate, not terribly As a prolific pamphleteer during the and Mathews were now living in France menacing monsters, came the first of AIDS crisis, in which she lost many and both were having affairs. In 1953, what she called Nanas, using the French friends, she saw no need to darken her after a bout of sexual jealousy com- slang that was the rough equivalent of bouncily cartoonish graphic style, though pounded by ill health (she suffered from “broads” or “chicks.” The Nanas were she embellished it with language that hyperthyroidism), she attempted sui- inspired by a pregnant friend whose conscientiously addressed the disaster. cide. For six weeks, she underwent elec- body was very curvy—almost hyper- Art was a place in her. Any work by her troshock treatments and psychoanaly- bolically female. (It was Clarice Rivers, is like a destination that, once reached, sis at a clinic in Nice. It seemed to help. wife of the painter Larry Rivers.) Saint lets you go elsewhere only by retracing Saint Phalle and Mathews had a sec- Phalle fashioned the shape as a con- the way you came. Other artists are like ond child, and the family spent most of tainer, hollow but apparently formed of this, notably those who are termed out- the remaining decade moving around seismic internal forces. Nanas prolifer- sider or self-taught: birds with their sin- Europe. In 1955, in Barcelona, she was ated at sizes small and gigantic, turn- gle songs. Saint Phalle’s enthusiasm for flabbergasted by the buildings and the ing dancerly and acrobatic. Saint Phalle Gaudí’s sophisticated designs extended mosaics of Antoni Gaudí. (Gaudí be- mastered gloss techniques for preserv- to the work of such visionary eccentrics came “my master and my destiny,” she ing their painted surfaces—in black- as Ferdinand Cheval, a nineteenth-cen- said.) Plunging into art, at first with and-white and, often, sizzling second- tury French postman and the creator of naïve styles of painting and assemblage, ary and tertiary hues—outdoors, in all a surreal imaginary palace; and Simon she separated from Mathews in 1960. weather. Nothing about the work jibed Rodia, of the Watts Towers, in Los An- He took the kids, but she stayed close with anything then current in art. Most geles. This predilection points to a com- to him, as she tended to do, all her life, critics, especially American ones, dis- pulsive hold on the life force that had with miscellaneous friends and (a great missed it. Today, as categorical distinc- propelled her from the start. many) ex-lovers. tions among art mediums and styles In her later years, Saint Phalle slipped Indeed, sociability was Saint Phalle’s deliquesce, it comes off as heroic. into celebrity. She designed and mar- element, to the point of blurring her keted a perfume, jewelry, and scarves, creative identity. At her first shooting here’s a playhouse feeling and, in to finance the protracted construction performance, she let the invited guests Tsome cases, a function to Saint of the Tarot Garden. (“Why don’t I be- take turns with the gun that she had Phalle’s big women and to such occa- come my own patron?” she asked.) rented from a fairgrounds for the occa- sional monsters as “The Golem” (1972), Those commodities look great, by the sion, delighting in their cathartic plea- which occupies a playground in Jerusa- way—they are continuous with her in- sure. As free with giving credit as with lem. Three snaking red tongues protrude ventive drive, in an art world that was claiming it, in the Tarot Garden—which as slides for kids. (When citizens op- on its way to welcoming heterodox pur- she created on an extensive plot of posed the commission by the city’s mayor, suits including retail commerce and land donated to her by some wealthy Teddy Kollek, Saint Phalle argued suc- overt politics. She pioneered, as well, an friends—Saint Phalle incorporated cessfully that scary things help children epochal rise of installational and envi- homages to the Italian workers who had master their fears. It was a big hit.) She ronmental art, though with forms too fashioned the steel armatures for her brought an unchanging spirit to her idiosyncratic to be directly imitable. sculptures, covered them with resin, and public works, occasional architecture (a The PS1 show is a cascade of bedaz- helped line the exteriors and interiors three-part home in the South of France zlements. Is it lovable? Not quite. Saint with ceramic tiles and shards of mirror. which nestles children’s rooms inside a Phalle was too guarded—wound too (Videos in the show document the years Nana’s breasts), and abundant drawings tightly around herself—to vamp for ad- of exacting labor.) She maintained a and handmade books. She never winks oration. Attention was enough. Under- productive partnership with Tinguely to educated taste. There’s a frequent ten- standing proved more elusive, but was for years, including throughout an dency to deem Saint Phalle’s childlike foreordained, eventually, by a fearless- intimate relationship that began in imagery sentimental, but I don’t think ness that sweeps a viewer along from the early sixties and resulted, a decade it is. No matter how playful, the benign start to finish. 

THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 67 tions of non-American food traditions— ON TELEVISION mirrors the experience of scrolling through YouTube Kids. Many caretakers will be pleased to find a sophisticated “mini-me” CHILDREN’S HOUR version of Anthony Bourdain’s “Parts Un- known,” or “Drunk History.” (The latter “Waffles + Mochi” and “City of Ghosts,” on Netflix. show was also produced by Konner.) At the beginning of the series, a mys- BY DOREEN S T. FÉLIX terious van rescues Waffles and Mochi from their home, a bleak, monochromatic tundra called the Land of Frozen Food. There, with no other options, they had subsisted on meals of ice. Sounding pained, a narrator explains the ups and downs of the habitat: “Ice cream never melts, and dreams, well, they get frozen, too.” This origin story, one of Dicken- sian misery, casts a pall that the show quickly dissolves. The van drops our crea- tures off at an exciting and sophisticated supermarket, where the abundance of fresh food lights up their lives. They bump into a talking shelf, named Shelfie, who introduces them to a mustachioed mop. “You must be Moppy,” Waffles says, eager to ingratiate herself in the new place. “No! It’s just Steve,” the mop retorts. This kind of snappy satirical humor is present throughout the series; later in the season, Tan France, of “Queer Eye,” guest-stars, and tries to make a potato—which some elementary-school-aged talking heads refer to as “ugly”—fashion-forward, only to realize that the vegetable is beautiful just as it is. Such kid-friendly sendups of adult programs (including “Finding Your Roots,” in an episode where Mochi trav- els to Los Angeles and Japan in search of his ancestry) are genuinely funny. Waffles and Mochi get jobs at the “ isten to your vegetables and eat Really, they are the least willful charac- market, where the owner asks them to Lyour parents!” So ends the ear- ters I’ve seen on television in some time. run errands, which, in turn, teach them worm theme song of “Waffles + Mochi,” The strength of “Waffles + Mochi,” about nutrition. The puppets have a lot a food-travelogue series for kids, sprung which was created by Erika Thormahlen of fun at work. Boarding a talking magic from the cosmopolitan minds at Netflix and Jeremy Konner, is its awareness that cart, they circle the globe, meeting ex- and Higher Ground, Michelle and Barack the children of the twenty-first century perts who share their knowledge of to- Obama’s production company. To the have been watching screens possibly since matoes, rice, and corn. In Peru, a local young viewer, a Roald Dahl-esque jin- birth, and are conscious agents, embold- chef and her son teach the puppets how gle like this one pinkie-promises a trippy, ened by the ease of the iPad, who are able to roast potatoes in a huatia, an outdoor macabre world of adult order undone, to distinguish bad children’s media from oven made of rocks and soil. At the home an imaginative expanse where edible the quality stuff. The series is good ed- of Bricia Lopez, the co-owner of a Oa- monsters roam free. Our protagonists ucational television, comparable to the xacan restaurant in Los Angeles, Waf- are cute puppet monsters for sure—Waf- best of PBS. Its eclectic form—animated fles and Mochi learn about the potency fles is the child of a waffle father and a musical interludes featuring Maiya Sykes of salt. Waffles, tasked with putting the yeti mother, and Mochi is an emotive and Sia as singing fruits; live-action cook- finishing touches on a salted-choco- but nonverbal Japanese dessert—and ing demos starring famous chefs and late-chip cookie, had been screwing up they are sensualists, but they are not free. well-cast kids; stunningly deft explana- the assignment, because she had no one to teach her the virtue of moderation. Michelle Obama produced and stars in the kids’ series “Waffles + Mochi.” The puppets travel as far as Mars to

68 THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 ILLUSTRATION BY HAYDEN GOODMAN get their work done. They enjoy learn- eat, and “Waffles + Mochi” believes that ette. A couple of times, I had to hit Pause; ing what it means to eat properly, and you are also what you watch—what a Ito blurs animation and photography, also pleasing their boss, who, at the end child consumes, in all senses, will dic- prompting viewers to mistake partially of each episode, rewards the duo with a tate her character. In order to be good, illustrated images for the real thing. The badge. The owner of the supermarket, you have to absorb other good, organic story lines, too, blend the texture of true by the way, is Mrs. O—Michelle Obama, things: mushrooms freshly pulled from biography with the conceit of the show. who is not only an executive producer the earth, and politically astute kids’ pro- The characters are often voiced not by of the show but one of its stars. Mrs. O, gramming. Waffles seems to be moti- actors but by ordinary people with a con- a benevolent mentor figure, stays largely vated by an unspoken shame regarding nection to whatever neighborhood the above the fray. While her workers scour her pre-epicurean days—a shame that intrepid researchers are visiting. (“I just the planet for eggs to bring to the chef some kids know before they have the wanna show you how much more free Massimo Bottura, in Italy, for his special language to express the feeling. The show you can be,” the “ghost” of a jazz musi- tortellini recipe, she hangs out in a gar- celebrates Waffles’s frantic willingness cian, named Jam Messenger Divine, tells den atop the supermarket and is aided to conform to the mores of a diverse and the Ghost Club, in the historically Black by a stuffy bureaucrat bee called Busy, foreign world. But are there other pup- neighborhood of Leimert Park.) The se- who can’t be bothered to remember Waf- pets languishing back in the Land of ries breaks down the mammoth notion fles’s name. I’m not sure how a child Frozen Foods? Who will save them? of cultural history in ingeniously discrete might metabolize these details, but, to and carefully considered parts. me, Obama’s performance—especially ounteracting the suavity of “Waf- “City of Ghosts” respects the crush compared with those of some of the ce- Cfles + Mochi” is “City of Ghosts,” of the city, its noise, its smell, its unpre- lebrity guests—is rather opaque, overly also on Netflix, a documentary-style dictability. It also respects the intelligence dependent on her esteem outside the animated series that overflows with soul of children, their ability to process com- boundaries of the show. and cool. Here is an un-Western ghost plex and painful truths. Many of the Mrs. O punctuates the episodes with story, set in the American West—L.A.— adults in “City of Ghosts” are initially truisms, spun from the subject of the day’s that invites viewers of all ages to sit still, unable to understand the spirits in their adventure. In the episode about pickling, be quiet, and listen to the past over the midst, and are frightened. The Ghost she explains the importance of restraint: din of the technocratic present. Four Club explains to Chef Jo, who has just “It takes a lot to exercise patience, espe- young Angelenos have formed the Ghost opened, in her words, an Asian-inspired cially when you want something to hap- Club, a film crew that provides a ghost- restaurant in Boyle Heights, that the pen right away.” Obama delivered plati- whispering service to adults who be- missing chili flakes and the overturned tudes on “Sesame Street” a decade ago, lieve that they are being haunted by fryer at her eatery are expressions of valid but, now that she owns the block, her unsettled spirits. By the sheer force of frustration, not evil. Subtly, Ito presents sermonizing feels a bit different. their bigheartedness, the club coaxes adulthood as a state of perpetual discon- “Waffles + Mochi,” which clearly de- these spirits out of hiding, and the spir- nect. One elder, Mr. Craig, has not lost scends from Obama’s somewhat polar- its then sit for charming interviews, in touch with his roots. Rather, his face is izing anti-obesity campaign, Let’s Move!, which they convey the particularities of lined with the burden of remembering. promotes the broader and more widely pre-gentrification life. Zelda, a little girl His episode is a remarkably dignified accepted philosophies of the liberal whose microphone is a hairbrush, is our tribute to the Tongva, the indigenous parenting Zeitgeist. In her post-White host; her older brother, Jordan, provides people who once inhabited the Los An- House life, the former First Lady has the “camerawork.” geles Basin. With the guidance of Mr. pivoted from lecturing on healthy eat- Elizabeth Ito, the creator, an alum Craig and a Tongva poet, the children ing to talking about moral living, but a of “Adventure Time” and “Phineas and meet an ancestor, in the form of a crow, trace of élitism lingers. You are what you Ferb,” has put together an uncanny pal- who sings to them through the wind. 

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THE NEW YORKER, APRIL 5, 2021 69 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 Akeem Roberts, must be received by Sunday, April 4th. The finalists in the March 22nd contest appear below. We will announce the winner, and the finalists in this week’s contest, in the April 19th 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

“ ” ......

THE FINALISTS THE WINNING CAPTION

“I don’t like to cook in an empty stomach.” Ben Wiener, Jerusalem, Israel

“Not the return to inside dining I was expecting.” “So that’s where all the furniture went.” Amy Thomas, Centerville, Mass. Andrew Gray, Jackson, Tenn.

“I guess it’s just us for dinner.” Robert Carlson, Sherwood, Ore. COCKTAIL HOUR LIVE!

APRIL 13–15

Join us for the inaugural Vanity Fair Cocktail Hour Live!, a series of inspiring conversations, innovative performances, and irresistible beverages, all experienced in the comfort of your home.

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PRESENTED BY 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 PUZZLES & GAMES DEPT. 15 16 THE 17 18 CROSSWORD 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 A moderately challenging puzzle. 28 29 30 31 BY WYNA LIU 32 33 34 35 36

ACROSS 37 38 39 40 1 Dummy text used in publishing and based on a work by Cicero 41 42 43 44 11 Includes 45 46 47 15 Vaporware?

16 Pressing need? 48 49 50 51 52 53 17 Item whose slipperiness was the subject of a 2014 Ig Nobel Prize-winning study 54 55 56 57 58 18 Gregarious bird known for its ability to mimic sounds 59 60 61 62 19 Rocinante, Don Quixote’s steed, for one 20 Ballot measure, for short 63 64 22 Band with the nineties hit “Creep,” to fans 65 66 23 “Illmatic” rapper 24 Band with the nineties hit “Creep” 26 Lagoon lead-ins 3 They’re used to make zest 44 New-wave band named after an illicit 28 Tart fruits that aren’t tart 4 “A Visit from the Goon Squad” author form of radio promotion 30 Specialty of Domenico Scarlatti Jennifer 46 Piecemaker? 32 Complex cetacean crooning 5 Aquatic mammal whose closest living 49 Change, as controller buttons relative on land is the elephant 36 Dweller along the Volga 51 Mournful composition 6 Longtime host of “This American Life” 37 Artist Walker known for her cut-paper 52 Modify silhouettes depicting American slavery 7 Vim 53 One-ups 38 “Succession” actress Sarah 8 Itemized instruction 54 “Mr. Show” bit 40 Nothing more than 9 Where endometria are located 56 Like one who asks too many questions 41 Longest river in Deutschland 10 Fruits you might knock on to test for 58 43 Mountain and tree, for two ripeness Muppet with a unibrow 45 Disingenuously appeal (to) 11 Asset for an archer 60 “___ End” 47 Seltzer brand with a bear named Orson 12 Bootleggers’ destinations 62 Place to train as its mascot 13 “Keep your eyes to yourself!” 48 Like a hare vis-à-vis a tortoise, usually 14 Gesture that may accompany “Aw, nuts!” Solution to the previous puzzle: 50 Disclose 21 Gardener’s area A T H O S C E D E A G E S 51 Dollop 25 Baddie’s buddy B O B B Y D A R I N B O A T 54 Opposite of norte 27 Totally captivate C O A L M I N I N G A F R O 55 “I feel ___” (expression of validation) 28 Checked patterns S T R I P P O K E R L O L L 57 Certain work of kinetic art 29 “Doggystyle” rapper, familiarly G A P E A H O R S E 59 S A F E T Y H A V A N A End result of a tie? 31 God who aids the Trojans, in the Iliad 61 A B A S H E Y E T E S T S Air-pollution warnings 32 “___ in Cincinnati” (bygone sitcom set G U T I M M E N S E P E A 63 Proverbial concession at a radio station) A T H A Z A R D W H I N Y 64 Magnet for mockery 33 LOL-worthy E V E N T S P A I N T S 65 Kiddo 34 Music for the masses? M A R I S A W A T T 66 Leaders with intelligence? 35 With “the,” eighties band whose songs U C L A S C R A T C H P A D are featured in the jukebox musical T H A T S O U R C H E R R Y DOWN “Head Over Heels” T O N E A L L T H E R A G E 1 Duran Duran singer Simon 39 Type of olive in a Greek salad S O D S S E E S D E M O S 2 Florida city called the Horse Capital of 42 Team that plays its home games at Find more puzzles and this week’s solution at the World Barclays Center newyorker.com/crossword SHOP ONLINE ORDER A CATALOG www.gudrunsjoden.com Free Financial Tools Wealth Management

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